Oswald Spengler
Name: | Oswald Spengler |
Date of Birth: | May 29th, 1880 |
Occupation: | Historian, Philosopher |
Ethnicity: | German |
Oswald Spengler was a German reactionary philosopher of the Conservative Revolution school. He advocated a cyclical view of history, based on the rise of the fall of empires and civilizations across historical epochs.
He is most famous for his magnum opus, the Decline of the West, published in 1918-1922 directly after the events of the First World War, which he foresaw and hoped would herald the age of 'Caesarism' (despotism) for his country, Germany.
He was politically a reactionary[1] and his books were banned by the Nazis due to his opposition to biological determinism.
Like many famous philosophers, he never married and lived life as a celibate recluse.[2]
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"Woman is strong and wholly what she is, and she experiences the Man and the sons only in relation to herself and her ordained role. In the masculine being, on the contrary, there is a certain contradiction; he is this man, and he is something else besides, which woman neither understands nor admits, which she feels as robbery and violence upon that which to her is holiest. This secret and fundamental war of the sexes has gone on ever since there were sexes, and will continue - silent, bitter, unforgiving, pitiless - while they continue."
—The Decline of the West, vol. II, Perspectives of World History
"The man climbs up in his history until he has the future of a country in his hands - and then woman comes and forces him to his knees. Peoples and states may go down in ruin over it, but she in her history has conquered. This, in the last analysis, is always the aim of political ambition in a woman of race."
—Ibid
"And not until women cease to have race enough to have or to want children, not until they cease to be history, does it become possible for them to make or to copy the history of men."
—Ibid
"The woman is world-history. By conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life."
—Ibid
"Woman is Sin so the great ascetics felt, as their fellows of the Classical, of China, and of India had felt. The Devil rules only through woman."
—Ibid