Decline of the West

By Oswald Spengler. Here are my notes from the Introduction (some is verbatim, some not, and the italics are gone -- sorry):

For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals. Is all history founded upon general biographic archetypes?

The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.

The mean whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means are we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.

Thus our theme...the philosophy of the future. It expands into the conception of a morphology of world history, of the world-as-history in contrast to the morophology of the world-as-nature that hitherto has been almost the only theme of philosophy.

What concerns us is not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time are, per se, but what they signify, what they point to, by appearing.

That there is, besides necessity of cause and effect -- which I may call the logic of space -- another necessity, an organic necessity in life, that of Destiny -- the logic of time -- is a fact of the deepest inward certainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinction to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the "Critique of Pure Reason" investigates...We await, to-day, the philosopher who will tell us in what language history is written and how it is to be read.

Possibilities of world-formation are not necessarily actualities.

For whom is there history? The question is seemingly paradoxical, for history is obviously for everyone to this extent, that every man, with his whole existence and consciousness, is part of history. But it makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of himself as something rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type of consciousness there is certainly no world-history, no world-as-history. But how if the self-consciousness of a whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistorical spirit? How must actuality appear to it?

In the world-consciousness of the Hellenes all experience--personal and common--was immediately transmuted into a timeless, immobile, mythically-fashioned background for the particular momentary present (the "pure Present", the negation of time, the polar and not periodic, which fills that life with an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown). Such a spiritual condition is practically impossible for us men of the West, for whom the past is a periodic and purposeful organism of centuries or millennia.

The art of portraiture is biography in the kernel, and in Egypt it was practically the artist's only theme.

The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of care -- care for the future, and necessarily bound up therewith, care for the past. The Egyptian denied mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his Culture (mummification vs. burning the dead).

To the Classical mind self-examination was deeply foreign. Goethe's works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single great confession!

The Classical mathematical mind conceived of things as they are, as magnitudes, timeless and purely present, as geometry; we conceive things as they become and behave, as function, in flux (Newton named his calculus "fluxions").

The ground of West Europe s treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it -- and great histories of millennial duration and mighty far-away Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets! The Ptolemaic system of history.

Goethe's saying, "What is important in life is life and not the result of life," is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the riddle of historical form by means of a programme.

We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form, and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, one works upon unlimited possibilities -- never a natural end -- and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans artlessly the continuation of his structure.

"Mankind," however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. "Mankind" is a zoological expression, or an empty word. Instead of one linear history, I see the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Each Culture has its on new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field. They belong, like the plants and the animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton. World-history, then, is a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms.

To-day we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so.

But something much more disquieting than a logical fallacy begins to appear when the centre of gravity of philosophy shifts from the abstract-systematic to the practical-ethical and our Western thinkers from Schopenhauer onward turn from the problem of cognition to the problem of life (the will to life, to power, to action).

What correlation is there or can there be of Nietzsche's idea of the "Dionysian" with the inner life of a highly-civilized Chinese or an up-to-date American? [me: the quintessential American philosophy by necessity must be up-to-date and addressed to the inner life.] What is the significance of his type of the "Superman" -- for the world of Islam?

What the West has said and thought, hitherto, has remained narrow and dubious, because men were always looking for the solution of the question. It was never seen that many questioners implies many answers. The real student of mankind treats no standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong. All truths are path-dependent. [me: but the set at any particular time is not limitless; if we can find global truths of mankind (truths about the set), truths that, at the very least, won't change soon, then we can do something indeed. the proper foundation for that is psychology].

Goethe the artist portrayed the life and development of his figures as the thing-becoming and not the thing-become. This is how he could say at the bivouac fire on the evening of the Battle of Valmy: "Here and now begins a new epoch of world history, and you, gentlemen, can say that you 'were there.' "

One grouping of the Faustian soul, public men before all else -- economists, politicians, jurists, [pundits] -- opine that "present-day mankind" is making excellent progress. The danger of this group lies in a clever superficiality. The other grouping, composed above all of belated romanticists -- poets, philosophers, artists, represented by three Basel professors Bachofen, Burckhardt, and Nietzsche -- succumb to the usual dangers of ideology. They lose themselves in the clouds of an antiquity that is really no more than the image of their own sensibility in a philological mirror. Consequently, even in point of critical foundations, neither group takes the other seriously.

It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the spirit of Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads to the end.

The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, a strict and necessary organic succession. In this way the Romans were the successors of the Greeks; the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development. Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness -- in a word, Greek soul, Roman intellect. Pure Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-down of forms that have become inorganic or dead. From these periods onward the great intellectual decisions take place, not as in the days of the Orpheus-movement or the Reformation in the "whole world" where not a hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that have absorbed into themselves the whole content of History, while the old wide landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, serves only to feed the cities with what remains of its higher mankind. World-city and province -- the two basic ideas of every civilization. In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up.

After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, Paris, London come Berlin and New York. The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of "home," cold matter-of-fact in place of of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a fossil representative of the older religion of the heart, "society" in place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights. And unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of the 20th, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of professional (and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires.

Money is the hall-mark of a politic of Civilization to-day, in contrast to a politic of Culture yesterday. Not till the Roman Caesarism -- foreshadowed by C. Flaminius, shaped first by Marius, handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of fact -- did the Classical World learn the pre-eminence of money. Without this fact neither Caesar, nor "Rome" generally, is understandable.

After Zama, the Romans never again either waged or were capable of waging a war against a great military Power.

To maintain the heroic posture for centuries on end is beyond the power of any people. Imperialism is to be taken as the typical symbol of the passing away. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are only extensive possibilities. Hard as the half-developed Socialism of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny.

Alexander and Napoleon were romantics. Caesar, on the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with immense understanding.

He who cannot see that our choice is between willing Caesar and willing nothing, between cleaving to this destiny or despairing of the future and of life itself; he who cannot feel that there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed with the idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past ages -- must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through history or to make history.

It would have been absurd in a Roman of intellectual eminence, who might as Consul or Praetor lead armies, organize provinces, build cities and roads, or even be the Princeps in Rome, to want to hatch out some new variant of post-Platonic school philosophy at Athens or Rhodes. Consequently no one did so. It was not in harmony with the tendency of the age, and therefore it only attracted third-class men of the kind that always advances as far as the Zeitgeist of the day before yesterday.

The solutions of the last philosophy of the West will be got by treating everything as relative, as a historical phenomenon, and its procedure will be psychological -- an unphilosophical philosophy. What is also has become -- the when and the how long hold as deep a secret as the what. Everything, whatever else it may be, must at any rate be the expression of something living . It is perfectly clear that no single fragment of history can be thoroughly illuminated unless and until the secret of world-history itself, to wit the story of higher mankind as an organism of regular structure, had been cleared up.

The World-War was not a momentary constellation of casual facts but the the type of a historical change of phase occurring within a great historical organism of definable compass at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago. [me: attractors and self-organized criticality, the when, the where in phase space, the potential actualized.]

Stock-taking doctrine -- the confirmation through synthesis of all that has been sought and achieved for generations past, integrating all the truly living tendencies which it finds in the special spheres, no matter what their aim may be.

The structure of rigid being -- principles of causality, of law, of system -- should not be applied to the picture of happenings, to the philosophy of the future.

Goethe (summation of Spengler's philosophy): "The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast." It is the distinction between intuition and analysis.