Hegel??

"After decades of trying and utterly failing to see what could possibly be worthwhile in Hegel's philosophy, I believe I've had a breakthrough."

That's the first paragraph of an essay I posted here on December 11, 2023. 4 months later, it seems more and more likely that what I understood was a YouTube which purported to be about Hegel. Does that video actually have anything to do with Hegel? I don't know. I don't have any Earthly. I can't even. 

 

What we have here, now as before, is failure to communicate. We're back to where we were before last December. I am not getting the message from Hegel's texts. 

Unless I am. Unless Schopenhauer was right about Hegel's philosophy: that it was pseudo-intellectual gibberish successfully passing itself off as philosophy. But I can't be sure about that anymore. 

It's not that I am afraid to assail the reputation of a celebrated thinker and purported genius. Every word Susan Sontag published or said on a broadcast was pseudo-intellectual garbage, delivered with that smug grin William Gaddis warned us about. Spengler is, im Grunde genommen, pretty silly, and hugely overrated. But at least much more entertaining than Sontag.

It's not that I can't follow philosophers in general. With those up to and including Hegel's most celebrated immediate forerunner Kant, and also with those following him, although I must often read very slowly and repeat certain passages, I don't get this feeling I get with Hegel. Not with Kant himself, not with Heidegger, not with Adorno. Not with the world's most famous Hegelian, Marx. 

Well, as Kierkegaard said -- Kierkegaard, who has often delighted me, often made me shake my head chidingly, but never puzzled me: enten -- eller. Either Hegel has fooled a great number of very smart people, who regard him as a great genius, but not me, or Schopenhauer, or Kierkegaard -- or all of those people have significantly smarter than all three of us, at least in this regard.

I can easily admit it when a single person is clearly more intelligent than I  -- okay, not easily, but I can admit it. When an entire group is outdoing me, it's disturbing. 

It sort of reminds me of the historical Jesus question. I've studied it pretty thoroughly. Most of the people who have studied it pretty thoroughly say that it's pretty obvious that a person named Jesus preached in Galilee and Jerusalem in the 20's, 30's or 40's AD, that he said many of the things in the text we today call the Sermon on the Mount, and that he was crucified on Pilate's orders. 

Well, it's still not obvious at all to me. That light bulb above my head, which is supposed to go on when I see how the evidence all adds up to Jesus having really lived and preached and been crucified by Pilate -- that light bulb is not on, it has not begun to flicker. The Biblical scholars go over the evidence, and to me, they're making the case that it's possible Jesus existed, the case that it's conceivable -- and then they say, so you see, it's really certain that he existed! And I shout wearily: No! I don't see!

I also don't see how I'm not keeping up with what those Biblical scholars are saying. Let's take the example of another famous controversy: were the writers of the New Testament wrong when they said that a virgin birth was prophesied by Isaiah? Yes. They were wrong. Bart Ehrman explained this to me in less than half a minute. To make a short story even shorter: read the entire chapter of Isaiah 7, and as Ehrman said: shame on all of us supposedly brilliant people for not already having read the entire chapter. It's not long. The Hebrew word can mean "virgin," or simply "young women," somewhat like the English term "maiden." Reading Isaiah 7, the entire short chapter, makes it clear that the Greek New Testament authors were mistaking in translating the word as "virgin" instead of simply "young woman."

I had zero trouble keeping up with that. But understanding what is so great about Hegel...

"Die WIRKLICHE Philosophie Des 19. Jahrhunderts" Nach Spengler

In dem Untergang des Abendlandes, DTV, 9. Auflage 1988, S 479-81, gibt Spengler eine Liste von mehreren Dutzenden Buechern, Theaterstucken, Opern und Pamphleten, die er "eine Uebersicht ueber die wirkliche Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts" nennt. Es ist eine sehr interessante Liste. Aber wie so sehr oft bei Spengler, obwohl etwas sehr interessant ist, fragt man sich, ob das Interessante auch ueberhapt sinnvoll ist, von tiefsinning ganz mal zu schweigen. Spengler wollte mit dem Untergang eine "Umrisse einer Morphoplogie der Weltgeschichte" schreiben. Ich denke, das ist ihm voellig mislungen, dass er aber stattdessen und unabsichterweise etwas faszinierendes schrieb, das einsam in seiner eigenen Katagorie dasteht. Spengler war ein Reaktionaer, ein Rassist und ein Wirrkopf, aber ganz anders als die allermeisten Reaktionaeren, Rassisten und Wirrkoepfe ist er gar nicht langweilig. Vorausgesetzt dass man ihn nicht ernst nimmt, enthaelt sein seltsam magum opus etliches Wertvolles.

Also, zu dieser angeblich wirklichen Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts: es ist weite davon, die schlechteste Auswahl von 19jahrhundertiger Schreibungen die ich je gesehen habe. Vieles davon finde auch ich ganz gut.

Fragt sich aber, wie die Authoren dieser Philosophie Spengler gefunden haetten.

Fuer jemanden wie Spengler, der die ganze Welt mit seinem Buch umfassen will, ist diese Liste kaum umfassenderweise international. Nicht nur, dass Schriften aus Nord- und Suedamerkia, Afrika, Asien und Ozeanien voellig fehlen. Dachte Spengler, dass waehrend des ganzen 19. Jahrhunderts nur in Europa (wirklich) philosophiert wurde?

Ich denke, dass er vielleicht eben das wirklich gedacht hat. Und dass in einer gewissen vergangenen Epoche nur in China, in einer anderen nur in Aegypten (wirklich) philosophiert wurde usw. So eine Art von Wirrkopf war er: er war nicht gluehend mit Hass noch triefend mit Verachtung fuer die meisten Menschen der Welt wie viele Rassisten. Er war vielmehr die Art von rassistischem Wirrkopf, der glaubte dass er in einem "europaeischen Zeitalter" lebte.

Aber immerhin: wenn ich richtig gezaehlt habe, gibt es 20 deutschspraechige Werke auf dieser Liste von angeblich wirklicher Philosophie, und dann nur 14 nichtdeutschspraechige. Das heisst: von der urspruenglichen Sprache her gezaehlt, obwohl Spengler einigen Titeln in deutscher Uebersetzung nennt. Also: 2 Werke von Schopenhauer, 1 von Proudhon, 1 von Comte, 3 von Hebbel, 1 von Feuerbach, 1 von Engles, 3 von Marx, 5 von Wagner, 5 von Ibsen, 1 von Darwin, 1 von Mill, 1 von Duehring, 3 von Nietzsche, 3 von Strindberg, 1 von Weiniger und 2 von Shaw.

Nicht nur, dass dies eine ausschliesslich europeaische Liste ist; es ist eine fast ausschliesslich germanische. Nichts auf dieser Liste von Spanien, oder Italien, oder Polen oder Russland. 32 von 34 Werken in germanischen Sprachen, und dann 2 auf Franzoesisch. Und auf Deutsch nichts von Goethe; 4 Opern und eine Pamphlete von Wagner aber nicht Faust. Und nichts von Heine. Schwer, mir vorzustellen, dass Nietzsche sich gern auf einer solchen Liste gesehen haette, nachdem er sich die Muehe gemacht hatte, mehrere Werke und zahllose Bemerkungen in den ueberigen Werken seiner Feindschaft mit Wagner zuzuwidmen, und zwar gar nicht zuletzt Wagners Mitmachens in Deutschtuemmelei und Antisemitismus wegen. Oder Proudhon, Comte, Hebbel, Feuerbach, Engles (wusste Spengler ueberhapt, dass Engles ein ganzes anti-Duehring-Buch schrieb?), Marx, Darwin. Shaw war ganz laessig wenn man ihn auf Listen setzte; er erklaerte dann und wann ruehig, warum er nicht auf dieser oder jener Liste gehoerte, schien aber gar nicht aufgeregt uber solchen Sachen zu werden. Und so muss ich an seiner statt empoert werden.

Was denkt ein so emsiger Deutschtuemmler wie Spengler, dass er hoch priest, wenn er Internationalisten wie Proudhon, Comte, Hebbel, Feuerbach, Engles, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche und Shaw als Schoepfer einer wirklichen Philosophie lobt?

Zeigt diese merkwuerdige Liste dass Spengler gelegentlich besser als seine Nationalismus war, dass er Besserem und Tieferem gegenueber gar nicht blind und taub war?

Oder zeigt es vielleicht, dass er gelegentlich (oder staendig?) Buecher hochpries, welche er gar nicht gelesen hat, und ganz einfach aus Unwissen so tut, als haetten Marx und Nietzsche mehr mit Wagner und Duehring als mit Goethe und Heine zu tun?

Alternate Histories Of The 20th Century

It was Oswald Spengler who got me thinking about the things which led to this recent blog post about the Imperial election of 1519 and also to this one, about early 16th-century Europe more in general. I was flipping through the Untergang des Abendlandes when I came across, on pp 192-3 of this edition,



a passage which is silly even by Spengler's standards: first the assertion that Columbus had very nearly made his famous voyage of discovery for the French instead of for the Spanish; then, the assertion that if Columbus had sailed for the French, Francis I would, without question, have been crowned Holy Roman Emperor instead of Charles I of Spain becoming Emperor Charles V, and then some absurdly specific pronouncements of the differences in history which the different outcome of the Imperial election would have caused, such as different, French styles of diplomacy dominating the age instead of the Spanish diplomacy, and different, French wars happening instead of the Spanish wars which did happen, and that we would think of French people who had never been born instead of Philip II, Alba, Cervantes, Calderon, Cervantes and so forth; and finally, that the "inner logic" of the age, which had to find its "ultimate expression" in the French Revolution -- "or an event of analogous content" would not have been affected by any of this.

Yeah! Spengler could really talk some mess, he was a thoroughly un-profound person who managed to pass himself off, for a while at least, as one of the deepest thinkers of the 20th century. But what he wrote is interesting. It just doesn't have much to do with the original, groundbreaking study of history which Spengler claimed it was. It's alternate history, which is not a study of history, but a genre of fiction.

Sometimes the difference between a deep novelist and a silly historian is very simply that the novelist freely admits that what he is writing is fiction, and the historian doesn't admit, or, worse, doesn't even realize that he's writing fiction. I'm not saying that Spengler could have been an interesting novelist, I'm saying that he was, and that it's a real shame that his work is considered to be non-fiction. That has only added confusion to a world which already contains much too much confusion.

Many books have been written about Jesus. They're all fiction. I myself have written one of them, a novella. The less-deluded and/or more honest among those of us who have written such books have admitted that we were writing fiction. It's not just that no one knows enough for sure about Jesus to fill even a short book -- we don't know anything for sure about him yet, not even whether or not he existed.



So, I sometimes imagines alternative scenarios of the 20th century. Mostly ways in which less war might have occurred. I have no idea what, if anything, is actually to be learned from such fantasies:

I've spent quite a lot of time imagining the Allied invasion of Anzio in World War II going much differently. I imagine General Patton in charge of the invasion instead of the General Lucas who was its commander in real life, and squandered the tremendous opportunity gained by the Germans having not noticed the invasion at all and having practically no troops in the area. Instead of moving quickly from the beachhead, expanding it and taking as much territory as possible before the Germans reacted, Lucas inexplicably stayed on the beach offloading equipment for two days, until the Germans had the beach surrounded, and the Allied troops there were sitting ducks and were slaughtered.

Lucas sounds like a quartermaster to me. My alternative version of events begins with someone convincing Eisenhower, before the invasion, that Lucas is all wrong for the job -- that he's a quartermaster, not an invader. This insight allows Eisenhower to transfer Lucas without hurting his feelings: he says to Lucas: "There's been a change of plans: our warehouses and depots in Naples are in a disastrous state. It's a huge clusterfuck, supplies aren't moving at all. It's imperative that things change down there immediately, and you're just the guy to go in there and kick some ass and get everything organized. We'll have Patton or somebody do the Anzio landing." Calling it a "landing" instead of an "invasion" to stay as close as possible to Lucas' mindset and ward off any clue he might have that any of this has to do with a weakness of his.

So, Patton lands on January 22, 1944 and immediately zooms off toward Rome, 30 miles away. Instead of the Germans holding Rome until June as they did in reality, Patton takes the city in the early morning of 24 January. In reality, with the Allied troops stuck in Anzio, the abbey Monte Cassino, in a pass in the high mountains mountains to the south-east of Rome, was where the Allied advanced was held for months and tens of thousands of Allied soldiers died. In my alternate version, after Rome is taken, the Allies quickly surround Monte Cassino by occupying the width of the Italian penisula west to east to Monte Cassino's north. The abbey is completely cut off from all supplies and reinforcements on February 8, surrenders on February 14, and a domino effect of Allied momentum and German surrenders accelerates until German soldiers in Berlin rebel and kill Hitler and Germany surrenders before the D-Day invasion can even take place.

Another alternate history does away with World War II altogether, by completely changing Hitler's personality. After World War I, while Hitler is spying on radical groups for the German army, one of which groups in real life he would join and which would eventually become the Nazi party -- instead of all of that, he happens to meet a theatre troupe, falls in love with an actress, becomes an actor, shaves off the moustache ("I don't think it looks good even on Chaplin," his girlfriend and co-worker says), and the exposure to the theatre melts his icy heart, love and tenderness drive out the rage and hatred which were there, WWII never happens.

Or we could go back further and do away with both world wars: instead of assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess Sophie, which led to World War I in real llife, Gavrilo Princip, aggrieved at Austria's domination of the Balkan Slavs, misses. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie are unharmed. Princip is not executed because Franz Ferdinand himself, after much exertion, convinces Emperor Franz Joseph to spare his life. Franz Ferdinand visits Princip in prison. Often. Princip notices that the Archduke has become thinner. "I hope it's not because you've fallen ill," he says politely. "No," Franz Ferdinand replies,"I've been exercising more and eating more sensibly. Having come so close to being killed and survived, I felt as if I'd been given another chance at life. I've given some very serious thought to what I want to do with what time I have left." "And why did you give me another chance?" Princip asks. "Because," the Archduke replies, "I felt that there was enough good in you that it would be wrong to completely give up on you. And also because I feel that the enmity between your people and mine must end. We both want life to improve for the Serbs, don't you realize that?" Princip doesn't believe anything the Archduke says for a while. But gradually he sees an earnest man grappling with monstrously huge matters of politics, where before he had only seen a monster. He's moved to much more comfortable quarters, and he and the Archduke, to the amazement of the world, become friends. Years later, after the Archduke has become the Emperor, Princip is freed. Franz Ferdinand oversees the gradual and peaceful dismantling of the Empire, letting the various Southern Slav nations become states of their own.

All the tremendous energy which was spent in the world wars in real life, and all of the ingenuity which went went into developing ever-deadlier weapons, in my fictional version goes instead into peaceful exertions in science and engineering and the arts. In real life Ferdinand Porsche made a hybrid-electric car around 1900; in my fictional version, plug-ins have largely replaced gasoline-burning cars and airplanes, and coal-and-oil burning ships, by 1920. By 1925, between wind, solar, tidal and geothermal power, there is scarcely any demand for petrochemical fuel anymore, neither for vehicles nor factories nor to heat homes. The air becomes cleaner, the climate doesn't destabilize. The Black Hills of South Dakota remain un-strip-mined. Communism spreads, peacefully. The Internet is in hundreds of millions of homes and offices by 1940. By 1960 there is no longer any need for currency, and human hunger and homelessness are no more. By 2015, some of the brighter chimpanzees and gorillas have begun to write and publish books.

Civilisation My Arse, Sir Kenneth! [PLEASE READ THE PS!]

Kenneth Clark, 1903-1983, the art critic and historian, OM, CH, KCB, FBA -- in other words: about as upper-crusty British as one could be without actually belonging to the royal family -- probably best known, like Carl Sagan and J Bronowski, for a public-television series, in Clark's case entitled "Civilisation," and the book associated with the series, Ah say Ah say Kenneth Clark seems to have been a very nice, very charming man. I probably would've liked him if I'd ever known him, it seems that most people did. But then, would a common "unwashed" American "ethnic" person such as myself ever actually have met Clark? He may have had staff members charged primarily with the duty to see to it that such meetings never took place. He may well have spent most of his time in the company of royals, and very little time with anyone who was not titled.

Such insulation would help to explain the nature of his work. I do not like Clark's work. I do not like it in a tree, I do not like it with a bee, I do not like it with a crutch, I do not like it very much, I do not like it here or there, I do not like it anywhere, I do not like it with grape jam, I do not like it, Sam I Am! Bertrand Russell boldly asserts that the ancient Greeks invented philosophy. Whatever the Egyptians and Chinese and Indians and other were doing before Thales & Co,. it wasn't philosophy, according to Russell. I think Russell is wrong about that. Way wrong. Well, Clark goes Russell one better and asserts that the ancient Greeks invented civilisation. What is often referred to as Western civilisation is the only truly civilized state of things, according to Clark. Clark also repeats the traditional Western mistake of missing how tenuous is the connection between ancient Greek and the modern West, and not only tenuous, but very much dependent upon the links of Moslem and Byzantine culture, which kept the legacy of Greek philosophy and science and literature and art alive while the West sank into very deep and dark barbarism indeed. Islam is cited only 3 times in the index of Civilisation, China and Japan not at all, Africa only that one time at the beginning, where Clark politely puts down the civilisation represented by that African mask about which he apparently knows nothing, about which he clearly wishes to know nothing.

At this point people may want to defend Clark by saying that "Civilisation"/Civilisation is only about Western civilisation. Yes, clearly it is. But Clark could've called it Western Civilisation. He didn't. He also doesn't mention all the long list of things that the West has taken from other cultures and then claimed as its own. No, he's one of the ones ignorantly claiming them.

At the beginning of Civilization, the book and television series, Clark is in Paris, the center of his idea of civilization. He talks about how in the 9th century, Vikings -- not civilized, according to Clark -- almost captured Paris, and oh what a calamity that would've been! Then he shows a picture of an ancient Greek sculpture of Apollo, and asserts that it represents a much higher state of civilisation than an African mask. (If Clark had any idea what part of Africa the mask came from, or what it represented, or anything else about it, he kept all that info to himself.) (That is my sarcastic way of pointing out that Clark was pretty ignorant of the African culture he was disparaging in his pleasant and polite way.)

Clark asserts that civilsation is something you can feel. In, I think, a very similar way, Oswald Spengler asserts in the Untergang des Abendlandes that race is something you can feel. I don't feel what Clark or Spengler is feeling, but in both cases I feel the presence of bigotry.

Let's get back to Paris and the Vikings -- would it have been such a calamity if the Vikings had taken Paris? Would that act have threatened to extinguish civilisation, as Clark implies?

What the fuck was so civilised about Paris in the ninth century? The Carolingians were busily waging war against each other and destroying the Empire Charlemagne had established. The kings and nobles were not caring well for their peasants. The economy was still mostly barter. A lot of people starved to death. Civilisation my ass. Having the Vikings take over could've actually improved things in lots of ways. They didn't want to plunder and destroy like the Huns or the Conquistadors -- or like the Carolingians were still for the most part attempting to do, except that Charlemagne's descendants weren't nearly as good at waging war as he was, and were primarily waging futile war against each other, whereas Charlemagne at least had pacified the very large area under his control -- the Vikings wanted to rule, and they ruled pretty well, from England to Russia and lots of places in between.

In the ninth century the Vikings were still un-Christian and illiterate. I don't think the non-Christianity was a bad thing. I would agree with Clark that literacy is a good thing. However, I think it was a bad thing that the Christian Church had such a thorough monopoly on literacy in Western Europe at the time. For one thing, the contemporary accounts of encounters between Christians, such as those in and around Paris in the ninth century, and illiterate non-Christians such as the invading Vikings, were all written by Christians. Lately it has occurred to historians how one-sided such depictions were, how distorted at the expense of the non-Christians. Clark was not part of the re-assessment and correction of the traditional Western view of the world. He was a staunch traditionalist. Where the West encountered literate peoples, whether Byzantine or Arab or Copt or Syriac or Chinese or Mayan or what have you, Clark does not avail himself of the non-Western records -- well, it's very hard for anyone to avail themselves of the Mayan records, since the Conquistadors burnt almost all the Mayan books and killed all the Mayans who could read them. Oops! -- and does not seem to be the slightest bit interested in the possibility that his traditional, pro-Western view of the world could be wrong.

It is wrong. Way, way wrong. It wouldn't have been cutting-edge in the 18th century, let alone the 20th.

PS, 26 October, 2019: This post is completely wrong. Clark was the opposite of a snob. I should have read past the first half-page before shooting my mouth off. I'm sorry.

Some Fascinating Facts Mentioned By Spengler in "The Decline of the West"

In my previous post I mostly criticized Oswald Spengler. I mentioned that in addition to what I rejected in his work there was much that I liked, but I was a little vague about what I liked. Here are just a few examples of the many factual tidbits to be found in The Decline of the West:

That the palettes of the painters of Classical ancient Greece were almost entirely confined to the colors black, yellow, red and white. That Rousseau defended the theory that humans and apes share a common ancestry in 1754. That the poor people of Rome lived in extremely crowded conditions in buildings similar in some ways to the tenements of modern cities; that these buildings were made of wood, were sometimes over 10 stories tall, and often collapsed, killing many of their inhabitants. That in the year 787 Charlemagne outlawed all mention of werewolves and witches. That the spherical architectural form typical of mosques appeared in the Roman Pantheon and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople before the beginning of Islam.

Some of My Very Ambivalent Views on Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) has fascinated and annoyed me for a long time. Der Untergang des Abendlandes,his magnum opus, was one of the first books I bought in Germany. I can't remember whether I bought it during my first visit to a German bookstore, a little shop near Studentenwohnheim Tannenbusch II, the enormous prefab-concrete dormitory on the western edge of Bonn into which I'd just moved. I remember quite clearly that I bought Kant's Kritik Der Reinen Vernunftand Kritik Der Praktischen Vernunftduring that first bookstore visit; I either got Spengler's War and Peace-sized paperback at the same time or very soon afterwards. That's almost 20 years ago now, and I've been wrestling with the damn thing ever since. The thing is, I find a lot to admire and a lot to object to in this book, whose title is generally translated into English as The Decline of the West. My objections have been great enough that several times I believed that I was done with Spengler. Now I don't think I'll ever be done with him. His fascination for me is too great.

Spengler's thesis is that cultures are living organisms which pass through a vigorous youth into maturity, eventually changing from cultures into civilizations, and that then they grow old and die. He felt that the West, in the early 20th century, had just entered its final stage, had just become a civilization, and that in a few more centuries it would be dead.

Foremost among my objections to Spengler is that he was racist. Not in the crude and violent way of the Nazis, whose party he was invited to join, although he declined. A more apt comparison would be Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was not a hater, but he did believe that humanity was divided up into races, and that these divides were impossible to cross, that the foreign could never become familiar. "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," Kipling asserted flatly, no doubt in his mind about it. Spengler agreed. I disagree. I believe that there is a common humanity the world over much more profound than the differences between, say, Europeans and Asians, or between Asians and Africans. I believe that a white man can master Japanese calligraphy as profoundly as any Japanese person, and that a Japanese woman can conduct an orchestra playing a symphony by Beethoven as well as anyone else. Kipling and Spengler would've disagreed with me there, and talked about how such things are "in the blood." I think such things are learned, just as differently languages are learned, and that a person's culture can be changed every bit as much as his clothes.

Spengler's racism shows when he insists that Spinoza's philosophy is characteristically Jewish, that it has a fundamental kinship to Jewish authors like Moses Maimonides, while its relationship to European philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz is superficial and illusory. It shows when he discusses the theory of relativity dismissively while refusing to so much as mention Einstein's name, and when he mentions just about every prominent German poet of the 19th century with the exception of Heine. Karl Marx gets a pass from this treatment, for some reason, and is classed by Spengler among the leading dozen or so geniuses of the 19th century.

Spengler says, quite flatly, that race is something that you can feel. (With your "blood." You can "hear" the "voice of the blood.") I disagree, but I think that it's quite easy to feel the presence of racism and to hear the voices of racists, and that they are quite simply mistaken.

Out of Spengler's convictions about race comes his conception of cultures as biological entities, with limited lifespans. I think of cultures as mass behaviors. I believe that we humans can change our behavior as we please, that we can reject this culture and adopt that one, or choose not to identify or ally ourselves with any mass movement, or pick and choose elements from different cultures. I see this sort of change and choice becoming ever more prevalent all around me.

Still, a century ago, during Spengler's lifetime, views like his about "race" and "blood" were much more prevalent than today, at least in the West, and centuries before Spengler they were more prevalent still. And so his opinions about the birth and youth and maturity and death of cultures have a lot to say, I think, about Western attitudes in earlier times, if about nothing else.

And now to what I like about Spengler: he seems to have read an enormous number of good books, and despite the great flaw of his racism, they seem to have taught him a lot. He knows a vast number of fascinating details about the artistic, political, economic and social life of people all over the world over the entire course of the five thousand years since people began to write, and a considerable bit more about the biology of our planet going back millions of years, and is constantly pointing out fascinationg parallels and differences between this time and place and that. When I study Spengler's fat book I'm constantly marveling at his brilliant insights and constantly wincing at his prejudices.

Spengler has annoyed a lot of people besides me. Thomas Mann, for example, dismissed Spengler as a snob and called him "Nietzsche's clever monkey." ("Nietzsche klugen Affen.") The latter remark has an extra, amusing layer of meaning in the original German: "Affe" or "monkey" associates itself in the mind with the verb "nachaffen," which is similar to the English "to parrot:" it means: to mindlessly repeat what someone says, without necessarily comprehending it. Spengler declared that he was a follower of Goethe and Nietzsche; by calling him "Nietzsche's clever monkey," Mann was asserting that Spengler was merely repeating Nietzsche's phrases without having understood them. Nietzsche objected strongly to racists and nationalists claiming to be his followers. Goethe, too. There were both dead when Spengler claimed to be following them and so could not object specifically to him.

Still, as with Kipling, so with Spengler the shortcomings of bigotry are far from the whole story.