[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

[jprussell]

Thank you for the clarification, I was slightly conflating some distinct (but I think related) notions of "Progress," and you are right to point out that Hall was not a follower of the secular religion of Progress JMG most often means when he talks about that.

Basically, I believe that the modern secular religion of Progress is a Christian heresy with all the explicitly religious bits filed off. I'll back up and try to explain what I mean a bit more. The Soul Image of Faustian culture is moving toward a point infinitely far away - always visible as a goal, but always on the horizon, forever out of reach.

Okay, so that's one thread. Another is that many/most of the Middle Eastern/Magian religions had/have a view of time that it is going to a definite end with some kind of fulfillment. Early Faustian culture took this on, but I'd argue with a bit more, hmm, enthusiasm(?) for being on the right side of the end times, because they naturally used the idea of the Apocalypse to express the Soul Image of the far-off goal. Over time, the teleological obsession with moving toward perfection fused with the increasing focus on the material world (politics, science, technology) and less on the religious, though for most of its history it was expressed religiously.

So, all of that is to say that even religious folks from Europe and America for the past few centuries have taken for granted that everything is going somewhere for some purpose. I think Hall was expressing that through his own very idiosyncratic lens. I think the secular religion of progress is another way that tendency gets expressed.

Happy to expand on or clarify any of this.

[sdi]

Yes—I think we're on the same page!