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Pierre Le Vigan ♦
Essayiste.
En intitulant leçons de la philosophie, et non leçons de philosophie leur ouvrage collectif, les philosophes réunis autour d’Alain Renaut ont certainement voulu signifier quelque chose, et pas seulement se distinguer par le titre des ouvrages intitulés « leçons de philosophie » de Ferdinand Alquié, de Jean Beaufret, de Simone Weil (cours de Roanne), et de bien d’autres. Avec la philosophie, il s’agit moins d’apprendre une matière à côté d’autres (la sociologie, la psychologie, l’esthétique, etc) que de se mettre à l’écoute de ce qu’a à nous dire une lecture spécifique du monde, de la vie, de l’homme. Cette lecture qui est « à part », et qu’il serait contre-productif de considérer comme « au-dessus » mais qui essaie bel et bien de prendre de la hauteur, c’est la philosophie même.
Nous y sommes avec l’ouvrage dirigé par Alain Renaut. Cinq parties composent le livre, et ces parties sont elles-mêmes divisées en chapitres, de 3 à 6 par partie.
Chaque partie est précédée d’une introduction générale et suivie d’une ouverture vers des débats actuels. Le sujet, la culture, la raison et le réel, la politique, la morale sont les parties abordées successivement. Ce sont au total 28 chapitres ou leçons qui sont proposés à l‘étude. Les thèmes sont ceux du programme des baccalauréats. Ils vont du sujet à son environnement et à ses moyens de connaissance, et concernent ensuite l’action et les pratiques. C’est un parti pris parmi d’autres qui étaient possibles. Ce chemin est très français, au sens de cartésien, et est assez moderne. Ce n’est pas le chemin des Anciens. Mais même quand on veut penser « contre » Descartes, il est difficile de ne pas penser à partir de lui, ou au moins en passant par lui.
Les auteurs ne cachent pas, du reste, les réserves que peuvent leur inspirer ce plan de travail, qui est celui de l’éducation nationale, mais ils ont choisi d’en montrer les éventuelles limites de l’intérieur. Le déploiement de ce modèle classique d’exposition de la philosophie a le mérite de susciter des échos chez tous les lecteurs, avancés ou moins avancés, de thèmes philosophiques. Il montre aussi qu’il est possible d’entrer dans la philosophie par différentes portes. C’est pourquoi Alain Renaut précise à juste titre qu’il n’est aucunement indispensable de lire ce livre dans l’ordre des parties et des chapitres. Nous ne sommes donc ni face à un manuel scolaire/universitaire à proprement parler, ni face à un anti-manuel, ce qui serait bien prétentieux, et une vaine coquetterie.
Il n’y a pas à réinventer la philosophie, non plus que l’amour, ou le courage, ou la recherche du beau. Il s’agit de la faire vivre. Alain Renaut est un penseur du sujet, attaché à mettre ses pas dans ceux de Kant et de Fichte. Il s’est fait connaitre par son essai, écrit avec Luc Ferry, sur et contre la « pensée 68 » (1985). Il est très éloigné de la pensée de la déconstruction et de la French Theory. Il s’inscrit dans la lignée d’un libéralisme tocquevillien tempéré par le souci de la justice sociale, à la différence d’un Hayek pour qui la justice exclut la justice sociale.
Complexe, mais sans appareil de notes, les Leçons de la philosophie n’est pas inaccessible pour un non philosophe. Mais comme tout ce qui est rigoureux, il n’est pas facile. Il demande du travail, et qui croit que la philosophie peut être facile s’est évidemment trompé d’adresse. Le grand mérite de l’ouvrage est sa clarté d’exposition pédagogique et l’art de prendre le temps de cette exposition. Subsidiairement, les auteurs prennent garde de ne pas abandonner l’approche justement philosophique de thèmes qui ont aussi, à l’évidence, d’autres dimensions. Qui peut nier que le thème de l’Etat, parmi bien d’autres, est aussi un thème historique, anthropologique, etc. Mais la valeur ajoutée qu’apporte l’ouvrage est justement de rester dans sa dimension irréductiblement philosophique, même s’il s’agit ici de philosophie politique, et donc indissociablement de philosophie morale. Non pas que le politique puisse se réduire à la morale, mais il a toujours un rapport avec la morale, c’est-à-dire avec l’idée que nous avons de la façon dont l’homme doit se tenir dans le monde et en société. Il y a une morale chez Machiavel et Schmitt.
Inutile de dire plus longuement que le livre d’Alain Renaut et de ses amis nourrira les questions plus qu’il n’y mettra un terme
Un seul exemple : l’opposition, dans le chapitre sur l’État, entre le libéralisme de Locke et l’absolutisme de Hobbes est remarquablement éclairée. Mais elle laisse sous silence les continuités partielles. Certes, leur conception de l’état de nature n’est pas la même, plus conflictuelle chez Hobbes que chez Locke. Les droits naturels de l’homme sont immédiats chez Locke, médiats chez Hobbes, après la délégation du pouvoir auprès du Léviathan, délégation que ne se fait pas de l’individu au souverain mais d’abord horizontalement, entre individus, qui se mettent d’accord pour, ensuite, déléguer le pouvoir au souverain (qui est un homme ou une assemblée).
Mais, dans les deux cas, Hobbes et Locke, la « réalité humaine est fondamentalement individuelle » (François Tricaud). Le modèle de Hobbes renvoie à un état de nature qui est une anticipation de la lutte dans une société de marché, telle que la bourgeoisie de son époque commence à la façonner. Il n’est pas indifférent que l’Etat tout puissant tel que le souhaite Hobbes ait été précisément le pendant de l’atomisation des individus, et ait été le moyen de leur imposer de force le libéralisme économique, la destruction des communs, d’imposer une économie de marché, puis quelques siècles plus tard une société de marché qu’elle portait dans ses flancs. (Crawford Brough MacPherson a expliqué cela dans La Théorie politique de l’individualisme possessif. De Hobbes à Locke, Folio, 2004). De ce fait, il n’est pas illégitime de voir dans Hobbes un père du libéralisme, mais un père pessimiste, beaucoup plus que ne l’était Locke, un père qui pense que, précisément, la prise en main d’une société d’individus isolés nécessite un Etat quasi dictatorial. C’est ce point qu’avait vu Joseph Vialatoux, mettant en évidence le fait que Hobbes voit l’individu à la place de la personne humaine entretenant des liens communautaires avec ses proches (c’est la problématique du personnalisme communautaire contre l’individualisme libéral).
Léo Strauss notait de son côté : « Du libéralisme pleinement développé, Hobbes ne se différencie que parce que, mais précisément parce que, il sait et voit contre quoi il faut imposer l’idéal libéral de la civilisation : pas seulement contre des institutions corrompues, contre la mauvaise volonté d’une couche dominante, mais contre la méchanceté naturelle de l’homme ; dans un monde qui n’est pas libéral, il installe les fondements du libéralisme contre – sit venia verbo – la nature non libérale de l’homme » (Commentaire de La Notion de politique de Carl Schmitt, in Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss et la notion de politique. Un dialogue entre absents, trad. F. Manent, Paris, Julliard, 1990, p. 140). On ne saurait mieux dire.
Het probleem van zo’n essaybundel, waarin we naast Cliteur namen terugvinden als 
Sid Lukkassen komt tot een andere conclusie: de culturele hegemonie van links moeten we laten voor wat ze is. We moeten compleet nieuwe, eigen media, netwerken en instellingen oprichten die niet ‘besmet’ zijn door het virus en voor echte vrijheid gaan: ‘De enige weg voorwaarts is dus het scheppen van een eigen thuishaven, een eigen Nieuwe Zuil met bijbehorende instituties en cultuurdragende organen. Die alternatieve media zijn volop aan het doorschieten, Doorbraak is er een van.
« On était exempt de ces fléaux quand on ne s’était pas encore laissé fondre aux délices, quand on n’avait de maître et de serviteur que soi. On s’endurcissait le corps à la peine et au vrai travail ; on le fatiguait à la course, à la chasse, aux exercices du labour. On trouvait au retour une nourriture que la faim toute seule savait rendre agréable. Aussi n’était-il pas besoin d’un si grand attirail de médecins, de fers, de boîtes à remèdes. Toute indisposition était simple comme sa cause : la multiplicité des mets a multiplié les maladies. Pour passer par un seul gosier, vois que de substances combinées par le luxe, dévastateur de la terre et de l’onde ! »
Et d’évoquer la pédophilie festive de nos romains diners :
It was most likely in the context of this scientific tradition and its enemies that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, generally recognized as Germany’s greatest poet (or one of them, at any rate), later authored attacks on Newton’s ideas, such as Theory of Colors. Goethe, an early pioneer in biology and the life sciences, loathed the notion that there is anything universally axiomatic about the mathematical sciences. Goethe had one major predecessor in this, the Anglo-Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley. Like Berkeley, Goethe argued that Newtonian abstractions contradict empirical understandings. Both Berkeley and Goethe, though for different reasons, took issue with the common (or at least, commonly Anglo-Saxon) wisdom that “mathematics is a universal language.”
Cuvier, however, does not belong to the German transcendentalist tradition, so Spengler mentions him only peripherally. On the other hand, in the third chapter of the second volume of The Decline of the West, Spengler uses a word that Charles Francis Atkinson translates as “admitted” to describe how Cuvier propounded the theory of catastrophism. Clearly, Spengler shows himself to be more sympathetic to Cuvier than to what he calls the “English thought” of Darwin.
Writing in 1963, Oliver avoids mention of Yockey’s “culture-distorter” or the Jewish Question (although he makes a nod to that Birchite proxy, the International Communist Conspiracy). Years later, with the “Birch Business” well behind him,
Car pour lui, nos sociétés occidentales sont caractérisées par le passage d’une phase solide de la modernité, stable, immobile et enracinée, à une phase liquide, fluide, volatile et néo-nomade où tout semble se désagréger et se liquéfier, phase « dans laquelle les formes sociales (les structures qui limitent les choix individuels, les institutions qui veillent au maintien des traditions, les modes de comportement acceptables) ne peuvent plus se maintenir durablement en l’état parce qu’elles se décomposent en moins de temps qu’il ne leur en faut pour être forgées et se solidifier
Above all, we must shed from within ourselves the idea that we, personally, are “entitled” to free speech or that the masses can welcome the whole truth. If we still have these notions, then we are in fact still slaves to our time’s democratic naïveté. No, free speech is at once a duty and a prize, to be exercised only once we have become worthy, by our own personal excellence and self-mastery. That was, at any rate, the way Diogenes the Cynic saw things, calling free speech “the finest thing of all in life.”
One might fairly assert that Berdyaev did himself little good publicity-wise by cultivating a style of presentation which, while often resolving its thought-processes in a brilliant, aphoristic utterance, nevertheless takes its time, looks at phenomena from every aspect, analyzes every proposition to its last comma and period, and tends to assert its findings bluntly rather than to argue them politely in the proper syllogistic manner. In Berdyaev’s defense, a sensitive reader might justifiably interpret his leisurely examination of the modern agony as a deliberate and quite appropriate response to the upheavals that harried him from the time of the 1905 Revolution to the German occupation of France during World War II. If the Twentieth Century insisted on being precipitate and eruptive in everything, without regard to the lethal mayhem it wreaked, then, by God, Berdyaev, regarding his agenda, would take his sweet time. Not for him the constant mobilized agitation, the sloganeering hysteria, the goose-stepping and dive-bombing spasms of modernity in full self-apocalypse. That is another characteristic of Berdyaev – he is all at once leisurely in style and apocalyptic in content. Berdyaev was quite as apocalyptic in his expository prose as his idol Fyodor Dostoevsky was in his ethical narrative, and being a voice of revelation he expressed himself, again like Dostoevsky, in profoundly religious and indelibly Christian terms. Berdyaev follows Dostoevsky and anticipates Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his conviction that no society can murder God, as Western secular society has gleefully done, and then go its insouciant way, without consequence.
By the mid-1930s, in the extended aftermaths of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, and in the context of the ideological dictatorships, the conviction had impressed itself on Berdyaev that the existing Western arrangement, pathologically disordered, betokened the dissolution of civilization, not its continuance. In The Fate of Man in the Modern World, Berdyaev summarizes his discovery. In modernity, a brutal phase of history, the human collectivity must endure the effects of ancestral decisions, which subsequent generations might have altered but chose instead to endorse, and live miserably or perhaps die according to them. Modernity is thus history passing judgment on history, as Berdyaev sees it; and modernity’s brutality, its nastiness, and its inhumanity all stem from the same cause – the repudiation of God and the substitution in His place of a necessarily degraded “natural-social realm.” Berdyaev writes, “We are witnessing the socialization and nationalization of human souls, of man himself.” Some causes of this degeneracy lie proximate to their effects. “Modern bestialism and its attendant dehumanization are based upon idolatry, the worship of technics, race or class or production, and upon the adaptation of atavistic instincts to worship.” Again, “Dehumanization is… the mechanization of human life.” With mechanization comes also the “dissolution of man into… functions.”
One of the pleasures of reading backwards into the dissentient discussion of modernity is the discovery of contrarian judgments, such as Berdyaev’s concerning the Florentine revival of classicism, that stand in refreshing variance with existing conformist opinion. Will Durant sums up the standing textbook view of the Renaissance in Volume 5 (1953) of his Story of Civilization. When “the humanists captured the mind of Italy,” as Durant writes, they “turned it from religion to philosophy, from heaven to earth, and revealed to an astonished generation the riches of pagan thought and art.” Having accomplished all that, according once again to Durant, the umanisti reorganized education on the premise that “the proper study of man was now to be man, in all the potential strength and beauty of his body, in all the joy and pain of his senses and feelings, [and] in all the frail majesty of his reason.” Durant’s tone implies something beyond mere description; it implies laudatory approval. Before turning back to Berdyaev, it is worth remarking how obviously wrongheaded Durant is in so few words. Insofar as the umanisti adopted Platonism – or rather late Neo-Platonism – they cannot exactly be said exclusively to have “turned” the general attention “from heaven to earth.” Rather, they refocused that attention from the transcendent God of the Bible and the Church Doctors to the celestial powers of Porphryian cosmology, the ones who might be manipulated by magical formulas to serve their earthly masters. Now in adopting Protagoras’ maxim that, man is the measure, the umanisti did, in fact, “terrestrialize” thinking. They achieved their end, however, only at the cost of swapping a cosmic-teleological perspective for an egocentric-instrumental one. It was an act of self-demotion. Had Berdyaev lived to read Durant’s Renaissance, he himself would inevitably have remarked these easy-to-spot misconceptions.
In The Meaning of the Creative Act, Berdyaev takes Benvenuto Cellini – a much-romanticized figure, using the adjective “romanticized” in its populist connotation – for one signal specimen of the “Renaissance Man.” Berdyaev is fully aware that describing the Renaissance simply as a revival of paganism amounts to inexcusable naïvety. “The great Italian Renaissance,” he writes, “is vastly more complex than is usually thought.” Berdyaev sees the so-called rebirth of classical letters and art as a botched experiment in dialectics, during which “there occurred such a powerful clash between pagan and Christian elements in human nature as had never occurred before.” The tragedy of the Renaissance consists in the fact, as Berdyaev insists, that, “the Christian transcendental sense of being had so profoundly possessed men’s nature that the integral and final confession of the immanent ideals of life became impossible.” Cellini embodies the conflict. In his life, no matter how declaredly “pagan,” “there is still too much of Christianity.” Cellini could never have been “an integral man,” as his moral degeneracy and spasmodic repentance attested. In Berdyaev’s argument, Christianity has effectuated, however imperfectly, a theurgic alteration in being towards a higher level. Cellini’s life illustrates the point. The attempt to return to being at a lower level must fail, as it failed for Cellini; it can bring only suffering to the subject and in the milieu that attempts it.
Berdyaev emphasizes the drastic diremption of the Quattrocento by reminding his readers of the earliest, purely Christian phase of the Renaissance. “It was in mystic Italy, in Joachim de Floris, that the prophetic hope of a new world-epoch of Christianity was born, an epoch of love, and epoch of spirit.” The pre-perspective painters also loom large in Berdyaev’s appreciation: “Giotto and all the early religious painting of Italy, Arnolfi and others, followed St. Francis and Dante.” Where Raphael and Leonardo, as Berdyaev intimates, worked in a realm of literalism – copying from nature in a mechanical way – these earlier figures exercised their genius on the level of “symbolism.” In Berdyaev’s view, “mystic Italy” prefigures late-Nineteenth Century Symbolism, a movement that he found rich in meaning and hopeful in implication. Joachim, Dante, and St. Francis all violated what Berdyaev calls “the bounds of the average, ordered, canonic way”; their “revolt” precludes “any sort of compromise with the bourgeois spirit,” as did the later revolt of Charles Baudelaire, Henrik Ibsen, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Whether it is Giotto or Baudelaire, the theurgic impulse aims, not to “create culture,” but to create “new being.”
Caliban and emergent mechanical mastery taken together might well form an image to make one skip a breath. For once the “ebullience” of liberation-from-religion neutralizes “spiritual authority” and stimulates the “differentiation,” natural man, ego-driven and undisciplined, is bound to end up in possession of the Neo-Atlantean instrumentality, whereupon the prospect opens out on no end of mischief. Berdyaev’s historical diagnosis indeed runs in this direction. He even formulates the law of what he calls “the strange paradox”: “Man’s self-affirmation leads to his perdition; the free play of human forces unconnected with any higher aim brings about the exhaustion of man’s creative powers.” The Protestant Reformation of the German North and the so-called Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century in France and the German states represent, in Berdyaev’s scheme, ever-lower stages of this descent into dissolution rather than the steps-upward of the ready version of Progress. The paradox of humanism consists in its having “affirmed man’s self-confidence” while also having “debased [man] by ceasing to regard him as a being of a higher and divine origin.”
Berdyaev certainly never stood alone in his diagnosis of modern despiritualization. Similar if not identical insights occur under the scrutiny not only of the other writers mentioned at the outset (from Blixen to Undset) but more recently in the work of Jacques Barzun (especially in his great late-career book, From Dawn to Decadence), Roberto Calasso, Jacques Ellul, René Girard, Paul Gottfried, Kenneth Minogue, Roger Scruton, and Eric Voegelin, to name but a few more or less at random. Yet however many names one crowds together in a sentence, the shared judgment remains in the minority and under exclusion. In the prevailing liberal-progressive view, the world is monistic and one-dimensional: Everything is race, class, gender, or the state. In Berdyaev’s dissenting view, the world is dualistic and three-dimensional: “Christianity reveals and confirms man’s belonging to two planes of being, to the spiritual and to the natural-social, to the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Caesar.” It is the first dimension – actually a double dimension – of height and depth that guarantees freedom in the second dimension. The denial of the realm of height and depth is therefore the essence, a totally negative essence, of the Kingdom of Caesar intransigent. Berdyaev values man over society because he values spirit over matter,” the sole concern of men on the “natural-social” plane. The existing society indeed values matter exclusively, to the extent of having fixated itself on the finished product – the latest cell phone or handheld electronic game-player or that contradiction-in-the-adjective, the smart car – while deputizing foreign nations to produce these things. This same society, a kind of super cargo-cult, deracinated, demoralized, despiritualized, badly educated, deluged in pornography and ideology, and as conformist as any primitive tribe, vigorously denies the spirit, where not explicitly as articulate theory then in behavior.
« Walter Laqueur l’a montré : une vie accélérée remplace l’atmosphère calme et recueillie de l’avant-guerre. De cent mille voitures particulières au sortir de la guerre, l’Allemagne passe à un million deux cent mille dix ans plus tard.
Conclusion apocalyptique :
Votre publication a eu récemment l’occasion de faire écho de façon favorable au livre de Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le Testament de Dieu, publié aux Éditions Grasset dans la collection « Figures ». Je pense que votre bonne foi a été surprise. [Il suffit, en effet, de jeter un rapide coup d’œil sur ce livre pour s’apercevoir que loin d’être un ouvrage majeur de philosophie politique, il fourmille littéralement d’erreurs grossières, d’à-peu-près, de citations fausses, ou d’affirmations délirantes. Devant l’énorme tapage publicitaire dont bénéficie cet ouvrage, et indépendamment de toute question politique et notamment de la nécessaire lutte contre le totalitarisme, 
Il est bon pourtant d’analyser les arguments de Bernard-Henri Lévy. Il y en a de quatre types : 
Mais Fustel décrit la corvée démocratique au jour le jour (pp.451-452) :
For those seeking something like a “how to” guide for living as a Traditionalist, it is mainly the second division of the book (“In the World Where God is Dead”) that offers something, and chiefly it is to be found in Chapter Eight: “The Transcendent Dimension – ‘Life’ and ‘More than Life.’” My purpose in this essay is to piece together the miniature “survival manual” provided by Chapter Eight – some of which consists of little more than hints, conveyed in Evola’s often frustratingly opaque style. It is my view that what we find in these pages is of profound importance for anyone struggling to hold on to his sanity in the face of the decadence and dishonesty of today’s world. It is also essential reading for anyone seeking to achieve the ideal of “self-overcoming” taught by Evola – seeking, in other words, to “ride the tiger.”
Still, through this gloom one may detect exactly the position that Evola correctly attributes to Nietzsche. Like Kant, Nietzsche demands that the overman practice autonomy, that he give a law to himself. However, Kant held that our self-legislation simultaneously legislates for others: the law I give to myself is the law I would give to any other rational being. The overman, by contrast, legislates for himself only – or possibly for himself and the tiny number of men like him. If we recognize fundamental qualitative differences between human types, then we must consider the possibility that different rules apply to them. Fundamental to Kant’s position is the egalitarian assertion that people do not get to “play by their own rules” (indeed, for Kant the claim to be an exception to general rules, or to make an exception for oneself, is the marker of immorality). If we reject this egalitarianism, then it does indeed follow that certain special individuals get to play by their own rules.
As with the passions, the average man “owns” his moods: “this unhappiness is mine, it is me,” he says, in effect. The superior man learns to see his moods as if they were the weather – or, better yet, as if they were minor demons besetting him: external mischief makers, to whom he has the power to say “yes” or “no.” The superior man, upon finding that he feels unhappiness, says “ah yes, there it is again.” Immediately, seeing “his” unhappiness as other – as a habit, a pattern, a kind of passing mental cloud – he refuses identification with it. And he sets about intrepidly conquering unhappiness. He will not acquiesce to it.
If we consult the context in which the quote appears – an important section of Twilight of the Idols – Nietzsche offers us little help in understanding specifically what he means by “the distance that separates us.” But the surrounding context is a goldmine of reflections on the superior type, and it is surprising that Evola does not quote it more fully. Nietzsche remarks that “war educates for freedom” (a point on which Evola reflects at length in his Metaphysics of War), then writes:
Evola’s very long sentence about the superior man now ends with the following summation:
First, a few words about Spengler’s writing in this book, which I found to be terrible: like Heidegger, overly dense and sometimes nearly incomprehensible in the pompous old school German style (in contrast, Nietzsche, particularly apart from Zarathustra, was exceedingly comprehensible and easily understandable). Contrary to all of Spengler’s breathless fans, I did not find his magnum opus to be very well written. It’s a terribly boring, turgid compilation of rambling prose. I can only imagine the full-scale version is worse (and if memory serves, it was). Another point is that Spengler’s deconstructivism is highly annoying to the more empiricist among us, his idea that Nature is a function of a particular culture. Well (and the same applies to some of Yockey’s [plagiarized] rambling on the subject), for some cultures, Nature apparently is a more accurate “function” of reality than for others, and this more accurate representation of objective reality has real world consequences that cannot be evaded.
The sections “Race is Style” and “People and Nation” are of course relevant from a racial nationalist perspective, and reflects Spengler’s anti-scientific stupidity, this time about biological race. Those of you familiar with Yockey’s wrong-headed assertions on this topic will see all the same in Spengler’s work (from which Yockey lifted his assertions). This has been critiqued by many – from Revilo Oliver to myself – and it is not necessary to rehash all of the arguments against the Spenglerian (Boasian) deconstructivist attitudes toward biological race. We can just shake our heads sadly about Spengler’s racial fantasies – that is as absurd as that of any hysterical leftist SJW race-denier – and move on to other issues.
Those are mere details however. Important details, but not the fundamental, the main thesis. So, what about the main thesis of his work? The overall idea of cyclical history? Yockey’s lifting of that idea in his own work? Rereading Spengler’s major thesis hasn’t changed my mind about it in any major way, but there are some further points to make.
Let’s get back to Spengler’s content, and some of my objections alluded to above. Thus, as far as content goes, my “take” on it remains the same; I agree with much but I disagree with much as well, particularly the “pessimistic” inevitability of it, and the smug arrogance in suggesting, or implying, that disagreement with that aspect of the work implies some sort of mental weakness, delusion, or cowardice on the part of the reader. Spengler himself suggests that he “truth” of the book is a “truth” for him, a “truth” for a particular Culture in a particular time, and should not necessarily be viewed as an absolute truth in any or every sense (indeed, it everything from science to mathematics is, according to Spengler, formed by the Culture which creates it, and is thus no absolute in any universal sense, then we can quote Pilate ‘“what is truth?”). Therefore, my “truth” in the current year leads me to conclusions different from Spengler; one can again assert that Spengler himself, by writing the book and outlining he problem, himself undermined his assertion of inevitability, since know we can understand the trajectories of Cultures and, possibly, how to affect those trajectories.
That is related to an important deficit in the work of Spengler that I have read. He describes the lifecycle of High Cultures, but never really dissects why the cultures inevitably (or so he says) move from Culture to Civilization to Fellahdom. What actually are the mechanistic causes of Spring to Summer to Fall to Winter? I guess that Spengler (and Yockey) would just say that it is what it is, that the Culture is life an organism that grows old and dies. The problem is that this analogy is just that, an analogy. A Culture is composed of living organisms, humans, but is itself not alive. And esoteric rambling about a “cosmic beat” explains nothing. If ones buys into the Spenglerian premise, then some rigorous analysis as to why High Cultures progress in particular ways is necessary. We need an anatomical and molecular analysis of the “living organism” of the High Culture. Does Frost’s genetic pacification play a role? The cycle, noted by Hamilton, of barbarian invasions, the influx of altruism genes, followed by the aging of the civilization at which point fresh barbarian genes are required to spark a renaissance in the depleted fellhahs? The moral decay that occurs with too much luxury, too much wealth, too much power? A form of memetic exhaustion? 
I maintain that those of us in the interregnum between High Cultures have the power to shape 
Speaking of Russia, another part of Spengler’s work that I found reasonably well argued and somewhat convincing (as well as fairly novel) is his idea of applying the concept of pseudomorphosis to human populations. In particular, one cannot really dispute some of his points about the Magian and Russian cultures in this regard, but when he says that Antony should have won at Actium – what nonsense is that? So, that Rome should have become more tainted with Near Eastern cults and ideas even more than it was? What’s the opposite of pseudomorphosis – where a Civilization becomes memetically conquered by a meme originating from a young Culture? How did the memetic virus of Christianity infect the West? Wouldn’t it have been worse if Actium was won by the East? When Spengler writes of “syncretism” he begins to touch upon this reversal, which eventually goes in both directions (and as Type I “movement” apologists for Christianity like to tell us, that religion was eventually “Germanized” in the West).
And if Spengler’s main thesis is flawed by its own self-realization, what can one say about his side ideas? Those, particularly dealing with science, are absolute hogwash. In that sense, Spengler is over-rated, never mind his poor writing, including his horrifically turgid style. Yockey may have been offended by this “blasphemy” against his idol – “The Philosopher of History” – but it is nevertheless warranted.