Just Try Not to Think About Those Rapture Rockets and Nazi Salutes

Spengler never gives a single tidy definition of China’s “space‑feeling,” but the scholarship makes one thing clear: he treats China as a distinct High Culture with its own primordial intuition of space, and Chinese thinkers in the 1920s–40s engaged with this idea as part of defining an autonomous Chinese cultural identity.

Through the power of pure inductive reason, that scholarship, and Spengler’s own morphology, the Chinese space‑feeling can be divined as follows.

THE ENCLOSED CULTIVATED GARDEN. Where the West (Faustian) feels space as infinite and directional, Spengler sees China as oriented toward bounded, shaped, humanized space—the world as a garden rather than an endless frontier.

This intuition expresses itself in walled cities,  courtyards, terraced landscapes, patterned, ritualized arrangements of space. It is a world that is tended, not conquered. Why does it remind me of Tuscany?

Organic rather than geometric. Chinese space is grown, not engineered. It is rhythmic, seasonal, curved—more like a landscape painting than a cathedral vault.

This contrasts with Apollonian “near‑space” (Classical body-centered statuary before Platonism), Faustian “infinite space” (Western bam-zoom and Marvel comics art), Magian “cavern‑space” (Arab–Persian: Ptolemy the Astronomer meets Mithras in his grotto).

China’s intuition is earth‑rooted and horticultural. Distance is measured in terms of the time and effort it takes to get to your destination: the li.

Harmonizing rather than expansive. Spengler reads Chinese culture as seeking balance, not transcendence or boundlessness. This manifests as Confucian ritual order, bureaucratic equilibrium, agrarian continuity,

cyclical historical sensibility.

The Chinese world‑sense is a cosmic village, not a cosmic voyage. Earth‑bound, ancestral, and inward

instead of the Western upward/outward thrust. China’s space‑feeling is presumed or supposed to be downward toward soil, inward toward family and lineage,  continuous rather than progressive. It is the intuition of cultivated earth, not infinite sky. Somehow the Mandate of Heaven fits in, I just know it. Maybe the garden is impressed on the earth from on high.

The Comparative Civilization Forum archive notes that Chinese thinkers in the 1920s–40s used Spengler’s framework to argue that Chinese culture was an autonomous organism, not a lagging version of the West.  

Spengler’s idea of a unique Chinese space‑feeling helped articulate a distinct cultural identity during a period of intense debate about Westernization.

China’s space‑feeling, for Spengler, is the intuition of the world as a cultivated, enclosed, organic, earth‑bound garden—harmonized rather than expanded, rhythmic rather than infinite.

What seems lacking is the long and winding road with its Taoistic sigmoid curves. The Taoistic intuition of space does look like a living sigmoid curve: winding, asymmetrical, adaptive, never rectilinear. But here’s the twist: Spengler assigns the primordial Chinese space‑feeling not to Taoism but to the older, agrarian, ancestral, Confucian stratum of the culture‑organism.

Confucianism = the “form‑language” of the Culture. For Spengler, every High Culture has a primordial intuition of space, and  a canonical style that expresses it. The ancestors of the Faustians used Gothic architecture to imitate the tall trees in their ancestral forests. He thinks China’s canonical style is courtyard geometry,  walled cities, terraced fields, ritualized spatial order. This is the garden‑space intuition: bounded, cultivated, harmonized.

Confucianism, in his eyes, is the codification of that spatial instinct.

OTH IMHO Taoism = the "late mystical counter‑current”.

Spengler sees Taoism as inward, dissolving, anti‑form,  a mystical softening of the Confucian frame. It’s the same way he treats Neoplatonism in the Classical world,  Sufism in the Magian world, Romanticism in the Faustian world. These are late, dissolving, curve‑like movements that arise after the culture’s primary form‑language is established.

So Taoism, for him, is not the root intuition—it’s the counter‑gesture. If we step out of Spengler’s taxonomy and look at the actual phenomenology of Chinese space, Taoism is the one that flows like a river, coils like a dragon path, bends like a mountain trail, or spirals like a pine branch.

This is sigmoid space—curved, adaptive, non‑teleological, maximally optimizing. It’s the space of wu wei, meandering streams, the “uncarved block”, - wandering sages, and landscape scrolls that unfold like S‑curves.

If you were building a civilizational morphology from scratch, Taoism would be the obvious candidate for China’s spatial intuition.

Why didn't Spengler choose it? Because Spengler’s method privileges the dominant public form, not the mystical minority, the built environment, not the metaphysical imagination, the long bureaucratic rhythm, not the wandering sage. Confucianism shaped the visible, architectural, administrative world of China.  

Taoism shaped the inner, poetic, metaphysical world. 

Spengler always picks the former as the space‑feeling of the creative minority.

 A synthesis you might enjoy

Fuse Confucian space with Taoist space. Together they form a dual spatial intuition, the frame (Confucian),  the flow (Taoist). A loom and a thread. A terrace and a stream. A courtyard and a wandering path.

Mao's highly personal, full-blown, bat-shit crazy immortality project. 

Chinese I was well and truly over and done with. Following decay (or during it, since periodization is fuzzy) came the invaders. This time the invaders were Us. We brought our own ideas to the cultural synthesis. This did not suit the Mad Marxist at all.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution had multiple overlapping goals, but the murk has been cleared to give us a factual backbone for them. From there, we can also trace the deeper civilizational logic that animated Mao’s choices.

Historically documented, authoritative sources identify four primary aims:

❶ Replace successors who were drifting toward pragmatism. Mao feared that leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were steering China toward a Soviet‑style technocratic model. He wanted new cadres loyal to his revolutionary line.

❷ Rectify and purify the Communist Party. Mao believed “bourgeois elements” had infiltrated the party and state, threatening to restore capitalism.

❸ Give youth a revolutionary experience. A thrill a minute. He wanted to mobilize students as a moral shock force—Red Guards—to “bombard the headquarters” and revive revolutionary fervor.

❹ Reshape education, culture, and health systems to be less elitist. Mao saw traditional hierarchies—Confucian, academic, professional—as reproducing inequality and betraying the revolution.

But beneath the policy goals was a deeper civilizational goal. If we read Mao through the same morphological lens we used with Spengler, the Cultural Revolution becomes something more radical:

❶ A war on China’s inherited “space‑feeling”. Mao wanted to destroy Confucian hierarchy, ancestral authority, the garden‑space of harmony and continuity.

He saw these as the deep grammar of “feudal” China.

In Spenglerian terms, Mao attempted to break the civilizational form‑language of China and replace it with a new revolutionary one.

❷ A forced re‑founding of the culture-organism. Mao believed revolutions decay unless periodically renewed.  

So he tried to create a permanent revolution, a kind of cultural Year Zero. This is why temples were smashed, - teachers humiliated, genealogies burned, classical texts destroyed.

It was an attempt to erase the old symbolic order.

Pol Pot was a copycat.

❸ A political purge disguised as metaphysics. Mao fused  personal power consolidation, ideological purification, and metaphysical renewal. He framed political rivals as embodiments of “bourgeois” or “feudal” tendencies, turning factional struggle into cosmic struggle.

❹ A ritual of chaos to prevent bureaucratic ossification. Knowing just enough to be dangerous, Mao feared China would become Soviet, technocratic,  managerial, and thus predictable.

So he unleashed chaos to prevent the Party from hardening into a stable elite. This is why the Cultural Revolution repeatedly attacked the very institutions that ran the state.

In short, the Cultural Revolution’s official goals were political and ideological, but its deeper aim was civilizational: to uproot China’s inherited cultural grammar and replace it with a perpetually revolutionary one. It was an attempt to destroy the Confucian “garden‑space” and replace it with a new, ever‑struggling, ever‑mobilized revolutionary cosmos. He was trying to overwrite a culture’s primordial space‑intuition by acts of pure destruction.

A civilization only becomes a “II” when its old cultural grammar is allowed to reconstitute around new historical conditions. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was, in effect, an attempt to block any sort of reconstitution.

❶ Civilizational “II” forms require synthesis, not rupture. In Spenglerian terms, a “II Civilization”  emerges when the old symbolic order is not destroyed,  but reinterpreted, re‑harmonized, and re‑embedded in new institutions. Think of Hellenistic II Greece (Classical → Hellenistic); Carolingian II Europe (Late Roman → Medieval); *Heian II Japan (Yamato → Classical Japanese). These are syntheses, not purges.

A “II” form is always a continuity‑through‑transformation.

❷ Mao attempted the opposite: a Year Zero. The Cultural Revolution tried to sever lineage, erase Confucian grammar, destroy ancestral memory, uproot the garden‑space, break the bureaucratic continuity,  delegitimize classical texts, and annihilate the scholar‑gentry habitus.

This is not synthesis. This is anti‑continuity. It is the civilizational equivalent of burning the loom so no new tapestry can be woven.

❹ Why this blocks a “Chinese II Civilization”. A “II” form requires the old cosmology, the old spatial intuition, the old symbolic repertoire to be available for recombination. The old Ptolemaic cosmology was not busted entirely by the Faustian verve but rearranged (or painfully midwifed) by Kepler.

But Mao’s project aimed to destroy the archive—not just the physical archive, but the living one. Ritual,  etiquette, kinship, pedagogy, classical language, - aesthetic sensibility, and moral cultivation are the raw materials of a civilizational rebirth. Without them, the culture cannot “turn over” into a new phase.  

It can only flatten into ideology.

❹ The tragic irony is tjat Mao delayed the necessary synthesis he feared. By trying to prevent a Confucian‑Marxist synthesis, Mao actually delayed China’s civilizational re‑centering, forced a later, more compressed re‑synthesis, created a vacuum that Deng’s reforms filled with pragmatism rather than metaphysics.

The difference between a reconstitution and the genesis of a new civilization with a new instrumentality of enrichment and flourishing is too hard to call. Why, Kroeber asked, couldn't the phases of the West be relabeled as West I, West II, West III etc? Why is it "Indian II" and "Chinese II"?

The result is that Chinese II Civilization—if it emerges (as I think it has) —will be post‑Mao, post‑trauma, post‑rupture, and therefore more hybrid, more improvisational, more self‑conscious. This last item is very interesting. Now that psychohistory is believed to be possible, what will a self-conscious civilization look like? What'll it DO?

In any eventuality, it will not be a smooth Confucian‑Marxist fusion. It will be a genesis after a civilizational near‑death experience.

❺ The deeper Spenglerian point is Spengler;s belief that late‑phase revolutions often try to erase the cultural soul in order to impose a new one. But the soul of a High Culture is not so easily killed. The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to destroy the Chinese “garden‑space” and replace it with a permanent revolutionary “struggle‑space”. But the garden re‑grows. 

And that regrowth is precisely what a “Chinese II Civilization” would be. Even now geopoliticians are arguing about what China will do next. One side is denying that China will not follow the typical territorial expansionism. Where's the blue-water navy? Oh yeah, but what about the Belt-and-Road Initiative?