Is this the most underrated work in modern history? It has fundamentally changed how I view the world...

Not really

yes, and his views of the realization, externalization, and exhaustion of forms can be applied to any creative endeavor, not just cultures. i have a feeling spengler will be viewed as a vitally important part of the canon once the current order breaks down.

the west hasn't existed since 1918

>banal
how can you possibly call it banal, it's one of the most romantic expressions of historical thought ever conceived

0% chance he has read it. it's not about the ideas its name would invoke to a random leftist in 2019.

>since napoleon*
fixed

I was just being bombastic, trying to illicit some details. I never see the those.

Capitalism is nearly done with the US (since the 70s) and it’s moving onto China. I don’t know or see how this has anything to do with Spengler. It would always seem obvious to me that the little fire ants of Europe would change or drown in the long run, had I live back then.
But here I’m curious and no time to chitchat atm

Have you/Are you considering reading Imperium by Yockey? People mention that it's supposed to be a sequel to Spengler

Probably the originals, I don't have experience with the abridged edition but I think it's important to read what the author originally intended. The way it's written is Spengler will construct an argument using several different examples, talking about one example for a few pages then moving on to the next all in support of the same argument. It sometimes feels like he's repeating himself, because he is, his intent is to convince, but I think a lot of the meaning would be lost in an abridged edition.

He argues that all expressions of a high culture, like the Western and Greek, can be defined by what he calls a "prime symbol": infinite space for the West, in contrast, the present body for the Greeks. Just talking about art, Western art is highly abstract and meant to give the viewer an experience of depth while Greek art is meant to encapsulate the pure present moment. Complex classical music is the highest form of Western art while for the Greek it's the nude statue. He argues that Renaissance sculptors were merely imitating Classical sculptures without really understanding it, and it was only with oil painting that emphasized the horizon and classical music did Western art really come find its own footing. I'm probably bad at explaining it but the book is insanely detailed and I find it difficult to summarize in just a few words.

Heh, you're so right, butterfly. China is taking over. Maybe I can take you there on our honeymoon after we get married? Wouldn't that be fun? :3

>muh

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How the hell have people not filtered butterfly posts by now?
Like c'mon guys, they're complete bait, anti-intellectual posts which try to derail every good thread

Hu. Sounds like nonsense. Thanks though

Who you calling anti intellectual??

I was actually right, sweety. Better luck next time though hon.

>since the Thirty Years War
ftfy

>Read Adorno instead
Didn't he basically just agree with Spengler but criticized his determinism?
China is in what Spengler calls pseudomorphosis: China has been culturally dead since about 200BC, and is currently heavily under the influence of Western culture. Spengler predicted the USSR would collapse because socialism is a Western ideology and incompatible with non-Western cultures. China seems to be slowly coming out of socialism, I don't know if a collapse is inevitable.
I use Anonimizer, tripfags haven't been a problem on other boards for a long time

Their posts aren't that bad desu. They're attention-seeking and ill-informed, sure, but they also sometimes stir discussion where people have to actually explain their point instead of just saying "this book is good", "this book is bad", etc.

Haven't heard of it but I'll make sure to read it, thanks

>implying you've read it
Fag

>Who you calling anti intellectual??
The dumb cunt claiming Spengler was wrong and only a few posts later admitting to never having read Spengler.

read sorokin's the crisis of our ages. it is right and in the introduction he attacks spengler's theory

Actually I just read more about it and I'm not going to read it, sounds like the author /completely/ misinterpreted Spengler from his wikipedia page.

See

So it’s all about culture?
It IS all nonsense if that’s the case. Culture changes.
Look, the “Apocalypse” is a metaphor for death, the personal end. Every-fucking-thing has its end
>tripfags are a problem
Only for autists who can’t take their recognizable anonymous
>you’re ruining the board
No, I’m not.

Again, I was only pushing your buttons.
And it turns out I was right. Wow.

>Haha joke's on them I was only PRETENDING to be retarded.

Just a reminder that that one sentence synopsis of a 600 page book you read on wikipedia is cited from the ADL.
Just something to keep in mind.

>being this new

>It IS all nonsense if that’s the case. Culture changes.
>Every-fucking-thing has its end
which one

>I was just pretending to be retarded
Embarrassing

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“Culture” is as fine as sand

I don't think he misinterpreted him, but he definitely didn't agree with Spengler whole heartedly, to say the least.

Anoth 10/10 for me. Thanks.

>Every-fucking-thing has its end
Uniquely Western idea. You prove Spengler right just by saying this. You haven't even read the book so just gtfo.
>>you’re ruining the board
>hasn't even read the book

I read his personal wikipedia page and it says he's an anti-semitic nazi or some shit, things Spengler advocated against.

this is just 'x is a spectrum' trash can thought-substitute, fuck off

That isn't even what that means you retarded nigger. You've been here for years and still don't understand memes that people have been posting since like 2011.

>Uniquely Western idea
Bullshit
I see. You don’t know what culture is.goodnight

And I suppose you e been posting for five whole years!
Another 10/10 for me. You’re all too kind

>You don’t know what culture is
you're basically saying "don't bother describing, comparing, and interpreting stages of cultures" for no reason, you are saying that people shouldn't bother interpreting reality and your reasons for it are nihilistic bullshit and you know it.

Jokes on you, I was only pretending to be retarded and you took the bait. 10/10 for me

you sound like this tranny I know but you're even more insufferable holy shit just fuck off already

>be me
>German NatSoc
>read Decline of the West, knowing that Goebbels loved it
>also remember that Spengler rejected NatSocialism
>read Rosenbergs Myth of the 20th century afterwards
>Rosenberg was NatSoc, so I want it to be the superior work
>Come to the realization that Rosenbergs Myth is just an accumulation of a pseuds ramblings, its total garbage
>Spenglers work fundamentally changed the way I think about history and politics
>find out even Goebbels called Rosenbergs Myth "a philosophical burp".
>this is pretty accurate because a burp is a loud noise without any valuable content

Spengler is completely underrated. The most important books I ever read are:
Ellul - Technological Society
Hitler - Mein Kampf
Kaczynski - Anti-Tech Revolution
Spengler - Decline of the West
Otto Weininger - Sex and Character

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Have you read Imperium by Francis Parker Yockey?

Myth is an OK intro to Aryan esotericism. It's accessible and touches on a breadth of topics even if it's mostly plagiarized and shallow.

It's great, now read the Poverty of Historicism by Popper before you get carried away

Well, technically "The West" has never existed at all as some coherent and distinct entity across both time and space.

>German NatSoc
>reads

Hmmm, very nice, pretty surprising too, I hope he keeps up the ha-

>has a single Googleplex sized folder named "Azian cuties" on his desktop

Unsurprising, get out of here you fuckin normie.

Read Imperium.

Abridged first, whole version second.

No. I’m saying people shouldn’t predict apocalypse when a thing or style goes out of fashion, even a nation’s fall. They’re more trouble then they’re worth. Music and books matter more than borders and laws.

I don't understand how you can read agree with anything spengler wrote and still be a retarded hitlerist. He BTFOs national socialism in The Hour of Decision, that's why shitler banned that book.

Because Hitler isn't a person anymore, he's a symbol now.

can you stop derailing the thread? you dumb bitch

That was last night. Get over it.
I was honestly trying to get something of substance out into the open instead of empty praise

i saw that too, pretty funny, especially given how butterfly poster likes to post on every thread.

now i realize butterfly poster isn't actually well-read or smart, just vain and opinionated.

He's just a retarded attention whore, all tripfags are like this. Ignore them and they go away.

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I cant get into it, its too basic bitch for me after reading Evola.

>Circa 200bc
Is this unironic joke? If you say 1300ad, i may agree, but 200bc? Wtf

Spengler believes all cultures achieve everything their prime symbol allows them to achieve by their "modernity" phase. All great art and philosophy in a culture is created prior to and during early modernity, which was the Spring and Autumn period then the Warring States period in ancient China which concluded with the first Chinese empire under Qin Shi Huang, and for us it is the Enlightenment up until about 2100 AD. After this point the culture has essentially thought itself to death, and only remakes and reimaginings of previous art and philosophies are possible. The modernity period is when the culture loses its religion and begins over-analyzing the world, when the simple act of living becomes problematic, and it is in this age when most famous philosophy is written. After a period of atheism (every culture has its own form of atheism, the Graeco-Roman form of atheism is acceptance of monotheism, the Western form is denial of any higher power) the culture finds itself in need of spirituality once again, but Spengler argues that it's not possible for any man of the rational modernity phase of a culture to be truly religious, he is only deluding himself. So the culture invents a spiritual surrogate of religion that isn't truly a religion, Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China, Stoicism in Rome. The culture continues to simply exist after this point, not really living, just a tired skeleton of a once great culture, with great warlords fighting over the scraps that remain. This is what happened in China and India, and what would have continued to happen in Rome and ancient Egypt had they not been supplanted by other high cultures.

>Since the roman conquest of Judea.
I think we're onto something...

Is the abridged version acceptable?

>i dont know what i am talking about i just wanted to bring up my own hobby horse rather than engage the topic
get raped

Evola translates him in Italian. Spengler is arguably deeper than evola

Spengler isnt even close

Spengler makes you realize the Western Will is what created Evola in the first place

What version of this should I get? If an abridged version, what is missing from it? And will I be put on a(nother) list?

>spurring conversations
>exchanging ideas
>vain
Dumb opinion, user

>It has fundamentally changed how I view the world.
Same bruh.

see
Apparently the original 2 volumes haven't been in print for decades, which is why they are so expensive. The ones I bought from Scholar Select are scans of library copies of the original.

anyone who reads or writes grand history narratives is a pseud

do yourself a favor and read some poetry instead

What is his criticism?

Media went overdrive with obamania, West will have its Caesars.

That's not what the book is about.

>Northrop Frye, reviewing the Decline of the West, said that "If... nothing else, it would still be one of the world's great Romantic poems".

Can someone give me an ISBN or something? I have no idea what to do in terms of translation, abridgement, etc

Th “west” had its Caesar already. And they knifed him.

Well, I was only going off of what the user above told me. Everyone else is buttmad

>Th “west” had its Caesar already. And they knifed him.

honestly why do you even bother replying to topics you obviously have zero knowledge of? you just make yourself look like an idiot to everyone else that is familiar with Spengler

Wow, i think she actually felt a bit of shame here.

Is this supposed to be a deep reference to the book? DISCUSS IT or shut the hell up

This thread is empty, devoid of the topic. And it’s not my fault.

Caesar is an archetype not just a person. There are many like him in history but he represents it best. In their greed, in their naive desire to preserve and cling to a system that needed to die, they killed and made a martyr of a great man who spared their lives when he could have easily been a tyrant, and instead ushered in a man far more ruthless than Caesar who didnt care for sparing anybody.
Its just part of the cycle of history. Historically we're in the late Roman Republic and its only a matter of time before our Caesar comes and his inevitable Augustus.

Why is it so hard to get a copy of this book? Why has he faded so much into obscurity.

>dude history is cyclical lmao

Yes the west is in decline
It was wrong about the cyclic nature of things. It was backwards, every time we make some progress it becomes too much for us to handle and we revert back to oedipal authority. Cesarism isn't a return to the ideal, it's a return to infancy. I've said it before and I'll say it again, we're all devo.

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it sucked. no bones about it.

pc culture phasing out anything related to traditional culture because nazis

>Cesarism isn't a return to the ideal, it's a return to infancy.
It was never a return to the ideal, that's what fascism is, and one of the reasons Spengler hated the nazis. The "modern" period of a civilization is when the culture starts questioning its way of life and rejects tradition; it's "modernity" because it's the phase where the people of a culture become arrogant and begin to think they know better than the men who built it. Fascism wants to force a return to traditional values while Caesarism comes at the end of the "modern" period when the powerful men of the day realize that the rejection of tradition has only brought social and political disintegration. Compare the Hundred Schools of Thought in ancient China to the modern West: when Qin Shi Huang became the first emperor, he banned all Chinese ideologies except Legalism to give his empire one thought, one way of life. I like to call it realistic fascism because the motivation is not a return to traditional values, it's a crackdown on opposing values. All the various political philosophies and ideologies in the West right now will meet the same fate under our Caesars, around the year 2100.

>complex classical music

I hope he doesn’t mean that atonal garbage that is the school of Schoenberg

Post an extract, I want to read

Probably not, his favorite artist was Beethoven

Excuse my ignorance with this theory, but doesn't the rise of the internet threaten this cycle?

Doesn't it fundamentally affect culture in a brand new way?

Good, I’ll read him eventually then

I've never really seen anyone talk shit about Rome like he does.

Nope. Donald Trump is the first evidence of Caesarism in the West, a cult of the man in opposition to the elites. Look at his internet following on /pol/ and the_donald. Trump being memed into the White House has become a meme itself.

Holy shit, I came to Yea Forums for the first time to find some new books to read (probably gonna check out Spengler now) and I've already found someone to filter within the first couple hours. Amazing.

What's the quality like on those? Scanning library copies sounds like it would have shit quality.
Would you be able to post a pic of an average page in that version?

It's fine, there's an underlined sentence or mark on the page here and there but otherwise it's perfect

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>ctrl f
>no man and technics
it's more important to a philosophy of life than decline, which is more for advanced readers

in one of his letters from 1935 he thought the reich wouldn't last another ten years. still, germoney probably should've won the war. things are looking grim now...

and some oc

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the gays....responsible for all the evil in the world today

It's still a return to infancy. Hopefully we make a post-human turn and start evolving again. Our shenanigans done wen too far this time, there will be no place for humans to start over.

>Philosophy of Life
>For beginners
Philosophy of Life has gotta mean something very different for you

i dont know user english is not my first language. i made the rookie mistake of reading decline before man and technics but in hindsight M&T is a better start

I was under the impression M&T, P&S, etc were supplementary works meant to be read after The Decline

Reads pretty good desu

I dont see why it would
What do you mean?

Trump isnt even close to a Caesar give me a break. He is more like a discount Marius. He is just a herald of what is to come. Small time orange business man.

M&T was supposed to be a big book like Decline but he decided not to write it bc noone read Decline properly

So essentially you think the internet is speeding up the cycle?

I think the internet is slowly becoming a representation of Jungs collective unconscious.

It will probably become sentient.

I never said Trump was a Caesar, I just meant he is the first sign of the stirrings of Caesarism in our culture. I think there still needs to be a Sulla figure before an actual Caesar.
I can understand that, The Decline was very popular in its day just because of its title, but I wonder how many people who bought it at the time actually read it. One of the things I found very interesting about Volume 1 is that there is no mention of the actual decline of the West until a footnote like 300 pages in where he specifically mentions the decadence of modern art. It's mostly a historical philosophy book.

mussolini's grandson giulio cesare mussolini is running as an mp. drumph can eat shit

I just think this generations civilization is going through societal, cultural, and existential shifts that are not similar to anything in history. So I find it unlikely that you can accurately predict the future by extrapolating this cultural cycle theory into the future.

I think the internet and even TV have drastically changed the way culture works compared to ancient Greece or China or even pre WW2 Europe.

How many times have you "quit Yea Forums" butterfly? Last time I checked it was 4? I have been seeing your bullshit on this website with the same namefagging nonsense for literally years. Yea Forums is supposed to be one of the smarter boards. Have you still not come to the understanding as to why the anonymous nature of these boards are paramount? Is your namefagging some sort of pathological scratch to some relentless itch? You're truly insufferable.

As an aside, did you participate in hypersphere or totalitarianism in a tundra? I wish to know so I can remove the pages from my hard copies.

Sincerely yours,
An user who has told you to fuck off about 12 times.

Different user but I share your sentiment. I think for a long time things were somewhat predictable and cyclical, but everything is shifting onto a whole different playing field. From internet to eventual artificial intelligence, I think we are entering an age very unlike anything that came before, and one from which we will not be able to return

That is my opinion as well, you cannot discard the disruptive effect of modern technology. Greeks, romans, chinese, etc... didn't have fast means of transportation, instant communication and a good enough mastery of crowd control technics

>I just think this generations civilization is going through societal, cultural, and existential shifts that are not similar to anything in history.
I know you didn't read the book. But every civilization has its own unique decline. Spengler's theory is not cyclical, just that the same trends occur in every culture. So while China's prelude to Caesarism was endless war in the Warring States period, ours is the opposite in that the West seems to be committed never to fight a major war again. The West has allowed the other regions of the world to use its technology, and now China is set to overtake the US as the world's hegemonic power. The unpleasant feature of hegemony is that eventually you have to exercise it. Thucydides Trap will come into play here, in a situation I'd imagine to be somewhat similar to the Mithridatic Wars. In a theoretical total war between China and the US with modern technology it's not difficult to imagine a US president being granted emergency powers. It's a situation like this that will give rise to a Sulla, a pre-Caesar who establishes the idea of a legal dictatorship, however temporary, in the West. Modern technology won't affect Caesarism, I believe it will aid it, because it allows populists like Trump to effectively reach their entire audience at once.

Thanks user. Is the cover as shitty as it looks on Amazon?

If you mean Scholar Select, yes it does

It was actually pretty prescient. You can criticize spengler for his epistemological errors and the fact that this historical work is more metaphysical than historical, but it was absolutely correct in many ways.

That last thing you said is what troubles me with the Decline book, and its something that Adono also pointed out. This particular form of Western decline that seems to never end is kinda unique in that never before has a civilization dominated the whole of the earth. Western capitalism accelerates the decline at one time and at others painfully delays it. I mean look at the parallel between 1930's and 2010's that all the people are making. Nominally all the perfect conditions had been set for for 1930's to be the phase of Caesarism, but the Thallasocratic Anglo order prevailed accelerated by capital with its locus in the USA. Even with Trump its difficult to imagine western caesarism because the way the modern west acts isn't with a political decisionism, but leaving everything to the market to decide. If anything, think about how a Caesarism would actually save political formations like the US and the EU and would halt the decline. I don't mean an authoritarian dictator, but a real leader with ideals that other people could follow and not some mandarin bureaucrat.

A lot of people like to say Spengler was wrong because they think Caesarism came and went in the form of 20th century fascism, but it was far too early for Caesarism at that time. Pic related is part of Spengler's own model that's printed in the back of the book, Caesarism probably won't come for another 100 years.

The idea of someone transforming the Roman Republic into an autocratic empire would have been ridiculous even as late as Sulla. But the thing with the "Roman Empire" as we like to call it is that Augustus was not seen as any kind of autocrat to the Romans themselves, to them he was primer inter pares, the first among equals. His extra-constitutional powers were given to him by the senate for the purpose of upholding the republic. It wasn't until the time of Diocletian, a good 300 years later, that the emperors dropped the facade. We have a unique advantage in world history that we can look back and analyze high cultures that came before us, and we can see that the Roman Republic truly died with the ascension of Augustus.

The West is the exact opposite of the Classical culture in terms of prime symbol, but they are the only two high cultures that reached modernity as republics. Therefore it's not unreasonable to assume Western Caesarism will take a similar form as Roman Caesarism; that is, a Caesar pretending he's not a Caesar.

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You should read Preußentum and Sozialismus, I think. He addresses some of your concerns there.

Technology has sped everything up, including the speed with which ideas and concepts spread across the globe, and the rate at which they can suddenly become ubiquitous. Spengler's predictions here were correct, but they will occur far sooner than he had anticipated.

Will we even know when the new Caesar has appeared? Or will that be something our descendants will realise looking back?

Caesarism doesnt refer to one particular person, it refers to a period where constitutional powers are no longer sufficient to govern, and where brute force gradually becomes the norm. You'll see many Caesar-like figures, but these are just the symptoms of a gradual shift of mentality.

>complex music is the best

What a pretentious wanker

>I'm 14 and this is deep

It's a bunch of nonsense.

Kinda since Trump took office.

Redditor detected

Man, imagine the irony if the next manifestation of Caesarism is Mussolini's great-grandson Julius Caesar

It parses myriad ethical quandaries, that's for sure.

do elaborate

Ah ok then I agree

Spengler actually hated the title, because 'decline' gives a normative and emotional judgment that he didn't want to make, and because his analysis applies to all civilizations, not just the west.

fpbp

can i get the full image?

Once.
I moved, took advantage of not having internet.
How could you tell nonsense from th other? AHH
It was a smarter board, it has slipped From that in recent years.
I did not add anything to the Yea Forums books. Still tinkering with my own stuff.

>the Greeks were totally not gay
>priests were totally not gay till the 20th century

>Lookit me lookit me!

Right. But I’ve never been big on his cyclical history thing, so I shit on his statement and say there was already a Caesar. Others of the type come and go, true, but you don’t relive history. The US/west won’t have so e kind of zenith, reborn as an empire or some shit, like Rome.

>But I’ve never been big on his cyclical history thing, so I shit on his statement
You're also shitting all over this board and I think we'd appreciate it if you stopped sometime soon.

Does anyone know what the difference between the abridged and unabridged versions are, specifically?
I want to know if it's worth the extra cash to get the unabridged version with the ugly as fuck cover.

Some aspects of it are.

The abridged edition is 500 pages. The unabridged volumes together are about 1100 pages. Make of that what you will.
>Ugly cover
Who gives a fuck. When you're done with it all you're going to see of it is the spine on your bookshelf.

relampagofurioso.com/spenglers-civilization-model/

What's so bad about it?

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thanks

Teleological cyclical history sounds like good fun (in an /x/ way at least). And that posted image seems fine, if a bit verbose. Why is reading it crimethink?

Spengler is not really crimethink. His races are 'cultural races', and it's all too abstract and idealist to make anybody very upset. The idea that civilizations decline is deemed reacitonary by the more dogmatic of progressives, but since he's not advocating anythign at all but simply saying 'things will inevitably unfold this way' he doesn't really get attacked much.

More than crimethink Spengler is just wholly irrelevant to modern academics. Even his cultural relativism is too elitist and pessimistic about multicultural understanding

>since the death of the last painter of the Chauvet cave

Also fuck Lascaux, that modernist buffalowreck.

Well Spengler is associated with fascism because he hated democracy and laid the foundations of fascist corporatism in his book Prussianism and Socialism. But he kind of unknowingly condemns his own book to obscurity when he writes that Western civilization sees time as a linear progression from A to B, and also that the majority of men of the late West can only understand the world in terms of cause and effect. For example if you ask a modern historian "/why/ did Caesar cross the Rubicon?" he will tell you /how/, and has no interest whatsoever in the /why/. The /why/ is what Spengler tries to answer, as a matter of Destiny. It's crimethink to the materialist to propose that there is a spiritual reason Caesar crossed the Rubicon, or a spiritual reason for the French Revolution. Spengler writes that the "Sea Peoples" (an unknown people that raided ancient Greece about 3000 years ago that remain a mystery to this day) were Germanic raiders, similar to the Varangians of the Byzantine period, a very early expression of the nascent Faustian (Western) Will to explore and conquer. This would be absolute nonsense to a materialist historian.

>I think for a long time things were somewhat predictable and cyclical

Amusing how people tend to say that a posteriori. Did the Roman also think their political evolution from the early Republic to the barbarian takeover of the Empire was predictable ?

Why use that title then ?

He had a problem getting the book published. It's possible it was the publisher's idea to make it more financially viable.

>is the west not in decline?
>since Spengler capitalism has gone global, a political system modeled on western ideals dominates the world, consumerism has become a cultural phenomenon that elicits the most voluntary participation of any population in history, antiquated cultural markers of the west - clothing (suits), food (micky d's), and even language (english) have become globally standardized to the point where westerners literally believe they have no culture simply because their culture has become a baseline for the world, mass production has meant that even the most destitute and impoverished children in Africa are running about in Superman and Mickey Mouse T-shirts
>jaded psuedointellectual reactionaries decry the "cultural Marxism" of identitarian POC/gender/feminist movements without realizing that these groups of people are so entrenched in western thought that, despite nominally subverting western norms, they still adhere to Western models of categorizing race, orientation, and gender.

Western culture has literally become meta. It's become a baseline.

Daily reminder that Wittgenstein recommended Spengler and Weineger as required reading.

very aesthetic textshape

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Yeah, Spengler really did influence some of the biggest names of the 20th century, even though he himself fell mostly in obscurity outside of very conservative and far right circles.

I dont get why Spengler appealed to Wittgenstein, though.

Was Spengler right about Dostoevsky?

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What's really the point of the book? Sulking is for faggots, as is traditionalism (which is like trying to force the past back into the present; it never works). He formulates an analysis that seems sensible, yet leads to nothing constructive. And the West being Faustian makes perfect sense — it means that we wanted this to happen.

I imagine it was Spengler's insistence on there being no single real math, no real concepts, words only refer to cuturally specific understandings of reality. Wittgenstein probably took that and extrapolated the fuck out of it with his views on language and thought

that bit about 'if a lion could speak we would not understand it' has always reminded me of Spengler

"Der Untergang des Abendlandes"
>Downway of the Occident
>Under-ment of the Not China
>Darkening of the Sundown Lands

He said "Vollendung" would have better: Completion of the West.

He's great on details that imply big theories that he then leaves on the table. His take on the early church fathers, ending with Marcion, implies an entire chapter of Christianity between 30 and 55 CE which is entirely lost to us, except for a trace in Paul and a single verse in Mark. Follow Spengler to his logical conclusion on that and Jesus had seven siblings, Mary was far from virginal, Joseph the father died early in Jesus life, and Mary was likely second-married to his oldest surviving brother as Jewish tradition required. John the Baptist was probably Yeshua's cousin, and the resurrection was a spiritual event. First Christianity, as trace-evidenced from two older verses, would have been repulsed by both the Eucharist and the "zombie Jesus" notion of a re-animated corpse. All the sexual whitewashing, literality and theological papering over were added by later apologists all of whom had been denied any participation in the 30-50 traditions of the First Church continued in Galilee by the brothers under the leadership of Peter. Blockbuster stuff, but Spengler just fires his shot at the "Jewish tension" over the NT and OT then drops the mic on all that it would mean. Based and redpilled, Teuton style.

>'if a lion could speak we would not understand it'
Well duh, he'd probably speak Swahili or something

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Pretty much, Spengler writes that tolerance occurs when a culture is dying, but the Will to Power is a fundamental part of the Western psyche that will never die. That's why we have exclusive homosexuals, exclusive atheists, exclusive feminists, etc, in a culture war with exclusive traditionalists. The Will to Power prevents the Westerner from thinking any way of life other than his own is possible, in contrast to ancient Greece which had opposing schools of thought like the Stoics and Epicureans existing simultaneously and (though they disliked each other) peacefully.

I'm not Russian so I'm not going to comment on whether Dosto embodies the Russian soul or any such memery, but he does have the delirious and revelatory quality of the prophet

All the bits about him in Decline are good

I think Witty was suggesting the lion would speak lion, so any translation would require some kind of lion/Feline A/Feline B/Predator A/Sanskrit style Rosetta Stone to make any sense of. Chomsky would agree that the lion would speak lion, but that there would still be nouns and verbs involved that could be deciphered given a sufficiently reliable set of bridge translations.

Math. I don't think Spengler, a German, abandoned arithmetic. When he points out that the classicals had no zero, he is not saying that their quantity 5 was not identical to "V" or that VII - V = II is not equivalent, precisely, to 7-5=2, he was making a second-order point about what it would be like to have a mind and world view unbothered by the nagging sense of "zero-ness" that bothers us since its invention. An upgrade of this burden - now we not only have "zero" as a concept; placeholder of an absence of the category; we also now have "null" which is the absence of "zero" itself. Holy double existential crisis, Batman.

Pretty nice altogether.

>Sulking is for faggots, as is traditionalism (which is like trying to force the past back into the present; it never works).

Spengler isn't a nihilist, he advocates finding meaning in the hopeless resistance against destiny: if death is inevitable, you should die on your feet, an honorable death, and not sulking away. What is the point you ask? On one hand, Spengler is, in his own words, venturing on the first attempt at foreseeing the course of world history and the destiny of the West. On the other hand, Spengler's philosophy of history, the first attempt to explain comprehensively all world history, is itself an expression of the Faustian soul.

Vollendung is really such a great word and would be a much more appropriate title, but even that is difficult to translate into English. Completion isn't quite right, Fulfillment of the West is more accurate.

Spengler didn't think that 'number' was a single concept. The 'quantity' 5 is for the Classical mind a conception of 5 corporeal bodies. For the Faustian mind it is only part of a relation, a function of two things.

>5 corporeal bodies
That's how I see it, tho. Fingers. Sides of a pentagon. "5." Pythagoras and I could understand each other. I think where we'd delaminate from agreement is if I tried to explain "base 16" or "binary." All the ancient accounting receipts we have from Mesopotamia for goats and wheat bushels differ in nearly no conceptual way from the packing slip in your Amazon Prime box.

>The straight line from Spengler to "a pile of little arms."
>Brando's bald head
>The name of a Ghostbuster
>Campbell's skyscapers overtaking church spires

He's out there. On the edges. The secret source you never cite. Imagine going to work as a stone mason apprentice at 14. Becoming a master stone mason at 30. Working on the same one building your entire life. "How was work today, dear?" "We laid half a course. Like yesterday." Every day for your entire life. You have sons and daughters. The sons all become stone mason apprentices when they turn 14. They go to work with you on that same one building. They spend their entire lives on it. The your grandchildren do the same. Then you die secure in the absolute faith that your great-grandchildren will finally finish that one building, which they do.

800 years later your building burns to the ground and no one remembers your name or anything about you.

>Untergang.
Yeah. I'm feeling it.

The section in Decline about how Faustian number is 'function' is quite interesting. If you ctrl f keywords in the pdf you should find it without too much trouble.

Not being a mathematician myself I can't really know it amounts to anything more than poetry

yes

Individually a number is a body, but after a certain point in Western mathematics numbers cease to be "numbers" and become abstract symbols for something else. Like the notation 1.23E+10 which I randomly pulled of Wikipedia. To the Greek everything is a body, nothing in their form-language has a higher meaning than what the eye sees in front of it. That's the significant difference between the Greek and Western prime symbols. I think that's also why there's such a thing as high brow vs low brow culture in the West, it's the difference between art that has abstract meaning that only the initiated can understand and art that the man on the street can understand. He can understand the the number 500 is one body x five hundred times, but only someone who really knows their shit knows what 1.23E+10 means.

I get it. Spengler is on my eyelids. He's right, but interpreting him requires the same kind of loopy Continental whimsy that he deploys as style. It's like the linear mistake historians make when they present "agriculture -> industrial -> information" as a series of successions, rather than as a stack of strata. Agriculture and industry did not disappear when we invented computers. Nor did the concept of quantity disappear when we invented zero. It just got integrated into higher-order deployments. If you asked Spengler whether he counts his eggs the way Cicero counted his eggs, I think he'd say something like "Yes, but he bought his with real money."

Yes. Like: It's a stack. Maybe a Spenglerian metaphor would be a series of tree rings wrapping each other as they grow toward senescence.

>as a series of successions, rather than as a stack of strata.
This was what struck my mind originally when i read Spengler, are the cultures 'building off of each other' the way technology clearly has been?

Because if you take Spengler at face value then he really is 'continental whimsy' as you put it. He has a full fledged idealist ontology, there is no objective world of nature to refer to such that he and Cicero are doing the same thing when they count their 5 eggs.

I think Spengler never really addressed that problem, nor was he clear enough about how the crude tendencies of race coalesce into a Culture. A prime symbol is already fully self-contained and gives rise to the entire culture(and not causally, because history doesn't progress causally for Spengler, but according to a mystic pattern). So the Faustian function can't be incorporating the Corporeal body.

As far as I know he never explicitly talks about what 'quantity' means as a function shared by both versions of number

>This was what struck my mind originally when i read Spengler, are the cultures 'building off of each other' the way technology clearly has been?
Yes and no. Spengler makes it very clear that Classical and Western civilization have almost nothing in common, and it's foolish to think that ancient Greece is the cultural foundation of the West (he dedicates an entire chapter to why the Renaissance was not a revival of Classical culture but a bastardization of it). He mentions that Western mathematicians "rediscovered" Greek mathematics, but then diverged into their own form of abstract math from there. Greek math can be easily understood by anyone, for example children learn it in school. But due to the abstract nature of advanced Western mathematics only Western civilization (and as of today, most of the world which is under Western pseudomorphosis) can understand it. Western math exists because of its unique prime symbol. When the West finally dies, its mathematics will die with it.

what

Tripfag femcel

>When the West finally dies, its mathematics will die with it.
*blocks your path*

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>Is this the most underrated work in modern history?
no, and you should feel ashamed. Think again

Reminder Chad Kissinger recommended Spengler to Nixon.

then nixon sold out US technology to China

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Just started reading and even him talking about different understandings of history across civilizations is blowing my mind.

You're getting what was coming to you. Arrogance came back to bite you.

fpbp, I'm glad I turned off my filters today, and in the future, I'm not filtering you anymore

butterfly control yourself

>everyone who I disagree with is samefagging

>illicit

Real Politic is a bitch, eh?
Why is Kissinger still alive?

>arrogance
It’s called trolling. You people in skinned frogs can dish it but you can’t take it
I donno what went wrong there. Obviously meant elicit, but it wouldn’t take

Okay butterfly I will use my secret weapon, but please lets not make this sexual.

Say something nice about me :3

>Real Politic is a bitch, eh?

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>over half the content cut
Holy shit they've mutilated it

>Music and books are more important than law and borders

What a wonderfully bourgeois thing to say from your comfortable bourgeois house in your white country and your probably majority white neighborhood. Move to a place experiencing significant political turmoil or massive amounts of illegal immigration and tell me the law matters less than your masturbatory pseudi-intellectual pursuit.

Btw, in case you're wondering, you're the reason men don't and should never take women's political opinions seriously.

Imagine thinking you know anything about the West when you're too weak or afraid to be a cutthroat capitalist, a balls-to-the-wall genius entrepreneur, a cultural magnate, a transcontinental presence, a suave chameleon, a destroyer of worlds; much less whether or not it's in decline. You aren't Faustian then, but Fraudian.

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>prolelivesmatter

Isnt butterfag a commie? If so he shouldn't shit on the proles

what does that have to do with me

Wow, you sound like a very naive and easily impressed 19 year old who has never read philosophy of history before. How do you type "the most underrated work in modern history" if you've barely read any of it, let alone any of the mountains of criticism of that book from the decades since?

cringe

>in skinned
*thin skinned
Fuck this thing

My country is turning rather brown, I’m working class and I am of he conviction that laws and borders are to protect bourgeois land owners and their booty.

I am a working class anarchist

Is this the work to start with or is something else is important first?

Maybe a bit of Plato, don't need to read anything else.

If you don't have a general idea of world history you might feel a bit lost.

0/10

the fact that you are here proves it right

This desu

You’re too kind.

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DO NOT RESPOND TO TRIPFAGS
DO NOT RESPOND TO TRIPFAGS
DO NOT RESPOND TO TRIPFAGS

Hey butterfly, what are your thoughts on post left anarchism and communization

Whatever works.

What a fucking lazy, brainlet level question to ask someone.

Yeah im a brainlet
Sorey

I despise you so much.

We all do. Imagine how pathetic you have to be to get some sort of sick enjoyment out of namefagging on Yea Forums all day. Jesus.

Lucky for me having a degree in philosophy. (Probably the first time I've said that)
I have the knowledge of a highschooler that paid attention. Is there like a /his/ chart or some recommendation?

Goethe and Kant are referenced constantly throughout the book, Nietzsche is referenced occasionally. As for history he goes into detail about specific events that a general overview wouldn't. You might have to occasionally google what he's talking about. In any case the charts here will come in handy while you read, but they should be printed in the book too.

bump

>So the culture invents a spiritual surrogate of religion that isn't truly a religion, Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China, Stoicism in Rome.
I really really hope wokeism isn't our surrogate, because if it does we're totally fucked. Even though it has the whole nominally secular but really pseudoreligious thing nailed down to a tee.

Having lurked this board since 2012, back when posting a Spengler thread would get you a three-day ban, I can honestly say that Butterfly, or every succession of Butterflies, has/have been the absolute worst posters on this board. Snarky, midwit takes. Every post.

They probably think of itself/themselves as "gadflies" to curious people proposing interesting conversation topics. But they're more like moths, incessantly and annoyingly bumping into bright spots in often dark board. For no reason, really. Just bumping, bumping, bumping, as if being a marginal annoyance was the sacred purpose of life.

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Really? A ban?
How come you can’t engage, inform, enlighten? Why all this Long winded attempt at insults?

Waste of time

>posting a Spengler thread would get you a three-day ban
Why? I know there were more communists back then, but why this mod assholery - the board should be allowed to form a coherent opinion on it, at least.

>Snarky, midwit takes. Every post.
This is pretty much how every single Kropotkin/Bakunin worshipping anarcho-syndicalism/anarcho-communist acts like whether on a chan or on twitter. Like ancaps but slightly less annoying, while ancaps just fucking bore you to death with "LOGIC" that boils down to "get off my lawn", anarcho-communists have snarky quips and "DUDE JUST READ KROPOTKIN!", they think they have everything figured out, having the great advantage that their ideology has never been tried out. Pure middlebrow.

He wasn't talking about banning you, dumbass, don't be disingenious.

>He wasn't talking about banning you
The tripfriend didn't say that he did. Don't be disingenious.

>did
*was

I believe it is, sort of. Spengler said that the final world sentiment of the West would be ethical socialism, which includes social justice. But it's not "wokeism" per se, the West is currently in the middle of a non-violent culture war between traditionalists and liberals, roughly equivalent to the Social War in Rome where the Italian Allies wanted equal treatment as Roman citizens. I think SJWs are just one faction of this culture war that will disappear after it's over, but we will be left with the characteristic formless population of late phase Spenglerian cultures. There won't be any races or nationalities. The lumping of all ethnicities into one universal "white race" or "black race" as we do today is evidence of this already. This is one of the reasons Spengler thought Hitler was an idiot, because he romanticized times past instead of steeling himself for the future.

Unfortunate to hear if you're a racist, but then the Spenglerian blackpill was never easy to swallow.

The janitors back then were left-leaning. There was a strict policy to keep right-of-center views contained within /pol/. Post about Guenon? Ban. Spengler? Ban. Evola? Ban. Ernst Junger? Maybe a ban. Sometimes not. It was weird.

Yea Forums's grown more tolerant of right-leaning threads and opinions.

Jesus fuck I remember that. I used to browse Yea Forums back then because there was no /his/ and I wasn't right wing enough to browse /pol/, but there was absolutely zero tolerance of anything right wing. It was fucking cancer. Then I eventually did migrate to /pol/, then to /int/, then to /his/, and now after all these years I find myself back on Yea Forums after having developed an interest in philosophy. The atmosphere is so much cooler now, I was really surprised because for years I thought Yea Forums was a socialist shithole, based on my experience from like 2012.

>jaded psuedointellectual reactionaries decry the "cultural Marxism" of identitarian POC/gender/feminist movements without realizing that these groups of people are so entrenched in western thought
Some of us do realize it. I call it "late stage Faustianism"

All ideology is a replacement of religion.

>China has been culturally dead since about 200BC
Oh my

>Spengler believes...
Why should any of this stuff he believed be -right-, though? Sounds like a nice-sounding story based on nothing much. Eg his understanding of Chinese history sounds about what I'd expect from an early 20th century educated European who's unable and/or unwilling to research the subject in any depth. To pick one element, the notion that all of China's 'great art' was created before the Han dynasty is clearly complete bullshit.

>To pick one element, the notion that all of China's 'great art' was created before the Han dynasty is clearly complete bullshit.
When he talks about great art he simply means the creation and fulfillment of art styles. Take modern Cinema vs Shakespeare for example. Character and personality are important in Western storytelling and Shakespeare was among the first to create Western dramas that explore the psychology of its characters, like in Hamlet or Macbeth. The world-fear of our culture is explored through it: downfall into insanity and chaos as a result of our ambitions. This is the central theme of all Western tragedies. If you ever wondered why Shakespeare is so important to us even today, that's why. All modern theatre and Cinema is essentially rehashing Shakespeare, but Western culture is dying out, so that Shakespearean world-fear is no longer as important to us. What we have left is the form-language of theatre and Cinema that still values character and personality, but devoid of any universal Cultural meaning/world-fear. This shift happened in Chinese art somewhere between the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods.

What the heck is "world-fear"?

The existential fear that arises out of the 'world feeling' of a Culture, which in our case is our longing for the infinite. Spengler called Western civilization Faustian because we are willing to sacrifice anything to realize our ambitions, but secretly know that it will be our downfall. The Greek world feeling was the exact opposite in that they longed for the pure present (they had no care for future or past time that you could say we are slaves to), and as such their tragedies revolve around the disruption of the present by divine retribution. The Greek tragedy is one of the event and the relief they feel after the event has passed, while the Western is one of character and the almost masochistic satisfaction we get from identifying with a character like Macbeth. Spengler believed all Western interpretations of Greek tragedies are falsehoods because we are only able to see them as tragedies of the character and not the event, as is natural to us.

What culture are you fkn talking about..

Can we all take her?

If you know what I mean

Because user never derails good threads