Accueil
https://ia600509.us.archive.org/15/items/Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler/Decline_Of_The_West.pdf
http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/spengler/
"I can then call the essence of what I have discovered .. true II - that is, true for me, and as I believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time; not true in itself as dissociated from the conditions imposed by blood and by history, for that is impossible."
"Life itself is only fulfilled in death."
"I feel urged to name once more those to whom l owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche."
"That which has at last (and to my own astonishment) taken shape in my hands I am able to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a German philosophy."
-Oswald Spengler, préface de 1922 à la seconde édition de The Decline of the West. Form and Reality.
"It became clear that these ideas must necessarily be brought forward at just this moment and in Germany, and, more, that the war itself was an element in" the premisses from which the new world-picture could be made precise."
-Oswald Spengler, préface de 1917 à la première édition de The Decline of the West. Form and Reality.
"In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and
specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment - the West-Europe an-American."
"The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world."
"History is repetition."
"We have before us two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and experience the world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and purposes of imagination ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes of experience dissecting according to scheme; and - to mention even thus early an opposition that has never yet been noted, in spite of its significance - the domain of chronological from that of mathematical number."
"It makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of himself as something rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type of consciousness there is certaintly no world-history, no world-as-history. But how if the selfconsciousness of a whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistoric spirit ? "
"After the destruction of Athens by the Persians, all the older art-works were thrown on the dustheap (whence we are now extracting them), and we do not hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled himself about the ruins of Mycena: or Phaistos for the purpose of ascertaining historical facts. Men read Homer but never thought of excavating the hill of Troy as Schliemann did; for what they wanted was myth, not history. The works of lEschylus and those of the preSocratic philosophers were already partially lost in the Hellenistic period. In the West, on the contrary, the piety inherent in and peculiar to the Culture manifested itself, five centuries before Schliemann, in Petrarch - the fine collector of antiquities, coins and manuscripts, the very type of historicallysensitive man, viewing the distant past and scanning the distant prospect (was he not the first to attempt an Alpine peak?), living in his time, yet essentially not of it. The soul of the collector is intelligible only by having regard to his conception of Time." (p.31)
"There is historically no "European" type, and it is sheer delusion to speak of the Hellenes as "European Antiquity"."
""East" and "West" are notions that contain real history, whereas "Europe" is an empty sound."
"The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Copernician discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India ; Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico - separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power."
"Great thinkers, making a metaphysical virtue of intellectual necessity, have not only accepted without serious investigation the scheme of history agreed "by common consent" but have made of it the basis of their philosophies and dragged in God as author of this or that "world-plan". Evidently the mystic number three applied to the world:-ages has something highly seductive for the metaphysician's taste. History was described by Herder as the education of the human race, by Kant as an evolution of the idea of freedom, by Hegel as a self-expansion of the world-spirit, by others in other terms, but as regards its ground-plan everyone was quite satisfied when he had thought out some abstract meaning for the conventional threefold order."
-Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. Form and Reality.
"Chaque culture a ses possibilités d'expression particulières qui apparaissent, mûrissent, se fanent, et ne reviennent jamais... Ces cultures, êtres vivants du rang le plus élevé, grandissent sans la moindre finalité, comme les fleurs des champs. Elles font partie, comme les fleurs des champs, de la nature vivante de Goethe et non de la nature morte de Newton."
-Oswald Spengler, Le Déclin de l'Occident, Paris, 1948 (1918 pour la première édition allemande), Tome I, p.33.
http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/spengler/
"I can then call the essence of what I have discovered .. true II - that is, true for me, and as I believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time; not true in itself as dissociated from the conditions imposed by blood and by history, for that is impossible."
"Life itself is only fulfilled in death."
"I feel urged to name once more those to whom l owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche."
"That which has at last (and to my own astonishment) taken shape in my hands I am able to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a German philosophy."
-Oswald Spengler, préface de 1922 à la seconde édition de The Decline of the West. Form and Reality.
"It became clear that these ideas must necessarily be brought forward at just this moment and in Germany, and, more, that the war itself was an element in" the premisses from which the new world-picture could be made precise."
-Oswald Spengler, préface de 1917 à la première édition de The Decline of the West. Form and Reality.
"In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and
specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfilment - the West-Europe an-American."
"The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world."
"History is repetition."
"We have before us two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and experience the world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and purposes of imagination ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes of experience dissecting according to scheme; and - to mention even thus early an opposition that has never yet been noted, in spite of its significance - the domain of chronological from that of mathematical number."
"It makes a great difference whether anyone lives under the constant impression that his life is an element in a far wider life-course that goes on for hundreds and thousands of years, or conceives of himself as something rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type of consciousness there is certaintly no world-history, no world-as-history. But how if the selfconsciousness of a whole nation, how if a whole Culture rests on this ahistoric spirit ? "
"After the destruction of Athens by the Persians, all the older art-works were thrown on the dustheap (whence we are now extracting them), and we do not hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled himself about the ruins of Mycena: or Phaistos for the purpose of ascertaining historical facts. Men read Homer but never thought of excavating the hill of Troy as Schliemann did; for what they wanted was myth, not history. The works of lEschylus and those of the preSocratic philosophers were already partially lost in the Hellenistic period. In the West, on the contrary, the piety inherent in and peculiar to the Culture manifested itself, five centuries before Schliemann, in Petrarch - the fine collector of antiquities, coins and manuscripts, the very type of historicallysensitive man, viewing the distant past and scanning the distant prospect (was he not the first to attempt an Alpine peak?), living in his time, yet essentially not of it. The soul of the collector is intelligible only by having regard to his conception of Time." (p.31)
"There is historically no "European" type, and it is sheer delusion to speak of the Hellenes as "European Antiquity"."
""East" and "West" are notions that contain real history, whereas "Europe" is an empty sound."
"The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Copernician discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India ; Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico - separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power."
"Great thinkers, making a metaphysical virtue of intellectual necessity, have not only accepted without serious investigation the scheme of history agreed "by common consent" but have made of it the basis of their philosophies and dragged in God as author of this or that "world-plan". Evidently the mystic number three applied to the world:-ages has something highly seductive for the metaphysician's taste. History was described by Herder as the education of the human race, by Kant as an evolution of the idea of freedom, by Hegel as a self-expansion of the world-spirit, by others in other terms, but as regards its ground-plan everyone was quite satisfied when he had thought out some abstract meaning for the conventional threefold order."
-Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. Form and Reality.
"Chaque culture a ses possibilités d'expression particulières qui apparaissent, mûrissent, se fanent, et ne reviennent jamais... Ces cultures, êtres vivants du rang le plus élevé, grandissent sans la moindre finalité, comme les fleurs des champs. Elles font partie, comme les fleurs des champs, de la nature vivante de Goethe et non de la nature morte de Newton."
-Oswald Spengler, Le Déclin de l'Occident, Paris, 1948 (1918 pour la première édition allemande), Tome I, p.33.
