Book review and analysis -- THE DECLINE OF THE WEST By Oswald Spengler
This book is monumental, with ambitions far beyond what is normally called “history.” Rather, it is both an epistemology and metaphysics. Oswald Spengler is calling for a revision of our understanding of the world. Within our tradition of Western culture we have come to see of the world through science, and the methods of the sciences reveal to us what we tend to accept as the world as it is. Spengler rejects this thesis and calls that entire tradition the perspective of World as Nature. To this he opposes a different view – World as History. The two ‘worlds’ are different; the World as Nature and its scientific, mathematical models give us the world of space, the “become,” that which is. The World as History, on Spengler’s analysis, gives us the world of “becoming,” the world of time. One may quickly suspect Spengler is not quite so radical as this at first sounds. Certainly from late 19th century through at least the mid-20th century thought, there is a distinction argued that the so
This book is monumental, with ambitions far beyond what is normally called “history.” Rather, it is both an epistemology and metaphysics. Oswald Spengler is calling for a revision of our understanding of the world. Within our tradition of Western culture we have come to see of the world through science, and the methods of the sciences reveal to us what we tend to accept as the world as it is. Spengler rejects this thesis and calls that entire tradition the perspective of World as Nature. To this he opposes a different view – World as History. The two ‘worlds’ are different; the World as Nature
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