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The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality

Book by Oswald Spengler · 4 quotes · Philosophy, Art, Frederick William I

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AllPhilosophyArtFrederick William IGlerHistoryHumanityKarl MarxMankindMichelangeloNational Socialism OriginOswald SpenglerPhilosophy Of HistorySocialismSpeStruggle

The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality Quotes

“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.”

PhilosophyHistoryPhilosophy Of HistoryGlerSpe
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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