From the desk of Steve Kogan on Wed, 2011-01-05 19:18 This is Part 2 (A) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan. Between 1911 and 1914, Spengler’s presentiments of an "approaching World-War" took a historical turn, and he began to see the present crisis as the contemporary form of a recurring phenomenon in the history of other cultures. The prime feature of this ever-recurring catastrophe, as he saw it, was the transformation of an old, form-filled, and soul-expanding culture into a nihilistic and outwardly-expanding empire of a "world-city" civilization, with the world war corresponding to the Punic Wars in the Classical world, as "The later Egyptian historian concealed under the name 'Hyksos period' the same crisis which the Chinese treat under the name 'Period of the Contending States.'" In Spengler's world-picture, this "age-phase" also coincides in the Arabian world with the ascendancy of "Baghdad - a resurrected Ctesiphon, symbol of the downfall of feudal Arabism - and this first world-city of the new Civilization became from 800 to 1050 the theatre of the events which led from Napoleonism to Caesarism, from the Caliphate to the Sultanate." In his introduction, Spengler remarks that above and beyond all the correspondences that were appearing to him "in every increasing volume . . . there stood out the fact that these great groups of morphological relations, each one of which symbolically represents a particular sort of mankind in the whole picture of world-history, are strictly symmetrical in structure." In the third chapter of Volume I, he underscores the complete design of this picture: "Every Culture, every adolescence and maturing and decay of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically necessary stages and periods, has a definite duration, always the same, always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol." 
Rhythms of History
Thursday, 6 January 2011
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