/lit/ - Literature

If Spengler was born in the 90s he would have been a gamer

>>19062628
>mathematics is the expression of the unique soul of each culture
Absolutely fucking retarded, complete ignorance of Mathematics, the History of Mathematics, or both

>>19062628
dumb

>>19062628
The best thing about this is that the chuds that like Spengler are also the ones that scream about how stupid ethnomathematics is

>>19062656
can you elaborate why?

>>19062985
Not him but in the last 70 years a totally new subfield of math, computer science, has arisen and grown to such an extent that it now counts as a field separate from mathematics. The underlying concept of computer science is about as far from the idea of the infinite as you can imagine

>>19063006
Computer science is literally Evil though

>>19063021
But it BTFO of the argument that western mathematics has run it's course. Spengler would have had no clue what computability or computational complexity even were

Spengler was wrong. He had to be. His model fundamentally does not, and cannot amount for modern America of you read him closely. It completely up-ends his entire model and obliterates the notion of Faustian anything.

Yes, it is all poisoned by whatever this new aged Marxist-derived cult is

>>19063030
Couldn't that actually affirm the thesis? Is that really Western mathematics are is this the mathematics of the new universal liberal age?

>>19063030
>computer science has arisen and grown to such an extent that it now counts as a field separate from mathematics
>it BTFO of the argument that western mathematics has run it's course
it seems like you can't draw that conclusion based on how you characterised computer science. are they separate or not? you've defined it once as a separate discipline and once as a continuation of western mathematics. the second definition is implicit in the second quote.

>>19063196
We skipped all his Caesar shit then if we are in a new civilization

>>19063221
what if the fascists were the caesarian era?

>>19063155
One thing that has to be noted is that there was a certain quiet death of the Faustian spirit. In 1960's it was alive and well in form of the space race(as well as boom in hard sci-fi), even the mid 2000's atheists were fetishizing it, without the ability to contribute or partake in it, but were expressing this exact sentiment. Nowadays however it seems that the obsession with discovering and expressing your originality and individuality took over completely, so maybe we are living in post-fall society and the whole I'm genderfluid transasperger disabledkin stuff is the expression of the new culture.

Spengler was a pseud

>>19063234
Last couple of months 3 different private companies have put people into space.

>>19062656
I'm not going to respond to each of your posts directly because you have no idea what you're talking about. Spengler did not view there as being "multiple mathematicses", rather he thought that each Culture-Civilization (a sort of higher-dimensional mind-parasite that lives in peoples heads and impacts how they conceive of space-time) had a unique interest in certain aspects of reality and as such had unique interests in math. The Ancient Greeks, for example, were very focused on points and relations, so they really liked geometry. It's not that they couldn't invent Calculus, or that they wouldn't find uses for it, but rather that geometry dealt with what they really cared about.

Computer Science is one of the most Faustian disciplines possible: it's what happens when you run out of worlds to map, create your own, and then use them to get really fucking good at mapping worlds.


>>19063251
Correct, which aligns with Spengler's predictions. As a Culture-Civilization's life progresses it eventually hits a point where technology just becomes "build a bigger toy" for more extreme yet totally understood goals. This is completely in line with building better rockets (bigger toys) and blasting them further into space (more extreme yet totally understood goals).

>>19062628
Math student here. I'm very far from being the most knowledgeable person about the field but hopefully I can clear some things up.
>Is Western mathematics in decline?
I'm not familiar with the most cutting-edge research in math but I see no sign to think this is true. There are no mathematicians complaining about the poverty of ideas. Big recent ideas include homotopy type theory, proof verification, Scholze's condensed mathematics, noncommutative geometry, and probably a lot of other progress whose true significance won't be understood and widely accepted until a few decades later.
>he asserts that mathematics is the expression of the unique soul of each culture
I really think it's the opposite. Mathematics seems to be mostly universal. The only consistent axis of cultural difference is how rigorous you are, i.e. how much emphasis do you lay on having precise proofs and clearly laid out foundations. But even this axis doesn't seem to vary culture to culture, especially not after the 18th century. There is no western mathematics, there's just mathematics. The japanese, scandinavians, eastern europeans, russians, french, jews all contribute to the same mathematical edifice and each of them is as accepted as the others.
>Greek culture is concerned with pure locality that is man and his immediate surroundings which implies a mathematics of the local which is geometry
This just sounds ridiculous. Euclidean geometry is not an applied science. It's purely about reason and proof about ideal objects. And they're not local, lines in Euclid are allowed to extend indefinitely and the plane (and space) in which the geometry takes place is extended indefinitely.
>By contrast Faustian mathematics concerns itself chiefly with problems of infinity (for Faustian civilization has infinite space as its symbolic form), infinite sets and numbers which can't be said to exist in the same way as rational numbers
By that standard faustian mathematics is but a very small subset of modern mathematics. Modern math does not study problems of infinity, it rather studies mathematical problems using a framework which is infinitistic however the research itself is not concerned about the infinity per se, it simply uses infinite tools to analyze other things. You might have heard of things like Banach Tarski or HIlbert's Hotel and got the impression that that's what math is about. It's not.
> we were to sketch the outline of the state of contemporary mathematics a complete lack of true innovation would definitely be a distinguishing feature
If you just judge the last century then this is completely 100% not true. For the great advances in mid-20th century I suggest Dieudonne's book A Panorama of Pure Mathematics.

>>19063306
So either continuing space travel or discontinuing space travel both support Spengler? Sounds kind of like BS

>>19063334
A good theory can explain all outcomes and predict them all as a series of if-then statements. I'm going to preempt some sperg whose going to come in with
>implying that faustian man is interested in mapping and not the HECKIN BASED RETAKING OF CONSTANTINOPLE AND DECLARING PUTIN THE CZAR OF ALL RUSSIAS
No, Faustian Man is about a 3D grid with vectors moving through it. Getting in a big tube with a point on the end and careening through outer space measure stuff is arguably the single most Faustian thing you can do. I mean come the fuck on you're literally in a physical manifestation of a vector.

Faustian Man, according to Spengler, will NOT stop doing space travel. It will continue doing space travel by any means necessary. It HAS to. It literally cannot stop. Stopping would imply complete death of the Culture-Civilization, which would imply total eradication of "The West" as we know it. Even if the US suddenly went away, Europoors would pick up the slack. They HAVE to. At a slower pace, but they would.

>>19063251
Yes, but they're ran by the generation of people who grew up in the times of all these pop science shows about spaaace. You will not see zoomers doing this when they get old and rich enough.

To understand this point these are like Ptolemies in Egypt, the last tether connecting them to their old and dying civilization. Once they were gone the last distinguishing elements that made Egypt its own thing rather than place, eastern mediterrean was gone.

>>19062628
Faustian mathematics peaked with the stuff that told us there are things called quasars that shoot out energy light and song and black holes which suck it all back up.
However mathematics in its current form is platonistic and inevitably this turned into gay dualism and fascination with unreality like the creation of other virtual worlds, social spaces, virtual thinking or calculating machines. You could say this is the Faustian spirit expanding but I dunno, seems gay and seems to just be going in Bourgeois directions lately.
As the population of the United States and Europe becomes less Aryan then it is over for space flight and quantum physics and such, at least on a scale that allows for the commandeering of a lot of resources for this Faustian engineering spirit.

>>19063355
>>19063473
This what I'm talking about two different posts back to back saying the opposite developments both support Spengler. One says continued space travel supports Spengler and the other says space travel is stopping and that supports Spengler too. Crap is so vague and open to interpretation you can get anything out of it.

>>19063490
Just how long do you think the Ptolemies ruled Egypt for, anon?

>>19063006
Computer science marks the end of western civilization and the beggining of a brave new transgender world. Mr Turings famous test

>>19063511
I think Spengler is full of crap you should be responding to the other Spengler anon that thinks
>Faustian Man, according to Spengler, will NOT stop doing space travel. It will continue doing space travel by any means necessary. It HAS to. It literally cannot stop

>>19063329
How worried are you about AI completely taking over the field of mathematics and rendering human mathematicians obsolete?

>>19063520
It sounds like you went into this thinking it'd be BASED GOLLABS MUH MINERALS MARIE man and instead got big-brained 20th century German idealism and are upset that it doesn't involve the retaking of Constantinople.

>>19063512
Trannies aren't a uniquely western/Faustian concept.

>>19063538
You're dodging the fact that both you think the opposite developments support Spengler's theory. Again I think Spengler is full of crap and barely knowledgeable about the mathematics of his time

>>19063535
Not worried at all. Computers might help discover whether some theorems are true, but the job of a mathematician is to understand why they're true. It will never take over completely. AI will only be a tool that humans use to help them better understand what's going on.

>>19063550
>spengler predicts that some thing will act in a specific manner at time A and a different manner at time B
>one anon says that this thing will act in a specific manner at time A
>one anon says that this thing will act in a specific manner at time B
what is so hard about this for you?

>>19063559
Except you're both talking about the same time. Does continued space travel at this time support or undermine Spengler's theory? One of you said support and the other said undermine

>>19063571
no one anon who is not me said that space travel now supports spengler and another anon who is not me said that space travel not happening later supports spengler.

spengler is about shit happening through time. shit changes over time.

>>19063249
/thread
/spengler

>>19063329
Euclid's geometry =/= Euclidean geometry
Spengler is talking about geometry as it was practiced in the age of Ancient Greece and which was systematized by Euclid
>And they're not local, lines in Euclid are allowed to extend indefinitely and the plane (and space) in which the geometry takes place is extended indefinitely.
That is the modern Faustian understanding of the matter. Here's how Euclid defines straight lines in Elements
>A line is breadthless length.
>A straight line is a line which lies evenly with the points on itself.
See the difference? In fact Spengler addressed your point in Decline of the West and he concurred that Faustian mathematics has largely incorporated the results of Apollonian (or ancient) mathematics and adjusted them to fit into its system (with Euclidean space, vectors and whatnot). Here's Spengler: "We can now understand what it is that divides one mathematic from
another, and in particular the Classical from the Western. The whole world
feeling of the matured Classical world led it to see mathematics only as the
theory of relations of magnitude, dimension and form between bodies. When,
from out of this feeling, Pythagoras evolved and expressed the decisive
formula, number had come, for him, to be an optical symbol — not a
measure of form generally, an abstract relation, but a frontier post of the
domain of the Become, or rather of that part of it which the senses were able
to split up and pass under review. By the whole Classical world without exception numbers are conceived as units of measure, as magnitude, lengths,
or surfaces, and for it no other sort of extension is imaginable. The whole
Classical mathematic is at bottom Stereometry (solid geometry). To Euclid,
who rounded off its system in the third century, the triangle is of deep
necessity the bounding surface of a body, never a system of three intersecting
straight lines or a group of three points in three dimensional space. He
defines a line as “length without breadth” (μῆκος ἀπλατές). In our mouths
such a definition would be pitiful — in the Classical mathematic it was
brilliant."

>>19063631
Euclid's second postulate
To produce a finite straight line continuously in a straight line.

Euclid's definition of parallel lines
Parallel straight lines are straight lines which being in the same plane and
being produced indefinitely in both directions, do not meet one another in either direction
either direction.

Euclid's geometry had the notion of an infinite plane.

>>19063662
Correct, and that was already explained in >>19063306.
>Spengler did not view there as being "multiple mathematicses", rather he thought that each Culture-Civilization (a sort of higher-dimensional mind-parasite that lives in peoples heads and impacts how they conceive of space-time) had a unique interest in certain aspects of reality and as such had unique interests in math. The Ancient Greeks, for example, were very focused on points and relations, so they really liked geometry. It's not that they couldn't invent Calculus, or that they wouldn't find uses for it, but rather that geometry dealt with what they really cared about.

>>19063030
My brain works at the speed and time complexity of O(1) whereas yours does at O(n^n), little bitch boy faggot cunt nigger.

>>19063688
>>And they're not local, lines in Euclid are allowed to extend indefinitely and the plane (and space) in which the geometry takes place is extended indefinitely.
>That is the modern Faustian understanding of the matter

That is not just the Faustian understanding of the matter. Euclid the ancient Greek mathematician understood the plane as extending infinitely. Your statement above is wrong

>>19063741
>Euclid the ancient Greek mathematician understood the plane as extending infinitely.
Correct. Because, as mentioned, there's only one mathematics, and there's nothing stopping an Ancient Greek from understanding all of it. This is precisely what Spengler says

But what Euclid cared about wasn't infinite planes. It's also not what Faustian Man cares about, either. It is what Russian Man cares about, though.

>>19063234
No, we’re living in either the pseudo-morphosis of something else over Faustian civilization, or else the total breakdown of his model. He viewed America as essentially unimportant so unless in the last analysis America turns out to be a short lived footnote in the record or Faustian civilization lasting barely 100 years, or as another culture entirely, but the latter seems to make no sense either.

>>19062628
>Is Western mathematics in decline
yep
https://quillette.com/2021/08/19/as-us-schools-prioritize-diversity-over-merit-china-is-becoming-the-worlds-stem-leader/

>>19063777
I'm a Russian man and I care about you anon, take your meds

>>19063251
It doesn’t matter. Americans, companies, individuals, government, whatever are nobodies in Spengler’s model. They’re necessarily prohibited as being a driving core of Faustian civilization by his views on race and the influence of the land on race, culture, and the land. Either American civilization isn’t Faustian or something about his model was wrong.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF03022980
>Viewed superficially, mathematics is the result of centuries of effort by many thousands of largely unconnected individuals scattered across continents, centuries and millennia. However, the internal logic of its development much more resembles the work of a single intellect developing its thought in a continuous and systematic way, and only using as a means a multiplicity of human individualities, much as in an orchestra playing a symphony written by some composer the theme moves from one instrument to another so that as soon as one performer is forced to cut short his part, it is taken up by another player, who continues it with due attention to the score.
>Truly, this is not a figure of speech! The history of mathematics is full of examples in which the discovery of one scholar remained unknown only to be reproduced later with amazing accuracy by another. In a letter written the night before the duel which led to his death, Galois formulated some fundamental assertions about the integrals of algebraic functions. More than twenty years later, Riemann, who certainly did not know of Galois' letter, posed a new and proved those very same assertions. To give another example: After Lobachevsky and Bolyai independently founded noneuclidean geometry, it came to light that Gauss and Schweikart had independently arrived at the same results more than ten years earlier. One experience a strange feeling when one sees the same diagrams, drawn as if by the same hand, in the writings of four mathematicians working independently of one another.

>>19063822
I just read something about this Bolyai was the son of Gauss's close friend and Lobachevsky's tutor had extensive correspondence with Gauss about geometry. Neither Bolyai or Lobachevsky produced any mathematical work after their "discovery" and Gauss had done his work a decade prior with the intervening years spent in close discussion with the father and tutor respectively

>>19063251
Well according to Spengler, Faustian civilization has a few hundred years left at most. So unless you think Elon Musk is going to do anything really profound in the next 50-100 years, it makes no difference and the space race is going nowhere. Besides, other countries which are not Faustian at all send people and things to space. They just copy Faustian. Could the Americans not be doing the same?

>>19062628
We're not there yet. We'll get there eventually. Computer science is currently being innovated. When that stops, we will know that we have reached the most ossified stage (unless something new is created).

This is a based thread. Screencapped for later

>>19063155
Apparently, he changed his mind on America. In 1932, he wrote an essay to one of HL Mencken’s newspapers that suggested America was not nothing and was in fact part of a Nordic-Germanic blooded Faustian civilization comprised of Americans, British (English), Germans, and French. So he updated his predictions on America, but not his model. It still doesn’t explain how America supersedes his notions of race and land and the effects of the latter on race, culture, and civilization. I suppose it’s possible that for the Americans it’s still wholly Faustian because not enough time has passed or Faustian civilization is uniquely positioned to overcome the influence of land on a civilization. Given the fact that Faustian civilization had colonies across the planet and America was formed wholly in the civilizational phase, the latter seems like it might be possible.

One has to wonder though how things will change as the face of America changes though. America seems to not fit very neatly into his model no matter what.

>>19063021
Based retard.

>>19062656

What's the best translation for The Decline of the West?

>>19064361
>>19063155
>Apparently, he changed his mind on America.
I have no idea how you think he "changed his mind" when in the first fucking page of the first fucking sentence he refers to Faustian civilziation as such:
>In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment - the West-Europe-American.
Like holy shit do you fags even read the book? Of course he knew the US was Faustian. He writes very snarky regarding the US, because he hates it. For the same reason he hated Hitlel. He is a reactionary. He looks down on civilization and masterbaits to culture man.

>>19062628
I can sort of understand where Spengler is coming from here, and like the guy who recommended Dieudonne I strongly disagree that mathematics lacks innovation. In fact, as Freeman Dyson put it, in the divorce between physics and mathematics, as often happens in a divorce, one party got the worst of the deal. Mathematics has flown ahead while physics has languished. You cannot be exposed to modern mathematics and actually believe it's not had innovations.
Then again, Spengler's point about culture influencing the "soul" of mathematical thought does seem to be true in a way. I'm not the first to say so either, many mathematicians have thought of different styles of maths, from Aryan vs Jewish mathematics, T & S types, to Arnold's idea of "criminal axiomatisors" and it does seem that the idea of diving into abstraction is very heavily influenced by both the Jewish and French mathematicians whereas Russians often have a more direct way of seeing things and like to come from specific examples into generality, rather than vice versa.
I really struggle to think of how mathematics as a whole could be considered Faustian though. I think Spengler does have a general kind of point, but I don't think he knew enough about mathematics to really justify this.

>>19063155
19063155
Can you explain how is he wrong about America? USA has literally all symptoms of the late phase civilization(Faustian). I don't see a problem.

>>19063006
Infinitely far?

>>19063251
Space isn't real

You have to be the dumbest pant shitting drooling retard to still believe in "outer space" in 2021

>>19062628
Why is he so extremely based bros?

>>19066097
Space is inside me right now

>>19062674
Huh yeah nice point.
> Coloring the Curriculum: Elementary Mathematics and the Black gaze
>> fuck off i dont believe in any of the made up bullshit
> Euclid concludes the project of capturing the Greek soul through geometry
>> SO TRUE!!1!1!

>>19063006
Computer science also concerns itself with the infinite. For example complexity theory deals explicitly in infinites by considering the growth of functions without regard for their coefficients

>>19063899
I fail to see the problem. Its not like they went to his house, killed him in his sleep and stole his work.
This how math progress works

>>19062628
>Bruno's idea of infinite universe,
Wait, you mean like the Indian idea which he ripped off? The fact that Indian mathematicians literally invented the mathematical concept of infinity before Faustian culture as a way of describing Brahman? Spengler was a pseud who would've been a Traditionalist if a had just a bit more knowledge.

>>19066346
Source?