Decline of the West download epub

Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” was and still is a controversial book. Some have even regarded it as hopelessly flawed. Conceived just before 1911 and written during World War I, it was published a few months before Germany signed the Armistice (in 1918) that would lead to its eventual calamities within the Weimar Republic and set the stage for the rise of the Third Reich. Whatever else one may say about it, the book seems to have been eerily prophetic, especially for Germany.

Spengler’s unconventional and creative technique of using imagination and intuition to divine the probable future by way of “physiognomic meaning” and “morphological” analysis rather than the more accepted “systematic” approach of compiling facts and dates was met with scathing criticism by much of the academic world. Nevertheless, Spengler’s difficult book became a sensation in Germany and quickly sold 90,000 copies, much to the chagrin of the experts. Throughout the book Spengler is attempting to write a “philosophy of history” as opposed to a mere recounting of the past devoid of intrinsic order or inner necessity. Instead, Spengler was seeing each fact in the historical picture according to its symbolic context. He wanted to set free their shapes, hidden deep beneath the surface of a true “history of human progress.” Yet there was no such thing as progress (in the evolutionary sense) according to Spengler. The entire book was a protest against Darwinism and its systematic science based upon causality. Instead, he regarded a “culture” as an organism and world history as its biography. The best metaphor for his “morphological” approach was the four seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter. The instinctive genius of a youthful, even barbaric culture in the springtime of its development would enable it to flourish. As it matured it would exult in all the potentialities of its creativity, reaching heights never before attempted. Great architecture, advanced mathematics, artistic innovations, technological ingenuity, statecraft, warfare, etc. would reach full flower well into its summer. Then, as the inner form world and imagination of such a culture began to lose its force it would enter an urban and worldly “late” (autumnal) period of rationalism and free itself from subservience to religion and dare to make that religion the object of epistemological criticism, thus opening the door to nihilism. Finally, it would go into its winter season or “Civilization” phase and begin its slow and inevitable decline. The West was already entering its Civilization phase by 1918 according to Spengler. It would not be a sudden collapse, but a gradual setting of the sun, a time of lengthening shadows, i.e., a “Twilight of the Gods.”

The most arresting thematic metaphors in Spengler’s imaginings were the three main cultures of Western Civilization, namely the Apollonian, Magian, and Faustian. Apollonian culture was classical civilization, i.e., the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hellenistic pagan culture of the ancients. Magian-Arabian culture encompassed Judaism, primitive Christianity, Mazdeism, Nestorians, Manicheans, Monophysites, and Islam. It was an eschatological and apocalyptic culture. It saw the world as Cavern, and our time on earth as limited. Submission to God was its primary ethos, but there was also the possibility of salvation, and of a coming Savior. By contrast, Apollonian culture did not see the past or even the present as being that different from the future. History as some linear narrative from which lessons could be learned was alien to the Apollonian mind. Instead, myth contained the essential, unchanging wisdom of existence. Character was fate. Pride came before the fall. The gods were capricious. But Faustian culture – which began around 1000 A.D. wished to extend its will into infinite space. It had built the Gothic cathedrals to realize this inward, willful striving for extension into the illimitable heavens, to flood the soul with light. Descartes, Leibnitz, Euler, Gauss, Newton, and Riemann, had pushed western mathematics to new heights. European artists had learned to use light and shadow, the color wheel, and the laws of perspective and vanishing points to create paintings that appeared three dimensional. The music of the Baroque and the art of the fugue had expressed the Faustian notion of limitless space. All this and much more are discussed in exhaustive detail throughout the book.

This abridged version will give the reader a healthy overview of Spengler’s book. But I recommend the full, unabridged version for anyone who has the time and inclination to read it at length. Even though there are numerous arguments for and against Spengler’s unorthodox approach, his erudition in mathematics, the natural sciences, and classical literature is impressive. Yet his style is dreamlike and poetic (in the epic sense). This book is not for everyone, but if it speaks to you it will light your fire.

I'm only 3/4 of the way through this dense text and if anything changes I will edit this accordingly.

Spengler clearly possesses an immense foundation of erudition, in which he heavily relies on as opposed to postulating new ideals, concepts, or even displaying his poetic prowess. The text appears to be far more interesting than it actually is, given that it was the philosophical basis for Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium (which is the whole reason why I'm reading it in the first place as a sort of prequel). For the majority of the book (and this is an understatement really), Spengler seems to divert from his thesis of higher culture and its transition into civilization (the end of high culture). This is for at least the first 1/4 of the text. The prefaces written by other authors really encapsulate Spengler's best ideas, especially Spengler's prophecy of a coming Caesar or sort of a Mahdi figure in Islamic lore that would become the future Emperor of the West (I can see where Yockey would get the idea of an "Imperium" from). Written prior to the ascension of Adolf Hitler, it is said in the prefaces that Spengler denied Hitler as being this Caesar.

Spengler's thesis is quite oxymoron especially when it comes to race. He views culture as organisms, that live and die, but when it comes to race, the biological entities that encompass these cultures, he denies race as a mere abstract concept like most Postmodernist thinkers of today. If culture is an organism, it is an organism because of the collective, homogeneous biological entity that constitutes said nation. Spengler's view of race paves the way for Progressive Nationalism or Civic Nationalism, and in the age of Trumpism we are not witnessing that just because one feels "American" does not unite all the races within a multicultural, motley state. The Hitlerist Darwanistic view of race fulfilled the abstract abyss of Spenglerian racial thought. I don't not know why Spengler is revered in many far-right and alternative right circles. Maybe it's because Yockey extracted so much from him, I'm not sure (I'm almost certain that Yockey adopted Spengler's exact view on race). But I can say for certain that many did not actually understand Spengler.

There is hardly a book written in the past 150 years that can surpass Spengler's 'Decline of the West' in the depth of understanding, interpreting and explaining the logic behind cultural phenomena and its relationship to the historical development of civilizations in general. This is 'THE THEORY of EVERYTHING' in the field of Humanities. Moreover, if you are an open-minded student and the 'college progressivism' hasn't infected your brain, this book will open your eyes to a whole new level of understanding that will allow you to look at the world more wisely. So remember, your social science professor might not be pleased that you are reading Spengler and not Marx.