What is Veeky Forums opinion on Oswald Spengler?

>2020: All remaining sciences will become extensions of understanding human behavior. (1.III.5, 1.XI.15)

>The intellects of the late West will recognize that the attempt to systematize or categorize anything is more of a reflection of the psychological and socio-historical paradigms that engender the imagination of such systems than it is something that really exists “out there” in Nature. Interpreting the signs and symbols of past centuries is in fact the “last Faustian philosophy” and the only possibility remaining to the Western mind (1.IV.12). [Tangent: Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game describes a post-collapse society where such interpretation has become the highest and only art-form left in the world.]

>Prediction came true: Yes. By the late 1960s, the “objective” status of the scientific observer in sociology and anthropology was already subject to some doubts. In the 1980s, the social sciences and philosophy were thoroughly wrecked by the work of Jacques Derrida. These two categories of study never recovered from this Copernican revolution but are basically running on steam. Since roughly 2005, the humanities have also made a definite turn towards what Spengler calls “physiognomical” analysis, and it is fair to assume that the hard sciences will begin to turn inward in a similar way in the coming years, especially after the failure of ITER and other mammoth experimental projects.

>For those who think Spengler ultra-conservative, it is interesting to note that he is eager to promote (in 1.IV.12) what basically amounts to cultural relativism.

what did he mean by this?

based

So we still have about 3 centuries of Western Civilization left? I wish it'd come crashing down sooner. The Caesars cannot come fast enough

He's pretty good but Plato had already said all of that. He only added historical flesh to Plato's theoretical bones.

source

>The Caesars cannot come fast enough
When they do come they'll make the west of tomorrow look like the middle east of today: a war-torn hellhole dominated by religious demagogues and unscrupulous power-brokers and strongmen.

better then the liberal trash society we have today

If you really hate it that much, there's nothing stopping you from traveling to the middle east to go be somebody's body in a ditch

Thanks for the link!

Book VIII of the Republic

Anyone able to recommend some good secondary literature on spengler and his ideas?

Use google, there's dozens of essays on Spengler and his works on the Internet and they're pretty much all worth reading

but the middle east is full of sandniggers.
If europe got rid of liberalism we could easely get rid of the muslim plauge

If we got rid of liberalism there'd be no difference

>archdruid report.

Haven't read him since he went full Trumptard.

Link?

>Le all races are equal, it's just cultural differences meme.
Come on it's 2016!

>pre-19th century Europe was the same as modern Middle East
This is what libtards actually believe

>retarded sociopaths from /pol/ are a scientific authority
No one takes racial theory serious besides lonely neckbeards on Veeky Forums

how is he a Trumptard? I'm just reading his blogs for the first time, and I don't see any blind fanaticism, just reasonable explanations for the appeal of Trump

for a total layman like myself - there's a great podcast that goes by the name of his most famous work. First few are more current events (show began in July - the most fuck-all month of 2016), but they get around to his writing eventually. Highly recommended

declinecast.com/

shit like this makes me wonder why Marxists still exist. why do people still cling to Marx when people like Spengler and Toynbee obviously have deeper and more accurate philosophies of history?

Marxism preaches the idea of eventual utopia. Spenglerism only preaches eventual doom, and his ideas are antithetical to the popular conception that humanity is on a linear path to greatness. It's much easier to want the former than accept the latter.

Here's a funny thing: I'm surprised Spengler hasn't been picked up more by third worlders. Marx holds out the promise that the revolution, and justice will still be Eurocentric. Even for Maoists, the third world is the battlefront to overthrow western imperialism, so that we can have Communism in the west.

Spengler holds out the possibility of the third world being the future. In the Spenglerian sense, I think Africa is the home of the only vital civilization.

The west is dying. The Eastern and Muslim worlds have entered into voluntary suicide in response: The East by hollowing itself out to pursue western Materialism, a Pyrrhic victory even if they achieve it. The Islamic world knows it has no future, and responds with futile, suicidal gestures.

Africa may seem 'barbarous' to late western sensibilities, but so would the Western Golden age. They are 'barbarians' of the modern age the way the Germans were to the dying Roman culture.

Russians should pick it up, because he went on about how Russia is a young High Culture and how it will abandon communism in the foreseeable future in order to reach its own adulthood ( in which he was more than just correct ):

"All bolshevism contains something of the dismal bitterness of the Maccabees, as well as of the much later insurrection that led to the destruction of Jerusalem. Its rigid dogmatism alone could never have supplied the impetus that sustains the movement even to the present day. The subliminal anti-Western instincts of Russia, at first directed against Petrinism, have lent strength to bolshevism. But since bolshevism is itself an outgrowth of Petrinism it will in time be destroyed in order to complete Russia’s liberation from “Europe.”

Yet the future of the unconscious forces of Russia lies not in the solution of political and social quandaries but in the imminent birth of a new religion, the third to emerge from the matrix of Christianity, just as Germanic-Western culture unconsciously conceived the second form of Christianity around 100 A.D. Dostoyevsky is one of the prophets of this new faith; it is as yet nameless, but it has already begun to enter with quiet, infinitely tender power."

Neither of you have actually read Spengler, have you?

I am sure cultural relativism in this case means respecting other cultures while adhering to your own. Honorable but violent competition is a plus.

>tfw you took the iron pill and now there is no turning back
>tfw you ride the tiger

welcome brother

>Russians should pick it up, because he went on about how Russia is a young High Culture and how it will abandon communism in the foreseeable future in order to reach its own adulthood ( in which he was more than just correct ):

Decline of The West comes with a Nikolai Berdyaev essay on him in my country. Also Dugin uses much of Spengler.

You missed the point entirely.

it could be argued that middle eastern culture is currently going through its Caesarist phase as we speak, as it is a place where the rule of ideas and money have broken down completely and all that is left are blood politics, and that when the West enters this phase then it, too, will be a place ruled by shameless religious demagogues who tyrannize and repress their constituents and leave no lasting legacy other than human suffering, and a wretched, bloody waste of human talent and ingenuity.

He's proven pretty handy in providing a bright red flag for when I should stop listening to someone, because the only people I've ever seen give a shit about him are Alt-Right sperglords attempting to turn their sense of anomy into a coherent ideology and symptom of wide-spread societal decline.

I can never decide if his is a work of consummate genius or the barking of a grifter trying to sell books.

The irony is that he was utterly dismissive of what you and I would call the "alt-right", at several instances speaking favorably of cultural relativism and he had a dim view of Nazi Germany and everything it represented, successfully predicting that it would implode in the mid 1940's

>Oh no please keep listening to me user!
I like how the above poster assumes this would matter to anyone. Absurdly amusing.

And maybe you should read him then, because I'm not Alt Right at all and I consider him quite elucidating.

If they actually read him properly and not a cursory reading or countercurrents.com quotes, they'd abandon him.
The only thing the Alt Right likes about him is the Cassandra tier title.
Then they go on about how "iz imperium tiem, Trumpenreich 2016", but Spengler would describe empire as the final stage of a civilization, the ultimate sign of its decline.

>The irony is that he was utterly dismissive of what you and I would call the "alt-right", at several instances speaking favorably of cultural relativism and he had a dim view of Nazi Germany and everything it represented, successfully predicting that it would implode in the mid 1940's

Did he have a favoured political system? I've never personally read him (although, despite my flippant attitude towards people I've seen touting him, he is on my to-read list), but as I recall he believed history to be cyclical, without an end-point as Hegel or Marx would have had it. So what would he have favoured under those conditions?

To be completely honest I'm not sure, maybe there's another user who's studied him in greater detail than I have who could answer that question with greater clarity, but IIRC he took a very meta-approach to ideology: he didn't identify as a capitalist or a socialist, he saw them as two parts of the same conversation, and that the philosophy of the future would be a totally different conversation in a totally different language.

>If they actually read him properly and not a cursory reading or countercurrents.com quotes, they'd abandon him.
Yeah but in fairness if alt-right people did that for everything they read, they probably wouldn't be alt-right any more.

I'm pretty sure that's like, their defining feature. Most serious academics consider Hitler's philosophy to be an incoherent hodgepodge of ideas meant to galvanize people than actually provide an argument of substance.

I only read his Decline of The West. I find his magnum opus to be quite apolitical. It's not written to offer a solution or a 'way out' of our predicament. He isn't a 'moderate' Evola or something. He is a true historian in this sense. He goes through the seasons of worlds and describes it in some of the best prose I've found in historical tomes. But nowhere do you feel
He even says Socialism is the very essence of Faustian/Western culture. So I don't get why leftists who claim to have read him get so butthurt.

He closes the book with a Stoic phrase, so that tells you something.

That's what every fascistoid movement does: it thieves other ideologies and makes a pastiche of whatever it can salvage.

But what I don't get is how the left is willing to admit this for a number of things, like how 20th century fascism basically mimicked socialist movements.
But when a thinker gets appropriated by them, he is guilty by association.
This is what happens all too often in Antifa circles and it just undermines the intellectual credibility of the left when they start witch hunting like this.

In fact I'm pretty sure at one point he considered socialism as the pinnacle of western ethical development, a sort of final exhaustion of form, pushing an idea like the golden rule to its logical conclusion.

Correct me if I'm wrong

No, you're exactly right.
I have made some annotations in the book but I can't find the exact page where he said this.
But yes. He basically says what Zizek is now saying about Christianity.

>20th century fascism basically mimicked socialist movements.
interesting observation. A similar thought struck me the other night when I was having a conversation with a conservative about a hypothetical civil war between urbanized leftists against rural right-wingers, and I asked him how he expected to fund his war when the urban centers were the places where all the wealth and industry was concentrated. His argument in a nutshell was that working class people (the proletariat) would rise up en masse depending on a moneyless system (because conservatives supposedly have all the farms, guns, and oil) to aid them in seizing industry (the means of production) from the liberal elite (the bourgeoisie)

>But when a thinker gets appropriated by them, he is guilty by association.
I know a lot of liberals who are perfectly fine reading Martin Heideggar, a man who went to his grave an unapologetic national socialist
What the conservatives have a hard time admitting is that the liberals have become the new Moral Majority, which means that they "own" the mechanism for producing shame culture, and just like the devout protestants before them, swing that shame bat at anyone who doesn't conform ideologically.

>Zizek is now saying about Christianity.
I confess that I don't follow Zizek that much. Care to elaborate?

See, this is what I don't get. Heidegger was indeed unapologetic and still is perfectly fine for them to read and extract ideas. But they don't wanna touch Spengler with a 10 foot pole because "he seems kinda fashy"...

From a Spenglerian perspective, liberals are secularized Faustian Christians. Not only the factionalism is on par with Reformed Christianity, but also the whole egalitarian New Jerusalem they aspire, at all costs. The pacificsm of some branches is very much a Christian remnant as well. And people like Peter Lamborn Wilson, an anarchist, refer to baptists as examples for anarchist communities.
Disagree as much as one wants, but they can't be blamed for being 'un-Western', if anything, they are indeed as Western as a Westerner could be in this late stage.

What are the first and second forms of Christianity?

Magian Christianity ( Middle Eastern/Byzantine ) and Faustian Christianity ( Western European )

What could Russia possibly spawn that would be comparable to Catholicism or Orthodoxy?

We'll have to wait and see.

Checking that out,
Thx m80

Has anybody ever wondered that maybe The Decline of the West is the actual psychohistory Asimov meant in his Foundation books?

But those belong to separate civilizations, according to Spengler.

Cont.
He even went as far as saying that the adoption of christianity by the West was a historical error that only concealed the true form of it.

hard to say. foundation definitely touched on those kinds of things thematically, but only as lightly as possible, and never in detail. aasimov wrote pretty politically neutral fiction, and his stuff is from a pretty realist lens, going so far as to basically write things that expounded extremely right wing ideas because it was just more reaistic, but the dude was pretty left wing politically despite it all

russia is very much a culture built in order to survive the fringes of civilization and raids from pastoral peoples.

with sufficient time and suppression of sand niggers, they could either evolve into western europe or an extremely harsh reactionary polity. either of which would basically fulfill the role of "comparability."

I don't think anyone says actual civilizations are fixed. democracy was fixed, and therefore reasonably easy to predict because democracy is the lack of the civilization, and it runs where institutions consume social capital and burn the remaining monetary/cultural reserves, therefore there is only one way forward: consumption and exploitation of cultural assets

A great visionary and redpiller

There is some overlap and the concept of psychohistory certainly seems inspired by the musings of people like Spengler and Tonybee, but the single hugest difference is that psychohistory was envisioned as being a true science: just plug the numbers into your hand-held calculator (hey, it was written in the 1940's, a hand-held calculator was considered one of those insanely powerful gadgets that people will invent in the distant future) and you get your testable, falsifiable proofs.

I think he's more of a brownpill than a redpill

Iron pill = Evola
Brown pill = Spengler
Blue pill = Netflix
White pill = Pornhub
Green pill = ???
Kek pill = /pol/

>In the 1980s, the social sciences and philosophy were thoroughly wrecked by the work of Jacques Derrida.
What the hell? A good chunk of academia doesn't even acknowledge him.

Green Pill is Robert Anton Wilson or Carl Jung

Too bad when won't live to see a development of higher Russian Culture forms.

When it happens it will involve a war with Turkey and an expanding of influence through Eastern Europe

Don't we have this same thread over and over again?

He advocated for Prussian styled "Socialism" ,and had a pretty good short book about it.

>See, this is what I don't get. Heidegger was indeed unapologetic and still is perfectly fine for them to read and extract ideas. But they don't wanna touch Spengler with a 10 foot pole because "he seems kinda fashy"...

Look at it this way: if you see a swastika spray painted on an overpass do you think "Buddhist peace symbol"?
So when liberals hear "muh degeneracy" do they think "Spenglerian social cyclic theory"?

I think most lay liberals are willing to hear you out if you make the distinction that you're not just pushing alt-right bullshit. It's the academics who are dismissive of Spengler, for various reasons.

Martin Heideggar was a respected academician with a long, illustrious career while Spengler never made it to the ranks, having failed his dissertation due to insufficient citations, so there's a lingering feeling among academics that Spengler "couldn't hack it as a real historian". And most historians take a more evolutionary view towards history, that it is a gradual progression from simpler to more complex forms which adapt to environment, making grand historical narratives superfluous or misleading. And he said some pretty racist shit in Man and Technics, which basically renders him ash in the mouths of pretty much the entire liberal establishment.

An intellectual equivalent might be like Origen or Thomas Hobbes: the splash that they made had less to do with their own body of work and more to do with the reaction that they provoked among learned people, who felt the need to respond in an articulate fashion why their work might be a load of Bullshit

Discrediting him for not rising in te academic ranks or not having sufficient citations isn't valid. His ideas are consistent as far as I can see

>isn't valid.
except it is if you want to be respected by the academic establishment who subject their own beliefs and the beliefs of other professionals to rigorous, quantifiable analysis

And lots of ideas are consistent. Doesn't make them factually correct

thats a bit of a stretch

The only viable similitude is in the evolution of political systems, namely from democracy towards despotism, but even then, the details are all messed up

damn, is Spenglerianism having a comeback?
Not surprising, but still, nice.

I'm not alt-right and find him one of the most influential thinkers of history that I got the chance to read

And like others anons have already said, anything more than a very cursory reading would make any alt-righter abandon Spengler.
His radical cultural relativism and his views on race would be enough to disappoint any alt-righter cliche /pol/lack

Dude the nazis and /pol/tacks who have actually read his works, hate him.

An even more joyless and fatalistic version of Evola.

>And most historians take a more evolutionary view towards history, that it is a gradual progression from simpler to more complex forms which adapt to environment, making grand historical narratives superfluous or misleading. And he said some pretty racist shit in Man and Technics, which basically renders him ash in the mouths of pretty much the entire liberal establishment.

During my time as a student, we deconstructed that myth of progress.I don't know many people taking this linear model of history seriously.
Veeky Forums really seems like a bunch of people from the 1950's who haven't even seen the rise of the Annales or the linguistic turn. Are your textbooks in high school really that dated?

You might have a hard on for authority, but many historians nowadays look, on purpose, for fringe figures like these in order to challenge the ideas you would probably consider 'more true' because they fit the general consensus. You don't make any strides by just sticking with your grand narratives. You need to pry and see what else is afloat out there.
The irony of studying a guy like Spengler is that we can look at one of those 'grand history' type figures who didn't quite 'made it' in the establishment and ask ourselves why he remained fringe, why he didn't become an established voice in historiography. Why didn't Toynbee get as much following either? Is it just a matter of right/wrong? What does that tell us about us historians?

But, what the hell, this is Veeky Forums, where life is reduced to a prestige race, scoring at least 50 chicks in life, getting a job with 500k and reading Veeky Forums's sticky.

I am what many would call "alt-right" and i like his works. moral absolutism is cancer.

>moral absolutism is cancer.
I was under the impression that in so far as alt-right is anything beyond memes this is opposed their narrative.

There are other flavours of degeneracy in the other boards.

>, we deconstructed that myth of progress
That's what I meant by evolutionary: that it is adaptation to circumstance and environment without any clear "direction", just like biological evolution. By progression from simpler to more complex forms I'm talking about a modern industrial economy with hundreds of millions of people being more complex than an agrarian bronze-age society of a few hundred thousand people, which itself is more complex than a paleolithic society of a few hundred breeding pairs.

>You might have a hard on for authority
If the doctor tells me the dark spot on my skin is Melanoma I'm going to take him seriously because I respect the fact that he went through the rigorous process of acquiring his medical license. You might have a problem with authority.

>but many historians nowadays look, on purpose, for fringe figures like these in order to challenge the ideas you would probably consider 'more true' because they fit the general consensus
In my experience they don't care about fringe theories if they lack rigor, and instead prefer cross-disciplinary studies incorporating fields like psychology, evolutionary biology, sociology, economics, linguistics, among others.

>But, what the hell, this is Veeky Forums, where life is reduced to a prestige race, scoring at least 50 chicks in life, getting a job with 500k and reading Veeky Forums's sticky.
You bitch, and yet you stay here wallowing in the filth. Nobody's making you stay here so who's worse, the fools, or the person who follow the fools trying to earn their approval?

I like his system of ceremonial magic.

the actual reason historians discard Spengler is because they're deeply indoctrinated Marxists and they don't want to face the facts that history is cyclical and western civilization will collapse within the next century

spoken like somebody who doesn't actually know any historians

well first off i don't really consider myself alt right. But i think there is a difference betwen using moral relativism as excuses for what for example muslim immigrants and extremists are doing or using moral relativism in a historical/anthropological sense.

The next century?

By Spengler's reckoning, we have two and a half centuries. Has there even been a Caesar figure yet?

Do you think tapping out oil will affect how long Western civilization lasts?

The last century at least should be a time of chaos anyway, as it happened to Rome.

We're way past our prime already.

I read Decline of the West, though honestly I was skimming by the end because it struck me as a bunch of bunk.
It reads like some Jungian psychology crap (except, of course, Jung and Freud's works were regarded seriously until psychology either disproved or showed most of their theories to have no real basis). It's no coincidence authors like Spengler, Toynbee and even Baudrillard make these unfalsifiable ideas about how history is supposed to work and what humanity and western civilization are heading to and contradict each other in the process. Each of their methodologies, but most remarkably and blatantly Spengler's, requires a vague searching of a pattern in civilization rise and collapse and the use of a bit too many tablespoons of confirmation bias. When something vaguely fits into the pattern Spengler wants to make it fit into, it's a success, and the similarities between this "evolution" are highlighted while the equally or more numerous differences in each case are downplayed.
The obvious criticism, then, is that history like most disciplines that deal with the behavior of humans, follows somewhat a Bonini's paradox pattern where there are too many nuances and localized mechanisms changing history for someone to just "see the big picture" and encompass the "stages" common to every human civilization. This isn't to say culture and ideas are never common to many civilizations or that formulating any general pattern is outrageous, but it does mean that the patterns you come up with won't necessarily have predictability (as should be painfully obvious in Spengler) and that the more grandiose ones are more distanced from the complexity of reality.
At best, I'd agree with the Oxford edition intro, that Spengler is a "seismograph" of his time rather than of all times and civilizations, be they "Magian," "Apollonian," or "Faustian."

he was great in Breaking Bad

>By Spengler's reckoning, we have two and a half centuries. Has there even been a Caesar figure yet?

The Romans themselves never made the distinction between Republic and Empire, and thought of the Caesars as preservers of the Republic even as the Emperor took on ever more monarchical trappings and their democracy had degraded into a hypocritical farce.

For all we know the first Caesar already exists or has existed, and if someone were to point him out to us we'd think it was nonsense.

It's too early. The first Caesar of our civilization will only be born around now. Maybe that's too early still. Augustus referred to himself as the First Citizen, or Princeps, of the Republic. The first among equals. In the Roman constitution he wasn't even allowed to call himself a monarch and there would have been outrage if he had. He wanted everyone to know/think that he was not a monarch or dictator (even though he was), but rather an extension of the people. There's nobody like that in our civilization yet.

>The Romans themselves never made the distinction between Republic and Empire
Caesar was declared dictator in perpetuity and Augustus ruled for fucking life with power unseen by a single individual since the time of the Roman monarchy.

The Roman emperors made a big attempt at being preservers of the Republic but they sure as shit weren't when it came to the actual institutions and regulations of the Republic, and everyone could see it.

It'd be like Obama getting declared President for life. And then some bumfuck relative of his takes over after Obama gets assassinated, declares himself First Citizen through an enormous military conflict and says that he inherits Obama's position as President for life, oh and he takes a ton of power from Congress and says he can tell the Supreme Court what to do.

Every last one of us would know something was going on, we wouldn't wake up one day and say "GASP! WE'VE BEEN LIVING IN AN AUTOCRATIC REGIME! HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN?!".

We haven't even had our Sulla yet, Caesar is still a long away off and that's assuming we've had our Punic Wars.

>>The intellects of the late West will recognize that the attempt to systematize or categorize anything is more of a reflection of the psychological and socio-historical paradigms that engender the imagination of such systems than it is something that really exists “out there” in Nature. Interpreting the signs and symbols of past centuries is in fact the “last Faustian philosophy” and the only possibility remaining to the Western mind (1.IV.12). [Tangent: Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game describes a post-collapse society where such interpretation has become the highest and only art-form left in the world.]

This is unironically true though.

>Punic Wars.
Are they historicaly inevitable in the same sense as ceasarism is?
I would consider our faustian civilisation to be about the long period of unrest leadin up to the rise of Julius Ceasar. In that sense, the world wars are analogues to the civil wars before the Ceasars.

>If the doctor tells me the dark spot on my skin is Melanoma I'm going to take him seriously because I respect the fact that he went through the rigorous process of acquiring his medical license. You might have a problem with authority.

Bad analogy.
You can't compare the study of history to the study of the human body. In the case of the latter it's relatively easy, and necessary, to achieve a great sense of objectivity.
To study the human past is a whole other deal. Since the human past is a chaos of events we can only make sense of when we tell it in the form of a story, it's not only the craft of the historian to render it meaningful, but also, and more importantly, to develop a sense of identification with the story as worlds told and tell themselves without becoming its propagandist.

This is what makes Spengler more interesting than Marxism, because Marxism pretended the study of history is a science, and not an art. Which historiography very much is. And it shouldn't be ashamed of 'losing' its scientific status, because if seen as an almost literary activity, we can achieve so much more in terms of understanding than we do when we reduce history to the collecting of data and then propagating an ideology. If we want to understand the human past and the humans from the past, we need to learn the ways of novellists, poets and playwrights, not of engineers, physicians and geologists.

Spengler was able to identify the 'world-feeling' Weltanschauung of each of these High Cultures to a degree a Marxist can't, because to them they're all just ant hills that spew cultural artefacts and ideas in relation to their production methods, not storytelling creatures from the get-go.

Well, he's correct. The amount of Marxists in historiography is still disproportional compared to other fields.
It's because it wanted to desperately be an exact science, a 19th century desire if anything. And Marxism pretends to fulfill that need.

>adaptation to circumstance and environment without any clear "direction"

How come you fuck it up giving a a perfectly sound definition of evolution and then go on ranting about progression again all of the sudden?

Evolution has nothing to do with progression, nor is it that which is taking place. It is not complexification.
We, life and history is evolutionary alright, but not in the sense you talk about complexification of societies, where we are just meant to go from hunter-gatherer to post-industrial astronaut in a matter of time.