Julius Evola's Preface to The Decline of the West

Translated into English for the first time

This is the first half of Evola’s preface to Spengler’s Decline of the West. Published in 1957, Evola was the first to produce a full-length Italian translation of Spengler’s magnum opus. Evola’s work deals heavily with questions of modernity, tradition, and the decline of aristocratic cultures. In this preface, Evola reflects on the original contributions of Spengler while also levying some warranted critiques. Perhaps of chief importance to Evola is the relationship between “traditional man”, historicity, and whether certain values are truly timeless. For Spengler, such talk is nonsense. Consequently, Evola takes him to task.

A special thank you to Pleth (@plethonist on X.com) for leading the way on this translation.

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EVOLA

While minor works by Spengler have been available in Italy for some time now, his main book, to which the author owes his worldwide fame, is only being made accessible to a general readership for the first time through this translation, despite the frequent references to it found in current literature.

One might think that this publication holds a certain relevance today, due to the fact that the same state of mind it represents has reappeared in the aftermath of the Second World War. The same collapse of values has become evident, and the same sense of a general crisis of civilization has intensified. These were the characteristics that marked the post-World War I period, laying the groundwork for the success of Spengler's work and lending a symbolic value to its title, "The Decline of the West.”

Partly, this is true. However, it is also true that themes which initially held a sense of originality in the early reception of the book have now become almost clichéd, representing the first barometric indicators of a shift in historical sensibility away from previously dominant historical and progressive optimism. In the meantime, these themes have been repeated and developed in various ways through a wide range of literature, more or less extemporaneously. Thus, a balanced and objectively critical assessment of such concepts is now imperative.

In the second place, the title of the book, as the reader will see, only partially corresponds to its content. It is not merely an endeavor to systematically highlight the twilight nature of the Western civilization at its end. Instead, it represents the exposition of a personal philosophy in general, where the philosophy and morphology of world history are merely a consequence, and Spenglerian views on the decline of the West and the forms in which our civilization might come to an end are also second-order consequences, so to speak. And within this personal philosophical system, there are far too many things of a highly debatable value.

In a general sense, it can be said that Spengler's most evident merit lies in his attack against the linear and progressive (and also post-Hegelian dialectical) conception of history. He challenges the idea that there exists a singular history that encompasses all of humanity and unfolds from a lesser to a greater state of civilization in indefinite evolution. Another merit of Spengler is his pointing out the intellectual provincialism of certain historiographies, where anything outside Western history, confined to the conventional schema of ancient-medieval-modern, would be more or less irrelevant and marginal, if not outright nonexistent. In contrast, for Spengler, history fractures into closed, discontinuous cyclical courses, each corresponding to a specific irreproducible civilization. The cycle pertaining to Western or Euro-Western civilization is just a particular cycle, lacking any privileged position. Like all other cycles, the cycle of our civilization also had a specific beginning and will have an inevitable end. Differentiated from ahistorical forms of existence, civilizations, having fulfilled their time, dissolve back into them.

The Spenglerian conception is entirely based on an organic analogy. According to Spengler, the primary phenomenon in history, the Goethean "Urphänomen," is constituted by civilizations. These are conceived as organisms that, despite being of a higher order and having a superindividual character, like all organisms, have a finite duration and present well-defined phases of development. Just like visible organisms, civilizations have youth, a period of maturity and flourishing, followed by old age, leading to decline and ultimately, an end. The "morphology of world history" aims to identify the recurrence of these phases in various cycles of civilizations within a system of correspondences and "synchronisms" that extend beyond the domains of art, thought, science, religion, ethics, law, and so forth.

Once one of these organisms dissolves, another emerges in a different "landscape," repeating the same cycle without continuity with the previous, based on a new original and irreproducible idea. Each cycle of civilization expresses a specific idea or "soul" in its arts, wars, thought, architecture, economy, sciences, and so forth, imparting a symbolic character to all these manifestations. Nothing truly passes from one civilization to another. What one civilization might borrow from another is assimilated in a different function, according to a different idea, the specific idea of that civilization, imbuing it with a different meaning, a different quality. For instance, Christianity as it was adopted in Euro-Western civilization ("Catholic-Germanic" Christianity) is fundamentally different from original Christianity, which emerged and developed within the framework of what Spengler calls the "Magian" civilization.

According to Spengler, each civilization not only has a distinct worldview and life conception stemming from its “prime-symbol," but also a different science, mathematics, physics, and so on. There are no singular or universal mathematics, paintings, laws, economies, etc. Instead, there are diverse mathematics, diverse painting styles, diverse economies, diverse legal systems, each with a different spirit, sense, and symbolic value.

Therefore, we are confronted with a pluralistic and thus relativistic conception, where the positive blends with the negative. While it is valid to break the magic circle that leads one to interpret every civilization according to one's own, thereby disregarding its originality, it becomes evident that excessive emphasis on discontinuity and particularly Spengler’s assertion that every truth and understanding are historically conditioned and subject to the irrevocable law of the civilization to which they belong, leads to a methodological impossibility. Rigorously speaking, one would be condemned to truly understanding only their own civilization. Right from the outset, Spengler's assumption of grasping the soul and guiding idea of civilizations different from our own appears absurd. Furthermore, following Spengler's logic, we Westerners would find ourselves in a particularly unfavorable situation in this regard, as the historical character that conceives everything in terms of perspectivist relativity would be specific to our civilization. In such a case, the premises would need to be reversed.

To fulfill the task that Spengler has outlined, the individual from the civilizations he labels ahistorical or atemporal would be far more qualified. Such an individual could also be described as the "traditional man." Freed to a greater extent from the demon of history, such an individual would possess the capacity for a free, objective gaze capable of apprehending differences without distorting them. Moreover, it is the traditional man who is responsible for historical visions and "myths" of a vastness that finds no parallel in any of the modern philosophies of history (with the exception of Guénon, who revived those traditions). Examples include the doctrine of the "four ages," which holds a universal character as it has been formulated by various civilizations, the doctrine of the "great year," the doctrine of kalpas, and so on.

On the other hand, the fate of modern individuals, to undergo historical conditionality in their conceptions, is real and is illustrated by the case of Spengler himself: his entire exposition is rooted in an irrationalistic philosophy of life, an evident product or byproduct of the last European civilization. This philosophy is the last among those that can help us understand the spirit of other civilizations or other phases of a civilization, for instance, starting from our Middle Ages.

Regarding the cyclical development of individual civilizations, Spengler introduced a distinction and a corresponding terminology of debatable value: "culture" (Kultur) versus "civilization" (Zivilisation). In any case, the "culture" phase is the qualitative and differentiated one, tied to the prime-symbols of castle and temple, centered around the two "primeval castes" of nobility and priesthood, emphasizing the values of race, tradition, living custom, a sense of destiny, and artistic intuition. Once the apex of each cycle is surpassed, primarily with the rise of cities, the advent of the Third Estate, and ending with the rule of the masses, all these values wane, and the transition from "culture" to "civilization" occurs. Civilization is an inevitable terminal and twilight phase of each cycle. In civilization, abstract intellect predominates, pure "wakefulness" detached from instinct, race, and cosmic substratum. Here, the inorganic supplants the organic, mechanical randomness supplants lived experience, the world as history gives way to the world as nature, and form yields to formlessness. The advent of machinery, the omnipotence of money and finance, the rule of the masses and the anti-caste, all mark civilization. Its ultimate symbol is the sprawling cosmopolitan metropolis, which absorbs and devours the countryside and its energies. Socially and politically, civilization culminates in Bonapartism and Caesarism: it is formless power in the hands of individuals who despotically control the forces and people of this internally dissolved and twilight world. Beyond this point, there is no more history in the higher sense, nothing holds significance or symbolic power; primitive, ahistorical, "eternal," purely biological forms of the primordial return.

According to Spengler, we are living in the civilization phase of the Euro-Western (or "Faustian") cycle, which began around the year 1000 AD. The concept of the "decline of the West" simply expresses this fact, our destiny. Even the West will experience the end of its cycle, in forms that other civilizations have already experienced, and the form of which can thus be prognosticated going forward.

Spengler can reject the accusation of pessimism here, as he sees this as a simple observation of an inevitable natural phenomenon. To predict the ways in which a civilization will be extinguished is no more pessimistic than describing the phases of decline, old age, and inevitable death in any organism. However, the question would then shift: Spengler can be accused of pessimism not in the specific regard of the phenomenon of "civilization," but rather in the broader context of his doctrine, which is informed by a biological fatalism inappropriately extended to the realm of the philosophy of history.

Since this is the most interesting and worthy point of consideration within our author's theories, it would be wise to add a few more brief remarks.

Just as individual lives, succeeding one another in time, while being closed cycles with more or less the same biological phases, can collectively give expression to a continuity on a higher plane (for example, as history), similarly the theory of civilizations as more or less parallel cycles does not necessarily exclude a broader perspective. Someone who would take the secure guidance of the ancient traditional views already mentioned, notably the doctrine of the four ages, could easily see that while each particular civilization may have had its own distinctive character and may have followed the mentioned course that culminates in a phase of civilization, nevertheless, for the entirety of them, the same rhythm has unfolded since ancient times. Thus, "civilization" seems to be the final term, the terminus ad quem, to which the complex of preceding civilizations appears to have been ordered, and in which an overall process of an involutionary nature is concluding. So much so that within the individual forms of preceding "civilizations," one can almost see partial forms, almost trials or prefigurations, which were to have their most complete, radical, and universal realization only in the Euro-Western civilization, identical to the "modern world." Universal realization, we may say, since the civilization of the recent West is no longer the episode of a specific civilization limited to a particular "landscape." Instead, it is a phenomenon that is gradually encompassing the entire globe, leaving no space where something new can be conceived and a new cycle initiated. Moreover, Spengler acknowledges this by speaking of the "planetary" character that, unlike others, the Faustian civilization presents.

The value of distinguishing between civilization and culture has been recognized for a morphology of history. However, such a distinction should have been further elucidated in the form of two "categories" in the Kantian sense, and two general types of possible organization of human life. This would have given rise to a valuable duality as a guiding thread for discovering, beyond apparent pluralism, the different, antithetical spirit presented by art, science, worship, custom, and so forth, depending on whether they refer to a "culture" or a "civilization.”

In relation to this, if Spengler highlights the characteristics of each civilization quite well, there is much to be said about what would correspond to its opposite for him, namely what is truly and properly culture. One might even question whether Spengler was capable of comprehending the spirit of superior traditional forms of culture, as it appears that he mostly appreciates expressions of a somewhat primitive existence, tied to the countryside and small centers, with qualitative forms, including warlike, priestly, and symbolic elements, and with emphasis placed on the domain of the arts, albeit on a small scale and of short duration. These expressions, however, lack a connection to something transcendent and spiritual in a higher sense. Spengler's philosophy of life leads him to only sense the value of what is vitally confused, what is irrationally and almost unconsciously lived. The forms of a higher consciousness and a transcendence detached from life, which ordains and dominates life and existed at the heart of all major traditional civilizations, are already included by him in the phases of urban degeneration, detachment from origins, and the tyranny that intellectualized "waking-being" exerts on the maternal substrate of life and "being.”

In passing, it can be mentioned that this is the reason why, even though Spengler attaches great importance to the world of symbols and myths, he does not align with the traditionalist tendency that attributes metaphysical content to that world. For Spengler, symbols and myths have more or less the same "vital" and confused meaning attributed to them by irrationalists and psychoanalysts. They are manifestations of the unconscious substrate of life, something that exists not beyond but within the realm of each normal and awakened individual.

It is noteworthy that there is no reference to Vico in Spengler's work. He either completely ignored Vico's ideas or chose to remain silent about this thinker, whose theory of historical recurrences bears analogies to Spengler's, but with the advantage of better-defined historical categories despite various imperfections and digressions. This superiority arises from the fact that Vico drew his inspiration from one of the formulations of the ancient doctrine about the cyclical succession of individual phases of civilization in an involutionary sense. As is known, Vico distinguishes in cyclical development between the sacred period and the heroic one, which then transitions into the merely human and rationalistic period (the "barbarism of reflection"), roughly equivalent to Spengler's phase of "civilization." In Vico's framework, this period represents the same final phenomenon of a "monarchy," understood more or less as a form of "Caesarism." The Spenglerian schema is more incomplete than Vico's because Spengler's confused, irrationalistic interpretation of the spirituality of origins, his commingling of priesthood and nobility in an existential opposition from the outset, hinders the ability to adequately distinguish the sacred phase from the heroic and warrior phase. Furthermore, this would have required an exploration of the "metaphysical dimension" of civilizations, which is lacking in Spengler's historiography (it is significant that he consistently refers to the "soul" of a civilization, but never to its "spirit"). Instead, his work places excessive emphasis on considerations related to the domain of the arts, particularly arts construed in a humanistic sense. Overall, one gets the impression that his morphology almost reduces to a "psychology" of civilizations (hence the use of the term "physiognomy"), rather than serving as a true philosophy or metaphysics of history.

[END PART 1]

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