Decline of the West - Abbreviated Version
Text
Summary produced by Michel Bauwens on the basis of reading notes made out of mostly excerpts from Spengler himself.
Vol. I - Form and Actuality
Chapter I - Introduction
I. (p. 3)
"Is there a logic to history ? .. Is there a metaphysical structure of historic humanity? .. (Are there) a series of stages which must be traversed, and traversed moreover, in an orderly and obligatory sequence? .. Is all history founded upon general biographic archetypes?" (p. 3)
II. (p. 3)
"The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy." (p.3 ) ... Analogies, in so far as they have laid bare the organic structure of history, might be a blessing to historical thought. .. But as hitherto understood and practiced, they have been a curse." (p. 4-5)
III. (p. 5)
"This book introduces the theme of the 'world as history', given form out of its opposite, the 'world-as-nature'". (p.5)
"I have not hitherto found one historian, who has carefully considered the morphological relationship that inwardly brings together the expression of forms of all branches of culture. Viewed from this morphological standpoint even the humdrum facts of politics, assume a symbolic and even metaphysical character." (p. 6)
"There is, besides a necessity of cause and effect - .. the logic of space - ... another ... organic necessity in life, that of Destiny, the logic of time." (p. 6)
"We await .. the philosopher who will tell us in what language history is written." (p. 7) (>< Galileo wrote: "philosophy, as Nature's great book, is written in mathematical language", p. 6)
IV. (p. 7)
"Man has before him two possibilities of world formation:
- Nature, ... the shape in which he interprets the immediate impression of his senses - History, .. that from his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world, in relation to his own life. (p. 7)
"For whom is there History? .. For anyone (that) conceives himself as something rounded off and self-contained.. : there is no world-as-history. .. How if the self-consciousness of a whole nation .. rests on this historical spirit? .. The Classical Culture possessed no memory, no open history in this special sense." (p. 7)
"This pure Present, whose greatest symbol is the Doric Column, in itself predicates the negation of time (of direction). " (p. 8)
"For a roman consult, the past is substituted instantly into an impression that is timeless and changeless, polar and not periodic ... >< .. whereas for our world ... the past is definitely periodic." (p. 8)
- for example:
- "the Athenians passed a decree by which all who propagated astronomical theories were made liable to impeachment; Thucydides (made) the astonishing statement that before his time, no events of importance had occurred." (p. 8)
- "Classical history .. (is) the product of essentially mythological thinking" (p. 9). "It never entered the Classical head to draw any distinction between history as story and history as documents." (p. 9)
>< By contrast, "In the Indian Culture, .. it is a full millennium after Buddha, when Ceylon produces something remotely resembling a historical work, the 'Mahavansa'. (p. 9) ... "It is in the anonymous form that we possess the Indian philosophy." (p. 10)
"Indian man forgot everything but Egyptian man forgot nothing." ... The Egyptian soul (was) ... conspicuously historical. The Egyptian culture is an embodiment of care - care for the future - and for the past ... The body of the dead man was made everlasting, just as his personality ('ka'), was immortalized though the portrait statuettes. ... The Egyptian denied mortality >< the Classical Man affirmed it." (p. 10)
V. (p. 11)
"At the threshold of the Classical Culture, we meet the custom of burning the dead, typifying the ease with which it could forget every piece of its inward and outward past." (p. 10) "The symbolic act .. was the ceremonial completion of death, and the denial of historical duration. (p. 11)
"From this moment the plasticity of the individual spiritual evolution was at an end .. Classical drama admitted .. little themes .. of inward evolution and .. the Hellenistic instinct set itself against portraiture in the arts." (p. 11)
"Right into the imperial period, Classical art handled only the matter that was natural to it, the myth." (p.11) .. "No Greek ever wrote down any recollections .., not even Socrates >< .. On the contrary, the Vita Nuova is found at the very outset of the spiritual history of the West, .. a work of deep self-examination." (p. 11) .. Goethe considered his works, "only fragments of a single great confession." (p. 11)
"Men read Homer but never thought of excavating the hill of Troy .., for what they wanted, was myth, not history." (p. 11) >< "The chimes of countless clock towers that echo day and night over West Europe, are perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world's feeling is capable." (p. 11)
"It remains to mention the .. difference between Classical and modern mathematics .. The former conceived of things as they are, as magnitudes, timeless and purely present, and so it proceeded to Euclidean geometry ('mathematical stasis'). >< We conceive things as they become and behave, as function, and this brought us to dynamics .. and differential calculus." (p. 12)
"We men of Western Culture are, with our historical sense, an exception and not the rule. World history is our picture, and not all mankind's." (p. 12)
VI. (p. 12)
"What then is World History ? .. The subdivision into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern .. is a meaningless scheme .. which has entirely dominated our historical thinking. . The scheme circumscribes the area of history, ... it rigs the stage." (p. 12-13)
"We select a single bit of ground as the natural center .., and make the central sun." (p. 13)
"From the morphological point of view, should our 18th cy. be more important than any other of the sixty centuries which preceded it?" (p. 13)
"The most appropriate designation for this current West European scheme history .. is the Ptolemaic system of history!" (p. 13)
VII. (p. 14)
"The scheme, 'ancient-medieval-modern', in its first form, was a creation of the Magian world sense .. The strictly dualistic sense of the East .. expressed itself by the figure of a catastrophe, an epochal change of phase between world creation and world decay, .. a drama in which one prevails over the other." (p. 14)
"Adding a third epoch, that we call 'modern' , on Western soil , gives the picture of history the look of progression." (p. 14) ("The oriental picture was at rest, with equilibrium as its outcome, and a unique divine act as its turning point", p. 14)
"Beyond the ancient and medieval, something definitive was beginning, a Third Kingdom .. The mystic number three applied to the world has something highly seductive." (p. 15)
"History was described,
- - by Herder as the education of the human race - - by Hegel as the self-expansion of the world spirit - - by Kant as the evolution of the idea of freedom." (p. 15)
"On the threshold of Western Culture, we meet the great Joachim of Floris (c. 1145-1202) .. who shattered the dualistic world form of Augustine." (p. 15)
"His teaching (the Age of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost) .. moved the best: Dante, Thomas Aquinas, ... and awakened a world outlook which took entire possession of the historical sense of our Culture. .. Lessing took his idea of the 'education of the human race', with its three stages of child, youth, and man, from the teaching of the 14th cy. mystics." (p. 15)
But, "it is quite indefensible .. to endow the 3-phase system with tendencies that will bring it exactly to one's own standpoint.!" (. p15)
The total history .. may be merely an additive compilation of separate developments." (p. 16)
" 'Mankind' .. has no aim, no idea, no plan .. Break the magic circle and at once there emerges an astonishing wealth of actual forms) ... I see .. the drama of a number of mighty Cultures .. Each having its own idea, passions, its own death .. Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, .. decay, and never return.. I see world history as a picture of endless formations and transformations." (p. 16-17)
VIII. (p. 17)
"When Plato spoke, he did so for the Greeks, in contrast with the barbarians. When Kant speaks, "he maintains the validity of his theses, for men of all times and places." (p. 17). But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of western thought." (p. .17)
"It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker: insight into the historically relative character of his data." ... We have "the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves .. Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from "Consider the historical horizon of Nietzsche (which) ... lie deep in the essence of Western Civilization and are for the analysis of that civilization of decisive importance .. He never one moved outside the scheme ('ancient, medieval, modern'), nor did any other thinker of his time." (p. 18)
"All these are local and temporary values .. most of them limited ... to the intelligentsia of cities of the Western European type." (p. 19)
"The real student of manking treats no standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong." (p. 19)
"One must free oneself of limitations of self .. before one dares assert the pretension to understand .. the world-as-history." (p. 19)
IX. (p. 20)
"To approach the phenomenal world in motion, these are the means of historical research." (Goethe's Living Nature, the thing-becoming, world-as-organism .. these are the world-as-history!)."
"Set forth the Classical Culture as a self-contained phenomenon embodying and expressing the Classical Soul; put it beside the Egyptian, the Indian, the Babylonian, the Chinese and the Western, and determine for each of these higher individuals what is typical in their surgings." (p.20)
X. (p. 20)
"Our narrower task ... is to determine ... the state of West Europe and America at the epoch of 1800-2000, ... to establish the chronological position of this period in the ensemble of Western culture history. " (p. 20)
"This period ... appears as chronologically parallel .. with the phase of Hellenism, and the present culmination, marked by World War, corresponds to the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman Age." ( p. 20) ... (considered in the spirit of analogy, p. 20)
"Spengler insists .. we are not continuators of Classical Civilization, but its adorers: 'we ... must begin to realize ... how immeasurably alien these things are ... from our inner selves." (p. 21)
"Today, one group, mostly politicians, look at the Classics to argue how well we are doing; the other group, the Romantics, who do not feel well in this age, stress that we have betrayed it.
XI. (p. 22)
"There are two ways of regarding the Classic, the materialistic and the ideological." (p. 22)
"Each side, with its gaze fixed on causality, demonstrates that the other side cannot ... understand the true linkages." (p. 22)
"At bottom, the opposition is between culture man and those of civilization man. ... We have projected our deepest spiritual needs and feelings on to the Classical picture ... Few theses would be more helpful for understanding the Western soul." (p. 23)
"For the man who ... has won the unconditional freedom of outlook ... that which assigns relative ran .. is simply the greater or lesser purity of their form language and symbolism." (p. 24)
XII. (p.24)
"What is Civilization, understood as the organic logical sequel fulfillment of a culture ? .. For every Culture has its own Civilization .. The Civilization is the inevitable destine of the Culture." (p. 24)
"Necessary organic succession, .. in this principle we obtain the viewpoint .. from which .. the problems of historical morphology become capable of solution." (p. 24)
"For the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as successors of the Greeks .. (p. 24): Greek soul - Roman intellect! ... and this antithesis is the difference between Culture and Civilization." (p. 25)
"Again and again, there appears this type of strong-minded non-metaphysical man, and in the hands of this type .. lies .. the destiny of every 'late' period." (p 25)
" 'Pure' civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking down of forms that have become inorganic or dead .. In such periods do Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism ripen into definite world conceptions which enable a moribund humanity .. to be reformed .. The transition from Culture to Civilization was accomplished in the Classical world in the 4th, for the Western in the 19th." (p 25)
"World city and province (are) the two basic ideas of every civilization .. Instead of a world ('true people: born and grown on the soil'), there is a city, a point ('while the rest dries up'), contemptuous of the country man .. Regions that lie outside the radiation circles of one of these cities .. become provinces." (p. 25)
"It is the common intellectual process of later periods ('such as the Ionic and the Baroque'), (that) provincial towns fight inwardly a lost battle against world cities .." (p. 25-26). "The world city means cosmopolitanism instead of 'home', 'society' in place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights .. Any high ideal of life becomes largely a question of money." (p. 26)
"All these things .. (mean) the definitive closing down of a Culture, and the opening of a quite new phase of human existence: anti-provincial, late, futureless, but quite inevitable." ( p. 26)
"What is the hallmark of a politic of civilization today, in contrast to a politic of Culture yesterday ? .. It is .. money! (p. 27) .. "To the Culture belongs gymnastics, the tournament; to the Civilization belongs Sport." (p. 27)
"It is possible to understand the Greeks without mentioning their economic relations; the Romans, on the other hand, can only be understood through these." (p. 27)
XIII.
"The Roman world dominion was a negative phenomenon, being the result not of a surplus of energy on one side, .. but of a deficiency of resistance .. The old East forwent all external self-determinations ('After Zama, the Romans never again .. were capable of waging a war against a great military power") (p. 28)
"To maintain the heroic posture for centuries is beyond the power of any people." (p. 28)
"Imperialism may continue to exist (as) .. amorphous and dispirited masses, as the typical form of the passing away, .. scrap material of a great history." (p. 28)
"Imperialism is Civilization 'Unadulterated' .. The energy of culture man is directed inwards, that of Civilization man outwards .. The expansive tendency is a doom, something demonic and immense ("it is not the conscious will of individuals, or even that of whole classes of people.")
=> For the 'brain man', there are only 'extensive' possibilities." (p. 28)
"This is the prelude of a future which is still in store for us .. This outcome is obligatory and insusceptible of modification." (p. 29)
"The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time .. but a single phenomena of history, strictly limited and defined." (p. 30)
XIV.
"This high plane of contemplation once attained, the rest is easy. .. In effect, the substitution of a Copernican for a Ptolemaic aspect of history, that is, an immeasurable widening of horizon .. When we use the risky word of 'freedom', we shall mean .. : freedom to do .. the necessary, or nothing." (p. 30)
"The present is a .. civilized time, and, ipso facto, a great number of life possibilities fall out as impossible. .. It is not in our power to make otherwise .. it is not .. permissible to defy clear historical experience." (p. 31)
"We have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a 'late' life, the parallel is to found in .. Caesar's Rome." (p. 31)
"Of great painting, or great music, there can no longer be, for Western people, any question ... Only extensive possibilities are left to them." (p.31)
"I can only hope that men of the new generation may be moved by this book to devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics." (p. 31)
XV.
"It still remains to consider the relation of a morphology of world history to philosophy. All genuine historical work is philosophy. (p.31).. Every thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in the common destiny of mortality." (p.32)
"Here are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is the expression of its own and only of its own time. No two ages possess the same philosophical intentions. The immortality of thought forms is an illusion." (p. 32)
"Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine .. All the philosophers of the newest age are open to serious criticism: .. they do not possess real standing in actual life .. Not one of them .. has intervened .. in big .. actuality." (p.32) .. "At other times: .. Confucius was several times a minister. Pythagoras was the organizer of an important political movement. Goethe .. a model executive minister." (p. 33) .. The philosphers of today .. lack any weight." (p. 33)
"It has come to this, that the very possibility of a real philosophy .. is in question. .. A doctrine that does not attack and affect the life of a period .. is no doctrine." (p. 34)
"A time which coincides exactly with the idea of a world city .. is a time of decline. We have not chosen this time .. Everything depends on seeing our own position, our destiny, learly: .. we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization." (p. 34)
"Systematic philosophy closes with the end of the 18th cy. Kant put its utmost possibilities in form .. He is followed by a specifically megalopolitan philosophy that was .. practical, irreligious." (as "parallelled in Chinese civilization by the 'Epicurean' Yang-Chu, the 'socialist' MoTi, the 'positivist' Mencius." (p. 35) )
"Schopenhauer .. is the first to make the Will to life ('creative life force'), the center of gravity of his thought. It has embraced all the possibilities of a true philosophy, and at the same time, has exhausted them." (p. 35)
"Ethical (philosophy) has been wound u p .. A third possibility, corresponding to Classical Skepticism, still remains to the soul world of the present day est .. It can be brought to light by the hitherto unknown methods of historical methodology." (p. 35)
"Skepticism .. of the West, .. is obliged to be historical through and through .. Its solutions are got by treating everything as relative, as a historical phenomenon, and its procedure is psychological .. We regard .. the history of philosophy as its gravest theme." (p. 35) ("comprehension of the past as organism")
"In this work, it will be our task to sketch this unphilosophical philosophy, the last that West Europe will know. Skepticism is the expression of a pure Civilization and it dissipates the world picture of the Culture that has gone before." (p. 35)
"Everything .. must be .. the expression of something living:
=> The Morphology of World History becomes .. a universal symbolism. (p. 36)
"Truths are truths only in relation to a particular mankind .. My own philosophy is able to express .. only the Western soul, .. in its present civilizational phase." (p. 36)
XVI.
"A political problem cannot be comprehended by politics themselves: important factors at work in the depths could only be grasped through their artistic manifestations." (or even scientific .. and .. philosophical ideas). .. Politico-social analysis (is) impossible without bringing in all the great problems of Being." (p. 36)
"No single fragment of history could be thoroughly illuminated .. untel the secret of World History itself, (i.e. until) .. the story of higher Mankind as an organism of regular study .. has been cleared up." (p. 36)
"There appeared the fundamental dependence of the most modern physical and chemical theories on the mythological concepts of our Germanic ancestors." (p. 36-37)
"Great groups of morphological relation are strictly symmetrical in structure .. Therefore, I saw the preent - the approaching World War - in a quite other light." (p. 37)
"Nietzsche himself had gripped all the decisive problems, although, being a romantic, he had not dared to look strict reality in the face .. The 'stock taking doctrine' .. could only come at this time." (p. 37)
"Man, as an element and representative of the World, is a member, not only of nature, but of History - which is a second Cosmos." (p. 38)
"History was seen as Nature, and treated accordingly, applying the principles of causality, the structure of rigid Being, to the picture of happenings." (p. 38)
"A baneful mistake, (as) necessity, so completely alien to the causal, (is) at work. A phenomenon is not only a fact for the understanding, but also an expression of the spiritual, not only an object, but a symbol as well." (p. 38)
"The work falls naturally in two parts:
- The first, 'Form and Actuality', starts from the form language of the Great Cultures, attempts to penetrate to the deepest roots of their origin, and so provides itself with the basis of a science of the Symbolic.
- The second part, "World Historical Perspectives', starts from the facts of actual life; seeks to obtain a quintessence of historical experience, that we can set to work upon the formation of our own future." (p. 39)
==Chapter II - The Meaning of Numbers== (p. 41)