[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

[deketemoisont]

Again, on the assumption that this will be seen by the most people in the *very* near future (I intend to get to everything else somewhen this week!):

on only Westerners having done linear perspective, Pavel Florensky wrote an essay I found excellent but don't remember *that* well now, called "Reverse Perspective", about that used in traditional icons, which includes argument that the artists were perfectly capable of using Western perspective but chose not to, included in the book Beyond Vision. A good related article: https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0115/ch5.xhtml .

Thanks for these, and may you be long productive!

[thinking_turtle]

The concepts of "time" vs "destiny" is very interesting. I often find myself walking through the past and trying to explain it. I'll start looking for a "destiny" switch!

Newton did not see gravity as inherent in matter, or space as empty. He wrote:

That gravity should be innate inherent & {essential} to matter so yt one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum wthout the mediation of any thing else by & through wch they may convey their action or force {may} be conveyed/ from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I beleived no man who has in philosophical matters any competent {illeg} faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent {acting} <7v> consta{ntl}y according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to ye consideration of my readers.

As it is, Lorentz' relativity showed that Newton's laws were not valid at speeds near the speed of light. So Newton's laws are indeed "models", and not "objective facts".