Why Cultures Age and Die
Why do cultures develop, age and die? Having looked at how cultures are formed by symbolic interpretations of both incident and nature, we can ask how and why cultures change in very similar sequences through time, enough so that Spengler could identify a four-seasons development of the world views of several societies, beginning with a Spring time and a summer time, the culture phase of Destiny, History, Metaphysics and the soul, and an Autumn and Winter, the Civilisation phase dominated by Nature, Causality, Physics and the intellect.
As the individual ages he may, in his youth, not know for certain what lies ahead but may only see the future as a form of fate; the Prince understands that he will one day become a king but is not certain of what that may entail for his kingdom. But from the opposite end of life man may look to the past and find commonalities among the facts of his day and learn causal Truths from the past; looking to the future from youth, that time which has not yet become, he may only see poetic symbolism, but looking to the past, that which has already become, he can draw up laws and systems based upon empirical and rational observations.
Like wise a culture, as an extension of the individual, nay in Spengler's eyes almost an entity unto itself with it's distinct similarities to an individual's development through life, will, in it's culture phase, not have a clear understanding of the universe as seen from it's world view, be it the Faustian Infinite, the Apollonian Corporeal or the Magian Cavern-like. Thus the world will appear magical and mythical, only able to be interpreted via symbols and generalities. The longer a culture exists the longer amount of time they will be able to look back on and draw lessons from. The innate destiny pictures they notice from the incidents of the past will influence how their models to structure their world might look, resulting in seemingly objective systems such as mathematics or science having very different characters between cultures.
One day they will reach a state of balance between the qualitative interpretation of their world and the progressive quantification of it, resulting in a summer time, a high point, of culture. Then the intellect will over take the spirit, systems and laws derived from centuries of research and philosophizing will shut down the superstitions of the land, the rationalist and his equivalents across time will use their Autumn prime to secure a world without God or metaphysics before the Winter arrives, the spirit of the culture no longer exists in any meaningful form, all that is left of it is a sentiment of a better time, ready to be cancelled out by the callous man of power who now dominates every field of life. Life as part of that particular worldview ceases to be describable as “living” in any sense higher than a primitive struggle for survival and thus the now-dead society leaves behind a corpse of sterile political structures and a litter of now impossible-to-understand technologies and ideas. Then on, one must travel elsewhere to find new world views and cultures sprouting up now free from the influence of the old societies.