In 1980, soon after I had immigrated to the UK, I bought a hardback copy of Decline.  I had been reading Toynbee and wanted to explore a different Metahistorian.  Spengler was, relative to Toynbee’s 12 volumes, quite brief.  However what Spengler lacked in mass he made up for in complexity & detail.  He is not easy to read.  Several times I picked up Decline only to put it down after a few attempts, perhaps 4 pages,utterly mystified.

 

Finally while in Egypt temporally unemployed I had the time & incentive to read the 2 volume masterpiece.  It is indeed a good read but one that is very very daunting.  Not infrequently I would read a page and begin a new page and suddenly ask myself, what have I just read?  I would return to the previous page and re-read it, maybe several times.  In many cases I would look words up (Wikipeda, but not exclusively). 

 

I have built this site to support & aid first time readers of Decline.  I have tried to identify the main stumbling blocks and it is these which I have addressed in my glossary and the accompanying Endnotes.  I also include a synopsis and index.  There is nothing original in the site, it is strictly a tool.  It is certainly not a substitute for the long & arduous task of reading Spengler's magnum opus.

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The vocabulary Spengler uses is highly esoteric & academic, full of words like morphology and subtilized.  I would stumble across these and often be at a loss as to what he was saying.  At a minimum such a vocabulary hinders the speed of reading and the depth of understanding.

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Secondly Spengler references a wide variety of personages, wars & analogies drawn form history.  I am a modern history specialist, with England as my main field.  Spengler’s references in particular to Classical history (one of his specialties) often mystified me, and certainly his references to Egyptiac and Chinese history stopped me cold.  To give the reader a guide to these historic references, I include a brief explanation in the glossary.  As well I have provided Endnotes in an attempt to keep the footnotes brief.  A fuller treatment is provided here if the reader wishes to dig further.

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Spengler will on occasion use foreign phrase and words, often Latin or German, sometime Greek, occasionally French.  Again this can slow down your reading as well as your grasp of his meaning.  I have provided translations, although I was not brave enough to attempt the Greek.

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Like many German philosophers Spengler aimed at creating a whole system with its own specialist nomenclature.   It is an attempt (though he admits incomplete) to systematize all of history.  It is truly metaphysical.  And as such it is very easy to get lost in his (often repeated) explanations & systems, and feel like you are chasing your own tail.  His writing (again like much of German philosophy) is often convoluted, complicated & detailed aiming to drive home a holistic explanation.  To aid in understanding his system I include in the glossary a lexicon of terms which have specific meaning in his system.  They are identified with a  color code (maroon).  They are of course my (fallible) interpretation of his system.

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Spengler also assumes familiarity with a great breadth of specialist topics and subjects, in particular mathematics and philosophy but also literature, art & architecture as well as religion & music.  Where I felt it useful I have included brief definitions, explanations & illustrations; in some case these are extended in the Endnotes (e.g. non Euclidean geometry).

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Finally Spengler did not write in a philosophical vacuum and he is particularly indebted to the Germanic school and in particular Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Goethe.  If you are unaware of these thinkers or unfamiliar with their main ideas, his references to them are mystifying.  On the other hand a rough idea of their main concepts helps explain a great deal of his thinking.  For instance Spengler does not agree with much of Kant but he uses the idea of categories (which he calls necessities- namely time, space, history as nature, history as space) which are clearly derived from Kant’s ideas, though used in a very different fashion.  To give the reader a leg up on these I have included brief explanations in the Endnotes.

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Good luck.  It is a book well worth reading.  I hope these notes help.