Oswald Spengler and the Metaphysical Roots of Civilization

[AshvinP]

Below is an excellent lecture by JDE on Oswald Spengler and the metaphysical roots of various world civilizations. Spengler took Goethe's scientific concept of the Ur-phänomen, the ideal archetypal form which can be experimentally inferred from the phenomenal forms we observe in their constant transformations, and applied it to the (1) Hindu, (2) Chinese, (3) Greco-Roman, and (4) Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilizations. Each one had an incipient world cosmology and 'death cult' at its inception as follows:

1) The world as a dream
2) The world as the 'wandering Dao'
3) The perfect physical form (Apollonian)
4) The world as cave/cavern

These incipient metaphysical ideas are what drives the birth of these civilizations, not economic or resource dynamics as hypothesized by people such as Jared Diamond in his book, Guns, Germs and Steel. They all also had brand new ways of disposing of the dead, with the (4) West 'cutting ties' with the dead by burning or burying the bodies (no ancestor worship). He calls Western civilization the 'Faustian' civilization and predicts Russia will be the center of the next world civilization. Much more in the presentation below.

[AshvinP]

I left out the most important civilization in Spengler's The Decline of the West... the Western civilization. It is the world of infinite space, as Gebser also noted, which was fully formed by the 16th century with the Reformation, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution. The Faustian civilization. JDE has remarked that Spengler finished the book at the same time the Titanic sunk, which he views as a great parable for Western civilization. It has hit the Iceberg and its a 'mathematical certainty' it will be submerged in a matter of time, perhaps literally by rising sea levels.

[AshvinP]