[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

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

Re: Neoplatonism

[jprussell]

Thanks for sharing this!

This is precisely the kind of murky waters based on largely personal judgment calls I was alluding to above. Spengler would say "look at how this guy approaches religion/philosophy! It's the same as Orthodox! They're all Magians! He's fooling himself that he's carrying on the Apollonian tradition!"

Someone who believes in the traditional view of more-or-less unbroken continuity of the "West" from (at least) Homer through to today, would say "Look, the guy's a Platonist. Does anyone think Plato wasn't Apollonian? We have an unbroken tradition of teachers teaching pupils, all of them coming back to Plato's works, all of them saying they care about the same stuff. How is this not continuity?"

As I got from JMG, I'm inclined to resolve the binary of "pseudomorphosis or continuity" with a third term to make a ternary, maybe something like "transmission" or "inheritance." I think Spengler's point that folks from different cultures really are different has a lot of truth to it, but I also think it's kind of silly to say that if Plato and a modern Neoplatonist could meet and talk readily they would have nothing in common about what they actually believed. Instead, I think that there would be threads of continuity, but also novel insights and applications. Sure, some of those would lead to disagreements, and each might walk away thinking he has the better understanding, but there would likely be enough common ground to say "we're talking about two different takes on the 'same' thing."