DECLINATION OF DECLINE
OSWALD
SPENGLER
& AI
Recognising Patterns
in a Chaotic World
About
DECLINATION PROJECT
Welcome to Declination of Decline, an independent book project on Oswald Spengler and pattern recognition in the age of algorithms! The project was launched in 2025 by Croatian author Mirna Rudan Lisak, PhD, in anticipation of the 90th anniversary of Spengler’s death on 8 May 2026. A dedicated website was the outset of a much longer creative undertaking and intellectual companionship with a thinker who has influenced Mirna for many years. His philosophy was, and still is, the “operating system” of her cultural essays, in which she combines science and the arts. Now she sets The Decline of the West against modern technology, in which AI expands the Faustian drive beyond the physical world.
Mirna’s thesis proposes Spengler’s morphology of history as an early form of pattern recognition, the same operation AI now performs mechanically when identifying recurring structures across vast datasets. In each essay, she extends Spengler’s method to the present, reviving his complex mind to examine whether virtual space continues civilisational expansion or is on the brink of its implosion.
The noun Declination is in collusion with Decline, allowing us to choose whether to see it as refusal, as declension multiplying perspectives on decline, as the celestial arc above the horizon, or as a metaphor for historical rise and fall. Rather than introducing Spengler once more or merely writing about him, the Declination Project uses his philosophy as a lens onto the world he glimpsed but could not yet see, asking whether we can still decline the decline in the 21st century.
Culture
IN THE ERA OF AI AND VIRTUALITY
Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was a German philosopher and political thinker whose two-volume The Decline of the West was one of the bestsellers of interwar Europe. Although his work was praised, he was widely considered controversial, as he rejected the idea of permanent progress and interpreted history as a succession of self-contained high Cultures.
His inexorable worldview defines his morphology of history, in which all Cultures rise in their youth to reach maturity through myth and art, and decline in old age, when they harden into Civilisations through technics and power. Under Goethe’s sway, Spengler’s West is Faustian: irrepressibly expansive and inventive, yet, like any Culture, destined for exhaustion.
Although Spengler’s century-old writings have long been neglected, amid digital acceleration and geopolitical shifts they are newly legible and invite us to test them against the future. Freed of projected nostalgia and doctrine, they help us understand even the emergence of Caesarism—the tendency of late democracies to turn authoritarian from within.
This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us … to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.
Project in motion: Declination of Decline uses the advantages of modern technologies to introduce itself in advance, even before the book is published, to catch the attention of Spenglerian readers in time. It develops in public, moving backwards from design to writing across 2025–2027.
The website was launched in 2025, to be ready for the 90th anniversary of Spengler’s death. It is an act of remembrance, aiming to revisit Spengler’s thought and find out whether and where it still lives today, including in the work of figures who are unaware of the connection but echo his vision.
Spengler’s intellect covered as many as fourteen disciplines, and this book, with Spengler’s “help,” shares that ambition. It is interdisciplinary, uniting culture, history, arts, technology, politics, and sciences, testing his thought and method in an enduring encounter of movement and difficulty, always attempting to see him in full view.
Schedule
FROM CONCEPT TO PUBLICATION
Act 1
— Conceptual Launch
For the 90th anniversary, the web stage of the project is created. Its design is based on a tombstone-inspired logo and modern fonts, with colours reflecting Spengler’s temperament. An acid-yellow accent emanates a digital glow, while discreet hover effects and animations trigger a modern dynamic. The visual environment holds a key to the Declination Project’s deeper intention: to turn this website into a space for Spengler’s return.
Act 2
— Book Development
From 2026 onward, the Declination Project is in its most demanding phase: creative writing. The website is its online platform, providing links to essays as soon as they are published in journals. The development is visible as Mirna tests her ideas against Spengler’s, writing her book in co-creation with her favourite philosopher. His thought is her lens for the Western trajectory he once described and in which she now lives.
Act 3
— Publishing & Events
This is a post-publication space, where announcements will appear for all related public events organised to promote the book and Spengler’s work. It is also a stage for acknowledgements, presentations, dialogues, and encounters with readers and fellow thinkers. If the author survives the work, this will be the right moment to consider whether Declination of Decline should continue beyond this project, or take a bow.
First visit to Spengler: Nordfriedhof, Munich, 8 May 2022