It may legitimately be observed (with the lightness and peculiar brutality of such observations) that the philosophers of England and France are directly interested in the universe itself, or in one or another of its features, while the Germans tend to consider it a simple motive, a mere material cause for their enormous dialectical edifices, which are always groundlеss but always grandiose. Their passion is for the propеr symmetry of systems, not for any eventual correspondence with the impure and disorderly universe. The latest of these illustrious Germanic architects -- a fitting successor to Albertus Magnus, Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Kant, Herder, Novalis, Hegel -- is Spengler.

Spengler was born on May 29, 1880, in the town of Blankenburgam­ Harz, in the duchy of Brunswick. He studied in Munich and Berlin. At the beginning of this century he completed a degree in philosophy and letters; his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus (Halle, 1904) was the only thing he published before the sensational work that would make him famous. Spengler spent six years writing The Decline of the West. Six stubborn years in a hungry Munich tenement, in a lugubrious room that faced a destitute landscape of chimneys and grimy rooftops. During this period, Oswald Spengler owns no books. He spends his mornings at the public library, lunches in working­ class cafeterias, drinks vast, scalding quantities of tea when ill. Around 1915, he finishes revising the first volume. He has no friends. Secretly, he compares himself to Germany, which is also alone.

In the summer of 1918, The Decline of the West appears in Vienna.

Schopenhauer wrote: "There is no general science of history. History is the insignificant tale of humanity's interminable, weighty, fragmented dream." In his book, Spengler set out to demonstrate that history could be something more than a mere gossipy enumeration of individual facts. He wanted to determine its laws, lay down the foundations of a morphology of cultures. His manly pages, composed in the period between 1912 and 1917, were never contaminated by the singular hatred of those years.

Around 1920, his glory began.

Spengler rented an apartment on the Isar River, lingered amorously over the purchase of several thousand books, collected Persian, Turkish, and Hindu weaponry, climbed high mountains, and denied himself to the persistence of photographers. Above all, he wrote. He wrote Pessimism (1921), Political Duties of German Youth (1924), Reconstruction of the German State (1926).

Oswald Spengler died in the middle of this year. His biological concept of history is open to debate, but not the splendor of his style.

[1936] [EA]