Why doesn't /pol/ talk more about the man who accurately

Spengler is a difficult read and some of his historical views are fairly outdated.

Also he was a metaphysician in the German idealist tradition so he's basically ignored in modern academia even on the "right" or what passes for it.

I'd recommend reading his work anyway it's very interesting and insightful, if you don't have the attention span to read the full "Decline of the West" then try "The Hour of Decision" or "Prussianism and Socialism" or "Man and Technics" they're a lot shorter and easier to digest.

He opened my eyes. But tho, not sure what to say beside ARCHIVE, SPREAD and DEFEND. Still have to read the second book.

>>139675813
Book 2 is great you're missing out

at least read the abridged version

>>139676305
It is laying around. Still have to digest the first mentally. It strangely black pilled me without the aphatic state typical for the black pill, rather the opposite; his analysis gave me hope.

>>139675019
he was jewish

He's the ultimate blackpill.

>>139675467
how does he define the "West"?

The hardest part of Spengler, or at least Decline of the West, is simply reading, comprehending, and understanding the entire thing.

Completely comprehending what he says can sometimes require an encyclopedic knowledge of Western and Classical history. Each page is so dense it can be hard to read more than a few sections at a time without stopping to re-read and reflect. You basically need either a massive IQ or a lot of time on your hands to read Decline of the West, preferably both.

Even then, you still have to get past his often archaic prose and constant blackpills. Ultimately, Decline of the West is one of the few books I'd call truly life changing for me. It transforms the way you experience and internalize life.

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>>139679353
>continental philosopher that is deliberately obtuse bordering on incoherance
Why can't they write clearly like Schopenhauer?

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Because Spengler is depressing as fuck. He's right, but he's a huge blackpill.

>>139679720
It's basically a normie repellent

>>139675019
Because he's wrong.

Because we get flooded with newfags everyday. Book threads along with redpill threads should be daily. We should not be regressing to the point of "hurrr, natsoc is Marxist socialism" and garbage like that.

>>139675019
i shud rly go to the library before my hold on this book ends

>>139675019
Oh I love that guy's youtube videos!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uha7WWgoeX4

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>>139678351
Faustian culture, basically western Europe from around the middle ages to the the 19th century

Really his description of Faustian culture comprises hundreds of pages so there's not really any great way to sum it up.

Ultimately he does compare different civilizations to different foundational ideals so the west is based on "infinity" whereas Greco-Roman culture was based on static, motionless and the near east was more based on Manichean dichotomy good/evil light/dark

India for example had it's foundational cultural definition as zero or nothingness.

>>139675019
because /pol/ is basically r/the_donald and /leftypol/ now

>>139680461
I've been sitting here flipping through my copy of Decline of the West for the past 20 minutes trying to fine good passages to describe Faustian Man and I just can't do it.

People just need to read the book for themselves and figure it out.

>>139680865
How well does this do?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsaieZt5vjk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAY9OlphRok&t=1s

Interesting video ft. Dickie Spencer and Bowden discussing Spengler.

Spencer fucking adores Spengler's theory.

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>>139680865
The basic definition is the comparison to Faust from German legend.

He traded his soul to the deal for unlimited knowledge. The western mind/culture also pursues unlimited knowledge, expansion, exploration, etc of everything even if it will lead to ultimate destruction.

>>139681081
Impressive. "Winter" was prescient.

>Optimism is cowardice
sometimes the rebirth of a civilization seems possible. Jewish people did a pretty good job resurrecting Hebrew and keeping their culture through centuries.

>>139679826
that sounds kind of contrarian

>>139681294
Spengler is against any sort of ethnic nationalism though, so I find his thoughts to be interesting but still quite flawed. He and Hitler did not see eye to eye, though Hitler respected his ideas.

>>139683168
The Spengler-Nazi saga is hilarious

>Nazis fucking love Spengler and want his approval and blessing
>Spengler thinks Hitler is a retarded goober who is going to ruin the climatic battle between Prussian militarism and Anglo mercantilism

>>139679353
Are Americans really this stupid? I read it just fine in high school.

>>139681294

>Spencer adores Spengler's theory
>"history isn't over, we are world history"

pick one

>>139680865
If you want an easy to understand description of Faustian culture, you should read Neil Postman's Technopoly, it's very straightforward and describes the exact same shit. I don't know if there's a pidgin translation though.

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>>139682650
Ultimately Spengler's theories are flawed I'd say

The Indians, Jews and Chinese, even though they got BTFO by foreigners have hardly changed over the milennia.

Not even whites have changed that much. The only real change has been when a race gets wiped out and replaced like in Central Asia, the middle east, etc.

Spengler didn't believe in Racial biology ironically and instead bought the nonsensical and now long discredited Boazian/Lemarkian ideas that you could magically change you genetics by "trying hard"

Kek, pretty cute to see how cultural marxist ITT try to hijack Spengler. Will it change the narrative in their favour, na.

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>"Barbarism is that which I call strong race, the eternal warlike in the type of the beast-of-prey man. It often seems to have ceased to exist, but it is crouching in the soul ready to spring. Given a big challenge - and it is on top of the enemy. It is dead only when Late urban pacifism, with its weary desire for peace at any price, short of that of its own life, has rolled its mud over the generations. That is the spiritual self-disarmament, following on the physical, which comes of unfruitfulness."

Is it too late /pol/, or is our warlike spirit still crouching in the soul, ready to spring?

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Everyone on /pol/ should read The Decline of the West.

The thesis is that a civilization is like an organism: it's born, it goes through various stages of development, and then dies. A people initially has a culture (Kultur), and when they settle onto a territory, the transition to civilization (Zivilisation) begins. Each Kultur has an underlying essence. The Examples he gives are "the point" in the case of antiquity, "the unknown" in the case of the Islamic world, and "the infinite" in the case of the modern West (whose beginning he places with the barbarian settlements after the fall of Rome).

Spengler argues that this underlying culture-essence manifests in all aspects of the civilization that follows. Greek geometry was focused on the point. The prime Greek art was the statue: a solid thing in space, a point. Greek astronomy saw the earth as a point in the center of a surrounding and rigid universe. Greece was organized around the city-state, a uniform point. Even the Roman Empire still had a city as its central focus. The gods of antiquity were many and anthropomorphic beings who existed at points in space and time.

Islam's mathematics was algebra, the math of the unknown variable. Islamic monotheism contains the notion of the unknowable God. Spengler sees Arab/Middle Eastern civilization as preceding Islam and containing philosophers like Plotinus who likewise wrote of "The One," an unknown universal Being and first substance, something which precedes the "demiurge," or the god of matter.

The West contributed infinitesimal calculus and the infinite series to mathematics--notions of the infinite. The West replaced the geocentric and static universe with the expanding cosmos, in which we are insignificant. The West's prime art form is music (the West is the only civilization that gave birth to polyphony) where the art is not constrained by physical space.

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>>139688824

Eventually, when the culture-essence exhausts itself, the civilization becomes degenerative, repetitive and dies.

Art and thought become nothing more than trends, increasingly rebellious and with quickening changes in fashion. Novelty becomes the new value. Breaking the old rules can only go long for so long. Originality is lost.

Spengler put the completion of the West's transition of culture to civilization at the Battle of Waterloo. The 19th century typified the era of breaking old trends and old ideas for the sake of modernity itself, for progress as an intrinsic value, and for the sake of novelty. Art went down the path of increasing abstraction until, by the 20th century, representative art had nearly fully passed.

Spengler essentially saw the West in the early 20th century as culturally dead. It was in need of a Caesar, who would carry the civilization into the next era of Imperium, which was not a cultural revitalization but a new epoch equivalent to the Roman Empire in which the emphasis would be on building and conquest.

Spengler didn't think of himself as an optimist or a pessimist. He saw civilizations as organisms with a life span like that of a man. He saw one positive in this however: civilization, if it could last forever, would eventually degenerate into meaninglessness and absolute lack of creativity--death brings renewal.

That's the book in a nutshell. It's a long book but a decent read.

>>139675019
Im surprised we don't hear more about comparisons of the current left and the French Revolution, or how feminism was never sane and people where saying it was batshit crazy 100 years ago in exactly the same way it is now, thats it's never changed