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 fulfillment - the West European - American.
Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual 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 premises may be pushed?...
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 craftworks, sciences, laws, economic types and world-ideas, great men and great events - may be accepted and pointed to as symbols.
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...
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 them, 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(6)...
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 a 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.
...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 a 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...
In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole of life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end-what does it signify?
The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of "home"...To the world city belongs not a folk but a mob. Its uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in Science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to all matters of sex and society goes back far to quite primitive instincts and conditions(25)...
The aim to which all this is striving, and which in particular every Nature-searcher feels in himself as an impulse, is the achievement of a pure numerical transcendence, the complete and inclusive conquest of the visibly apparent and its replacement by a language of imagery unintelligible to the layman and impossible of sensuous realization - but a language that the great Faustian symbol of infinite space endows with the dignity of inward necessity. The deep skepticism of these final judgments links the soul anew to the forms of early Gothic religiousness. The inorganic, known and dissected world, the World as Nature and System, has deepened itself until it is a pure sphere of functional numbers. But, as we have seen, number is one of the most primary symbols in every Culture; and consequently the way to pure number is the return of the waking-consciousness to its own secret, the revelation of its own formal necessity. The goal reached, the vast and ever more meaningless and threadbare fabric woven around natural science falls apart. It was, after all, nothing but the "word-bound" structure of the "Reason," the grammar by which it believed it could overcome the Visible and extract therefrom the True. But what appears under the fabric is once again the earliest and deepest, the Myth, the immediate Becoming, Life itself. The less anthropomorphic science believes itself to be, the more anthropomorphic it is. One by one it gets rid of the separate human traits in the Nature-picture, only to find at the end that the supposed pure Nature which it holds in its hand is- humanity itself, pure and complete. Out of the Gothic soul grew up, till it overshadowed the religious world-picture, the spirit of the City, the alter ego of irreligious Nature-science. But now, in the sunset of the scientific epoch and the rise of victorious Skepsis, the clouds dissolve and the quiet landscape of the morning reappears in all distinctness...
The final issue to which the Faustian wisdom tends - though it is only in the highest moments that it has seen it - is the dissolution of all knowledge into a vast system of morphological relationships. Dynamics and Analysis are, in respect of meaning, form-language and substance, identical with Romanesque ornament, Gothic cathedrals, Christian-German dogma and the dynastic state. One and the same world-feeling speaks in all of them. They were born with, and they aged with, the Faustian Culture, and they present that Culture in the world of day and space as a historical drama. The uniting of the several scientific aspects into one will bear all the marks of the great art of counterpoint. The eternal music of the boundless world-space - that is the deep unresting longing of this soul, as the orderly statuesque and Euclidean Cosmos was the satisfaction of the Classical. This union, a necessity of the Faustian understanding of the world, following the formula of a dynamic-imperative causality, will develop into a single world-transforming science, which will be the grand legacy of the Faustian soul to the souls of Cultures yet to be, a bequest of immensely transcendent forms that the heirs will possibly ignore. And then, weary after its striving, Western science returns to its spiritual home(224).
-Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West. Abridged edition by Helmut Werner. Alfred Knopf: New York, 1962
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