/lit/ - Literature

>>16637750
Unless you're well versed in Western philosophy, mathematics, literature and history of Europe you're in for being filtered hard

>>16637750
>>16637756
With glasses he looks like an incel but without like a chad, what gives?

>>16637750
Peak Rankean historical idealism

>>16637750
A lot of gay germautism

>>16637750
Penis Envy

>>16637767
>that thing
>looking like a chad in any way or form

Anger if you're reading the English translation

>>16637750
Being wrong as a science

>>16637761
this. there are mind-blowing chapters of Decline, and multichapter slogs that you will gain nothing from without knowing everything about history and not only of Europe

>>16637750
a lesson in mathematics

>>16637761
This. I tried to read it at 19. Got filtered. Came back after my Bachelors and years of independent study and it was mind blowing.

>>16637750
"Marie, get out"

Nobody has ever read the unabridged Decline completely, so nobody can give you an answer to that.

>>16638931
filtered

>>16638582
What are the mind blowing chapters in your opinion?

>>16639218
I'm only about 60% of the way through still, but that I liked the most so far were "Soul-Image and Life-Feeling" and "Origin and Landscape" although you need at least the introduction as well in order to understand his culture/civilization dichotomy

>>16638931
I'm gonna finish it next month. I'm planning on reading it in 10/15 years in the original German too

>>16638931
i have

Please don't be an idiot like me and begin with Spengler.

Spengler is the endpoint. When you're a wizened 40 year old with decades of reading under your belt and historical knowledge, then you can begin to comprehend him.

>>16637761
Bullshit, just read it.

>>16638549
>t. 3 arrows

>>16640379
>Spengler is the endpoint.
It's amazing how he predicted the rise of socialism and mass transit.

>>16637750
Why does he say that western/faustian civilization began around 900 ad when 800 ad (Crowning of Charlemagne) seems like the much more logical starting point?

Why do so many alt righters mention his book, even though he said all races have innate intelligence and there are other reasons for difference in outcome? Do they even read his book or is it just a meme?

>>16640755
they see it on reading charts and talk about it to sound bigbrained

>>16640755
why do you believe this is a reason not to read it?

>>16641060
Not saying that people shouldn't read it, it's just weird to me that only the alt right adopted it and the general view of it also fascist. There was some interesting of him argueing that the title could be too pessimistic if you misinterpret it and I think that's what's causing this.

>>16640755
>alt righters
go back to plebbit dumb nigger

>>16641121
yeah because spengler was known to be a vocal opponent of fascism hehehe, poltards btfo

>>16640755
>Why do so many alt righters mention his book, even though he said all races have innate intelligence and there are other reasons for difference in outcome?
Because we agree with him. Race isn't the only reason. It's just the biggest and most indelible.

>>16637750
a refutation of the west

>>16640755
Because the think it supports their worldview and they haven't actually read it. They probably just skimmed the wikipedia article. Same could be said about leftists and chomsky/rawls/zizek

>>16641213
>Because the think it supports their worldview
it does for a significant part
>Same could be said about leftists and chomsky/rawls/zizek
the left doesn't read

>>16640755
>>16641213
take your reductionist faggotry and fuck off

>>16637750
goat fucking and third rate golden dawn rituals.

>>16640602
Anyone know the answer to this?

>>16640602
>>16643647
For Spengler every new civilization begins with a grand architectural style, for the West it was the Gothic cathedrals, egypt is the pyramids, Greeks wooden temples etc

>>16637767
Bait

we love you anyway Oswald Eggler

>>16644106
But gothic cathedrals started in the 12th century and were preceded by romanesque ones.

>>16640602
A new culture is born when its cities gain SOVL. Basically, once the peasants of place x start being closer to peasants from place y than to town of place x, you can say the town has gained SOVL and is thus entering the Spring period

>>16637750
A waste of time. I don't know why people read these Astrology for humanities major tier books. All that space for useless information.

>>16637761
>>16638582
>>16640379
The subject matter is very interesting to me and I really want to read this but I have never read a book on history before, I am not well versed in history by any means. Would reading this just be a waste of time?

>>16645056
Unironically it would. You END with Spengler, not start with him. Start with the Greeks and make your way up to Spengler

In all seriousness, Toynbee is far superior to Spengler. The reading is better, too, just a lot longer.

>>16645167
>single longest work of the 20th century
Nobody got time for that

>>16645056
>read some Wikipedia pages
>read DoW
>get filtered and commit suicide
or
>don't get filtered and actually start with the Greeks
>resume with the Romans
>keep reading the classics until you reach the 20th century (by this time you should have a thorough knowledge of world history)
>reread Spengler
This should keep you entertained for 10/15 years but that's the price to of becoming /lit/.
Alternatively just become an engineer or something else, like becoming a legionnaire for the Western Caesar (me).
t. Raskolnikov

>>16644655
Exactly, the whole book is filled with so many of these 'it is because I say so' claims that I was goddamn annoyed after only 50 pages in.

>>16645772
filtered

>>16637750
you're in for the AGE OF CAESARISM BROTHER
THERE IS NO ESCAPING IT

>>16646136

>>16644951
Based

>>16646141
This image implies a circle, which is not Spengler.
Otherwise, good image

>>16646141
>>16646573

okay

But what does it all mean based anon

>>16647203
you'll find out soon buddy
Obama and Trump will make a lot more sense

>>16646141
trump is closer to the gracchi than to caesar

>>16640602
you're using the terms wrong. civilization is a late stage of culture when its natural patterns become ossified into institutions

>>16646141
bugman-tier.

>>16648176
kys midwit

>>16640602
because he was an autistic German and the first Reich starts with the HRE in the 900s AD.

>>16646141
>"chaos" lasts 1900 years

>>16645390
Dangerously based

>>16637756
Speaking as a pessimist, this is absolutely incorrect. Pessimism takes no effort or courage; it's the path of least resistance. It's a defense mechanism against rejection and failure.

>>16648846
I think it's Nietzschean statement. As Ligotti call thinkers like Nietzsche "heroic pessimists"
moving ahead despite knowing the painful realities of existence and vanity of actions isn't cowardliness at all but on the contrary and way more courageous than optimism.
pessimism without committing suicide or taking some "meaningful" action is a way of cowardliness.

>>16648314
based retard

>>16638931
i have

>>16638931
i haven't

>>16637767
Wouldn't go as far as saying Spengler looks "like a chad", but if you look at various photos of the man you can clearly see that he really let himself go towards the end of his life, leading to him looking relatively much better or worse depending upon the year.

>>16644655
Wouldn't Ruskin align Romanesque and Gothic as 'Modern/Western' in contrast to Greek? Think of Western culture using Rome as a veering off point to go in another direction from the Classical.

I think his consideration of architecture is why he rated the Song Dynasty, which corresponds (contemporaneously) with Gothic style.

>>16645100
I would agree with this but if you are keeping studious notes you might have a chance with Spengler.

>>16649762
*rated the Song Dynasty so highly*... yet there's little discussion of the Chinese soul during the Tang and the Nestorian role in developing art and architecture. Did the Nestorians bring Gothic style to the East or vice-versa, initiating the Song style some time after the Gothic cathedrals?

>>16638931
i'll get it when the arktos translation comes out

>>16640602
It started with Abraham (Faust) actually.
>Make an evil pact with a dark entity for [Earthly power/Mammon/Knowledge]
All you need to do is
>build a baby torture machine - mass circumcision traumatization and mutilation
>follow the javascript; if you fail you must kill an innocent animal or human and take its place

>>16644655
Yes. Spengler believes Faustian man is born in the 900s AD.

Spengler posits "Culture-Civilizations" as essentially memeplex-gods living in an alternate dimension. The human brain is a weird sort of "extra-dimensional place" that they can phase into. When Spengler talks about race, he talks about people partaking in the same Culture-Civilization. This is why all races are innate to him: they're not biological AT ALL. There is NO biological component. Greeks have been Apollonian, Magian, and Faustian, all with the same biology. These "races" are mental constructs, not biological ones. These Culture-Civilizations are grand unifying narratives of space, time, place in both, and purpose. For Faustian Man, it's an infinite grid of 3D space extending out in all directions, and we move through it as a vector with direction and magnitude. But for Indian Man, all space and time is compressed to a single point, with everything happening at once, as Indian Man sees through the petty mental illusions of space and time.

This is why Faustian Man is constantly exploring, seeking to map the world and all its things (mapping the 3D space, but ALL space, including the space of information), striving, building, going forward. It's also why Faustian Man COMPLETELY shits the bed when he CAN'T (or isn't ALLOWED) to do that. Indian Man, meanwhile, can easily have deep meaningful conversations with people long dead because time is just an illusion. So is space. This is also MENTAL, which is why High IQ Indians are hyper-eclectic in their interests, akin to Aristotle. They see connections that we don't, and can make connections that we can't.

People who are not of a "race", who do not partake in a Culture-Civilization, are felaheen: a seething human mass with no history or culture. This is, again, in Spengler's terms. The Mongols were felaheen, they obviously had history and culture in a colloquial sense. But, lacking a Culture-Civilization, they had no lasting impact. They came, they say, they conquered, and then faded away. Brazil is an example of a modern hive of felaheen. Europeans in between the death of Apollonian Man at the hands of Magian Man (Constantine era Christianity is the final blow of this, but it actually starts as early as Rome's destruction of Carthage) were a felaheen. The period of roughly 500AD to 900AD in Europe is, in Spengler, one such period of ahistory and aculture.

When you stop viewing Spengler as le ebin bald GOLLABZ :DDDDD man and instead realize that he's actually positing something related to Dawkins's whole "extended phenotype" theory, he suddenly stops being so gloomy.

>>16640379
you can read Man and Technics with pretty basic knowledge and still absorb it

>>16646141
why is buttigieg in caesarism?

>>/lit/thread/S16509942#p16509942

>>16649988
Trump supporter made it

>>16649988
i'm pretty sure the original was Trump. Buttguy Pete pic makes it funnier

>>16646573
To be fair, at the end of Civilization there's a reversion back to some kind of proto-spirituality (e.g. second religiousness) similar to the one at the beginning of the culture. So you could say that in the life cycle of a culture everything comes full circle. Of course this doesn't imply that the cycle restarts but you get my point.

How come Faustian characters get a shot of redeeming themselves while Faustian civilization does not?

>>16649932
>Yes. Spengler believes Faustian man is born in the 900s AD.

WRONG

Faustian Man was born with Achilles and Ancient greek culture is the foundation of Western Civilization

>>16652494
>t. never read Spergler

>>16652732
sprenger was a fervent german nationalist, of course he wanted the west to be born only when germania was civilized not before, we´re still living in Plato´s shadow and Greek Culture in General because they´re the foundation stone of the west, if you read history you would notice instantly

>the west is all about exploration and expansion!!!!!

no shit, they were also greek colonizers in antiquity, see pic related, of course they didn´t have the technology like the spanish conquistadors had

>>16652779
The Greeks didn't give two fucks about exploring the Atlantic and they were shit at geography.

>>16649315
How am I a ratard?

>>16652779
>>16652494
You genuinely have no idea what you're talking about. Achilles would be Apollonian Man. Well, the actual a-ki-re-u would be part of some pre-Apollonian group, or would be a Felaheen, but that's semantics.

Your pic demonstrates it: the Greeks didn't colonize lands, they made city states. The form of exploration and discovery that Faustian Man engages in is not only impossible, but utterly pointless to Apollonian Man. The spread of Greek City-States is more akin to cellular division than Faustian Man's conception of colonization, which is the spread of a slime-mold across territory. There was nothing worthwhile in between the City-States.

Why would you hold so fervent of an opinion on a topic you don't understand?

>>16652841
>Achilles would be Apollonian Man.

why Sprengler is using greek gods as archetypes in his work then? shouldn´t he use a proper term if he thinks the west is separate from ancient greek culture? apollonian, dionysian all figures of greek mythology

without ancient greece and rome there´s no west, germanic people (like sprengler himself) would´ve been living in mud hutts and praising odin for their state of mediocrity

>>16637750
Sex gifs.

>>16652868
He isn't. Apollonian Man is the only "Greek God -Man" in Spengler. There is no "Dionysian Man". Are you confusing Spengler and Nietzsche? Spengler posits
>Magian
>Apollonian
>Faustian
>Russian
>Indian
>Sumerian
>Chinese
>Meso-American
Men.

Read this thread, this was already explained here: >>16649932. The "Culture-Civilizations" listed above have NOTHING to do with biology. They are purely methods of conceptualizing time and space. A 40IQ'd Abo, a Bantu cannibal from the congo, an Ashkenazi Jew, and a Greek can all be "Magian Men" if they conceptualize time and space in the Magian manner. A German, an Inuit, and a Russian can all be "Faustian Men" if they all conceptualize time and space in a Faustian manner. Faustian Man is currently swallowing the Earth, so there indeed Congo-Niggers who are Faustian Men. The Greeks, initially Apollonian Man, adopted Magian ideals, and are now Faustian Men. Between 500AD (roughly the death of Apollonian Man) and 900AD (the birth of Faustian Man) the Germans were felaheen, cultureless, civilizationless, historyless. Then, they unified under Faustian Man. While this was going on, the Greeks were still Magian Men, their native Faustian ideals having been replaced (Christianity is the death-knell of Apollonian Man, but the process actually starts around 200BC).

Apollonian Man is named so precisely because the Greeks were Apollonian Men, as were the Romans, and all other Mediterranean peoples. It is a conceptualization of bodies in space. The space in between the bodies is meaningless, the bodies are discrete and uniform. It's why the Greeks were shit at history, because history wasn't a series of events for them, it was a story describing what a thing was and where it went. It's why they cared about geometry (the relation of bodies) but didn't give a rat's ass about what would go on to be calculus.

>>16652948
if being a faustian man is a state of being, should i (a south american person descendant of people from italy and spain) consider myself faustian too? or am i a mix of apollonian and faustian?

>>16640755
Spengler claims civilizations expire and are then lead by strong Caesars into a new age.

>>16653001
Apollonian Man is long dead. The Romans, in their pursuit of Empire, imported Magian ideals. The Apollonian Men saw the world as a series of discrete uniform bodies dancing around each other in the void. There is distance between the bodies, but distance only means anything in relation to bodies. The void is truly empty, and measureless. Faustian Man, however, sees the world as a 3D grid, so space does actually have measure. Apollonian Man saw these bodies as being unable to interfere with each other; they could bump into each other, one could make another bigger or smaller, you could knock a body far away out of its dance with other bodies, but you could never "break into" another body. It just didn't work that way.

The Romans imported Magian ideals in order to get around that. The Romans sacked Carthage (totally acceptable for Apollonian Man), and then they salted the earth, so Carthage would die. That was inconceivable for Apollonian Man. As more and more Magian Man got imported (Spengler also has a theory of "pseudo-morphosis", wherein one Culture-Civilization conquers another and stifles it, but does not kill it; Russia was subjected to this by Faustian Man, which is why in Spengler's day they had no "Prime Architecture". Magian Man was subjected to this by Apollonian Man, which is why Apollonian Man ends up dying at the hands of Magian Man, as revenge for that stifling), Apollonian Man withered.

The interesting question, then, and this is why I relate this to Dawkins' Extended Phenotype theories, is: can you intentionally join another Culture-Civilization? South America is Faustian, but where it isn't, it's just a mass of felaheen (see: Brazilian favelas). How then, does an individual go from Felaheen, to joining a Culture-Civilization? Can I just will myself into being part of Russian Man (I am not ethnically or nationally Russian, at all) by thinking like a Russian?

I, personally, would say yes.

>>16653077
interesting, what about the negros?, idk if sprengler talked about them but i make my own theory that black people are incompatible with civilization because of their savage nature, the thing anglo-saxon liberals are doing to blacks is appeasing to their worldview so to say, so their importing their inherently chaos nature to civilization which creates more mayhem, i think Malcolm X was aware of this so that´s why he wanted their people to be separated from the United States


do you also know why Sprengler doesn´t consider Russians as part of the west? is it because their followers of the orthodox religion? i consider the russian nation to be part of the west, there´s nothing foreign in what i see from them, they also contributed to the arts, sciences, expanded from their place in the moskva river towards siberia and even reached north america, i mean for god´s sake, they were the first to explore Space itself, wouldn´t that strike you as proper Faustian Western to you?

>>16653001
>(a south american person descendant of people from italy and spain
Fucks sake why is it always you filthy spics that go so hard on this meds vs nords bullshit?

>>16653222
>mfw anglo-americans think that i live in the jungle communicating with monkeys and talking with mexican accent

lol

>>16638549
Based Weberian?

>>16652779
>>16652868
>>16653198
>>16653198
It's SPENGLER
S P E N G L E R

>>16653300
spergler

>>16653198
I don't think Sub-Saharan Africa ever had any long-term unification to result in a Culture-Civilization of its own. This isn't necessarily because niggers are dumb (it certainly doesn't help of course), but rather that they literally could not attain the population density necessary to have such a thing. Before European agriculture came along, most of Sub-Saharan Africa was devoid of human activity. We see something similar in Central Asia, where even though the populace has IQs in the 100s, they never had a Culture-Civilization of their own because they could never (intellectually) band together for long enough to develop one.

As for Russian Man, his argument is essentially that Russians are very similar to the West in terms of how they see space and time (an infinite 2D plane). This results in similarities, but also differences. This is why Russia has always been both intimately familiar, but also a weird oriental despotism. For the West, it's in an uncanny valley of sorts, eerily similar, but where it differs, it can be frightening. However, Russia was then subjected to pseudo-morphosis by Faustian Man (Petrinism, wherein the Russian Elite had a huge hardon for France), which brought them closer. The actual Russian People are indeed, I would say, culturally and biologically Westerners. They are, however, Westerners operating under a different Culture-Civilization. Whereas Faustian Man is the result of Germanicss in the Primordial Forest of Europe, Russian Man is the result of Slavs on the steppes of Asia.

There are also Russian Men who are NOT Westerners. Central Asians, Siberians, and Turkics are Russian Men, but they are NOT Westerners, and have no cultural or biological relation to Westerners.

I talked about Russia in a previous post here: >>/lit/thread/S16509942#p16535169

One flaw in anything involving Spengler is that his terms are sort of unclear. When I speak of Russians, do I mean "the ethnicity" or "the people who adhere to the culture-civilization"? Spenglers theories are detached from biology and culture, and that's great and all, but sometimes we do actually need to talk about the intersection of these Culture-Civilizations and culture/biology, and it gets sort of clumsy.

>>16653341
thanks for the clarifying my doubts

>>16653341
central asia and the Caucasus are critically understudied and underappreciated regions in the Western consciousness desu

>>16640755
I've never really heard of this, if you mention it on /pol/ very few non-german's are aware it even exists. I think Richard Spencer mentioned it once, but got the ideas so damn wrong that it made him seem like a midwit (pretty sure he is). If anything most "alt righters" (so third positionist if we're being truthful) prefer Evola or autistic things like Siege.

So is the Spenglerian Caesar a good thing or a bad thing for humanity?

>>16645056
>>16645100
He's not that difficult. Much easier to understand without any prior reading than the likes of Kant. You don't need to understand all of his historical references to understand the gist of the book and see how his analysis and predictions are reflected in the world around you.

>>16652841
you are talking to a canadian kike called Seanald. he used to shill his blog on /pol/ but was such a low IQ brainlet that he go utterly BTFOd.
he is the single biggest pseud on all of 4chan. he thinks he very smart but in reality he's the biggest retard you'll ever come across on this website.

>>16654496
For Spengler, it was neither good nor bad, and was necessary, just like how becoming old is not good or bad but is natural to life. I've seen people who are politically left wing (in some flavor or another) reject Spengler because they hate the conclusion that we draw near Caesarism and think Spengler wishes for this. Spengler may have had no love for autumn money power or intellectuals, but did not see good in Caesarism either, and preferred the old aristocratic state that had at that time been forced out of Europe.

>>16654496
>Spenglerian
>humanity
pick one

>>16654496
it's beyond good and bad man
IT'S DESTINY

>>16652779
you are a nigger... christianity gave something no other people in the world has to Europeans: the possitivity of Law, the interiorization of life; no more yolk of the administrators of the metaphysical law... you dumb materialistic nigger

>>16654585
>you are a nigger... christianity gave something no other people in the world has to Europeans: the possitivity of Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_law

Pseudo-intellectualism, going by this thread.

>>16645056
>>16645100
>>16645390
>>16654505
>>16637761
>>16638582
>>16640379
Okay anons, If I really wanna hit Spengler but want to do reasonable prep... ahem, REASONABLE... what stuff is gonna be on my reading list?

>>16656009
>Reasonable prep

What do you mean by reasonable?
I recommend:
The Republic
Meno
Apology
Nicomachean Ethics
Politics
Aristotle's Metaphysics
Anselm Monologion & Proslogion
Descartes meditations
Spinoza Ethics
Hume's Inquiry
Leibniz monadology
Kant 1st Critique
Kant Metaphysics of morals
Hegel Philosophy of History
Hegel Philosophy of Right

So a basic background in the history of philosophy + more in depth Kant and Hegel. If you want, also Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

>>16656080
Wow thanks anon. Read some Nietzsche already so I guess this is my next reading list. Cheers

>>16655870
Dude he literally predicted liberalism and mass transit. He's not a pseud.

>>16656085
Make sure you read them mostly in order, the 2 big filters are probably the metaphysics and Kant, but if you get through those spengler is no big deal. I kept the Hegel pretty simply, I know that a lot of people would reccomend his phenomenology and logic as well prior to engaging with any neo-Hegelian thought, but I personally think that for people like Marx, Spengler, and Strauss who are more focused on the political aspects of Hegelian thought those his philosophy of right and philosophy of history should be enough. Ilyin, Heidegger, Husserl and even someone like Scruton will probably need the phenomenology as well as Kant's 2nd and 3rd critiques

>>16656108
Really helpful, thanks anon. Tbh, I like Greek philosophy (stoics mostly) and Nietzsche (Zarathustra) because I find it accessible. I may very well get filtered on many of these.

However, I have read summaries of Spengler and can find zero fault in him. Even other people writing articles about him has made me think he is totally based and correct.

I really want to read him. And Heidegger also. But these two big brains need a lot of work first.

why is it so hard to get a decent copy of Decline of the West Vol 1 & 2????

fascist nonsense