The Decline of the West

BOOKS | Oswald Spengler | 1918

The Decline of the West, a monumental work by Oswald Spengler, presents a philosophy of destiny and a new outlook on history, aiming for the first predetermination of history and the future stages of a Culture.

This work is intuitive and depictive, written in a language that seeks to illustrate objects and relations rather than offer ranked concepts, addressing readers capable of immersing themselves in its word-sounds and pictures.

Spengler's philosophy, deeply influenced by Goethe and, to a lesser extent, Nietzsche, emphasises the philosophy of Becoming over Being, intuition over analysis, and views the Godhead as effective in the living, becoming, and changing, rather than the dead and set fast.

Core Concepts

Morphology of World History and Organic Cultures

Spengler's work attempts to predetermine history by applying the method of comparative morphology in World history. It posits that Cultures are organic beings that, like plants and animals, bloom and age, arising with primitive strength from a mother region and remaining bound to it throughout their life cycle.

Each Culture possesses its unique idea, passions, life, will, feeling, and ultimately, its own death. This concept views world history as an endless picture of formations and transformations, a waxing and waning of organic forms, in contrast to the professional historian's view of a linear accumulation of epochs. This "natural" or "Copernican" form of the historical process lies deep within its essence and reveals itself only to an unprejudiced eye.

Each of the great Cultures possesses a specific "habit" or way of manifesting itself, encompassing its character, course, and duration. This habit is evident in religious, intellectual, political, social, and economic styles, and extends to artistic choices, communication forms, costumes, administration, and city planning.

The rhythm (Takt) of Classical existence, for example, differed from that of Egyptian or Arabian, with Greece and Rome having an andante and the Faustian spirit an allegro con brio.

Civilisation as Destiny

Civilisation is the inevitable destiny of Culture, representing its organic, logical sequel, fulfilment, and finale. It is the most external and artificial state of developed humanity, a conclusion, the "thing-become" succeeding the "thing-becoming," death following life, rigidity following expansion, and the intellectual age of the stone-built, petrifying world city following the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. Civilisations are an end, irrevocable, and reached repeatedly through inward necessity.

Analogy as the Means of Understanding

While mathematical law identifies dead forms, analogy is the means to understand living forms. Through analogy, polarity and periodicity in the world can be distinguished, revealing that expression forms of World history are limited in number and that eras, epochs, situations, and persons repeat themselves true to type.

This principle, referred to as "homology," brings a new connotation to the word "contemporary," where two historical facts occurring in the same relative positions in their respective Cultures are considered equivalent. For example, Pythagoras is a contemporary of Descartes, Archimedes of Gauss, and the Ionic and Baroque periods ran contemporaneously.

This method suggests that all great creations and forms in religion, art, politics, social life, economy, and science appear, fulfil themselves, and die down contemporaneously in all Cultures, with a strict correspondence in their inner structure.

Rejection of Linear History and Eurocentrism

The subdivision of history into "Ancient," "Medieval," and "Modern" is deemed an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme that has dominated historical thinking and prevented the true position of Western European development from being perceived.

This scheme, with its simple rectilinear progression and meaningless proportions, is criticised for its inability to incorporate new fields of history and its inherent Eurocentrism, which treats West Europe as a "steady pole" around which other "mighty far away Cultures are made to revolve".

The idea that Western eighteenth-century history is more important than any other of the sixty centuries preceding it, or that vast Indian and Chinese cultures are relegated to footnotes, is considered ridiculous. The three-phase system is seen as an imposition of one's own religious, political, or social convictions onto history, taking the spirit of the West for the meaning of the world.

The concept of "Mankind" as having an aim, idea, or plan is rejected as a zoological expression or an empty word; instead, there is a "drama of a number of mighty Cultures". The conventional historical scheme leads to a chaotic blur due to the overwhelming volume of material that cannot fit it.

Time, Space, Destiny, and Causality

The fundamental elements of the historical form world are polarity and periodicity. Spengler asserts that the secret of historical form does not lie on the surface or in superficial similarities; rather, phenomena can show deceptive outward similarity but be inwardly unconnected (e.g., Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid), or extreme outward dissimilarity with identical import (e.g., Trajan and Rameses II).

Destiny, as the means to understand living forms, is contrasted with Causality, which identifies dead forms. True science, with its notions of truth and falsity, applies to the collection and sifting of historical material, but real historical vision belongs to the domain of significances, where the crucial words are "deep" and "shallow".

Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. The Morphology of the mechanical and extended is called Systematic, while the Morphology of the organic, of history and life, bearing the sign of direction and destiny, is called Physiognomic. The great days of Physiognomic are yet to come.

Destiny is the deep logic of world-becoming. Historical events are not merely a momentary constellation of casual facts, but a type of historical change of phase occurring within a great historical organism at a preordained point. The "incidentals" of history, such as particular personalities or events, do not alter the theme or meaning of an epoch, but merely the shape of its development.

Key Cultural Souls and Their Symbols

Spengler identifies distinct "souls" for different Cultures, each with a prime symbol.

Faustian Soul (Western Culture)

The Faustian soul, whose prime symbol is pure and limitless space, emerged with the birth of the Romanesque style in the tenth century between the Elbe and the Tagus. Its "body" is the Western Culture. Characteristics include:

• Dynamic and Historical: A deep consciousness and introspection of the ego, a resolutely personal culture evidenced in memoirs, reflections, retrospects, and prospects, and conscience. Western man lives in the consciousness of his becoming and constantly looks to past and future.
• Will-to-Power: An irrepressible urge into distance and a specific, dynamic will-to-power. This is evident in its ethics, states, economic systems, and technics, which strive to overcome resistances and win through to generality and duration. The Faustian soul is Will and nothing but Will, needing an aim for its Columbus longing.
• Art and Architecture: The art of the fugue, Galileian dynamics, instrumental music, and Gothic cathedrals. Faustian architecture begins on a grand scale with gigantic intentions, passionate language, and implicitly endless space in its prosody, rhythmic syntax, and imagery. It drives through walls into the limitless universe of space, making exterior and interior complementary images of the same world feeling. The Gothic spire is an "I", the flying buttress an "I".
• Mathematics and Science: Infinitesimal Calculus, functional Analysis, dynamic physics, and a drive towards pure numerical transcendence. The Western mind aims for a world picture that is exact, mathematically disposed, and experimentally probed, allowing man to dominate it.
• Morale: Ethics of direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. This "ego habeo factum" (I have done it) ethos is intolerant of differing views, constantly seeking to fight and destroy the existent. Active, strong-willed, and vertical in tendency, it demands space for its activity but only for that. Its ethical socialism is the sentiment of action at a distance, with care for others as its emblem.
• Nihilism: From Rousseau onwards, Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in the grand style of life, leading to the coming of Nihilism as the soul exhausts its inner possibilities.

Relation to Nature: The endless, lonely, twilight wood became a secret wistfulness in Western building forms. Oaks, beeches, and lindens are felt as bodiless, boundless, spiritual, symbolising a straining beyond the summit. The rustle of the woods stands in deep relation with Destiny, history, duration, and the directional quality impelling the anxious Faustian soul towards an infinitely distant future.

Apollinian Soul (Classical Culture)

The Apollinian soul, identified with the Classical Culture, chose the sensuously present individual body as its ideal type of the extended. Characteristics include:

• Static and Ahistorical: Focus on the pure Present, lacking all idea of inner development and thus real history. The Classical universe, or Cosmos, is a well-ordered aggregate of near and completely viewable things, concluded by the corporeal vault of heaven.
• Art and Architecture: Nude statue, mechanical statics. Classical architecture begins from the outside, with proportion and measure, suggesting an evasion of difficult architectural problems. The temple is laid down in majestic rest, eliminating direction in depth. Sculpture is a language of outer surface, not inner meaning.
• Mathematics: Euclidean geometry of bodily bounding surfaces.
• Morale: Embodied in the Gesture, a permanent and self-contained posture adapted to a plastic ideal of being. Beauty plays a distinct role, defined by tangible, publicly evident traits. Its ethical ideal is catharsis, the purgation of the soul from non-Apollinian elements, leading to statuesque steadiness and will-less ethos, akin to the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana. Tolerant as a matter of course due to its world of coexistent individual things.
• Politics: Individual city-states of Greece, where the state was identified with the stone body of the individual Polis. Politics is understood as physical collision of party against party, with the aim of exterminating the other side.
• Science: Lacked memory or organ of history; what we call history was often mythological thinking. For Thucydides, no events of importance occurred before his time.

Language: Greek and Latin lacked exact equivalents for words like "will," "space," "action," and "activity". Classical language and art were comprehensible in one glance, non-exclusive, and catered frankly for all.

Magian Soul (Arabian Culture)

The Magian soul appeared in the time of Augustus in the regions between the Nile and Tigris, Black Sea and South Arabia. Its world-as-cavern is a peculiar kind of extension, profoundly different from Faustian or Classical space. Characteristics include:

• Dualism and Destiny: Its history is a surveyable one, consisting of a beginning and an end to the world, acts of God of mighty magic, and a battle of light and darkness. It sees history as the progressive actualisation of a world plan laid down by God.
• Piety and Submission (Islam): A will-less resignation, where the spiritual "I" is unknown, and the spiritual "We" reflects divine light. The Magian waking consciousness is a theatre of conflict between light and darkness, not a power in itself. All attempts to meet God's operations with personal purpose are considered "masiga" (evil). Grace is a substantial inflowing of divine pneuma, received, not acquired.
• Mathematics and Art: Algebra, astrology, alchemy, mosaics, and arabesques.
• Politics: Caliphates, mosques, sacraments, and scriptures of various religions. The Magian nation is a community of co-believers, defined by sacramental acts like circumcision or baptism. Its specific world outlook is expressed by distinctive scripts. The Roman Empire eventually absorbed the adherents of the Pagan Church, receiving the Christian system in its Latin guise, which was unmeaning to the Greek Church. Islam is regarded as the Puritanism of the Early Magian religions, swiftly absorbing Judaism, Mazdaism, and Christian churches due to its deeper significance and warlike onslaught.

Law: Arabian law came from God, manifested through enlightened men, resting on the majesty of its name rather than success. It is an oracle to be questioned esoterically, with secret meanings in letters.

Egyptian Soul

The soul of Old Egypt expressed its world feeling almost exclusively by the immediate language of Stone. Characteristics include:

• Timeless-Become and Directional Depth: Stone is the great emblem of the timeless-become, binding space and death. Its prime symbol is the way, expressing existence as a traveller following one unchanging direction. It comprehended space as a continuous process of actualisation, with tomb temples and sun temples representing a rhythmically ordered sequence of spaces, not an organisation of space.
• Brave Soul: Its style is one of rigor and force. It loved the strong stone of immense buildings.
• Care: The Egyptian administration of the Old Kingdom is an example of state formations where care is conspicuous.

Absence of Vertical Tendency: The Egyptian nation, for all its historical disposition, is as alien to the Faustian genealogical principle as it is to the Roman nobility.

Indian Culture

The Indian Culture is characterised by an immobile attitude, non-desire, and static self-containedness of the individual, recalling the Indian ethic and the man formed by it.

• Nirvana: The seated Buddha statue, "looking at its navel," and Zeno’s Ataraxia are not altogether alien. The Buddhist ideal of Nirvana is thoroughly Indian and traceable from Vedic times, closely akin to the Classical katharsis. It signifies a final and practical world sentiment of tired megalopolitans with a closed Culture behind them and no future before them.
• Numbers: Indians conceived numbers that, by Western ideas, possessed neither value nor magnitude nor relativity, becoming positive or negative based on position. This spirituality originated the conception of nothingness as a true number (zero).
• Care-less Submission: A picture of utterly care-less submission to the moment and its incidents. Stoicism and Buddhism are alike in their negation of historical feeling of care, contempt of zeal, organising power, and duty sense.

Stages of Culture and Civilisation

Every Culture passes through age phases like an individual man: childhood, youth, manhood, and old age. These stages are marked by distinct "styles" which are expressions of the Culture itself, not separate entities like Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo.

Springtime (Culture)

The earliest portions of a Culture are characterised by a young and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, visible in early Romanesque and Gothic, early Homeric Doric, and early Christian art. It is a period of religious creativeness, where a mighty theme rises out of the pre-urban countryside. At the beginning of the springtime, the nobility is the fine flowering of the people, the vessel in which the national character receives its destined Style. Religious history and political history, truths and facts, stand opposed and irreconcilable, beginning in cathedral and castle.

Late Period (Civilisation)

The transition from Culture to Civilisation marks the victory of the city over the country, freeing itself from the grip of the ground but leading to its ultimate ruin.

It is rooted in intellectualism and becomes irreligious. This is an age of much writing and reading, perpetually confusing the opposition of life and thought with thought about life and thought about thought.

• World City: The concept of world city and province brings up a new form problem of History. The world city means cosmopolitanism instead of 'home', cold matter-of-fact instead of reverence for tradition, scientific irreligion, 'society' instead of the state, and natural instead of hard-earned rights.
• Sterility and Depopulation: The sterility of civilised man, a metaphysical turn towards death, emerges. Children are not desired or found a reason for existence, leading to appalling depopulation that crumbles the pyramid of cultural man from the summit. This has been observed in the Classical world, Egyptian New Empire, and Western Civilisation.
• Money and Intellect: Money becomes an inorganic and abstract magnitude, disconnected from fruitful earth. High ideals of life become largely a question of money. Intellect and money emerge as forces separated by a deadly enmity from old class ideals of heroism and saintliness. Money, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally superior to ideal truths.
• Skepticism and Second Religiousness: The Late period is characterised by an unlimited optimism of reason, followed by an unqualified skepticism.This leads to the Second Religiousness, a deep piety that fills the waking consciousness, which is a necessary counterpart of Caesarism. It is not a new creation but a re-experience and re-expression of the first religiousness, arising spontaneously among the masses with a naive belief in a mystic constitution of actuality.

Specific Manifestations in Cultures

Art

Art itself becomes a sport in Civilisation, played before a highly intelligent audience of connoisseurs and buyers.

• Faustian Art: From Romanesque and Gothic to the oil painting of Venice and the instrumental music of the Baroque, art conquers endless space. Instrumental music becomes the ruling art of the West, with the violin as the noblest instrument for expressing its secrets.Faustian music is dynamic, boundless, and capable of portraying distances, lights, shadows, and ethereal colours. The Impressionists and Wagner sought to conjure a world in space out of tone and colour. However, art in the West declines and dies of senility after Wagner and Cézanne, with present-day art being described as impotence and falsehood.
• Apollinian Art: Classical statues are all structure and expressive surfaces, without incorporeal arrière pensée, exhausting actuality for the Classical eye. Classical art aims to bind and bound, securing the body feeling and bringing the eye back from distance to a Near and Still that is saturated with beauty.

Renaissance: A revolt against the Faustian forest music of counterpoint, without true depth, either ideal or phenomenal. It did not alter the ways of thought or life feeling of West Europe, remaining dependent on the forms of the original movement and representing a hesitant soul's effect. It is described as an "anti-Gothic movement" and a reaction against polyphonic music, with a Classical equivalent in the Dionysiac movement.

Philosophy

Systematic philosophy closed with Kant at the end of the eighteenth century, followed by a specifically megalopolitan philosophy that was practical, irreligious, and social ethical.

This includes Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Ibsen, and Shaw, who made the Will to life the centre of thought.

The final philosophy of West Europe is an unphilosophical one, a physiognomic skepticism. Truths are only truths in relation to a particular mankind, and Spengler's philosophy expresses the Western soul in its present civilised phase. Skepticism dissipates the world picture of the preceding Culture.

Science and Mathematics

The history of Western knowledge is one of progressive emancipation from Classical thought.

• Faustian: Developed infinitesimal calculus (Leibniz, Newton), and functional analysis (Euler). The goal of Faustian wisdom is the dissolution of all knowledge into a vast system of morphological relationships, where dynamics and analysis are identical in meaning and form with Romanesque ornament, Gothic cathedrals, Christian-German dogma, and the dynastic state.
• Classical: Euclidean geometry. Classical science reached its great century after the death of Aristotle, ending with Archimedes and the Romans.

Decline of Science: Science exists only in the living thought of great savant generations. The great masters are dead, and the current era experiences a decrescendo of brilliant gleaners. The will-to-victory of science will be overthrown by a new element of inwardness, leading from skepticism to Second Religiousness, where men desire to believe and not to dissect.

Politics and the State

Politics in the highest sense is life, and life is politics. World history is city history.

• Feudal State: The early stage of a Culture, an ordering of common life with reference to an Estate (nobility), where stone and blood are elevated into symbols.
• Class State: Characterised by a particular class (minority) ruling, whether constitutionally or otherwise, and providing political leadership. This is seen in the Greek Polis, Norman states, and post-1789 France.
• City-State: In the Classical world, the State was identified with the stone body of the individual Polis. The city-state, with its willed narrowness and brevity of office holding, made firm decisions on who should be "the State" impossible.
• Dynastic State: Faustian peoples are historical peoples, bound by history, with the ruling "house" as the eminent symbol of common Destiny. All Western nations are of dynastic origins.
• Caesarism: The final political constitution of Late Civilisations, paralleled in the Augustan Age of the Classical and Shi-hwang-ti's time in China. It involves the rise of great individual fact-men who can plunge a world from order into chaos. The age of Caesarism needs neither art nor philosophy.
• Democracy and Plutocracy: In the West, democracy and plutocracy are viewed as the same thing under different aspects (wish and actuality, theory and practice). Respect for the big number (equality, natural rights, universal suffrage) is a class ideal of the unclassed, but these ideals are put into effective motion by money. The universal franchise ultimately becomes an object for political manipulation by organized leadership and money.
• Imperialism: Taken as the typical symbol of passing away, Civilisation unadulterated. It is a doom, a demonic and immense expansive tendency that grips and uses up late mankind of the world city stage.

Religion and Morale

The spiritual in every living Culture is religious, whether conscious of it or not. The megalopolitan, however, is irreligious, and all religiousness in the Megalopolis rests upon self-deception.

• Faustian Morale: Characterised by activity, determination, self-control, and the overcoming of resistances. The Faustian ethic from Thomas Aquinas to Kant is an "excelsior," a fulfillment and justification of the "I". Faustian compassion is dynamic charity, a proud soul's demand upon itself.
• Puritanism: A great creation peculiar to the Late period of all Cultures. It manifests as an enthusiasm of a sober spirit, cold intensities, dry mysticism, and pedantic ecstasy. It lacks the joy of the Springtime religion and fights with dark fury against evil.
• Second Religiousness: The sequel to the Culture, appearing as Rationalism fades into helplessness. Old religious forms return, powerful, in the guise of popular syncretism. This deep piety fills the waking consciousness.
• Socialism: Morphologically equivalent to Buddhism and Stoicism as an end phenomenon. It is the Faustian world feeling become irreligious. It dynamically treats the theme of individual self-management, defending the working out of life and powerfully thrusting into the future over all mankind under one regimen.

City versus Country

The city, with its gradual detachment from and final bankrupting of the country, is the determinative form of higher history. The village is embedded in the landscape, confirming the country; the Late city defies the land and contradicts nature, seeking to be something different and higher. The gigantic megalopolis annihilates the country picture, suffering nothing beside itself. Rootless, dead to the cosmic, and irrevocably committed to stone and intellectualism, the Civilised city develops a language of becomeness and completion, not evolution.

Language and Writing

• Race and Speaking: Language divorced from speaking is a dead stock of signs; speaking is the activity that operates with them. Race is involved in how matter is set in sentences, influencing the type of sentence unit.
• Culture Languages: Historical languages whose destiny accomplishes itself in step with organic evolution of lifetimes. They are determined by the spirit of the language employed and in turn influence it. Writing is an invention of inward forcefulness, making world history dependent on script as a means of communication.
• Urban Languages (Koine): Final homeless and rootless languages, perfectly mechanical, precise, and cold, learned by traders and porters. Their creation is driven by the spirit of economics, not race or religion.

The Decline of the West

The book itself is an attempt to sketch an unphilosophical philosophy, the last that West Europe will know. It argues that the Western European-American Culture is in the phase of fulfilment, and the book's venture is to predetermine its untravelled stages.

The period of 1800-2000 is chronologically parallel to the phase of Hellenism, with the World War corresponding to the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman age. Rome, with its rigorous realism, offers the key to understanding the future of the West.

The book was written with the World War in mind, viewing it not as a momentary constellation of casual facts, but as a type of historical change of phase within a great historical organism.

The decline of the West is directly comparable in course and duration to the decline of the Classical world, and is heralded and sensible today. It is the conclusion of the city's history, where it sacrifices the blood and soul of its creators and the last flower of its growth to the spirit of Civilisation, moving towards final self-destruction.

The Creative inner life is at an end, and intellectual existence can only be kept up materially by outward effect in the space of the City. In the twentieth century, the ethical disposition of the West remains "socialistic," but its theory has ceased to be a problem, leaving the possibility of a final stage of Western philosophy: physiognomic skepticism. The ultimate wisdom of the Faustian soul tends towards the dissolution of all knowledge into a vast system of morphological relationships.

Ultimately, the issue of decline may be tragic for individuals who feel nothing is left to conquer in art, drama, or painting. The book suggests that men of the new generation should devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paintbrush, and politics instead of epistemology.