Already on such a young blog I have dispensed with the notion of "book review", because I think my attitude isn't so much whether to recommend a book so much as it is to offer up some considerations on it. If I were a snooty university-type, I would call this "engaging in discourse" or "participating in dialogue" with the books, but I am not that type, at least I hope not. So these posts will be "Thoughts on ___" until further notice.
Anyway, I have recently finished, about a year and change after starting it, the first volume of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. It's quite a grand work of history, covering politics, art, mythology, religion, ethics, metaphysics, etc. in a sweeping survey that attempts to establish "a morphology of world-history". I would characterize Spengler as an anti-perennialist, not because he directly contradicts the idea of a perennial philosophy, but in that he very strictly emphasizes what Civilizations have in common within themselves and how they are all mutually incommensurable. This will be the subject of my first consideration, followed by sundry others in no particular order.
History Can't Step Into the Same River Twice
According to Spengler, each Civilization in world-history is governed by a single Prime Symbol by which its constituents (especially its great men) perceive Nature. For example, the Classical civilization's symbol was the Body (σώμα). In Classical art this is reflected in the preference for sculptures, the lack of backgrounds or perspective in painting, the lack of scenery-changing in theater, and the appreciation for nudity in clothing. Politically this is reflected in the model of the lone city-state and the general lack of empire-building; Alexander's expedition was a very short-lived episode, the Anabasis is always related as a journey back home, and the Roman "Empire" scarcely expanded beyond the Mediterranean banks. In theology, this is reflected by polytheism: the world, even in its divine aspect, is a grand sum of individual bodies, that is, the many and diverse gods and spirits, who possess a very substantial, material existence (e.g. they all literally live on Mount Olympus). Spengler contrasts this with Western (what he calls Faustian) Civilization, whose symbol is Infinite Space, the opposite of Body. In Western art we see this in the tendency towards landscape paintings, contrapuntal music, tall cathedrals and towers, and the disdain for nudity (since the Body opposes Space). In Western politics furthermore we see this reflected in a constant theme of expansion: the Vikings, the Age of Exploration, the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars, Manifest Destiny, the Third Reich, NATO, etc. as well as "universal" programs of healthcare, vaccination, welfare, compulsive service, education, etc. As regards religion, this yields a kind of monotheism that informs even the pre-Christian Germans and Celts. The Norse had a definite Allfather and the Celts had the King of the Faeries, roles that Zeus did not play at all for the Greeks—after all, in the Iliad, Zeus is on the antagonists' side. Furthermore, the realms of these gods, faeries, etc. are utterly ethereal; Olympus and almost all other locations in Greek mythos can be found on a map, but Valhalla is nowhere.
Spengler spends his book treating all of these and more (math, science, epistemology, metaphysics, etc.) in much more depth and with a couple other civilizations, but one of the more off-putting conclusions, for me, is the impossibility of conversion. It is impossible, says Spengler, for one to change one's fundamental view of the world from one prime symbol to another. Rather, the "worldview" changes for whoever receives it. Consider how drastically Christianity has branched off and morphed wherever it has gone. It started out in Magian (Arabian, Persian, Jewish, etc.) territory, but even the New Testament itself adapts Christ's message, since the authors were Greeks and Romans from the dying Classical civilization. In the West it transformed into Catholicism, literally "universalism" (καθόλικα), as well as later Protestant sects. Here, its theology included derivations of God's existence from Motion, Causality, Ontology, etc., concepts entirely missing from the Bible itself, to say nothing of Classical philosophy. It transformed furthermore to suit Russian civilization (Prime Symbol is the Plane, which Spengler does not elaborate on) as well as later developments in its Magian homeland (gnostic sects, Melkite and Coptic rites, etc.). All this is to say, nobody ever converted directly to Christianity; they merely took the material from the Bible and re-tooled it for the needs of their own worldviews. That Christ pushed out Odin is, for Spengler, a trivial detail.
This presents quite the issue for people like me: Western Buddhists. How, after all, can a Western man, raised with a view of the world as Space, embrace unadulterated Buddhism, which comes from a worldview based on Illusion, Emptiness? One may identify some commonalities here and there, but according to Spengler, I will never not be a Faustian. If you've spent time in Buddhist circles at all, that might ring true to you. Take, for example, how very desperately Western Buddhists try to contradict or distort the idea of anattā, no-self. For the Faustian, the rejection of the soul, the individual consciousness, comes off as rank heresy; the complement to Western Space is identity. Who is there to experience and perceive Space? Whose perspective do we take in a landscape painting? Who mans the voyages over the Seas or to the Moon? Someone is there to experience the vastness and loneliness, to learn about it and wrestle with it. A Western Buddhism has to cater to these questions in a way that no preceding sect has had to, just as much as Roman Catholicism had to answer Faustian questions about the nature of God that the Bible didn't provide for.
This, however, is not an unprecedented case. Buddhism, like Christianity, did morph to fit the Civilizations it was transmitted to. In Zomia, there wasn't much need to adapt, hence Theravāda's very conservative character. In China and Vietnam, it catered to Taoist and Confucian biases, giving rise to the Chan and Pure Land sects, respectively. In Japan, the shamanic Shintō adopted the buddhas and bodhisattvas as an extra class of deities, resulting in a Buddhist-Shintō fusion that continued to elaborate on Chan (now Zen) and Pure Land. In Tibet, meanwhile, the Chan sect was ignored, and instead they took on esoteric Vajrayana and mixed it with the dark sorcery of the native Bön religion. Some of these sects are quite aware that they are adulterations. The Vajrayana school, borrowing from Hindu Tantra, argues that their more sensuous practices are required because they are in Kāli Yuga, the Age of Decline, when men are no longer spiritually equipped to take up the original practices laid out by Prince Gotama. The Japanese monk Shinran echoed this observation, that Dharma has declined, and that we have no chance for enlightenment whatsoever in this world, and that we can only hope therefore for Amitābha's grace to lead us to a rebirth where we can undertake original Buddhist sadhana properly. Julius Evola, even as he remarks on these later branches as "degenerations", admits the positive value of Tantric and Zen practices (though he seems less conciliatory to Pure Land) for "men among the ruins".
Former mahathera Paññobhāsa has already sketched out some thoughts on a properly Westernized Buddhism, that is to say, Buddhism adapted without left-wing politics, and he has more recently joined up with a few others to continue this project in a broader direction that includes Hinduism and other religions. I shall meditate more on this matter in future posts, but here I'll cap this thought off with praise to Spengler for offering a strong case for a properly meta-historical perspective on religion.
Postmodernism and Scientific Knowledge
I have been allergic to this word and the attitude it connotes for a few years now. This is leftover from my phase as a milquetoast MAGA sort, parroting Sargon of Akkad and Armored Skeptic all through high school and college. Unlike shallow YouTubers and plebeian politicians, however, Spengler's strong argument and multitude of sources for his main thesis (again, the incommensurability between Civilizations) leads quite convincingly to a postmodern conclusion. Permit me to quote him at a little length; after contrasting Classical and Faustian views of astronomy, that is, limited spheres against infinite space, he writes:
Our denial of the "vault" of heaven, then, is a resolve and not a sense-experience. The modern ideas as to the nature of starry space—or, to speak more prudently, of an extension by light-indices that are communicated by eye and telescope—most certainly do not rest upon sure knowledge, for what we see in the telescope is small bright disks of different sizes. The photograhic plate yields quite another picture—not a sharper one but a different one—and the construction of a consistent world-picture such as we crave depends upon connecting the two by numerous and often very daring hypotheses (e.g., of distances, magnitudes and movements) that we ourselves frame. The style of this picture corresponds to the style of our own soul. [emphasis mine] In actual fact we do not know how different the light-powers of one and another star may be, nor whether they vary in different directions. We do not know whether or not light is altered, diminished, or extinguishes in the immensities of space. We do not know whether our earthly conceptions of the nature of light, and therefore all the theories and laws deduced from them, have validity beyond the immediate environment of the earth. What we "see" are merely light-indices; what we understand are symbols of ourselves. (IX.I.viii)
Now, a naïve Westerner would probably insist that this is the result of Spengler writing in 1917, prior to space exploration (something that, incidentally, consummates the Faustian symbol of infinite space more than anything else), and that now we have manned missions, robotic rovers, and far-off telescopes going out into space to confirm our observations. Men have walked on the Moon, robots have ridden over (and got lost) on Mars, and telescopic cameras send us all manner of images from different perspectives. Against this, the easiest thing would be bring up the issue of so-called dark matter, hypothesized mass used to correct erroneous gravitational calculations for some distant bodies. Why, Spengler might ask, is that the sole correct view of the world, and why is the correct view not that gravity simply works differently elsewhere in the universe? As Chess Grandmaster Řżëḱâ has put it, for two equally workable models, how can you know which model is "more right" in that case? Řżëḱâ affirms the modern scientific method:
[A]nother way of explaining the usefulness of hypothesis, then, is that by affirming a hypothesis at the outset, you are openly declaring your "belief system"/hypothesis, and trying to judge whether 1) the experimental results can be accommodated into the hypothesis or 2) the hypothesis needs to be negated for the results to be accommodated.
On this note, Spengler accords some praise to the Western scientists for not just presenting a very convincing model of reality, but also for including model-formation itself into the model. Nonetheless, there is no one unconditioned science, for the very simple and inexorable reason that you are running this data through your conditioned, individuated consciousness, which uses its own formations (sankhāra to borrow a Buddhist term) to work things out. And, just as a computer simulation is limited by the nature of its underlying code structure, our Nature-knowledge is limited by what Spengler calls "the form of our Soul".
Numbers, formulæ, laws mean nothing and are nothing. They must have a body, and only a living mankind—projecting its livingness into them and through them, expressing itself by them, inwardly making them its own—can endow them with that. And thus there is no absolute science of physics, but only individual sciences that come, flourish and go within the individual Cultures. [emphasis mine] [...] To the Classical therefore belong the conceptions of matter and form, to the Arabian (quite Spinozistically) the idea of substances with visible or secret attributes, and to the Faustian the idea of force and mass. Apollinian theory is a quiet meditation, Magian a silent knowledge of Alchemy the means of Grace (even here the religious source of mechanics is to be discerned), and the Faustian is from the very outset a working hypothesis. The Greek asked, what is the essence of visible being? We ask, what possibility is there of mastering the invisible motive-forces of becoming? For them, contented absorption in the visible; for us, masterful questioning of Nature and methodical experiment. (XI.ii)
As this is a religious blog, not a scientific one, I will conclude this thought on the note that, while Spengler does affirm that there is no one true science (something we might say also of religion, since he equates them as different expressions of Nature-knowledge), he maintains that there is one Nature that all the sciences study. So, unlike most postmodernists, he's not a nihilist or a social-constructivist. If anything, he seems to be in line with the perennialist attitude, that all the sciences and religions are "right on their own terms", and that they all study the same object. In emphasizing differences instead of commonalities, he produces a strong admonition to Christians and Hegelians: those who see time as a line of progress, with continuity between the Civilizations, culminating in Western science, ethics, politics, etc. as the final and only true way for all mankind. Spengler more lucidly concludes that the Civilizations are not continuous, they rise and fall, they are incommensurable, and there is no neutral perspective from which one can judge any of their sciences supreme among the rest.
Buddhism, Stoicism, and Socialism Revisited
The second-ever post on this blog was a critique written of his drawing a parallel between Buddhism, Stoicism, and Socialism. That was written quite soon after I read an early section in the book, so I didn't have time to really absorb his argument. Now I understand that he was not intending to set these three up as equivalent phenomena, but as analogous phenomena: that is, the practical systems of thought that reign over the latter half of a Culture's lifespan. India was a Culture while it was still Vedic, but after it was crystallized into a Civilization by Brāhmaṇic and Upaniṣadic thought, the Buddha appeared and heralded an austere, myth-free sadhana against the Hindu status quo. Classical Culture was vibrant from the Homeric period up to the Pre-Socratics, then became Civilization due to the influences of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but it was the Stoic and Epicurean schools that brought in the emphasis on private practice and the attainment of αταραξία. Our own Faustian Culture lasted from the dawn of the Vikings through the Medieval period, crystallized around Kant and the Enlightenment philosophers, after which appeared Socialism. Spengler's use of this word is much broader, however, than the ordinary meaning it has today (which is to say "government welfare programs"). Here, Spengler takes Socialism to be an ethical system, "that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its views on behalf of all" (X.II.i).
Now, anyone can see that there is a strong kinship between Buddhism and Stoicism, but a pointed opposition between them and Socialism. Spengler notes that the wisdom of Buddha, Epicurus, and Seneca are all given as stern, take-it-or-leave-it counsels, without a hint of injunction, whereas the Socialists consider their political programmes as utterly mandatory; the State shall, the citizens shall, the workers shall, etc. In this view, even such radical individualists as Nietzsche and Rothbard could be considered Socialists, painful as that is to even type. But Spengler's point is this: all three are the antipodes of the ancien regime, but still within the bounds of the Prime Symbol. Let me elaborate on that, since that's a bit of a dense statement.
Brahmanism and Buddhism are opposed in that the former hold invocation, devotion, ritual, etc. as valid means of spiritual practice, whereas the Buddha writes those off as worthless; in one discourse, he compares this to a man who wishes to cross a river by hoping that the other shore will get up and walk to him, whereas Buddhist practice says there is no choice but to swim across with one's own effort. Nonetheless, extending that analogy, the Brahman and the Buddhist agree that the river (saṃsāra, Becoming; or perhaps māyā, Illusion, the Prime Symbol of Indian Culture) is an obstacle that we must get across. In Classical Civilization, the Deity Cults and Stoa are opposed in that the former mandate devotion to the various gods through public ceremony and worship, whereas the Stoa and Epicureans hold that the gods care not a wit for any of us mortals, and that we are better off looking after our own well-beings instead of theirs. Nonetheless, the two agree that there are a multitude of powerful divinities (again Prime Symbol of the world as a multitude of Bodies). Finally, in our own civilization, the Medievals (Aquinas and the Scholastics) affirm Natural Law and the feudal system of fiefdoms, later plebeianized by Locke into private property for citizens as well, whereas the Socialists reject private law, private wealth, private life in general, and move all concerns into the domain of the State; but they have all agreed that the central problem of politics is how we are to divide up the land and its resources justly (so they all share the Prime Symbol of Space).
Such is Spengler's point. The take-away here, I think would be most applicable to those invested in ideological politics, whether staunchly reactionary or boldly progressive: that there is an arc to each Culture-Civilization's life cycle, and that there is no reversing past the apex (sorry reactionaries) and there is no avoiding the decline and death of the civilization (sorry progressives). In this regard, the Buddhists and Stoics wisely regard these matters with indifference, while the Socialists stubbornly go on without any meta-consciousness of the historical forces at work. It seems that Spengler himself took a while to really absorb this, however; he remained quite involved with German politics until about the last few years of his life, after the Nazis quashed his criticisms and censored his books. Then again, the same could be said of my much-vaunted hero Evola, who kept up with Fascist and Nazi inner circles quite a bit longer before the war put him in a wheelchair and forced him to give up on politics (Ride the Tiger has a pointedly apolitical, nay, antipolitical attitude about it). One would think that any study of history, religion, etc. with the persepectives both of them bring would lead straight to a disillusionment with democracy and a retreat from politics. But hey, that's just me.
MacIntyre and Moral History
Last year, I read another "conservative postmodernist": Alasdair MacIntyre. Despite sharing the same two labels, MacIntyre is quite the opposite of Spengler. MacIntyre sees continuity between Classical and Western Civilization where Spengler points out extreme opposition. Critically, where MacIntyre identifies continuity (the transition from Antiquity and Aristotelianism to the Middle Ages and Thomism) is for him the apex of moral theory, the blending of Greek and Christian ideas of virtue. We've discussed now at length that Classical Greece, Magian Christianity, and Faustian Europe were utterly incommensurable, and that any dialogue between the three has resulted in adaptations of foreign material, not their acceptance; so that transition period MacIntyre vaunts is really the big disconnect between the two Civilizations. Now I see more clearly the problem that MacIntyre's view of history causes: he is operating on a Classical assessment of Faustian civilization, and when he comes up with problems, he tries to formulate solutions with yet more Classical thinking.
MacIntyre's evaluation of pre-Enlightenment communities is that they all had their own "narrative" with corresponding "personas" for their citizens to fit into. Before, I thought this was a fine model for him to hold up, but here's the problem: he's borrowing the model of Classical theater, the theater of bodies and masks, with no scenery, presided over by the Chorus, a feature Spengler calls intolerable for Faustian tragedy. The Chorus embodies what MacIntyre loves about Antiquity, that is, the enforcement of civic values and communitarian identity, the drawing out of all private sentiments and action into pompous, public displays of piety, of mourning, etc., the assignment of rigid destinies and, indeed, personas; all utterly foreign to us, as Spengler explains:
In comparison with this kind of drama, Shakespeare's is a single monologue. Even in the conversations, even in the group-scenes we are sensible of the immense inner distance between the persons, each of whom at bottom is only talking with himself. Nothing can overcome this spiritual remoteness. It is felt in Hamlet as in "Tasso" and in Don Quixote as in Werther, but even Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzeval is filled with and stamped by the sense of infinity. (IX.I.vi)
So MacIntyre's problem is that Westerners are atomized strangers, but this is a tautology; MacIntyre's problem is that Westerners are Westerners. There is no West without solitude or inner monologues, and therefore there is no West without atomization and individual moralities. The Enlightenment project that MacIntyre devotes his criticisms to was the inexorable conclusion of the Faustian "cult of Space". So far from being a reactionary, MacIntyre is a fish out of water, a man who longs for somatic, public morality in a Culture of spatial, private ethics. I retract my original judgment that he "successfully identifies what we're missing for social order", because he fails at even that much. The best I can say about him is that perhaps he himself is a good case against what Spengler said, that conversions between Cultural outlooks are impossible; for we have here an ardent Classical man living in Faustian modernity. Perhaps, then, it's entirely possible for one to convert out of the Faustian mode of thought into Chinese Taoism or Indian Buddhism, and we might save ourselves the trouble of going through any adaptations before we properly embark on the quest for immortality.
