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Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler Books

Philosopher

Aphorisms

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Hour Decision

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Selected essays

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“Added to all this is the universal dread of reality. We "pale-faces" have it, all of us, although we are seldom, and most of us never, conscious of it. It is the spiritual weakness of the "Late" man of the higher civilizations, who lives in his cities cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural experiencing of destiny, time, and death. He has become too wide awake, too accustomed to ponder perpetually over yesterday and tomorrow, and cannot bear that which he sees and is forced to see: the relentless course of things, senseless chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries into which the individual with his tiny scrap of private life is irrevocably born at the appointed place. That is what he longs to forget, refute, or contest. He takes flight from history into solitude, into imaginary far-away systems, into some faith or another, or into suicide. Like a grotesque ostrich he buries his head in hopes, ideals, and cowardly optimism: it is so, but it ought not to be, therefore it is otherwise. We sing in the woods at night because we are afraid.”

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Book:The Hour of Decision: Germany and World-Historical Evolution
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“Faced as we are with this destiny, there is only one world. Outlook that is worthy of us, that which has already been mentioned as the Choice of Achilles — better a short life, lull of deeds and glory, than a long life without content. Already the danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatever is deplorable. Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.”

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Book:Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life
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“It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless. The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.”

DestinyMemoryReactionaryTeleologyOrganic Logic
Book:The decline of the West
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“I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves—but there is no ageing “Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.”

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Book:The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality
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“Michelangelo alone would tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The question of form was for him a religious matter; for him and only for him it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art; of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the terrible in his forms that frightened his contemporaries. No man ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel into a buried world.”

ArtStruggleMichelangeloOswald Spengler
Book:The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality
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“Of this economic Stoicism of the Classical world the exact antithesis is Socialism, meaning thereby not Marx's theory but Frederick William I's Prussian practice which long prededed Marx and will displace him – the socialism […] that comprehends and cares for permanent economic relations, trains the individual in his duty to the whole, and glorifies hard work as an affirmation of Time and Future.”

SocialismKarl MarxNational Socialism OriginFrederick William I
Book:The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality
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“We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.”

IfsMenHeartMayDoeHelpingLyingCultureRealizingBornDestinySeeingGenerationsPositionHe ManDependsCivilizationRemainsWinterCeaseChosenGoldenAcknowledgeOur DestinySummitRipeCharlatansPedantsSimpletonsPhidias
Book:Form and actuality
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“At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.”

ThinkingLooksSoulLastsMotherDesireDiesCultureWishLosesCommonEffortHalfDarknessSuccessfulFireChildhoodDyingCreationProduceColdCivilizationGravesDawnGrayRomeWearyWombReluctantRomanticismDaylightClassicism
Book:The decline of the West
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“To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.”

WellsViewsClearMediaObjectsDramaPureIntellectualDemocraticFinishedInwardDisguiseMasterpieceDetachmentMonstrousWill PowerThoroughFlatteredEnslavementArtilleryClear View
Author:Oswald Spengler
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“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.”

MenWayMeanEndsFoundLostBornPathTakenDoorsOne ThingFrontsPositionGreatnessDutyDiedSoldierBonesPostsRescueHonorableCan NotDestinedWithout HopeEruptionThoroughbredsPompeiiRoman Soldiers
Book:Routledge Revivals: Man and Technics (1932): A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life
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“This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on. This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.”

WayMayHas BeensPurposeProudMeaningfulThis LifeBe Proud
Book:Aphorisms
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“The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.”

PeopleKnowsWorldHumansMeanHas BeensWarFactsMightDesireDifferencesHuman BeingsIdealsPaidFamiliarWorld HistoryHeed
Author:Oswald Spengler
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“Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.”

MenLongCountryDiesCitiesBloodWasteTownsGiantsStreamsDryMidstBoresLong AgoIncessantlyDevouring
Book:The Decline of the West...: Perspectives of world-history
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“Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike, and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself.”

IfsMenHumansLooksRunningCultureAnimalSpeciesPrimariesFeminineEverlastingReproductionUnchangingShort Lived
Book:Aphorisms
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