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The decline of Europe is a summary of the chapters. Oswald Spengler and his Decline of Europe. Why was Spengler criticized?

Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution

higher professional education

"Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin"

Institute of Social and Political Sciences

Department of International Relations

Department of European Studies

Report on the topic: "Oswald Spengler: The Decline of Europe"

Work completed:

1st year student of FMO

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Gubaidulina Snezhana

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l civilization

Introduction

1. "The Decline of the Western World"

2. Spengler's Philosophy of Culture

3. Soul of culture

4. The transition of culture to civilization

5. Differences of culture and civilization

6. Civilization as the death of culture

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

Spengler Oswald (1880-1936), a prominent German philosopher, culturologist, historian, representative of the philosophy of life, creator of the cyclic theory, author of the sensational work "The Decline of Europe", which brought him the sensational glory of the prophet of the death of Western civilization. Only in the 20s. The first volume of this cultural bestseller went through 32 editions in many languages. His teaching was intended to overcome the mechanistic nature of the 19th-century global schemes for the evolution of culture as a single ascending process of the formation of world culture, where European culture acted as the pinnacle of human development.

The creative biography of the German thinker is unusual. The son of a petty postal clerk, Spengler did not have a university education and could only finish high school, where he studied mathematics and the natural sciences; As for history, philosophy and art history, in the mastery of which he surpassed many of his outstanding contemporaries, Spengler dealt with them independently, becoming an example of a self-taught genius. Spengler's official career was limited to the position of a gymnasium teacher, which he voluntarily left in 1911.

Oswald Spengler was born on May 29, 1880 in Blankenburg, Germany. Educated at Munich and Berlin Universities. Studied philosophy, history, mathematics and art. In 1904 he received his doctorate. He first worked as a teacher in Hamburg and then taught mathematics at the University of Munich.

1. "The Decline of the Western World"

In 1918, the first volume of Spengler's famous work, The Decline of the Western World, was published. In it, the author predicted the death of Western European and American civilizations, presenting history as a kaleidoscope of eight "organic" cultural and historical types: Egyptian, Indian, Babylonian, Chinese, Greco-Roman, magical (Byzantine-Arabic), Western European and Mayan culture. The ninth is the culture of the future, Russian-Siberian.

Citing a variety of historical data, Spengler tried to prove two main theses.

The first considered all cultures as organisms following the same pattern of development and death within the same historical cycle. All of them pass through the stages of pre-culture, culture and civilization and are marked by crises of the same type and similar events and figures. So, Alexander plays the same role in ancient culture as Napoleon in Western culture, Pythagoras and Luther, Aristotle and Kant, Stoics and socialists also correlate.

In accordance with the second thesis, each culture has its own unique "soul", expressed in art, thinking and activity.

How is culture different from civilization? How was "The Decline of Europe" interpreted in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany? Why is the author not able to control the perception of his statement? These and other questions are answered by PhD in History Dina Huseynova.

Oswald Spengler, with his book The Decline of Europe, influenced the thoughts of thousands, maybe even millions of readers. This book was published in 1918, immediately after, and perhaps it was the war that served as the impetus for the popularity of Spengler's ideas, because the book turned out to be prophetic.

I would like to consider Spengler's phenomenon from a philosophical point of view: not only what was his idea that Europe was in danger of decline, but to consider, using the example of Spengler, the question of how much the author of a particular idea is able to control how it is perceived. It seems to me that this is precisely what constitutes the interest in Spengler for historians of ideas - Spengler as an incident in history.

Spengler has an interesting biography. He was a historian of mathematics, natural sciences, literature and taught these subjects at school. Born in 1880 and for a long time did not seek a public life or a scientific career, he taught at school and was content with this activity. Then he felt called to combine his knowledge of mathematics, economics and history and develop a universal conception of world history. Even before the First World War, he began to develop this concept from the 10s. And only later, during the war, did he begin to echo the events and somehow respond to them.

What was his main idea? There are two ideas. This is a huge book, two volumes, which in a sense continues the German tradition of universal history. But there are two new elements.

First, in this book, he tries to show that European civilization is only one of many civilizations and that it has no intellectual superiority over other civilizations, including, for example, the Arab culture, the culture of China, India and other countries. As an intellectual analysis of European culture, this is a book that puts Europeans in their place.

Secondly, conceptually, Spengler draws a new distinction between culture and civilization. In the German tradition, it was customary to believe that culture is a deep heritage. This understanding is especially involved in German culture, that it is a set of elements of style and ideas that have deep foundations and are an achievement on the basis of which one can say that one nation has superiority over another. In a specific case, in Germany, especially in the eyes of conservatives, the cost of German civilization and culture exceeded that of the French. And in order to develop the idea of the superiority of German culture, a distinction was made even at the level of language. It was said that German culture is precisely culture, and, for example, in France or England there is only civilization. Civilization is a superficial set of practices. In which hand to hold the knife and fork, or which hand to blow your nose, are superficial practices that have absolutely no effect on the analytical achievements of the human mind. According to conservatives, France is dominated by civilization, while Germany is dominated by deep knowledge, knowledge of the concept of infinity and other cultural achievements.

For Spengler, this is not the case. For Spengler, each cultural cycle is seen as a planet that travels in a certain orbit. This planet has the ability to first develop its cultural potential, and then be reborn into a civilization.

That is, civilization is a temporary term that describes a culture in decline.

First, civilization comes up with deep ideas. In the case of the German civilization, this is the philosophy of mathematics, infinity, the idea of technical knowledge of the world, the measurement of the planet. This is Kant, critical reason, the development of reason. Then these materials develop into civilization, they become, for example, material for the development of technical devices that can destroy humanity. It would seem that the mind should exceed humanity over others, but in fact it can contribute to the development of technology that can destroy humanity. This is how any culture develops. Any culture can come to the stage of decline at the stage of civilization. This is exactly what is seen in the example of European culture.

In addition to this, he develops the idea of a racial theory of culture and civilization. He says there are white cultures and there are colored cultures farbige. European culture is white culture. In the phase of degradation, the so-called white revolutions develop in it - the forces that he associated with liberalism, socialism, forces that lead to the decline and internal decay of the system. But there are also color revolutions. Color revolutions are revolutions of non-European peoples who have not yet come to a model of technology, technical development. But they, too, can destroy deep European culture through color revolutions.

Characteristically, colored peoples are not necessarily peoples whose skin color is not white. The figures of color revolutions, according to Spengler, include Russians, Scythians. His idea is that it is necessary to fundamentally distinguish between Europeans and non-Europeans according to the principle of these two ideas, the two principles of the decomposition of culture: through civilization and barbaric, anti-technological aspirations, which he saw, for example, in Bolshevism.

What is interesting if we turn to the perception of Spengler in different circles? The publication was published in 1918-1922 and gradually, through translation into different languages, is distributed not only among German-speaking readers, which include mainly Germans and Russians (many Russians studied in Germany at that time). It is translated into English, French, Spanish and many other languages. There are several blocks of Spengler's perception.

First, he was seen as a prophet. After his prediction that Europe would come to an end was perceived as prophetic, and not only in general analysis, but precisely through technical elements, details, that this, on the one hand, was an economic crisis, technical achievements of self-destruction and anti-colonial movements that develop inside European civilization. All this was taken as a prophecy.

Readers such as Thomas Mann in Germany, critics of the imperial tradition in British historiography, modernist poets such as the Irishman Yeats, as well as authors from the Russian cultural tradition: Fyodor Stepun, economist Yakov Bukshpan, Nikolai Berdyaev, all of them they see in Spengler the prophet of the decline of precisely Western Europe.

This is where the differences begin. What does it mean that he correctly predicted the decline of Europe? This means that the next step in interpretation is the question: what follows from this? How can further decay of this culture be prevented? Where exactly is the threat coming from? Does it come from economic or technological processes? Or from some racial representation of the enemies of European civilization? Here interpretations diverge. In addition, interpretations become politicized.

The second block of Spengler's perception is the block of his political interpretation. I will single out two authors who wanted to use Spengler as an authoritative author for constructing new political ideologies - these are Goebbels in Germany and Lunacharsky in Soviet Russia.

Goebbels perceives Spengler's analysis in a purely racist way, but at the same time he tries to mobilize Spengler himself, who is alive - he died only in 1936 - and Spenglerians to serve a racist, anti-Semitic theory.

For him, the color revolution is, among other things, the revolution of the Jewish people against the Faustian principle of German civilization.

But Spengler tries to abandon this presentation because he was a critic of ardent anti-Semitism, and refuses to participate in public events. For example, in the so-called "Potsdam Day", when Hitler, together with General Hindenburg, tried to create a new ideology of fastening the old and new elites in the fight against the Jewish conspiracy. Spengler distances himself from this, and he is immediately deprived of any public role and forbid the publication of his books - at least, they introduce rather strict censorship on the publication of his books starting in 1933.

What does Lunacharsky do? In Soviet Russia, after the publication of a book about Spengler in 1922, philosophers - these were Stepun, Berdyaev and others - were forced to leave Russia. Spengler's name is mentioned only in the vein of anti-capitalist criticism of the West. Lunacharsky tries by means of decrees to determine how Spengler should be interpreted and why "The Decline of Europe" implies the decline of precisely Western Europe, based on the principles of capitalism.

Thus, we have two political interpretations of Spengler. And only then, in the 50s, a third interesting path develops, namely: Spengler turns out to be an authority for anti-colonial movements. Here an important role is played by socialists such as Aimé Sezer and Leopold Sédar Senghor, for whom Spengler, as the theorist of color revolutions and the decline of Europe, is not only a prophet, but also a performative theorist of anti-colonial movements.

What happens? It turns out that the author who wrote a certain work, “The Decline of Europe”, and a number of other works that later came out, is interpreted in completely different ways, in different keys by different people who are contemporaries. What does it mean? That any idea can be interpreted as you want? It seems to me that for the historian of ideas this is an interesting case from which one can derive a theory of the speech act, in which one must determine that the author is not able to control the fate of the utterance, that the utterance can have its own biography and, in addition, that each reproduction of the speech act ( for example, a quotation, or a generalization, or a reference to this speech act) is a new speech act. And in this case, the author can also enter into a dialogue with other events, with other speech acts, and try to somehow correct them. For example, refusing to participate in political events and trying to control the use of their ideas. But in fact, the author is not able to control the fate of his statement, and he has his own story.

The most interesting approach to this was developed, oddly enough, by Ilya Ehrenburg, who came to Berlin and in the 1920s determined that Spengler had become a kind of spirit of the times, and in a literal sense. It turns out that a perfume called “The Decline of Europe” was even released on the market at that time. I would like to compare the autonomy of the speech act with the way spirits spread in a room. A person is not able to control the spread of smell, and yet the smell has an incredibly powerful effect on people's consciousness. This is how Spengler's idea of the decline of Europe was influenced.

Spengler has several cultures: Chinese, Indian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, European, Arab, Mayan culture. All of them are completely independent. The very intervals in the development of cultures are incommensurable. In Europe, cumulative comprehension. Gradually developing, sciences, arts appear, everything else is just a testing ground for this. Spengler - and on the basis of what is such a statement? Why is Europe the quintessence of cultural development?

Other cultures have existed for millennia and could repeat the path of European development n-th number of times. But they had other values and they went the other way. Cultures: Greco-Roman, Arabic and European. At the heart of Greco-Roman culture is the Apollonian soul, as a kind of symbol of the Greeks' desire for beauty. Arabs - magical soul (principal bifurcation of the soul and body). European culture is a Faustian soul. A person is dissatisfied with his existence, and he begins to rush about. Dynamics, expansion, aggressiveness. Source souls give rise to cultures. Culture is birth and youth, civilization is old age. At the level of culture there are spiritual beginnings, at the level of civilization there is a structural beginning (petrification of the soul). Culture is characterized by poetry. At the stage of civilization - philosophy (mind). Culture - religion, faith.

Civilization - atheism, unbelief, sects. Culture is a high stage of morality, ethical behavior and the impossibility of doing otherwise. Civilization is right. Fear of punishment. Culture is an art (in the global sense of the word). Greeks - Olympics, sculpture. The word agon is an element of competition. At the stage of civilization - sport as a way of life. Every story goes through all these metamorphoses. Civilization is the sunset of this or that history. "The Decline of Europe" (18). It was a wild success. She equalized the losers and the winners. Europe lost, not only Germany. All cultures have experienced the stage of civilization. Expansion, the desire to conquer others, at the expense of them to profit culturally. Since there are independent cultures, there is homology, similarity in the development of individual elements. There are fundamental differences in the understanding of things. The attitude of the Greeks to the number was fundamentally different. The Greek symbol for number is the Doric column, a monad bounded from above. There were no negative numbers (no negative things).

For Europeans, the symbol of the number is a Gothic temple (aimed at infinity). Time is the engine of civilization. Watches - the most terrible invention - a symbol of the inexorability of time. Antiquity did not know such a time. Attitudes towards eternity in general and about human life are different in different cultures. In Europe (burial) is one thing, in Ancient Greece (burning) is another. In Egypt, mummification. The appearance of decadent movements: Buddhism, stoicism, socialism - are aimed at leveling the individual (depriving culture of patronage). Spengler is in solidarity with Nietzsche, believing that socialism continues the doctrine of the uprising of moral slaves. He does not predict the end of history at all. One type of possible new culture is Russian-Siberian.

O. Spengler, the author of the world-famous work “The Decline of Europe”, considered reality to be a projection of the soul into the area of the extended. Being in the process of becoming, in the power of fate, the world is just a symbol and a sign of the one who perceives it. Spengler proceeded from the thesis that there are as many worlds as there are people and cultures, and each such world "turns out to be a constantly new, one-time, never-repeating experience."

Religion for Spengler was the implementation of the language of forms of culture. He singled out three forms of culture and, accordingly, expressions of the spiritual element: Apollonian, Faustian and magical, which are the Cause of the emergence of religion. The source of the religious outlook is the enmity between the soul and the world; fear of a world that is in the process of becoming, causes in the human soul the desire to create certain forms in which the religious needs of the individual are embodied. The causes of religion, from the point of view of Spengler, are rooted in the Intuitive Experience by the soul of the process of life, fate (the inevitability of death), time and temporality of being. There is a bifurcation of reality in the consciousness of the individual into, so to speak, the secular world of the human soul and its religious world. The soul is aware of its loneliness in the midst of a world alien to it, which is represented by the kingdom of dark forces, the embodiment of evil, therefore, in confrontation with reality, it creates a world of culture, the essence of which is religion.

According to Spengler, there are two types of deep fear. The first, inherent even in animals, is before space as such, its overwhelming power, before death. The second is before time, the flow of being, life. The first type of fear gives rise to the cult of ancestors, the second - the cult of the gods and nature.

It is religion, according to Spengler, that frees from both types of fear. There are different forms of liberation: sleep; mysteries, prayer, etc. The highest form of liberation is the religious overcoming of fear, which occurs through self-knowledge. Then “the conflict between the microcosm and the macrocosm becomes something that we can love, that we can completely immerse ourselves in. We call it faith, and it is the beginning of man's intellectual activity." Faith in God for a person is salvation from a sense of power and the inevitability of fate. Only with the help of faith is overcome the fear of the unknown and mysterious, because faith is the basis of knowledge of the world. Knowledge is only a later form of faith.

Religion is the soul of every culture, Spengler believed, culture is not free to make a choice in favor of irreligiousness. Religion, like culture, is inherent in all aspects of organic life. It goes through the stages of emergence, growth, prosperity, decline and death. “Cultures are organisms. World history is their common biography. The vast history of Chinese or ancient culture is a morphologically exact likeness of the microhistory of an individual person, some animal, tree or flower, ”wrote Spengler,

Biologism (consideration by analogy with organic life) in relation to religion, spiritual life and culture in general, Spengler combined with an attempt to show the historical development of the religious worldview within the framework of various forms of culture. The very concept of religion in Spengler was interpreted ambiguously, approaching in meaning either myth or metaphysics. Religious experience finds its expression in myth (this is theory) and cult activities (this is technique). Both require a high degree of development of human worldview and are born either by fear or by love. Based on this, Spengler divided all mythology into two types - the mythology of fear (characteristic of primitive religious ideas) and the mythology of love (characteristic, for example, of early Christianity and later mysticism).

Spengler believed that civilization (which he identified with the decline and death of culture) is characterized, first of all, by the development of atheism and the theory of socialism; “Hellenic-Roman stoicism is atheistic to the same extent as the socialism and Buddhism of Western European and Indian modernity - often with the most respectful use of the word “God””. In essence, he considered atheism as one of the varieties of religious worldview.He singled out ancient, Arabic, Western atheism.Spengler called Nietzsche's thesis about the death of God "dynamic atheism", meaning "the deification of infinite space".Religious and atheistic worldview, according to Spengler, were united in essentially spiritual phenomena, the difference between them lies in the fact that the basis is the belief in the opposite: the affirmation of the idea of God and its denial.Considering religion as metaphysics, the philosopher believed that religion is “...the otherworld, wakefulness in the midst of the world in which the evidence of the senses illuminates only the foreground; religion is life in the supersensible and with the supernatural. natural, and where there is not enough power to possess such vigilance, or even to believe in it, there true religion ceases to exist. Despite the relativistic consideration of various cultures, all of them, according to Spengler, are characterized by the presence of religion as the basis of society. The decline of the religious worldview entails the death of culture.

Oswald Spengler was an eminent German historian and philosopher whose expertise and knowledge spanned mathematics, the natural sciences, art theory and music. The main and most important work of Spengler is considered to be the two-volume "The Decline of Europe", his other works were not popular outside of Germany.

The article presented below focuses on the bold and ambiguous work on the historical and philosophical topics, which is The Decline of Europe. Spengler outlined the summary in the preface he wrote. However, on a few pages it is impossible to contain the whole complex of ideas and terms that are of particular interest to modern history.

Oswald Spengler

Spengler survived the First World War, which greatly influenced his philosophical views and the theory he formulated of the development of cultures and civilizations. The First World War forced to revise and partially rewrite the second volume of the main work, which at that time had already been completed by Spengler, “The Decline of Europe”. The summary of the two-volume book, written by him in the preface to the second edition, shows how large-scale hostilities and their consequences influenced the development of Spengler's theory.

The subsequent works of the philosopher focused on politics, in particular on nationalist and socialist ideals.

After Hitler's National Socialist Party came to power in Germany, the Nazis considered Spengler one of the supporters and propagandists of radical ideology. However, the subsequent evolution of the party and militaristic tendencies made Spengler doubt the future not only of the Nazis, but also of Germany. In his book "Time of Decisions" (or "Years of Decisions"), which criticized the ideology of Nazism and superiority, was completely withdrawn from print.

"The Decline of Europe"

The first independent work of the historian and philosopher Oscar Spengler is his most popular, discussed and influential work.

Understanding the uniqueness and originality of cultures is one of the main themes of the work on which Oswald Spengler worked for more than five years - "The Decline of Europe". A brief summary of the two-volume book and an introduction to the second edition written by the author will help to deal with the complexly formulated, complex theory of Spengler.

The two-volume treatise touches on many topics and offers a complete rethinking of how history is perceived in the modern world. According to the main theory, it is wrong to perceive the development of the whole world in terms of dividing eras into ancient, medieval and new eras. The Eurocentric scale of historical epochs cannot correctly describe the emergence and development of many Eastern cultures.

Spengler, The Decline of Europe. Summary of chapters. Volume One

Immediately after its publication, the book surprised the German intellectual community. One of the most innovative and provocative works that offers an argumentative critical approach to the theory of the development of cultures, which was formulated by O. Spengler, is “The Decline of Europe”. The brief content of the theory, included in the author's preface, almost completely focuses on the phenomenon of perceiving history from the point of view of morphology, that is, flow and change.

The Decline of Europe consists of two volumes. The first volume is called "Form and Reality" (or "Image and Reality") and consists of six chapters that set out the foundations of Spengler's theory. The first chapter focuses on mathematics, the perception of numbers, and how the concept of boundaries and infinity affects the perception of history and the development of cultures.

"Form and Reality" not only builds the foundation for the modern study of history, but also offers a new form of its perception. According to Spengler, with her scientific outlook, she influenced the "naturalization" of history. Thanks to the ancient Greek knowledge of the world with the help of laws and rules, history turned into a science, with which Spengler categorically disagrees.

The philosopher insists that history should be perceived "analogue", that is, focus not on what has already been created, but on what is happening and being created. That is why mathematics is given such an important role in the work. Spengler believes that with the advent of the concept of boundaries and infinity, man felt the importance of clear dates and structures.

"The Decline of Europe", a summary of the chapters. Volume two

History must be perceived morphologically.
European culture has passed from a period of development (Culture) to an era of decline (Civilization).

These are precisely the two main theses with which Oswald Spengler puzzled his contemporaries. "The Decline of Europe" (an introduction, a summary of the work and critical articles on historical topics call the above theses the "cornerstones" of Spengler's theory) is a book that turned a lot in the minds of philosophers.

The second volume is called Perspectives on World History (or Views on World History); in it the author explains in more detail his theory of the development of different cultures.

According to the theory of the emergence and development of cultures, which was formulated by the author, each of them goes through its own life cycle, similar to human life. Every culture has childhood, youth, maturity and decline. Each during its existence seeks to fulfill its purpose.

High Cultures

Spengler identified 8 main cultures:

Babylonian;
Egyptian;
Indian;
Chinese;
Middle American and Aztecs);
classical (Greece and Rome);
the culture of the Magi (Arab and Jewish cultures);
European culture.

In The Decline of Europe, the first five cultures are outside the author's focus, Spengler motivates this by the fact that these cultures did not have a direct collision and therefore did not influence the development of European culture, which, obviously, is the main theme of the work.

Spengler pays special attention to classical and Arab cultures, while drawing parallels with the European culture of individualism, reason and the desire for power.

Key ideas and terms

The difficulty of reading "The Decline of Europe" lies in the fact that Spengler not only often used familiar terms in a completely different context, but also created new ones, the meaning of which is almost impossible to explain outside the context of Spengler's historical and philosophical theory.

For example, a philosopher uses concepts (the author always writes these and some other terms in a work with a capital letter) in contrast to each other. In Spengler's theory, these are not synonyms, but to some extent antonyms. Culture is growth, development, the search for one's Goal and Destiny, while Civilization is decline, degradation and "surviving the last days." Civilization is what remains of Culture, which allowed the rational principle to win over the creative.

Another pair of synonymous-contrasting concepts is "happened" and "happening". For Spengler's theory, "becoming" is the cornerstone. According to his basic idea, history should focus not on numbers, laws and facts that describe what has already happened, but on morphology, that is, on what is happening at the moment.

Pseudomorphosis is the term Spengler uses to define underdeveloped or "off course" cultures. The most striking example of pseudomorphosis is Russian civilization, whose independent development was interrupted and changed by European culture, which was first “imposed” by Peter I. It is this undesirable interference in his culture that Spengler explains the dislike of the Russian people for “strangers”; as an example of this dislike, the author cites the burning of Moscow during Napoleon's offensive.

The course of history

Spengler's main postulate regarding history is the absence of absolute and eternal truths. What is important, meaningful, and proven in one culture may become complete nonsense in another. This does not mean that the truth is on the side of one of the cultures; rather, it says that each culture has its own truth.

In addition to a non-chronological approach to the perception of the development of the world, Spengler promoted the idea of the global significance of some cultures and the lack of global influence of others. It is for this that the philosopher uses the concept of High Culture; it denotes a culture that influenced the development of the world.

Culture and Civilization

According to Spengler's theory, High Culture becomes a separate organism and is characterized by maturity and consistency, while "primitive" is characterized by instincts and a desire for basic comfort.

Civilization expands without an element of development, being in fact the “death” of Culture, but the author does not see the logical possibility of the eternal existence of anything, therefore Civilization is the inevitable withering of a Culture that has ceased to develop. While the main characteristic of Culture is the formation and development process, Civilization focuses on the established and already created.

Other important for Spengler distinctive features of these two states are metropolitan cities and provinces. Culture grows "out of the ground" and does not tend to the crowd, each small city, region or province has its own way and pace of development, which ultimately constitutes a unique historical structure. A striking example of such growth is Italy during the High Renaissance, where Rome, Florence, Venice and others were original cultural centers. Civilization is characterized by the desire for mass and "sameness".

Races and peoples

Both of these terms are used contextually by Spengler, and their meanings are different from the usual ones. Race in "The Decline of Europe" is not a biologically determined distinctive characteristic of a human species, but a conscious choice of a person throughout the existence of his Culture. Thus, at the stage of formation and growth of Culture, a person himself creates language, art and music, chooses his partners and place of residence, thereby determining everything that in the modern world is called racial differences. Thus, the Cultural concept of race is different from the Civilized one.

The concept of "people" Spengler does not associate with statehood, physical and political borders and language. In his philosophical theory, the people come from spiritual unity, association for the sake of a common goal, which does not pursue profit. The decisive factor in the formation of the people is not statehood and origin, but the inner feeling of unity, "the historical moment of lived unity."

Feeling the World and Destiny

The historical structure of the development of each Culture includes the obligatory stages - the definition of the worldview, the knowledge of one's Destiny and Purpose, and the realization of Destiny. According to Spengler, each Culture perceives the world differently and strives towards its Goal. The goal is to fulfill your Destiny.

Unlike the lot that falls to the lot of primitive Cultures, the High ones themselves determine their path through development and formation. The fate of European Spengler considers the worldwide spread of individualistic morality, which hides the desire for power and eternity.

Money and Power

According to Spengler, democracy and freedom are closely related to money, which is the main governing force in free societies and large Civilizations. Spengler refuses to call such a development of events in negative terms (corruption, degradation, degeneration), since he considers it the natural and necessary end of democracy, and often of Civilization.

The philosopher argues that the more money individuals have at their disposal, the more clearly the war for power takes place, in which almost everything is a weapon - politics, information, freedoms, rights and obligations, principles of equality, as well as ideology, religion and even charity.

Despite the low popularity in modern philosophy and history, the main brainchild of Spengler makes you think about some of his arguments. The author uses his considerable knowledge in various fields to provide perfectly reasoned support for his own ideas.

Regardless of what you want to read - an abridged and edited version of the work "The Decline of Europe", a summary or critical articles about it, the author's brave and independent approach to changing the world's perception of history and culture is not able to leave readers indifferent.

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Analysisoriginal sourceO. Spengler " SunsetEurope"

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Briefbiography

Born May 29, 1880 in Blankenburg (Germany) in the family of a postal official Bernhard Spengler and his wife Paulina. In the autumn of 1891, the family moved to the ancient university city of Halle, where Oswald continued his studies at the Latina Gymnasium, which focused on the humanitarian training of its students, primarily on the teaching of ancient languages.

The Gymnasium Latina showed a rare combination of Oswald's talents: he was one of the best students in history and geography, and at the same time he showed an aptitude for mathematics. In October 1899, Spengler graduated from high school. Heart disease exempted him from military service and Oswald decided to devote himself to teaching. He enrolled in the natural-mathematical department of the University of Halle.

The death of his father in the summer of 1901 prompted Oswald to move to the University of Munich, then he leaves for Berlin.

Under the guidance of the philosopher Alois Ril, Spengler prepared a work on the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus and defended his doctoral dissertation, which gave him the right to teach in senior gymnasium classes. In 1908 he began to work in one of the Hamburg gymnasiums as a teacher of history and mathematics.

In February 1910, Pauline Spengler's mother died. The part of the inheritance received by Oswald in March 1911 allowed him to return to Munich. In Munich, he began work on the main work of his life - "The Causality of Fate. The Decline of Europe" (DerUntergangdesAbendlandes, 2 vols., 1918-1922, a revised version of the first volume was published in 1923). In this most significant of his works, Spengler predicted the death of Western European and American civilizations, which would follow the cruel "era of Caesarism."

The second half of the 1920s was a time of calm in Spengler's life. He was completely absorbed in the work on a large purely philosophical and anthropological work, which remained unfinished and was published in the form of several thousand fragments only in 1965 by A. Koktanek, a researcher of the Spengler archive, under the title "First Questions. Fragments from the Archive."

The global economic crisis that erupted in 1929 confirmed Spengler's alarming forebodings. The period of relative political calm in Germany came to an end.

On March 18, 1933, he received a telegram from Propaganda Minister Goebbels inviting him to speak on the radio about the great "Day of Potsdam". However, Spengler refused. In August 1933, his book Years of Decisions was published. "People have come to power, reveling in power and striving to perpetuate the state that is suitable for a moment. Correct ideas are brought by fanatics to self-destruction. What at first promised greatness ends in tragedy or farce."

In early June 1934, for the first time in many years, he did not go to his favorite Wagner festival, not wanting to be surrounded by a "brown crowd". But Spengler was finally turned away from Nazism by the so-called "night of long knives" - June 30, 1934, a series of political assassinations that deeply shocked him. After the massacre of E. Rem's group, among whom were his personal friends, Spengler became a voluntary dissident, not hiding his critical attitude towards many government actions.

During the bloody purge, not only the leaders of the stormtroopers, who loudly demanded the continuation of the "national and social revolution", died, but also the conservative opponents of the regime.

It is difficult to imagine how the further fate of Spengler and his relationship with National Socialism would have developed. But on the night of May 7-8, 1936, Oswald Spengler died in his Munich apartment. Two books were placed in the coffin - "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and "Faust", with which he always went to rest.

Generalcharacteristicteachings

The subject of Spengler's philosophical and cultural studies was the "morphology of world history": the originality of world cultures (or "spiritual epochs"), considered as unique organic forms, understood with the help of analogies. Resolutely rejecting the generally accepted conditional periodization of history into "Ancient World - Middle Ages - Modern Time", Spengler offers a different view of world history - as a series of cultures independent of each other, living, like living organisms, periods of birth, formation and death .

Spengler proposes to replace the leveling unity of the idea of the world-historical process with a picture richer in content - a cyclic history of the emergence, flourishing and death of numerous original and unique cultures. Among the “great cultures” that have fully realized their potential, Spengler includes the Chinese, Babylonian, Egyptian, Indian, ancient, Byzantine-Arab, Western, Mayan culture, as well as the “awakening” Russian-Siberian. The uniqueness of each culture is ensured by the originality of its “soul ”: the basis of ancient culture is the “Apollo” soul, the Arab one is “magical”, the Western one is “Faustian”, etc.

The dying of any culture, be it Egyptian or "Faustian" (that is, Western culture of the 12th-18th centuries), is characterized by the transition from culture to civilization. Hence the key opposition in his concept to “becoming” (culture) and “becoming” (civilization).

Thus, the culture of Ancient Greece finds its completion in the civilization of Ancient Rome. Western European culture, as a unique and time-limited phenomenon, originates in the 9th century and flourishes in the 15th-18th centuries. and from the 19th century, with the onset of the period of civilization, it begins to "roll"; the end of Western civilization (since 2000), according to Spengler, who did a tremendous job of collecting factual material about various world cultures, is comparable (or “simultaneous”) with the 1st-2nd centuries. in ancient Rome or 11-13 centuries. in China.

The thesis consistently pursued by Spengler about the uniqueness of cultures, their changeability (not continuity) led to the recognition of their value equivalence: they are all equal in their historical significance and must be compared without any evaluative categories.

Comparative analysis of cultures, according to Spengler, reveals the unity of their fate: each culture goes through the same sequence of phases of development, and the main features of each phase are identical in all cultures; all cultures are similar in duration of existence (about 1000 years) and the pace of their development; historical events related to one culture have correspondences (homologies) in all others.

Each culture, exhausting its internal creative possibilities, dies and passes into the phase of civilization (“civilization”, according to Spengler, is a crisis outcome, the completion of any culture), which is characterized by atheism and materialism, aggressive outward expansion, radical revolutionism, scientism and technism, as well as urbanization.

The concept of the “meaning of numbers” acted as the foundation of Spengler’s historical method, further distancing nature and history from each other. According to Spengler, the spiritual life of a person endowed with "waking consciousness" unfolds in time and in a certain direction. As a result, in the mind of the individual, a personal picture of the world, inherent only to him, is constituted: either figurative-symbolic or rational-conceptual. By means of the type of mathematical number or word, a figurative worldview of the already become, realized - “nature”, according to Spengler, is “countable”. History, on the other hand, as a dynamic realization of a possible culture, is associated with chronological dimensions and is alien to unambiguous calculations.

At the same time, according to Spengler, the self-development of culture is possible only in the context of awareness by its subjects of the significance of the procedures for measuring, counting, forming and fixing images of the outside world, etc. Thus, in the context of the concept of "sense of numbers", ancient culture, based, according to Spengler, on finiteness, corporeality of the numerical series, is opposite to the civilization of the modern West, founded by the numerical idea of infinity.

Spengler defined his own vision of history as a criticism of classical historicism: in his opinion, it is chronology and “deep experience” of the destinies of cultures that determine the systematization of phenomena according to the historical method - cultural studies in this context acts as the “morphology” of history.

According to Spengler's scheme, all modes of knowledge are "morphologies"; the morphology of nature is an impersonal systematics; the morphology of the organic - life and history - is "physiognomy" or the emphatically individualized art of the "portrait of culture" transferred to the spiritual realm. The comprehension of cultural forms, according to Spengler, is fundamentally opposed to abstract scientific knowledge and is based on a direct "sense of life." Manifestations of a particular culture are united not only by a common chronological and geographical relationship, but, above all, by the identity of style, which is found in art, politics, economic life, scientific vision of the world, etc.

Cultures, according to Spengler, arise "with sublime aimlessness, like flowers in a field", and just as aimlessly leave the stage ("... only living cultures die"), leaving nothing behind. The morphology of Spengler's culture informed the Western world that it was irresistibly declining: according to Spengler, a rationalistic civilization means the degradation of the highest spiritual values of a culture doomed to death. The great cultures of the past, according to Spengler, seem to demonstrate to the West its own destiny, its immediate historical future.

Spengler was negative about both socialist ideas and National Socialism.

Place « sunsetEurope» increativitySpengler

The Decline of Europe (1918), Sh.'s main work, had a strong influence on the philosophy of history in the 20th century, gave rise to a huge number of comments and interpretations, a mass of critical responses - from benevolent criticism to complete denial.

Work on the first volume lasted about six years and was completed in April 1917. Its publication in May of the following year caused a real sensation, the first edition was sold out instantly, in the blink of an eye from an obscure retired teacher who occasionally published articles on art, Spengler turned into a philosopher and prophet, whose name was on everyone's lips. Only in 1921-1925, and only in Germany, 35 works about Spengler and about this work of his were published.

There was a paradox in the very popularity of The Decline of Europe, since the book was intended for a very narrow circle of intellectual readers. But that touch of sensationalism that has accompanied Spengler's book since its appearance, and which has never been shaken off, has given rise to many distortions and misunderstandings around this masterpiece, the purpose of which, in the author's own words, was to "try for the first time to predetermine history" .

The appearance of the first volume of "The Decline of Europe" caused an unprecedented stir, because its author was able to determine the ideological situation in Germany of those years like no one else and turned into an intellectual star of his time.

However, the more noisy the success of the book with readers became, the more bitter were the attacks on it. And Spengler's charismatic disregard for authority forced his critics to pay him the same coin. Accusations of dilettantism, incompetence, pretentiousness rained down from all sides. But there were other voices as well. For the German sociologist Georg Simmel, the book was "the most significant in the philosophy of history since Hegel." The writer Hermann Hesse was delighted with the book. She made a big impression on

various philosophers, such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Edmund Husserl. In the left and Marxist circles, the intelligentsia reacted critically to the work. his attention to other issues. In addition, the fierce controversy surrounding the book made him rethink the concept, and only in April 1922 the manuscript was completed.

Generalproblemandstructurework

The proposed collection of articles about Spengler's book "Untergangdes Abendlandes" is not united by the common worldview of its participants. What they have in common is only in the awareness of the significance of the topic itself - about spiritual culture and its modern crisis.

The main task of the collection is to introduce the reader to the world of Spengler's ideas. A more systematic exposition of these ideas is the subject of an article by F. A. Stepun. But other authors, sharing their impressions of the book and thoughts about Spengler, tried to reproduce the objective content of his ideas as much as possible. Thus - on the instructions of the collection - the reader from four reviews should get a fairly complete picture of this undoubtedly outstanding book, which constituted a cultural event in Germany.

Chapter I. THE MEANING OF NUMBERS

Orientation and length: chronological and mathematical number. Number as a principle for setting boundaries. There is no "number in itself". Lots of mathematics. Kantian concept a priori. The form of cognition is neither constant nor universally valid: it is a function of a particular culture. Knowledge styles. The inner affinity of each mathematics with the form language of its contemporary arts: Euclidean geometry and the sculpture of isolated statues; analysis and counterpoint. Antique number as a value (measure). Bodily, not spatial extent. Absence of irrational and negative numbers. The world system of Aristarchus. Mathematics and Religion. Number and death. Diophantus and the Arabic number (algebra). Descartes and the analysis of the infinite. Western number as a function. History of Western mathematics, progressive emancipation from the concept of magnitude. The irrational is anti-Hellenic. Fear of the world and attraction to the world. The origin of the mathematical, religious and artistic language of forms; expression of fear of the unknown. Geometry and arithmetic (measurement and counting) are obsolete names. The squaring of a circle is a classical antique limit problem. Mathematics of the small (ancient state). Construction and operation. The classical Western limit problem: the limit of the infinitesimal calculus (relation to the Baroque style). Analysis overcomes the boundaries of the visible. Antique axiom about parallel and non-Euclidean geometries. Multidimensional spaces (point manifolds). The latest achievement of the Faustian idea of number: transformations and invariant calculus. Exhaustion of formal possibilities and the end of Western European mathematics.

Pproblemworldstories. Physiognomyandtaxonomy

The need for a new historical method. The exclusion of ideals and morality as a measure of development. History and nature - image and law - direction and extension. Physiognomy and systematics as two types of morphological consideration of the world. What is culture? Building history of a higher order. The Goethe Phenomenon. Tempo, duration, style, the death of higher cultures. Repetition of the course of culture by individuals belonging to it. The concept of epoch homology. Homogeneous structure of all cultures. Possibility of morphological prediction and reconstruction of historical periods.

Anddayfateandprinciplecausality

Two forms of cosmic necessity: organic and inorganic logic - fate and causality (life sense and form of knowledge). Associated with attraction to the world and fear of the world. Causal forms" of the world as an attempt of the mind to defeat fate. Fate as a way of existence of the primordial phenomenon.

Time problem. Systematic misunderstanding: "time and space". Time (irreversibility) is like destiny. Time is not a concept, it is inaccessible to science. Measurement of space and calculation of time ("what" and "when"): natural and historical questioning of the world. Mathematics and Chronology.

Time, fate and tragedy. Euclidean and analytical tragedy (tragedy of position and tragedy of development). Every culture has its own idea of fate. The limits of the possibility of understanding the "world history of others". Great symbols of the times; as the only aid: a watch. Burial forms. Calendar. Erotica. The form of the state and the sense of time: the ancient, Egyptian and Western idea of the state. Stoicism and socialism: connection with plastic arts and music. Fate and Chance. Causality and predestination. The tragedy of chance (Shakespeare). Tyukhe and the style of ancient existence. Astrology and oracle. Antique tragedy of fate. The Logic of History: Columbus and the Spanish Century. Epochs and episodes. Anonymous and personal form of history. The fate of Napoleon. Luther. Is there a true historical science? A mixture of physical-causal and historical-physiognomic methods. History as a "process". "Hunger and Love" Social drama as a parallel to the materialistic understanding of history. lack of skepticism. Recent Tasks.

Macrocosm. Symbolismimagepeaceandproblemspace

What is a symbol? The idea of the macrocosm. The world as a set of symbols in its relation to the soul. Each person has his own environment. Space and death. "Everything transient is only a symbol." The problem of space. Only depth ("the third dimension") forms space. Kant's theory. Independence of mathematics from visual representation. Variation of the visual image. A large number of possible types of space. Spatial depth--directivity (time). The identity of the experience of depth and the awakening of inner life. Ideal extension type: Each culture has its own original symbol. Western primordial symbol: infinite space. The Kantian problem did not exist for the Greeks. Euclidean position on parallel lines and a large number of space structures in Western European mathematics. Antique and initial symbol: material separate body.

BUTpollonovskaya,Faustian, magical soul

Olympus and Valhalla. Magical and Faustian Christianity. Ancient polytheism (God as a body) and Western monotheism (God as space). Egyptian primordial symbol of the path. The meaning of the architecture of the pyramids. The double meaning of art: imitation and symbolism (attraction to the world and fear of the world). The earliest art is always architecture: stone and primordial symbol. State forms and architectural forms; expression of will, care, duration. Hohenstaufen and pharaohs. Exterior architecture and interior spaces. style problem. The unity of life expectancy within one culture. Egyptian style as an example of the history of style, the coincidence of its phases with the phases of the Western style. Unity of style from Romanesque art to Empire. Moving the center of gravity of stylish creativity from early architecture to one of the fine arts. Doric and Ionic styles, Gothic and Baroque as youthful and senile phases of the same style. The Task of the Science of Art: Comparative Biographies of the Great Styles. Psychology of art technique. The true beginning of Arabic art: the ancient Christian "Late Antique" art as its early stage, the art of Islam as a late one. Mosaic, arabesque. The combination of a round arch and a column is an Arabic motif.

Spengler dwells on the consideration of three historical cultures: ancient, European and Arab. They correspond to three "souls" - the Apollonian, which chose the sensual body as its ideal type; the Faustian soul, symbolized by boundless space, dynamism; magical soul, expressing the constant duel between soul and body, the magical relationship between them. From this follows the content of each of the cultures. For Spengler, all cultures are equal; each of them is unique and cannot be condemned from an external position, from the position of another culture. The phenomenon of other cultures speaks a different language. For other people there are other truths. For the thinker, either all of them or none of them are valid. Concentrating his attention not on logic, but on the soul of culture, he managed to accurately notice the uniqueness of the European soul, the image of which can (as the author himself believes) be the soul of Goethe's Faust - rebellious, striving to overcome the world with its will. Spengler believes that each culture has not only its own art, but also its own natural science and even its own unique nature, because. nature is perceived by man through culture. “Each culture already has a completely individual way of seeing and knowing the world - as nature”, or - one and the same thing - “each has its own, peculiar nature, which in exactly the same form cannot be possessed by any person of a different warehouse.

But to an even higher degree, each culture has its own type of history, in the style of which it directly contemplates, feels and experiences general and personal, internal and external, world-historical and biographical development. According to Spengler, every culture is based on the soul, and culture is a symbolic body, the life embodiment of this soul. But all living things eventually die. A living being is born in order to realize his spiritual powers, which then fade away with old age and go into oblivion along with death. This is the fate of all cultures. Spengler does not explain the origins and causes of the birth of cultures, but on the other hand, their further fate is drawn by him with all possible expressiveness. “Culture is born at the moment when a great soul awakens and stands out from the primitive state of the eternally childish humanity, a certain image from the ugly, limited and passing from the limitless and abiding. It flourishes on the soil of a strictly limited area, to which it remains attached, like a plant. A crisis in culture occurs when its soul realizes the totality of its possibilities in the form of peoples, languages, religious teachings, arts, states and sciences. As a result, culture returns again to the arms of the primitive soul. However, the flow of culture is not a smooth, calm process. This living being is a tense passionate struggle: external - for the assertion of its power over the forces of chaos and internal - for the assertion of its power over the unconscious, where this chaos, maliciously, hides.

The conceptual provisions of O. Spengler are distinguished by similarities with Danilevsky's theory, namely: the denial of the linear development of history, the commonality of the stages of world history, the assertion of the idea of the polycyclic nature of the historical process. O. Spengler identified the following signs of civilization:

development of industry and technology;

· cosmopolitanism instead of fatherland;

· giant cities and crowds of people, a faceless mass instead of the people;

money instead of the fertility of the land;

rejection of traditional values;

degradation of art and literature.

Civilization is the last phase of the existence of culture, this is its decline. According to O. Spengler, the Western world was at this stage. Thus, culture is the natural state of society (organism), and civilization is artificial (mechanism).

The specifics of the presentation of the material

At the heart of "The Decline of Europe" is not the apparatus of concepts, it is based on the organism of words. The concept is a dead crystal of thought, like its living flower. A concept is always unanimous, self-identical, and once and for all defined in its logical capacity. The word is always thoughtful, elusive, always reloaded with new content.

"The Decline of Europe" was worked out by Spengler not from concepts, but from words that the reader should feel, experience, see. There are, in fact, very few of these words in The Decline of Europe.

Each waking consciousness distinguishes in itself "own" and "alien". All philosophical terms, according to Spengler, point to this basic opposition. Kant's "appearance", Fichte's "I", Schopenhauer's "will" - these are the terms that feel for some "own" in the mind. “Thing in itself”, “not I”, “the world as representation”, point, on the contrary, to some “foreign” of our consciousness.

Spengler does not like terms, and therefore he “covers the difference between “his” and “alien” with a thoughtful opposition of thoughtful words, calling his own “soul”, and someone else’s “world and rom”.

Spengler then superimposed the word “becoming” on the word “soul,” and the word “becoming” on the word world. Thus two poles are formed, the pole of the formation of the soul and the pole of the world that has become. The world of possibilities and the world of fulfillment.

Between them, life is like the realization of possibilities.

Listening then to the nature of the emerging world, Spengler feels it is mysteriously endowed with a sign of direction, that essentially inexpressible sign, which in all highly developed languages was indicated by the term "time". Merging, thus, time with becoming life, Spengler in the opposite pole of consciousness, in the pole of "alien", merges the world that has become with space, feeling space as "dead time", as death. This is how the organism of Spengler's fatal words branches in The Decline of Europe. These words, taken together, do not constitute Spengler's terminology ("he has no terminology"), but some conditional signaling.

What is time? - Spengler answers: “time is not a form of knowledge, all philosophical answers are imaginary. Time is life, direction, aspiration, longing, mobility.

What is causality? - dead destiny. What is fate? - organic logic of being.

In this way, Spengler signals to the soul of the reader that he knows about life, the world and knowledge.

Spengler's method is nowhere shown, so to speak, in its naked form. In The Decline of Europe there is no chapter specifically devoted to its disclosure: description and defense. He is revealed in Spengler's book in a very peculiar way, as a living force, which, in view of its obvious efficiency, has no need to report and justify itself. This mastering by the sparingly developed and deeply buried method of the heavy masses of Spengler's knowledge gives the whole book an impression of lightness and dynamism.

ATconclusions

The German thinker, through a series of analogies with the cultures of the past, proves the inevitable death of Western culture. “The fall of the Western world is nothing more, nothing less than a problem of civilization.” Europe has long passed into the civilizational stage, and its final death is only a matter of time. With this, O. Spengler explains all the crisis phenomena that have gripped modern society. Deep erudition, boldly drawn parallels, the breadth of the issues under consideration, and the almost poetic tension of the narrative make the rationale for the concept expressed in The Decline of Europe extremely convincing (and often mask the flaws of the arguments).

Spengler peers into the darkening distances of history: the endless flickering of endlessly born and dying forms, thousands of colors and fires, flaring up and dying out, the free play of the most free accidents. But little by little the eye begins to get used to it and a second, more stable historical plan emerges. In the nests of certain landscapes (Spengler loves the word landscape and always speaks of spiritual, spiritual and musical landscapes) on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, in the Nile Valley, in the expanses of Asia, on the Central European plains, the souls of great cultures are born. Having been born, each of them ascends to its spring and its summer, descends to its autumn, and dies in its winter. To this fatal circle of external life there corresponds an equally fatal circle of the inner life of the spirit. The soul of each era inevitably makes its circle from life to death, from culture to civilization.

The opposition of culture and civilization is the main axis of all Spengler's reflections. Culture is the powerful creativity of the maturing soul, the birth of a myth as an expression of a new feeling of God, the flowering of high art, full of deep symbolic necessity, the immanent action of the state idea among a group of peoples united by a uniform worldview and unity of life style.

Civilization is the dying of creative energies in the soul; problematic worldview; replacement of questions of a religious and metaphysical nature with questions of ethics and life practice. In art - the disintegration of monumental forms, the rapid change of other people's fashionable styles, luxury, habit and sport. In politics - the transformation of people's organisms into practically interested masses, the dominance of mechanism and cosmopolitanism, the victory of world cities over rural distances, the power of the fourth estate.

Civilization is thus, according to Spengler, an inevitable form of death for every obsolete culture. The death of a myth in unbelief, of living creativity in dead work, of cosmic reason in practical reason, of a nation in an international, of an organism in a mechanism.

The destinies of cultures are similar, but the souls of cultures are infinitely different. Each culture, like a ring of Saturn, is surrounded by its fatal loneliness.

“There are no immortal creations. The last organ and the last violin will someday be split; the enchanting world of our sonatas and our trios<3>, just a few years ago by us, but also only for us born, will fall silent and disappear.

The highest achievements of Beethoven's melody and harmony will seem to future cultures as the idiotic croaking of strange instruments. Sooner than the canvases of Rembrandt and Titian have time to decay, those last souls for whom these canvases will be something more than colored patches will be transferred.

Who understands Greek lyrics now? Who knows, who feels what it meant to the people of the ancient world?

Nobody knows, nobody feels. There is no single humanity, no single history, no development, no progress.

There is only a mournful analogy of the circulation from life to death, from culture to civilization.

Listliterature

1.http://www.gumer.info/bibliotek_Buks/Polit/Article/speng.php

2.http://www.bibliofond.ru/view.aspx?id=30224

3. Teaching aid Glazov 2010

4.http://www.bibliotekar.ru/filosofia/89.htm

5.http://rudocs.exdat.com/docs/index-528107.html?page=2#131207

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The decline of Europe is a summary of the chapters. Oswald Spengler and his Decline of Europe. Why was Spengler criticized?

Report on the topic: "Oswald Spengler: The Decline of Europe"

1. "The Decline of the Western World"

Oswald Spengler

"The Decline of Europe"

Spengler, The Decline of Europe. Summary of chapters. Volume One

"The Decline of Europe", a summary of the chapters. Volume two

High Cultures

Key ideas and terms

The course of history

Culture and Civilization

Races and peoples

Feeling the World and Destiny

Money and Power

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THE LAST NOTES

The decline of Europe is a summary of the chapters. Oswald Spengler and his Decline of Europe. Why was Spengler criticized?

Report on the topic: "Oswald Spengler: The Decline of Europe"

1. "The Decline of the Western World"

Oswald Spengler

"The Decline of Europe"

Spengler, The Decline of Europe. Summary of chapters. Volume One

"The Decline of Europe", a summary of the chapters. Volume two

High Cultures

Key ideas and terms

The course of history

Culture and Civilization

Races and peoples

Feeling the World and Destiny

Money and Power

Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below

Similar Documents

What else to read

THE LAST NOTES

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