Mysterium Fasces - November 05, 2024


Greve Hans - Spengler 101 #1 - Basic Metaphysics And Destiny - 2016-12-10

Topics
Spengler's metaphysics and cultural stages intellectualism vs. destiny time manifestation destiny and national spirit
Hosted by
Alexandre Duiven
Mentioned
Oswald Spengler Marx Saint Augustine R. Descartes Charles XII Kierkegaard Moscovites Apollonian Mohammed Napoleon Rousseau Madonna Greeks David Tsar Nero
The Celtic Saints Of Britain (2) - Saint Samson Of Dol – w_ Florian Geyer & Sven Longshanks

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Length

27 minutes

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159.59

Word count

4,442

Sentence count

327

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5

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this pilot episode, I give a brief introduction to Oswald Spengler's theory of history, and how it can be applied to different high-culture worldviews. I also talk about how to understand another culture, and why you can't really understand it if you're not from that culture.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:00.000 Hello, this is Greva Hans and today I'm going to talk about Oswald Spengler.
00:00:04.400 In fact, I'm planning to make a sort of series where I basically try to explain the concept
00:00:08.720 which Spengler put forth in The Decline of the West. I'm thinking of making this chapter by
00:00:14.640 chapter but if it would turn out to be too impractical I will cut more to the essence of
00:00:19.360 what he is saying. Regardless, Spengler's writings often do this while at the same time giving many
00:00:26.400 examples of his theory of world history. A history which in contrast to the intellectualist academia
00:00:33.280 of today is in its very nature metaphysical rather than materialist. This first pilot episode if you
00:00:40.320 will I will give an introduction of Spengler's view of things which will be elaborated further on in
00:00:47.440 the coming episodes. As said, Spengler's view of history is metaphysical and not materialist. He
00:00:55.200 has in a way more common with people like Evola than Marx, only he does not use Evola's pretentious
00:01:02.080 prose. Regardless, he could be seen as a sort of stoic of history, seeing the same concepts repeat
00:01:08.800 themselves again and again with different high cultures such as different civilizations. Although
00:01:13.840 Spengler made a difference between culture and civilization this is a topic for another time. Each
00:01:19.360 high culture has a sort of soul, a metaphysical essence which births everything which this culture
00:01:25.840 creates. Its art, its warfare, its religious understanding, its philosophy, its government
00:01:31.280 and so on. The whole basis of their worldview. A culture's lifespan was roughly 12 centuries and during
00:01:38.480 this time we would have several different phases. One can liken to different seasons of a year. A spring,
00:01:46.080 a summer, an autumn and a winter. We're going to go into these different stages in detail during
00:01:51.840 another episode. But the essence of these stages is that the spring lays the foundations and starts
00:01:58.560 building something, the summer perfects it, the autumn rationalizes it and during the winter it all starts
00:02:05.520 to rot away unless conserved in a frigid form for essentially the millennia to come. But back to the
00:02:12.080 point regarding the spiritual, the metaphysical essence of the different high cultures. If you're
00:02:17.840 not from this high culture you cannot really understand it. You can try to understand it, you can
00:02:22.720 try to use your empathy to try to get a hold of their worldview. But you'll always be inferior to
00:02:28.320 someone from this high culture. It has not borne you in its bosom, so you can never fully understand it.
00:02:34.720 Just as a foreigner, never can fully understand the natural spirit of another country or man fully 1.00
00:02:39.920 knowing god. This sort of sounds like the the essences and energies spoken of in christian theology.
00:02:47.680 The essence of the culture brings into being the energies of the culture. The artist's vision
00:02:53.120 comes before his masterpiece. The worldview precedes the action one takes upon it. So an artisan is a
00:03:00.560 part of the culture just as much as a warrior and merchantess. They all participate in it whether they
00:03:05.760 know it or not. They do this without losing their own distinct identity, just like the concept of
00:03:11.280 methexis in Greek. Since you can never understand another culture but have to live in it. You cannot 1.00
00:03:18.400 really write papers on papers on papers and try to get an understanding of it purely cognitively,
00:03:24.720 purely intellectual. You have to have the artist's gaze. You need to be, as Spengler put it,
00:03:32.080 a psychologist. Not in a dry way psychologists are educated, but seeing what lays behind the appearance,
00:03:39.200 using the eye of the soul to gaze upon the world, the news of the Greeks. You must not see history as
00:03:45.840 a sort of science, but more than not. And in order to grasp something foreign, you must distance yourself
00:03:52.400 from your own opinions, your own views, your own preconceptions. And while liberals have made this a
00:03:58.480 cliche, the actual point of this is vital in order to understand how history has turned out as it has been.
00:04:05.600 Because all your views spring from that which has born you. Your views spring from your culture.
00:04:13.360 So if you're going to get a full understanding of another culture, you must first distance yourself 1.00
00:04:16.720 from your own culture. Spengler spent a great deal of the first part of the book to explain that natural
00:04:22.560 science, for example, does not equal knowledge about human nature. The first is physical,
00:04:28.960 the other metaphysical. Nor does scientific experience equal life experience. We can see this
00:04:34.880 painful obvious in the modern established academia. Where we spend more time on Gendry's studies than stuff
00:04:42.080 of actual relevance. It's like our high culture's ideas, not the same as our high culture's manifestation.
00:04:48.560 We may appear to be soulless right now, for example, but this fanatic existentialist soullessness we see
00:04:54.000 now is in fact just a warped version of our own spirits, which is very much alive. The human being's
00:04:59.440 action in life manifests its culture. The human being is a sort of organ of it, a cell in the limb of the
00:05:04.640 culture, so to speak. This shows again how Spengler differs from the mainstream academia. Spengler gives us
00:05:10.080 an organic view of history, while the academia gives us a pretentious, mechanized, intellectualized,
00:05:16.000 view of history as a vague concept. And in a vain attempt to try to be objective, they in fact become
00:05:24.000 insanely subjective. Since it plays their own intellect above Venus, brain above art. So here we
00:05:32.480 started to grasp one of the key points Spengler is trying to make throughout his works. You can kill and 0.98
00:05:37.440 you can give life. When you kill something you intellectualize it. You try to use your brain to
00:05:42.560 understand something above your brain. When you give something life you simply manifest it. From a
00:05:48.880 canvas and some colors you create a Mona Lisa. While modern intellectuals can't explain why beauty
00:05:57.440 exists and thus have modern art as you know a sort of existentialist reaction, the cultural man, and I'm
00:06:03.920 saying this strictly in a Spengler definition and not in a pretentious wine-drinking way. The cultural man
00:06:12.080 manifests beauty without trying to explain it with his brain. He realizes this is about me, this is beautiful,
00:06:19.600 I realize this and I'm going to manifest it. It's an ideal. An ideal in contrast to intellectual materialism.
00:06:29.520 Modern art is death incarnate since it does not speak to anything higher. The only thing modern art
00:06:36.400 speaks to is the infinite inner void people want to confirm sharing with everyone else. Thus everything
00:06:43.920 higher than this void is despised by these people. Their brains may be sharper but that's questionable.
00:06:50.080 Their souls are way poorer. Yet even the spirit of European modernity comes from the same
00:06:57.440 roots as us. The Faustian mentality. In a different episode we will go into more detail in what exactly
00:07:04.960 the Faustian mentality is the Faustian higher culture. And how come people should not use the word
00:07:12.960 Faustian as a meme to justify their own fedora tipping. But shortly put, the modernist garbage represents the 0.99
00:07:20.080 end of the current stage in our civilization and us. People with a soul, a worldview and a desire to save, 0.97
00:07:26.640 our nations represent another. This too will be elaborated on in another episode. A high culture
00:07:32.880 awakens when a mentality starts spreading. This very essence is solely, if you will, first manifests
00:07:38.720 in one people before spreading to others. For example, you have the Slavic Byzantine civilization
00:07:44.080 in the cradle of Kyiv that morphed over the centuries into the Russian Empire. There's many different Slavic
00:07:50.160 tribes within it like Novgorodians, Moscovites, Kyivans, Ukrainians, Belorussians and so on and so on.
00:08:00.240 Or how the Frankish Holy Roman Empire led to Europe. The Kingdom of Charlemagne led to Europe,
00:08:05.440 in modern Europe as we know it now. We have the same civilization mentality, the same Faustian
00:08:10.240 mentality, the same Ursugboll. But we're different nations with our own different national ideas. Again,
00:08:15.120 we are part of something without losing our own identity because of it. This mentality is formed
00:08:20.880 largely from the area where the culture springs from. The Egyptian civilization being a good example,
00:08:25.520 the Egyptian symbol according to Spengler would be a steady way forward, life as a journey with a
00:08:30.320 different end. A linear progression, like the river Nile. Or the Russian symbol, the boundless steppe and
00:08:36.560 a world filled with brothers to reach out to, strong as a bear insisting on its way to its surroundings,
00:08:41.200 or perhaps more fittingly, a world of younger brothers to set straight. The individual
00:08:46.160 civilization of symbols will be elaborated on in another episode too. Further on, since themes
00:08:52.400 remain the same in Spengler's theory, we can find things which are homologous, just like a fish fin
00:08:57.920 are homologous to our hands. The usage of instruments, the orchestra, would be the same as the antique
00:09:05.600 statues of the so-called Apollonian high culture. Further, R. Descartes would be the same as their 0.57
00:09:12.160 Pythagoras. Both have the same relative position on the timeline of the different high cultures.
00:09:18.080 That's why Spengler also called Mohammed, the Martin Luther of the megan civilization,
00:09:22.240 according to the visiting empire as the catholic Austrians. Washington, Baghdad and Alexandria were all
00:09:27.600 built at the same time in these relative timelines. Further on, the Pyrrhic wars were the same as our
00:09:38.880 world wars. The Macedonian conquest of Persia, the same as the Napoleonic wars. Only here and there 0.82
00:09:45.200 Napoleon actually won. Russia of the day lost. Archimedian Persia lost. Persia lost. The mentality of 0.57
00:09:54.560 a high culture also gives the sense of destiny. For the Germans, they had the Drang nach Ostern.
00:09:59.840 For Germans, they had this this pan-Slavicism, where it takes the form of Soviet communism,
00:10:05.280 Tsar's statocracy, bourgeois trading blocs. France, according to Spengler, has a drive to these too,
00:10:11.520 to the rhyme. But contrary to the Stavik Germans, the French would be too passionate and emotionally 0.92
00:10:17.520 unstable to have a stable state which manifested, according to him, in the colonial policies. Focusing more on
00:10:24.400 sadism than state-building. Although perhaps this harsh view was something to do with, you know,
00:10:29.760 the time and place this book was written, you know, 1920s Germany. Regardless, you can still see his
00:10:36.000 view being correct when you look at the chaos of the French Revolution, people like Marquis de Sade,
00:10:40.480 and their insatiable revanchism after the loss of Allah's loyal. This sense of destiny is not
00:10:48.880 logical. I mean, you can't measure it or logically make sense of it. Well, it is logical, but it's not
00:10:54.640 cognitively. It is not cognitive intellectual. You can't get it with your pure brain. It's metaphysical.
00:11:01.760 It's metaphysical in its nature. It comes from above and is imposed into the minds of the people,
00:11:08.880 rather than the people, consciously using a sort of will to power to create their own destiny.
00:11:13.840 It simply exists. It simply is. This idea of destiny is thus best communicated through art.
00:11:21.440 Listen to a Russian Quar or a Prussian march. If you compare the two, you get different impressions. 0.58
00:11:28.640 Same with the science. You get different scientific discoveries based on this feeling of destiny.
00:11:33.280 The Greeks and Romans perfected the art of making beautiful statues and city planning.
00:11:38.080 The American civilization chemistry in the form of alchemy, you know, theology. Just like you think of Greek fire.
00:11:45.520 Speaking of that, the Byzantine Empire was not the same civilization as the Roman Empire of old, but
00:11:51.200 with the American civilization. More of this in another episode. Since destiny is metaphysical in its nature,
00:11:58.640 a sort of ideal you wish to achieve as a people, history is not just casual events you can measure
00:12:05.680 in the materialism, but only relative to the metaphysical sense. This is a key point which you need to understand to get Spengler.
00:12:13.120 His focus is all on the metaphysical nature of the people, a nation and civilization.
00:12:19.840 The physical only being a result of it. He goes as far as to speculate that race is formed through metaphysical energies of the homeland.
00:12:28.560 Mystical metaphysical energies of the homeland. You know, shaping the man into its image.
00:12:36.000 He took the example of how Americans have grown shorter since arriving there.
00:12:40.000 However, he admitted that this is pure speculation and you shouldn't take it too serious.
00:12:44.160 I mean, this is still in contrast to the Faustia theory of evolution.
00:12:48.080 It seems human, kind as a sort of will to power, a will to life. Anyway, intellectual knowledge can never explain the destiny.
00:12:57.360 When intellectualized, it always becomes stale and cold.
00:13:02.720 The mere act of trying to make things nice and casual, dependent on an observable event before it,
00:13:09.280 is in fact a titanic mentality. Because it's an attempt of the mind to usurp the place which is
00:13:16.080 rightfully occupied by the racial feeling, the ideals, the logoi, whatever you want to call it.
00:13:21.760 Not the physical essence which is above the human intellect, which uses the intellect for its own ends
00:13:27.120 rather than being abused by it. It's an attempt to trick the guards, so to speak.
00:13:31.760 Thus, eventually, the intellectual constructs, casuality itself, and in all intellectual things,
00:13:41.360 eventually it's all pushed aside. It pushes aside everything metaphysical.
00:13:46.960 Intellectualism becomes a goal in and of itself.
00:13:51.840 This also marks the transition from a rural-dominated nation to a city-dominated nation.
00:13:56.560 Not that urbanites are necessarily more than rural people, but the urban mentality starts to dominate
00:14:03.200 the rural one. The intellect abuses the ideals, yet never manages to escape the workings of the
00:14:08.480 ideals. In Western history, this would be the turning point of the French Revolution.
00:14:13.920 Truth is not made by man. Truth comes from above. By placing the intellect before instincts,
00:14:19.280 you start spreading untrue. This is all from Spengler, by the way. This is not my opinion,
00:14:24.320 is what Spengler is actually saying. At this point, nothing is holy. Everything is a subject of
00:14:30.720 deconstruction, which eventually leads to what we have, you know, right now. As Saint Augustine said,
00:14:36.640 If no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain to someone who asks, I do not know. This is in reference to
00:14:44.880 this ideal, this destiny feeling. Another example Spengler took is a number. A number has a metaphysical
00:14:52.720 essence. I mean, two has a timeless meaning, yet the art of calculating is in the realm of the dead,
00:14:59.120 the intellectual. You start using this, and before you know it, you're counting shekels.
00:15:04.640 You're creating banking systems, quotas, bureaucratic spreadsheets, computering,
00:15:09.200 all this stuff, which is purely intellectual, not metaphysical. It's dead. It's not art. It's
00:15:14.160 a frigid. It's the mind's attempt to escape the confines of the ideal. It's in fact rebellion.
00:15:25.840 It's saying that you're above this. Well, you're not above it. More on this a bit later on right now.
00:15:32.880 The symbol of our civilization could be seen as a clock, pushing us further and further on, pedantically
00:15:38.240 sucking us the eye of every minute in the most productive way possible, in an attempt to reach
00:15:43.200 highest. In contrast, the Greek civilization, the Apollonian, had nothing of that. Their civilization
00:15:49.120 was timeless. Time did not matter in the same way. This is due to the nature of the Faucian worldview. 0.97
00:15:54.160 Constant progress, seemingly for the sake of progress. This is also why you can say that the
00:15:59.760 mentality of our civilization is still very much alive and kicking, in a deranged form, in the modern
00:16:05.280 social justice forest. They want constant progress, no matter the costs. Nothing is as Faustian as
00:16:10.640 opening the floodgates of brown sludge, in a sense. All to make sure the machine we have runs as efficient
00:16:16.800 as possible. Also, people are told. And so people believe. The epitome of timelessness was the palace
00:16:24.400 palace orgies of Nero and Caligula. They didn't care about the future. They just wanted everything now,
00:16:30.480 in a dot, in a limited, concentrated sense. The insane extorting of the provinces the
00:16:39.840 Pocahonsors did, was the same mentality. The now is important. Time is not important. What we have 1.00
00:16:46.320 right now is important. And everything should be centered towards the now. The dot, the point, the center.
00:16:53.760 The length of outstretched infinity of time was irrelevant for them. For them it was just now, now, now,
00:16:59.840 and now. You can see the same with the power mentality in the clock. Perhaps this is partly
00:17:06.560 what gave us the strength to conquer the entire world, combined with wanting to have a legacy
00:17:11.440 to the infinite generations to come. As Cecil Rhodes put it, to annex the stars.
00:17:18.160 Regardless, you see the same two mentalities in how people are buried. In Apollonian civilization,
00:17:25.440 either prepared for the final journey of the sticks with a coin in the mouth, the body,
00:17:32.160 that is, the being itself, the person itself. If you place a coin in the mouth, that person has the
00:17:38.000 coin, you know, in their mouth as it passes sticks to give Chiron. And the body itself was cremated.
00:17:45.600 So you just have a metaphysical body alive. The metaphysical body is freed from the physical body,
00:17:52.320 so to speak. And this is also marking the end of its journey in life. The end of the great pose,
00:17:59.840 as Spengler put it. In contrast, we build tombstones. And this is again a manifestation of this
00:18:08.240 view of time, infinity. We want our gravestone to be there. And we want that sort of legacy,
00:18:16.560 so to speak. We want our grandchildren to go to our grave and lay flowers. This sense of time
00:18:25.440 manifests throughout our culture. Madonna icons being an example, a sort of eternal mother giving
00:18:30.800 life which stretches towards infinity. The woman is history with her being a mother. And the father's
00:18:36.960 history by war and politics, as Spengler put it. The state manifests as a sort of father cares for
00:18:43.280 his sons. Or so the ideal state would be, as Spengler elaborates, a great deal about in his other
00:18:50.240 works. Our socialism is also homogenous to the stoicism of the Greek-Roman civilization that is 0.97
00:18:57.280 Apollonian. Not socialism in the sense of Marxism, but in the sense of a camaraderie among the whole
00:19:04.560 people among the nation. A sort of solidarity between them. This is also the Prussian socialism,
00:19:10.480 which Spengler elaborated. A sense to serve the whole. The mentality of Frederick the Great and
00:19:15.280 Charles XII of Sweden. Toil and sweat is seen as a service to the whole. So you can have time and the
00:19:22.480 future being acknowledged, rather than having no sense of it. Like the Roman, who instead focus on 0.77
00:19:28.320 individual detachment from passions, becoming like a statue, perfecting the grand pose, the role of
00:19:35.200 one man, the mask one wears, and the grand comedy of existence. The grand divine comedy of existence.
00:19:42.080 That's the Greco-Roman mentality. As I mentioned earlier, Spengler's historic view is metaphysical.
00:19:48.400 You can see the thread going all over the place here. And I hope I've been trying to make it as
00:19:54.240 clear as possible. In Spengler's view, simply studying chronology and being academic about this
00:20:00.240 is like being stuck in Plato's cave. An academic can never really get what Napoleon was about,
00:20:05.600 nor Alexander the Great, nor any great man of note. The academic just wants to intellectualize and
00:20:10.560 categorize. Religion and art gives a man a look up to the high world, outside the cave. Stale books and
00:20:17.200 academic circle jerks drags you down and makes you more and more pretentious and stupid. 1.00
00:20:21.680 In Spengler's view, free will exists only. In that we either follow this destiny, this ideal, 1.00
00:20:29.440 or reject it. And we get dragged by it. This is also a point which St. Augustine made,
00:20:35.200 in the City of God, somewhere in the second book, I believe. I mean, free will is to be true to your
00:20:39.920 actual will. Your ideal, your true nature, if that makes sense. Everything else is being enslaved to your
00:20:46.720 desires. Even the will to power is a desire. This is a point which Spengler understands,
00:20:52.640 and I think it's very important to understand this point as well. Free will is the same thing
00:20:57.440 as your ideal. Either you reach it, or choose to reject it in favor of comfort. It is the second
00:21:05.520 option all the case springs from. It is the first option all life springs from. Nature, that is the
00:21:11.440 intellectualized world and view of things, see no value in the destiny, the ideal, the metaphysical.
00:21:17.760 It goes against it. A man like this wants to analyze reality naturally and scientifically,
00:21:24.000 yet you'll only get a strange buzz of coincidences all over the place. I mean, just ponder the
00:21:28.800 complexity of the human body, or how big bang led to what we have now. It would be all a coincidence
00:21:35.120 according to this kind of person. Destiny is given the corner of coincidences and nothing more. Yet,
00:21:43.520 at what point becomes the builder of the wall, the prisoner of his own wall. So, how can a person like
00:21:52.080 Napoleon, which spread the views of the natural and cognitively, intellectually understandable world,
00:21:59.360 be a great man of destiny? Because his destiny was the bringing in of the scientific world, analyzing
00:22:08.560 everything to death, as if the stars aligned, revolutionary frond-solve invention of the steam
00:22:14.240 engine. The brain's triumph of the equation. A machine consuming resources and granting titanic power
00:22:21.360 for power's sake. Same thing with the scientist, his destiny is the analysis of nature. And whether he
00:22:28.080 likes to admit it or not, he is still inferior to this destiny since he still acts accordingly. Likewise with
00:22:33.920 intellectuals such as Marx and Rousseau. They thought themselves to finally have understood
00:22:39.840 things intellectually, but have been wrong. As I believe Kierkegaard said, I have understood the
00:22:45.120 highest that is not given to many in the generation. Yet, at the same time, something new rushes upon me.
00:22:50.720 The highest to fall is not to understand the highest, but to act on it. All history is the realization of a
00:22:57.760 mentality. The seed of logos which is left to grow for generations, if you will. It bursts out like a
00:23:03.920 flower. It's not meant to be intellectually categorized and mastered. It's supposed to be lived. Further on,
00:23:10.720 great man does not come from nowhere. There's two things that need to align. And that's the destiny of the
00:23:17.920 macrocosmos, the culture, the high culture, the progress of the civilization, and the destiny of the
00:23:25.120 microcosmos that is the individual. When these two align, a great man is born. Men who may have been great 300 years ago
00:23:32.560 can live for David, for example, but they wouldn't be great. Their own destiny does not align to destiny of the whole.
00:23:42.640 You could say that the great men of the past surfed on the waves of history.
00:23:47.680 They were surfers. They were surfers of destiny.
00:23:51.360 Since every man has a destiny, and every nation a destiny, and so on, if a nation would go against
00:23:58.640 its own destiny, its own spirit, they would be weak and easily defeated by another nation, true to its ideal. 1.00
00:24:05.120 A plutocratic merchant German empire would not be able to beat a British merchant empire, just as a British land 0.93
00:24:14.080 power would not be able to beat a German one, even if the material art should be the same.
00:24:22.800 Of course, they have two different spirits. Thus, an nation must be true to its ideal, its destiny,
00:24:28.640 in order to be in shape, as Spengler puts it. Spengler elaborated this in his mining works,
00:24:35.040 how this would be the case for Germany, and shows how this may have been the source of the strength
00:24:41.600 of the British merchant empire. You know, the whole eternal Anglo meme, it comes from this.
00:24:47.120 This is the the mainspring of the eternal Anglo meme. Spengler actually made a point in Prussianism and 0.94
00:24:55.360 socialism, that the British empire could have
00:25:00.800 this really as the prime minister, because Anglos and Jews are essentially the same.
00:25:05.840 They're not, but you know, they are both merchant people. That was Spengler's point, and therefore
00:25:10.960 another merchant people could do well in a merchant republic, or merchant empire, as the English was, the British empire.
00:25:18.400 It makes practical sense to if you think about it, by the way. In Germany, if it is a merchant naval kingdom,
00:25:23.760 would not be able to defend itself as good from France or Russia. Just look at the geography.
00:25:30.160 Again, just as we talked about in Egypt, the geography shapes the culture.
00:25:38.400 The culture springs from their habitats, and this shapes them. And if you look at the geography,
00:25:44.960 you can see that if you go east, you get more and more land. So you've got this expansion again,
00:25:50.400 expansion, expansion, expansion. And eventually you hit the euro, so maybe that's where the whole
00:25:56.720 Drangekosten come from. Just constant expansion to the east, because it was like an indifferent land for them. 0.98
00:26:05.120 But I don't know, that's just a theory. So this is also how you can understand Frederick the Great's
00:26:11.920 condemnation of German colonialism, as a waste of resources needed in the fatherland.
00:26:20.640 I think he wrote about this in the Antimark, even. I read it a while back, but I don't really know.
00:26:26.640 But I know he was against colonialism, Frederick the Great is this.
00:26:30.240 In any case, this ursymbol, this high culture mentality, manifests both in the intellectual life
00:26:35.920 and the intuitive, artistic and religious life. This symbol manifests for the scientist into his
00:26:42.000 understanding of the data he collects about the natural world, and thus into casuality
00:26:47.680 and a belief in scientific theories. The symbol also manifests into the metaphysics of a nation,
00:26:54.960 which gives it its wisdom and existential understanding of things. Its own view of the elephant, so to speak.
00:27:02.400 A truth, not a theory. Spengler viewed even the most fanatic anti-metaphysical intellectual
00:27:10.080 materialist as a subject of this metaphysical symbol, whether this person would accept it or not.
00:27:15.760 Again, we can see this again as social justice warriors. Their constant drive for progress, progress,
00:27:21.040 progress for progress sake is very Faustian. It's very Western. It's just that this spirit has
00:27:27.760 manifested a bound and destructive way in the social justice warriors. I think that was everything
00:27:33.760 I wanted to say in this episode. If anything has been unclear, feel free to ask questions in the
00:27:40.960 comment section. Next episode, we're going to talk about Spengler's view on the macrocosm, I think. See you around.