Decline of the West - Abbreviated Version

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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 identity 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 fo rour 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 occured." (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.

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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)