Heidegger - History, Greek Decline and Spengler

But if we continue to speak of peoples who have 'declined' and the 'declined' Greek world, what then do we know of the essence of historical decline?  What if the decline of the Greek world were that event by which the primordial essence of Being and of truth would be secured back in its own concealedness and thereby first become futural?  What if 'decline' would not be end but beginning?  Every Greek tragedy narrates the decline.  Every one of these declines is a beginning and dawning of the essential.  When Spengler, wholly on the heels of Nietzsche's metaphysics and coarsening it everywhere and leveling it down, speaks of the 'decline of the West,' he is not at 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 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 as it falls back into the concealedness of its beginning -- i.e., it does not decline in the sense of perish, because it can never 'decline' that way.  If, in order to elucidate the δαιμόνιον [daimonion-God of thought], we point here at the essence of the Greek divinities, then we have in mind not antiquated things, or the objects of historiography, but history.  And history is the event of the essential decision about the essence of truth, which event is always a coming one and never something past.  In forgetting, however, we are subservient to the past in the most dire way.


-M. Heidegger.  Parmenides.  1942.


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