A rational, theoretical understanding of the world, Spengler claimed, was possible only at the price of deadening the world and by “forcing the voices of the blood to be silent,” voices that connected every individual to the chain of ancestry and to destiny. Abstract thought, by contrast, was chronically unable to grasp what is truly important, namely, “the when and wherefore, Destiny, blood, all that our intuitive processes touch in our depths.”8 Modernity, then, was a race toward death, a sign of a culture having reached the end of its term.
