/lit/ - Literature

>>21351757

>>21168691
>Write it out for a pleb like me. I think it's worth hearing this stuff; I'd consider putting any insights in a preamble for the best-of
spengler was a historian/philosopher who wrote decline of the west around the time ww1 ended
it's a chasmic analysis of how civilisations are formed, how they function and die, sort of like a full spectrum analysis
anyway he recognised similar patterns among every civilisation that has ever existed and one of the most troublesome patterns is the "last man", the type of person who becomes more and more common toward the end of a civilisation's life, the last man is characterised by apathy, feebleness and no higher desire than feeling comfortable in the moment, sort of like some of those characters in honest work

he's pretty infamous at this point, you haven't heard of him?

>>20913864
I was thinking of reading that one time. Symbols are cool.

Spengler never talk deeply about other civilization before right?
can anyone tell me more about prime number of each civilizations?
and the reasons why russia culture never develop their cultural expression through architect?

Are there any Spenglerians or other secondary sources that go into more detail on the civilizations/cultures that aren't talked about as much? The ones outside of Faustian, Classical, and Magean?

>>19508131
Yeah. Magian Man murdered Sumerian Man and Apollonian Man, and Apollonian Man murdered Egyptian Man. Russia and China will do nothing to Faustian Man, they can't. The sort of global war that that would require is something that they're incapable of prosecuting. Russia at its height (thus far) couldn't even run a navy without the US's help, and today they can't even run an economy without the US's help. China, likewise, is utterly dependent upon the US for its economy. The death of Faustian Man will occur when Jewish International Finance moves back to Europe.

>>19507854
Spengler is a technical philosopher. He postulates CIVILZATIONE and KULTURE, both of which are two stages of a specific thing. tl;dr there's these higher-dimensional mind-funguses that live in your brain and control how you see space-time. There's some kind of form in nature that you then find some kind of material manifestation of. Faustian Man sees the cosmos as a 3D grid with a vector moving through it. Ancient forests inspired Faustian Man, and in mimicry of this fundamental conception of the world they built the Gothic Cathedral (in both cases, space is full of "Stuff" in all three spatial dimensions).

Spengler's CIVILIZATIONE is not "Western Civilization". Rather, it's actually BAD. CIVILIZATIONE is the end-state after ossification begins. KULTURE, meanwhile, is the young and fruitful stage. AFTER the full transition to CIVILIZATIONE has occurred, however, these brain-funguses can last forever. They don't "die". That's the problem with >>19507765, which implies some kind of Indo-European cyclical history rather than the progression of semi-organic ideal beings. Chinese Man and Indian Man both achieved the final ossification of CIVILIZATIONE in 200AD and 200BC, respectively. All this means is that they have a totalizing worldview concerning space-time that is able to completely absorb and repurpose anything to its own ends (see: Mao explaining Dialectical Materialism as just being the Tao, and Marxist-Leninist Thought as Ru). The problem with Faustian Man is that it is reliant upon infinite growth, and when that falls apart, so does Faustian Man. Whites revert to Fellaheen (people who aren't possessed by brain-fungus; example, the Mongols).

Spengler says that if you, YOU PERSONALLY, want to go down in history, you basically have to do what Musk, Bezos, and Gates are doing now (make increasingly bigger toys).

>>19439194
You forget yourself. Here on /lit/ almost everyone has heard of Spengler and his cycles. See also: Turchin's secular cycles, Kondratieff waves.

>>19196934
>Is it fair to say Spengler was wrong?
he believed that the Russian people imported Socialism and that Socialism is Western
he is clearly wrong on that one

in his terms:

Fascism seems distinct Western-Faustian (Roman-Catholic Christianity)
Socialism seems distinct Eastern-Russian (Orthodox Christianity)

Europe is geopolitical and spiritual in between West and East, it is neither distinctively Western nor Eastern

>>18751876
>In a way you can say history is both linear and cyclical.
The term you are looking for is spiral. What you say is how I view history: it consists of action and reaction, something Spengler vehemently denied when he said that civilizations don't influence each other. He sets up Faustian and Apollonian civilizations to be polar opposites, but never considers the possibility that the entire Faustian worldview was born out of a reactionary flight from the limitations of Greek thought, which is what actually occurred during the Middle Ages through to the Scientific Revolution as the Western mind liberated itself from Plato and Aristotle even as it pretended to worship them.

But the Greek worldview was itself a reaction to the Egyptian. Gone is the two dimensional art of Egypt, enter the three dimensional Greek sculpture; gone is the obelisk and the pyramid that reaches vertically, enter the horizontal Greek temple.

History is an upward action. So says Faust when he attempts to transcribe the Bible, but is unable to write "first there was the word", replacing it instead with "first there was the deed"

>>18513842
np anon. This is the only other spengler infographic I have, or have seen around here for that matter

which books represents each Spengler's cultures?

>inb4 mehhhh generalitzation!
yes!

>>18393019
You have hundreds of pages of this? It's in need of some editing. Some of the excessive wokeness should go, not just for some more subtly, but also it just gets a little repetitive. It doesn't need to be in my face all the time. Maybe move some to the footnotes and be sure you haven't already made that joke. At least not so closer together.

>>17976495
I found him a worthwhile read, just be aware that you're signing on for 950 pages of German metaphysics. I wish I could recommend a summary but all the summaries I've seen have managed to completely miss the central point of the book.

What high cultures do eatern european countries belong to for Spengler?
Are the western slavs and hungarians part of the west?
Are the balkans magean?

Was he right bros?

>>17492071

> write all your poems about being lost in the woods

How would Spengler or Toynbee classify the aspects of her High Culture, anons, if they had to write about it? I'm actually interested in your thoughts on this

>>16926218
(also requesting the suggested "404 not found" for Russia)

Oh wow, another Spengler thread with just ONE (1) single anon who has actually studied him.
Gets me everytime

>>16773332
I would say first of all read Goethe and Nietzsche otherwise you're not going to get it:

1. Have decent knowledge about the Greeks
2. Read about the different forms of government of Rome and know all the emperors (especially Caesar - he goes into great depth about him - and the later emperors)
3. Learn about mathematics/physics college degree level
4. Read about Gothic cathedrals.
5. Read a lot about renaissance art and impressionism
6. Read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (he dedicates entire paragraphs to the deference of the two)
7. Know how economy works
8. Inform yourself about the time the work was written in.
9. Know a shit ton of history to begin with

I only did point 8 really. I already knew a bit about the romans/greeks and about history in general. But if you really want to get it all, you should read "The Decline" a couple of times.

Also pic related will help you

>>16707266
I forgot pic rel

>>16512064
>I consider him my intellectual mentor/father figure.
Same for me. The Decline of the West - the worst named book of all time - is the reason I began to take an interest in the wider view of things. There is no better mentor than a true polymath to show you why things matter.

How do you guys finance your reading hobby?

I'm allergic to most used books since they're usually moldy/smelling of cat piss 70% of the time, so I usually have to dish out $10-$15 per book I read.

If a book is short or simple enough I'll just read it for free online, but if it's something like philosophy or a longer novel, it hurts my eyes to read on the computer screen.

How do you deal finance your reading?