John David Ebert introduces Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, beginning with Spengler's life and his debt to Nietzsche's account of Socratic man ending Greek tragedy. He outlines Spengler's morphology of high cultures as self-contained life cycles, each with its own prime symbol, mathematics and arts, covering the Egyptian, Magian, Faustian and nascent Russian cultures, and applies the scheme of cultural seasons to the West's late phase.
John David Ebert — 4 recordings in the archive.
Related reading: The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler.
Spengler publishes volume 1 of decline in the West in 1918 just as the Germans had lost World War 1 now Spangler was who's a high school teacher and he was one of these fellows who didn't care for academics any more than I do and he just sort of floated around on the peripheries of German culture ten years working as a high school teacher and then he was gradually nurturing this idea and it gradually shaping his mind and he decided to quit and go write this book and he liked me to have trouble with migraine headaches so he was able to get a disability from the state and he never married he was a bachelor and he had a sister who in a sense became a kind of I guess a surrogate wife for him after her marriage didn't work out in later years she moved in with him he lived up into his 50s and died of a heart attack and what we know about his childhood was that he was tormented by nightmares we just do know that he was the sort of isolated genius and so we sort of then decides to write this book and he's up late at night he's staying up till like 2:00 or 3:00 o'clock in the morning just reading everything he can get his hands on to bolster this thesis about the decline of civilization and he says my two if you look at the first page of the decline of the West he says my two greatest thinkers are Goethe and Nietzsche now Nietzsche was the first really to begin to see how civilization falls apart who's the begin he was the first to begin to see the way in which his first book is the birth of tragedy beaches which he publishes in 1872 and the thesis in that book was that Greek tragedy fell apart the moment that it sort of lost this wonderful balance between the a Bellini intention and the Dionysian tension and the appellee nion Apollo is the god of restraint and the Sun and light and reason and structure and clarity Dionysus on the other hand is the god of wine of madness drunken intoxication of sexuality so we have two radically opposed gods but the way in which those tendencies work into Greek tragedy are such that the chorus…