Der Untergang des Abendlandes

I've been slogging through Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Oxford University Press 1991, for almost a decade, having picked it up again and again intermittently whenever school work and other activities afforded time. I purchased my copy in Sydney, Australia, of all places, on my way back from the invasion of Iraq, or the opening phases of O.I.F. I flipped through it on the remaining month long boat ride, mind blown by the sweeping scope of history that Spengler worked into clear and connected cycles and phases. Since then, I've made rather slow progress. By the time I left the Marines, I had only read through half of it and without much depth. I was pretty smart then, but I often had nothing to reference Spengler's assertions and connections against, so how could I know if he wasn't just another right wing romantic suffering Nietzsche's depression.

After finishing my degree a few years hence, I decided it was time to conquer the beast and read through it anew. So now, about 7 months on, and I'm just about half way through. This thing is dense, and now armed with deeper perspective, just as much is written between the words as with them. One could mull certain sections of the book, especially Soul-Image and Life Feeling, for a lifetime to ascertain our own true feelings about them. So, I will be discussing this text now and again as the mood strikes. I will also attempt to keep it condensed into brief, food for thought sized posts. This one is already dragging on, and I haven't gotten to anything Spengler actually said.

So while I was reading my morning chapter, I came upon this series of thoughts concerning"Nature Knowledge":

"All Laws formulated in words are derived from experiences, typical of the one-and only the one-Culture."
"Every critical science, like every myth and every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude.... Any reproach, therefore, leveled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up "the Truth" in place of "anthropomorphic" conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist at all.... The statement that "man created God in his own image," valid for every historical religion, is not less valid for every physical theory, however firm its reputed basis of fact" -Spengler, p.190

Serious business, no? Spengler is a big fan of culturally determined ideals, soul feeling and worldview being the foundation from which all other cultural manifestations spring and are invariably bound to and restricted by. For him, direct cultural extensions from Protestant Christianity and its reformation of man's relation to God, and therefore the state, society and even one's self, and the mechanical views of space, physics and nature that were emerging with Newton's influence on Enlightenment philosophers combined to create the modern attitude towards both the profane and sacred realms. An individualized, liberal in the classic sense and  mechanized view of religion, science, nature and humanity paved the way for Industrialism, Socialism and the situation in 20th century Europe.

While religion, like much of Spengler's argument and subject matter, deals with the subjective, mystical, and the intuitive, science is verifiable and can be expressed in a manner somewhat independent of other forms of cultural expression. Mathematics, which was one of Spengler's specialties, is a universal language that exists and extends beyond other non verbal communications such as art, the image and music. However, it remains purely a human contrivance. Mathematics are systems of numbers, themselves cultural concepts, that are arranged and utilized according to culturally derived standards. Math doesn't exist in the "natural" world, just as gravity doesn't exist there either. Both are human concepts that are applied to the surrounding world in order to explain it, and do nothing more than describe things or actions of things. The same goes with religious feeling, though it often deals with the wholly intangible and is now separated from the mechanics and processes of daily life. Today, we prefer physics, math and science to animism, god's will and spiritualism.

This post is already getting over lengthy, so I'll leave you with this to gnaw on. More Spengler will surely come along, and I'll no doubt be going back to discuss things earlier in text as well. Next post will have some pretty pictures, I promise.