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Der Untergang des Abendlandes #1-2
The Decline of the West
Since its first publication in two volumes between 1918-1923, The Decline of the West has ranked as one of the most widely read and most talked about books of our time. In all its various editions, it has sold nearly 100,000 copies. A twentieth-century Cassandra, Oswald Spengler thoroughly probed the origin and "fate" of our civilization, and the result can be (and has been) read as a prophesy of the Nazi regime. His challenging views have led to harsh criticism over the years, but the knowledge and eloquence that went into his sweeping study of Western culture have kept The Decline of the West alive. As the face of Germany and Europe as a whole continues to change each day, The Decline of the West cannot be ignored.
The abridgment, prepared by the German scholar Helmut Werner, with the blessing of the Spengler estate, consists of selections from the original (translated into English by Charles Francis Atkinson) linked by explanatory passages which have been put into English by Arthur Helps. H. Stuart Hughes has written a new introduction for this edition.
In this engrossing and highly controversial philosophy of history, Spengler describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity. Guided by the philosophies of Goethe and Nietzsche, he rejects linear progression, and instead presents a world view based on the cyclical rise and decline of civilizations. He argues that a culture blossoms from the soil of a definable landscape and dies when it has exhausted all of its possibilities.
Despite Spengler's reputation today as an extreme pessimist, The Decline of the West remains essential reading for anyone interested in the history of civilization.
486 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1918
About the author
Oswald Spengler
67 books497 followersOswald Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg (then in the Duchy of Brunswick, German Empire) at the foot of the Harz mountains, the eldest of four children, and the only boy. His family was conservative German of the petite bourgeoisie. His father, originally a mining technician, who came from a long line of mineworkers, was a post office bureaucrat. His childhood home was emotionally reserved, and the young Spengler turned to books and the great cultural personalities for succor. He had imperfect health, and suffered throughout his life from migraine headaches and from an anxiety complex.
At the age of ten, his family moved to the university city of Halle. Here Spengler received a classical education at the local Gymnasium (academically oriented secondary school), studying Greek, Latin, mathematics and natural sciences. Here, too, he developed his affinity for the arts—especially poetry, drama, and music—and came under the influence of the ideas of Goethe and Nietzsche. He even experimented with a few artistic creations, some of which still survive.
After his father's death in 1901 Spengler attended several universities (Munich, Berlin, and Halle) as a private scholar, taking courses in a wide range of subjects: history, philosophy, mathematics, natural science, literature, the classics, music, and fine arts. His private studies were undirected. In 1903, he failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus because of insufficient references, which effectively ended his chances of an academic career. In 1904 he received his Ph.D., and in 1905 suffered a nervous breakdown.
Scholars[which?] remark that his life seemed rather uneventful. He briefly served as a teacher in Saarbrücken and then in Düsseldorf. From 1908 to 1911 he worked at a grammar school (Realgymnasium) in Hamburg, where he taught science, German history, and mathematics.
In 1911, following his mother's death, he moved to Munich, where he would live until his death in 1936. He lived as a cloistered scholar, supported by his modest inheritance. Spengler survived on very limited means and was marked by loneliness. He owned no books, and took jobs as a tutor or wrote for magazines to earn additional income.
He began work on the first volume of Decline of the West intending at first to focus on Germany within Europe, but the Agadir Crisis affected him deeply, and he widened the scope of his study. Spengler was inspired by Otto Seeck's work The Decline of Antiquity in naming his own effort. The book was completed in 1914, but publishing was delayed by World War I. Due to a congenital heart problem, he was not called up for military service. During the war, however, his inheritance was largely useless because it was invested overseas; thus Spengler lived in genuine poverty for this period.
At the age of ten, his family moved to the university city of Halle. Here Spengler received a classical education at the local Gymnasium (academically oriented secondary school), studying Greek, Latin, mathematics and natural sciences. Here, too, he developed his affinity for the arts—especially poetry, drama, and music—and came under the influence of the ideas of Goethe and Nietzsche. He even experimented with a few artistic creations, some of which still survive.
After his father's death in 1901 Spengler attended several universities (Munich, Berlin, and Halle) as a private scholar, taking courses in a wide range of subjects: history, philosophy, mathematics, natural science, literature, the classics, music, and fine arts. His private studies were undirected. In 1903, he failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus because of insufficient references, which effectively ended his chances of an academic career. In 1904 he received his Ph.D., and in 1905 suffered a nervous breakdown.
Scholars[which?] remark that his life seemed rather uneventful. He briefly served as a teacher in Saarbrücken and then in Düsseldorf. From 1908 to 1911 he worked at a grammar school (Realgymnasium) in Hamburg, where he taught science, German history, and mathematics.
In 1911, following his mother's death, he moved to Munich, where he would live until his death in 1936. He lived as a cloistered scholar, supported by his modest inheritance. Spengler survived on very limited means and was marked by loneliness. He owned no books, and took jobs as a tutor or wrote for magazines to earn additional income.
He began work on the first volume of Decline of the West intending at first to focus on Germany within Europe, but the Agadir Crisis affected him deeply, and he widened the scope of his study. Spengler was inspired by Otto Seeck's work The Decline of Antiquity in naming his own effort. The book was completed in 1914, but publishing was delayed by World War I. Due to a congenital heart problem, he was not called up for military service. During the war, however, his inheritance was largely useless because it was invested overseas; thus Spengler lived in genuine poverty for this period.
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March 13, 2008
Liked this book so much I quit drinking for a month
March 7, 2024
All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless it is mere ant-industry.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is one of my favorite books, not only because it is written so beautifully, but because of the spectacle of decline—of a great empire slowly and inevitably crumbling. The scene is irresistibly tragic. Like a Macbeth or an Oedipus, the Empire succumbs to itself, brought down by its own efforts at self-expansion. Or perhaps the scene can be better compared to the Fall of Man in Milton’s poem, a grand cosmic undoing, followed by the heroic struggle against the inevitable.
Besides the sublime tragedy of Rome’s decline, it fascinates because it gives us a foreboding of what might happen to us. Indeed, maybe it is already? This would explain all the banality we see on television every day, all the terrible music on the radio. More than decline—a loss of political and economic power—this is decadence: a decay of taste, morals, artistic skill. Decadence seems observable in many historical instances: the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines: they all petered out, losing cultural vitality until they disappeared completely. Couldn’t the same thing be happening to us?
Oswald Spengler thought so, and he turned this thought into the basis for an entire philosophy of history. He was not a professional historian, nor an academic of any kind. He worked as a school teacher until his mother’s inheritance allowed him quit his job and to devote all of his time to scholarship. This scholarship was mustered to write an enormous book, whose publication was delayed by World War I. Probably this was very lucky for Spengler, since the pessimism and anguish caused by that war set the mood for his grand theory of cultural decline.
The Decline of the West puts forward a radically unconventional view of history. Spengler divides up world history, not into countries or epochs, but into “Cultures.” There have been only eight: the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Meso-American, the Chinese, the Indian, the Classical (Greco-Roman), the Arabian (includes the Byzantine), and the Western (European culture, beginning around the year 1000). Each of these Cultures he conceives as a super-organism, with its own birth, middle-age, and dotage. These Cultures all age at a similar rate, and go through analogical stages in the process (Napoleon is the Western equivalent to Alexander the Great, for example). Spengler believed that he had delineated these Cultures and traced their basic growth and aging process, thus providing a valid scheme for all future history as well, if any new Culture should arise.
Spengler is a cultural determinist and a cultural relativist. This means that he does not see these Cultures as dependent on the talent of individuals to grow; the individual is a product of the Culture and not the reverse. He also thinks that each of these Cultures creates its own self-contained world of significance, based on its own fundamental ideas. There is no such thing as inter-cultural influence, he thinks, at least not on any deep level. Each of these Cultures conceives the world so differently that they can hardly understand one another, let alone determine one another, even if one Culture can overpower another one in a contest of arms. Their art, their mathematics, their architecture, their experience of nature, their whole mental world is grounded in one specific cultural worldview.
Because Spengler is a determinist, he does not present us with a Gibbonian spectacle of a civilization succumbing to its own faults, struggling against its own decline. For Spengler, everything that happens in history is destiny. People don't make history; history makes people. Thus, while often classed as a political conservative, it is hard to put any political label on Spengler, or to co-opt his views for any political purpose, since he didn’t think we directed our own history. To be a true Spenglerian is to believe that decline is inevitable: decadence wasn't anyone's "fault," and it can't be averted.
Much of this book consists of a contrast between what he calls the Apollonian (Greco-Roman) worldview, and the Faustian (Western) worldview. The Apollonian world-picture is based on the idea of definite form and definable shape; the nude statue is its most characteristic art, the delineated human body; its mathematics is all based on geometry, concrete shapes and visible lines. The Faustian picture, by contrast, is possessed by the idea of infinity; we make fugues, roving explorations of musical space; our mathematics is based on the idea of a function, an operation that can create an endless series of numbers. Spengler dwells on this contrast in chapter after chapter, trying to prove his point that Western Culture, far from being a development of Classical Culture, is entirely incompatible with it.
His own Culture, the Western, he traces to around the year 1000, at the commencement of the Romanesque. How or why a new Culture begins, Spengler doesn’t venture to say; but once they do begin, they follow the same definite steps. It was inevitable, he thinks, that the Romanesque transformed into the Gothic, and then eventually flourished into the Baroque, the high point of our Culture, wherein we expressed our deep longing for the infinite in Bach’s fugues and Descartes’s mathematics.
Sometime around the year 1800, the Western Culture entered its late, senescent phase, which Spengler terms ‘Civilization.’ This is the phase that follows cultural growth and flourishing; its onset begins when a Culture has exhausted its fundamental idea and explored its inherent forms. A Civilization is what remains of Culture when it has spent its creative forces: “The aim once attained—the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual—the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization.”
The ‘decline’ that forms the title of this book is just this transition from Culture to Civilization, wherein major creative work is at an end. Civilization is, rather, the age of Caesarism, the consolidation of political power. It is the age of world cities, major metropolises filled with cosmopolitan urban intellectuals. It is the age of academics rather than geniuses, the Alexandrine Greeks instead of the Golden-Age of Athens. It is, in other words, the period that corresponds with the onset of the Roman Empire, a period of no substantial innovation, but of magnificent stability. The Western Culture, Spengler thought, was entering just this period.
Whereas those who are actuated by a Culture during its creative period feel themselves driven by inevitable impulses, which allow even mediocre artists to create great works, people within a Civilization are creatures of the intellect, not the instinct; and instead of being given creative power and direction by their Culture, they are left to substitute their own subjective tastes and whims for cultural destiny. Instead of, for example, having one overriding epoch in our artistic productions—such as the Gothic, the Baroque, or what have you—we have artistic ‘movements’ or trends—Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism—which, far from being necessary phases in a Culture’s self-expression, are merely intellectual fads with no force behind them.
Spengler’s theory does have the considerable merit of being testable, because he made very specific predictions about what the immediate future held. We had gone through the period of ‘Warring States,’ he thought, in which country fought country and money ruled everything, and were about to enter a period of Caesarism, wherein people would lose faith in the power of self-interested capitalism and follow a charismatic leader. This would also be a period of ‘Second Religiousness,’ a period of faith rather than reason—a period of patriotism, zeal, and peaceful capitulation to the status quo.
Nowadays, one-hundred years later, it seems these predictions were certainly false. For one, he did not foresee the Second World War, but thought the period of internecine warfare was coming to a close. What is more, economic power has grown even more important—far more important than political power, in many ways—and no Caesar has arisen, despite many contenders (including Hitler, during Spengler’s lifetime, of whom Spengler didn’t think highly).
Aside from its breadth, one thing that sets this book apart is its style. Spengler is a remarkable writer. He can be poetic, describing the “flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you—a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence.” He can be bitter, biting, and caustic, castigating the blind scholars who couldn’t see the obvious, satirizing the pseudo-sauve intellectuals who populated the cities of his time. He can be lyrical or epigrammatic, and can write ably about art, music, and mathematics.
His most characteristic mode, however, is the oracular: Spengler proclaims, predicts, pronounces. His voice, resonating through the written word, booms as if from a mountaintop. He sweeps the reader up in his swelling prose, an inundation of erudition, a flood that covers the world and brings us, like Noah in his ark, even higher than mountaintops. Perhaps a flood is the most apt metaphor, since Spengler is not only overwhelming in his rhetorical force, but all-encompassing in his world-view. He seems to have thought of everything, considered every subject, drawn his own conclusions about every fact; no detail escapes him, no conventionality remains to be overturned by his roving mind. The experience can be intoxicating as he draws you into his own perspective, with everything you thought you knew now blurry and swirling.
Spengler is so knowledgeable that, at times, he can sound like some higher power declaiming from above. But he was a man, after all, and his erudition was limited. He was most certainly an expert on music, mathematics, and the arts, and writes with keen insight in each of these subjects. But in politics, economics, religion, and especially science, he is less impressive. He completely fails to understand Darwin’s theory, for example, and he thought that physics was already complete and there would be no more great geniuses (and this, in one of the greatest epochs of physics!). He doesn’t even mention Einstein. Spengler also thought that our scientific theories were culturally determined and culturally bound; the Western conception of nature, for example, would have no validity for the Chinese (which doesn't seem to stop the Chinese from learning Newton's theories).
His grand theory, though undeniably fascinating, is also impossible to accept. What is the nature of a Culture? Why do they arise, why are they self-contained, why do they follow the same life-course? Why would one single idea determine every single cultural production—from mathematics to music, from architecture to physics—in a Culture from birth to death? All these seem like fundamental questions, and yet they are not satisfactorily addressed—nor do I see how they could be.
By insisting on the Culture as the unit of history, Spengler seems to be at once too narrow and too broad. Too narrow, because he does not allow for the possibility that these Cultures can influence one another; while it seems obvious to me that, yes, there was influence from the Classical to the Western, as well as from the Classical to the so-called ‘Magian’ (his term for the Arabian Culture), and from the Magian to the Western, and so on. And too broad, because within any given Culture there are not only different ages but different areas. Is the cultural difference between Spain and England ultimately superficial, but between the Renaissance and Classical Greece unbridgeable? Really, the more you think about Spengler’s claims, the less credible they seem. After all, if Spengler were right, how could he, a Western intellectual living in the Civilization phase of Western Culture, delineate the fundamental ideas of other Cultures and produce what he regarded as a major intellectual achievement?
I am certainly not saying that this book is intellectually valueless. By comparison, Walter Pater had this to say about aesthetic theories: “Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, and express it in the most general terms, to find a universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way.”
This seems equally true with regard to Spengler’s universal formula for history. Although I think his theory is untenable, this book is nevertheless filled to the brim with suggestive and penetrating observations, especially about art, architecture, music, and mathematics. Spengler may be a failed prophet, but he was an excellent critic, capable of making the most astonishing comparisons between arts of different eras and epochs.
Even if we reject Spengler’s proposed theory, we may still savor the grand vision required to see all of human history as a whole, to scan one’s eye over the past and present of humankind, in all its forms and phases, and to form conjectures as to its destiny. And Spengler was undeniably original in his inclusion of Babylonian, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Meso-American Cultures as of equal importance as Western history; indeed, it is at least in part to Spengler that we owe our notion of world-history. Rich in ideas, set forth in ringing prose, invigorating in its novelty, breathtaking in its scope—here we have a true classic, yet another example of a book whose enormous originality outweighs every conventional defect we can detect in it.
April 8, 2011
It has to be stated up front that I read TDOTW in its abridged format—and while Werner and Helps did as well as they could have under their space restrictions, this book is still a stunted patchwork of Herr Spengler's full-form thought. I've been referencing my unabridged PDF copy alongside this handsomely bound patient; and at times the surgery has been severe, the amputation close to the joint. If you have neither the money nor the time to do Spengler the justice of imbibing the entirety of his intellectual offering, then in such a pinch the abridgement will certainly do: but I would recommend searching out the two volumes in order to experience to the full the magisterial effort that the author has made in presenting his complex theory to the public.
The literal translation of Der Untergang des Abendlandes could be read as something like The Sunset of the Evening Lands or The Setting of the Twilight Realms, either of which nicely convey the lyrical touch that Spengler has liberally applied to his great work of poetic historical philosophy. It's a text rich with erudition across a broad field of disciplines, rife with the dense structural elements of an organic Culture that is born, lives, and dies in a fashion both comparable and comprehensible to the human beings who constitute it. It is a work that proceeded from a burgeoning conception of the requirement for a combinatory application of the empirical and the intuitional, of the gaze both within and without, of the extended-material with the soul-spiritual, the organic with the inorganic, the dead with the living, time with space, magnitude with function, the become with the becoming—the unification of a bifurcation—if the essential truth—that is, the depth—of what constitutes History was ever to be understood. It is at once both a difficult and a delightful read, wildly overreaching and conceptually sound, profoundly insightful and intelligent and peppered with controversial claims and interpretations. It should be read if for no other reason than the stimulation it provides, for it is difficult to imagine that there exists a reader who would not emerge at the end having found himself been given much to reflect upon—even those predisposed to flatly disagree—or take issue—with Spengler's conclusions.
Proceeding in a somewhat Hegelian fashion, Spengler posits an interpretation of history that has eluded all others, principally due to their being hampered by the conditions of the Civilization they live within. For the author, many years of study and reflection had lead him to the conclusion that History, of necessity linked with the direction and destiny of what we—lacking a better word—call Time (Becoming, Potentiality), has revealed itself within our world through the Higher Cultures: Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Classical (Graeco-Roman), Magian (Arabian), Mexican, and Faustian (Modern Western). Of these eight, one—the Mexican—had been extirpated; another—the Magian—was a pseudomorphical, or stunted Culture; and one more—the Russian, also pseudomorphical—at the time of the book's publication had the possibility of achieving High Cultural status of its own. Each of these Cultures was organic, with a life cycle of waxing and waning stages comparable to the lives of the human beings who lived within it, stages in which similar periods of flowering or morphologies in the fields of art, politics, religion, mathematics, philosophy, engineering, etc. would occur; and each of which would— irrevocably, once the Culture had fully become and all of its potentialities or possibilities had been actualized—wither away, becoming Civilizations, inorganic, mechanical, existent fully in the material world of causality and measurement, effectively dead to the spirituality of History and dominated by the vast, sprawling Megalopolises that had arisen and from which the decline—at varying speeds and over varying intervals—would occur. These processes are inseparably engendered within History, in Destiny, and, whilst realized and carried out by the masses of individual humans whose blood and souls are attuned to that particular Culture, the Culture itself is also an organic unit, necessary within Time as we experience it and only capable of developing and actualizing as it actually does. The Culture enables and drives forward its human members; these same humans realize the Culture and allow it to blossom, and all the while proceeding from a state of Becoming in active Time to one of Become, dead (actualized) within the extended, material world. It's a system of cyclical history that is inexorable and finite.
To make the case for his impressively deep philosophy, Spengler draws upon a wide field of studies and knowledge, displaying a frightful erudition and forcefully, logically, compellingly producing his examples, making his analogies, drawing his conclusions, at all times aware of the reader and leading him through an encompassing vision that Spengler believes must, in the end, prove irrefutable. It is written in a poetic and baritone text, serious, beautiful, dense, and sprinkled with a mordant wit, blasts of caustic irony. It makes for a mesmerizing read, one that requires a slow and methodic pace if the reader is to absorb the seemingly endless barrage of details; but it is a wonderful, a fascinating, a compulsively readable journey. It is impossible to convey the breadth of information imparted by the book in the space of a Goodreads review, but several parts in especial stood out for me: his proposition of a Faustian mathematics that embraced the infinite through functions and spatial abstractions—abandoning purely magnitudinous calculations—and an art that sought the same through the usage of brush strokes, atmospheric colors, prolific and contrapuntal instrumentation, soaring architectures and blossoming spaces, that endeavored to capture the sum of a person's—and hence a Culture's—soul in a maturing era that accepted no limits or boundaries. There is also the interpretation of the Faustian God as coterminous with Destiny, with Time, with Becoming—in other word's, God as Eternal-Potentiality-Eternally-Realized—and its juxtaposition with the Apollinian and Magian godheads that, for me, proved very enlightening; and his composition of the Magian world-view, its purview of existence as within a vaulted and glittering cavern, and his original outline of the conception and development of both the principal monotheisms and their pre- and post-birth offshoots, is first rate. His chapters, so brilliantly done, on the Soul-Image and Life-Feeling and Nature-Knowledge would, really, be worth the price of the book in and of themselves. Furthermore, when he speaks of a Civilizational Stage's Dead Art, an art completely overwhelmed by the critical faculty, in thrall to overriding causality and the promotional whim, the solo genius of the individual untethered from the wings of an onrushing or soaring Cultural Destiny, the reader cannot help but cast glances at such entities as portions of modern literature, philosophy, theory, psychology and psychoanalysis, and the variegated offerings of modern art—the manner in which everything has been progressively compartmentalized and broken down and dissected into minute portions, such that the wonder or beauty or inspiration or meaning of the original, of life, of the magical creative power itself, seems to have become lost, replaced by sterile minutiae and plastic posing and semantic games—to feel that Spengler might actually have been on to something.
Anticipating that the majority of the attacks upon his work would come from the analytic school, at the outset of Decline Spengler cautions that an over-reliance upon a materialistic and mechanistic system of causality is what both has blinded modern man to the Historical Destiny unfolding about him and is a principal symptom of the Culture that has Become and, consequentially, is already in a process of decline and decay. In such a work there will inevitably be inaccuracies and forced analogies and manipulations of historical fact undertaken by the author, if for no other reason than the sheer size, the audacity of the task he has endeavored to carry out, the timeline depth and the events like grains of sand—some were apparent to me as I read along, others I only discovered when I went online, after particularly rousing chapters, to investigate the response to Spengler's postulations. But really, this far removed from the period of its publication and with all the societal and cultural changes that have occurred, readers will almost surely have preconceived positions going into the tome, and it is unlikely - not impossible, but unlikely - that they will emerge at the end swayed in their opinion. Spengler is not just concocting a historical analysis here—he is engaging in philosophy, in establishing an ontology, dancing with metaphysics, in an effort to mentally place the reader into a position where the chain of events and interpretations that follow will seem of a plausibility that would elevate them to veracity. If the reader does not fully embrace Spengler's depiction of being, of the unprovable claim of an organic Destiny that, functioning as History's will, moves these cultures into the birth canal and ensures their fulfillment, then the entire affair cannot, in the end, hold together.
For myself, I am not in accord with Spengler's philosophy. I cannot accept the removal of contingency, the all-bases-covered necessity involved in accepting such a High Cultural position: it both denies individuals the fullness of the genius they summoned to achieve the heights in their field that they did, and excuses the excesses and savageries committed by those who gave free reign to the baser or sanguinary side of their personalties—by stating that the Culture ensured that there were humans available to undertake the actions that needed to be taken, that what was required to be done would be done, by hook or by crook, provides too much cover for the deplorable and not credit sufficient for the glorious. It could be used to accept injustice or repression or brutality as simply being in and of the Culture under which it occurred. Responsibility and freedom are vital in my conception of humanity. Furthermore, it is an inherently untenable philosophy by his own standards: since he admits that every thinker is inescapably bound by the purview and mindset of his own particular Culture-in-Time, his own World-Image and World-Feeling, then it beggars any standard of truth outside of the Faustian flavor that his limit-seeking-and-testing analysis and perception of the past Cultures, of utterly foreign construction and timber, could be so patently slotted and fitted into a particular cyclical system that coincides with an interpretation aligned to his own Teutonic spirit. For notwithstanding Spengler's assertion that History cannot be measured upon the scales of truth, but rather by its depth, the impressiveness of the latter in the German's conception has actually been achieved, the layers built one upon another through this same Faustian perception, one whose profundity may be exaggerated to readers of the same Cultural milieu. With all of that said, the manner in which he interlocks the events and attitudes of Cultural eras across time is quite impressive and powerful, and the fact that in several of his conclusions and predictions—especially in the realms of religion, technics and politics—he proved chillingly prescient and accurate is but proof of the remarkable sagacity and judgement that filled his historical insight.
Yet he dismisses too readily within his destinal organicity the effects of evolutionary change, of genetic adaptability, of the capacity for the human mind, a sensory input machine beyond our full ken, to process data and adjust the brain's functional abilities over time—even of the manner in which complex societies interact and change, the organizational rules under which they operate, combine and separate, overcome problems and challenges that arise. Of course, this can all be laid upon an overriding Culture whose incorporeal hand is aligning with humanity along Destiny's pathways, wherein there is no stochasticity or circumstance but only purpose and fulfillment; but again that is entering into metaphysics and requires belief or faith to be accepted, neither of which I find myself in possession of. To keep things in perspective, I am not saying that Spengler is wrong—just that I, one small unit of the Faustian Civilization, don't hold with his grand theory—and in the face of the massive and deep learnedness that I am making this declaration, I may not unreasonably be likened to a zoo-kept monkey instinctively and ignorantly flinging poop.
The conclusion? This is a work of unmitigated brilliance, and if I remained unpersuaded by the entirety of Spengler's thought, I was blown away by its magnificence and given much to ponder and consider about the interrelations and possibilities of the analogies he made and the conclusions he reached. He has stirred the cup of my mind in a more vigorous manner than most of the books I have read in the past year or two. Conceived prior to the Great War, completed during its brutal undertaking, published just anterior to its cessation of hostilities, it is a work of Teutonic passion and mordant pessimism, a great celebration of the organic spirit and being, a somber meditation upon the material world, a deep penetration through the constituent tissues of known human cultures and societies, a crushing outline of the money-democracy triumph through enslavement and the looming specter of a blood-soaked Caesar, an ontological imprinting of Time, an Anti-Faustian Faustian tract birthed during the civilizational stage of the latter by a man seemingly forgetful of his own proclamation that his Culture had become and that he was penning not a tract driven by Destiny, but by the pervasive rational cause-and-effect whose suzerainty he mistrusted; that his philosophical thought ran a curious gamut of the infinite and the cyclical, evinced traits of the Magian mindset at work within the Faustian, a curious recession from infinite space to enshrouded cavern, that might help to account for the original and unique interpretation he brought to bear upon the events he recorded; the aethereal agonies of the star-slung and the earthy proskynesis of the entombed, peering into the depths of his conceptional cultures from such a towering, weightless height, such a cramped, crushed, gravitational embrace, that the vision-swept ofttimes blurred or shimmered out of focus and required a series of longing, heart- and soul-driven looks backward, away from the melting horizon, before their image sharpened itself through his complex arrangment of Platonic, Hegelian, Nietzschean, and oversized Goethean lenses set in their durable Spenglerian frames. It is a stunning work of art, a paean to the brilliance of man and his eternal quest to summon answers out of this question-bound cosmos: triumphs, profundities, mars and blemishes all.
The literal translation of Der Untergang des Abendlandes could be read as something like The Sunset of the Evening Lands or The Setting of the Twilight Realms, either of which nicely convey the lyrical touch that Spengler has liberally applied to his great work of poetic historical philosophy. It's a text rich with erudition across a broad field of disciplines, rife with the dense structural elements of an organic Culture that is born, lives, and dies in a fashion both comparable and comprehensible to the human beings who constitute it. It is a work that proceeded from a burgeoning conception of the requirement for a combinatory application of the empirical and the intuitional, of the gaze both within and without, of the extended-material with the soul-spiritual, the organic with the inorganic, the dead with the living, time with space, magnitude with function, the become with the becoming—the unification of a bifurcation—if the essential truth—that is, the depth—of what constitutes History was ever to be understood. It is at once both a difficult and a delightful read, wildly overreaching and conceptually sound, profoundly insightful and intelligent and peppered with controversial claims and interpretations. It should be read if for no other reason than the stimulation it provides, for it is difficult to imagine that there exists a reader who would not emerge at the end having found himself been given much to reflect upon—even those predisposed to flatly disagree—or take issue—with Spengler's conclusions.
Proceeding in a somewhat Hegelian fashion, Spengler posits an interpretation of history that has eluded all others, principally due to their being hampered by the conditions of the Civilization they live within. For the author, many years of study and reflection had lead him to the conclusion that History, of necessity linked with the direction and destiny of what we—lacking a better word—call Time (Becoming, Potentiality), has revealed itself within our world through the Higher Cultures: Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Classical (Graeco-Roman), Magian (Arabian), Mexican, and Faustian (Modern Western). Of these eight, one—the Mexican—had been extirpated; another—the Magian—was a pseudomorphical, or stunted Culture; and one more—the Russian, also pseudomorphical—at the time of the book's publication had the possibility of achieving High Cultural status of its own. Each of these Cultures was organic, with a life cycle of waxing and waning stages comparable to the lives of the human beings who lived within it, stages in which similar periods of flowering or morphologies in the fields of art, politics, religion, mathematics, philosophy, engineering, etc. would occur; and each of which would— irrevocably, once the Culture had fully become and all of its potentialities or possibilities had been actualized—wither away, becoming Civilizations, inorganic, mechanical, existent fully in the material world of causality and measurement, effectively dead to the spirituality of History and dominated by the vast, sprawling Megalopolises that had arisen and from which the decline—at varying speeds and over varying intervals—would occur. These processes are inseparably engendered within History, in Destiny, and, whilst realized and carried out by the masses of individual humans whose blood and souls are attuned to that particular Culture, the Culture itself is also an organic unit, necessary within Time as we experience it and only capable of developing and actualizing as it actually does. The Culture enables and drives forward its human members; these same humans realize the Culture and allow it to blossom, and all the while proceeding from a state of Becoming in active Time to one of Become, dead (actualized) within the extended, material world. It's a system of cyclical history that is inexorable and finite.
To make the case for his impressively deep philosophy, Spengler draws upon a wide field of studies and knowledge, displaying a frightful erudition and forcefully, logically, compellingly producing his examples, making his analogies, drawing his conclusions, at all times aware of the reader and leading him through an encompassing vision that Spengler believes must, in the end, prove irrefutable. It is written in a poetic and baritone text, serious, beautiful, dense, and sprinkled with a mordant wit, blasts of caustic irony. It makes for a mesmerizing read, one that requires a slow and methodic pace if the reader is to absorb the seemingly endless barrage of details; but it is a wonderful, a fascinating, a compulsively readable journey. It is impossible to convey the breadth of information imparted by the book in the space of a Goodreads review, but several parts in especial stood out for me: his proposition of a Faustian mathematics that embraced the infinite through functions and spatial abstractions—abandoning purely magnitudinous calculations—and an art that sought the same through the usage of brush strokes, atmospheric colors, prolific and contrapuntal instrumentation, soaring architectures and blossoming spaces, that endeavored to capture the sum of a person's—and hence a Culture's—soul in a maturing era that accepted no limits or boundaries. There is also the interpretation of the Faustian God as coterminous with Destiny, with Time, with Becoming—in other word's, God as Eternal-Potentiality-Eternally-Realized—and its juxtaposition with the Apollinian and Magian godheads that, for me, proved very enlightening; and his composition of the Magian world-view, its purview of existence as within a vaulted and glittering cavern, and his original outline of the conception and development of both the principal monotheisms and their pre- and post-birth offshoots, is first rate. His chapters, so brilliantly done, on the Soul-Image and Life-Feeling and Nature-Knowledge would, really, be worth the price of the book in and of themselves. Furthermore, when he speaks of a Civilizational Stage's Dead Art, an art completely overwhelmed by the critical faculty, in thrall to overriding causality and the promotional whim, the solo genius of the individual untethered from the wings of an onrushing or soaring Cultural Destiny, the reader cannot help but cast glances at such entities as portions of modern literature, philosophy, theory, psychology and psychoanalysis, and the variegated offerings of modern art—the manner in which everything has been progressively compartmentalized and broken down and dissected into minute portions, such that the wonder or beauty or inspiration or meaning of the original, of life, of the magical creative power itself, seems to have become lost, replaced by sterile minutiae and plastic posing and semantic games—to feel that Spengler might actually have been on to something.
Anticipating that the majority of the attacks upon his work would come from the analytic school, at the outset of Decline Spengler cautions that an over-reliance upon a materialistic and mechanistic system of causality is what both has blinded modern man to the Historical Destiny unfolding about him and is a principal symptom of the Culture that has Become and, consequentially, is already in a process of decline and decay. In such a work there will inevitably be inaccuracies and forced analogies and manipulations of historical fact undertaken by the author, if for no other reason than the sheer size, the audacity of the task he has endeavored to carry out, the timeline depth and the events like grains of sand—some were apparent to me as I read along, others I only discovered when I went online, after particularly rousing chapters, to investigate the response to Spengler's postulations. But really, this far removed from the period of its publication and with all the societal and cultural changes that have occurred, readers will almost surely have preconceived positions going into the tome, and it is unlikely - not impossible, but unlikely - that they will emerge at the end swayed in their opinion. Spengler is not just concocting a historical analysis here—he is engaging in philosophy, in establishing an ontology, dancing with metaphysics, in an effort to mentally place the reader into a position where the chain of events and interpretations that follow will seem of a plausibility that would elevate them to veracity. If the reader does not fully embrace Spengler's depiction of being, of the unprovable claim of an organic Destiny that, functioning as History's will, moves these cultures into the birth canal and ensures their fulfillment, then the entire affair cannot, in the end, hold together.
For myself, I am not in accord with Spengler's philosophy. I cannot accept the removal of contingency, the all-bases-covered necessity involved in accepting such a High Cultural position: it both denies individuals the fullness of the genius they summoned to achieve the heights in their field that they did, and excuses the excesses and savageries committed by those who gave free reign to the baser or sanguinary side of their personalties—by stating that the Culture ensured that there were humans available to undertake the actions that needed to be taken, that what was required to be done would be done, by hook or by crook, provides too much cover for the deplorable and not credit sufficient for the glorious. It could be used to accept injustice or repression or brutality as simply being in and of the Culture under which it occurred. Responsibility and freedom are vital in my conception of humanity. Furthermore, it is an inherently untenable philosophy by his own standards: since he admits that every thinker is inescapably bound by the purview and mindset of his own particular Culture-in-Time, his own World-Image and World-Feeling, then it beggars any standard of truth outside of the Faustian flavor that his limit-seeking-and-testing analysis and perception of the past Cultures, of utterly foreign construction and timber, could be so patently slotted and fitted into a particular cyclical system that coincides with an interpretation aligned to his own Teutonic spirit. For notwithstanding Spengler's assertion that History cannot be measured upon the scales of truth, but rather by its depth, the impressiveness of the latter in the German's conception has actually been achieved, the layers built one upon another through this same Faustian perception, one whose profundity may be exaggerated to readers of the same Cultural milieu. With all of that said, the manner in which he interlocks the events and attitudes of Cultural eras across time is quite impressive and powerful, and the fact that in several of his conclusions and predictions—especially in the realms of religion, technics and politics—he proved chillingly prescient and accurate is but proof of the remarkable sagacity and judgement that filled his historical insight.
Yet he dismisses too readily within his destinal organicity the effects of evolutionary change, of genetic adaptability, of the capacity for the human mind, a sensory input machine beyond our full ken, to process data and adjust the brain's functional abilities over time—even of the manner in which complex societies interact and change, the organizational rules under which they operate, combine and separate, overcome problems and challenges that arise. Of course, this can all be laid upon an overriding Culture whose incorporeal hand is aligning with humanity along Destiny's pathways, wherein there is no stochasticity or circumstance but only purpose and fulfillment; but again that is entering into metaphysics and requires belief or faith to be accepted, neither of which I find myself in possession of. To keep things in perspective, I am not saying that Spengler is wrong—just that I, one small unit of the Faustian Civilization, don't hold with his grand theory—and in the face of the massive and deep learnedness that I am making this declaration, I may not unreasonably be likened to a zoo-kept monkey instinctively and ignorantly flinging poop.
The conclusion? This is a work of unmitigated brilliance, and if I remained unpersuaded by the entirety of Spengler's thought, I was blown away by its magnificence and given much to ponder and consider about the interrelations and possibilities of the analogies he made and the conclusions he reached. He has stirred the cup of my mind in a more vigorous manner than most of the books I have read in the past year or two. Conceived prior to the Great War, completed during its brutal undertaking, published just anterior to its cessation of hostilities, it is a work of Teutonic passion and mordant pessimism, a great celebration of the organic spirit and being, a somber meditation upon the material world, a deep penetration through the constituent tissues of known human cultures and societies, a crushing outline of the money-democracy triumph through enslavement and the looming specter of a blood-soaked Caesar, an ontological imprinting of Time, an Anti-Faustian Faustian tract birthed during the civilizational stage of the latter by a man seemingly forgetful of his own proclamation that his Culture had become and that he was penning not a tract driven by Destiny, but by the pervasive rational cause-and-effect whose suzerainty he mistrusted; that his philosophical thought ran a curious gamut of the infinite and the cyclical, evinced traits of the Magian mindset at work within the Faustian, a curious recession from infinite space to enshrouded cavern, that might help to account for the original and unique interpretation he brought to bear upon the events he recorded; the aethereal agonies of the star-slung and the earthy proskynesis of the entombed, peering into the depths of his conceptional cultures from such a towering, weightless height, such a cramped, crushed, gravitational embrace, that the vision-swept ofttimes blurred or shimmered out of focus and required a series of longing, heart- and soul-driven looks backward, away from the melting horizon, before their image sharpened itself through his complex arrangment of Platonic, Hegelian, Nietzschean, and oversized Goethean lenses set in their durable Spenglerian frames. It is a stunning work of art, a paean to the brilliance of man and his eternal quest to summon answers out of this question-bound cosmos: triumphs, profundities, mars and blemishes all.
January 28, 2011
Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was a huge international bestseller after the First World War for reasons that will become obvious, and for reasons that may be just as much so, Spengler considered his theories prophetic and completely justified given that he started this book in 1911 before the shit totally hit the fan. Spengler’s wide ranging theories on the subject of history writing include the repeated idea that the vast majority of historians can do no more than write history from from their self-centered points of view of a present they consider more important than any other time. Spengler turns out to be guilty of this charge himself, imparting a special meaning onto his own time that many others have seen in theirs- the End of Days. However, Spengler did not mean this in the completely apocalyptic Christian sense, but instead termed it the “wintertime of Faustian civilization.” In admittedly fascinating and frequently beautiful (if problematically rather mystical) language, Spengler divides space and time amongst dominant Cultures, which are definite entities with specific, distinct underlying motivations and perceptions of the world that differentiate each entity from the others. He concentrates mostly on contrasting the “Apollonian,” culture capturing the Classical age, which he sees as characterized by a perception of all time as Present and centered on the body, and “Faustian,” which is his name for current Western age, characterized by a precise conception of time and the continual and unfulfilled longing for the unattainable (in class we talked about the fact that if we are “Faustian” we should really discuss what our deal with the devil was- I don’t think we got an answer other than unlimited power). Each Culture has a natural and “inevitable” life cycle, which he articulates in terms of the seasons and life stages of men. In each great Culture’s “Autumn,” it becomes a “Civilization,” which is the signal of a definite and inevitable decline. Spengler draws a distinction between Culture, which is the “thing becoming,” and Civilization, which is the “thing become”, and symbolizes inertia and death and can only refine and push to the limits the ideas that Culture has put forward and then indulge an “expansion” instinct until the Civilization has exhausted itself and dies- as, he posits, Faustian civilization is on its way to doing, shown by the period of imperialism and expansion and finally “Caesarism,” which is the final sign of death. Each phase is characterized by certain symbols that appear at identical moments in each culture and civilization’s life phase, and tell us what phase the Culture is in. Therefore there is a kind of “code” that can be deciphered that will in theory be able to show an informed person what the next step is. He names about 8 great civilizations, but ends up collapsing it to Apollonian, Faustian, and Magian (Arabian) culture. He does not care about that which is not “world-historical,” and leaves many things outside his concept because, quite frankly, they do not matter. Don’t agree with him? Well, that’s probably just because of your Culture’s shaping of you and the fact that you inevitably can’t- perhaps it is due to your Faustian need to beat a theory you can’t possibly prove wrong.
Spengler’s theories rely on several underlying assumptions that are still prevalent and frequently acted upon in our present age, and the different inferences that have been drawn from ideas similar to his have supported different conclusions that I see in my reading quite often. The most prominent of course being the inevitable conclusions of his ideas about culture. How people, communities and states choose to deal with the idea of “cultural difference,” is one of the most important and politicized issues in today’s world. Spengler can be used to support some fairly innocuous ideas, such as his rejection Eurocentric world view of a “privileged” Western culture emphasizes the theoretical equality of cultures at a value judgment level, therefore supporting cultural diversity by showing that each culture has something to offer the world. However, I spend the great majority of my studies encountering the more polarizing aspects of his work, where like ideas have caused incredible amounts of damage. Specifically, his strong emphasis on the “natural,” differences between people and his firm conviction that there are no universal truths that apply to all mankind because of cultural differences. This often leads to the conclusion that there is only one right way to do things with has been mystically ordained and all who do not act the way that a person of their Culture is supposed to act are evil. It is the basis of ideas that allow for the creation of racial hierarchies, or terming “Others” a completely different (usually lesser) species, and time and time again, the inability to identify past a certain line stopping any hope of solving problems or establishing partnerships. (Unsurprisingly, Henry Kissinger effing loved this book- he wrote his undergraduate thesis on it. As my professor put it, “Of course he loved it. It means he can make decisions on his private plane and feel justified.”) One of the most fascinating sites for debate that deals with the extent to which cultural ‘differences’ are something that must be recognized is in theory about how democracies should deal with multiple ‘cultures’ under their rule- should these be recognized and given rights, therefore lending perhaps dangerous support to the idea of naturalized difference or should people be merely citizens in the eyes of the law, with no differentiation, as is the French ideal (at least in theory)? The exploration of where one should draw the line, what compromises between theory and reality are necessary, is absolutely fascinating. Going too far one way or the other seems to produce negative results.
Beyond its effect on the shape of nations and international relations, Spengler’s emphasis on the role of Culture, “style,” and civilizational path as the determinants of what we do as individuals is very dissatisfying. This Calvinistic sense of “predestination,” and the “inevitability” of our actions leaves little room for human agency and free will. I have struggled with this in judging actions in different historical periods because it is true that the environments in which we grow up certainly has an effect on us. I recently read Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction, in which an episode was discussed in which a German officer pursued defeated, dying enemies into a desert to little practical purpose at the cost of his own life and those of his men- was this an effect of the military culture German officers operated in? Or was this decision due to the specific personality of the officer involved? Spengler might find it “predestined,” by the declining path of civilization and the need for “expansion,” but there were also many people who left Germany as rising militarism set in, and a member of the militaristic Hollenzollern family, the short lived Emperor Frederick III, was an unshakeable liberal who fought against the more right-wing elements in Germany until his death. Spengler does not account for these “anomalies” of people who do not act as his map of their Culture would dictate that they, by all rights, should.
But really, you guys, I feel like I am not doing this book justice. It is written in this dreamy, mystical language that can work like an incantation, with your mind sinking into the crazy until the expression of it seems beautiful. It is originally written in German, and perhaps due to the fact that many words are untranslatable, you get things like “soul-world,” and “world-feeling,” “life-essences,” “morphological world order,” “world-consciousness,” and “form-feeling.” And he repeats these nonsense words over and over like they explain everything- it is beyond the mystical words of nationalist primordalists, even more religiously oriented. But I can’t even totally dismiss it as perhaps a crazy man’s poetry when it yields up random gems all the time: “mankind is but a zoological expression,” or “The word Europe ought to be struck out of history… Europe expresses no reality but merely a sketchy interpretation of a map… ‘East’ and ‘West’ are notions that contain real history, whereas Europe is an empty sound. Everything great that the Classical world created, it created in pure denial of the existence of any barrier between Rome and Cyprus, Byzantium and Alexandria,” “The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, that because we live on it- and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets!”
I don’t know.. he’s crazy, like totally over the hill nutzo, but it is based on incredibly impressive learning and knowledge. He’s able to do a history of art, a comparison of complicated notions of time, and a history of mathematics completely comfortably. He gets facts wrong again and again, but you can sort of see the weird logic in the end. He’s not THAT off a lot of the time. And it is terribly seductive at times- you can see how so many people want to think this way. There were certainly enough of them in the Bush administration- and in Al Qaeda. Samuel Huntington’s theories are a crude adaptation of Spengler. The echoes of his influence are still being felt. This is a massive, massive tome, but I recommend reading at least a bit of it to better understand the method behind the madness.
Spengler’s theories rely on several underlying assumptions that are still prevalent and frequently acted upon in our present age, and the different inferences that have been drawn from ideas similar to his have supported different conclusions that I see in my reading quite often. The most prominent of course being the inevitable conclusions of his ideas about culture. How people, communities and states choose to deal with the idea of “cultural difference,” is one of the most important and politicized issues in today’s world. Spengler can be used to support some fairly innocuous ideas, such as his rejection Eurocentric world view of a “privileged” Western culture emphasizes the theoretical equality of cultures at a value judgment level, therefore supporting cultural diversity by showing that each culture has something to offer the world. However, I spend the great majority of my studies encountering the more polarizing aspects of his work, where like ideas have caused incredible amounts of damage. Specifically, his strong emphasis on the “natural,” differences between people and his firm conviction that there are no universal truths that apply to all mankind because of cultural differences. This often leads to the conclusion that there is only one right way to do things with has been mystically ordained and all who do not act the way that a person of their Culture is supposed to act are evil. It is the basis of ideas that allow for the creation of racial hierarchies, or terming “Others” a completely different (usually lesser) species, and time and time again, the inability to identify past a certain line stopping any hope of solving problems or establishing partnerships. (Unsurprisingly, Henry Kissinger effing loved this book- he wrote his undergraduate thesis on it. As my professor put it, “Of course he loved it. It means he can make decisions on his private plane and feel justified.”) One of the most fascinating sites for debate that deals with the extent to which cultural ‘differences’ are something that must be recognized is in theory about how democracies should deal with multiple ‘cultures’ under their rule- should these be recognized and given rights, therefore lending perhaps dangerous support to the idea of naturalized difference or should people be merely citizens in the eyes of the law, with no differentiation, as is the French ideal (at least in theory)? The exploration of where one should draw the line, what compromises between theory and reality are necessary, is absolutely fascinating. Going too far one way or the other seems to produce negative results.
Beyond its effect on the shape of nations and international relations, Spengler’s emphasis on the role of Culture, “style,” and civilizational path as the determinants of what we do as individuals is very dissatisfying. This Calvinistic sense of “predestination,” and the “inevitability” of our actions leaves little room for human agency and free will. I have struggled with this in judging actions in different historical periods because it is true that the environments in which we grow up certainly has an effect on us. I recently read Isabel Hull’s Absolute Destruction, in which an episode was discussed in which a German officer pursued defeated, dying enemies into a desert to little practical purpose at the cost of his own life and those of his men- was this an effect of the military culture German officers operated in? Or was this decision due to the specific personality of the officer involved? Spengler might find it “predestined,” by the declining path of civilization and the need for “expansion,” but there were also many people who left Germany as rising militarism set in, and a member of the militaristic Hollenzollern family, the short lived Emperor Frederick III, was an unshakeable liberal who fought against the more right-wing elements in Germany until his death. Spengler does not account for these “anomalies” of people who do not act as his map of their Culture would dictate that they, by all rights, should.
But really, you guys, I feel like I am not doing this book justice. It is written in this dreamy, mystical language that can work like an incantation, with your mind sinking into the crazy until the expression of it seems beautiful. It is originally written in German, and perhaps due to the fact that many words are untranslatable, you get things like “soul-world,” and “world-feeling,” “life-essences,” “morphological world order,” “world-consciousness,” and “form-feeling.” And he repeats these nonsense words over and over like they explain everything- it is beyond the mystical words of nationalist primordalists, even more religiously oriented. But I can’t even totally dismiss it as perhaps a crazy man’s poetry when it yields up random gems all the time: “mankind is but a zoological expression,” or “The word Europe ought to be struck out of history… Europe expresses no reality but merely a sketchy interpretation of a map… ‘East’ and ‘West’ are notions that contain real history, whereas Europe is an empty sound. Everything great that the Classical world created, it created in pure denial of the existence of any barrier between Rome and Cyprus, Byzantium and Alexandria,” “The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, that because we live on it- and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets!”
I don’t know.. he’s crazy, like totally over the hill nutzo, but it is based on incredibly impressive learning and knowledge. He’s able to do a history of art, a comparison of complicated notions of time, and a history of mathematics completely comfortably. He gets facts wrong again and again, but you can sort of see the weird logic in the end. He’s not THAT off a lot of the time. And it is terribly seductive at times- you can see how so many people want to think this way. There were certainly enough of them in the Bush administration- and in Al Qaeda. Samuel Huntington’s theories are a crude adaptation of Spengler. The echoes of his influence are still being felt. This is a massive, massive tome, but I recommend reading at least a bit of it to better understand the method behind the madness.
July 22, 2023
the Dusk of the Evening-Land - read all through a gnostic lens - metahistory as the archonic scar of reality, metahistory as how people in history saw themselves in history, spirit unfolding - the creation of Spheres to immunize from the Real: all responses to death, all morphologies of a blossoming Vishnu -- a bored Demiurge using civilization itself as a board game on a rainy day. O weep, dance of millenia.
an ur-Text marking the rise of the new unified field theory of metahistory. if there is indeed a gnostic thrownness and a Spenglerian Dasein: this opens the door for entire new dimensions of thought hitertho unremarked. the Platonic Idea of a plant mirrored in the waters of history with which we swim: the non-object of the amniotic fluid that builds this simulation before we even begin to interact with it: forming our a priori foundations of the Mind. Spengler unconsciously began to describe the astral garden of the Death-Rose - the Negative Rosarium - where the gnostic is tested by Oblivion's vitriol. The spine-bearing limbs of these abyssal flowers bind and penetrate the Seeker: winding out of a substrate of annihilation, mechanization, Limitation - the form-problems of our world-image, our death-feeling coalescing with space-feeling: the ur-Symbol of each civilization manifesting in it's architecture, art, number-world, philosophies, Polis, body social, soul-image and so on and so forth. The development of perspective in painting turns into the dissolving of the figure to the pure background; thus borne the Dutch landscape painting - then the hyperdimensional object of surrealism and cubism all tending towards a higher understanding of the space-feeling of the West; at once Spengler here predicts the moon-landing and the Internet by noting the early intimations of aviation through Da Vinci. The metaphysical residue of our death-feeling in our mathematics, our Art gleaning off our God-idea, the resonant echoes of the soul-image in our atom-idea, motion and force - the colossal dimensionality of the Rose shaping everything: the phenomena of the Self awakening to the Light of Day. Recall that the Rose thrives on bone, blood and ordure - geniuses are the obverse forebrains of civilization - the rest are pulled by the vector of humanity. All nodes on the network of the metahistorical Rose - its blossom and decay.
America is a worm hole into the future. The Omega Point. You have entered into the final phase of what might be called homeostatic obsolescence, what Spengler saw as the inevitable decline of cultures into twilight of civilizations: the sedentarization of a once-vital species, or: dusk as ontological principle, when you put down your spears and planted your roots in the earth: agriculture neotenized your skulls, made your forms and thoughts and beings more baby-ish, you were laid by the Death's Head, and grew bored in your yokes. Punched through the Egg's shell into the mirror-ball of the self. I believe the Cut was made with the first man bored of creation. After that you were never yourselves again. What cities do is convert White Noise into Platonic fantasia. Dead grey time into technicolor. Contraction into the tech singularity. Your Throat is getting narrower and narrower. You are children locked in your father's closet.
an ur-Text marking the rise of the new unified field theory of metahistory. if there is indeed a gnostic thrownness and a Spenglerian Dasein: this opens the door for entire new dimensions of thought hitertho unremarked. the Platonic Idea of a plant mirrored in the waters of history with which we swim: the non-object of the amniotic fluid that builds this simulation before we even begin to interact with it: forming our a priori foundations of the Mind. Spengler unconsciously began to describe the astral garden of the Death-Rose - the Negative Rosarium - where the gnostic is tested by Oblivion's vitriol. The spine-bearing limbs of these abyssal flowers bind and penetrate the Seeker: winding out of a substrate of annihilation, mechanization, Limitation - the form-problems of our world-image, our death-feeling coalescing with space-feeling: the ur-Symbol of each civilization manifesting in it's architecture, art, number-world, philosophies, Polis, body social, soul-image and so on and so forth. The development of perspective in painting turns into the dissolving of the figure to the pure background; thus borne the Dutch landscape painting - then the hyperdimensional object of surrealism and cubism all tending towards a higher understanding of the space-feeling of the West; at once Spengler here predicts the moon-landing and the Internet by noting the early intimations of aviation through Da Vinci. The metaphysical residue of our death-feeling in our mathematics, our Art gleaning off our God-idea, the resonant echoes of the soul-image in our atom-idea, motion and force - the colossal dimensionality of the Rose shaping everything: the phenomena of the Self awakening to the Light of Day. Recall that the Rose thrives on bone, blood and ordure - geniuses are the obverse forebrains of civilization - the rest are pulled by the vector of humanity. All nodes on the network of the metahistorical Rose - its blossom and decay.
America is a worm hole into the future. The Omega Point. You have entered into the final phase of what might be called homeostatic obsolescence, what Spengler saw as the inevitable decline of cultures into twilight of civilizations: the sedentarization of a once-vital species, or: dusk as ontological principle, when you put down your spears and planted your roots in the earth: agriculture neotenized your skulls, made your forms and thoughts and beings more baby-ish, you were laid by the Death's Head, and grew bored in your yokes. Punched through the Egg's shell into the mirror-ball of the self. I believe the Cut was made with the first man bored of creation. After that you were never yourselves again. What cities do is convert White Noise into Platonic fantasia. Dead grey time into technicolor. Contraction into the tech singularity. Your Throat is getting narrower and narrower. You are children locked in your father's closet.
April 15, 2019
This is truly an awful book. It has an overriding incoherent theory of a ‘morphology’ on history and the author’s frustrations against democracy, and it has a sympathy for Nationalism while fascism flows throughout the second volume (yes, I read both volumes I and II).
First, the author is not really ‘erudite’ and he has an incredibly shallow grasp of complex subjects but it runs a mile long, and he is definitely frustrated with his country losing The Great War and by Volume II having lost the war.
Goethe and Nietzsche are his inspirations especially in Volume I, but by Volume II he barely relies on them because his full on fascism comes through. In Volume I he spoke incredibly intelligently on ‘entropy’, ‘Einstein’s General Theory’, and ‘theory of groups’ from Topology. He ties those items into his nonsense on all of history repeats itself through different forms, and that there is no truth but only myths and that ‘that history of humanity is meaningless, culture gives us meaning, leading to Civilizations which will inevitably disappear’. All civilizations will end with a ‘Caesarsism’ collapse, according to him, and you know what, darn those pesky little Enlightenment Ideals like democracy, equality, fairness, reason over faith by authority, or that the other fellow not a member of your tribe just might have something worthwhile to bring to the table.
The author moves around a lot and tries to make everything that has ever happened fit his weird theory. He has an ode against ‘double entry accounting’, for example; he states that it was discovered in 1490 and was as important as Columbus discovering America; he’s probably right, but he doesn’t like it because of his weird take on money and power and politics. He’s certain that women have their feminine place and men have their lordly place and puts that into his twisted narrative. Myth is all there is and truth is nothing but a complex word game with a series of facts, at least that is how this author plays the game.
There is a fascist strain that oozes thru out this book. Trump and his Republican enablers would just lap those parts up. Trump has many times made statements such as ‘only I can save you’; he’ll say that about the stock market, immigration, or a host of other things. Spengler thinks that for most of us destiny happens but only a few make destinies. We are doomed (and I think Spengler wants us) to be led by someone who will pull us up by our bootstraps (I wanted to use that metaphor of ‘bootstraps’ because it is impossible as far as I know to pull myself up by one, and the Nationalist leader will not be able to do such a thing either).
Spengler believes ‘blood, soil and character that is formed by the small towns’ makes people cultured and Jews without history are not capable of forming a worthwhile image of themselves as are the ‘Negroes’ of Africa.
Trump calls himself a ‘Nationalist’ because he does not want ‘inclusive Patriotism’ but rather an ‘exclusive Patriotism’, a belief that the definition of ‘right and wrong’ starts with the appearance of a self proclaimed charismatic strong leader and ends with the simplistic jingoism such as ‘make America great again’ or as Spengler says ‘my country right or wrong’ (Spengler actually used that expression in one of his extended ramblings on history) which will inevitably lead to the end of logical and rational debate because the methodology is to manipulate ones passions through emotional appeals against people who are not part of your tribe as defined by the supreme leader who is only charismatic to those who have made him so from their own manipulated feelings. Tolerance of the other is anathema to exclusive patriots or Nationalists; ‘build that wall’, ‘lock her up (without a trial)’, make sense only to those who process their truths through emotions based on fear, hate and intolerance.
Spengler does not like the rational. The rational to him is where the urban elite (he calls them ‘megapolitans’ or something like that) consensus uses the abstract to take away from the real facts in the world; in addition he’ll blame money, commercialism and controls foisted upon us by democratic processes which will inevitably lead to our own downfall. He desperately wants to bring back the wonder and awe of the Homeric Greeks and the gratitude that they would say we owe to the universe all of which we have misplaced today (1920ish), and he wants us to re-embrace pride in ourselves as individual parts of a Nation greater than ourselves; our foundation for meaning must come from something greater than ourselves such as national pride therefore allowing us to embrace an exclusive patriotism, a Nationalism tending towards fascism in the mode of Benito Mussolini. Truth, for him, would emanate from the nation not the individual. The individual needs the state with a great leader and each individual’s meaning can only come from a state as lead by a great charismatic leader.
It’s obvious that this book was very influential in its day. Joseph Campbell ‘universal myths’ theory as shown in ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ which I disliked as much as this book partially because it too has within it a nationalistic narrative similar to this book. Heidegger clearly is pointing to this book as the ‘greatness of the movement’ when he made the statement in the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ that "the works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever do with the inner truth and greatness of the movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)", and I suspect Heidegger was contrasting Spengler’s book with the most vile best seller ever ‘The Myth of the 20th Century’ as one of the ‘works that are being peddled about nowadays’. Spengler definitely dislikes ‘the encounter between global technology and modern man’ and believes it weakens us and separates us from the soil, blood and culture.
Spengler wisely down plays race except he didn’t seem to like the ‘Negroes’ or the ‘Jews’, he does walk a fine line and mostly focuses on a nation (or peoples, or culture) instead of a race. I would say that all Nazis would be able to enjoy this book, but that doesn’t mean one would have to be a Nazi to enjoy it. One could just as easily be a Nationalist, or exclusive Patriot, or ignorant of history and philosophy thus thinking this book was erudite, or curious to look at what was prevalent in 1920ish Germany and how the Germans were more than happy to soon embrace a monster for their leader.
I recently read a book, ‘Critic of Everyday Life’, by Lefebvre. It’s three volumes long, and it’s a Marxist work and the overlap between these two books was surprising. For Marxist class is the ontological foundation for all truth, for a Nationalist (and Fascist, which Spengler definitely was, but wiki tells me he was not a Nazi supporter) the Nation as seen through the privileged tribe as interpreted by a charismatic leader who will always make every fact that disagrees with them a ‘false fact’ or ‘fake news’ the source of all truth. For one who has read both (especially Volume I of ‘Critic of Everyday Life’) there will be a lot of obvious overlap between these two works.
A Nationalist like Trump (that’s his label for himself, not mine) and his Nationalist followers would get a foundation from this book that they clearly don’t have. They’d have to ignore the goofy ‘morphology’ part of the book, but this book would help them better understand themselves. The author inverts all of the lessons of The Enlightenment: rely on your feelings not reason, be exclusive not inclusive, nation trumps the individual, certainty in one’s own truths that comes from pride from one’s own tribe and anyone not a member of your tribe is not as good as you; and truth comes from the authority of one’s leader who you have elevated to a charismatic status. All of these items are within this book and wrapped in weird mysticism that the author definitely has. For example, he’ll say Euclidian spirit is finite and relative to all the other morphological shapes, while Faustian truth is infinite and absolute and leads to the death of the civilization. One can easily follow the author’s mystical convoluted story, but most readers will just ignore that crap.
First, the author is not really ‘erudite’ and he has an incredibly shallow grasp of complex subjects but it runs a mile long, and he is definitely frustrated with his country losing The Great War and by Volume II having lost the war.
Goethe and Nietzsche are his inspirations especially in Volume I, but by Volume II he barely relies on them because his full on fascism comes through. In Volume I he spoke incredibly intelligently on ‘entropy’, ‘Einstein’s General Theory’, and ‘theory of groups’ from Topology. He ties those items into his nonsense on all of history repeats itself through different forms, and that there is no truth but only myths and that ‘that history of humanity is meaningless, culture gives us meaning, leading to Civilizations which will inevitably disappear’. All civilizations will end with a ‘Caesarsism’ collapse, according to him, and you know what, darn those pesky little Enlightenment Ideals like democracy, equality, fairness, reason over faith by authority, or that the other fellow not a member of your tribe just might have something worthwhile to bring to the table.
The author moves around a lot and tries to make everything that has ever happened fit his weird theory. He has an ode against ‘double entry accounting’, for example; he states that it was discovered in 1490 and was as important as Columbus discovering America; he’s probably right, but he doesn’t like it because of his weird take on money and power and politics. He’s certain that women have their feminine place and men have their lordly place and puts that into his twisted narrative. Myth is all there is and truth is nothing but a complex word game with a series of facts, at least that is how this author plays the game.
There is a fascist strain that oozes thru out this book. Trump and his Republican enablers would just lap those parts up. Trump has many times made statements such as ‘only I can save you’; he’ll say that about the stock market, immigration, or a host of other things. Spengler thinks that for most of us destiny happens but only a few make destinies. We are doomed (and I think Spengler wants us) to be led by someone who will pull us up by our bootstraps (I wanted to use that metaphor of ‘bootstraps’ because it is impossible as far as I know to pull myself up by one, and the Nationalist leader will not be able to do such a thing either).
Spengler believes ‘blood, soil and character that is formed by the small towns’ makes people cultured and Jews without history are not capable of forming a worthwhile image of themselves as are the ‘Negroes’ of Africa.
Trump calls himself a ‘Nationalist’ because he does not want ‘inclusive Patriotism’ but rather an ‘exclusive Patriotism’, a belief that the definition of ‘right and wrong’ starts with the appearance of a self proclaimed charismatic strong leader and ends with the simplistic jingoism such as ‘make America great again’ or as Spengler says ‘my country right or wrong’ (Spengler actually used that expression in one of his extended ramblings on history) which will inevitably lead to the end of logical and rational debate because the methodology is to manipulate ones passions through emotional appeals against people who are not part of your tribe as defined by the supreme leader who is only charismatic to those who have made him so from their own manipulated feelings. Tolerance of the other is anathema to exclusive patriots or Nationalists; ‘build that wall’, ‘lock her up (without a trial)’, make sense only to those who process their truths through emotions based on fear, hate and intolerance.
Spengler does not like the rational. The rational to him is where the urban elite (he calls them ‘megapolitans’ or something like that) consensus uses the abstract to take away from the real facts in the world; in addition he’ll blame money, commercialism and controls foisted upon us by democratic processes which will inevitably lead to our own downfall. He desperately wants to bring back the wonder and awe of the Homeric Greeks and the gratitude that they would say we owe to the universe all of which we have misplaced today (1920ish), and he wants us to re-embrace pride in ourselves as individual parts of a Nation greater than ourselves; our foundation for meaning must come from something greater than ourselves such as national pride therefore allowing us to embrace an exclusive patriotism, a Nationalism tending towards fascism in the mode of Benito Mussolini. Truth, for him, would emanate from the nation not the individual. The individual needs the state with a great leader and each individual’s meaning can only come from a state as lead by a great charismatic leader.
It’s obvious that this book was very influential in its day. Joseph Campbell ‘universal myths’ theory as shown in ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ which I disliked as much as this book partially because it too has within it a nationalistic narrative similar to this book. Heidegger clearly is pointing to this book as the ‘greatness of the movement’ when he made the statement in the ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’ that "the works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever do with the inner truth and greatness of the movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)", and I suspect Heidegger was contrasting Spengler’s book with the most vile best seller ever ‘The Myth of the 20th Century’ as one of the ‘works that are being peddled about nowadays’. Spengler definitely dislikes ‘the encounter between global technology and modern man’ and believes it weakens us and separates us from the soil, blood and culture.
Spengler wisely down plays race except he didn’t seem to like the ‘Negroes’ or the ‘Jews’, he does walk a fine line and mostly focuses on a nation (or peoples, or culture) instead of a race. I would say that all Nazis would be able to enjoy this book, but that doesn’t mean one would have to be a Nazi to enjoy it. One could just as easily be a Nationalist, or exclusive Patriot, or ignorant of history and philosophy thus thinking this book was erudite, or curious to look at what was prevalent in 1920ish Germany and how the Germans were more than happy to soon embrace a monster for their leader.
I recently read a book, ‘Critic of Everyday Life’, by Lefebvre. It’s three volumes long, and it’s a Marxist work and the overlap between these two books was surprising. For Marxist class is the ontological foundation for all truth, for a Nationalist (and Fascist, which Spengler definitely was, but wiki tells me he was not a Nazi supporter) the Nation as seen through the privileged tribe as interpreted by a charismatic leader who will always make every fact that disagrees with them a ‘false fact’ or ‘fake news’ the source of all truth. For one who has read both (especially Volume I of ‘Critic of Everyday Life’) there will be a lot of obvious overlap between these two works.
A Nationalist like Trump (that’s his label for himself, not mine) and his Nationalist followers would get a foundation from this book that they clearly don’t have. They’d have to ignore the goofy ‘morphology’ part of the book, but this book would help them better understand themselves. The author inverts all of the lessons of The Enlightenment: rely on your feelings not reason, be exclusive not inclusive, nation trumps the individual, certainty in one’s own truths that comes from pride from one’s own tribe and anyone not a member of your tribe is not as good as you; and truth comes from the authority of one’s leader who you have elevated to a charismatic status. All of these items are within this book and wrapped in weird mysticism that the author definitely has. For example, he’ll say Euclidian spirit is finite and relative to all the other morphological shapes, while Faustian truth is infinite and absolute and leads to the death of the civilization. One can easily follow the author’s mystical convoluted story, but most readers will just ignore that crap.
Read
August 6, 2020Nietzsche's finest moment. It only had to come 3 decades after his collapse in Turin. In fact a lot of this reminds one of reading Nietzsche at his best and most synthetic like in The Birth of Tragedy (fitting) or The Genealogy of Morals. Also Spengler's use of Goethean philosophy, especially that of "living" organic development contra Darwinism, is just fascinating and has made his Conversations with Eckermann a priority read for me. And much before I get around to reading Aristotle or Kant most likely, but shoot me if I read what I find to be much more poetic and sensuously compelling in philosophy rather than what is logically and soundly argumentative as is the contemporary vogue, for which my own formal and sterile schooling has completely eliminated all charm of for me.
This edition itself is fantastic. When Spengler is great he's Great; like Nietzsche he is eminently readable if you would even put in the smallest amount of effort, though you will still feel the 400 or so pages because of the density of insights, but these will the very same ones that get you through it. Like the best works of literature too, as you read you will learn to better comprehend the writing, and in the end will make a better reader out of you. Still, some of his more lengthy ramblings about the inner nature of mathematics and the meaning of symbols for cultures have no doubt been cut down here in the abridgment, so even I am grateful that I did not need to read another, say 600-700 more pages of that. Also dispel whatever you may have heard about Spengler's political stance here: even after reading every word of this book I cannot tell you with any concrete certainty what his personal political views are, which is exactly as it should be, and it is a great credit to Spengler that he resisted the temptation to add personal notes or rallying cries to a work like this. There is material here for both monarchists and socialists alike to use as arguments and to denounce. Modern buzz-words whose translations are likely a stretch like "blood" and his determinism have a completely different meaning/connotation in context. And no doubt if you really got his message here such things as petty party politics appear almost irrelevant in the continuum of world-history.
One can quibble endlessly about the small details in Spengler's historical research, but as the introduction suggests one should not take everything too literal-mindedly, but rather more poetically again like Nietzsche. The ones who did rail against these details, who Spengler knowingly and ingeniously termed "mere ant-industry" in this book, are people you would have never heard of before; the ones who did appreciate this book and maybe to a degree even absorbed it have the names of Max Weber, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Theodor Adorno(!) on the other hand. Indeed it's no surprise that it took a German-language mind to understand this-in the end-German book, and what they likely appreciated was the poetic force and brilliant imagery of the writing first and foremost, for which all historical writing in the Anglo-sphere has greatly lacked since Carlyle who himself was under the influence of Hegel. Everyone who has ever tried to puzzle out historical and even just general linguistic terminology themselves knows how some concepts must be felt rather than be spelled out in plain speech, as Walter Benjamin famously suggested as such in his essay on translation. So even he would be proud at how Spengler handles this, which is a large contributing factor as to why this book has had such staying power: he attacks the difficult-to-name concepts at an oblique angle, using unique metaphors and comparative imagery to illuminate these concepts for the reader rather than reducing them. Some of these extended metaphors are the cultural comparisons of the genealogy for entire cultures in themselves, for which reading them gave me such a feeling that cannot be described, but can be equated to completing a mathematical proof through insight alone. That in so many words is the great strength of this writing.
If there is one specific thing that this book utterly illuminated for me that has been obscure before is the particularly German comparison of "Civilization vs. Culture". They can be imagined roughly as such: a civilization-oriented society is for the thoroughly democratized cosmopolitan city dweller that weigh the pros and cons of every material purchase, who focuses politically and ethically on the greatest happiness for the greatest number as opposed to cultivation through potential hardship and baptism-by-fire in essence to create easily swayed but comfortable masses; a culture-oriented one on the other hand is the society (irrespective of political structure) for which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Mussorsgky, and Repin could have lived in one milieu and thought nothing of it for example. Might it not be a significant indicator that while we may think of the second as fine and dandy we would rather as a political mass want the first to live in because the sight of oppressed and hard-done people can guilt us so? But in the end it is little matter for the preference of individuals for one or the other as is Spengler's thesis: through gradual transformations in taste and political/economic order, the culture-society will eventually become the civilization-society, and the many comparisons he draws which constitute the bulk of the book are, if not compelling, then certainly food for thought and not wanton fear-mongering. For once a people have stop producing admirable cultural and aesthetic works in the form of literature, song, and the plastic arts, what historically can be pointed to by future ones as evidence that a great civilization once was?
So might I become a bit more obnoxious now in the discussion of history whenever it comes up? Oh absolutely, but what are the true uses now of a socio-historical-philosophical book for the non-academic if one can't allow themselves such liberties once in a while?
This edition itself is fantastic. When Spengler is great he's Great; like Nietzsche he is eminently readable if you would even put in the smallest amount of effort, though you will still feel the 400 or so pages because of the density of insights, but these will the very same ones that get you through it. Like the best works of literature too, as you read you will learn to better comprehend the writing, and in the end will make a better reader out of you. Still, some of his more lengthy ramblings about the inner nature of mathematics and the meaning of symbols for cultures have no doubt been cut down here in the abridgment, so even I am grateful that I did not need to read another, say 600-700 more pages of that. Also dispel whatever you may have heard about Spengler's political stance here: even after reading every word of this book I cannot tell you with any concrete certainty what his personal political views are, which is exactly as it should be, and it is a great credit to Spengler that he resisted the temptation to add personal notes or rallying cries to a work like this. There is material here for both monarchists and socialists alike to use as arguments and to denounce. Modern buzz-words whose translations are likely a stretch like "blood" and his determinism have a completely different meaning/connotation in context. And no doubt if you really got his message here such things as petty party politics appear almost irrelevant in the continuum of world-history.
One can quibble endlessly about the small details in Spengler's historical research, but as the introduction suggests one should not take everything too literal-mindedly, but rather more poetically again like Nietzsche. The ones who did rail against these details, who Spengler knowingly and ingeniously termed "mere ant-industry" in this book, are people you would have never heard of before; the ones who did appreciate this book and maybe to a degree even absorbed it have the names of Max Weber, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Theodor Adorno(!) on the other hand. Indeed it's no surprise that it took a German-language mind to understand this-in the end-German book, and what they likely appreciated was the poetic force and brilliant imagery of the writing first and foremost, for which all historical writing in the Anglo-sphere has greatly lacked since Carlyle who himself was under the influence of Hegel. Everyone who has ever tried to puzzle out historical and even just general linguistic terminology themselves knows how some concepts must be felt rather than be spelled out in plain speech, as Walter Benjamin famously suggested as such in his essay on translation. So even he would be proud at how Spengler handles this, which is a large contributing factor as to why this book has had such staying power: he attacks the difficult-to-name concepts at an oblique angle, using unique metaphors and comparative imagery to illuminate these concepts for the reader rather than reducing them. Some of these extended metaphors are the cultural comparisons of the genealogy for entire cultures in themselves, for which reading them gave me such a feeling that cannot be described, but can be equated to completing a mathematical proof through insight alone. That in so many words is the great strength of this writing.
If there is one specific thing that this book utterly illuminated for me that has been obscure before is the particularly German comparison of "Civilization vs. Culture". They can be imagined roughly as such: a civilization-oriented society is for the thoroughly democratized cosmopolitan city dweller that weigh the pros and cons of every material purchase, who focuses politically and ethically on the greatest happiness for the greatest number as opposed to cultivation through potential hardship and baptism-by-fire in essence to create easily swayed but comfortable masses; a culture-oriented one on the other hand is the society (irrespective of political structure) for which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Mussorsgky, and Repin could have lived in one milieu and thought nothing of it for example. Might it not be a significant indicator that while we may think of the second as fine and dandy we would rather as a political mass want the first to live in because the sight of oppressed and hard-done people can guilt us so? But in the end it is little matter for the preference of individuals for one or the other as is Spengler's thesis: through gradual transformations in taste and political/economic order, the culture-society will eventually become the civilization-society, and the many comparisons he draws which constitute the bulk of the book are, if not compelling, then certainly food for thought and not wanton fear-mongering. For once a people have stop producing admirable cultural and aesthetic works in the form of literature, song, and the plastic arts, what historically can be pointed to by future ones as evidence that a great civilization once was?
So might I become a bit more obnoxious now in the discussion of history whenever it comes up? Oh absolutely, but what are the true uses now of a socio-historical-philosophical book for the non-academic if one can't allow themselves such liberties once in a while?
August 23, 2018
Spengler is officially my second favourite mainstream philosopher, after only Nietzsche. Spengler, rather like Nietzsche, wrote like a poet and with the profundity of a sage. Nearly every single page filled me with intellectual ecstasy. There is not a single topic under the sun that Spengler does not offer insight into and synthesize into his overwhelmingly elegant thought-system. Much like Nietzsche, Spengler is deliberately rejected by academia simply because they are afraid of him. People and especially the various species of Liberals do not want to have their presumptions challenged. In order to keep Spengler out of mainstream discussion they will deliberately ignore and twist his words to obfuscate him. Calling Spengler a mere "Prophet of Doom" is like calling Nietzsche simply a "Nihilist" - not only are either of those statements superficial, but they fail to even come close to the core of what either of them said or believe. Anybody who says either of those things to you should be immediately disqualified from being "Intelligent" in your mind.
Spengler is the only philosopher of history who ever mattered, recognizing that other philosophical historians before him like Hegel are themselves only the products of a civilization experiencing a particular turning of the wheel of birth-growth-death-rebirth.
Spengler is the single most self-aware Westerner who ever lived, penetrating more deeply than anyone into the core of the unique psychology of Western Man. His process of differentiating between Classical and Western Man as well as Western Man and "Magian" Man ("Magian" Spengler's term for the religious ethos of the Middle-East) really make you feel, in your very blood and bones, how as a Westerner, you are a unique being with a way of looking at the world that is utterly without precedent and thoroughly exciting.
Days after opening this book I could feel the Spenglerian thought-system refining my mind, and it is hard not to see the world from a Spenglerian lens after reading it. It is best to be able to see the world from as many lenses as possible, but without falling into the delusion that all lenses are equal. The Spenglerian lens is a particularly illuminating one.
Without question the best book I read this summer. It will haunt me for a long time and I cannot wait to read it again, which I will do without question. Next time I will read the un-abridged version. HIGHLY, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Spengler is the only philosopher of history who ever mattered, recognizing that other philosophical historians before him like Hegel are themselves only the products of a civilization experiencing a particular turning of the wheel of birth-growth-death-rebirth.
Spengler is the single most self-aware Westerner who ever lived, penetrating more deeply than anyone into the core of the unique psychology of Western Man. His process of differentiating between Classical and Western Man as well as Western Man and "Magian" Man ("Magian" Spengler's term for the religious ethos of the Middle-East) really make you feel, in your very blood and bones, how as a Westerner, you are a unique being with a way of looking at the world that is utterly without precedent and thoroughly exciting.
Days after opening this book I could feel the Spenglerian thought-system refining my mind, and it is hard not to see the world from a Spenglerian lens after reading it. It is best to be able to see the world from as many lenses as possible, but without falling into the delusion that all lenses are equal. The Spenglerian lens is a particularly illuminating one.
Without question the best book I read this summer. It will haunt me for a long time and I cannot wait to read it again, which I will do without question. Next time I will read the un-abridged version. HIGHLY, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
May 10, 2019
ok, this is epic.
February 9, 2022
Spengler is popularizing the academic and elitist idea that each culture and during different times has its own worldview. And not just that, but the “right” historian and philosopher (i.e., Spengler himself) is “reading” that worldview retrospectively from the different domains of arts, sciences, politics, economics, and so on; and presenting them to the masses for entertainment and edification. The problem is that Spengler is taking this task way too seriously and consequently covers a ridiculous amount of history, cultures, and worldviews.
With several distinctions borrowed from Nietzsche, Goethe, Romanticism, and more generally from the German Idealism (like organic vs. mechanic, becoming vs. being, and so on), Spengler is claiming to detect ascending and descending patterns in the history of all past and present cultures. It is of no surprise that he sees in the European democracies of his time the nadir of the current cycle. He is quite the conservative and as such profoundly dislikes democracies and their representative elections, economics and money, legal and universal equality, free press, Marxism, formal sciences, academics and intellectuals, popular entertainment, and so on.
Most of the content (>75%) is tedious and outdated. Given that these two books were bestsellers 100 years ago in Germany, Spengler is worth reading in order to understand his culture obsessed with worldviews; and not much for their proper content. In other words, these two books make the German Idealism that will eventually turn anti-democratic and towards Fascism quite concrete for a present and non-German reader.
With several distinctions borrowed from Nietzsche, Goethe, Romanticism, and more generally from the German Idealism (like organic vs. mechanic, becoming vs. being, and so on), Spengler is claiming to detect ascending and descending patterns in the history of all past and present cultures. It is of no surprise that he sees in the European democracies of his time the nadir of the current cycle. He is quite the conservative and as such profoundly dislikes democracies and their representative elections, economics and money, legal and universal equality, free press, Marxism, formal sciences, academics and intellectuals, popular entertainment, and so on.
Most of the content (>75%) is tedious and outdated. Given that these two books were bestsellers 100 years ago in Germany, Spengler is worth reading in order to understand his culture obsessed with worldviews; and not much for their proper content. In other words, these two books make the German Idealism that will eventually turn anti-democratic and towards Fascism quite concrete for a present and non-German reader.
September 12, 2011
The greatest book written in the 20th century. Nobody can really call themselves well-read if they haven't read this.
July 10, 2015
The rare honest conservative intellectual. Spengler explores the factors that make all cultures unique. The decline of the west he speaks of needs not be a negative one, but a simple passage in the narrative of history. It is a shame his work was appropriated by fascists, but it serves as a very useful insight into the state of culture and globalization at the time.
July 11, 2021
So intricate and pregnant it becomes laborious, this book is relatively easy to 'give oneself up to' with a vague familiarity with the German philosophy idiosyncratically regurgitated here; and it is as easy to dismiss it as what it is, hallucinatory parallelisms found by everyone's favorite high school math teacher drowning & under a very Mann-isch delusion, the kaleidoscopic secrets of the universe playing before his German eyes before the Weimar respite came crashing down. Like Aschenbach's visions, the beauty and pseudo-coherency of his visions are clear and accessible; and likewise, they are false under any degree of hardminded scrutiny. But, between, indubitably stand some correct judgments and some structural manoeuvers worth investigating. I tried consulting Wittgenstein's Culture and Value notebooks in hopes of some interesting insights (less out of reverence for Witt, and more out of interest in his occasionally powerful ability to cross-examine branches of philosophy), but he seems merely to have rubbed against this same issue, namely, the difficult question of how to structurally deal with Spengler's tendrils.
So yes: while his new system of terminology doesn't quite work and his organon of historical facts and analyses fare even poorer, it would appear there is something incontrovertibly correct here - for, as his thesis shows, he is concerned not with material facts or analytical terminologies but rather with an ill-defined but clearly efficacious brand of the (panpsychic?) phenomenology. The issue of course is not one of preliminary choice between systems per se, something at which Spengler would never win against cooler heads (ie, over-reaching phenomenological networks are simply of no use to anyone trying to establish explanations and analyses). Rather it's about what ideas and approaches can be salvaged from this insolvent but alluring system, which at present does not quite have a canonical place in serious historical studies even though it tenably could - although, it's not encouraging that Spengler is eschewed by all historians, most philosophers, and nearly every non-'esotericist' (though this may have more to do with his unique approach, which in some ways refuses to speak to any other discipline on their own terms). The Frankfurt school (and Heidegger) seemed fond of him, but in general I think the people like Habermas and the French who continued these ideas eschewed this particular branch of German misadventures.
Anyways, the main thesis of Spengler's book is that we must understand history not by material notions of causality, teleological rivers towards a fixed endgoal, or stratified patterns of traceable action; rather, we must explain it in terms of a flexible new model that traces the 'life cycles' of cultures in&of themselves - something derived from Goethe's theory of plant morphology (growing and dying according to a fixed 'morphological' pattern which it follows on some special epi-physical level), and also Goethe's essay 'The Epochs of Man' where the generic life cycle of cultures is given, from confused beginnings through various degrees of intricacy until only an empty, soulless husk remains. This cycle is unstoppable and ominpresent, and is antifragile enough to accommodate even the gigantest of unlikely major happenings (save genocides allowed merely by circumstance, as in the Aztecs).
Even the scientific and mathematical communities within a culture are reflections these life cycles - although it should be noted that Spengler's railing against 'naturalism' (ie, scientific realism whether via Aristotle or Einstein) is less a way of dismissing the reality and efficacy of the material world and our systems of understanding it, but rather an effort to redirect focus away from the rigid formalism of the late 19th century and onto his new model. The meaning unto history, and unto us as people, of these scientific and mathematical models can ONLY be understood in terms of their symbolic value, the pre-existing interests that determine their aim and fruit, and the socio-cultural effects that result from the increased capacities that arise - which, he claims, is why the meaning of our 'Faustian' science is in our delight in studying force, and in our paintings, epic-sweeping landscapes. The wholesale rejection of anything that doesn't arise out of cultural valuation and social currents for the sake of antitechnical, metastructural analysis is a common flaw throughout Spengler's book - but here, just as commonly, it's offset by a deliberate if not entirely justificatory purpose.
Analogue perhaps to this is the relationship between Spengler and the political sphere: For all his wide-spread reading and dilettantism, he doesn't quite seem to have any sort of political capacity other than for the genealogical appreciation for how politics comes into being and structurally operates; it's basically impossible to find or even imagine him making any sort of genuinely political commentary, and such is his fatalist-determinist project that he proceeds neutrally & without editorializing, even if this is the result of an erroneous and unrealized desire to stand beyond the stream of time (or, to have ground to speak on complex issues without concrete technical knowledge). This is mostly significant to note as regards to Spengler's value&influence as a reactionary favorite: haunting in his book are notes about the dissolution of values, the fallible manipulations of massive superstructures, and the inevitability of a quiet apocalypse; but the issue remains that his predictions are so unconcerned with anything material, and that so many possibilities could 'realize' his predictions, so that no useful concrete moral or prediction could arise from his book for political (or really any) purposes. Indeed, the fatalism is inevitable to the point that, ideologically speaking, the book is probably singularly of "use" as an apocalyptic poem for the enjoyment of reactionaries. No beautiful thing is useful, anyhow, as they like to think in Europe.
One of the more enduring aspects of the Spenglerite spiel is the cosmology he gives unto us - the three headed hydra of the Classical, Magian and Faustian. To the fan of German intellectualism naturally appeals the desire to systematize the Goethean dance into a choreography & in reading Faust we can see a vision that (to the Western eye) capitulates all that came before and all that follows; Spengler integrates not only these Faustian currents and the plant morphology, but also the quasi-mystic color theory and his poetic waxings on clouds and tectonic plates, and thus applies them to his vision of historical cycles and the Faustian spirit within man. Hence, the general life cycle of Europe from the medieval Teutonic knights and post-Roman feudals is determined by various swellings&realizations of this Faustian culture, which follows the same systemic pattern that Spengler claims to have identified. Indeed, through this book he traditionally operates by taking pre-existant dichotomies / partitions of Geist, and then counterproposes his own. Instead of Classical/Medieval/Modern we get a more eloquent but still rigid perennialism, for example - and in lieu of the Latinate vs Germanic anatomy that the nationalistic hobbyists of German intellectual of the 19th century, we get a tripartite division.
Still, while the Magian is an effort to break with the Eurocentric dichotomy of treating the East as total Other, it only obfuscates more than it illuminates: the Arabian blocs, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Russians are all castigated within this category. Spengler is, incidentally then, at his most insightful when he is concretely treating each of these national spirits as separate cases, and at his worst when he waxes on about the common received image of the mystic-alluring-eternal Orient (Nevertheless cf Mann's Russian Clavdia Chavchat, and her 'chinese eyes'). Of course, the issue is less Spengler's accuracy about any of these countries or spirits, and rather the structural cogency of the choice altogether to divide them as such - and I think here, more than even perhaps in his analysis of the Sciences, his system breaks in consequential ways. His analyses about the future of Russia and the evolution of Abrahamic religions are plausible and totally worth considering, but are so uncharacteristically focused on concrete data and content that Spengler's metaphysical system is totally unnecessary to assert them and, if anything, obscures the explanatory/prognostic value of what he's saying.
To this effect, a very lengthy and endearing stretch of the second volume is devoted to the "Problems of the Magian" culture. Spengler strides confidently through history of eastern religion, from Persian cults to the unfurling of Judaism to the crucifix climax and then too the Christian cults which followed him, escalating all the way to its final realization(!) in Islam. I'm somewhat but not TOTALLY ignorant in these historical-religion studies, so while I can't say that his analyses here are by any means accurate, they definitely do provide an immensely exciting and coherent picture which ties together the mysterious feelings of these ancient-religious documents (everything from Mithra to Gnosticism to Scholasticism) and purports to explain them; clearly he runs up against his vanity once again in his rejection of causal/material naturalism, and hyper-inflates the value, say, of external action in the course of medieval Europe in favor of a dubious centralizing of the Pseudomorphosis ('hollow' evolution according to imitation of external past cultures) of Arabian religion through the reinterpretation of Christian doctrines - but, all the same, his efforts to explain much of the history of Arab-Jewish history in the Middle East benefits IMMENSELY from the project, whose main thesis may well be an effort in empathy. That is to say, Spengler may well have made more coherent sense than most historians of his day by simply taking into consideration the consequences of a mass group of people who genuinely believed in the coming of the apocalypse. In places like this, in terms both of his metaphysics and especially in terms of raw connections, Spengler achieves more insight (if more artistically than analytically) than anyone, save Hegel, if you want.
And it is indeed Spengler's effort as a philosopher in the stream of Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Schoepenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Heideggers and the Adornos to come that we have to understand his value. While Spengler at times professes to stand outside the stream of history enough to note the fundamental structural differences between himself & past cultures, his efforts (both in terms of content and structure) are something that could never have happened anywhere or any-time other than the early 20s in Weimar. As Adrian Leverkuhn's (or Mahler's, if you want to swing that way) symphonies contain a funeral dirge for the total perversion&destruction of the illusory visions of Aschenbach & Castorp, then so too does Spengler stand right on the moment before the final irreversible collapse into the void. His anatomy of the structures which all cultures follow (which nominally purports a rejection of Eurocentricism) is based off a motley gang-up of Teutonic philosophic ideals united solely by his persistent aiming at the parallellist theme - you can find post-Kantian neuroses about space and time, Nietzschean pontifications about the relativity of psychological frameworks, Schoepenhauerian reflections on Will that verge on prefiguring the Husserlian-Heideggerian phenomenology and ludditism, and all this aside from the Goethean fixations on Force, Striving, Infinity, etc.
Naturally, we can apologize for all this (as Spengler grows near to admitting at several points) by remembering that he himself is a Faustian in the dying-days of his culture - which produces a frustrating circular logic where Spengler's system is confirmed because his assertion of his own system necessarily follows from his place in that system. I've struggled with wrapping my head around this to almost no avail; the best salvation I can retch from this is that, for any practical future purposes, a distanced and ironical respect for such self-imploding systemics must be held, and that from it concrete ideas or turns-of-logic may be excavated on the proper occasion, just as Goethe did with Spinoza and Nietzsche with the apocalyptic theories he was always just barely preventing himself from espousing.
The ghost of Nietzsche indeed looms large in this book. A wonderful user named 'Prickle' on this site says alluringly that this is "Nietzsche's finest moment. It only had to come 3 decades after his collapse in Turin"; although I can't quite agree. Nietzsche himself visibly struggles with these same Germanic impulses - the desire to concoct anatomies (teleological or caricaturisch) of national spirits, the desire to eschew the limitations of politics and religion for an elusive and mystical commentary, a love of watching the dancing and evolution of supposedly infinite conceptual categories as they change with the generations for reasons they don't understand. And indeed Spengler takes an immense glee in employing Nietzsche's same Heraclitean paradoxes onto the evolution of cities and the understanding of psychology (two of the finest chapters in the Decline); we watch as each successive epoch rushes towards a new tier of realization, understanding neither where they came from nor where they are going or why, and as an entire shifting river of urban evolutions and psychological sciences lead from a barbaric and violent past into a pedantic and pointless future, while staving off pessimism in glee at the poetical ironies and the conceptual fluidities.
But by this same ironic balance are Spengler and Nietzsche at total odds with one another. Nietzsche's destructive dialectics could never accept such a coherent connection between the generations, nor could he ever think a sweeping analysis of lost epochs and gigantic currents could ever rise out of the pre-existing influences (which Spengler nonsensically if plausibly tries to simply accept&incorporate). Spengler would be to him merely another post-Schoepenhauerian whose one step forward means two steps back on every page. Likewise, Spengler assaults Nietzsche for falling guilty to his own critiques, and by making simple historical errors - notably, eg, how the Slave Morals of the Jewish Law came to full prominence and realization not under slavery but within powerful epochs - and notes that Nietzsche's eschewal of morality is not a destruction of all systems but rather the erection of a new system. This is a misunderstanding of Nietzsche, but Nietzsche himself was guilty of it - compare the self-sabotage within Zarathustra, and his immense cares to hold himself at a properly flexible systematicism in Beyond Good And Evil. And so both thinkers find in the other the same mysterious but infinitely elusive paradoxicalism that increasingly came to dominate (their interpretation of) German intellectualism, and which drove one to kiss a horse and the other to be forgotten by posterity.
If you read this whole review, thanks but shame on you for trusting random internet idiots!
So yes: while his new system of terminology doesn't quite work and his organon of historical facts and analyses fare even poorer, it would appear there is something incontrovertibly correct here - for, as his thesis shows, he is concerned not with material facts or analytical terminologies but rather with an ill-defined but clearly efficacious brand of the (panpsychic?) phenomenology. The issue of course is not one of preliminary choice between systems per se, something at which Spengler would never win against cooler heads (ie, over-reaching phenomenological networks are simply of no use to anyone trying to establish explanations and analyses). Rather it's about what ideas and approaches can be salvaged from this insolvent but alluring system, which at present does not quite have a canonical place in serious historical studies even though it tenably could - although, it's not encouraging that Spengler is eschewed by all historians, most philosophers, and nearly every non-'esotericist' (though this may have more to do with his unique approach, which in some ways refuses to speak to any other discipline on their own terms). The Frankfurt school (and Heidegger) seemed fond of him, but in general I think the people like Habermas and the French who continued these ideas eschewed this particular branch of German misadventures.
Anyways, the main thesis of Spengler's book is that we must understand history not by material notions of causality, teleological rivers towards a fixed endgoal, or stratified patterns of traceable action; rather, we must explain it in terms of a flexible new model that traces the 'life cycles' of cultures in&of themselves - something derived from Goethe's theory of plant morphology (growing and dying according to a fixed 'morphological' pattern which it follows on some special epi-physical level), and also Goethe's essay 'The Epochs of Man' where the generic life cycle of cultures is given, from confused beginnings through various degrees of intricacy until only an empty, soulless husk remains. This cycle is unstoppable and ominpresent, and is antifragile enough to accommodate even the gigantest of unlikely major happenings (save genocides allowed merely by circumstance, as in the Aztecs).
Even the scientific and mathematical communities within a culture are reflections these life cycles - although it should be noted that Spengler's railing against 'naturalism' (ie, scientific realism whether via Aristotle or Einstein) is less a way of dismissing the reality and efficacy of the material world and our systems of understanding it, but rather an effort to redirect focus away from the rigid formalism of the late 19th century and onto his new model. The meaning unto history, and unto us as people, of these scientific and mathematical models can ONLY be understood in terms of their symbolic value, the pre-existing interests that determine their aim and fruit, and the socio-cultural effects that result from the increased capacities that arise - which, he claims, is why the meaning of our 'Faustian' science is in our delight in studying force, and in our paintings, epic-sweeping landscapes. The wholesale rejection of anything that doesn't arise out of cultural valuation and social currents for the sake of antitechnical, metastructural analysis is a common flaw throughout Spengler's book - but here, just as commonly, it's offset by a deliberate if not entirely justificatory purpose.
Analogue perhaps to this is the relationship between Spengler and the political sphere: For all his wide-spread reading and dilettantism, he doesn't quite seem to have any sort of political capacity other than for the genealogical appreciation for how politics comes into being and structurally operates; it's basically impossible to find or even imagine him making any sort of genuinely political commentary, and such is his fatalist-determinist project that he proceeds neutrally & without editorializing, even if this is the result of an erroneous and unrealized desire to stand beyond the stream of time (or, to have ground to speak on complex issues without concrete technical knowledge). This is mostly significant to note as regards to Spengler's value&influence as a reactionary favorite: haunting in his book are notes about the dissolution of values, the fallible manipulations of massive superstructures, and the inevitability of a quiet apocalypse; but the issue remains that his predictions are so unconcerned with anything material, and that so many possibilities could 'realize' his predictions, so that no useful concrete moral or prediction could arise from his book for political (or really any) purposes. Indeed, the fatalism is inevitable to the point that, ideologically speaking, the book is probably singularly of "use" as an apocalyptic poem for the enjoyment of reactionaries. No beautiful thing is useful, anyhow, as they like to think in Europe.
One of the more enduring aspects of the Spenglerite spiel is the cosmology he gives unto us - the three headed hydra of the Classical, Magian and Faustian. To the fan of German intellectualism naturally appeals the desire to systematize the Goethean dance into a choreography & in reading Faust we can see a vision that (to the Western eye) capitulates all that came before and all that follows; Spengler integrates not only these Faustian currents and the plant morphology, but also the quasi-mystic color theory and his poetic waxings on clouds and tectonic plates, and thus applies them to his vision of historical cycles and the Faustian spirit within man. Hence, the general life cycle of Europe from the medieval Teutonic knights and post-Roman feudals is determined by various swellings&realizations of this Faustian culture, which follows the same systemic pattern that Spengler claims to have identified. Indeed, through this book he traditionally operates by taking pre-existant dichotomies / partitions of Geist, and then counterproposes his own. Instead of Classical/Medieval/Modern we get a more eloquent but still rigid perennialism, for example - and in lieu of the Latinate vs Germanic anatomy that the nationalistic hobbyists of German intellectual of the 19th century, we get a tripartite division.
Still, while the Magian is an effort to break with the Eurocentric dichotomy of treating the East as total Other, it only obfuscates more than it illuminates: the Arabian blocs, the Chinese, the Indians, and the Russians are all castigated within this category. Spengler is, incidentally then, at his most insightful when he is concretely treating each of these national spirits as separate cases, and at his worst when he waxes on about the common received image of the mystic-alluring-eternal Orient (Nevertheless cf Mann's Russian Clavdia Chavchat, and her 'chinese eyes'). Of course, the issue is less Spengler's accuracy about any of these countries or spirits, and rather the structural cogency of the choice altogether to divide them as such - and I think here, more than even perhaps in his analysis of the Sciences, his system breaks in consequential ways. His analyses about the future of Russia and the evolution of Abrahamic religions are plausible and totally worth considering, but are so uncharacteristically focused on concrete data and content that Spengler's metaphysical system is totally unnecessary to assert them and, if anything, obscures the explanatory/prognostic value of what he's saying.
To this effect, a very lengthy and endearing stretch of the second volume is devoted to the "Problems of the Magian" culture. Spengler strides confidently through history of eastern religion, from Persian cults to the unfurling of Judaism to the crucifix climax and then too the Christian cults which followed him, escalating all the way to its final realization(!) in Islam. I'm somewhat but not TOTALLY ignorant in these historical-religion studies, so while I can't say that his analyses here are by any means accurate, they definitely do provide an immensely exciting and coherent picture which ties together the mysterious feelings of these ancient-religious documents (everything from Mithra to Gnosticism to Scholasticism) and purports to explain them; clearly he runs up against his vanity once again in his rejection of causal/material naturalism, and hyper-inflates the value, say, of external action in the course of medieval Europe in favor of a dubious centralizing of the Pseudomorphosis ('hollow' evolution according to imitation of external past cultures) of Arabian religion through the reinterpretation of Christian doctrines - but, all the same, his efforts to explain much of the history of Arab-Jewish history in the Middle East benefits IMMENSELY from the project, whose main thesis may well be an effort in empathy. That is to say, Spengler may well have made more coherent sense than most historians of his day by simply taking into consideration the consequences of a mass group of people who genuinely believed in the coming of the apocalypse. In places like this, in terms both of his metaphysics and especially in terms of raw connections, Spengler achieves more insight (if more artistically than analytically) than anyone, save Hegel, if you want.
And it is indeed Spengler's effort as a philosopher in the stream of Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Schoepenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Heideggers and the Adornos to come that we have to understand his value. While Spengler at times professes to stand outside the stream of history enough to note the fundamental structural differences between himself & past cultures, his efforts (both in terms of content and structure) are something that could never have happened anywhere or any-time other than the early 20s in Weimar. As Adrian Leverkuhn's (or Mahler's, if you want to swing that way) symphonies contain a funeral dirge for the total perversion&destruction of the illusory visions of Aschenbach & Castorp, then so too does Spengler stand right on the moment before the final irreversible collapse into the void. His anatomy of the structures which all cultures follow (which nominally purports a rejection of Eurocentricism) is based off a motley gang-up of Teutonic philosophic ideals united solely by his persistent aiming at the parallellist theme - you can find post-Kantian neuroses about space and time, Nietzschean pontifications about the relativity of psychological frameworks, Schoepenhauerian reflections on Will that verge on prefiguring the Husserlian-Heideggerian phenomenology and ludditism, and all this aside from the Goethean fixations on Force, Striving, Infinity, etc.
Naturally, we can apologize for all this (as Spengler grows near to admitting at several points) by remembering that he himself is a Faustian in the dying-days of his culture - which produces a frustrating circular logic where Spengler's system is confirmed because his assertion of his own system necessarily follows from his place in that system. I've struggled with wrapping my head around this to almost no avail; the best salvation I can retch from this is that, for any practical future purposes, a distanced and ironical respect for such self-imploding systemics must be held, and that from it concrete ideas or turns-of-logic may be excavated on the proper occasion, just as Goethe did with Spinoza and Nietzsche with the apocalyptic theories he was always just barely preventing himself from espousing.
The ghost of Nietzsche indeed looms large in this book. A wonderful user named 'Prickle' on this site says alluringly that this is "Nietzsche's finest moment. It only had to come 3 decades after his collapse in Turin"; although I can't quite agree. Nietzsche himself visibly struggles with these same Germanic impulses - the desire to concoct anatomies (teleological or caricaturisch) of national spirits, the desire to eschew the limitations of politics and religion for an elusive and mystical commentary, a love of watching the dancing and evolution of supposedly infinite conceptual categories as they change with the generations for reasons they don't understand. And indeed Spengler takes an immense glee in employing Nietzsche's same Heraclitean paradoxes onto the evolution of cities and the understanding of psychology (two of the finest chapters in the Decline); we watch as each successive epoch rushes towards a new tier of realization, understanding neither where they came from nor where they are going or why, and as an entire shifting river of urban evolutions and psychological sciences lead from a barbaric and violent past into a pedantic and pointless future, while staving off pessimism in glee at the poetical ironies and the conceptual fluidities.
But by this same ironic balance are Spengler and Nietzsche at total odds with one another. Nietzsche's destructive dialectics could never accept such a coherent connection between the generations, nor could he ever think a sweeping analysis of lost epochs and gigantic currents could ever rise out of the pre-existing influences (which Spengler nonsensically if plausibly tries to simply accept&incorporate). Spengler would be to him merely another post-Schoepenhauerian whose one step forward means two steps back on every page. Likewise, Spengler assaults Nietzsche for falling guilty to his own critiques, and by making simple historical errors - notably, eg, how the Slave Morals of the Jewish Law came to full prominence and realization not under slavery but within powerful epochs - and notes that Nietzsche's eschewal of morality is not a destruction of all systems but rather the erection of a new system. This is a misunderstanding of Nietzsche, but Nietzsche himself was guilty of it - compare the self-sabotage within Zarathustra, and his immense cares to hold himself at a properly flexible systematicism in Beyond Good And Evil. And so both thinkers find in the other the same mysterious but infinitely elusive paradoxicalism that increasingly came to dominate (their interpretation of) German intellectualism, and which drove one to kiss a horse and the other to be forgotten by posterity.
If you read this whole review, thanks but shame on you for trusting random internet idiots!
Shelved as 'not-finished'
June 12, 2021"Aber »die Menschheit« hat kein Ziel, keine Idee, keinen Plan, so wenig wie die Gattung der Schmetterlinge oder der Orchideen ein Ziel hat. »Die Menschheit« ist ein zoologischer Begriff oder ein leeres Wort.»Die Menschheit? Das ist ein Abstraktum. Es hat von jeher nur Menschen gegeben und wird nur Menschen geben« (Goethe zu Luden). Man lasse dies Phantom aus dem Umkreis der historischen Formprobleme schwinden und man wird einen überraschenden Reichtum wirklicher Formen auftauchen sehen. Hier ist eine unermeßliche Fülle, Tiefe und Bewegtheit des Lebendigen, die bis jetzt durch ein Schlagwort, durch ein dürres Schema, durch persönliche »Ideale« verdeckt wurde. Ich sehe statt jenes öden Bildes einer linienförmigen Weltgeschichte, das man nur aufrecht erhält, wenn man vor der überwiegenden Menge der Tatsachen das Auge schließt, das Schauspiel einer Vielzahl mächtiger Kulturen, die mit urweltlicher Kraft aus dem Schoße einer mütterlichen Landschaft, an die jede von ihnen im ganzen Verlauf ihres Daseins streng gebunden ist, aufblühen, von denen jede ihrem Stoff, dem Menschentum, ihre eigne Form aufprägt, von denen jede ihre eigne Idee, ihre eignen Leidenschaften, ihr eignes Leben, Wollen, Fühlen, ihren eignen Tod hat. Hier gibt es Farben, Lichter, Bewegungen, die noch kein geistiges Auge entdeckt hat. Es gibt aufblühende und alternde Kulturen, Völker, Sprachen, Wahrheiten, Götter, Landschaften, wie es junge und alte Eichen und Pinien, Blüten, Zweige und Blätter gibt, aber es gibt keine alternde »Menschheit«. Jede Kultur hat ihre neuen Möglichkeiten des Ausdrucks, die erscheinen, reifen, verwelken und nie wiederkehren. Es gibt viele, im tiefsten Wesen völlig voneinander verschiedene Plastiken, Malereien, Mathematiken, Physiken, jede von begrenzter Lebensdauer, jede in sich selbst geschlossen, wie jede Pflanzenart ihre eigenen Blüten und Früchte, ihren eignen Typus von Wachstum und Niedergang hat. Diese Kulturen, Lebewesen höchsten Ranges, wachsen in einer erhabenen Zwecklosigkeit auf wie die Blumen auf dem Felde. Sie gehören, wie Pflanzen und Tiere, der lebendigen Natur Goethes, nicht der toten Natur Newtons an. Ich sehe in der Weltgeschichte das Bild einer ewigen Gestaltung und Umgestaltung, eines wunderbaren Werdens und Vergehens organischer Formen. Der zünftige Historiker aber sieht sie in der Gestalt eines Bandwurms, der unermündlich Epochen »ansetzt«."
June 15, 2023
Interesting ideas. Some downright brilliant and paradigm shifting. Spengler is completely unreadable and I couldn’t finish this given he mulled over obscure points on the same few topics repeated. This book should have been 1/10th the length and still would’ve worked.
September 3, 2018
It’s impossible to review this monumental work in its entirety, as Spengler deals with such a vast array of ideas that one could use it as a reference for a myriad of studies on world history.
It's a pity no one followed in his footsteps to do just that. This book has a lot to offer in terms of methodology.
Just to demonstrate: Spengler foresaw the end of theory long before postmodernism. He stressed the importance of the narrative and the artist’s suave in studying history, not the analytical and dissecting mind of the laboratory positivists tried to transpose to their field ( something most historians only figured out with the linguistic turn ). To Spengler the historian reaches closest to how it "eigentlich gewessen" was by being an artist rather than a scientist.
He was no oracle with supernatural qualities. Neither can his predictions be casted aside as a matter of sheer luck. It’s in his thinking itself we must see the power of his premonitions. That is a bitter pill to swallow for the humanities, but as time moves on I’m expecting Spengler to be proven right in more regards.
Trained as I was in modern historiography, I largely ignored Spengler’s magnum opus up until recently as well. He was mentioned once, in my time as a sophomore, but never did he get that honour again. I’m sure this is the case in most colleges and universities out there. “Just another cyclical thinker.” Peripheral.
Cyclical theories were never really en vogue in modern times, as the mind of this era presupposes a continuous growth/decline, depending on one’s politics. The academia still considers such systems of thought as relapses into archaic thinking, something to be avoided at all costs.
Like Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream as consecutive phases in world history, so do historians do the same when they observe the oneiric past. To them the movement of history is one which goes to an increasing refinement of different civilizations, or it’s a development from one production mode to the other.
But Spengler does more than bring just another “spring-summer-autumn-winter”-chronology of civilizations. He delivers an almost botanical study of Cultures and Civilizations. Dealing with them as if they were plants, which grow like mold as cells congregate. To Spengler high cultural man produces just that, soil bound expressions. Such expressions are different in accordance to each landscape. The Faustian ( or Western ) landscape is dominated by the boundless northern forests and plains, the Magian is lured to take the descent into the domes of desert mountains, the Egyptian lives and dies alongside the single path ( of the Nile ) to divinity, etc. Each landscape, each a weltanschauung that wishes to envelop itself in an Aristotelian sense to completion, like the tree encapsulated in the seed. Most of Spengler's attention is spent on the in-depth study of them.
This is no cheap “Blut und Boden”, since it’s the land itself being the true spell caster over the cultures their respective world-views. The spell lasts even when the inheritors of that Culture move elsewhere.
Spengler scoffs at those who obsess over eugenics and racialist nonsense.
Which brings me to Adorno’s critique of Spengler. Adorno claimed Spengler was wrong for having predicted the end of Western civilization as he was writing long after the book in a post-WW II world where capitalism goes on unceasingly. Adorno saw it as self-evident to state that Spengler’s forecast was incorrect.
And that alone convinces me that Adorno didn’t even bother reading the book and just based his review of Spengler’s thesis on hearsay and maybe a cursory read at best. In “Decline of the West” Spengler foresees megalopolises for tens of millions by the year 2000. And to enter a decline in Spengler’s thinking doesn’t mean an imminent collapse. Rome entered its decline when Caesarism dominated the Classical world. More than five centuries passed before the deathblow was struck. The West still needs to enter that phase, but it’s dawning upon us. Also sprach Spengler.
"Der Führer hat von meinem Buch den ganzen Titel gelesen," says Spengler about Hitler.
It seems a lot more have been guilty of that sort of intellectual laziness.
It's a pity no one followed in his footsteps to do just that. This book has a lot to offer in terms of methodology.
Just to demonstrate: Spengler foresaw the end of theory long before postmodernism. He stressed the importance of the narrative and the artist’s suave in studying history, not the analytical and dissecting mind of the laboratory positivists tried to transpose to their field ( something most historians only figured out with the linguistic turn ). To Spengler the historian reaches closest to how it "eigentlich gewessen" was by being an artist rather than a scientist.
He was no oracle with supernatural qualities. Neither can his predictions be casted aside as a matter of sheer luck. It’s in his thinking itself we must see the power of his premonitions. That is a bitter pill to swallow for the humanities, but as time moves on I’m expecting Spengler to be proven right in more regards.
Trained as I was in modern historiography, I largely ignored Spengler’s magnum opus up until recently as well. He was mentioned once, in my time as a sophomore, but never did he get that honour again. I’m sure this is the case in most colleges and universities out there. “Just another cyclical thinker.” Peripheral.
Cyclical theories were never really en vogue in modern times, as the mind of this era presupposes a continuous growth/decline, depending on one’s politics. The academia still considers such systems of thought as relapses into archaic thinking, something to be avoided at all costs.
Like Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream as consecutive phases in world history, so do historians do the same when they observe the oneiric past. To them the movement of history is one which goes to an increasing refinement of different civilizations, or it’s a development from one production mode to the other.
But Spengler does more than bring just another “spring-summer-autumn-winter”-chronology of civilizations. He delivers an almost botanical study of Cultures and Civilizations. Dealing with them as if they were plants, which grow like mold as cells congregate. To Spengler high cultural man produces just that, soil bound expressions. Such expressions are different in accordance to each landscape. The Faustian ( or Western ) landscape is dominated by the boundless northern forests and plains, the Magian is lured to take the descent into the domes of desert mountains, the Egyptian lives and dies alongside the single path ( of the Nile ) to divinity, etc. Each landscape, each a weltanschauung that wishes to envelop itself in an Aristotelian sense to completion, like the tree encapsulated in the seed. Most of Spengler's attention is spent on the in-depth study of them.
This is no cheap “Blut und Boden”, since it’s the land itself being the true spell caster over the cultures their respective world-views. The spell lasts even when the inheritors of that Culture move elsewhere.
Spengler scoffs at those who obsess over eugenics and racialist nonsense.
Which brings me to Adorno’s critique of Spengler. Adorno claimed Spengler was wrong for having predicted the end of Western civilization as he was writing long after the book in a post-WW II world where capitalism goes on unceasingly. Adorno saw it as self-evident to state that Spengler’s forecast was incorrect.
And that alone convinces me that Adorno didn’t even bother reading the book and just based his review of Spengler’s thesis on hearsay and maybe a cursory read at best. In “Decline of the West” Spengler foresees megalopolises for tens of millions by the year 2000. And to enter a decline in Spengler’s thinking doesn’t mean an imminent collapse. Rome entered its decline when Caesarism dominated the Classical world. More than five centuries passed before the deathblow was struck. The West still needs to enter that phase, but it’s dawning upon us. Also sprach Spengler.
"Der Führer hat von meinem Buch den ganzen Titel gelesen," says Spengler about Hitler.
It seems a lot more have been guilty of that sort of intellectual laziness.
March 12, 2017
Things come and go, rise and fall...youth spring summer midlife autumn decline winter perish. History is made and as such, that which is history is itself ephemeral. From this basic premise, many an internally consistent metaphysics of history follows.
Why this book matters:
It may not matter at all. I enjoyed if only because it is a wholly unique specimen of a philosophy of history, a sort of time-independent philosophy of the nature of civilizations and their attendant cultures, a sort of Heraclitian metaphysics (he wrote is doctoral thesis on Heraclitus as it turns out!) The thing is is that this guy was a High School math instructor, and then he retires, and then writes shit like this. And by "like this," I mean not only one of the most important tracts contributing to German national conservative thought in between the two world wars - once could easily cherry pick a self-constructed national socialist ideology if one desired - but a book of pretty incredible learning across millennia and discipline alike.
He mainly looks at Classical, Magian (Arabian/Persian/Judeo-Christian), and Faustian (Western/European) civilizations and shows how they start off with a certain vivacity for ideas, architecture, and the arts, an economy focused on the exchange of goods, hierarchical political organization, populations organically tied to traditional trades in the country side, and an overall mystical/religious worldview (anti-rationalist). Each of these three cultures/civilizations has its own "prime symbol," a sort of fundamental stuff out of which all the other symbol elements of the cultural sphere refer back to (oh yeah, he's a crazy-ass German idealist, however much he may speak of " blood" and "facts" trumping reason and ideas; meaning, he believes that all reality is basically a wholly culturally contained array of symbols that are to be understood vis-a-vis the "prime symbol" (the "physiognomic" method as opposed to, you know, your typical abstract system of reason).
So blood and facts, which means LIFE and not DEATH. Time/history is made my men, and men ARE time; ARE that microcosm within the macrocosm; are those beings that live "in tension" who, one step removed from the purely organic world can hypostatize their experiences/sensations/BECOMING in THOUGHT/the BECOME. Spengler is all about "becoming" and not the "become." Hence, his strong dislike of rational systems of explanation/causality (scienctism and technology in general). Basically, crazy ass Nietzschean ubermensch stuff except for the fact that with Spengler - lol - there's no way out. Cos the culture is collapsing so all we can do is hang on tight and fight like MEN, not like a bunch of pansies (take this historical kick in the balls and LIKE IT).
Anyway, in all serious, the erudition on display is really awesome. You will learn A LOT. The chapters on the Arabian/Judeo-Christian/Persian civilization and its prime symbol of "the cave" are particularly fantastic. Anyway, basically he's saying that Classical man had "form", Magian had "consensus," and Faustian has "infinity" as their respective prime symbols, whereupon he seizes upon all the evidence and erudition he can muster (and he musters) to prove his point. To top it off, the whole thing is not so much prose as it is poetry/prose. I guess he initially was planning on writing the whole thing as a series of aphorisms. Too appropriate.
Why this book matters:
It may not matter at all. I enjoyed if only because it is a wholly unique specimen of a philosophy of history, a sort of time-independent philosophy of the nature of civilizations and their attendant cultures, a sort of Heraclitian metaphysics (he wrote is doctoral thesis on Heraclitus as it turns out!) The thing is is that this guy was a High School math instructor, and then he retires, and then writes shit like this. And by "like this," I mean not only one of the most important tracts contributing to German national conservative thought in between the two world wars - once could easily cherry pick a self-constructed national socialist ideology if one desired - but a book of pretty incredible learning across millennia and discipline alike.
He mainly looks at Classical, Magian (Arabian/Persian/Judeo-Christian), and Faustian (Western/European) civilizations and shows how they start off with a certain vivacity for ideas, architecture, and the arts, an economy focused on the exchange of goods, hierarchical political organization, populations organically tied to traditional trades in the country side, and an overall mystical/religious worldview (anti-rationalist). Each of these three cultures/civilizations has its own "prime symbol," a sort of fundamental stuff out of which all the other symbol elements of the cultural sphere refer back to (oh yeah, he's a crazy-ass German idealist, however much he may speak of " blood" and "facts" trumping reason and ideas; meaning, he believes that all reality is basically a wholly culturally contained array of symbols that are to be understood vis-a-vis the "prime symbol" (the "physiognomic" method as opposed to, you know, your typical abstract system of reason).
So blood and facts, which means LIFE and not DEATH. Time/history is made my men, and men ARE time; ARE that microcosm within the macrocosm; are those beings that live "in tension" who, one step removed from the purely organic world can hypostatize their experiences/sensations/BECOMING in THOUGHT/the BECOME. Spengler is all about "becoming" and not the "become." Hence, his strong dislike of rational systems of explanation/causality (scienctism and technology in general). Basically, crazy ass Nietzschean ubermensch stuff except for the fact that with Spengler - lol - there's no way out. Cos the culture is collapsing so all we can do is hang on tight and fight like MEN, not like a bunch of pansies (take this historical kick in the balls and LIKE IT).
Anyway, in all serious, the erudition on display is really awesome. You will learn A LOT. The chapters on the Arabian/Judeo-Christian/Persian civilization and its prime symbol of "the cave" are particularly fantastic. Anyway, basically he's saying that Classical man had "form", Magian had "consensus," and Faustian has "infinity" as their respective prime symbols, whereupon he seizes upon all the evidence and erudition he can muster (and he musters) to prove his point. To top it off, the whole thing is not so much prose as it is poetry/prose. I guess he initially was planning on writing the whole thing as a series of aphorisms. Too appropriate.
May 14, 2008
In our current age of science mania, people seem to think that history and the social sciences are completely objective endeavors, and worse, that they are sciences.
Spengler serves up a view of history that is deep, thought-provoking and awe-inspiring. If I remember correctly - as its been a few years since I read it - he sets out on the premise that a historical study should not be measured on its 'truth' - since 'truth' is culturally biased and not a black-and-white thing - but rather on its depth of insight. It's the same measuring stick upon which to gauge the great psychologists and social theorists.
The best parts are in the first half - his surveys of art, science, and especially Ancient Greece. After reading Spengler, just thinking about Ancient Greece will set your mind turning for hours on end. The last half of the book, in contrast, is either genius or complete nonsense - hard to follow.
Spengler serves up a view of history that is deep, thought-provoking and awe-inspiring. If I remember correctly - as its been a few years since I read it - he sets out on the premise that a historical study should not be measured on its 'truth' - since 'truth' is culturally biased and not a black-and-white thing - but rather on its depth of insight. It's the same measuring stick upon which to gauge the great psychologists and social theorists.
The best parts are in the first half - his surveys of art, science, and especially Ancient Greece. After reading Spengler, just thinking about Ancient Greece will set your mind turning for hours on end. The last half of the book, in contrast, is either genius or complete nonsense - hard to follow.
February 11, 2015
Spengler is an astute observer of long-term historical trends, but his attempts to squeeze these observations into the framework of his system don't always hold up to close scrutiny. Yet they do more often than I had expected they would. Whatever the case, later historians and political scientists given to grand systematizing—your Braudels, your Quigleys, your Huntingtons, your Barzuns, your Fukuyamas, your Fergusons—owe Spengler a debt of gratitude (whether they agree with his views or not), if only because he made the educated public more receptive to this kind of bold and ambitious theorizing.
May 18, 2014
I was a Spengler guy before I'd even heard of Spengler and my first read of this last year only confirmed it.
* Re-reading this and tried it on the free Kindle edition - filled with odd formatting, typos, errors, and even missing sections. If you pay attention, you can make out what is being explained but be forewarned, it's not pretty; switching back to my trusty paperback. Sloppiness aside, the Kindle edition still is, however, FREE. There is also another Kindle edition for sale, which I assume does not contain the monstrous errors.
* Re-reading this and tried it on the free Kindle edition - filled with odd formatting, typos, errors, and even missing sections. If you pay attention, you can make out what is being explained but be forewarned, it's not pretty; switching back to my trusty paperback. Sloppiness aside, the Kindle edition still is, however, FREE. There is also another Kindle edition for sale, which I assume does not contain the monstrous errors.
April 25, 2013
Everybody with even the slightest interest in History must read this. It`s one of the most influental book of the last century, and one of the most original History book ever written. You might love it, you might hate it, but you must read it.
April 17, 2024
I dropped this book after reading the introduction, realizing there's no necessity to anticipate on what's coming afterwards.
When I started with this book I was impressed by the rhetoric of Spengler and liked the frequent mentionings of Goethe, however towards the end of the introduction I realized that these are mere tricks and that this book is but a nothingburger.
I was slightly impressed by the ideological similarities, but after further reading one quickly realises that Spengler is an idiot and should not be paid any attention. Spengler claimed that he had appropriated Goethe's methodology and sought to answer Nietzsche's questions - but Spengler reveals himself to be an idiot without a system or structure who refuses to understand the world. I see no reason why there should be a difference between Spengler and a BAP idiot on x.com. Both are cynics, both contradict each other and have no sensible world view and have a troglodytic interpretation of socialism, babbling about some kind of breeding. That Spengler tries to appropriate Goethe but is opposed to socialism is testimony to the fact that Goethe is alien to him - that he had no understanding of dialectics, the relevance of dialectics and Goethe's influence on Hegel and the Left Hegelians. Spengler avoids any self-criticism by criticising things in a completely arbitrary way and defining things in a completely arbitrary way that contradict his actual statements not two pages later. Hardly to speak of his cheap trick: criticising his inspiration in order to create a mask of anti-dogmatism, accompanied by his cheap absolute cultural relativism.
He cries about "positivists" because his system gets nuked by formal logic - he cries about idealists because his head is empty - bankrupt of ideas. He stands by the idealists then the positivists, inconsistency to the max, no well thought out system. You can read his fake love to the peasantry through the lines and the intent of him mentioning the peasantry in a positive light served only for political purposes as propaganda for his figure. "Imperialism is civilisation" - no comment. His criticism of positivist historians serves, as already mentioned, only to evade any self-criticism, to avoid detaching himself from his dogma and avoid bringing light to the fact, that he has no well thought out system, he has no proper analysis, he simply reigurgitates and quotes history books and farts out of his brain - not much of value left besides some sentences with above average rhetoric. Spengler is an idealist and has a world view that he refuses to change and his historical analysis and its relevance is swept away by materiality by this.
"The greater the human being, the truer the philosophy [....], which is independent of the provability and even non-contradiction of the individual propositions." - the same thing as mentioned earlier - a way to avoid any accountability, way to avoid of delivering proper analysis or even atleast a system, he doesn't even have a system, he as a person is just retarded as fuck. Intellectual fraud, world class idiot - no wonder the right are mentally retarded. No historical analysis except the Marxist one will satisfy the post-Marx materialist.
When I started with this book I was impressed by the rhetoric of Spengler and liked the frequent mentionings of Goethe, however towards the end of the introduction I realized that these are mere tricks and that this book is but a nothingburger.
I was slightly impressed by the ideological similarities, but after further reading one quickly realises that Spengler is an idiot and should not be paid any attention. Spengler claimed that he had appropriated Goethe's methodology and sought to answer Nietzsche's questions - but Spengler reveals himself to be an idiot without a system or structure who refuses to understand the world. I see no reason why there should be a difference between Spengler and a BAP idiot on x.com. Both are cynics, both contradict each other and have no sensible world view and have a troglodytic interpretation of socialism, babbling about some kind of breeding. That Spengler tries to appropriate Goethe but is opposed to socialism is testimony to the fact that Goethe is alien to him - that he had no understanding of dialectics, the relevance of dialectics and Goethe's influence on Hegel and the Left Hegelians. Spengler avoids any self-criticism by criticising things in a completely arbitrary way and defining things in a completely arbitrary way that contradict his actual statements not two pages later. Hardly to speak of his cheap trick: criticising his inspiration in order to create a mask of anti-dogmatism, accompanied by his cheap absolute cultural relativism.
He cries about "positivists" because his system gets nuked by formal logic - he cries about idealists because his head is empty - bankrupt of ideas. He stands by the idealists then the positivists, inconsistency to the max, no well thought out system. You can read his fake love to the peasantry through the lines and the intent of him mentioning the peasantry in a positive light served only for political purposes as propaganda for his figure. "Imperialism is civilisation" - no comment. His criticism of positivist historians serves, as already mentioned, only to evade any self-criticism, to avoid detaching himself from his dogma and avoid bringing light to the fact, that he has no well thought out system, he has no proper analysis, he simply reigurgitates and quotes history books and farts out of his brain - not much of value left besides some sentences with above average rhetoric. Spengler is an idealist and has a world view that he refuses to change and his historical analysis and its relevance is swept away by materiality by this.
"The greater the human being, the truer the philosophy [....], which is independent of the provability and even non-contradiction of the individual propositions." - the same thing as mentioned earlier - a way to avoid any accountability, way to avoid of delivering proper analysis or even atleast a system, he doesn't even have a system, he as a person is just retarded as fuck. Intellectual fraud, world class idiot - no wonder the right are mentally retarded. No historical analysis except the Marxist one will satisfy the post-Marx materialist.
August 19, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKbcb...
Demetra
Zagreb, 1997. i 2000. (1. i 2. tom)
Preveo Nerkez Smailagić
U sklopu "Filosofske biblioteke Dimitrija Savića"
Slava izdavaču "Demetri";
http://www.demetra.hr/
Moje zilijunsko čitateljstvo, eto vam moga osvrta cjelokupne "Propasti Zapada".
Kako koncipirati ovaj osvrt nakon što već napravih dva osvrta za prvi i drugi tom zasebice?
Sve citate koje ću baciti u ovom osvrtu ću uzeti isključivo iz drugog toma. Prvi tom sam već ostavio u Znanstvenoj, tko bi nosio obje toliko debele knjige sa sobom. Pa nisam ja Spartak.
O jeziku ovog izdanja, onom autorskom i onom samog prevoditelja, pogledajte u moja dva zasebna osvrta prvog i drugog toma; https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... te https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... Ako bih opet išta govorio o jeziku samo bih se ponavljao.
Dakle, krenut ću odmah s teorijskom podlogom Oswalda Spenglera. Spenglerov koncept povijesti počiva na dva pojma; zeitgeistu i temporocentrizmu. Sama ta dva pojma Spengler nikada ne spominje, no ona predstavljaju srž spenglereštine. Relativnost svake kulture, relativnost svake civilizacije, i u vidu promatranja same sebe i u vidu promatranja i shvaćanja drugih kultura i civilizacija. I tu relativnost feministkinje i liberali uvijek zaboravljaju. Plitkost tih umnih spodoba se ogledava primjerice u tome što oni nazivaju rod socijalnim konstruktom. Što je socijalni konstrukt? Socijalni konstrukt podrazumijeva da je neka društvena manifestacija (bilo rod, bilo obitelj, bilo nacija ili bilo što četvrto) relativno u smislu toga što svako razdoblje (možemo reći i kultura) na vlastiti način koncipira bilo koju društvenu manifestaciju. Obitelj kakvu danas poznajemo zapravo je nuklearna obitelj iz industrijskog zapadnjačkog društva. I to, kao, dokazuje da je normalno da dva muškarca odgajaju djecu. Reći za bilo što da je socijalni konstrukt je socijalni konstrukt samo po sebi. Istina je da je obitelj socijalni konstrukt, ali i sam sud o obitelji kao socijalnom konstruktu je i sam po sebi socijalni konstrukt. Liberalna-feministička logika jede samu sebe. Glupost libtarda i svih tih degenerika koji promoviraju lgbtizam, rodnu ideologiju i feminizam je na razini gluposti nacionalizma i fašizma.
O shvaćanju povijesti svake civilizacije kao nečeg organskog pa time i univerzalnog, odnosno, o tome kako se svaka civilizacija ponavlja kroz neke univerzalne topose svjedoči sljedeći citat iz "Propasti Zapada":
"Kod Akcija je stajala nerođena arapska kultura naspram staračke antičke civilizacije. Radilo se o apolonskom ili magičkom duhu, o samim bogovima ili o samom Bogu, o principatu ili o kalifatu. Antonijeva bi pobjeda oslobodila magičku dušu; njegov je poraz doveo kruto carsko doba nad njezin krajolik. Ishod borbe mogao bi se usporediti s posljedicama bitke kod Toursa i Poitiersa 732. godine- da su tamo pobijedili Arapi i -Frankistan- učinili kalifatom sjevero-istoka arapski bi se jezik, vjera i društvo odomaćili u vladajućem sloju, a džinovski bi gradovi, kao što su Granada i Kairuan, nastali na Rajni i Loirei, gotički bi osjećaj bio prisiljen izražavati se u davno ukrućenim oblicima mošeja i arabeski, a umjesto njemačke mistike imali bi neku vrstu sufizma."
Usporedba faustovskog, magičkog i apolonskog čovjeka se ogledava u sljedećem citatu:
"Dok je faustovski čovjek jedno -ja-, moć upućena na samu sebe, koja u zadnjoj instanci odlučuje o beskrajnom, dok apolonski čovjek kao soma među mnogima jamči samo za sebe samog, magički je čovjek svojim duhovnim bitkom samo sastavni dio pneumatskog -mi-, koje je spuštajući se odozgo u svim pripadnicima jedno te isto... Dok antički čovjek nasuprot svojim bogovima stoji kao jedno tijelo nasuprot drugom, dok faustovsko -ja-, koje je volja, svuda u svom prostranom svijetu osjeća djelovanje svemoćnog -ja- faustovskog božanstva, koje je također volja, magičko božanstvo je ona neizvjesna, zagonetna sila s visine, koja po svom nahođenju sudi li daruje milost, spušta se u tamu ili podiže dušu u nebu. Čak je i samo pomišljanje na vlastitu volju besmisleno, jer -volja- i -misao- u čovjeku su već učinci božanstva na njega."
O sličnosti povijesnosti u pogledu dodira stare odumiruće kozmopolitske civilizacije i mlade plodonosne kulture svjedoči ovaj Spenglerov citat:
"Židovstvo zapadnoeuropskog je, još u maurskoj Španjolskoj, postojeću vezu sa zemljištem potpuno izgubilo. Više nema seljaka. Najmanji geto je ipak, ma kako bio bijedan, dio velegrada, a njegovi stanovnici se, kao i u krutoj Indiji i Kini, dijele u kaste- rabini su brahmani i mandarini geta- i u masu kulija, s civiliziranom, hladnom, daleko nadmoćnom inteligencijom i bezobzirnim smislom za posao. Sve magičke nacije nalaze se, od križarskih pohoda naovamo, na tom stupnju. Parsi su u Indiji posjedovali jednaku društvenu moć kao Židovi u evropsko-američkom svijetu i Aramejci i Grci u jugoistočno Evropi. Pojava se ponavlja u svakoj drugoj civilizaciji, čim ona prodre u mlađa stanja: Kinezi u Kaliforniji- oni su pravi predmet zapadnoameričkog -antisemitizma- i na Javi i u Singapuru, indijski trgovac u istočnoj Africi, ali i Rimljanin u ranoarapskom svijetu, gdje je situacija upravo bila obrnuta. -Židovi- tog doba bili su Rimljani, a u apokaliptičkoj mržnji Aramejaca prema njima nalazi se nešto sasvim srodno zapadnoevropskom antisemitizmu."
Jebote, kakva intuicija, kakvo promišljanje. Spengler puca i pogađa. Zanimljivo je kako su Kinezi Sjeverne Amerike bili predmet mržnje mnogih marksista, recimo Jack London je uvijek govorio protiv azijatske najezde na Sjevernu Ameriku, iako se smatrao marksistom. Sve je odista u povijesnom taktu a ne u lijevo-desnoj paradigmi.
Ne da mi se više pisati. Pročitajte Spenglera!
Iako je samom Spengleru niti jedna civilizacija bolja ili lošija u odnosu na neku drugu civilizaciju mislim da trebamo stati na braniku Zapada, na braniku faustovske kulture. Pritom ne znači da ne možemo uživati u plodovima multikulturalizma (crnkinjama i wokovima). Spengleru ionako civilizacija nije rasno određena. Civilizacija je poput biljke, nikne, raste i odumre. Zato vjerujem da su najveća suvremena zla feminizam (prije svega jer je toliko degeneričan da pobačaj naziva ljudskim pravom) te rasizam ogledan u vidu ideologije "white nationalism" i alternativne desnice. Europi ne trebaju rasisti i feminiskinje već katolici i crnkinje.
Koliko ima smisla boriti se za našu faustovsku civilizaciju koja je spenglerijanski gledano neminovno na zalasku?
Ne znam, ali upravo je faustovsi težnja za nečim iracionalnim, za nečim nedostižnim, za nečim beskrajnim.
Upravo zato su komunizam i anarhizam nastali na Zapadu i zapravo su te ideologije odraz najveće faustovštine, one su duboko partikularne, nimalo univerzalističke.
S time da je Zapad za mene osobno samo katolički svijet.
Protestantizam i pravoslavlje se moraju pokoriti.
Predstava u Istanbulu mora završiti ta grad je Konstantinopol, a ne cirkus Istanbul.
Kristov grob nas čeka!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxCi...
Čitanje je ratovanje!
Demetra
Zagreb, 1997. i 2000. (1. i 2. tom)
Preveo Nerkez Smailagić
U sklopu "Filosofske biblioteke Dimitrija Savića"
Slava izdavaču "Demetri";
http://www.demetra.hr/
Moje zilijunsko čitateljstvo, eto vam moga osvrta cjelokupne "Propasti Zapada".
Kako koncipirati ovaj osvrt nakon što već napravih dva osvrta za prvi i drugi tom zasebice?
Sve citate koje ću baciti u ovom osvrtu ću uzeti isključivo iz drugog toma. Prvi tom sam već ostavio u Znanstvenoj, tko bi nosio obje toliko debele knjige sa sobom. Pa nisam ja Spartak.
O jeziku ovog izdanja, onom autorskom i onom samog prevoditelja, pogledajte u moja dva zasebna osvrta prvog i drugog toma; https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... te https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... Ako bih opet išta govorio o jeziku samo bih se ponavljao.
Dakle, krenut ću odmah s teorijskom podlogom Oswalda Spenglera. Spenglerov koncept povijesti počiva na dva pojma; zeitgeistu i temporocentrizmu. Sama ta dva pojma Spengler nikada ne spominje, no ona predstavljaju srž spenglereštine. Relativnost svake kulture, relativnost svake civilizacije, i u vidu promatranja same sebe i u vidu promatranja i shvaćanja drugih kultura i civilizacija. I tu relativnost feministkinje i liberali uvijek zaboravljaju. Plitkost tih umnih spodoba se ogledava primjerice u tome što oni nazivaju rod socijalnim konstruktom. Što je socijalni konstrukt? Socijalni konstrukt podrazumijeva da je neka društvena manifestacija (bilo rod, bilo obitelj, bilo nacija ili bilo što četvrto) relativno u smislu toga što svako razdoblje (možemo reći i kultura) na vlastiti način koncipira bilo koju društvenu manifestaciju. Obitelj kakvu danas poznajemo zapravo je nuklearna obitelj iz industrijskog zapadnjačkog društva. I to, kao, dokazuje da je normalno da dva muškarca odgajaju djecu. Reći za bilo što da je socijalni konstrukt je socijalni konstrukt samo po sebi. Istina je da je obitelj socijalni konstrukt, ali i sam sud o obitelji kao socijalnom konstruktu je i sam po sebi socijalni konstrukt. Liberalna-feministička logika jede samu sebe. Glupost libtarda i svih tih degenerika koji promoviraju lgbtizam, rodnu ideologiju i feminizam je na razini gluposti nacionalizma i fašizma.
O shvaćanju povijesti svake civilizacije kao nečeg organskog pa time i univerzalnog, odnosno, o tome kako se svaka civilizacija ponavlja kroz neke univerzalne topose svjedoči sljedeći citat iz "Propasti Zapada":
"Kod Akcija je stajala nerođena arapska kultura naspram staračke antičke civilizacije. Radilo se o apolonskom ili magičkom duhu, o samim bogovima ili o samom Bogu, o principatu ili o kalifatu. Antonijeva bi pobjeda oslobodila magičku dušu; njegov je poraz doveo kruto carsko doba nad njezin krajolik. Ishod borbe mogao bi se usporediti s posljedicama bitke kod Toursa i Poitiersa 732. godine- da su tamo pobijedili Arapi i -Frankistan- učinili kalifatom sjevero-istoka arapski bi se jezik, vjera i društvo odomaćili u vladajućem sloju, a džinovski bi gradovi, kao što su Granada i Kairuan, nastali na Rajni i Loirei, gotički bi osjećaj bio prisiljen izražavati se u davno ukrućenim oblicima mošeja i arabeski, a umjesto njemačke mistike imali bi neku vrstu sufizma."
Usporedba faustovskog, magičkog i apolonskog čovjeka se ogledava u sljedećem citatu:
"Dok je faustovski čovjek jedno -ja-, moć upućena na samu sebe, koja u zadnjoj instanci odlučuje o beskrajnom, dok apolonski čovjek kao soma među mnogima jamči samo za sebe samog, magički je čovjek svojim duhovnim bitkom samo sastavni dio pneumatskog -mi-, koje je spuštajući se odozgo u svim pripadnicima jedno te isto... Dok antički čovjek nasuprot svojim bogovima stoji kao jedno tijelo nasuprot drugom, dok faustovsko -ja-, koje je volja, svuda u svom prostranom svijetu osjeća djelovanje svemoćnog -ja- faustovskog božanstva, koje je također volja, magičko božanstvo je ona neizvjesna, zagonetna sila s visine, koja po svom nahođenju sudi li daruje milost, spušta se u tamu ili podiže dušu u nebu. Čak je i samo pomišljanje na vlastitu volju besmisleno, jer -volja- i -misao- u čovjeku su već učinci božanstva na njega."
O sličnosti povijesnosti u pogledu dodira stare odumiruće kozmopolitske civilizacije i mlade plodonosne kulture svjedoči ovaj Spenglerov citat:
"Židovstvo zapadnoeuropskog je, još u maurskoj Španjolskoj, postojeću vezu sa zemljištem potpuno izgubilo. Više nema seljaka. Najmanji geto je ipak, ma kako bio bijedan, dio velegrada, a njegovi stanovnici se, kao i u krutoj Indiji i Kini, dijele u kaste- rabini su brahmani i mandarini geta- i u masu kulija, s civiliziranom, hladnom, daleko nadmoćnom inteligencijom i bezobzirnim smislom za posao. Sve magičke nacije nalaze se, od križarskih pohoda naovamo, na tom stupnju. Parsi su u Indiji posjedovali jednaku društvenu moć kao Židovi u evropsko-američkom svijetu i Aramejci i Grci u jugoistočno Evropi. Pojava se ponavlja u svakoj drugoj civilizaciji, čim ona prodre u mlađa stanja: Kinezi u Kaliforniji- oni su pravi predmet zapadnoameričkog -antisemitizma- i na Javi i u Singapuru, indijski trgovac u istočnoj Africi, ali i Rimljanin u ranoarapskom svijetu, gdje je situacija upravo bila obrnuta. -Židovi- tog doba bili su Rimljani, a u apokaliptičkoj mržnji Aramejaca prema njima nalazi se nešto sasvim srodno zapadnoevropskom antisemitizmu."
Jebote, kakva intuicija, kakvo promišljanje. Spengler puca i pogađa. Zanimljivo je kako su Kinezi Sjeverne Amerike bili predmet mržnje mnogih marksista, recimo Jack London je uvijek govorio protiv azijatske najezde na Sjevernu Ameriku, iako se smatrao marksistom. Sve je odista u povijesnom taktu a ne u lijevo-desnoj paradigmi.
Ne da mi se više pisati. Pročitajte Spenglera!
Iako je samom Spengleru niti jedna civilizacija bolja ili lošija u odnosu na neku drugu civilizaciju mislim da trebamo stati na braniku Zapada, na braniku faustovske kulture. Pritom ne znači da ne možemo uživati u plodovima multikulturalizma (crnkinjama i wokovima). Spengleru ionako civilizacija nije rasno određena. Civilizacija je poput biljke, nikne, raste i odumre. Zato vjerujem da su najveća suvremena zla feminizam (prije svega jer je toliko degeneričan da pobačaj naziva ljudskim pravom) te rasizam ogledan u vidu ideologije "white nationalism" i alternativne desnice. Europi ne trebaju rasisti i feminiskinje već katolici i crnkinje.
Koliko ima smisla boriti se za našu faustovsku civilizaciju koja je spenglerijanski gledano neminovno na zalasku?
Ne znam, ali upravo je faustovsi težnja za nečim iracionalnim, za nečim nedostižnim, za nečim beskrajnim.
Upravo zato su komunizam i anarhizam nastali na Zapadu i zapravo su te ideologije odraz najveće faustovštine, one su duboko partikularne, nimalo univerzalističke.
S time da je Zapad za mene osobno samo katolički svijet.
Protestantizam i pravoslavlje se moraju pokoriti.
Predstava u Istanbulu mora završiti ta grad je Konstantinopol, a ne cirkus Istanbul.
Kristov grob nas čeka!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mxCi...
Čitanje je ratovanje!
September 1, 2020
A wide sweeping historical analysis rivaled by none. Spengler was a genius, and this book is a must read.
October 6, 2012
Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West is not what it appears to be at all. The book is not merely a tract by a prophet of doom nor a European thinker who compares world civilizations only to condemn them at the expense of an imperial mind. This book has philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and theology all rolled into one. It is a tour de force of mystical instincts and elemental drives which are proposed as making up intellectual and social movement history. Influenced by Nietzsche and Goethe, what is proposed is "a grand politics" or "a philosophy of becoming" which is said to be in decline in the face of the welfare state of mind. Spengler's discussion of socialism as at its best not an economic movement but "civilization-ethics" and his criteria for evaluating statesmen and state formation are outstanding, sober, and co-exist uneasily next to an otherwise mystical discourse which nevertheless would be rewarding to those in particular who like studies of comparative religion and art criticism.
September 11, 2010
Oswald Spengler was one of the world's greatest authors--I can reread'over and over again passages just for the visuals. Not for everyone though, especially not the Englishspeaking mind, which tends to visualize in snapshots rather than motion picture. More than history and philosophy, it is also a glimpse into a different way to think and think about things. A masterpiece, comparable to the Barberini Faun.
December 28, 2017
I love this book and find it odd that it has a reputation as having a right-wing bent. The author is looking at history objectively, and gives his thoughts on how the course of history can be moved (slightly) by nations, but I'd argue he's not advocating Empire building! There's a difference between stating a historical fact and supporting the impetus behind it.
Left, right, center, I think this book is a great read and recommend it.
Left, right, center, I think this book is a great read and recommend it.
Read
July 27, 2022In a mood of overconfidence, at 20 years, I began to read the German text. But I already got stuck after barely 20 pages. In the meantime this has become a historical document in itself. But in terms of view, it is very speculative.
September 7, 2008
I read this because Ludwig Wittgenstein read it. Am I sorry? No. Well, a little.
April 13, 2023
The Charles translation isn't impressive, but no point worrying about it. The text is mostly a monotonous, shrill, lament about the soullessness of non-Germanic cultures, carelessly analogizing cultures to organisms. Amusingly, even though he was an anti-Semite, he didn't hate the Jews enough for the Nazis. He's an antiphilosopher, and says very little of substance about critical thought, but there's some redeeming value. At one point, I forget where, he makes a somewhat charming argument about the superior rigor of the law of functions in comparison to the law of bodies. I'm sure it's not important though.
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