"He has completely mastered ten or fifteen sciences. He has a penetrating judgment on the whole historical process, as far as history reaches. And he also has something which men of today almost never have, a sound eye for the phenomena of decline in the civilizations of the present day. There is a fundamental difference between Spengler and those who do not grasp the nature of the impulses of decline and who try all kinds of arrangements for extracting from the decayed ideas some appearance of upward motion. Were it not heart-rending it might be humorous to see how people with traditional ideas all riddled with decay meet today in conferences and believe that out of decay they can create progress by means of programs. Such a man as Oswald Spengler, who really knows something, does not yield to such a deception. He calculates like a precise mathematician the rapidity of our decline and comes out with the prediction (which is more than a vague prophecy) that by the year 2200 this Occidental culture will have fallen into complete barbarism."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
ConservativesPhilosophers from GermanyHistorians from GermanyNon-fiction authors from GermanyPolitical authors from Germany
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Rudolf Steiner, On Spengler's Decline of the West, Lecture in Dornach, July 2, 1920
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oswald_Spengler
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Related Quotes
"Marxism is the capitalism of the working class."
"Socialism means power, power, and more power. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power. The path to power has a…"
"Work was for him a commodity, not an obligation. That is the core of his political economics. His ethics were the eth…"
"Marx wished to deprive capital of the right to private profit, but the only thing he could think of as a substitute w…"
"It is the heritage of anguished centuries, and it distinguishes us from all other people—us, the youngest and last pe…"
"To the new International that is now in the irreversible process of preparation we can contribute the ideas of worldw…"
"The philosophy of this book I owe to the philosophy of Goethe, which is practically unknown to-day, and also (but in …"
"The meaning of socialism is that life is dominated not by the contrast of rich and poor but by rank as determined by …"
"The concepts "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" reflect the typically English preference for business rather than manual…"
"The stone statue and the scientific system deny life. Mathematical number, the formal principle of an extension-world…"