/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16925377]

Decline of the west thread continued, along with related discussion on the topic of culture-civilisations and their relation to the ideas of other authors such as Junger.

[Anonymous No.16925380]

>>16925377
Best book I read in 2020 besides Moby Dick and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The insight that Spengler gave me, is enormous

[Anonymous No.16925387]

>>16925377
Right wing fascist, homophobic, transphobic propaganda. Karl Marx was right. Read Capital instead of this vile wretched book.

[Anonymous No.16925423]

>>16925387
Epic bait bro

[Anonymous No.16925583]

>>16925377
We are drawing ever closer to the Last Man described by Nietzsche. Spengler predicted he would become common around this time and it is already happening

[Anonymous No.16925592]

>>16925387
A rich man visits Karl Marx as he's writing the Communist manifesto.

He asks: "So what's in that book of yours, Mr. Marx?"

Marx replies: "None of your business."

[Anonymous No.16925662]

>>16925592
>>16925583
I want some genuine and deep discussion on the level of the previous thread, from those who have read it, on the topic of culture-civilisations

[Anonymous No.16925719]

>>16925662
everything was already said

[Anonymous No.16925842]

>>16925377
What did Spengler say about the future of religion in the west? Would it assume some form of syncretism or just die out?

[Anonymous No.16925858]

Got a link to the previous thread? I read this a while back but I think a lot of it went right over my head, especially the allusions to Goethe.

[Anonymous No.16925899]

>>16925858
>>16909256

[Anonymous No.16925989]

>>16925387
What does transphobic propaganda even mean? Were transgender people even considered in the book, like at all?

[Anonymous No.16926068]

>>16925989
>like

Fuck off yank

[Anonymous No.16926103]

>>16925842
He didn't say much other than there would be a "fake" revival of religion which would be followed by a genuine return of religious feeling. Tradcath larping and Jordan Peterson's religious utilitarianism can definitely be understood as the former, which some guy actually wrote a book about recently.

[Anonymous No.16926111]

>>16925899
I'm still sifting through the /pol/tard shittalking

[Anonymous No.16926120]

Is that arktos one going to be a completely new translation? They trustable with that?

[Anonymous No.16926151]

Semi-serious question: has Popper given any valid criticism of Toynbee and Spengler besides just disparaging them for creating historicist narratives?

[Anonymous No.16926185]

>>16926151
>Hoping to find anything of value in Popper's opinion about a non-scientific subject

ishiggy

[Anonymous No.16926215]

>>16925989
They don't know the answer to that because they've never read it.

[Anonymous No.16926218]

How will the next space-time conception look like, since it always seems to have been derived from natural landscapes?
Will the next "room" be the web-like room of cyber-space?

[Anonymous No.16926221]

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

[Anonymous No.16926247]

>>16926151
Pic related says Popper only attacked Hegelian and Marxian historicism that says history progresses towards a definitive end goal. He also distinguishes between Hegelian historicism and Rankean historism, which he says Popper said nothing about, and while I can't find any proof of Ranke's influence on Spengler, I believe it was substantial.

[Anonymous No.16926254]

>>16926247
>filename
kek

[Anonymous No.16926257]

>>16926254
It's a truly unfortunate name

[Anonymous No.16926316]

>>16926151
>>16926247
I found this footnote in the Open Society
> (1) Spengler’s Decline of the West is not in my opinion to be taken seriously. But it is a symptom; it is the theory of one who believes in an upper class which is facing defeat. Like Plato, Spengler tries to show that ‘the world’ is to be blamed, with its general law of decline and death. And like Plato, he demands (in his sequel, Prussianism and Socialism ) a new order, a desperate experiment to stem the forces of history, a regeneration of the Prussian ruling class by the adoption of a ‘socialism’ or communism, and of economic abstinence.—Concerning Spengler, I largely agree with L. Nelson, who published his criticism under a long ironical title whose beginning may be translated: ‘Witchcraft: Being an Initiation into the Secrets of Oswald Spengler’s Art of Fortune Telling, and a Most Evident Proof of the Irrefutable Truth of His Soothsaying’, etc. I think that this is a just characterization of Spengler. Nelson, I may add, was one of the fi rst to oppose what I call historicism (following here Kant in his criticism of Herder; cp. chapter 12, note 56)

[Anonymous No.16926338]

>>16926316
Popper really had a hateboner for Plato didnt he

[Anonymous No.16926384]

>>16925842
>>16926103
The Second Religiousness is what happens after Caesar assumes power. To use Rome as an example, it's Augustus' religious reforms, it is NOT Constantine.

Caesar is conservative, but in such a manner that affirms the validity of religious "liberalism". To again use Rome, Augustus was the Pater Familias, and all of Rome was his family. The Pater Familias was a small warrior-king, merchant-prince, and priest-lord over his small fiefdom. All within his manus (his hand) were his to do with as he pleased. Augustus very right to rule was rooted in an incredibly ancient, conservative, mindset. But, he was also followed wherever he went by Greek soothsayers, and the Anatolian Galli, the cross-dressing eunuch priests of Magna Mater, a decadent oriental Goddess. Augustus enacted laws meant to increase birthrates and punish infidelity, but also gave women hefty political and economic privileges, and worked to streamline prostitution.

The Faustian Caesar will re-affirm capital-P Progress, but also return to tried and true religion. The religion of Caesar is that of praying to Jesus to make racism go away.

This religious form is not COMPLETED by Caesar, but set in motion. It is a return to "Gothic Christianity": Scholastic, rigid, inhuman, distant, and wholly unconcerned with the trivialities of human life. It is an abstraction of the divine. Think Late Roman Pagan Neoplatonism, where the Gods and spirits and souls have been abstracted to purely intellectual affairs with no interaction with the human world. The religious mode becomes a game rather than a reality. A corollary to this is that science and math stop in their tracks; they become "solved". Euclid finished geometry, and there was no point in doing math after that. Intellectual life is thus about gathering up as much of this solved, static world as possible, and desperately holding onto it. Religion becomes nothing more than a series of propositions, and if you hold the wrong proposition, you get punished. All intellectual work is just crafting lists of citations.

[Anonymous No.16926504]

>>16926384
And how would you compare our current state to the Rome?

[Anonymous No.16926617]

>>16926384
As an aside I've read that his marriage laws were thought of as a bad joke even in his time and that he kinda had to give up that idea after a while given how unpopular (and unfeasible) the laws were.

[Anonymous No.16926796]

>>16925377
Posting before the retards who never read it and think Spengler was talking about mass immigration or trannies or whatever.

[Anonymous No.16926810]

>>16926796
Spengler did raise concerns for immigration, though. It's not the central thesis, but still.

[Anonymous No.16926832]

Is there a decent publication of this available anymore? (In English specifically)

[Anonymous No.16926838]

>>16926617
They were never enforced, because they were simply too unwieldy to enforce. It wouldn't be until Christianization that the Romans actually had a way to go door-to-door enforcing any sort of morality (St. Cyril went around burning all books that he could find that weren't the Bible and his commentaries on it, for example).

They were completely forgotten after Augustus' death. Technically, they were never repealed, they were just so ignored that they stopped being included in lists of laws.

>>16926504
There's two different things going on there.

Firstly, all of Spengler's culture-civilizations share a common life progression. Birth, growth, vitality, life, aging, ossification. He isn't a theoretician of "cyclical" history because his culture-civilizations (I, not he, call them this for simplicity) don't "die" of senescence, or eat each other. They can murder each other by "converting" each others followers, or die because felaheen (people who do not partake in a culture-civilization) force the people who partake in one to "unpartake" in one. However, once ossification ("decline") is complete, they can live forever. China finished its progression in like, 200AD, and can continue forever.

So, while we can say "Spengler says that the West is like Rome", he also says that it's like China, India, Egypt, Sumer, Mesoamerican, and the Semitic Middle East.

[Anonymous No.16926877]

>>16926838
Are you the same poster who lived in South America?

[Anonymous No.16926880]

>>16926838
Having said that, and detached from Spengler's works, but fueled by them, I do feel that there is a similarity between the Anglosphere and the Greco-Roman world that is stronger than, say, that of the Anglosphere and Chinese history. Saying "The US is Rome, Britain is Greece" has some merit. It's not 1:1, but I feel that the two are "on the same wavelength" more closely than any other comparison.

It's not correct to say "US=Rome, Britain=Greece, Spics=Germanics, Injuns=Celts, Trannies=Galli, US Presidents are going to become more and more like Sulla, until we get one who =Caesar". However, that comparison has some degree of predictive power, I would argue more than most other comparisons.

But again, "Faustian Man" in Spengler is not "the US", or "the Anglosphere", it's "a specific way of looking at space-time that arose in Germanic Europe around 900AD". A Congoloid, a Chinaman, a German, and an Inuit can all be "Faustian Man" (we can propose a minimum IQ requirement, so a SMART Congoloid, perhaps).

[Anonymous No.16926884]

>>16926877
No, I am not. I'm a burger.

[Anonymous No.16926885]

>>16926880
Isn't Western civilization is inherently greco-roman in its nature?

[Anonymous No.16926919]

>>16926885
Again, we must be careful with what Spengler is talking about. "Faustian Man" is not a child, a descendant, or at all related to "Apollonian Man". Apollonian Man's death and Faustian Man's birth are separated by centuries. The culture-civilizations of Spengler (so called because of their vital period, "culture", and their aged period, "civilization") are not "related" to each other. They're wholely unique.

Having said that, the "material" that these culture-civilizations "manifest" upon IS related. There IS a connection between "Medieval Europe" (and thus, its descendants, Modern Europe and the Anglo-Colonies) and the Greco-Roman world. "Western Civilization", referring to "Europe, her culture, her people" INDEPENDENT of Faustian Man, inherits a LOT from the Greco-Roman world (it also inherits a LOT, an often understated amount, from the Germanic peoples, however).

The Greeks, for example, have been Apollonian, Magian, and now Faustian Men. They've also been felaheen.

[Anonymous No.16926976]

>>16925387
Why not read both?

[Anonymous No.16927731]

>>16926384
>To use Rome as an example, it's Augustus' religious reforms, it is NOT Constantine.

Nah man, the second religiousness was the proliferation of the various east influenced mystery cults and stoicism.

[Anonymous No.16927781]

>>16926218
You assume there will be another space-time conception. What if Faustian civilization itself is the winter stage?

[Anonymous No.16927788]

>>16926384
>The religion of Caesar is that of praying to Jesus to make racism go away.
I am pretty sure it will be economic and scientific progress under the appearance of a society of orders, which would be like the apartheid system in south africa, which is based around the old Dutch laws.

[Anonymous No.16927794]

>>16927731
I'd say that's just part of Augustus. Spengler's specific prediction of what the Second Religiousness of Faustian Man would look like is some form of hyper-low-church Protestantism (he specifically named Anabaptism, but at the time he was writing this term would refer just as much to "Evangelicalism").

The Second Religiousness isn't strictly a religious doctrine as much as it is an outlook on the world and how spirituality works. For the Romans, acceptance of weird foreign Asiatic cults was NECESSARY for the fulfillment of the Roman religious outlook. The Romans conceptualized their right to rule as being grounded in their intense love for the Gods. ALL of the Gods. That meant that if there was some weird God out there, they had to love them. Magna Mater couldn't be left out. Weird cults and ideas HAD to be partaken in.

Caesar synthesizes "degradation" and "conservatism". Romanizing oriental Gods was necessary to do that. For Faustian Man, it'll be converting other peoples.

[Anonymous No.16927816]

>>16927794
>For Faustian Man, it'll be converting other peoples.
Again, more likely some form of the Sallic laws will return and the entire world will be bound into a system of apartheid.

[Anonymous No.16927899]

>>16927788
>>16927816
How so? How do you perceive this coming about?

[Anonymous No.16927914]

>>16927794
>Evangelicalism
I wonder if movements like Quiverfull will contribute to the coming of the second religiousness with their demographic dividend, which will be realized in the 22nd century, at the same time as the second religiousness.

[Anonymous No.16927945]

>>16926885
no, read spengler. appolonian and magian influences on western (faustian) civ are pseudomorphic.

[Anonymous No.16927948]

>>16927899
>How so? How do you perceive this coming about?
Because a society of order was the literal main mode of organisation of Western society, until Napoleon and even then it took more then a century to slowly erode the last vestiges away.

It also parallels other Indo-European societies like the Greeks, Persian and Romans, who also increased their old apartheid laws with the wave of growing conservatism.

I expect European civilization to return to the type of prenapoleonic society, found in most European nations.

This means a semi-rigid caste system of lower, working, burgher, warrior and priestly classses.

[Anonymous No.16928142]

>>16927781
After the singularity happens and when we will all live in the space-time of "virtual reality" there will have to be a new form of space-time conception emerging. Cyber-space (whatever that will be) would then be the new landscape out of which a new culture-civilization arises.
Or alternatively we have to think about space travel and how that will change the way how to perceive space-time.

It's two possibilities to think Spengler into a futuristic scenario. The technological possibilities of faustian man aren't burned out yet - we will still go a long way before there's new "room" for a new culture-civilization

In my opinion the other anon who always talks about his "caesarism" doesn't think futuristic-technologically enough about the coming times

[Anonymous No.16928482]

>>16928142
>Or alternatively we have to think about space travel and how that will change the way how to perceive space-time.
space travel itself is a Faustian conception. as this civilization erodes, we will never outdo the moon landing ever again. singularity is a fraud perpetrated by that charlatan Kurzweil, please don't take that seriously.

[Anonymous No.16928498]

>>16925377
If the french guy who wrote about the mesoamerican temperament is still here, please recommend some books about the topic, especially regarding "new peoples" temperament

[Anonymous No.16928523]

If the current west is a declined version of the west just because the west doesn't have all of the wealth anymore even though the west is richer than it has ever been, then keep india and china poor by invading and messing with them was actually a bad thing for them because it reduced their relative wealth. Thereby it also means that they did not "benefit" from colonialism and pillage like /pol/ loves to claim.

[Anonymous No.16928611]

>>16926880
America is Rome but all of Europe is Greece, not just Britain. JDE said Britain was separate from Europe, never having a "culture" phase and always being civilization from the beginning. America is the continuation of that.

[Anonymous No.16928723]

>>16928482
>we will never outdo the moon landing ever again
False. The Imperial Age is the age of greatest military and economic expansion. Pic related is the extent of the Roman empire in 90 BC during the Social War, which is right about where America is now with the Culture War. I'd say most of the world will be under American control, economically if not militarily, by 2100. That leaves space as literally the final frontier for Faustian expansion.

Also if you think American power is in decline now, remember Rome during the Social War looked like it was about to collapse too. But that war, the same as the modern Culture War, became the crisis that necessitated the coming of the Caesars.

[Anonymous No.16928892]

>>16927948
>Because a society of order was the literal main mode of organisation of Western society, until Napoleon

Explain the Napoleon part pls

[Anonymous No.16929012]

>>16928482
>space travel itself is a Faustian conception
Yes, it is. That's what I said. My point was, that AFTER faustian man will have expanded the territory of human beings to space (as >>16928723 kindly elaborated), there will be enough new "possibilities" for a new kind of space-time conception to arise from some new sort of "landscape". Until then I can't see enough room for a new culture-civilization, because the faustian soul is still so all-consooming on this planet.

As for "cyber-space", "virtual-reality", etc. I'm also not too sure

[Anonymous No.16929138]

Is there such a thing you can call the "Faustian" civilisation? I'm not really convinced. When, where and why was it born exactly?

[Anonymous No.16929287]

>>16929138
Jesus fucking christ, just read the goddamn book, you useless piece of human garbage