Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "time"

Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life by Oswald Spengler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The problem of man’s destiny

In this book Spengler examines technics, which he defines as the tactics of living, i.e. what one does with tools, rather than the tools themselves.

Spengler traces the history of technics in three phases:

Stage 1
The Hand

The genesis of man is the hand (see Animal Farm), which Spengler believes occurred as a sudden mutation.

It made man creative.

Stage 2
Speech (and Enterprise)

Speech then arose for needs of conversation or command (not thought or judgement). It is the means to collective doing (enterprise). It emancipated the intellect from the hand.

Man then separated into commanders and obeyers; individual lives mattered little at this time according to Spengler; what mattered was the whole, the tribe, the sea voyage or building project.

But the obeyers (hands) increased, and thus personality developed, as a protest against man in the mass.

Last Stage
Terminator: Rise of the Machines

The city then developed, and thought/intellect became rootless (although the city still drew its material sustenance from the land).

Roger Bacon’s ’Scientia experimentalis’ (1200s) was ‘the interrogation of nature with the rack, screw and lever’. God became an ‘infinite force’ rather than a personified Lord on a throne. Monks tried to find ‘perpetual motion’, which some saw as devilish.

Eventually machines grew so complex that leaders and led no longer understood each other. A spiritual barrenness set in, and leaders became divorced from the people. Nordic Man became spiritually enslaved to the machine.

European, Faustian culture is the most tragic culture, due to the conflict between its comprehensive intellectuality and its profound spiritual disharmony.

So the Faustian mind became weary of machines, and returned to contemplating nature (the green movement, the new age movement etc.). Man took refuge from civilisation. We can see this currently, with Nordics pursuing worthless degrees in ‘womyns studies’, while STEM positions in Western unis are occupied mainly by Chinese and Indian students.

Spengler thinks the export of white technics to the non-white world spelled the former’s doom, as the latter have no spiritual attachment to technics (except, maybe, the Japanese?). For non-whites, Spengler claims, technology is merely a weapon to be used against the Faustians who invented it (and he wrote this before mass immigration!).

But he then goes on to give his famous pronouncement that ‘optimism is cowardice’, that we must all die like the Roman soldier at his post.

With this pronouncement, Spengler reveals himself to be part of the problem.

Why didn’t he anticipate space travel, the ultimate technics? It can still serve as a point of revival for Faustians! What could appeal to their romantic impulses more than wanting to stand on the moons of Neptune?

Although Spengler claims the struggle between man and nature ‘ends’ with the Faustian culture, at one point he tentatively suggests a successor culture may arise ‘on the plains between the Vistula and the Amur’ (i.e. a Slavic-centred culture).

Given the current suicidal path Western Europe is following, this may turn out to be one of his more accurate predictions.





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Red Shift by Alan Garner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This lonely tale deals with non-linear Time, centred round a hill in Cheshire called Mow Cop and three young men linked to it down the centuries (or are they reincarnations of the same man?) in Roman days, in Cromwell’s time, and the 1970s.

The dialogues aren’t realistic, nor meant to be, instead poetically reflecting inner states.

Red Shift is a wonderful yet painful book, like a spiky dead sea urchin on a stony beach, under stars of late autumn.



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