Why do Anglos and Teutons and Norse (basically all Germanics) identify with Greco-Roman accomplishments and the Renaissance? Isn't that basically "le formerly monarchs" meme?
Also, how do you guys feel about Spengler's comparison of Western, Germanic architecture to Byzantine?
>In the earliest time the landscape-figure alone dominates man's eyes. It gives form to his soul and vibrates in tune therewith. Feelings and woodland rus- tlings beat together; the meadows and the copses adapt themselves to its shape, to its course, even to its dress. The village, with its quiet hillocky roofs, its evening smoke, its wells, its hedges, and its beasts, lies completely fused and embedded in the landscape. The country town confirms the country, is an intensification of the picture of the country. It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high- pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature.
He contrasts the spires efforts to reach toward an infinitely far away heaven, with the completeness of Byzantine architecture, domes that encompass heaven (indeed, Christ is on the interior of every Orthodox dome when you look up, and the ceilings are covered in angels and saints from heaven joining with the laity representing earth) and Churches that are icons of the whole of creation, an unity and love of the material instead of trying to escape from it. In fact, Spengler goes so far as to consider Byzantine style superior to classical Greek.
Isnt this guy the brother in law of Walter White ?
Spengler is a reductionist memelord who thinks he can explain 5000 years of history with memes, confirmation bias and shit he just pulled out of his ass.
>>505648
Spengler had some interesting ideas (like the relationship between a civilization's mathematics and a worldview) and put forth some valid questions, but he was way off the mark with his assessments of cultures. Honestly the way he treats some civilizations is as if they almost exist in a vacuum.
>Why do Anglos and Teutons and Norse (basically all Germanics) identify with Greco-Roman accomplishments and the Renaissance? Isn't that basically "le formerly monarchs" meme?
Because that is their cultural inheritance, it has nothing to do with blood. Spengler here is talking about pre-Christian Germanic society, with small villages in tune with nature, structures built out of wood, etc. This is the Germanics before the Greco-Roman influence.
I don't remember this part specifically, but I don't know where he is talking about Byzantine architecture, it mainly seems he is talking Gothic and Baroque spires, which do reach to supersede nature, instead of act in harmony with it, i.e. the Germanics' society post Christianity.
>>505745
*Germanics' society pre-Christianity
>>505648
After the fall of the Roman Empire, people were nostalgic for the Romans for centuries. They believed (with some justification) that they were worse off. So whenever someone wrote or did anything good, they referred to it as being influenced by the Romans. Eventually that became extended back to the Greeks and became a trope.
For centuries, though, no one ever admitted that they got lots of stuff from the Arabs, or that the Arabs preserved a lot of Roman stuff that would otherwise have been lost. And no one wanted to go back farther than the Greeks, to say the Mesopotamian civilizations or the Egyptians.
I assume that this was because during the period of time when the trope was being developed, the areas in question were controlled by the enemy Muslims and so they didn't want to get them in on the act.
>>505745
He talks about Byzantine, Moorish, Arabian, and so on. He talks about a lot of architecture, just not concentrated in one section.
>>505770
Spengler really likes mosque architecture, he says it was influenced by Byzantine architecture (I don't know how true that is). Only thing he dislikes are minarets, iirc. Probably for the same reason he disliked spires.
>>505648
>Also, how do you guys feel about Spengler's comparison of Western, Germanic architecture to Byzantine?
I don't know, because the passage you quoted has nothing to do with either of those styles.
>>505648
>Why do Anglos and Teutons and Norse (basically all Germanics) identify with Greco-Roman accomplishments and the Renaissance?
Do they really? Here in Norway we used farm life, mountains and fjords as symbols of national romanticism when the Danes fucked off from the Union.
So, I don't really get what you mean.
>>505648
You have to understand that Spengler considered Gothic architecture to be an expression of the Faustian soul which strived for the infinite. He took the odd position of claiming that the Byzantines were "magian" and not Western and there for came out of the same meme as the early Jews, Christians, Manicheans, and later Muslims. Hence why orthodox churches look so much like mosques.
The Magian world-feeling was epitomized as conceiving as the world-as-cavern through which the rays of Heaven shine through which is why the dome is such a recurrent theme in eastern architecture.
>>506086
Yeah, I agree with his assessment there. Orthodox Christianity influenced Byzantine culture, more than vice versa (or else it wouldn't be so similar to Coptic and Ethiopian Christianity).
>WE USED TO BE OF ROYAL BLOOD
>>506136
>PARDON ME
*discourses loudly*
>ARE YOU ASSERTING
*crosses self*
>WE ONCE WERE MONARCHS
*confesses*
>ET CETERA?
>>506136
>WE DOMESTICATED AUROCHS AND SHIT
You obviously haven't read Spengler.
He considers (and is obviously correct) Western and Greco-Roman to be two entirely different civilisations (which he identifies with what he calls the Faustian and the Apollonian soul respectively), and Byzantine/Islamic to be yet another, third civilisation (identified with the Magian soul).
He also says there is no point in trying to establish a hierarchy since every civilisation is "true" for the people who belong to it. However he does consider Apollonian soul to be superficial, and the Faustian to be especially apt at mastering the world thanks to its belief in directed force and striving for the infinite, which Gothic architecture is the most perfect representation of.
Finally the passage you quoted doesn't even mention West or Byzantine/Islamic. It simply compares the stages that every civilisation goes through, the earliest with the latest.
>>505785
>Spengler really likes mosque architecture, he says it was influenced by Byzantine architecture
No, he says they're part of the same civilisation. He even calls the Hagia Sofia and the Pantheon in Rome "mosques", because they're all expressions of the same civilisation which encompasses Late Rome, Judaism, Eastern Christianity, and Islam. The low dome of those Eastern temples embodies the Magian world view: of a closed magical cosmos where good and evil battle along a timeline separated in two.
>>505648
Because Western Europe is the result of the entwining of the Romans and the Germanic peoples.
