The Decline of the West
서구의 몰락
A philosophy of history by Oswald Spengler, published in 1918 (volume 1, "Form and Actuality") and 1922 (volume 2, "Perspectives of World History"). It treats world history not as one process of progress but as the life cycles of several "high cultures", each of which is born, grows, ages and dies over about a thousand years, and it prophesies that Western culture has already entered the late stage of "civilisation" and will end in imperialism and Caesarism. In his preface Spengler said he owed "the method to Goethe, the questions to Nietzsche". Widely read in Germany right after the defeat of 1918, it became a source of the Conservative Revolution of the Weimar years, and Lukács and Adorno examined it as a prime case of irrationalism and reactionary thought.
In depth
Why does this book belong in the Nietzsche genealogy?
The Decline of the West appeared eighteen years after Nietzsche's death, yet it shows better than any other book how Nietzsche entered the minds of the German educated public. At the end of the preface to the revised edition of 1922 Spengler wrote that he owed almost everything to two men: "From Goethe I have the method, from Nietzsche the questions, and if I am to put my relation to the latter in a formula, I may say that I have turned his outlook (Ausblick) into an overview (Überblick)."
Von Goethe habe ich die Methode, von Nietzsche die Fragestellungen, und wenn ich mein Verhältnis zu diesem in eine Formel bringen soll, so darf ich sagen: ich habe aus seinem Ausblick einen Überblick gemacht.
Nietzsche's questions were the diagnosis that European culture was sick, the presentiment of coming nihilism, and a view of life as will to power. The German Wikipedia notes that Spengler borrowed the "will to power" from Nietzsche to define life as a constant urge to grow and to dominate, and took the word "Apollonian" for the character of ancient culture from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. What Nietzsche had scattered in aphorisms Spengler turned into a system covering the whole of world history. The book therefore shows how Nietzsche spread as a popular worldview before academic philosophy took him up, and how that worldview flowed into the right wing of the Weimar Republic.
The first draft was finished when the First World War broke out and was revised until the spring of 1917. Volume 1 appeared in 1918 from Braumüller in Vienna, volume 2 in 1922 from C. H. Beck in Munich. Amid defeat and revolution the title became a slogan of the age. According to the German Wikipedia more than 600,000 copies were sold in the 1920s alone. The Korean translation is titled 서구의 몰락.
What does it argue? Culture and civilisation
The book opens: "In this book the attempt is made for the first time to predetermine history." Spengler proposed to trace in advance the stages still to come for the only culture now in its completion, that of Western Europe and America.
In diesem Buche wird zum erstenmal der Versuch gewagt, Geschichte vorauszubestimmen.
His ground is a "morphology" of history. Spengler proposed to observe history as Goethe observed the metamorphosis of plants. World history is not one line running through antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times, but a set of separate life courses of eight high cultures: Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Graeco-Roman, "Arabian" (grouping early Christianity, Byzantium and Islam), Mexican and Western. Each culture passes through the same stages, like spring, summer, autumn and winter, so the same stage in different cultures is "contemporaneous". By this comparison Spengler set Alexander beside Napoleon and the Roman Empire beside the coming Western empire. He called the soul of ancient culture "Apollonian", that of Arabian culture "Magian", and that of the West a "Faustian" soul straining towards the infinite.
The key concept is the distinction between "culture" and "civilisation". In German the two words had long separated spiritual depth from outward polish; Spengler turned them into a sequence in time. "Civilisation is the inevitable destiny of a culture." Civilisation is the hardened result that follows living growth: the stone world city instead of the countryside, money and the press instead of faith, and endless expansion.
Die Zivilisation ist das unausweichliche Schicksal einer Kultur.
He therefore did not condemn imperialism morally but accepted it as fate. "I teach here imperialism (...). Imperialism is pure civilisation. In this form of appearance lies irrevocably the destiny of the West." He called the British colonial magnate Cecil Rhodes "the first man of a new age".
Imperialismus ist reine Zivilisation. In dieser Erscheinungsform liegt unwiderruflich das Schicksal des Abendlandes.
Where did it stand politically?
Spengler saw himself as a national conservative. He held that the liberty, equality and fraternity of 1789 had brought only the rule of money, and that democracy, swayed by wealth and the press, passes into the age of dictators and "Caesars". Since he thought the process unavoidable, his conclusion was distrust of parliamentary democracy. As the English Wikipedia summarises, he argued that Marx's critique of capitalism stood on the same language and assumptions as capitalism and so confirmed it rather than refuted it. In the 1919 pamphlet Prussianism and Socialism he set Prussian order and obedience against Marx's socialism as "true socialism".
This thought became a reservoir of the Weimar "Conservative Revolution". Its relation to Nazism, however, is not simple. According to the German Wikipedia, Adolf Hitler read the book in prison in 1924 without being impressed, and in his May Day speech of 1935 he distanced himself from Spengler's pessimism, saying one should speak not of the decline of the West but of the resurrection of its peoples. Spengler for his part admired Benito Mussolini as the prototype of the coming age, and in The Hour of Decision (1933) he did not hide his contempt for the Nazis, who thereafter cold-shouldered him.
How did Marxists read it?
Marxist criticism took two lines. György Lukács treated Spengler in The Destruction of Reason as the case in which the philosophy of life arrived at extreme historical relativism. In the judgement the German Wikipedia quotes, Spengler threw out causality and lawfulness, put analogy in their place and made often shallow resemblances the canon of research; measured by the standards of Wilhelm Dilthey or Georg Simmel he was "no more than an often witty, but mostly superficial and frivolous dilettante".
Mit den Maßstäben von Dilthey oder auch von Simmel gemessen, ist also Spengler nicht mehr als ein oft geistreicher, zumeist aber oberflächlicher und leichtfertiger Dilettant.
Theodor W. Adorno took another path. He reworked a 1938 lecture into an English paper of 1941 and again into the 1950 German essay "Spengler after the Decline". As the English Wikipedia summarises, Adorno wanted to turn Spengler's reactionary insights towards progressive ends. He granted that Spengler's forecast that Caesarism and power politics would overcome the market had been borne out by the rise of the Nazis, and that his insights were often deeper than those of his liberal contemporaries. At the same time he criticised a determinism that erased human initiative, and a language that made fetishes of words like "soul", "blood" and "destiny". Where Lukács threw the book away, Adorno tried to salvage usable diagnoses from an enemy's prophecy.
The academic reception was mostly cold too. In 1921 Otto Neurath wrote Anti-Spengler to refute the book's method point by point. In his Nietzsche lectures of 1937 Martin Heidegger dismissed Spengler as a clever populariser of questions Nietzsche had already thought more deeply. That judgement sums up Spengler's place in this genealogy: less a philosopher who took over Nietzsche's questions than the man who translated Nietzsche into the worldview of the Weimar right.