- Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West: An Abridged
Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1918, 1922,
1932, 1959, 1961] 1991. ISBN 0-19-506634-0.
- Only rarely do I read abridged editions. I chose
this volume simply because it was the only readily-available
English translation of the work. In retrospect, I don't think
I could have handled much more Spengler, at least in one dose.
Even in English, reading Spengler conjures up images of great
mountain ranges of polysyllabic German philosophical prose. For
example, chapter 21 begins with the following paragraph. “Technique is as old as free-moving
life itself. The original relation between a waking-microcosm
and its macrocosm—‘Nature’—consists in a mental
sensation which rises from mere sense-impressions
to sense-judgement, so that already it works
critically (that is, separatingly) or, what comes to the same thing,
causal-analytically”. In this abridged edition
the reader need cope only with a mere 415 pages of such text. It is
striking the extent to which today's postmodern nostrums of cultural
relativism were anticipated by Spengler.
April 2004 