Exclusively on the basis of Nietzsche's metaphysics and without any original metaphysical thought, at the start of the twentieth century the author O. Spengler drew up a "balance" of Western history and proclaimed "The decline of the Occident." Today, as in 1918, when the arrogant book of this title came out, an eager public snaps up only the outcome of the "balance" without ever considering on which basic ideas of history this cheap balance of decline is concocted. In fact it had already been reckoned up clearly by Nietzsche, though thought out in a different way and in other dimensions. To be sure, the guild of serious researchers computed the "errors" of the book. This had the remarkable result that since then historiography itself has been conducted more and more within the horizon of Spengler's views and schemata, even where it was naturally able to make "more correct" and "more exact" constatations. Only to an age which had already forsaken every possibility of thoughtful reflection could an author present such a book, in the execution of which a brilliant acumen, an enormous erudition, and a strong gift for categorization are matched by an unusual pretension of judgment, a rare superficiality of thinking, and a pervasive frailty of foundations. This confusing semi-scholarship and carelessness of thinking has been accompanied by the peculiar state of affairs that the same people who decry the priority of the biological thinking in Nietzsche's metaphysics find contentment in the aspects of decline in the Spenglerian vision, which is based throughout on nothing but a crude biological interpretation of history.
Modern views of history, since the nineteenth century, like to speak about "meaning-conferral." This term suggests that man, on his own, is capable of "lending" a "meaning" to history, as if man had something to lend out at all, and as if history needed such a loan, all of which indeed presupposes that history "in itself" and at first is meaningless and in every case has to wait for the favor of a meaning bestowed by man. But what man is capable of in relation to history is to pay heed to it and to take care that history does not conceal from him its meaning and refuse it to him. But, as the case of Spengler shows, man has already lost the meaning of history when he has deprived himself of the very possibility of thinking about what, in the hastiness of drawing up "historiographical" balances, he is investing in the word "meaning." "Meaning" is the truth in which a being as such rests. The "meaning" of history, however, is the essence of truth, in which at any time the truth of a human epoch is founded. We experience the essence of the true only on the basis of the essence of truth, which in each case lets something true be the true that it is. We shall attempt here and now to take some steps in reflecting on the essence of truth.