Man and Technics Reading Group Discussion

[Anonymous No.11958928]

Yes it's finally here. No the original OP didn't forget. I expect every anon who complained about the discussion being too soon last week to have some really damn good questions and points to bring up.

The book itself is only about **50 pages**. Because of how short it is, hopefully even if you haven't yet read it, you can power through it over the weekend and join in.

>Man and Technology: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life is a short book by Oswald Spengler, in which the author discusses a critique of technology and industrialism. It was published as Der Mensch und die Technik in Munich in 1931.

>The principal idea in the work is that many of the Western world's great achievements may soon become spectacles for our descendants to marvel at, as we do with the pyramids of Egypt or the baths of Rome.[1] Spengler especially pointed to the tendency of Western technology to spread to hostile "Colored races" which would then use the weapons against the West.[2] In Spengler's view, western culture will be destroyed from within by materialism, and destroyed by others through economic competition and warfare.

Here is the original:

https://archive.org/details/DerMenschUndDieTechnik/page/n0

Here's an English translation:

https://archive.org/details/ManTechnics-AContributionToAPhilosophyOfLife193253/page/n3N

The book is a standalone work, but a basic knowledge of Spengler's previous works and his general philosophy of history is recommended, which you can find on Wikipedia. Or better yet, read his Der Untergang Des Abendlandes, The Decline of the West.

[Anonymous No.11958950]

I'm going to start this off with a basic prompt for anon's to respond to:

>In place of the honest religion of earlier times there was a shallow enthusiasm for the “achievements >of humanity,” by which nothing more was meant than progress in the technics of labour- saving and >amusement-making. Of the soul, not one word.

>Now, such ideals are not at all to the taste of the great discoverers themselves (with few exceptions), >not even to that of the finished connoisseurs of technics. It is that of the spectators around them who, >themselves incapable of discovering anything (or anyhow of understanding it if they did), sense that> >there is something to their own advantage in the wind. And out of these conditions, since in every >“civilization”1 materialism is distinguished by its lack of imaginative power, there is formed a picture of >the future in which the ultimate object and the final permanent condition of humanity is an Earthly >Paradise conceived in terms of the technical vogue of, say, the eighties of last century — a rather> >startling negation, by the way, of the very concept of progress, which by hypothesis excludes “states.”

Is Spengler anticipating here the cult of science which we see today? This dogmatic belief in science and progress-by-science?

[Anonymous No.11959160]

>>11958928
Bump

[Anonymous No.11959210]

>>11958950
objectively it is quite possible

[Anonymous No.11959478]

>>11958950
he is also anticipating Nick land
>>Every high Culture is a tragedy. The history of mankind as a whole is tragic. But the sacrilege and the catastrophe of the Faustian are greater than all others, greater than anything Æschylus or Shakespeare ever imagined. The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him — forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not — to follow its course. The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team.
he anticipates everything

[Anonymous No.11959483]

also post-colonialism
>Movement on these paths we call Progress. This was the great catchword of last century. Men saw history before them like a street on which, bravely and ever forward, marched "mankind" — meaning by that term the white races, or more exactly the inhabitants of their great cities, or more exactly still the "educated" amongst them.

[Anonymous No.11959515]

found the chapter on the hand a bit baffling, like i understand his point that most animals habit niches and don't really evolve, just stay in a stasis on those niches while they remain

But when about the periods between those static moments? he seems to mock evolution but certainly there has to be some mechanism that transforms the organisms when change is required? maybe he doesn't really deny evolution, just changes the focus to those moments where nothing changes and organisms just express their nature up to their logical conclusion and then pass away when their time is over?

[Anonymous No.11959775]

>>11958950
Don't think so. I think, he means that the future that is painted by the masses is one, where the technical progress leads to a paradise of levity for everyone. This would lead to a stasis and would defeat the idea of progress.
I think, it depends on if you believe that todays science-cult has the same ultimate goal or not. Do people wish to go further than paradise if they talk about singularities and acceleration? Could be.

[Anonymous No.11959884]

>>11958928
how does Spengler theory of "Technics as the Tactics of Living" fit with Heidegger famous lecture on "The Question Concerning Technology":
http://www.psyp.org/question_concerning_technology.pdf
http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/index.html

[Anonymous No.11959951]

Please excuse my English, because I am still learning. I think he was right, except about the race part. Materialism left unchecked is a danger to Western civilization, but we can also see it undoing the civilization of the far east of Asia as well. Maybe we can call that the Sinosphere for this purpose because the nations that make it up are all heavily influenced by China? It consists of China proper ("zhongguo") as well as Korea, Japan, and maybe Vietnam to an extent but I don't know if "Sinosphere" is a good word to describe it. "East" and "Far East" don't seem to be as proper to call it, because the East also includes Indian civilization and the Far East could also be taken to include those of far eastern Siberia (who usually would be better categorized as under "Eskimo" type of civilization or under Turkic civilization). But anyways, the rot is more pronounced in Japan and South Korea, probably because the two countries have attached themselves economically and culturally to the West. I think ultimately it will come down to culture rather than race. A brown guy who thinks, talks, and acts like an ordinary Frenchman or Canadian is certainly not as much of a threat to those societies as a white guy from the native ethnicity who has converted to Islam and wants a caliphate. The book "Camp of the Saints," while it is a flawed book and far from perfect, had a character like this. To judge based on race seems like a bad idea given the prevalence of people such as fully Americanized children of immigrants or fully Islamicized converts and children of converts who move from Western or Sinosphere nations to the Islamic world.

[Anonymous No.11960063]

felt like i was rereading pic relates

[Anonymous No.11960078]

>>11960063
No.

[Anonymous No.11960129]

after reading this, i have come to the conclusion that NPC's are herbivores who have succumbed to the enslavement of the Machine. its not that they're born an NPC, the Machine just took them over. this is why they seem so mechanical, like they're programmed. this is why they hate the NPC meme so much, because it threatens to expose their master who controls their actions in an attempt to conceal himself. this is why any deviation from the will of the Machine will earn you a social banishment from your peers, its his best tool against you without killing you. feel free to expand on this, i only read it through once and i didn't take notes or anything and i literally just thought of this.

[Anonymous No.11960164]

>>11960129
You're partially right, but you really ought to drop the NPC meme. What's you're calling the "Machine" is the society we live in. People are programmed to live in the societies they are born to and raised in. Some deviate from the programming. This isn't anything new and it's not a conspiracy. It's how societies have operated since we first formed societies. Some people may try to alter the programming (propaganda, advertising, brainwashing by changing the literature taught in the K-12 curriculum), but the programming will always be there. You can break it either through intellectual pursuits (not that you're an intellectual, I'm certainly not either) or by simply being a colossal fuck-up like an incel or a career criminal and being ostracized by your society for being a gross loser.
>this is why any deviation from the will of the Machine will earn you a social banishment from your peers, its his best tool against you without killing you
This is called the spiral of silence, anon.

[Anonymous No.11960243]

>>11960164
society is just enterprise though, and the machine is now the head of our enterprise. the machine is the head and all the NPC's are just hands. before, it was other, more faustian men at the head, and the programmed peasants had that spirit in them by extension, but now its the machine at the head and the men who are its hands now have the spirit of the machine, thus they are NPC's.

[Anonymous No.11960326]

>>11960243
No, dude. Also, you're misusing "Faustian" if you mean it the way Spengler did.

[Anonymous No.11960355]

>>11960326
how am i wrong tho? if i'm wrong i wanna know why

[Anonymous No.11960906]

bump

[Anonymous No.11961690]

>>11960243
>>11960355
not that guy, but i think according to Spengler we are seeing the logical conclusion (or life-cycle if you will) of Faustian civilization and Faustian man, as in it failed not because men where not Faustian enough, but because they were successfully Faustian

most men in society were never faustian anyway, see for example >>11959483

[Anonymous No.11962059]

>>11958928
did Spengler write something about how new civilizations come out of the ashes of previous civilization once they decline?

[Anonymous No.11962174]

>>11962059
I don't recall anything. Man and Technics was released after Decline of the West btw. So this book is more about the details of progress made by the nordic people and how that will play out.

[Anonymous No.11962413]

>>11961690
>>11962174
Spengler seems to have a weird vision of how things come to be as noted in here >>11959515 , he seems to write a lot of how things develop following their own internal logic but not so much how things change and appear in the first place

[Anonymous No.11962486]

>>11959515
Morphogenetic fields

[Anonymous No.11962496]

>>11962059
You mean like in terms of a rebirth? Or just generally new ones emerging? Because he wrote that one culture waiting to happen is a genuine Russian one, for example.

[Anonymous No.11962524]

>>11962496
like for example roman empire -> medieval christianity, does he see it as the same civilization or as the fall of one and raise of the next? how does he see this process of civilizational heredity if it's the 2nd case?

[Anonymous No.11962529]

>>11962486
how do those morphogenetic fields contain the potential to generate something that never existed before in the first case? i can understand them expressing certain features or not depending on the environment, but not how something new is generated

[Anonymous No.11962539]

>>11962524
He sees those two as completely distinct things, except that there's Westeners LARPing as Greeks, usually without comprehending their essence or by selectively interpreting them.
In relation to the Romano-Greek ancient culture, he does however talk about what he calls a pseudo-morphosis, as the overbearing Roman civilisation stifles the young and emerging Arabic one.
Check out the Decline of the West.

[Anonymous No.11962547]

>>11962539
>except that there's Westeners LARPing as Greeks, usually without comprehending their essence or by selectively interpreting them.
romans did larp as greek too though, seems like larping is a constant feature of most civilizations