Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Zweiter Band by Oswald Spengler
"Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Zweiter Band" by Oswald Spengler is a philosophical-historical treatise written in the early 20th century. It presents a sweeping “morphology of world history,” portraying high cultures as living organisms with fated life-cycles and situating the modern West in its phase of decline. This volume ranges across cities and peoples, religion, the state, politics, money, and technology to frame a grand comparative theory of cultural rise and decay. The
opening of the work contrasts the plant’s cosmic, bound, rhythmic life (Takt) with the animal’s free, polar, tension-filled microcosm (Spannung), then builds to the human world of the eye and light, where word-language emancipates understanding from sensation and gives rise to thinking. Spengler sets Dasein (destiny, time, blood) against Wachsein (spatial consciousness, causality), opposes facts to truths and practice to theory, and links human religiosity to the fear of the invisible and the recognition of death. He distinguishes “destiny men” (statesmen, warriors, entrepreneurs) from “causality men” (priests, scholars) and explores mass souls that surge beyond mere opinion into shared fate. Turning to “the group of high cultures,” he separates the world as history from the world as nature, shows how horizons widen from child and primitive life to cultural panoramas, contrasts Greek narrowness and Magian sacred chronologies with the faustian, planetary, and open-ended historical vista, and layers history from astronomy and geology through biology to human cultures and biography. The section closes by challenging 19th‑century mechanistic, surface-level explanations (Lyell, Darwin), urging a physiognomic, form-oriented reading of nature and history that seeks living patterns rather than causal systems. (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)
