Excerpts from Oswald Spengler, The
Decline of the West (1918, translated by
Charles Francis Atkinson)
For
every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the
first time the two words, hitherto used to express in an
indefinite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used ina
periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic
succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the
Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which
the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become
capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and
artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is
capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the
thing- becoming, death following life, rigidity following
expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying
world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of
Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward
necessity reached again and again.
....
The transition from Culture to Civilization was acocmplished for
the Classical world in the fourth, for the Western in the
nineteenth century. Form these periods onward the great
intellectual decisions take place, no longer all over the world
where not a hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three or
four world-cities that have absorbed into themselves the whole
content of History, while the old wide landscape of the Culture,
become merely provincial, served only to feed the cities with what
remains of its higher mankind. World-city and province--the two
basic ideas of every civilization--bring up a wholly new
form-problem of History, the very problem that we are living
through today with hardly the remotest conception of its
immensity. In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which
the whole 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 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, the
reappearance of the panem et circenses in the form of
wage-disputes and sports stadia--all these things betoken the
definite closing down of the Culture and the opening of a quite
new phase of human existence--anti-provincial, late, futureless,
but quite inevitable.
....
There are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is the expression of
its own and only its own time, and — if by philosophy we mean
effective philosophy and not academic triflings about
judgment-forms, sense-categories and the like — no two ages
possess the same philosophic intentions. The difference is not
between perishable and imperishable doctrines but between
doctrines which live their day and doctrines which never live at
all. The immortality of thoughts become is an illusion — the
essential is, what kind of man comes to expression in them. The
greater the man, the truer the philosophy, with the inward truth
that in a great work of art transcends all proof of its several
elements or even of their compatibility with one another. At
highest, the philosophy may absorb the entire content of an epoch,
realize it within itself and then, embodying it in some grand form
or personality, pass it on to be developed further and further.
The scientific dress or the mark of learning adopted by a
philosophy is here unimportant. Nothing is simpler than to make
good poverty of ideas by founding a system, and even a good idea
has little value when enunciated by a solemn ass. Only its
necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine.
For me, therefore, the test of value to be applied to a thinker is
his eye for the great facts of his own time. Only this can settle
whether he is merely a clever architect of systems and principles,
versed in definitions and analyses, or whether it is the very soul
of his time that speaks in his works and his intuitions.
....
And herein, I think, all the philosophers of the newest age are
open to a serious criticism. What they do not possess is real
standing in actual life. Not one of them has intervened
effectively, either in higher politics, in the development of
modern technics, in matters of communication, in economics, or in
any other big actuality, with a single act or a single compelling
idea. Not one of them counts in mathematics, in physics, in the
science of government, even to the extent that Kant counted. Let
us glance at other times. Confucius was several times a minister.
Pythagoras was the organizer of an important political movement
akin to the Cromwellian, the significance of which is even now far
underestimated by Classical researchers. Goethe, besides being a
model executive minister — though lacking, alas! the operative
sphere of a great state — was interested in the Suez and Panama
canals (the dates of which he foresaw with accuracy) and their
effects on the economy of the world, and he busied himself again
and again with the question of American economic life and its
reactions on the Old World, and with that of the dawning era of
machine-industry.
....
Whenever I take up a work by a modern thinker, I find myself
asking: has he any idea whatever of the actualities of
world-politics, world-city problems, capitalism, the future of the
state, the relation of technics to the course of civilization,
Russia, Science? Goethe would have understood all this and
revelled in it, but there is not one living philosopher capable of
taking it in.
....
With that, the claim of higher thought to possess general and
eternal truths falls to the ground. Truths are truths only in
relation to a particular mankind. Thus, my own philosophy is able
to express and reflect only the Western (as distinct from the
Classical, Indian, or other) soul, and that soul only in its
present civilized phase by which its conception of the world, its
practical range and its sphere of effect are specified.
Source:
http://libertygalaxy.com/videos/DeclineOfTheWestSpengler.pdf