The Decline of the West: The Complete Edition

All cultures in their beginning are aristocratic, dominated by the heroic estates of the warrior noble and priest. The maturation of a culture is a process of intellectualization, urbanization, social leveling, and the growing domination of money. In this process the creative essence of the culture is progressively lost until the culture, now become shallow, gives way to a soulless megalopolitan "civilization." In the West this transformation occurred in the 19th century. Democracy, behind which hides the dictatorship of money, then opens the path to Caesarism and the dissolution of the culture into total formlessness. Democracy, parliamentarism, egalitarianism, proletarian socialism, pacifism, humanitarianism, and attempts at "world improvement" and social reform, Spengler concluded, were all symptoms of a decadent civilization.

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.

far better to con-

struct an aero-engine than a new theory of apperception that is not wanted.

There are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is the expression of its own

and only its own time

And I can only hope that men of the new generation

may be moved by this book to devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics,

the sea instead of the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better

they could not do.

What are we to think of the individual who, standing before an ex-

hausted quarry, would rather be told that a new vein will be struck to-morrow

It will not be — already it is not — permissible to defy-

clear historical experience and to expect, merely because we hope, that this

will spring or that will flourish.

It is, I repeat, in effect the substitution

of a Copernican for a Ptolemaic aspect of history, that is, an immeasurable

widening of horizon.

That the 19th and 2.0th centuries, hitherto looked on as the highest point

of an ascending straight line of world-history, are in reality a stage of life

which may be observed in every Culture that has ripened to its limit — a stage

of life characterized not by Socialists, Impressionists, electric railways, tor-

pedoes and differential equations (for these are only body-constituents of the

time), but by a civilized spirituality which possesses not only these but also

quite other creative possibilities.

ht 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.