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Title: The Decline of the West (Oxford Paperbacks) by Oswald Spengler, Helmut Werner, Oswald Werner ISBN: 0-19-506634-0 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: January, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.3 (27 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: impressive
Comment: No brief phrase will summarize this book or my feelings about it. I simply wanted to rate it. Enjoy this impressive work.
Rating: 5
Summary: Civilization equals decadence?
Comment: The Decline of the West", first published in 1917, is the major contribution of the German Oswald Spengler to Western thought. And what a contribution it was!!! First of all, the work, which this edition is an abridged version, is tainted by accusations of being pro nazi and amiable to fascism in general and to Mussolini in particular , something that tormented the author all trough his reclusive life.
But, polemics apart, "The Decline of the West" is a major opus, indeed a masterwork, with a dense text full of a very Spenglerianian terminology and new concepts, which added lustre to the difficult task the translator faced and settled in the best possible way. After reading the first pages, the reader realizes that he is facing the work of a man of genius, of a man endowed with a polymath knowledge and with appetite for solving the puzzles of Western History, which he revisited and intended to set to a new course. His thinker of choice is Goethe, to whom he acknowledges the foundations of his thinking, being Goethe, in Spengler's view, the first and the only one who, despite not being a philosopher in the strict sense of the world, truly understood, via the mechanism of analogies, how the Western world ascended to its present condition and would eventually fall, in the way it happened earlier with the Classic antiquity of Greece & Rome.
The myth to be atacked is that Civilization is a step forward in the development of the human race, being Civilization a word that, in Oswald Spengler's view is synonimous with decadence or rather absence of Culture. The idea that the Western world is a development of things happened in classical antiquity is, again in Spengler's views, fallacious, because the Classical Antiquity vanished altogether in the collapse of the Roman Empire and our Western World began circa 1.000 A.D. One of the important tools to be reckoned with is analogies and it is used all the time to illustrate similarities in the rise and fall of earlier cultures and ours, which is to collapse after the exhaustion provoked by the money devotion present in our Western World. As it happened earlier in this final stage, some signs are important to be noticed, being the creation of so-called megopolis, or big cities, one of them, along with the surging of a quasi mythical personnage (Napoleon, Julius Cesar, Alexander, etc...) who was to be welcome by the peoples as a leader. Exactly here lies the intersection with the figures of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. It is up to the reader to judge by his own parameters if this interconnection is only ideal or was something transported into the real life of nazi German or Italian fascism.
Without any exageration, I should say that this is the type of book that jump-starts you in many fields of knowledge and, specially of interest, is , in my opinion, the exgese the author does of the Theory of Mathemathics as a way of explaining the different Cultural environments of Ancient Greece, Egypt and Arabian regions.
Despite this being an abridged version, I think that the present edition preserved in the best possible way the thinking and polemic points of view of the author.
Rating: 3
Summary: Biological Assumption of Culture to Civilization and Back
Comment: .
The theory of Spengler is as follows: Historical comparison of cultural formation, of governments, of civilizations, of art, architecture and music, of mathematics, science, philosophy, revolutions and control, of formations, destructions and deteriorations of societies and cultures; are thus interpreted to have a similarity with biological structure. Just as a sentient being is born, forms, grows, molds, progresses, digresses, deteriorates, ages, decays and dies, so it is with cultures and civilizations. In this case, a culture in its childlike creative ability solidifies into non-creative matter, stagnant, authoritarian and brittle and then dies. The ability of the "becoming" (Heraclitus) forms into the "become" (Permenes).
I personally had great difficulty reading both volumes of Decline of the West. I am not a top scholar in philosophy, but have read some of the classics; Plato, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Kiergaard, Rousseau, Locke etc. Spengler is an amazing walking and talking, or in this case writing, encyclopedia, however it appears that perhaps his advanced knowledge of anything from architecture, mathematics, to some unknown internal war and the names and rank of family members relating to the King, including his mother's role in the government compared to another civilization a century before on the other side of the globe, are to say the least, very abstract (or is it exact?) and confusing and detract from his message. Perhaps after my reading another 10 years of history, science, art, philosophy and mathematics, I will have the ability to understand another ten percent of these volumes.
One philosopher, Walter Kaufmann, had criticized Spengler's theory. In short, he relates that history is nothing as Hegel or Marx equates, as it does not control the destiny of man and in Spengler's case, history does not model a biological structure of aging. Rather, Kaufmann relates, historical observation of cultures and civilizations present themselves in layers, which form upon themselves and correspond in such ways that perhaps move horizontally as opposed to Spengler's vertically interpreted based direction. There is some valid truth to Spengler's assessment, being a valuable study to take seriously and contemplatively, however, it is also a limited argument, that is if you can use the word "limited" pertaining to Spengler's detailed, unlimited and exhaustive writing.
While Spengler's influence of creativity in that of Goethe and Nietzsche are his most desirable qualities, yet his biological interpretation tends to loose the ambiguous nature of mysterium tremendum, the chaotic nature of Dionysus that is formed only within the values created by man. True, nihilism - the chaos of passions and relativism - the leveling of values, evolve from a once "becoming" nature, a nature of determined values and beliefs, yet the "id" or unconscious realm of man and his development thereof, cannot be scientifically explained, not by Freud, nor by Spengler, as life, awareness and sleepiness is never explanatory in conceptual terms and systemized from empirical observations of societal structures and formations.
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