/lit/ - Literature

>>14591422
I find that remembering stuff you've analysed is much easier. Reading cultural criticism will automatically make your memory stronger for cultural objects, like films and music et cetera. Only works if you actively apply your knowledge though. It's like how remembering 5 chess moves backwards in time is difficult for most people, but grandmasters can remember every single move in every game they've played the last 5 years.

Why do people on this website take Nazis seriously or even outright valorize them so much?
Seriously this is the real historical question.

>>14591448
>adorno was a nazi

>>14591442
I agree with you, though you did not really answer my question.

>>14591487
My answer, is read a lot of cultural criticism, and consume a lot of cultural objects, analysing them critically. Thats how you amass cultural knowledge. Thats what you asked about doing. Dont see how I didn't answer your question. There is no list of 5 books you can read that suddenly gives you good understanding of a dozen different fieds.

>>14591448

you should address it to /his/, where you came from.

>>14591504

you ought to have said 'i don't know, as i haven't read any of his books.'
there isn't any shame in that.

>>14591556
You ought to have asked "How do I become an expert at everything cultural without putting in any effort". That way people could ignore your question.

>>14591448
Spengler was ardently not a NAZI

>>14591711

i'm not the op. you said 'there is no list of 5 books ... that suddenly gives you a good understanding.'
five titles that would give him a totally inadequate understanding would have been better.
don't be such a sourpuss.

>>14591448
Spengler rejected Nazism in 1934

>>14591746
>five titles that would give him a totally inadequate understanding would have been better

okay, read the starcraft lore books, the third book in the hunger games series, norwegian wood, the oh she glows vegan cookbook, and harry potter methods of rationality.

>>14591504
>>14591711
Like the other guy said, you clearly have never read any Spengler.
Your suggestion of 'just read cultural criticism' without elaborating on this or even suggesting a starting point is pretty illustrative of this.

>>14591777
Lmao stop replying to threads about books you haven't even read, you absolute sperg.

>>14591791
>no

I've asked this a million times, but where does one find a good edition of Spenglers work? The stuff on amazon is super old, abridged, and expensive. There's nothing of him in my school library.

>>14591820
peak pseud

>>14591828
Wait for Arktos to publish their edition

>>14591820

i wasn't taking the piss out of you, just name five books that you think would be a good start rather than this bleak /his/-tier meme slop.

>>14591851

everyone on this board does it, i'd wager. i do it.
it's sadistic to tear into him for being the one cunt who got nabbed. could happen to anyone

>>14591851
Shut up, I've actually read probably 1/3 of the books people start threads with here. I'm in the top 1% of lit. Also, my commentary on books I havent read is better than other peoples commentary on books they have read, because of my big brain.

>>14591861
This tbqh. Though it will probably be a very long time before they publish it.

>>14591448
Spengler was not pro-NSDAP

So no one has any real answers, it's just a bunch of newfags responding to an obvious baitpost saying that Spengler was a Nazi.
Great!

>>14591959

do you have any real answers?

>>14591865
So you've read 4 books

>>14591448
nazis were the good guys

>>14591422
This kind of thread must be answered. But not about Spengler specifically. We need a list of these massively erudite studies. A chart for the grand works of the humanities, including:

The Golden Bough
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Decline of the West
A Study of History
The Social History of Art (Hauser)
ETC!

Reply with books with similar scope.

>it's another "mongoloid tripfag derails thread" episode

>>14591448
eat shit

>>14591861
No, they’re going to change the CFA translation. Buy the Alfred Knopf editions online. They’re a bit expensive but not too bad considering how incredible the work is. I picked up my two volume set for $80

>>14592013
Yes. I've read 4 books. I've read a lot of other books though, so the total number is a lot more than that.

>>14591422
Just read whatever you can about those subjects and eventually you will start to establish relations and make associations between them, which will reinforce your conceptual base at the same time.

Spengler's secret is that he really never goes that deep in regards to individual subjetcs, but instead focus on their relations, both between them and also between different time periods.

Of course, with the hyper-specialization going today in almost every single knowledge area, Spengler's theories will always be attacked by focusing the arguments in very specific areas, which in reality doesn't discredit most of his conclussions.

>>14591865

>commentary on books I haven't read

Hardfiltered holy fuck.

>>14592041

now that i think about it you could probably glean much useful material from the patria konstantinopoleos regarding the art and urban environment of the later empire, in particular since it's a collection of many works accrued from 6th-11th centuries.
it's very unusual that there is such material for comparison, all together in one compilation.
the issue is i'm not really sure what OP is asking for. if he wanted to look at a decomposing historiographic tradition i'd suggest he read thucydides, livy and polybius, then go from procopius' wars (maybe theophylact if you want) through eusebius into george the monk and cedrenus and so forth, up until the more serious and thoughtful histories of attaleiates and choniates. the patria will give him some glimpse into a physically decomposing urban environment and the gradually fading collective memory that comes with it.
as you can tell anything i can contribute is going to be byzantine.

>>14592041
This is a much needed chart.

>>14591448
going to shill my video here
https://youtu.be/lt_rnVA7AlM?t=341
5:41

>>14591448
Seethe

>>14591448
PIG FUCK

>>14592260
>>14592255
>>14592195
>>14592069
>>14592038
>>14591937
>>14591774
>>14591744
>>14591549
>>14591450
If there is anyone I hate more than this baitposter, it is all the fucking newfags who think they are big-brained geniuses for all replying with the exact same line of "durr he's not a nazi!! owned!!! xdd" and derailing the thread.
More people replied to this baitpost with carbon-copy messages than actually answered OP's question.
Fucking kys all of you.

Spengler read pulp novels and smut

>>14591422
What did he say about these things? Give quotes.

>>14592301
Nothing more clearly displays the decadence of Western art since the middle of the nineteenth century than its absurd mass-wise rendering of nudes; the deeper meaning of study of the nude and the importance of the motive have been entirely forgotten.

And yet, at moments, Renaissance art succeeded in achieving something wonderful that music could not reproduce—a feeling for the bliss of perfect nearness, for pure, restful and liberating space-effects, bright and tidy and free from the passionate movement of Gothic and Baroque

His [Michelangelo’s] much-admired sfumato is the first sign of the repudiation of corporeal bounds, in the name of space, and as such it is the starting-point of Impressionism

Plein-air and its new colour scale stand for irreligion. One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to secularise the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.

The Apollonian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows above all a becoming. It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are amongst the finest and most intimately right achievements of Western art. The child links the past and future. In every art of human representation that has a claim to symbolic import, it signifies duration in the midst of phenomenal change, the endlessness of life

>>14591448
Reaction against bourgeois liberalism.

>>14592317
An addition to the last quote as well:

But the Classical Life exhausted itself in the completeness of the moment. The individual shut his eyes to time-distances; he comprehended in his thought the men like himself who he saw around him, but not the coming generations; and therefore there has never been an art that so emphatically ignored the intimate representation of children as the Greek art did.

More quotes to give others ideas:

Music transmuted also the architecture of Bernini’s Baroque into accord with its own spirit, and made of it Rococo, a style of transcendent ornamentation upon which lights (or rather “tones”) play to dissolve ceilings, walls and everything else constructional and actual into polyphonies and harmonies, with architectural trills and cadences

It was we and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and sought out high mountaintops for the sake of the limitless range of vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving—to be alone with endless space.

All that Nietzsche says of Wagner is applicable, also, to Manet. Ostensibly a return to the elemental, to Nature, as against contemplation-painting and abstract music, their art really signifies a concession to the barbarism of the Megalopolis, the beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last step. An artificial art has no further organic future, it is the mark of the end

We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of “the new style”, of “unsuspected possibilities”, theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists … the unabashed farce of Expressionism … The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian, Chinese and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical composition—all is pattern-work. We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation. So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures

>>14592041
I'd add to this
>Mind and Society by Pareto
>The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times

You don't need to agree with the text, but these kind of broad interdisciplinary grand narrative views are fascinating.

>>14592299
Based

>>14592473
also add Eliade, History of Religious Ideas

>>14592299
based old-timey coomer

Spengler, Oswald. A fancy amusement at best. Krauto-centric to the core. Enjoy him, but of little value.

>>14591422
>Decline of the West
>written 1926
Meanwhile, in reality
>Double-helix models of DNA being made
>Putting satellites into orbit
>thousands of planets being discovered
Yeah, "decadent" according to his retarded nihilistic views on reality.

>>14591448
Hitler was right about everything.

Anatomy of melancholy is a book with a Lot of cultural references.

>>14592927
I don't even know how to reply to this.
It's so retarded I have trouble believing you're not baiting.

>>14592927
None of those are actually creating anything new in the cultural arts. The decline Spengler speaks of is a lack of ability to create. Feeling this inadequacy in itself civilization turns to science instead - Benedetto Croce wrote that the modern scientist is like the heir to a house that simply rearranges the furniture and calls it something new.

>>14592927
He explains this on like... page 15 or some shit

>>14591450
He hated jazz

>>14592087
this.
Spengler was meta-historian, not a historian he didn't care about so much about the exact thing that caused the collapsed but why it caused the collapsed

>>14591448
It's called Die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei you fucking cretin.

>>14591865

>>14591422
When he was ten the family moved to the university city of Halle. Here Spengler received a classical Gymnasium education, studying Greek, Latin, mathematics and natural sciences. Here too he developed his strong affinity for the arts -- especially poetry, drama, and music. He tried his hand at some youthful artistic creations of his own, a few of which have survived -- they are indicative of a tremendous enthusiasm but not much else. At this time also he came under the influence of Goethe and Nietzsche, two figures whose importance to Spengler the youth and the man cannot be overestimated.

After his father's death in 1901, Spengler at 21 entered the University of Munich. In accordance with German student-custom of the time, after a year he proceeded to other universities, first Berlin and then Halle. His main courses of study were in the classical cultures, mathematics, and the physical sciences. His university education was financed in large part by a legacy from a deceased aunt.

His doctoral dissertation at Halle was on Heraclitus, the "dark philosopher" of ancient Greece whose most memorable line was "War is the Father of all things." He failed to pass his first examination because of "insufficient references" -- a characteristic of all his later writings that some critics took a great delight in pointing out. However, he passed a second examination in 1904, and then set to writing the secondary dissertation necessary to qualify as a high school teacher. This became The Development of the Organ of Sight in the Higher Realms of the Animal Kingdom. It was approved, and Spengler received his teaching certificate.

His first post was at a school in Saarbrücken. Then he moved to Düsseldorf and, finally, Hamburg. He taught mathematics, physical sciences, history, and German literature, and by all accounts was a good and conscientious instructor. But his heart was not really in it, and when in 1911 the opportunity presented itself for him to "go his own way" (his mother had died and left him an inheritance that guaranteed him a measure of financial independence), he took it, and left the teaching profession for good.

>>14591448
Dilate tranny. Also, return to /leftypol/ where you'll find dogs such as yourself

>>14591422
Ponder the dextrous arboreal travel of the orangutan. Think how such a brute can be so mindful of the movement of his body. Imagine then such a singularness of mind directed at history nerd shit. Thus you have arrived at the man before you.

>>14592041
Encyclopedie of the French philosophes

>>14591865
Typical tripfag

>>14592041
>>14592473
The Gothic Humanities (picture related)

>Eliade
>Guenon
>Toynbee
>Evola
>Gibbon
>Spengler
>Yockey
>Ellul
>Burkhardt
>Hauser
>Coomaraswamy (Art)
>Wyndham Lewis (Art)
>Pound/T.E. Hulme/Ts Elliot essays (Art)

>>14592998
>Benedetto Croce wrote that the modern scientist is like the heir to a house that simply rearranges the furniture and calls it something new.
k but that’s retarded. discovering new science and inventions takes more creativity than coming up with “cultural arts”

>>14592998
>is a lack of ability to create
meanwhile, the west has never been as productive, and is creating at the highest and fastest rate ever in all of history, the most complex and specialized technology to ever exist, for a complete and utter domination over the future...
>None of those are actually creating anything new in the cultural arts
meanwhile, in reality...
>photography first invented 1826
>Lumiere's short films invented 1895
>Audiovisual movies 1930
>Television 1950's
>2D videogames 1970's
>Computer-generated imagery 1990's
>3D IMAX movies 2000's
>40-hour cinematic videogames
lol
and if by "cultural arts" you meant philosophy (aka intelligence), then, yes, there is certainly decay here... but that demonstrates nothing but the decay of individuals, and not of "the west".

>>14592071
I've read the Arktos translation of Man and Technics and there didn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary. In fact, they are basing their translation off the Knopf translation. The real question is whether it will include the charts on civilizations.

>>14595250
100% this tripfaggot has a bunch of funko pops on his shelves next to his star wars DVDs.

>>14595250
Sound and fury and nothing else

>>14591448
Dilate.

>>14591450
>>14591549
>>14591744
>>14591937
>>14592069
>>14592255
>>14592260
>>14592954
>>14593444
>>14594287
>>14596579

>>14591448
You need to understand they NEED a daddy and will do anything to defend him.
After their daddy Petterson got destroyed they need to cling on someone else who tells them their hysteriea is justified.
Why do you think Guenon threads exist?

>>14591422
idk about spengler, but this is a phd reading list for cultural studies: https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cscl/pdfs/Cultural%20Studies%20Ph.D%20Reading%20List%20-%20Cultural%20Theory.pdf

>>14595250
>that demonstrates nothing but the decay of individuals, and not of "the west".
What do you think "the West" is made up of?

Let's look at painting vs photography. The painting is a subjective representation of how the world appears to the artist, and the artist conveys his own aesthetic idea to everyone else through this painting. The photograph is an objective capture of the world, it is no longer something organic and human. The photograph is not a human idea like a painting. It's not a coincidence that the modern world away from art and metaphysics and towards science and materialism, it's because we feel we no longer have the ability to create in us, so study and exploitation of the natural world, something we did not create, is all that's left to us.

All those things you mentioned are panem et circenses. They don't further any creative goal, except perhaps film, which does in fact allow the director to portray something subjective.

>You need to understand they NEED a daddy and will do anything to defend him. After their daddy Petterson got destroyed they need to cling on someone else who tells them their hysteriea is justified. Why do you think Guenon threads exist?

>>14592927
read the book you braindead panthshitting mongoloid

>>14595250
none of this is in conflict with Spengler's theory. I don't even agree with Spengler but you're retarded

Clean the shit out of your pants and read the book

>>14599425
Is that Yukio Mishima?