The future of science

Friedrich Nietzsche

With the loss of the impetus of Christianity, cyclical conceptions of history have resurfaced in the West. Let us see how Nietzsche expresses this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Part III, 2.2), at the same time as predicting the replacement of man by the Superman, so he should have been immune to it:

And that spider creeping slowly in the moonlight, and that same moonlight, and you and I, standing before this door chatting about eternal things—must we not all have existed once before? And must we not come again and travel that path that stretches before us, that long and dreadful path? Won't we have to return eternally?

Twentieth-century atheist cosmologists often expressed a preference for a cyclic cosmology, which in their view would make God unnecessary to explain the existence of the universe. Although some of those theories (steady-state cosmology and the alternation of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch) are no longer in vogue, thanks to the data we now have about the origin and future of the universe, new theories continually emerge to replace them.

One hundred years since The Decline of the West

Oswald Spengler

This year it will mark one century since the publication in 1918 of the first volume of the book The Decline of the West, by Oswald Spengler. The second volume was published five years later, in 1923. This book was the first to raise the idea that our famed Western civilization is in decline. What can we say about it, a hundred years later?

The great historian of the twentieth century, Arnold J. Toynbee, agreed with Spengler on his fundamental idea, although not in the details. For Toynbee, Western civilization collapsed in the twentieth century, when the two world wars proved its inability to face new challenges. Of course, for Toynbee, the collapse of a civilization does not mean its disappearance, it does not even prelude it. We still have ahead - according to him - a few centuries of what Toynbee calls the Universal Empire, linked, however, to a certain cultural stagnation.

The first thing we have to notice is: if Spengler actually managed to detect the decadence of our civilization, it means that the decline had begun much earlier. Evolutionary movements, both biological and cultural, are imperceptible at the beginning. When they become visible, they are quite advanced in their development.