The Decline of the West Volume I: Form and Actuality
By Oswald Spengler
Contents
I-Introduction
II-The Meaning of Numbers
III-The Problem of World-history--Physiognomic and Systematic
IV-The Problem of World-history--The Destiny-idea and the
Causality-principle
V-Makrokosmos--The Symbolism of the World-picture and the Problem
of Space
VI-Makrokosmos--Apollinian, Faustian, and Magian Soul
VII-Music and Plastic--The Arts of Form
VIII-Music and Plastic--Act and Portrait
IX-Soul-image and Life-feeling--On the Form of the Soul
X-Soul-image and Life-feeling--Buddhism, Stoicism, and Socialism
XI-Faustian and Apollinian Nature-Knowledge
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 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 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...
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