Eurocentrists BTFO by Spengler

Love this book so far.

He gets lumped in with the alt right quote a bit but he sort of btfo's all of the roman/crusader LARPing in the first chapter.

He makes a lot of baseless assumptions, but it's a good book so far.

I'm on the authoritarian right and wish more people would read him. He has a lot more nuance than those YouTube vids show.

It makes me unreasonably angry that Spengler is associated with Right-wing politics or even just politics at all. The guy literally thought history was predetermined, there is absolutely no relation between human effort and the unfolding of history except in the sense that the former manifests the latter.

His radical cultural relativism is also not traditional at all.

I think it's because he was heavily influenced by Nietzsche. He has the same sort of Amor fati thing when it comes to personal endeavors that some people probably find empowering.

He also subtly has that sort of will to power philosophy, at least for the individual, that I think both left and right could run with. I think it probably has to do with the fact that he was in the NDSAP before he died and anything even remotely affiliated retrospectively got the right wing label attached to them.

Although honestly all the intellectual Germans that weren't outright commies were with the ndsap.

Also I don't know if I would say that he is a cultural relativist. Just because societies all come to the same fates and go through the same cycles doesn't mean that some didn't attain more than others.

His notions on race are also, while not as strict as some, would be pretty taboo today.

He was incredibly culturally relativist. He didn't think the cultures even understood or experienced reality the same way. His notion of individual forms of 'number' is one of the most relativist things I have ever come across.

He clearly has biases, eg. he was not a big fan of the Greeks in some ways, and he obviously obsesses over and glorifies the West, but he is very strict about saying that Faustian soul isn't any more correct than the other ones, it simply is one way of seeing and being in reality.

As for the view being taboo, I agree, but they aren't right wing in the sense of political action, because there is no choice, there is only one future.

I don't know if it's neccesarily relativist, he kind of just posits that the symbols and forms, and even understanding of numbers are so dependent and locked within a culture that it's unattainable to outsiders.

I don't think he's arguing that the scientific achievements of the Greeks trump that of the west

I could be wrong though. Still trudging through.

Scientifically definitely not. Technology is the one thing that Spengler is very weak on, he really doesn't talk about it much in Decline except for emphasizing the technical nature of the metropolis and civilization in contrast to the earlier Culture. He has an essay called Man and Technics which is similarly feeble.
fatuma.net/text/Spengler_Man-Technics.pdf

The fact is that technological history plainly does not match the cyclical history of civilizations. Tech has been rising in a steady upward trends across all these risings and falls, it is something different, and Spengler never really reconciled these two things imo.

I"m not sure I understand what you're saying though, isn't saying that each culture understands the world completely differently and in an alien fahsion exactly what relativism is? He talks about modern physics at one point and it is clear that he thinks that the truth content of it has nothing to do with any kind of absolute reality, but that it is just and expression of a cultural Soul, same as the music or architecture of that people.

You make a great point with the technology thing. I wonder if he would encompass that within a larger supra cultural cycle where technology decays for the species as a whole as it becomes too decadent.

And you know what, after rereading your posts you changed my mind. I think he was a relativist. Thanks for the chat.

Space habitats and AI will occur far before then.

Dangerous Utopianism

Western Civilization was kill by 1945 at the latest

He's 100% a cultural relativist. He says the purpose of his philosophy is to deal the death blow to the West by revealing our completely arbitrary position in the world, as just one of many Cultures which eventually fall

You could actually make a Spenglerian case for this because the outcome of WW2 was heavily influenced by Russia, which for Spengler is an alien civilization, and the interactions between civilizations follow no logic, as seen in the premature annihilation of the Mesoamericans upon contact with the Europeans.

It is possible in other words that Western civ really was kill, but the most likely thing is that the USA ended up being the Rome to Western Europe's Greece rather than Germany, which is the country he thought would take up the Empire role.

We'll see.
It's dying, but it's obviously not dead yet. America is still in charge of the world.

What's the best edition or translation to buy? most seem to be abridged, something I'm usually hesitant on. Do I have to get one of the 2 volume sets?

sort of, read jahre der entscheidung published in 1933