What is the decline of the west about?

Oswald Spengler, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Oswald Spengler answers

The title has misled nearly everyone who encountered it. Let me be precise about what the book actually is. The Decline of the West is a morphology of world history — an attempt to read the forms of historical life the way a botanist reads the forms of plants, not by counting causes but by grasping the organic shape of development.1 The means for understanding living forms is analogy, not mathematical law; mathematical law identifies dead forms, while analogy alone can penetrate the living ones.2

Every high culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man — childhood, youth, manhood, old age — and the Faustian culture of the West is no exception.3 That is the thesis in its simplest statement. But the title itself requires correction. "Decline" does not imply catastrophe, some sudden and dreadful calamity.4 I was careful to say so from the beginning, and I say it again: if the word disturbs, substitute "fulfilment" — bearing in mind the special functions Goethe assigned to that concept in his own world view.5

A culture fulfils itself as a plant fulfils itself; the withering is inseparable from the blossoming, not a disaster visited upon it from outside. The spring of Romanesque and Gothic, that young and trembling soul heavy with misgivings — that is the culture in its morning.6 The noon is the moment of greatest virility, austerity, controlled intensity of form.7

What follows is not collapse but completion. The book was also not addressed to speculative persons but to active ones — an image of the world to be lived with, not a system for professional philosophers to brood over.8 The misunderstanding that only the negative side of the picture reached the public was, I confess, almost inevitable: the first volume was a fragment, and fragments invite misreading.9

The Caesar-men who emerge when money has destroyed the old orders of culture, when the Imperial Age arrives and the powers of blood resume their ancient lordship — that is not pessimism.10 It is the recognition that history moves in forms, and that those forms, once seen clearly, can be lived with dignity rather than mourned with sentimentality.

Sources

  1. 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 in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.
    The Decline of the West Vol I, Form and Actuality, pp. 17–18
  2. The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.
    The Decline of the West Vol I, Form and Actuality, pp. 17–18
  3. Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age.
    The Decline of the West Vol I, Form and Actuality, pp. 136–137
  4. My title does not imply catastrophe.
    Pessimism?, pp. 150–151
  5. Perhaps we could eliminate the 'pessimism' without altering the real sense of the title if we were to substitute for 'decline' the word 'fulfilment,' bearing in mind the special functions that Goethe assigned to this concept in his own world view.
    Pessimism?, pp. 150–151
  6. It is a young and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the morning of Romanesque and Gothic.
    The Decline of the West Vol I, Form and Actuality, pp. 136–137
  7. The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon culmination of its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense the form-language it has secured for itself, the more assured its sense of its own power, the clearer its lineaments.
    The Decline of the West Vol I, Form and Actuality, pp. 136–137
  8. My aim was to present an image of the world to be lived with, rather than to devise a system for professional philosophers to brood over.
    Pessimism?, pp. 150–151
  9. Most critics have neglected to observe that this first volume represents only a fragment from which, as I was soon to realise, it is not easy to form conclusions about what is to follow.
    Pessimism?, pp. 150–151
  10. In the form of democracy, money has won... But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming — the Casar-men. Before them the money collapses.
    The Decline of the West Vol II, Perspectives of World-History, pp. 444–445