Rating: 
Summary: Biological Assumption of Culture to Civilization and Back
Review: .
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.
Rating: 
Summary: "The Decline of the West" is a Guiding Light of Our Time.
Review: Decline of The West is a book squarely beyond the range of typical modern literary critique.
The fact that Dr.Spengler discovered a true existence of a living form in the history- and life-cycles of civilizations has been deliberately ignored by critics. The importance of this discovery for History as a science is on a level of Copernican helio-centric (Sun-at-the-Center) discovery in spatial sciences which inaugurated the modern advance of physical science. Yet it has not brought the official recognition that is its due.
Today, as it was 500 years ago in "The Middle Ages", the ruling spirit of the establishment feels threatened by the new revolutionary discovery and is trying to find ways to live with it without the consequences and implications of Dr.Spengler's discovery presented in this book. The Roman Catholic Church tried to spread ignorance of Copernicus as well, but will its modern-day equivalents be more successful in hiding the discovery?
It is up to the interested reader not to let this crime happen any longer.
Having in mind the huge scope and distance both in Time and Space that Dr.Spengler's book covers, the enormous energy and time spent by him in creating the material presented in this book becomes even more astonishing considering that the book is so deeply involved and touching upon the daily events of the times we live in.
Dr.Spengler in his work definitely belongs to the realm of the modern "TABOO," and precisely uncovers all the important facts and ideas, that our "accepted" intellectuals of the day DARE NOT touch upon, and prefer to avoid and misinterpret and misrepresent Dr.Spengler's thought and observations---for these are all too unnerving to them and too uncomfotably revealing about the character and direction of the times we live in.
Even though the Author has died many years ago, his insight and thought is squarely present in our every day problems, troubles and uncertainties.
Seldom will one find a philosopher, political scientist and a natural scientist-all in one and yet so penetrating in his thought and truly relevant and accurate to the daily life many years after his death.
Despite our civilization's boasting about the hitherto unheard-of levels of progress, creativity and prosperity unimaginable only a few dozen years ago, "Decline of the West" deals with the significance in them. The vision, understanding and practical forecasts of Dr.Spengler's scientific discipline of History encompass all of those and go beyond, at all times maintaining the "eagle's view from above" of life.
The 20th century is known for its false prophets and broken ideologies, yet amid all the storm and dust raised in the conflicts of this century, people have not noticed that all this time there existed a profound voice of calm unshaken in his beliefs and unmistaken, unshakeable in the strength of his experience and position, always proven right by facts beyond his control.
This is Dr.Spengler, and that makes him a lone example of a true scientist of politics.
This revelation then has to tell us something profoundly significant about the nature of our Western civilization's Information Age stage and the direction it is heading in, when a person from a 100 years ago can tell us so much more intimate and relevant things about the politics, science and life of people many years after his death, than the leading historians of the day can.
The average person's inability to tell truth from faleshood in the news goes beyond mere wealth of information phenomenon, and the popular Computer represents the vehicle of the Information Age, nothing more.
Today it is easy to be unaware of the profound and deep metaphysical roots underlying our advanced technical civilization's materialistic developments, yet Dr.Spengler in this work masterfully uncovers them.
That is why this book, Decline of The West is so important, and will help the modern reader understand much better, than through any other immediate means, the true scope, understanding and meaning of the age we live in and of the age our descendants will live in.
It is a true example of the intellectual nihilism of our times when works such as those of Dr.Spengler are deliberately passed by the intellectual elite keenly aware of its inability to deal with the disturbing insights of Dr.Spengler's mind, and consequently of its inability to rise to the rank of Spengler, prefering instead to sometimes select quotations from this great thinker in order to make themselves look bigger and wiser, --thinkers such as Hughes, Fischer and Connelly are among those.
To paraphrase Spengler, nobody can escape from History's all-encompassing reach, we humans only have a luxury of pretending that we can, and like a grotesque Ostrich we bury our heads into the daily mass-circulation media training our minds, making us increasingly less capable of exercising independent thought and judgement.
In the introduction, Spengler quotes his spiritual father, poet-philosopher Goethe with the description of confidence in life:"Inward form of significant life which unaware and unobserved inspires every thought and every action." That this description is no longer adequate for the life of Western Man provides a food for thought, since everything genuine in the way of feeling and thought is left open for unrestrained dissection and criticism by the standard-bearers of the modern intellectual inquisition which stifles any richness in the modes of thought in our universities, and has assumed the role of the judge, prosecutor and the jury in Media's daily virtual courtrooms, alias mass-circulation news. Hence the public truth of the moment holds sway.
The lack of inward form in our daily personal lives should not therefore come as a surprise since we are trained daily to seek programmable inspiration from the external world of the macrocosm, shunning away from our own inbred microcosm and the wealth of inspiration it could have provided us with, had we given it a chance.
At the very least "Decline of The West" enables the interested reader to form his or her own conclusion, which is something that Spengler's past critics could not afford to do.
Rating:
Summary: Decline of The West Is The Guiding Light of Our Time
Review: Decline of The West is a book squarely beyond the range of typical modern literary critique. The fact that Dr.Spengler discovered a true existence of a living form in the history- and life-cycles of civilizations has been deliberately ignored by critics. The importance of this discovery for History as a science is on a level of Copernican helio-centric (Sun-at-the-Center) discovery in spatial sciences which inaugurated the modern advance of physical science. Yet it has not brought the official recognition that is its due. Today, as it was 500 years ago in "The Middle Ages", the ruling spirit of the establishment feels threatened by the new revolutionary discovery and is trying to find ways to live with it without the consequences and implications of Dr.Spengler's discovery presented in this book. The Roman Catholic Church tried to spread ignorance of Copernicus as well, but will its modern-day equivalents be more successful in hiding the discovery? It is up to the interested reader not to let this crime happen any longer. Having in mind the huge scope and distance both in Time and Space that Dr.Spengler's book covers, the enormous energy and time spent by him in creating the material presented in this book becomes even more astonishing considering that the book is so deeply involved and touching upon the daily events of the times we live in. Dr.Spengler in his work definitely belongs to the realm of the modern "TABOO," and precisely uncovers all the important facts and ideas, that our "accepted" intellectuals of the day DARE NOT touch upon, and prefer to avoid and misinterpret and misrepresent Dr.Spengler's thought and observations---for these are all too unnerving to them and too uncomfotably revealing about the character and direction of the times we live in. Even though the Author has died many years ago, his insight and thought is squarely present in our every day problems, troubles and uncertainties. Seldom will one find a philosopher, political scientist and a natural scientist-all in one and yet so penetrating in his thought and truly relevant and accurate to the daily life many years after his death. Despite our civilization's boasting about the hitherto unheard-of levels of progress, creativity and prosperity unimaginable only a few dozen years ago, "Decline of the West" deals with the significance in them. The vision, understanding and practical forecasts of Dr.Spengler's scientific discipline of History encompass all of those and go beyond, at all times maintaining the "eagle's view from above" of life. The 20th century is known for its false prophets and broken ideologies, yet amid all the storm and dust raised in the conflicts of this century, people have not noticed that all this time there existed a profound voice of calm unshaken in his beliefs and unmistaken, unshakeable in the strength of his experience and position, always proven right by facts beyond his control. This is Dr.Spengler, and that makes him a lone example of a true scientist of politics. This revelation then has to tell us something profoundly significant about the nature of our Western civilization's Information Age stage and the direction it is heading in, when a person from a 100 years ago can tell us so much more intimate and relevant things about the politics, science and life of people many years after his death, than the leading historians of the day can. The average person's inability to tell truth from faleshood in the news goes beyond mere wealth of information phenomenon, and the popular Computer represents the vehicle of the Information Age, nothing more. Today it is easy to be unaware of the profound and deep metaphysical roots underlying our advanced technical civilization's materialistic developments, yet Dr.Spengler in this work masterfully uncovers them. That is why this book, Decline of The West is so important, and will help the modern reader understand much better, than through any other immediate means, the true scope, understanding and meaning of the age we live in and of the age our descendants will live in. It is a true example of the intellectual nihilism of our times when works such as those of Dr.Spengler are deliberately passed by the intellectual elite keenly aware of its inability to deal with the disturbing insights of Dr.Spengler's mind, and consequently of its inability to rise to the rank of Spengler, prefering instead to sometimes select quotations from this great thinker in order to make themselves look bigger and wiser, --thinkers such as Hughes, Fischer and Connelly are among those. To paraphrase Spengler, nobody can escape from History's all-encompassing reach, we humans only have a luxury of pretending that we can, and like a grotesque Ostrich we bury our heads into the daily mass-circulation media training our minds, making us increasingly less capable of exercising independent thought and judgement. In the introduction, Spengler quotes his spiritual father, poet-philosopher Goethe with the description of confidence in life:"Inward form of significant life which unaware and unobserved inspires every thought and every action." That this description is no longer adequate for the life of Western Man provides a food for thought, since everything genuine in the way of feeling and thought is left open for unrestrained dissection and criticism by the standard-bearers of the modern intellectual inquisition which stifles any richness in the modes of thought in our universities, and has assumed the role of the judge, prosecutor and the jury in Media's daily virtual courtrooms, alias mass-circulation news. Hence the public truth of the moment holds sway. The lack of inward form in our daily personal lives should not therefore come as a surprise since we are trained daily to seek programmable inspiration from the external world of the macrocosm, shunning away from our own inbred microcosm and the wealth of inspiration it could have provided us with, had we given it a chance. At the very least "Decline of The West" enables the interested reader to form his or her own conclusion, which is something that Spengler's past critics could not afford to do.
Rating:
Summary: Essential reading
Review: Like Arthur Schopenhauer in his WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Oswald Spengler, in THE DECLINE OF THE WEST, had one great, bipartite idea: (a) that all civilizations are analogous to biological organisms in the sense that they all go through their births, youths, maturities, old ages and deaths; and that, therefore, (b) the respective characteristics of their various stages may be forseen -- even prophesized. Fair enough. The main discordancy here is, that whereas Schopenhauer's great two-volume opus, to anyone who would take the time to read him, proves him to have been a masterly, if long-winded, literary craftsman, Spengler in his two-volume work is quite frankly a muddled thinker and an inept writer. No, let me take that back. Spengler is an unbelievably TERRIBLE WRITER, incapable of making the slightest point without a lengthy digression, which almost always is thrown in to show off his (undeniable) erudition, but which, unfortunately, usually proves nothing whatsoever except what a boring and pedantic fool he was. To be blunt, DECLINE OF THE WEST is a work which, though historically important, is, at the end of the day, pretty much tedious, laughable and repetitive, repetitive, repetitive, repetitive. So, if you happen to be one of those people hell-bent on trudging through this unbelievably amateurish tome, I would wholeheartedly suggest that you look into a deft abridgement. Otherwise, I would sincerely hope, for your sake, that you have a better way of spending your time.
Rating:
Summary: All that matters is that Spengler is right
Review: Much has been written about whether Spengler was a good man or a bad man, whether his is a good philosophy or a bad philosophy, all that matters is that his theory of world history is correct. Spengler does not identify a problem and then set forth what people must do to avoid the problem. In fact, the whole point of his theory is that Cultures are born, flourish and die in a predictable pattern. There is no more anything we can do to avoid the 'problem' than there is to increase a man's lifespan to 200 years. One example, which I think has clearly been borne out by current events: in the aftermath of WWI, where armies with troops numbering in the millions were often too small, Spengler predicted that armies of our time would number in the hundreds of thousands, and that these small, war-keen armies were meant to be used. Everything that is happening in the world today, from American response to 9/11, to pornography, to the professionalization of sports, to families not eating dinner together, is elucidated by Spengler's theory. If you want to understand the present, more importantly, if you want to understand the terrible internal problems the US will encounter in the next ten years, then you must understand the Decline of the West. It is a dense, serious, and demanding book. It is not a fun read, but it is necessary. The best analogy is a scene from The Matrix: Morpheus offers Neo two pills. The red pill will reveal the world as it truly is, which very few people actually see. The blue pill will take Neo back where he was, still fooled by the Matrix, oblivious to reality. The Decline of the West is the red pill.
Rating:
Summary: the decline of coherence
Review: Part of the problem, for me, is in the rigidity of the thesis, for Spengler maintains that cultures are like other organisms: they are born, flourish, decline, and die--and this is inevitable. Well, where do you go after stating such a premise? He goes into a lengthy first chapter on mathematics, which only by the barest of ideas links up to the development of his thesis. He then takes off in other directions, and soon the reader knows for certain that Spengler was to be taken at his word in the Introduction: he's out to present a philosophy, not a history of civilization. And present it he does, no matter how distant the connections and associations his intuition insists on bringing into the discussion. It's not that they don't connect, but that (per the intuitive's inherent weakness) many only connect in ways that don't really matter and could have been left out of even this, an abridged edition of the original work. The latter part of the book revives the reader who gets that far, but it's a lot of work for the gold one finds there. Perhaps Spengler makes his central point best by the very fragmentation and disconnection so evident in his prose.
Rating: 
Summary: A few contrasts & comparisons
Review: Spengler's classic tome about the fate of civilizations was very influential and widely read in his day, and his influence is still being felt today. His ideas are probably the best known in this area, but it's interesting to contrast and compare Spengler's idea with those of two other historians who have had similarly deterministic ideas about the rise and fall of civilizations. Toynbee came up with the idea of "challenge and response." A civilization is confronted with certain challenges and problems during its development. If it succeeds in surmounting them, it grows and becomes more powerful; if it fails, as it must eventually at some point, it's culture declines and ultimately dies off. Similary, John Suart Mill came up with the idea of positive and negative periods in history. It's been 20 years since I read Mill, but the quote where he aptly describes his idea went something like the following. I think I have it more or less correct: "During the positive period, mankind adopts with firm conviction some positive creed, claiming justification for all its actions proceeding from it, and possessing more or less of the truth and adaptation to the needs of humanity; when a period follows of negation and dissolution, wherein mankind loses all its old beliefs, of a general or authoritative character, except the belief that the old ones are false." What I find most interesting about Spenger's book, and about Toynbee's and Mill's theories, is the idea that there must ultimately be some sort of theoretical history that can explain the broad sweep of entire civilizations, that their waning and waxing can be attributed to some regular, lawful process. I am sceptical that this is the case, at least in so far as a general, all-inclusive explanation can be found, although I think there is a good deal of truth in the ideas of all three men. From my reading of history, the conditions and circumstances of each civilization and what ultimately led to its rise and fall, seem special or unique to that particular historical context, and probably wouldn't have worked out the same at a different time and place. Of course, all civilizations must maintain a strong military and economy, otherwise they are simply overrun by their enemies. Providing that, however, it seems to me that it comes down to the fact that there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. Great societies--such as those of ancient Egypt, Golden-Age Athens, Early Renaissance Italy, or modern America, are built because people are galvanized by the ideas they embody and by the opportunities they create. The energy, dynamism, and enthusiasm this creates is what makes their rise to power possible and is what makes them great. When this is no longer the case, the formerly great society goes into decline. Of course, such societies are often conquered from without at some point, but they were probably already declining internally for a some time before that happened--as when Rome was sacked twice during the 4th century AD--first by the Ostrogoths and then by the Visogoths. Anyway, just my two cents--and perhaps not so different from what the three above writers themselves have had to say about it.
Rating:
Summary: impressive
Review: 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:
Summary: Interesting contrast with our time
Review: There is no doubt about how Spengler defined the West: In terms of race. Not religion or democracy or capitalism or any other sort of philosophy. On the TV and magazines and such of the 21st century "The West" is variously defined in terms of liberalism, democracy, sexual expression, multi-culturalism, fee-market economics--anything except Spengler's definition. In the early 1920s, before Hitler was heard from and after WW I, Spengler wrote a little article in which he stated his definition of The West, gave an appraisal of its then current health and gave a prescription for its survival. He said in this article that the German defeat in the Great War (WW I of course) was the first great step in the decline of the West via its subordination to the "colored world". Spengler stated that the SINGLE hope for the survival of the West was "The Prussian spirit, not only in Germany but in other countries as well." He went on to say that the "next war" would determine whether the West lived or died. It is, looking back, as if Spengler wrote the history of WW II in advance, with the ending he seems to have expected but not wanted, omitted. It is interesting to ask the degree to which Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler were aware of themselves playing out roles in Spengler's vision, with hopes of saving or destroying the West as Spengler defined it. It is tempting to think so. British and American war policy, the fire-bombing of Dresden as the best bit of evidence, seems specifically bent upon destroying Spengler's West. It seems, on the other hand, that Hitler's extreme rish-taking was driven by a vision that now was the time to save the West, which would be soon destroyed if not now preserved for the years to come. Spengler's race-based view of decline appears to be the rotting away of the "Transendental Aesthetic" to use Kant's term. The presence of large numbers of non-Europeans in London and Amsterdam today seems to support Spengler's argument in the article I cited, but as an overall theory about the decline of Civilizations Toynbee's "Nemesis of Creativity" (control over creativity being in hands not supportive of the civilization)seems more generally appealing than Spengler's biological model. Perhaps they are both right. Or both wrong.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting contrast with our time
Review: There is no doubt about how Spengler defined the West: In terms of race. Not religion or democracy or capitalism or any other sort of philosophy. On the TV and magazines and such of the 21st century "The West" is variously defined in terms of liberalism, democracy, sexual expression, multi-culturalism, fee-market economics--anything except Spengler's definition. In the early 1920s, before Hitler was heard from and after WW I, Spengler wrote a little article in which he stated his definition of The West, gave an appraisal of its then current health and gave a prescription for its survival. He said in this article that the German defeat in the Great War (WW I of course) was the first great step in the decline of the West via its subordination to the "colored world". Spengler stated that the SINGLE hope for the survival of the West was "The Prussian spirit, not only in Germany but in other countries as well." He went on to say that the "next war" would determine whether the West lived or died. It is, looking back, as if Spengler wrote the history of WW II in advance, with the ending he seems to have expected but not wanted, omitted. It is interesting to ask the degree to which Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler were aware of themselves playing out roles in Spengler's vision, with hopes of saving or destroying the West as Spengler defined it. It is tempting to think so. British and American war policy, the fire-bombing of Dresden as the best bit of evidence, seems specifically bent upon destroying Spengler's West. It seems, on the other hand, that Hitler's extreme rish-taking was driven by a vision that now was the time to save the West, which would be soon destroyed if not now preserved for the years to come. Spengler's race-based view of decline appears to be the rotting away of the "Transendental Aesthetic" to use Kant's term. The presence of large numbers of non-Europeans in London and Amsterdam today seems to support Spengler's argument in the article I cited, but as an overall theory about the decline of Civilizations Toynbee's "Nemesis of Creativity" (control over creativity being in hands not supportive of the civilization)seems more generally appealing than Spengler's biological model. Perhaps they are both right. Or both wrong.
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