Oswald Spengler’s work is a bold attempt to determine the course of history in advance. Is there a logic to history? Do concepts fundamental to all organic life—such as birth, death, youth, and old age—perhaps hold a strict meaning in this domain that has yet to be uncovered? The awareness that the number of historical forms is limited, that ages, epochs, situations, and individuals repeat themselves typologically, has always existed. But who realizes that there is a profound formal connection between differential calculus and the dynastic principle of the state in the era of Louis XIV, between the ancient political form of the polis and Euclidean geometry, between the spatial perspective of Western oil painting and the conquest of space through railroads, radio, and long-range weapons, between contrapuntal instrumental music and the economic credit system? Even the most sober political facts, when viewed from this perspective, take on a symbolic, even metaphysical character, and for the first time, phenomena such as the Egyptian administrative system, ancient coinage, analytical geometry, the check, the Suez Canal, Chinese printing, the Prussian army, and Roman road-building techniques are understood equally as symbols.
Of any organism, we know that the tempo, form, and duration of its life are determined by the characteristics of the species to which it belongs. No one would assume that a thousand-year-old oak is just beginning to grow. No one expects a caterpillar, developing daily, to continue for several more years. In contrast, human history, with regard to the future, is dominated by an unrestrained optimism that disregards all historical experience. Yet "humanity" has no goal, no idea, no plan—just as the species of butterflies or orchids has no goal. "Humanity" is a zoological concept, or an empty word. Let this phantom disappear from the sphere of historical questions of form, and you will see an astonishing wealth of real forms emerge. Instead of the dull image of world history arranged in a single straight line, you will see the flourishing theater of a great number of magnificent cultures; you will see cultures, each with its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will, feeling, and death. These cultures, living beings of the highest order, grow in sublime purposelessness, like flowers in a field.
