These 13 parts over 2.4 hours of reading, were listened to while doing therapy floor exercises, and permitted me to write this summation in one listen. I will try and always exercise while listening. It is interesting that these exercises express an obsession with the preservation of a deteriorating structural form. Also, shadow boxing and listening does not work, for reasons I know not.
Spengler describes the awakening of the West, down to the cold calculus of Cant and Napoleon, as a “progressive emancipation from the classical,” with the classical understood as the worldview of Hellas, born in about 1100 B.C. and entombed in the “cold intelligence of the Romans” some 900 years later.
He notes that the math and artistic life of an emerging and a declining culture [a declining culture previously defined as suffering from the bloting effects of civilization] shadow one another. He draws a parallel between numerous early civilizations, such as the Egyptian and Archaic Greek, as having geometric artwork. This art, when not depicting a living thing, tend to be constructed with straight lines, representing this emerging culture imposing a worldview upon reality. Note the geometric nature of many petroglyphs.
The cold metaphor of the intelligent materialism of the Romans embalming the corpse of classical Greek culture is continued. This is expanded to a comparative study of the Classic Greek culture 540 to 323 B.C., to that of the genius of western culture, when number arts were used in their base form by the likes of Napoleon to calibrate destruction with artillery and in its higher form in the music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven.
“Nature is the numerable, history the aggregate…”
Number, in all cultures other than that of Western Civilization is a demarcation, a symbol of the limits of the worldview. Once the illuminated aspects of Creation are named they are frozen and circumscribe “the world order of comprehensible things.” These things will be expressed in math structure, language, architecture and… fear. The emergence of horror literature in the Enlightenment is perhaps an echo of this.
A native math sense, obvious in the structure and function of the boomerang, is described as having been possessed by the Australian Aborigines, who are the most primitive of the extant peoples.
“The style of a soul comes out in the world of numbers…”
An Indian, and Babylonian-Arabian-Iranian, a Classical and a Western Number World are discussed. These are different and apart from the Egyptian. A discussion of the evolution and infection of Classical and Modern math in relation to other number worlds dominates the 13 part discussion of the number, or symbolic, worldview.
I will return to this vine like growth of number systems down to our time to complete this summation.
It is of great interest to me, being a totally non musical person, that categories of musical instruments seem to whisper back to hunting:
-wind instruments [blow gun]
-bow instruments [archery]
-keyboard instruments [evolved from both, using wind and string instruments and mimicking the resonant operation of the human body, the organ being particularly horrific, making of the composer and player something of a monster making alchemist]
The math ignorant person has an order within himself that he is unable to express and makes him naturally tragic. Spengler draws a connection between poetry and math, which makes this one wonder of the hexemeter rule of ancient Greek poetics.
Pythagoras, founder of a math system and a religion, expressed his number system with 1 represented as a womb, a 2 as a phallus and a 3 as these in intercourse. His circle brought into being a classical math that would fall before the Persian/Babylonian/Arabian systems, who were Aramaic [Middle Eastern Aryаns] thinkers with Greek names who adopted an Indian [Aryan] influenced math through the Iranian [Aryan] influenced “Magian” number sense. [0]
Alexander’s conquest had subjected the soul of Hellas to the horror of a much greater harmonic order. The Egyptians had not written down their math system and might be understood as having bequeathed the great numeral fear to the Greeks. Herodotus [though he did not trust the Egyptian view] and Plato and Solon, did credit the Egyptians as the keepers of a deeper world sense.
Anaxamander’s Hyperion [without end] expressed this fear. He was a contemporary of Pythagoras.
“Euclid, who rounded off the system in the third century,” [200s B.C.] is seen by Spengler as a reactionary scientist attempting to demarcate reality through a geometric reduction that would save the Classical mind from the horrific descent into infinity that befell Western Man, setting up a scientific barrier against the alien. Spengler discusses all science as a barrier to the alien, a system of psychological protection against reality that has been laughably demonstrable since 2020.
In the 200s B.C. Aristakhos of Samos and Archimedes follow in brilliant uses of Classical math that does not breach the Well of Infinity. Spengler suggests in the subtext that they held back from the abyss.
Then, in and about the time that Diocletion imposed a political system that was a proto-caliphate, Diophantos, an Asiatic Greek under Magian influence, develops algebra in a continued yet descending dance around infinity.
[I understand this not at all, and am echoing Spengler. My only additions here are the relation of musical instruments, horror literature and lethal instruments and the final deduction below.]
Spengler makes no mention of Alexander as an agent of the Near Eastern infiltration of the Classical worldview. His actions seem to be understood as an aspect of destiny, a doom implicit in the high functioning low scale Life of Greece, a doom that invites empire. Those empires then flee that compressive doom, plunging into the opposite, infinitely expansive doom, even as they begin to implode. Note the evacuation of 7 U.S.G. embassies from 2020-24 even as that necrotic empire reaches for more influence in enemy spheres.
Spengler, points out that Newton and Kepler were motivated every bit as much by religious sense in their math work as was Pythagoras. Newton’s theological work greatly outweighed his science.
Spengler uses beautiful prose to describe this dance of opposites in the Western mind, that the brightest thinkers of Modernity treasured the Classical thinkers, but were their opposites, and perhaps formed the attraction natural to opposites, as expressed in the numbers 1 thru 3 of Pythagoras. The Greeks had no word for “space” and this was purposeful, for they feared infinity as a taboo unsought and unspoken, a place mortals ought not go:
“this world fear,”
“utter beyondness,”
“to give nothingness a value,”
[dreads] “that loom, threatening in the dawn,”
“The Classical, Apollonian” dread of nothingness contrasted totally with “the Modern, Faustian tendency towards the infinite.”
I see the Classical dread as an echo of cataclysmic memory, of a fear of the return of unlimited scale, of the sinking again of the world under heavenly powers. Only the Egyptian system survived the Bronze Age Collapse and the scholars of Hellas traveled to those priests for lore of the vanquished past.
Opposite of this, was the Early Modern science of the Enlightenment, shrugging off the Classical obsession of the Renaissance and acing towards Infinity without fear, even of atomic weapons that were yet in Spengler’s future, though his work whispers that looming threat to a strident hiss in many passages, some of which are quoted above.
It is my thought, that this achieved opposite of infinity-obsessed science systems—even though its fruit has all but abolished Christianity to the reclusive rural fringe, cast out of academics—was itself the handmaiden of Christian Salvation. For, not until the Reformation, which is the real birthplace of Western Christianity, did any kind of man, have an absolute, doctrine-based guarantee of immortality. There was, in the minds of Promethean creatures such as Newton, Bach, Copernicus and Kepler no fear of achieving a world erasing conclusion in their quest. They therefore feared not the rise of monsters such as Napoleon, and hence he rose, again and again. [1]
…
Notes
-0. I see it as congruent that Eastern Aryаn systems of thought had so much influence upon Western systems, and that these were adopted in by conquest from the west, a classic assimilation process.
1. Spengler dwells at length on Classical Number as a purposefully limited math view, shared by Gerta, an artist and political slave of Napoleon, who expressed an irrational fear of math. Classical culture stayed as small scale in politics, math and building as they could, until their arts were taken by Alexander into an alien worldview, causing a social cataclysm. Negative magnitudes were taboo...one did not seek the abyss that Modernity continues to hurdle into. Solon, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Menander, Euclid and Archimedes would have thought modern scientists, their social counterparts, to be criminally insane.
