The Decline of the West/Chapter 1

by Oswald Spengler

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment — the West-European American.

Hitherto the possibility of solving a problem so far-reaching has evidently never been envisaged, and even if it had been so, the means of dealing with it were either altogether unsuspected or, at best, inadequately used.

Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual^[1] and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms — social, spiritual and political — which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities indeed secondary or derived from that something? Does world-history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what are the limits to which reasoning from such premisses may be pushed?

Is it possible to find in life itself — for human history is the sum of mighty life-courses^[2] which already have had to be endowed with ego and personality, in customary thought and expression, by predicating entities of a higher order like “the Classical” or “the Chinese Culture,” “Modern Civilization” — a series of stages which must be traversed, and traversed moreover in an ordered and obligatory sequence? For everything organic the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals — may not these notions, in this sphere also, possess a rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted? In short, 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.

If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms — peoples, tongues and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craft-works, sciences, laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events — may be accepted and pointed to as symbols.

II

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

It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the expression-forms of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs, situations, persons are ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon has hardly ever been discussed without a side-glance at Cæsar and Alexander — analogies of which, as we shall see, the first is morphologically quite inacceptable and the second ts correct — while Napoleon himself conceived of his situation as akin to Charlemagne’s. The French Revolutionary Convention spoke of Carthage when it meant England, and the Jacobins styled themselves Romans. Other such comparisons, of all degrees of soundness and unsoundness, are those of Florence with Athens, Buddha with Chest, primitive Christianity with modern Socialism, the Roman financial magnate of Cæsar’s time with the Yankee. Petrarch, the first passionate archæologist (and is not archæology itself an expression of the sense that history is repetition?) related himself mentally to Cicero, and bur lately Cecil Rhodes, the organizer of British South Africa, who had in his library specially prepared translations of the classical lives of the Cæsars, felt himself akin to the Emperor Hadrian. The fated Charles XII of Sweden used to carry Quintus Curtius’s life of Alexander in his pocket, and to copy that conqueror was his deliberate purpose.

Frederick the Great, in his political writings — such as his Considérations, 1738 — moves among analogies with perfect assurance. Thus he compares the French to the Macedonians under Philip and the Germans to the Greeks “Even now,” he says, “the Thermopylæ of Germany, Alsace and Lorraine, are in the hands of Philip,” therein exactly characterizing the policy of Cardinal Fleury. We find him drawing parallels also between the policies of the Houses of Habsburg and Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony and of Octavius.

Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually implied rather a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious expressions than a really deep sense of historical forms.

Thus in the case of Ranke, a master of artistic analogy, we find that his parallels of Cyaxares and Henry the Fowler, of the inroads of the Cimmerians and those of the Hungarians, possess morphologically no significance, and his oft-quoted analogy between the Hellenic city-states and the Renaissance republics very little, while the deeper truth in his comparison of Alcibiades and Napoleon is accidental. Unlike the strict mathematician, who finds inner relationships between two groups of differential equations where the layman sees nothing but dissimilarities of outward form, Ranke and others draw their historical analogies with a Plutarchian, popular-romantic, touch, and aim merely at presenting comparable scenes on the world-stage.

It is easy to see that, at bottom, it ts neither a principle nor a sense of historic necessity, but simple iaclination, that governs the choice of the tableaux. From any techneque of analogies we are far distant. They throng up (to-day more than ever) without scheme or unities, and if they do hit upon something which is true — in the essential sense of the word that remains to be determined — it is thanks to luck, more rately to instinct, never to a principle. In this region no one hitherto has set himself to work out a method, nor has had the slightest inkling that there is here a root, in fact the only root, from which can come a broad solution of the problems of History.

Analogies, in so far as they laid bare the organic structure of history, might be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique, developing under the influence of a comprehensrve idea, would surely eventuate in inevitable conclusions and logical mastery. But as hitherto understood and practised they have been a curse, for they have enabled the histortans to follow their own tastes, instead of soberly realizing thet ther first and hardest task was concerned with the symbolism of history and its analogies, and, in consequence, the problem has till now not even been comprehended, let alone solved. Superficial in many cases (as for instance in designating Cæsar as the creator of the official newspaper), these analogies are worse than superficial in others (as when phenomena of the Classical Age that are not only extremely complex but utterly alien to us are labelled with modern catchwords like Socialism, Impressionism, Capitalism, Clericalism), while occasionally they are bizarre to the pomt of perversity — witness the Jacobin clubs with their cult of Brutus, that millionaire-extortioner Brutus who, in the name of oligarchical doctrine and with the approval of the patrician senate, murdered the Man of the Democracy.

III

Thus our theme, which originally comprised only the limited problem of present-day civilization, broadens itself into a new philosophy — the philosophy of the future, so far as the metaphysically-exhausted soil of the West can bear such, and in any case the only philosophy which is within the possibilities of the West-European mind in its next stages. It expands into the conception of a morphology of world history, of the world-as-history in contrast to the morphology of the world-as-nature that hitherto has been almost the only theme of philosophy. And it reviews once again the forms and movements of the world in their depths and final significance, but this time according to an entirely different ordering which groups chem, not in an ensemble picture inclusive of everything known, but in a picture of life, and presents them not, as things-become, but as things-becoming

The world-as-history, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its oppo- site the world-as-nature here is a new aspect of human existence on this carth, As yet, in spite of its immense significance, both practical and theoretical, this aspect has not been realized, still less presented Some obscure inkling of it there may have been, a distant momentary glimpse there has often been, but no one has deliberately faced it and taken it in with all its implications We have before us two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and ex- perience the world around him With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and pur- poses of imagination ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes of experience dissecting according to scheme, and to mention even thus carly an opposition that has never yet been noted, in spite of its significance domain of chronological from that of mathematical number^[3]

Consequently, in a research such as that lying before us, there can be no question of taking spiritual-political events, as they become visible day by day on the surface, at their face valuc, and arranging them on a scheme of "causes" or "effects' and following them up in the obvious and intellectually casy directions Such a "pragmatic" handling of history would be nothing but a piece of "natural science" in disguise, and for their part, the supporters of the materialistic idea of history make no secret about it-it is their adversaries who largely fail to see the similarity of the two methods 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 Present-day historians think they are doing a work of supererogation in bringing in religious and so- cial, or still more art-history, details to "illustrate" the political sense of an epoch But the decisive factor - decisive, that is, in so far as visible history is the expression, sign and embodiment of soul -- they forget I have not hitherto found one who has carefully considered the morphological relationship that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all branches of a Culture, who has gone beyond politics to grasp the ultimate and fundamental ideas of Greeks, Arabians, Indians and Westerners in mathematics, the meaning of their Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/28 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/29 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/30 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/31 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/32 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/33 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/34 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/35 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/36 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/37 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/38 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/39 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/40 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/41 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/42 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/43 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/44 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/45 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/46 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/47 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/48 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/49 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/50 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/51 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/52 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/53 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/54 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/55 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/56 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/57 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/58 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/59 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/60 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/61 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/62 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/63 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/64 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/65 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/66 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/67 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/68 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/69 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/70 outlines, possessed of full inward necessity, a solution derived from one single principle that though discoverable had never been discovered, that from my youth had haunted and attracted me, tormenting me with the sense that it was there and must be attacked and yet defying me to seize it. Thus, from an almost accidental occasion of beginning, there has arisen the present work, which is put forward as the provisional expression of a new world-picture. The book is laden, as I know, with all the defects of a first attempt, incomplete, and certainly not free from inconsistencies Nevertheless I am convinced that it contains the incontrovertible formulation of an idea which, once enunciated clearly, will (I repeat) be accepted without dispute.

lf, then, the narrower theme is an analysis of the Decline of that West-European Culture which is now spread over the entire globe, yet the object in view is the development of a philosophy and of the operative method peculiar to it, which is now to be tried, viz., the method of comparative morphology in world-history. The work falls naturally to two parts. The first, “Form and Actuality,” starts from the form-language of the great Cultures, attempts to penetrate to the deepest roots of their origin and so provides itself with the basis for a science of Symbolic. The second part, “World-historical Perspectives,” starts from the facts of actual life, and from the historical practice of higher mankind seeks to obtain a quintessence of historical experience that we can set to work upon the formation of our own future.

The accompanying tables^[4] present a general view of what has resulted from the investigation. They may at the same time give some notion both of the fruitfulness and of the scope of the new methods.

Notes

1. [Zufälligen]
2. [Inbegriff von ungeheuren Lebensläufen]
3. Kant's error, an error of very wide bearing which has not even yet been overcome, was first of all in bringing the outer and inner Man into relation with the ideas of space and time by pure scheme, though the meanings of these are numerous and, above all, nor unalterable, and secondly in allying arithmetic with the one and geometry with the other in an utterly mistakeo way It is not between arithmetic and geometry - we must here anticipate a little-but between chronological and mathematical number that there is fundamental opposition Arithmetic and geometry are both spacial mathematics and in their higher regions they are no longer separable Tere-reckoning, of which the plain man is capable of a perfectly clear understanding through his senses, answers the question When, not What or 'How Many
4. At the end of the volume.