[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!

[jprussell]

Gosh, sorry, I got so caught up in divination stuff the last couple of days I missed replying to this.

First off, thanks very much for the link, I will check it out shortly. Secondly, as for the traditional icons, do you remember what time period he was talking about? I ask because the development of linear perspective in the Renaissance is pretty well documented, and everyone who picked it up commented on how it was this cool new thing, and as someone who has learned to do it (poorly), I can attest that it requires some weird and at-first artificial-feeling steps to get it to work. On the other hand, every trained artist touched by the West since the Renaissance would have been taught it.

I ask, because it seems like an interesting difference to say "here were some people that were taught Western linear perspective, but found it didn't suit what they were trying to do and so chose not to use it" against "actually, other folks worked out how to do it but for the most part rejected it."

Funny, slightly related story I almost included in the piece, but I felt was beside the main point: I've read that when some remote tribal folks (I think in the Amazon) were shown drawings with Western linear perspective, they were like "why are these square thingies diagonal? why is this guy bigger than that guy?" and other such questions. There's also an optical illusion about diagonal straight lines looking different lengths, but actually being the same, that only works if you've grown up living in rectilinear buildings.