[Main Blog Post] Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West Bit 3: The Soul Image

[jprussell]

I've gotten to one of the juicier bits of Decline of the West - the "Soul Image" that defines different Great Cultures. Here's the post.

Comments

[deketemoisont]

I intend to make a much longer comment at a later point, but on the assumption that this will be most read in the next 48 h:

1) I've heard about the Classical, Magian, and Faustian soul images as described by Spengler everywhere else already! Do you find the others, as seemingly everyone else, not worth talking about, or not enough material for doing so?

2) I want to mention that Elias Canetti, in Crowds and Power, compares "national crowd symbols" (unfortunately the only part I read) for a number of countries (as you might expect, all European, considering Jews were overwhelmingly European at the time): for English ... no crowd, but the sea, a ship, crew, and captain; for Germans, a forest, sometimes marching; for Swiss, the mountains; for Dutch, dykes, sometimes only inside themselves, who'd rebuild the physical ones after breaking them upon invaders; for French, a recent one - the storming of the Bastille; for Spanish, a bullfighter and the watching crowd; for Italians - united Italy hadn't yet obtained one, ancient Rome being perceived to belong to "humanity" and Fascism having failed to give it a new one; for Jews, wandering across the desert.

3) some typos, but I only want to mention this because of the most hilarious one (almost "dawizard"-level), which involves "heimjunge".

4) may your next rest be fruitful!

[thinking_turtle]

Thanks, interesting update! I learned about Amine from the Future Boy Conan series, also by Hayao Miyazaki of Nausicaa fame. Amine's Japanese origin means I misinterpret many things. Yet it rewards you with a greater variety than Hollywood. I remember movies like "Wolf Children", "My Name" and "A Silent Voice" with joy.

That primitive people do not have culture seems logical: they don't have the free time to pursue it. Likewise, today's lower classes are mostly focused on work and keeping their possessions maintained or expanded. Their spare time goes to supporting sports teams, music or movies. Only students in the higher schools show interest in numbers, logic or debate.

I wonder at the role of energy in culture. When our resources dwindle, so will the number of elites and the "free time" our society can afford. Is lower energy the consequence of a dwindling culture, or the cause of its dwindling?

[sdi]

I'm one of those people who isn't too sure he buys the whole thesis, but this may just be because I really don't "get" Faustian culture. (But, then, what do I get? Got me.)

But, as a data point in Spengler's favor (and to a central point in your essay), Gilbert Murray also talks about how the Neoplatonists were cut from a different cloth than earlier Hellenistic thought generally. It's also interesting that some of the central figures of that movement, Porphyry and Iamblichus, were Syrian rather than Greek.

Soul image

[k_a_nitz]

FWIW I checked my German edition (from 1920) and the German title of chapter V of Vol 1 is "Seelenbild und Lebensgefühl" - which is literally "Soul image and life feeling" or image (Bild = image or picture) of the soul (Seele is soul) and life's (Leben) emotion (Gefühl = feeling or emotion). So the translator was pretty true to the original.

Neoplatonism

[james_j_omeara]

Funny you should mention Neoplatonism as an example of pseudomorphism. Just yesterday I was watching an episode of the Esoterica channel on Theurgy, and the host made exactly that point about Iamblichus (without mentioning Spengler etc. so quite independently), that Iamblichus, a Syrian by the way, is thought, and thought of himself, as being "purely" Platonic, but actually he discards a number of key beliefs of Plato and even Plotinus and Porphyry, his teacher; principally, rather than denigrating the body and demanding a purely intellectual approach, "theurgy" uses rituals, asceticism etc. to influence the gods and thus ascend back to the One. He emphasizes at the end that Iamblichus' model, which was taken over by the Platonic Academy itself, and even used by Julian in his attempt to re-start paganism, is much more like Orthodox Christianity than our idea of what "paganism" or "classical thought" is. Is this continuity an example of pseudomorphism?

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