My Top 12 Favorite Philosophical Works of the 20th Century

By John David Ebert

1. The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler (1918-1924): A little known and rarely discussed fact is that Heidegger, in his early lectures, read Spengler and was clearly both concerned and worried about the implications of his ideas. Spengler also seems to have been instrumental in the creation of Heidegger’s idea of Dasein, since he, too, uses the word, but in a different, more vitalistic-Romantic way.  In Spengler, Dasein, or Being, is opposed to Wachsein, or Waking Being, as instinct is opposed to intellect. World civilizations are unfoldings of Dasein, or Being, by supra-rational entelechies that function like cultural monads which unfold their life cycles deterministically from within. Though history appears to be a mess, Spengler saw that it was ordered by these 8 great civilizations, each of which irrefutably underwent a process of form-evolution that involved the birth of a particular Dasein, its growth and attainment of cultural maturity through a mastery of the arts, followed by a subsequent loss of such ability and decline into historical senescence and cultural irrelevance.  The most sobering part of Spengler’s theory, every part of which seems to be daily confirmed by one or another new headline, is that we in the West have passed the moment of our Greek-like mastery of art and culture and have entered a Roman-like period of militarism and empire with its attendant lack of competence in the arts. The shifting from metaphysical concerns in philosophy to economic-pragmatic concerns is symptomatic.

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A Question of Values

by Morris Berman

Reviewed by John David Ebert

You know that something fundamental and utterly irreversible has befallen the American publishing industry when Morris Berman, the author of The Twilight of American Culture and Dark Ages America, both published by a major house (W.W. Norton), is unable to find a publisher for his new book. As he remarks: “No American publisher was even mildly interested” since “clearly, a book like this is not going to make anybody rich.” Berman therefore decided to self-publish it on Amazon’s new self-publisher called Createspace. Read the rest of this entry »

Akhenaten and the Birth of Monotheism

An Essay by John David Ebert

I. Blackboard

The religious pattern of Western monotheism that becomes evident when the lives of Moses, Christ and Mohammad are drawn out on the blackboard is already clearly sketched out in the life of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, the West’s prototypal monotheist. There is no way to describe the founders of the three great monotheisms of the West without first glancing back at the pattern laid down by Akhenaten, whose great experiment already forecasts their advent. Read the rest of this entry »