In The Decline of the West, German philosopher and mathematician Oswald Spengler urges a new understanding of the world. In this work of historical philosophy, which was written mostly before World War I, Spengler names eight “high cultures” (the term he prefers), or civilizations, of human history: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Classical (Greek and Roman), Arabian, Western, and Mexican (Aztec/Mayan). Five of these cultures he uses as examples, but he discusses in more detail the Classical, Arabian, and Western cultures.
Spengler considers his work to be a morphology of history, meaning that he treats every culture separately, as a living organism, and tries to identify each culture’s birth, growth, decline, and death. Furthermore, to Spengler, no culture is superior. He uses the term “culture” to describe the growth and living stage, or soul, of an organism, and the term “civilization” to identify an organism’s declining stage, in which human creativity vanishes. A culture’s soul is held together by a bond of blood, and civilization actually destroys culture; with this destruction, the soul begins to die. A culture’s civilization stage could last hundreds of years in a petrified state. Because cultures are constantly changing, history is an endless series of formations and transformations. The one part of the formation that Spengler does not clearly describe is that of birth.
Three concepts are vital to understanding Spengler’s morphology of history: the unity of development in the life of each separate culture; each stage in the life cycle of all cultures lasts for about the same length of time; and every stage is contemporaneous with those of other cultures. The general pattern is that all cultures begin in a nonurban setting and then gradually move into urban developments, in which growth and materialism eventually lead to its decline.
In The Decline of the West, Spengler compares European conditions with the later years of Hellenistic Greece and the Roman Republic, ending about the time of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. Spengler recognizes the paradox of Western culture first honoring its Classical foundation then reaching out to other cultures. Classical humans had been static, but Western humans became dynamic, always looking for ways to expand their cultures.
Spengler follows the cyclical philosophy of history, in which all cultures go through a cycle of life similar to human life—birth, youth, maturity, decline, and death. The cycles follow a basic two-hundred-year pattern, although a major culture like the West might include several such cycles, one after the other. Spengler rejects the linear view of history and the use of the ancient-medieval-modern approach to the study of history. He says that every culture should be studied on its own. With this interpretation, he became an early advocate of historical relativism, the view that truth is relative to each historical period; truth for one culture might not be truth for another culture. Spengler, however, does not realize the self-contradiction inherent in this philosophy. He does not deny that cultures can have ideals, but he does deny the unlimited potential to reach those ideals. The end of a culture would be determined not by choice but by destiny, an end not unlike fate, an idea derived from the ancient Greeks.
Spengler’s coverage of religion, especially Judaism and Christianity, is confusing. He includes the beginning of Christianity in chapter 14, which covers Arabian culture—what he calls Magian—and classifies Christianity as one of the mystery religions of that region. To Spengler, religion is metaphysical, provable not by knowledge but by experience.
In The Decline of the West , Spengler defines the West as comprising western Europe and the United States. He makes no distinction between the two regions because, he argues, they both grew out of the same basic culture. He pinpoints the birth of the West to c. 1000 and to historical...
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