[Main Blog Post] Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West Bit 4: Time & Destiny against Space &

[jprussell]

We've gotten past the really big thoughts from Decline of the West, but there's still some interesting stuff to go through. This time, we talk about Time, Destiny, Space, and Motion.

Comments

[jprussell]

Thank you for the quote! One thing I didn't go into in the post, but was on my mind, is that Spengler seems to back-project a modernist atheism/agnosticism onto Newton that was, of course, totally false. I don't think Newton's interest in alchemy was widely-known back then, but these days, the quote you provide makes me think he must have had something like spirit/quintessence in mind as the likely agent.

Also, yes, thank you - I should have made more clear that modern professional scientists thoroughly known that Newtonian physics are only a model, and scientifically literate folks know that at least intellectually. When Spengler was writing, though, Special Relativity was still pretty new, and General Relativity was published between Volume 1 and 2, so those ideas were on the very bleeding edge of physics, so for him to recognize that at the time was pretty remarkable. Also, I think a perhaps more important point is that most folks who "know" that Newtonian physics is "only a model" know this intellectually, but still intuit how the world around them works in basically Newtonian ways, and it takes concerted mental effort to do otherwise.

[thinking_turtle]

Another answer to people who think the world is deterministic (that you can predict the future if you had infinite computing power) is radioactive decay. No-one can tell when a single atom of Uranium will decay. If you can't predict the future of a single atom, how can you predict the world?

Looking forward to the next part!