* Book: Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Ed. Arthur Helps, and Helmut Werner. Trans. Charles F. Atkinson. Preface Hughes, H. Stuart. New York: Oxford UP, 1991

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Context

"Decline belonged to a massive body of literature which took shape between the first and second world wars on the 'Crisis of Civilization', and which includes, among others, works like Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), Guenon's The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1929), Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1932), and is often seen, retrospectively, as a kind of manifesto of the pessimistic spirit which plagues Civilization like a demonic double; but it has also acquired the reputation for being not just an embodiment of doubts about the very project of Civilization, but a masterful work of metaphysical poetry (Miller once described it as a "stupendous morphological, or phenomenological, tone-poem"), and thus itself a product of the high culture of the West, and thus, like Foucault, carrying "out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture". It is certainly noteworthy that its author has gained the reputation, rare among 'historians', for being a 'prophet'."

(http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-decline-of-west-by-oswold-spengler.html)

Description

1. From the Brittannica:

"Der Untergang is a study in the philosophy of history. Spengler contended that because most civilizations must pass through a life cycle, not only can the historian reconstruct the past but he can predict “the spiritual forms, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the still unaccomplished stages of our Western history.” Unlike Arnold Toynbee, who later held that cultures are usually “apparented” to older cultures, Spengler contended that the spirit of a culture can never be transferred to another culture. He believed that the West had already passed through the creative stage of “culture” into that of reflection and material comfort (“civilization” proper, in his terminology) and that the future could only be a period of irreversible decline. Nor was there any prospect of reversing the process, for civilizations blossomed and decayed like natural organisms, and true rejuvenation was as impossible in the one case as the other."

(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oswald-Spengler)

2. From the Wikipedia:

"The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes), or more literally, The Downfall of the Occident, is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler. The first volume, subtitled Form and Actuality, was published in the summer of 1918. The second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History, was published in 1922. The definitive edition of both volumes was published in 1923.

Spengler introduces his book as a "Copernican overturning" involving the rejection of the Eurocentric view of history, especially the division of history into the linear "ancient-medieval-modern" rubric. According to Spengler, the meaningful units for history are not epochs but whole cultures which evolve as organisms. He recognizes at least eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman), Arabian, and Western or European. Cultures have a lifespan of about a thousand years of flourishing, and a thousand years of decline. The final stage of each culture is, in his word use, a "civilization".

Spengler also presents the idea of Muslims, Jews and Christians, as well as their Persian and Semitic forebears, being "Magian"; Mediterranean cultures of antiquity such as Ancient Greece and Rome being "Apollonian"; and modern Westerners being "Faustian".

According to Spengler, the Western world is ending and we are witnessing the final season, the "winter" of Faustian Civilization. In Spengler's depiction, Western Man is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached."

3. From Encyclopedia.com, by Klemens von Klemperer:

"The Decline of the West (1918-1922) was revolutionary less in its basic ideas than in the impressive breadth of its canvas—a feature for which it was readily attacked by professional scholars— and in its elaborate systematization of cultural and historical pessimism. Spengler’s immediate inspiration was his perception that the civilization of the West since the late nineteenth century was exhibiting the same symptoms as ancient civilization in its decline. He acknowledged the influences primarily of Goethe and Nietzsche; to them he owed “practically everything.” From Goethe he derived his “method,” particularly his way of relating scientific insights to cultural phenomena, and his latent historical relativism. From Nietzsche he acquired the “questioning faculty,” his approach to cultural criticism.

In the work of Edward Gibbon, decline had been a historical theme closely circumscribed by time and space; for Spengler it became a metaphysical one. While Gibbon had seen decline in a broader context of the long-range history of human progress, Spengler used it as an argument against the existence of progress. This difference is a measure of Spengler’s dramatic break with the premises of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. His historicism and antirationalism carried the tradition of German romanticism to its ultimate conclusions; he called his work a “German philosophy.” His ponderousness and lack of humor in fact took him far afield from both Goethe and Nietzsche. Thus the blue flower of German romanticism blossomed for the last time in an icy, apocalyptic twentieth-century setting.

The Decline of the West is described in the subtitle as a “morphology of history.” History is not the study of a coherent evolution (Spengler contra Hegel); it is a comparative study of cultures. Spengler dismissed with vehemence the traditional periodization of world history in terms of ancient, medieval, and modern. Instead he concentrated on eight separate cultures: those of Egypt, India, Babylon, China, classical antiquity, Islam, the West (Faustian culture), and Mexico. Each one of these “powerful cultures” imprints upon mankind its own form, has its own idea, passions, life, and death (Spengler’s historical relativism). Each one, like a plant, goes through the appointed course of youth, maturity, and decline (Spengler’s determinism). Each “culture,” in Spengler’s terms, produces its “civilization,” the latter representing a late, declining phase of that culture: a civilization is “a conclusion, the thing become succeeding to the thing becoming, rigidity following expansion,” intellect replacing the soul. For the linear view of history Spengler thus substituted a cyclical theory such as had last been elaborated in the West by Vico in the early eighteenth century (though one had been propounded in the nineteenth century by the Russian writer Nikolai I. Danilevskii).

According to this theory, historical events are symbolic of the “metaphysical structure of historical mankind.” There is a “morphological relationship” between diverse expressions of human activity—between differential calculus and the dynastic state of the time of Louis xiv, for instance, or between the ancient polis and Euclidean geometry. Furthermore, Spengler saw “contemporaneity” in phenomena widely separated in time—in the Trojan war and the crusades, in Homer and the song of the Nibelungs, and so forth. Napoleon was not a pupil of Alexander the Great but his alter ego. Altogether, historical data, instead of being subject to the law of cause and effect, follow a compelling “fate.” Spengler called his work grandiloquently a “philosophy of fate.” In effect, while he could hardly pass for a philosopher, he was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding visionaries.

Applied to twentieth-century Western civilization, Spengler’s theories opened up impressive social perspectives. His insights into atomized life in the big city (the “megalopolis”), into an age of masses, money, and a new Caesarism are penetrating. For all his mystical vision, Spengler actually raised the very issues that agitate contemporary sociologists. And what is more, many of his predictions have come true.

Spengler’s immediate impact on Germany was electrifying. Although accused of charlatanism by most professional scholars, he became one of the most widely read and discussed authors in the 1920s. At the same time, a number of pamphlets that he wrote after the war, while serving as sketches for and elaborations of his general work, drew him deeper and deeper into the bitter political struggles of the Weimar Republic. Preussentum und Sozialismus (1920) was particularly influential, orphic but compelling. It exhorted the Germans to live up to a type that Spengler, in The Decline of the West, had called the “last race”: strong, heroic, Prussian. Spengler’s politics added up to a violent rejection of liberalism, democracy, and the West, and they contributed vitally to the undermining of the young German republic, which was to him nothing but a “business enterprise.” While Spengler is considered by some to have paved the way for National Socialism, he disagreed with the Nazis on various basic issues (such as race) and many times repudiated the movement (Neubau des Deutschen Retches 1924; The Hour of Decision 1933b). The Nazis, however, used him as one of their ideological fathers, although after Hitler’s seizure of power they dismissed him harshly as a magician of decline, a sadist, and so forth. In the end Spengler died a lonely, almost forgotten man.

After World War n The Decline of the West, its prophecies seemingly borne out by events, came into its own, especially in the United States. Arnold Toynbee’s universal history—which conquered America in the late 1940s—was really something of a Spenglerian heresy, Spengler tempered by British empiricism. Spengler, indeed, left a lasting imprint upon modern “metahistorians” like Toynbee, sociologists like Sorokin, and anthropologists like Kroeber. Finally, a pessimistic mid-twentieth century saw itself reflected in Spengler’s grand scheme."

(https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-european-biographies/oswald-spengler)

Discussion

JOSÉ LUÍS GARCIA:

"The key to Spengler's philosophical anthropology and accompanying philosophy of history is his use of the Faustian legend in popular German literature to interpret modern technology. According to him, humans are the only predators able to select and design weapons for attacking nature and each other. At some point around the tenth century this ability developed to such an extent in Western European culture that humans seized for themselves the prerogatives of domination over nature. This inexorable destiny is a radical break with earlier periods of thought, in which humans saw themselves as subject to nature; yet it was a destiny made possible by nature, when nature gave human beings both mental superiority and hands. The hands are fundamentally weapons. More than a tool of tool, as described by Aristotle, the hand perfects itself in conflict more than manufacture. Indeed just as Spengler interprets the plough as a weapon against plant life, so he sees instruments of worship as arms against the devil. But Spengler does not confuse technology with tools or technological objects. Technology is a set of procedures or practical means for producing a particular end in view. In Spengler's words, technology is the tactics of living, a conception that goes beyond human life. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he identifies life with struggle, a fierce and merciless struggle that springs from the will to power, with the machine being the subtlest of all possible weapons.

Having placed the origin of Faustian culture in the Nordic countries, Spengler interprets the Enlightenment as the moment when the machine replaced the Creator. The machine became a god, with factories for temples and engineers for priests, whose mysteries were the esoteric features of mechanization. Nineteenth-century machine age industrialization imposed itself on nature with standardized, inert forms that are hostile to the natural world and the precursors of decline. But in order to feed the technological-machinist army Western Europe and North America furthered the destruction of nature across the globe, creating an untameable monster that threatens to conquer humans themselves and lead culture to a grandiose suicide. The tragedy of humanity lies in humans raising their hands against their own mother—nature. All the great cultures defeats. The struggle against nature is a struggle without hope, even though people pursue it to the end.

Contrary to the views of Enlightenment theorists such as Henri de Saint-Simon or Auguste Comte, the domination of nature by Faustian technology does not seek human emancipation, but is the manifestation of a blind will to power over the infinite. As Hermínio Martins (1998) argues, Spengler rejects the rationality of technological history. The history of Western European and North American technology is simply human tragedy because the infinite is always greater than efforts to tame it. Inspired also by Nietzsche's cyclic vision of history, Spengler sees culture, rooted in the soil, being replaced by civilization, in which the intellect prevails, decaying again eventually into culture.

The significance that Spengler attributes to technology, his defense of science-as-technology, his cultural pessimism, and his hostility to liberal, democratic values and institutions were commented on by Max Weber, and influenced thinking during the Nazi regime, despite the fact that he rejected national socialism completely in 1934. Many of his insights and expressions regarding the essentially non-transferable character of Western European and North American technological culture as a destiny, the will to power as the foundation of technology, and the conceptual and ontological dependency of science on technology are further echoed in Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger, as well as in some members of the first generation of the Frankfurt school."

(https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-european-biographies/oswald-spengler)

Excerpts

Oswald Spengler on the Evolution of Care Economy Orientations Across Civilizations

- Excerpt from Vol. I; Chapter IV. Part II. Section VI.

(not the full text of the section, but selected phrases, occasionally slightly adapted for smoother sentences - mb)

Oswald Spengler:

"It is the primitive feeling of care which dominates the physiognomy of the Western ("as that of the Egyptians ... and the Chinese") .. It creates the symbolism of the erotic which represents the flowing on of endless life. (p. 102)

Classical man conceived only the here and now:

   - the birth pangs of mother (was) made the center of the Demeter worship
   - the Dionysiac symbol of the phallus (was) the sign of a sexuality wholly concentrated on the moment (p. 103)

The domestic religion of Rome centered on the genius, i.e. the creative power of the head of the family. (p. 103).

To all this, the deep and careful care of the Western soul has opposed the sign of mother love .. The Mother with Child - the future at her breast. The Mary cult in the new 'Faustian' form began to flower only in the centuries of the Gothic. (p. 103)

(Magian Christianity had elevated Maria as 'Theotokos', i.e. 'she who gave birth to God', a symbol felt quite otherwise than by us.", p. 103)

Madonna with the Child answers exactly to the Egyptian Isis with Horus, both are caring, nursing mothers. This symbol had vanished for a thousand years or more! (p. 103)

From the maternal care the way leads to the paternal, and there we meet the State! .. The meaning of the state to the man is comradeship in arms, for the protection of hearth and home. (p. 103)

The state is the inward form of a nation, and .. history .. is the state conceived as kinesis .. The Woman as 'Mother' <is>, and the Man as Warrior and Politician 'makes' history. (p. 103)

The history of Higher Cultures shows us 3 examples of state formations in which the element of care is conspicuous:

   - the Egyptian administration even of the Old Kingdom (from 3,000 BC)
   - the Chinese state of the Chou dynasty (1169-256 BC)
   - the states of the West (p. 103)

On the other hand, we have in 2 examples - the Classical and the Indian - a picture of utterly careless submission to the moment and its incidents. (p. 103)

Stoicism and Buddhism .. are .. one in their negation of the historical feeling of care, their contempt for zeal. (p. 104)

In contrast to "Western Europe, with the model agriculture of the Orders, .. in the Classical world, men managed from day to day .. Casual surpluses were instantly squandered on the city mob. (p. 104)

Great statesmen of the Classical (did not) economically look far ahead. The meaning of the agrarian reform of the Gracchi .. was to make their supporters 'possessors' of the land, NOT 'managers of the land'. (p. 104)

Of this economic Stoicism, the exact antithesis is Socialism .. i.e. (not that of Marx!), the Prussian practice of Frederick William, .. that comprehends care for permanent economic relations, trains the individual in his duty for the whole, and glorifies hard work as the affirmation of Time and Future." (p. 104)

Oswald Spengler on Depopulation Through Childlessness as the End of a Civilization

Source: Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. 2; Chapter IV: Cities and People; Section V, pp. 69-74

Summary transcription based on excerpted text, by Michel Bauwens.

Osward Spengler:

“The Stone Colossus, ‘Cosmopolis', stands at the end of the life course of every great Culture.” (p. 68)

The Culture Man, whom the land has spiritually formed, is seized … by his own creation, the City.” (p. 69)

“The stony mass is the absolute City. These final cities are wholly intellect.

["the heart has (no longer) a prior meaning as the genuine center of a family; the old relation to the land is wholly extinct.” The intellectual Nomad is completely developed.” (p. 69)]

“Cities begin to overflow in all directions in formless masses, eating into the decaying countryside with utility buildings.” (p. 69)

“Now appears …the city of the city architect …In all civilizations, these cities aim at the chessboard form, the symbol of soullessness.” (p. 69)

"regular rectangle blocks astounded Herodotus in Babylon and Cortes in Tenochtitlan
in the classical world the series of abstract cities begins with Thurii, planned by Hippodamus of Milete in 441
Rhodes and Alexandria follow
the Islamic Architects laid out Baghdad from 762 and Samara a century later.” (p. 69)

[“I see, long after AD 2000, cities laid out for 10 to 20 million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of the countryside."]

“These city bodies extended in general not in breadth, but more and more upward.”

[i.e. “ block tenements in Rome; Diodorus tells us of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of these wretched upper floor tenements of Rome.”, p. 70]

“Beginning to end, a peasant cottage and a tenement block are related to one another as soul and intellect. Here there is only forward, never back. … Now, the giant city sucks the countryside dry.. Intellectual nomads... take the city with them into the mountains or on the sea. They have lost the country within themselves. Civilization is nothing but tension!” (p. 70)

[“tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it, is the transition to nothingness.”]

Genuine play... are products of the cosmic beat and as such, no longer comprehensible in their essence.” p. 70)

(Note that above, Spengler is contrasting the artificiality of City Life with the natural pulsation of life in the countryside, i.e. the ‘cosmic beat’.)

“Then, when being is sufficiently uprooted... emerges the sterility of civilized man ..., and the end to the drama.” (p. 70)

=> “The last man of the world city no longer wants to live.” p. 70)

"It is characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death."

["It is to be understood as a metaphysical turn towards death.”]

“As an individual, he may cling to life, but as a type, no.” p. 70)

The key part of the excerpt starts there:

“Children do not happen, .. principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity, can no longer find any reason for their existence.” (p. 72)

“When the ordinary thought of highly cultivated people begins to regard ‘having children’ as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning point has come. … For Nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, where life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an ‘it’, a drive, that is utterly independent of waking being.” (p. 72)

=> “When reasons have to be put forward, at all, .. life has become questionable.” (p. 72)

“In the Classical world, the practice was deplored by Polybus as the ruin of Greece; in subsequent Roman times, it became appallingly general.” (p. 72)

“The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. But now emerges the ‘Ibsen woman’, the comrade. Instead of children, she has soul conflicts. [“the heroine of megapolitan literature”] (p. 72)

“The same fact … in which Buddha grew up.” (p. 73)

“In Hellenism and in the 19th cy., as in the time of Lao Tzu and the Charvaka doctrine, there is an ethic for childless intelligence.” (p. 73)

“At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation .. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world cities … and finally the land itself. At the last, only primitive blood remains.” [the ‘Fellah’ type]. (p. 73)

The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed, .. well organized .. and yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale … “ (p. 73)

Nothing helped:

“The desperate marriage and children laws of Augustus (‘Lex de maritandis ordinibus’)
The wholesale adoptions
The incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted countryside
The immense food charities .. for children of poor parents

… nothing availed to check the process.” (p. 73)

[“Italy, then North Africa and Gaul, … and finally Spain, became empty and desolate.”]

“The terrible truth came out at last in the edict of Pertinax, AD 193, by which anyone in Italy or the provinces was permitted to take possession of untended lands, and if he brought it under cultivation, to hold it as his legal property.” (p. 73)

“The historical student has only to turn his attention serious to other Civilizations, to find the same phenomena:

Depopulation can be seriously traced in the background of the Egyptian New Empire (from the XIX Dynasty onwards)

The same tendency can be felt in the history of political Buddhism after the Caesar Asoka.” (p. 73)

“At the end of the evolution, the giant cities … stand empty, harboring a small population of Fellaheen.” (p. 74)

[“Samarra was abandoned by the 10th cy. ; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, … was a completely uninhabited waste .. about AD 635; Rome had in the 5th cy of our era, the population of a village.”] (p. 74)

More information

Excerpts via [1]; from Vol. 2

Full text versions online:

Bibliography

Today and Destiny: Vital Excerpts from The Decline of the West of Oswald Spengler by Edwin Franden Dakin, 1940.

As recommended by Encyclopedia.com:

"The best English-language introduction to Spengler's thought is H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (1952).

Other books include

E. H. Goddard and P. A. Gibbons, Civilisation or Civilisations: An Essay on the Spenglerian Philosophy of History (1926), and
William Harlan Hale, Challenge to Defeat: Modern Man in Goethe's World and Spengler's Century (1932).
An extensive discussion of Spengler is in Pitirim A. Sorokin, Modern Historical and Social Philosophies (1963; first published in 1950 as Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis), and a brief chapter on him is in
Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (1952).
Spengler After the Decline (chapter in Prism) by Theodor W. Adorno.
Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics by John Farrenkopf, 2001.

Additional Sources:

Fischer, Klaus P., History and prophecy: Oswald Spengler and The decline of the West, Durham, N.C.: Moore Pub. Co., 1977.

Hughes, H. Stuart (Henry Stuart), Oswald Spengler, New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers, 1992. "

Oswald Spengler by H. Stuart Hughes.

Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics by Francis Parker Yockey,1948

Decline of the West

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