The Decline of the West (Abridged)

Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” was and still is a controversial book. Some have even regarded it as hopelessly flawed. Conceived just before 1911 and written during World War I, it was published a few months before Germany signed the Armistice (in 1918) that would lead to its eventual calamities within the Weimar Republic and set the stage for the rise of the Third Reich. Whatever else one may say about it, the book seems to have been eerily prophetic, especially for Germany.Spengler’s unconventional and creative technique of using imagination and intuition to divine the probable future by way of “physiognomic meaning” and “morphological” analysis rather than the more accepted “systematic” approach of compiling facts and dates was met with scathing criticism by much of the academic world. Nevertheless, Spengler’s difficult book became a sensation in Germany and quickly sold 90,000 copies, much to the chagrin of the experts. Throughout the book Spengler is attempting to write a “philosophy of history” as opposed to a mere recounting of the past devoid of intrinsic order or inner necessity. Instead, Spengler was seeing each fact in the historical picture according to its symbolic context. He wanted to set free their shapes, hidden deep beneath the surface of a true “history of human progress.” Yet there was no such thing as progress (in the evolutionary sense) according to Spengler. The entire book was a protest against Darwinism and its systematic science based upon causality. Instead, he regarded a “culture” as an organism and world history as its biography. The best metaphor for his “morphological” approach was the four seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter. The instinctive genius of a youthful, even barbaric culture in the springtime of its development would enable it to flourish. As it matured it would exult in all the potentialities of its creativity, reaching heights never before attempted. Great architecture, advanced mathematics, artistic innovations, technological ingenuity, statecraft, warfare, etc. would reach full flower well into its summer. Then, as the inner form world and imagination of such a culture began to lose its force it would enter an urban and worldly “late” (autumnal) period of rationalism and free itself from subservience to religion and dare to make that religion the object of epistemological criticism, thus opening the door to nihilism. Finally, it would go into its winter season or “Civilization” phase and begin its slow and inevitable decline. The West was already entering its Civilization phase by 1918 according to Spengler. It would not be a sudden collapse, but a gradual setting of the sun, a time of lengthening shadows, i.e., a “Twilight of the Gods.”The most arresting thematic metaphors in Spengler’s imaginings were the three main cultures of Western Civilization, namely the Apollonian, Magian, and Faustian. Apollonian culture was classical civilization, i.e., the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hellenistic pagan culture of the ancients. Magian-Arabian culture encompassed Judaism, primitive Christianity, Mazdeism, Nestorians, Manicheans, Monophysites, and Islam. It was an eschatological and apocalyptic culture. It saw the world as Cavern, and our time on earth as limited. Submission to God was its primary ethos, but there was also the possibility of salvation, and of a coming Savior. By contrast, Apollonian culture did not see the past or even the present as being that different from the future. History as some linear narrative from which lessons could be learned was alien to the Apollonian mind. Instead, myth contained the essential, unchanging wisdom of existence. Character was fate. Pride came before the fall. The gods were capricious. But Faustian culture – which began around 1000 A.D. wished to extend its will into infinite space. It had built the Gothic cathedrals to realize this inward, willful striving for extension into the illimitable heavens, to flood the soul with light. Descartes, Leibnitz, Euler, Gauss, Newton, and Riemann, had pushed western mathematics to new heights. European artists had learned to use light and shadow, the color wheel, and the laws of perspective and vanishing points to create paintings that appeared three dimensional. The music of the Baroque and the art of the fugue had expressed the Faustian notion of limitless space. All this and much more are discussed in exhaustive detail throughout the book.This abridged version will give the reader a healthy overview of Spengler’s book. But I recommend the full, unabridged version for anyone who has the time and inclination to read it at length. Even though there are numerous arguments for and against Spengler’s unorthodox approach, his erudition in mathematics, the natural sciences, and classical literature is impressive. Yet his style is dreamlike and poetic (in the epic sense). This book is not for everyone, but if it speaks to you it will light your fire.

My strongest feeling about this book, next to my feeling that it is brilliant, is that, a preoccupation with objectivity blinds the author to what should have been his own loftiest conclusions--which conclusions, moreover, should have lead to some basic but hardly remote conceptual reconfigurations. Thus would Oswald Spengler's The Decline Of The West, already far more than a grabbag of superb suggestions for further research and reflection as it is often praisefully underestimated for seeming to be, have risen to the level of coherence it stifles itself in the pursuit of obtaining but which this brief reflective book review I hope can give a glimpse of.Given his defintions of Apollonian culture, centrally, that, in its distinctive care for clarity, it correspondingly abhors the vanishing points of complexity and even warns against alluding to them, and given his evocation of Goethe's Faust to define the new Germano-Christian culture that burst upon the world around the year 1000 and which has yet entirely to extinguish itself in our days, Spengler, in my view, should have seen that Apollonian culture and Faustian culture are not merely two disparate culture-souls among many, such as The Magian, The Chinese, and The Moonlight Culture of Japan, but at once, the two of them, superior to all other culture-souls and, far more crucially, not at all merely coincidentally so. As I have implied, Spengler's own reasoning points this way, but, disappointingly, he never "goes there."The Faustian Culture, which Spengler names for the willful and nearly damned wizard of Goethe's invention without ever--it is strange--raising the issue and implications of Faust's bad willing, is, in reality, something like the self-maddening ultraoverextension of Apollonian culture, from which the foundations of Faustian Culture are derived but whose well reasoned foundational taboos Faustian culture fundamentally defies. Spengler even links the "birth" of Faustian Culture to the contemporaneous spread of apocalyptic fears in the years around 1,000, even links an obsession (any) with space to anxiety and to death, without proposing that Faustian Culture, which he characterizes as anxious, apocalyptic, and fixated on vanishing depth, might not have been a new whole thing but, instead, a deadly wrong turn for a titanic culture-soul whose roots go far deeper than the year 1,000.Spengler's reasons for not even considering this line of thought may have included a wish to make German culture something pure and self-contained, which wish he was not in touch with in himself owing to what I have called his preoccupation with seeming objective; his reasons for not even considering this may also have included a similarly impelled aversion to "judging" rather than "scientifically describing" cultural histories--(i.e.) not *revealing* his judgments to himself. It's a shame and not least because Spengler is quite an excellent judge of many things. "The willing follow Fate; the unwilling Fate drags off," Spengler epigraphically concludes in Latin. It is my largest opinion about Spengler that, while far, far more than a great grabbag-packer, he must be dragged off unwillingly to his own fateful conclusions.

Great product, seems like a fair translation.This book should be mandatory for everyone interested in comparative philosophy, civilizations development and Nazi Germany.

As an older book, this is just a picture of each page so it doesn't display well if trying to read on the kindle app, particularly on your phone. Can't size it without the page being cut off so it becomes effectively illegible.

“Quietly the spatial and comprehensible (comprehension is in its essence number, in its structure quantitative) becomes prepotent throughout the outer world of the individual and, aiding and aided by the simple impressions of sensuous-life, effects a mechanical synthesis of the causal and legal sort, so that at long last the sharp consciousness of the megalopolitan — be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares, Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis — Is subjected to so consistent a pressure of natural-law notions that , when scientific and philosophical prejudice (it is no more that that) dictates the proposition that this condition of the soul is the soul and the mechanical world-picture is the world, the assertion is scarcely challenged.”If you understood what that sentenced was trying to say at all, then buy the book I guess. Otherwise I think it’s poorly translated and this sentence gave me a migraine (joking). I read four chapters out of this book and have no idea what this guy is trying to say. Don’t buy the book unless you have some kind of mental condition that lets you read sentences like that without having to re-read it three or four times.

Une passionnante plongée dans l'histoire des formations de peuples & des religions. Le grand philosophe allemand convoque les sciences humaines, la géopolitique, la sociologie, l'histoire des cultes & croyances, en une lumineuse synthèse & avec un souffle épique, selon son ingénieux concept de "pseudomorphose historique" (le développement apparent d'un peuple, sous une forme qui peut être empruntée à des traditions étrangères, peut voiler la poursuite d'une conscience ancestrale selon un développement original).Un livre qui ouvre des horizons bien plus larges & riches que ne le laisserait entendre sa réputation. A lire dans la lignée de Guénon, Eliade, etc., pour en comprendre mieux l'esprit.

I intensely dislike these scanned versions of original works. They are badly scanned, the size of the book is impractical, the pages are often angled badly from the scan and the whole effect is cheap and unpleasant.