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The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality Kindle Edition
- Publication dateDecember 2, 2012
- LanguageEnglish
- File size1641 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Often damned but still cited (the very title can turn a whole evening into a disputation), it is still a provocative and often dazzling book....An exciting excursion through history."―Time
"What [Spengler] wrote was an epic poem....The lesson to be learned from him is that writers too can be seismographs; the trembling of Spengler's themes signaled the coming of the Nazi earthquake."―New Statesman
About the Author
Oswald Spengler, one of the most controversial historians of this century, was born in Blankenburg, Germany in 1880 and died in Munich in 1936.
H. Stuart Hughes is Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of California at San Diego. He is the author of many books, including Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate, Consciousness and Society and, most recently, Sophisticated Rebels.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment--the West European--American.
Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms--social, spiritual and political--which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities indeed secondary or derived from that something? Does world-history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what are the limits to which reasoning from such premisses may be pushed?
Is it possible to find in life itself--for human history is the sum of mighty life-courses which already have had to be endowed with ego and personality, in customary thought and expression, by predicating entities of a higher order like "the Classical" or "the Chinese Culture," "Modern Civilization"--a series of stages which must be traversed, and traversed moreover in an ordered and obligatory sequence? For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime, are fundamentals--may not these notions, in this sphere also, possess a rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted? In short, is all history founded upon general biographic archetypes?
The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.
If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms--peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craftworks, sciences, laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events--may be accepted and pointed to as symbols.
The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.
It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the expression-forms of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs, situations, persons, are ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon has hardly ever been discussed without a side-glance at Caesar and Alexander--analogies of which, as we shall see, the first is morphologically quite in acceptable and the second is correct. Frederick the Great, in his political writings--such as his Considerations, 1738--moves among analogies with perfect assurance. Thus he compares the French to the Macedonians under Philip and the Germans to the Greeks. "Even now," he says, "the Thermopylae of Germany, Alsace and Lorraine, are in the hands of Philip," therein exactly characterizing the policy of Cardinal Fleury. We find him drawing parallels also between the policies of the Houses of Habsburg and Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony and of Octavius.
Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually implied rather a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious expressions than a really deep sense of historical forms. In this region no one hitherto has set himself to work out a method, nor has had the slightest inkling that there is here a root, in fact the only root, from which can come a broad solution of the problems of History. Analogies, insofar as they laid bare the organic structure of history, might be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique, developing under the influence of a comprehensive idea, would surely eventuate in inevitable conclusions and logical mastery. But as hitherto understood and practised, they have been a curse, for they have enabled the historians to follow their own tastes, instead of soberly realizing that their first and hardest task was concerned with the symbolism of history and its analogies.
Thus our theme, which originally comprised only the limited problem of present-day civilization, broadens itself into a new philosophy--the philosophy of the future, so far as the metaphysically exhausted soil of the West can bear such, and in any case the only philosophy which is within the possibilities of the West European mind in its next stages. It expands into the conception of a morphology of world-history, of the world-as-history in contrast to the morphology of the world-as-nature that hitherto has been almost the only theme of philosophy. And it reviews once again the forms and movements of the world in their depths and final significance, but this time according to an entirely different ordering, which groups them, not in an ensemble picture inclusive of everything known, but in a picture of life, and presents them not as things-become, but as things-becoming.
The world-as-history, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its opposite, the world-as-nature--here is a new aspect of human existence on this earth. As yet, in spite of its immense significance, both practical and theoretica1, this aspect has not been realized, still less presented. Some obscure inkling of it there may have been, a distant momentary glimpse there has often been, but no one has deliberately faced it and taken it in with all its implications. We have before us two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and experience the world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and purposes of imagination ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes of experience dissecting according to scheme; and--to mention even thus early an opposition that has never yet been noted, in spite of its significance--the domain of chronological from that of mathematical number.
Consequently, in a research such as that lying before us, there can be no question of taking spiritual-political events, as they become visible day by day on the surface, at their face value, and arranging them on a scheme of "causes" or "effects" and following them up in the obvious and intellectually easy directions. Such a "pragmatic" handling of history would be nothing but a piece of "natural science" in disguise, and for their part, the supporters of the materialistic idea of history make no secret about it--it is their adversaries who largely fall to see the similarity of the two methods. What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are, per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by appearing. I have not hitherto found one who has carefully considered the morphological relationship that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all branches of a Culture. Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and--what has perhaps been impossible hitherto--things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable.
But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory-enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its methods almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone has completely disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics, and thus we imagine ourselves to be carrying on historical research when we are really following out objective connexions of cause and effect. Judged by the standards of the physicist and the mathematician, the historian becomes careless as soon as he has assembled and ordered his material and passes on to interpretation. That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect--which I may call the logic of space--another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny--the logic of time--is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinction to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the Critique of Pure Reason investigates. This fact still awaits its theoretical formulation.
Mathematics and the principle of Causality lead to a naturalistic, Chronology and the idea of Destiny to a historical ordering of the phenomenal world. Both orderings, each on its own account, cover the whole world. The difference is only in the eyes by which and through which this world is realized.
THE MEANING OF HISTORY FOR THE INDIVIDUAL
Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of them it is that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human existence.
Man, thus, has before him two possible ways of regarding the world. But it must be noted, at the very outset, that these possibilities are not necessarily actualities, and if we are to enquire into the sense of all history we must begin by solving a question which has never yet been put, viz., for whom is there History? The question is seemingly paradoxical, for history is obviously for everyone to this extent, that every man, with his whole existence and consciousness, is a part of history. But it makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of himself as something rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type of consciousness there is certainly no world-history, no world-as history. But how if the self-consciousness of a whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistoric spirit? How must actuality appear to it? The world? Life?
ANTIQUITY AND INDIA: UNHISTORICAL
What diaries and autobiographies yield in respect of an individual, that historical research in the widest and most inclusive sense--that is, every kind of psychological comparison and analysis of alien peoples, times and customs--yields as to the soul of a Culture as a whole. But the Classical Culture possessed no memory, no organ of history in this special sense. The memory of the Classical man--so to call it, though it is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls a notion derived from our own-- is something different, since past and future, as arraying perspectives in the working consciousness, are absent and the "pure Present," which so often roused Goethe's admiration in every product of the Classical life and in sculpture particularly, fills that life with an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown. This pure Present, whose greatest symbol is the Doric column, in itself predicates the negation of time (of direction). For Herodotus and Sophocles, as for Themistocles or a Roman consul, the past is subtilized instantly into an impression that is timeless and changeless, polar and not periodic in structure--in the last analysis, of such stuff as myths are made of--whereas for our worldsense and our inner eye the past is a definitely periodic and purposeful organism of centuries or millennia. For this reason, although Classical man was well acquainted with the strict chronology and almanac-reckoning of the Babylonians and especially the Egyptians, and therefore with that eternity-sense and disregard of the present-as-such which revealed itself in their broadly conceived operations of astronomy and their exact measurements of big time-intervals, none of this ever became intimately a part of him.
As regards Classical history-writing, take Thucydides. The mastery of this man lies in his truly Classical power of making alive and self-explanatory the events of the present, and also in his possession of the magnificently practical outlook of the born statesman who has himself been both general and administrator. In virtue of this quality of experience (which we unfortunately confuse with the historical sense proper), his work confronts the merely learned and professional historian as an inimitable model, and quite rightly so. But what is absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective, the power of surveying the history of centuries, that which for us is implicit in the very conception of a historian. The fine pieces of Classical history-writing are invariably those which set forth matters within the political present of the writer, whereas for us it is the direct opposite, our historical masterpieces without exception being those which deal with a distant past. Thucydides would have broken down in handling even the Persian Wars, let alone the general history of Greece, while that of Egypt would have been utterly out of his reach. He, as well as Polybius and Tacitus (who, like him, were practical politicians), loses his sureness of eye from the moment when, in looking backwards, he encounters motive forces in any form that is unknown in his practical experience. For Polybius even the First Punic War, for Tacitus even the reign of Augustus, is explicable. As for Thucydides, his lack of historical feeling--in our sense of the phrase--is conclusively demonstrated on the very first page of his book by the astounding statement that before his time (about 400 B.C.) no events of importance had occurred (ov ueyaaa yeveoOai) in the world! 1
1 The attempts of the Greeks to frame something like a calendar or a chronology after the Egyptian fashion, besides being very belated indeed, were of extreme naivete. The Olympiad reckoning is not an era in the sense of, say, the Christian chronology, and is, moreover, a late and purely literary expedient, without popular currency. The people, in fact, had no general need of a numeration wherewith to date the experiences of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, though a few learned persons might he interested in the calendar question. We are not here concerned with the soundness or unsoundness of a calendar, but with its currency, with the question of whether men regulated their lives by it or not.
Product details
- ASIN : B00AHHVHK8
- Publication date : December 2, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 1641 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 487 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,618,545 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #21,063 in History of the U.S.
- #92,843 in United States History (Books)
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About the author
Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was a philosopher of history who is regarded as one of the principal figures of the Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic. His most important work was his two-volume 1918/23 book The Decline of the West, in which he theorised that all civilisations go through an inevitable cycle of rise and fall, with the West currently entering its declining period. The book went on to be immensely influential throughout the world. He saw a distinction between what he termed ‘Prussian socialism’ and Marxism. Although a nationalist, he was sceptical of the Nazis when they came to power, disagreeing particularly with their racial policies. In 1933, he was granted membership in the Senate of the German Academy. Arktos has issued reprints of his books Man and Technics, Prussianism and Socialism and The Hour of Decision in different languages.
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Customers find the book's content erudite and an outstanding philosophical force. They describe it as an expertly designed electronic rendition of a classic at affordable prices. However, some customers report issues with translation quality, errata, and scan quality. Opinions vary on readability - some find it great and interesting, while others find the writing difficult.
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Customers appreciate the book's erudite content. They find it an outstanding philosophical work with a tangible academic perspective. Readers describe it as the greatest achievement of Western thought and the greatest non-fiction book. The basic premise seems sound, but the writing can be difficult to understand. Art, music, politics, and theology will help readers understand the content, form, and aim of the book.
"...arguments for and against Spengler’s unorthodox approach, his erudition in mathematics, the natural sciences, and classical literature is impressive...." Read more
"...or a bad philosophy, all that matters is that his theory of world history is correct...." Read more
"...the core foundations of conservative thought, in a very tangible academic viewpoint, essential but too often missed in understanding today's politics." Read more
"...Hands down one of the most voracious arguments in all of modern philosophy. Readers of Nietzsche, Goethe, and Heidegger will not be disappointed...." Read more
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"...Yet his style is dreamlike and poetic (in the epic sense). This book is not for everyone, but if it speaks to you it will light your fire." Read more
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"The first chapter is worth the (already low) price of the book. Spengler was clearly ahead of his time...." Read more
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"...Great architecture, advanced mathematics, artistic innovations, technological ingenuity, statecraft, warfare, etc...." Read more
"...It is a dense, serious, and demanding book. It is not a fun read, but it is necessary...." Read more
"...Over all I believe it to be an essential read to understanding the core foundations of conservative thought, in a very tangible academic viewpoint,..." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2016Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” was and still is a controversial book. Some have even regarded it as hopelessly flawed. Conceived just before 1911 and written during World War I, it was published a few months before Germany signed the Armistice (in 1918) that would lead to its eventual calamities within the Weimar Republic and set the stage for the rise of the Third Reich. Whatever else one may say about it, the book seems to have been eerily prophetic, especially for Germany.
Spengler’s unconventional and creative technique of using imagination and intuition to divine the probable future by way of “physiognomic meaning” and “morphological” analysis rather than the more accepted “systematic” approach of compiling facts and dates was met with scathing criticism by much of the academic world. Nevertheless, Spengler’s difficult book became a sensation in Germany and quickly sold 90,000 copies, much to the chagrin of the experts. Throughout the book Spengler is attempting to write a “philosophy of history” as opposed to a mere recounting of the past devoid of intrinsic order or inner necessity. Instead, Spengler was seeing each fact in the historical picture according to its symbolic context. He wanted to set free their shapes, hidden deep beneath the surface of a true “history of human progress.” Yet there was no such thing as progress (in the evolutionary sense) according to Spengler. The entire book was a protest against Darwinism and its systematic science based upon causality. Instead, he regarded a “culture” as an organism and world history as its biography. The best metaphor for his “morphological” approach was the four seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter. The instinctive genius of a youthful, even barbaric culture in the springtime of its development would enable it to flourish. As it matured it would exult in all the potentialities of its creativity, reaching heights never before attempted. Great architecture, advanced mathematics, artistic innovations, technological ingenuity, statecraft, warfare, etc. would reach full flower well into its summer. Then, as the inner form world and imagination of such a culture began to lose its force it would enter an urban and worldly “late” (autumnal) period of rationalism and free itself from subservience to religion and dare to make that religion the object of epistemological criticism, thus opening the door to nihilism. Finally, it would go into its winter season or “Civilization” phase and begin its slow and inevitable decline. The West was already entering its Civilization phase by 1918 according to Spengler. It would not be a sudden collapse, but a gradual setting of the sun, a time of lengthening shadows, i.e., a “Twilight of the Gods.”
The most arresting thematic metaphors in Spengler’s imaginings were the three main cultures of Western Civilization, namely the Apollonian, Magian, and Faustian. Apollonian culture was classical civilization, i.e., the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hellenistic pagan culture of the ancients. Magian-Arabian culture encompassed Judaism, primitive Christianity, Mazdeism, Nestorians, Manicheans, Monophysites, and Islam. It was an eschatological and apocalyptic culture. It saw the world as Cavern, and our time on earth as limited. Submission to God was its primary ethos, but there was also the possibility of salvation, and of a coming Savior. By contrast, Apollonian culture did not see the past or even the present as being that different from the future. History as some linear narrative from which lessons could be learned was alien to the Apollonian mind. Instead, myth contained the essential, unchanging wisdom of existence. Character was fate. Pride came before the fall. The gods were capricious. But Faustian culture – which began around 1000 A.D. wished to extend its will into infinite space. It had built the Gothic cathedrals to realize this inward, willful striving for extension into the illimitable heavens, to flood the soul with light. Descartes, Leibnitz, Euler, Gauss, Newton, and Riemann, had pushed western mathematics to new heights. European artists had learned to use light and shadow, the color wheel, and the laws of perspective and vanishing points to create paintings that appeared three dimensional. The music of the Baroque and the art of the fugue had expressed the Faustian notion of limitless space. All this and much more are discussed in exhaustive detail throughout the book.
This abridged version will give the reader a healthy overview of Spengler’s book. But I recommend the full, unabridged version for anyone who has the time and inclination to read it at length. Even though there are numerous arguments for and against Spengler’s unorthodox approach, his erudition in mathematics, the natural sciences, and classical literature is impressive. Yet his style is dreamlike and poetic (in the epic sense). This book is not for everyone, but if it speaks to you it will light your fire.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2003Much has been written about whether Spengler was a good man or a bad man, whether his is a good philosophy or a bad philosophy, all that matters is that his theory of world history is correct. Spengler does not identify a problem and then set forth what people must do to avoid the problem. In fact, the whole point of his theory is that Cultures are born, flourish and die in a predictable pattern. There is no more anything we can do to avoid the 'problem' than there is to increase a man's lifespan to 200 years.
One example, which I think has clearly been borne out by current events: in the aftermath of WWI, where armies with troops numbering in the millions were often too small, Spengler predicted that armies of our time would number in the hundreds of thousands, and that these small, war-keen armies were meant to be used. Everything that is happening in the world today, from American response to 9/11, to pornography, to the professionalization of sports, to families not eating dinner together, is elucidated by Spengler's theory.
If you want to understand the present, more importantly, if you want to understand the terrible internal problems the US will encounter in the next ten years, then you must understand the Decline of the West. It is a dense, serious, and demanding book. It is not a fun read, but it is necessary.
The best analogy is a scene from The Matrix: Morpheus offers Neo two pills. The red pill will reveal the world as it truly is, which very few people actually see. The blue pill will take Neo back where he was, still fooled by the Matrix, oblivious to reality. The Decline of the West is the red pill.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2020Decline of the west is a beautifully written book that takes a comparative analysis of systems of culture across the world, and then a larger analysis of the "Western" culture and how its story fits the greater system of humanity. It's grand prediction is that eventually the 'faustian man' of the west will soon begin to question all of the foundations which creates and maintains western civilization, causing a caesarian moment, a great decline, and a resurgence of new warring cultures.
He takes a large analysis over the "Seasons" of different cultures, expanding from the essential parts of its mathematical roots, expanding on the Nietzschean worldview to the anthropological field and further into geopolitics.
However true or factual his statements may be, he sort of takes a lackluster "Facts over truth" that he believes elevates what he says over all other intellects. As if his worldview and viewpoints are somewhat more real than others because he can self-assess it, although he fails to realize that his systems are just as rooted as any other.
His predictions and assessments of his contemporary are also shaky, where he is comparing the 'soulful' timeless creations, which survived history, with the 'soulless' everything of his modernity, not seeing that what makes something of great value is time itself. So naturally, at every given time, we can make the mistake of believing that nothing of which our modern times create has value. Yet we see that there is much of the early 20th century that have survived and are of great value to us, even comparable to the great works of his reference.
Over all I believe it to be an essential read to understanding the core foundations of conservative thought, in a very tangible academic viewpoint, essential but too often missed in understanding today's politics.
Top reviews from other countries
- Rodolfo LessaReviewed in Brazil on March 22, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the greatest books of the XX century
Great product, seems like a fair translation.
This book should be mandatory for everyone interested in comparative philosophy, civilizations development and Nazi Germany.
- Sky phoneReviewed in Canada on July 11, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Great book.
- NicReviewed in Australia on April 26, 2021
1.0 out of 5 stars Not great on Kindle
As an older book, this is just a picture of each page so it doesn't display well if trying to read on the kindle app, particularly on your phone. Can't size it without the page being cut off so it becomes effectively illegible.
- PsychopompReviewed in the United Kingdom on February 28, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars A classic from Oswald Spengler
Spengler's writing was the underpinning of James Blish's okie/cities books. I read this book because of my enjoyment of Blish's books and recommend it if you want to help understand his underpinning inspiration. When published in 1918, The Decline .... was a worldwide success and resulted in much comment from intellectuals of the time and later. A more than worthwhile read in its own right.
- PlaceholderReviewed in India on September 14, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Excellent book