The Decline of the West

Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes, more literally “The Downfall of the Occident”) is a two-volume work. The first volume, Form and Actuality, appeared in summer 1918; the second, Perspectives of World History, followed in 1922. A definitive edition of both came out in 1923. Spengler called his book a “Copernican overturning,” rejecting the Eurocentric view of history and its linear division into ancient, medieval, and modern eras. For him, the real units of history are not epochs but entire cultures, which develop like living organisms.

Spengler gave the terms “culture” and “civilization” non-standard meanings. A culture, he argued, has a natural lifespan of about a thousand years of flourishing, followed by a thousand years of decline. It begins as a “race,” becomes a “culture” during its creative peak, and then turns into a “civilization.” Unlike others, Spengler did not see this final stage as better; instead, the military expansion and self-assured confidence at its start signaled that the civilization had arrogantly decided it already understood the world, stopped producing bold new ideas, and thus headed toward decline.

For example, the Classical world’s culture stage was Greek and early Roman thought; the Roman Empire’s expansion was its civilization phase; and the collapse of the Roman and Byzantine Empires was its decline. Spengler believed the West was in its “evening,” similar to the late Roman Empire, and approaching its own eventual decline despite its apparent power.

Spengler identified at least eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman, which he called “Apollonian”), the non-Babylonian Middle East (“Magian”), and Western or European (“Faustian”). Under “Magian,” he grouped Semitic, Arabian, Persian, and the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). He combined Ancient Greece and Rome as “Apollonian,” and modern Westerners as “Faustian.” According to Spengler, the Western world was ending, and the final season—the “winter” of Faustian Civilization—was being witnessed. He depicted Western Man as a proud but tragic figure: striving and creating, yet secretly knowing the actual goal would never be reached.

Spengler said he conceived the book around 1911 and spent three years on the first draft. When World War I began, he revised it, finishing the first volume in 1917. Published the next year, when he was 38, it was his first work apart from his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus. The second volume came out in 1922. The first volume is subtitled Form and Actuality; the second, Perspectives of World-history. Spengler described his aims in the prefaces and occasionally elsewhere, such as in the preface to Man and Technics.

His world-historical outlook drew on many philosophers, especially Goethe and, to some degree, Nietzsche. He discussed their influence in his lecture Nietzsche and His Century. He called his analytical approach “Analogy,” using it to “distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.” Morphology was central to his philosophy of history: he compared civilizations based on their forms and structures, ignoring function. In a footnote, Spengler summarized his core philosophy by quoting Goethe: “The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast.” Spengler said this sentence comprised his entire philosophy.

Scholars now agree that “decline” better captures the meaning of Spengler’s original German Untergang (often translated as “downfall”; literally “going under”). Spengler said he did not mean a catastrophic event but a protracted fall—a “twilight” or “sunset” (Sonnenuntergang is German for sunset, and Abendland, the German word for the West, literally means “evening land”). In 1921, he wrote that he might have used Vollendung (“fulfillment” or “consummation”) in the title and saved much misunderstanding.

Spengler gave specific, unusual meanings to certain terms. For him, “Civilization” is what a “Culture” becomes once its creative impulses fade and are overwhelmed by critical ones. Culture is the becoming; Civilization is the become.