Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Erster Band by Oswald Spengler
"Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Erster Band" by Oswald Spengler is a treatise on the philosophy of history written in the early 20th century. It contends that high cultures are living organisms with birth, growth, and decline, and advances a comparative “morphology” to forecast the West’s transition from culture to civilization. The work rejects linear, Eurocentric periodizations and reads arts, sciences, politics, and religion as symbols that express each culture’s inner form and
destiny. The opening of the book frames the project amid a crisis-ridden age and declares its aim: to determine whether history has a logic that allows one to foresee the remaining stages of Western culture. It contrasts mathematical law for dead forms with analogy for living forms, calling for a rigorous technique of historical comparison rather than casual parallels. The author distinguishes nature (causality, the logic of space, mathematical number) from history (fate, the logic of time, chronological number), and asks “for whom” history truly exists. He argues that Greeks and Indians were fundamentally ahistorical, whereas Egyptians were intensely historical, illustrating this through time-symbols like cremation versus mummification, calendars, and the invention of clocks. The book opposes the simplistic scheme of Antiquity–Middle Ages–Modernity and the provincial centrality of Western Europe, proposing instead multiple equal, landscape-bound high cultures that live and die by their own inner laws. It traces the tripartite scheme to late antique Gnostic-Christian thought, criticizes teleological philosophies, and urges a historically relative perspective that sees each culture’s arts, sciences, and morals as unique expressions of its fate. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
