The morphology of time
The Phase-Clock
Spengler's deepest claim is that every high Culture lives one life — a spring, summer, autumn and winter — and that the calendar lies about history. Here each Culture's life is stretched to the same length, so its births line up at the left and its Civilization-winters at the right. Read straightdown any vertical line and you see the stages he calls “contemporary” — Pericles beside the Baroque, the Sophists beside the Enlightenment — whatever the dates on the wall. The West stands in its winter; the marker shows where.
Hover a band for its dates, or sweep across to read the “contemporaries” down any vertical line.
The phases as a table
- Egyptian Thinite Period (3400 BC–2900 BC) · Old Kingdom (2900 BC–2150 BC) · Middle Kingdom (2150 BC–1580 BC) · New Kingdom (1580 BC–1205 BC)
- Chinese Shang Period (1700 BC–1300 BC) · Early Chou (1300 BC–800 BC) · Late Chou (800 BC–500 BC) · Contending States → Han (500 BC–220 AD)
- Classical Mycenean Age (1600 BC–1100 BC) · Doric (1100 BC–650 BC) · Ionic (650 BC–300 BC) · Hellenism → Rome (300 BC–300 AD)
- Arabian (Magian) Persian-Seleucid (500 BC–0 AD) · Early-Arabian (0 AD–500 AD) · Late-Arabian (500 AD–800 AD) · Caliphates → Mongol (800 AD–1250 AD)
- Western (Faustian) Carolingian (500 AD–900 AD) · Gothic (900 AD–1500 AD) · Baroque (1500 AD–1800 AD) · Modern · projected (1800 AD–2200 AD)
Click a Culture's name to see it set beside the others in theComparative Tables, or trace its ideas in theLexicon.
Each Culture's life is normalized to its own span, so reading down any vertical line shows the stages Spengler calls 'contemporary' — at the same point in the life-cycle, whatever the calendar date. The phase dates are his own, from the Comparative Tables; the alignment by morphological age is his contemporaneity thesis, not a claim of equal calendar duration. The West's Civilization terminus (~2200) is Spengler's forward projection, not a dated fact.The phase dates are transcribed from Decline of the West, Vol. I — phase dates transcribed from the Comparative Tables II (Culture-Epochs) and III (Political-Epochs). —The Decline of the West, Volume 1: Form and Actuality.