Introduction to Oswald Spengler

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bhglasgow
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Introduction to Oswald Spengler

Post by bhglasgow » Sun May 15, 2022 11:37 am

From an essay about Imperium by Francis Parker Yockey that I am writing:


Towering above them all, however, stood the conservative German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) and his two-volume magnum opus, The Decline of the West, which dominated Yockey’s thought to such an extent that Imperium is described, correctly, as a sequel to it.

In brief, Spengler rejected the progressive “ancient-medieval-modern” schematic of history that dominated- and still dominates- Western classrooms, and insisted that history occurs in cycles, with civilizations being born, growing old, and dying much in the same way as plants, animals, and individual human beings. All these civilizations are distinct from one another, and have their own method and attitude towards art, science, architecture, technics, mathematics, history, war-waging, etc. Thus, Spengler teaches there is no universal history, but the distinct lives of superpersonal spiritual organisms called High Cultures, all animated by an idea which encapsulates all their aforementioned attitudes and methods. To these High Cultures, the millions and millions of human beings within them operate like cells in the human body. Outside these High Cultures, to Spengler, there is no true history, for primitive man fights for no idea, but only the animal drives for food and pleasure. History has seen seven of these High Cultures actualize their life-processes: the Babylonian, Egyptian, the Indo-Aryan, Chinese, Greco-Roman (Apollinian), Mayan-Aztec (Mexican), and the Islamic-Semitic (Magian). The eighth High Culture, still undergoing the life-process as we speak, is ours: the white Western, which he calls Faustian. Just as Faust sold his soul in exchange for infinite knowledge and power, the Western man’s overpowering drive is to bridge all gaps between us and the infinite: to subjugate everything in our path, to uncover everything about the universe. The idea that animates us, our ‘prime symbol,’ to use Spengler’s term, is infinite space. Hence our unmatched drive to the ends of this earth-ball and even beyond it into space, and our Gothic cathedrals whose spires pierce to the skies, ever higher toward the sky, toward the infinite.
Yet the West is not currently driving forward: it retreats upon the world-stage, mired in all manner of filth. Spengler writes this phenomenon is merely a season of our life-process. In gaining power and conquering disease and Nature to an incredible degree, the West has grown complacent and lazy, as all High Cultures do at this ‘age.’ The uprooted agricultural population, previously the sustainers of Culture, pour into the towns and swell them into vast cosmopolises, where they become an idle, irreligious, pleasure-seeking rabble. We are in the age of the Demos, common, again, to all High Cultures. Yet, eventually the people grow tired of democracy, science and Rationalism; they turn towards an authoritarian figure, to primitive religious-forms and look upon the academic-type with disdain. This is the final life-stage of the High Culture: old age is the age of the Caesar, the Second Religiosity, and the grand World-Empire- the Imperium.

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Jim Mathias
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Re: Introduction to Oswald Spengler

Post by Jim Mathias » Sun May 15, 2022 3:56 pm

Nicely summarized for its ease of reading. This long-view perspective of Western Civilization's entry into the end stages of its life-cycle ought to help convince those considering our Cosmotheist grasp of eternal things to assist us in creating the bridge to our New Order to as the old collapses. It's not going to be easy getting there, but our life-philosophy provides a sort of light at the end of the tunnel for us to move forward towards.
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