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The Decline of the West (Paperback)
by Oswald Spengler
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Social-economic, Global politics, Nonfiction |
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An essential reading that will help you understand the present. To be ignorant of Spengler is to remain ignorant. |
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Author: Oswald Spengler
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition
Pub. in: April, 2006
ISBN: 1400097002
Pages: 480
Measurements: 8.0 x 5.3 x 1.0 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00512
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- Awards & Credential -
A classic on the future of civilizations, first published in 1918, more than 80 years ago. |
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"Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a "natural law " is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive of the State as an "order of society" which not only can be but must be altered - then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture-landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using up."
The above is a valuable passage from Spengler's book, very illustrative of his main thesis- which is not only that the world in which we exist today is barren of all impressive spiritual form and style, but must remain so.
Spengler's historical world-view is radically and quite fundamentally of a different stamp from almost any other. What sets him apart is the extraordinary impartialness of his style. Socio-political theorists are, almost without exception, liable to force entire millenia into the limited horizons of their own subjective criteria. They simply will not acknow- ledge that what is true for them is false or meaningless to the people of a different culture or different age. Spengler's philosophy breaks us free from this myopic world-view.
Readers and critics make more of his comparative study of culture-cycles than they should. One needn't accept the full accuracy of the compare- sons drawn between foreign cultures in order to gain a great deal of wisdom from this book. The idea that our own future can be mapped out through the comparative study of previous cultures is a theory I'm inclined to reject, given the extreme uniqueness of the Western civilization that currently encompasses the whole planet, one which experiences physical, technological, sociopolitical, and economic conditions that are so unlike any that have come before that they can quite justifiably be called "unprecedented".
Nonetheless, Spengler's basic point- that western culture attained its highest cultural glories three centuries ago, and has been plummeting into a chaotic, irreligious stew of materialistic formlessness ever since, remains indisputably true.
Spengler liberates one's historical perspective on two levels. He teaches the modern reader that the arbitrary system of cause-and-effect history, a system tacitly taken for granted by most, is neither true nor incorrect- it is simply SHALLOW, because it ignores the thread of spiritual continuity that underlies the organic working-out of a culture. Events, which are causal only insofar as they exist in the phyical world, derive their significance in the historical world from this spiritual necessity and continuity. He also liberates us from the idea of "human destiny" or "human history". He proves that, regardless of whatever arbitrary borrowings the West may have made from foreign cultures (such as the Arabic numeral system, for instance), the vast world-culture that we know today is an entirely Western development. Human history has nothing to with it; the world of spaceships, cell-phones, the Internet, and mass-production is simply a extensive projection, by the West in its "Civilization" phase, of the same spiritual motif that previously was realized inwardly during the culture centuries of the West: a dynamic, space-defying tendency that ranges beyond the near-and-present and constantly has an eye to the future. But what we term "progress" is really only a quite vulgar materialization of something that the people of Gothic times understood in religious terms.
Spengler points out the "uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions representative of the culture (nobility, church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in science)" as indicative of the absurd arrogance of the shallow civilization phase of the culture that has lost all connection to the blood, to tradition, and to the spirit. The shortsightedness with which we deem the past of our own culture a mere causal development leading up from the so-called "Dark Ages" to the vast technological corpus of our times, prevents us from understanding the beauty and significance of those culture-forms that the man of, say, the 15th century took for granted as something self-evident. We "fashion arbitrary forms into which the superficies of history can to be forced but which are entirely alien to its inner content."
Another passage:
"Culture and Civilization - the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 - on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and "facts." That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist."
Spengler doesn't postulate an alternative ideal to replace the shallow, spiritually bankrupt reality that immerses us. He only presents, with eagle-like sharpness of vision, a scheme of history that cannot be avoided because the inner necessities of cultural evolution have ordained that it will be so. Whether the reader accepts this view- mistakenly called by many critics "fatalistic" or "pessimistic" - is their own prerogative. However, I believe that the educated, intuitive, and non-partial reader who absorbs in depth as much of this book as possible, will be convinced, as I am, of the core truth of Spengler's argument.
(From quoting an American reader)
Target readers:
General readers
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Oswald Spengler, one of the most controversial historians of the twentieth century, was born in Blankenburg, Germany, in 1880. He studied mathematics, philosophy, and history in Munich and Berlin. Except for his doctor’s thesis on Heraclitus, he published nothing before the first volume of The Decline of the West, which appeared when he was thirty-eight. The Agadir crisis of 1911 provided the immediate incentive for his exhaustive investigations of the background and origins of our civilization. Spengler chose his main title in 1912, finished a draft of the first volume two years later, and published it in 1918. The second, concluding volume was published in 1922. The Decline of the West was first published in this country in 1926 (Vol. 1) and 1928 (Vol. 2); this abridged edition was first published here in 1962. For many years Spengler lived quietly in his home in Munich, thinking, writing, and pursuing his hobbies–collecting pictures and primitive weapons, listening to Beethoven quartets, and reading the comedies of Shakespeare and Molière. He took occasional trips to the Harz Mountains and to Italy. In 1936, three weeks before his fifty-sixth birthday, he died in Munich of a heart attack.
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From the Publisher:
Since its first publication more than eighty years ago, The Decline of the West has ranked as one of the most widely read and talked about books of our time. A sweeping account of Western culture by a historian of legendary intellect, it is an astonishingly informed, forcefully eloquent, thrillingly controversial work that advances a world view based on the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations.
This abridgment presents the most significant of Oswald Spengler’s arguments, linked by illuminating explanatory passages. It makes available in one volume a masterpiece of grand-scale history and far-reaching prophesy that remains essential reading for anyone interested in the factors that determine the course of civilizations.
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INTRODUCTION
In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfillment - the West European - American.
Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a meta- physical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms - social, spiritual and political - which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities indeed secondary or derived from that something? Does world-history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what are the limits to which reasoning from such premisses may be pushed?
Is it possible to find in life itself - for human history is the sum of mighty life - courses which already have had to be endowed with ego and personality, in customary thought and expression, by predicating entities of a higher order like "the Classical" or "the Chinese Culture," "Modern Civilization" - a series of stages which must be traversed, and traversed moreover in an ordered and obligatory sequence? For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime, are fundamentals - may not these notions, in this sphere also, possess a rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted? In short, is all history founded upon general biographic archetypes?
The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.
If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms - peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craftworks, sciences, laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events - may be accepted and pointed to as symbols.
The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.
It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the expression- forms of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs, situations, persons, are ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon has hardly ever been discussed without a side-glance at Caesar and Alexander - analogies of which, as we shall see, the first is morphologically quite in acceptable and the second is correct. Frederick the Great, in his political writings - such as his Considerations, 1738 - moves among analogies with perfect assurance. Thus he compares the French to the Macedonians under Philip and the Germans to the Greeks. "Even now," he says, "the Thermopylae of Germany, Alsace and Lorraine, are in the hands of Philip," therein exactly characterizing the policy of Cardinal Fleury. We find him drawing parallels also between the policies of the Houses of Habsburg and Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony and of Octavius.
Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually implied rather a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious expressions than a really deep sense of historical forms. In this region no one hitherto has set himself to work out a method, nor has had the slightest inkling that there is here a root, in fact the only root, from which can come a broad solution of the problems of History. Analogies, insofar as they laid bare the organic structure of history, might be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique, developing under the influence of a comprehensive idea, would surely eventuate in inevitable conclusions and logical mastery. But as hitherto understood and practised, they have been a curse, for they have enabled the historians to follow their own tastes, instead of soberly realizing that their first and hardest task was concerned with the symbolism of history and its analogies.
Thus our theme, which originally comprised only the limited problem of present - day civilization, broadens itself into a new philosophy - the philosophy of the future, so far as the metaphysically exhausted soil of the West can bear such, and in any case the only philosophy which is within the possibilities of the West European mind in its next stages. It expands into the conception of a morphology of world-history, of the world-as-history in contrast to the morphology of the world-as-nature that hitherto has been almost the only theme of philosophy. And it reviews once again the forms and movements of the world in their depths and final significance, but this time according to an entirely different ordering, which groups them, not in an ensemble picture inclusive of everything known, but in a picture of life, and presents them not as things-become, but as things-becoming.
The world-as-history, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its opposite, the world-as-nature - here is a new aspect of human existence on this earth. As yet, in spite of its immense significance, both practical and theoretica1, this aspect has not been realized, still less presented. Some obscure inkling of it there may have been, a distant momentary glimpse there has often been, but no one has deliberately faced it and taken it in with all its implications. We have before us two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and experience the world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and purposes of imagi- nation ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes of experience dissecting according to scheme; and - to mention even thus early an opposition that has never yet been noted, in spite of its significance - the domain of chronological from that of mathematical number.
Consequently, in a research such as that lying before us, there can be no question of taking spiritual-political events, as they become visible day by day on the surface, at their face value, and arranging them on a scheme of "causes" or "effects" and following them up in the obvious and intellectually easy directions. Such a "pragmatic" handling of history would be nothing but a piece of "natural science" in disguise, and for their part, the supporters of the materialistic idea of history make no secret about it - it is their adversaries who largely fall to see the similarity of the two methods. What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are, per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by appearing. I have not hitherto found one who has carefully considered the morphological relationship that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all branches of a Culture. Yet, viewed from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and - what has perhaps been impossible hitherto - things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the book-printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable.
But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory- enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its methods almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone has completely disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics, and thus we imagine ourselves to be carrying on historical research when we are really following out objective connexions of cause and effect. Judged by the standards of the physicist and the mathema- tician, the historian becomes careless as soon as he has assembled and ordered his material and passes on to interpretation. That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect - which I may call the logic of space - another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny - the logic of time - is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinction to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the Critique of Pure Reason investigates. This fact still awaits its theoretical formulation.
Mathematics and the principle of Causality lead to a naturalistic, Chronology and the idea of Destiny to a historical ordering of the phenomenal world. Both orderings, each on its own account, cover the whole world. The difference is only in the eyes by which and through which this world is realized.
THE MEANING OF HISTORY FOR THE INDIVIDUAL
Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of them it is that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human existence.
Man, thus, has before him two possible ways of regarding the world.
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History ebbs and flows. The illusion that we are somehow at the 'end of history' and that civil organization and values as they now stand are beyond history's broader and deeper currents might be the great popular Myopia of our time. Spengler in this book has applied his voluminous knowledge and interpretive skills to the rise and fall of civilizations. Does the 'West' conform to the definition of a civilization in the age of global communications and entertainment? If so, are its prospects different than those of its predecessors? Schools no longer prepare the main- stream student for learning and argument at this level. Spengler's thesis hinges on the leading intellectual & aesthetic edges of the last 1,000 years of our culture as compared to those of civilizations of antiquity, notably the Greco Roman.
There are scholarly contrasts to Spengler's study. William McNeill's 'Rise of the West' provides a direct challenge to many of its conclusions. Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Werner Jaeger's Paedeia (on Greek classical culture) might be good comparative reference books, but these have now been relegated in public familiarity to dusty and esoteric academic departments. Spengler's work, however, falls squarely and uniquely into the realm of a great work of the Deist tradition of Western social philosophy, from which its reputation for skepticism comes. Its apparent mysticism emanates from the deep investigation into the intellectual attitude of the Western mind. There are, of course, other traditions in the 'Western' mix which have broad and predictive implications. This opus should not be misconstrued of as a work of pessimism. Constructive action and faith are, in fact, its basis for the prospect of vigorous and sustained regeneration of the human cause.
This is an exacting study. It requires a critical attitude to penetrate and to see that it has a fundamentally human and hopeful (and debatable) message. The Decline of the West does in fact provide drama, grandeur, context and understanding to the sweep of history. It is accessible, though, to the determined general reader and constitutes a significant contribution to 20th Century thought. Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it.
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Arthur (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
Here is one of the mighty books of the century, which, sooner or later, will be read by all who ponder the riddle of existence... it is a truly monumental work, at once depressing in its pessimism and exhilarating in its compelling challenge to our accepted ideas. |
The New York Sun (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
This grand panorama, this imaginative sweep, this staggering erudition, this Nietzschean prose, with its fine color and ringing force, mark a work that must endure. |
Allen (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
As one reads Spengler the thought keeps recurring, ever more insistently, that here again is one of those universal minds which we had come to think were no longer possible. |
The New York Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-10 00:00>
With monumental learning… Spengler surveys man’s cosmic march… Always forceful… eloquent. |
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