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(More customer reviews)Spengler wrote "Man and Technics" as a short and accessible supplement to his 'magnum opus', "The Decline of the West". Despite being short this is in fact a truly GREAT book. Spengler examines man's way on earth from the perspective of a philosophical anthropology. In agreement with the other exponents of reactionary modernism in Weimar Germany, Spengler focuses on technology as the critical feature of the Faustian Western Civilization. Spengler uses the Goethian hero in order to disclose to the reader the likely outcome of man's blind worship of instrumental technological reason. At the same time he scorns the West for its imperialism and violation of the life-style of other cultures. Apart from the -mostly accurate - prognoses that it makes, "Man and Technics" reveals a detached view of humanity as if perceived from an Archimedean point of view. Spengler remains a great thinker, rather misunderstood, who ought to be rediscovered by modern intellectuals for his penetrating insight and his uncompromising honesty!
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"In the following pages I lay before the reader a few thoughts that are taken from a larger work on which I have been engaged for years.It had been my intention to use the same method which in The Decline of the West I had limited to the group of the higher Cultures, for the investigation of their historical pre-requisite - namely, the history of Man from his origins.But experience with the earlier work showed that the majority of readers are not in a postion to maintain a general view over the mass of ideas as a whole, and so lose themselves in the detail of this or that domain which is familiar to them, seeing the rest either obliquely or not at all.In consequence they obtain an incorrect picture, both of what I have written and of the subject-matter about which I wrote. Now, as then, it is my conviction that the destiny of Man can only be understood by dealing with all the provinces of his activity simultaneously and comparatively, and avoiding the mistake of trying to elucidate some problem, say, of his politics or his religion or his art, solely in terms of particular sides of his being, in the belief that, this done, there is no more to be said.Nevertheless, in this book I venture to put forward some of the questions.They are a few among many.But they are interconnected, and for that reason may serve, for the time being, to help the reader to a provisional glimpse into the great secret of Man's destiny."--- Oswald Spengler
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