This difference is a measure of Spengler’s dramatic break with the premises of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. While Gibbon had seen decline in a broader context of the long-range history of human progress, Spengler used it as an argument against the existence of progress. In the work of Edward Gibbon, decline had been a historical theme closely circumscribed by time and space for Spengler it became a metaphysical one. From Nietzsche he acquired the “questioning faculty,” his approach to cultural criticism. He acknowledged the influences primarily of Goethe and Nietzsche to them he owed “practically everything.” From Goethe he derived his “method,” particularly his way of relating scientific insights to cultural phenomena, and his latent historical relativism.
Spengler’s immediate inspiration was his perception that the civilization of the West since the late nineteenth century was exhibiting the same symptoms as ancient civilization in its decline.
The Decline of the West (1918-1922) was revolutionary less in its basic ideas than in the impressive breadth of its canvas-a feature for which it was readily attacked by professional scholars- and in its elaborate systematization of cultural and historical pessimism. Having taught at a number of schools, the last a Hamburg Realgymnasium, he moved to Munich as a private scholar in 1911, at which time he conceived the idea for the work which was to stir up the entire historical profession. Spengler was a lone wolf-a bachelor, and also an outsider to the German world of learning. Spengler’s preoccupation with this pre-Socratic Greek philosopher foreshadowed some of the main ideas of his major work: he was to translate “everything flows” into historical relativism and “war, the father of all things” into a self-consciously tough, “heroic” world view. He obtained his doctor’s degree at Halle with a dissertation on Heraclitus. Both inheritances came together in Spengler-in his scientific interests on the one hand and his stylistic ability and talent for bold, intuitive theoretical formulations on the other.Īfter attending a humanist Gymnasium in Halle, he studied mathematics and the natural sciences at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Halle.
Of Protestant parentage, he was descended on his father’s side from a line of mining engineers his mother’s family was artistically inclined. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), German universal historian, was born in Blankenburg, in the Harz mountains.
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