The philosophy and decline of the West

Abstract

"The decline of the West," of which the title of this essay speaks, does not exactly coincide with what Spengler understood by that term. Decline of the West means here the dissolution of the idea of a meaning and a unitary direction of the history of mankind, a kind of foundation in the modern tradition of Western thought. He regarded his own civilization as the highest evolutionary level attained by mankind in general, and on this basis felt himself called to civilize, even to colonize, to convert, to subject all the peoples with whom he came in contact.