[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!

[jprussell]

I look forward to a longer comment when you get the chance!

1) Fair enough - mostly it's that Spengler obviously has far less to say about any of those, and I lack the encyclopedic knowledge to take my own stab at it. He does talk a bit about the Egyptian, comparing its linearity to the Faustian Soul Image, but rather than a line extending into infinity, it is a set path with known waypoints and a definite end (deriving, of course, from the Nile). If I remember right, he briefly mentions the Chinese and Mesoamerican Soul Images, but I don't even remember what he says they were - likely that's on me, but it's also an indication of how little Spengler had to say on them. A further wrinkle, if I remember right, is that Spengler assumed that all of East Asia had only the Chinese as a Great Culture, and everybody else was pseudomorphosing them at best, which I suspect downplays the original contributions of the Koreans and Japanese, despite an obvious and heavy Chinese influence.

2) Interesting - I assume these are the metaphors folks from these countries used when describing crowds and/or "the people"? From the examples, it seems especially to have focused on what metaphors used for political leadership of those crowds (e.g. "steering the ship of state" or "leading the people across the desert"). On this post's topic, it's maybe most interesting how much diversity there is in these metaphors, if they're all Faustian as Spengler says.

3) So, are you reading "heimjunge" as a typo? That was a lame attempt to render "homeboy" in German, but if I made a hilarious interlingual faux pas, please do let me know.

4) Thank you! Kids were a lot today, and I was trying to handle more so their mother could enjoy Mothers' Day, and then a huge tree in our yard fell down - so we're all fine and I'll be okay, but some rest will likely do me good.

[deketemoisont]

3) Oh, for frack's sake! For whatever bizarre reason, I assumed it was mispasted where it was and the intended word had been "he" - nope, it makes perfect sense (should be capitalized?). OTOH: those of you who know the "dawizard" error can skip straight to the "Other Contenders" section at https://selinker.livejournal.com/32929.html .

[jprussell]

Hah! Not sure if I should count this as a win or a hilarious loss.

I didn't know about "dawizard," despite seeing the Encyclopedia Magica books on the shelves and wanting them, as I wanted all TSR splatbooks of the time. That's a truly funny story, not getting how "ctrl+f" works is a wonderful moment in time. As for the other contenders, I had heard of the King James one, but those are pretty great.

[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?

[jprussell]

1) Thanks much! Also, thanks for the title recommendations, I have not seen any of those, so I'll have to see if I can track them down. I don't watch as much anime now as I once did, but as you say, it's nice to get the variety.

2) I think whether you can say primitive people don't have "culture" depends very much on how you're defining that very abstract word. If you mean something like "high culture" or "familiarity with and/or facility with producing elements of a highly developed artistic, intellectual, and/or philosophical tradition" then, sure, folks at a subsistence level are going to have a lot less of that, especially material expressions of that. On the other hand, my cultural anthropology professor defined culture as something like "a society's shared understanding of how the world works" - something that literally every human society has. Generally speaking, I find the anthropological use more often helpful, and prefer to talk about the snobbish use by qualifying it (like I did with "high culture" above).

3) As for energy and culture, that's a good question. Certainly we have far more popular culture than ever before, and it's easier to contribute to it than ever before, thanks in large part to energy-intensive technologies and the lifestyles they enable. On the other hand, everything Apollonian culture ever made was done with muscle, wind, and wood for energy, so it seems like you can get plenty of High Culture without the glut of energy we take for granted.

[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.

[sdi]

You know, it occurs to me that another point in favor of your example is that Manly P. Hall was A) ostensibly from Faustian culture, B) a Neoplatonist, and C) obsessed with the notion of "Progress" (specifically, that philosophical tolerance of the sort Neoplatonism teaches is how Mankind becomes Better).

[jprussell]

Well, one thing I didn't bring up in my post is JMG's theory that North America is actually in the pre-Cultural phase and we're currently undergoing a Faustian pseudomorphosis. If true, those of us in the US (including Manly P. Hall) would not be true Faustians and all, and might be likely to mess it up when we try to express its Soul Image.

Progress, of course, is another topic that JMG has much to say on, and it's somewhat surprising to me that Hall was obsessed with it, given the quality of his Occult writing and recommended practice. I can note, though, that Hall was alive at what might have been the Spiritual high point of the religion of Progress, if not the point of its greatest scope and power (which is probably right now, or coming very soon). What I mean is that up until the 70s or so, you could look at the world through the lens of Progress and still pretty credibly believe it was happening, so I think you got a more sincere belief with less of the negative baggage than those who cling to it in the face of mounting evidence against it.

Altogether, though, something I need to think more about, so thank you for sharing the perspective!

[sdi]

Well, I don't mean that Hall bought into the secular religion of Progress (with its technological trappings and medical sacraments): in fact, he's quite clear that these steps come at the cost of spiritual progress and will come back to bite us someday soon. Rather, I mean that he seems to believe in the notion of progress in the abstract, but he applies it to the spiritual destiny of mankind.

But as you note, I'm probably not in on the game—I think the whole notion of progress of any sort is as weird as the whole male body thing that the Greeks totally had going on. So it's a little difficult for me to grasp!

[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.

[thinking_turtle]

2) Interesting, one definition is about individuals who have excess time to think about the world, develop new ideas and express them in art. The second is a society's shared image of the world.

3) Good point! There are choices even at a lower energy level. We could use some energy to develop culture instead of going on holiday.

Looking forward to the next installment!

[sdi]

Yes—I think we're on the same page!

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.

Re: Soul image

[jprussell]

Thanks very much for this! I had heard it was a pretty close translation in general, and usually where there are difficulties, the translator provided a footnote discussing his choice, but it's nice to have confirmation from a German speaker.

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."