# Man's flight from the reality of mortality (Oswald Spengler)



## Reformed Covenanter (Aug 6, 2021)

I have seen @Edward mention Oswald Spengler a few times. I came across the below interesting observation in one of his books:

Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the _form of all that is actual_ - from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual - whether this be animal or plant or man - is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures.

Every creation is foredoomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the " have-been " works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hubris of Prometheus, who thrust his band into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about "undying achievements "?

Oswald Spengler, _Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life_, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (1932; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), pp 13-14.

Reactions: Like 1


----------



## RamistThomist (Aug 6, 2021)

Spengler is easily among the top 3 "most interesting thinkers I have read in the past few years."


----------



## Jerusalem Blade (Aug 7, 2021)

It's true what Spengler says about dismissing our mortality. Something I had written a few weeks ago when it was discovered I had such a severe blockage of my left carotid artery a stroke could easily have been imminent:

Part of the thing about the possible stroke is that I could die anytime, without notice — or be severely debilitated. That initially threw me! I’m used to being in control of my life — after all, it’s been 79 years I’ve been living, and it *felt* like I’m always going to be living! I don’t mean _eternally_ living, but living in _this_ life. I’m just _*used*_ to being alive.​
It's hard to imagine _not_ being alive in this world.
​​​

Reactions: Love 1


----------

