Heidegger about Spengler

Exclusively on the basis of Nietzsche’s metaphysics and without any original metaphysical thought, at the start of twentieth century the author O. Spengler drew up a “balance” of Western history and proclaimed “The decline of the Occident”. Today, as in 1918, when the arrogant book of this title came out, an eager public snaps up only the outcome of the “balance” without ever considering, on which basic ideas this cheap balance of decline is concocted. (Parmenides, E56, D82)

When Spengler, wholly on the heels of Nietzsche’s metaphysics and coarsening it everywhere and levelling it down, speaks of the “decline of the West”, he is not a all speaking of history. For he has already in advance devalued history to a “biological process” and made out of history a greenhouse of “cultures” that grow and fade like away like plants. Spengler thinks history, if he thinks at all, in a history-less way. He understands “decline” in the sense of mere coming to an end, i.e., as biologically represented perishing. Animals “decline”, they perish. History declines insofar it falls back into the connectedness of its beginning – i.e., it does not decline in the sense of perish, because it can never “decline” that way. (Parmenides, E113, D168)