The other day, I stumbled across Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), an interesting piece in more than a few ways: 1) it was a good opportunity to practice my German, 2) it seems to echo many of the thoughts bouncing around in my own head.

I never put much stock in the rather Western view—beginning with Herodotus and the Ages of Metallic Men, then reified in the Christian view that man had a consistent, directed purpose, and then even in our middle schools—that history could be divided linearly (perhaps with a little overlap) between the ancient, medieval, and modern eras. History is far more mutable and malleable than a line—there’s no doubt about that, and yet we insist on this pretty little lie—Plato might call it a “noble lie,” for it flatters the sensibilities of modern man, and convinces him that he is forever on a path of progress (which, as we all know, is certainly always a good thing).

The Hindus have cycles (they call them “yugas”), the Greeks have cycles (see Polybius, Plato, Aristotle for their views on political development—“anacyclosis”). Come to think of it, it seems like most of the non-Abrahamic cultures with flood myths embrace some form of cyclical history. And there were some men in the 19th and 20th century who held parallel views—Carlyle’s vision of history as a phoenix, and Pareto’s foxes and lions. But they have always been in the minority among Westerners.

Spengler crystallizes the views of these rare historians, introducing his book as a “Copernican overturning,” proposing instead of the linear standard a concept of cultures as organisms, each flourishing for about a thousand years, and declining for another thousand. The final stage of each culture is a “civilization.” He recognized at least eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mesoamerican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman, “Apollonian”), Arabian (“Magian”), and Western or European (“Faustian”).

The Western world, he perceives, is nighing its end, and the final season, and we are witnessing, like silent, deluded bystanders, the winter of Faustian Civilization. Western Man is a proud but tragic figure, an Oedipus or Ulysses, because while he strives and creates, he secretly knows he will never reach his ultimate goal, the break from materialism to true spiritual freedom.

Spengler, on his philosophy:

Plato and Goethe stand for the philosophy of Becoming, Aristotle and Kant the philosophy of Being… Goethe’s notes and verse… must be regarded as the expression of a perfectly definite metaphysical doctrine. I would not have a single word changed of this: “The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast.” This sentence comprises my entire philosophy.

But this decay is not something to be mourned—it is a fact of existence. Culture is religious creativeness (I use “religious creativeness” rather secularly to connote a sense of wonder at the world), and the beginning of Enlightenment rationalism is the end of innovation, falling from unlimited optimism to unqualified skepticism, incapable of thinking in the real. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of Baudrilliard’s second or third order simulacra, where academics are forced to analyze symbols with no underlying meaning at all. The masses respond to this hyperintellectualization (which Plato cautions well against) with deep suspicion of academia and science and learning, which, in many ways, is what we see today. This, Spengler deems the “Second religiousness,” ushering in a new authoritarian ruler who can only attempt to stay the inevitable, and like the Sanskrit Bhagavatam notes, even if we may attempt to once again return to the original watersheds of our cultures, desperately clinging on, it will be merely mimetic (see Rome under Augustus).

Another great culture will come about one day, cycling through the same Platonic forms. Hopefully, I will have the opportunity to see it.