Oswald Spengler was a fertile thinker of the type that even if wrong in the details there is much of fertile value in the kind of thinking they initiated. That can be said of said of the geometric thought of Plato & the natural history of Aristotle. Though many of our times tend to put much faith in contra-Spenglerian thought, I have not seen they have much to offer. Perhaps Spengler is the last of the lineage of neo-Germanic thought that had more samyag-bodha as opposed to the rAkshasa-bodha seen in Hegel & the dADhImukha. There was also an admixture of the 2 in the likes of the mUlavAtUla German poet Heinrich Heine.
The civilization’s organism-like nature and the tendency of civilizational senescence were important ideas of Spengler. However, it is a pity he remained stuck at old von Goethe & did not grasp the kR^isha-puruSha Darwin’s novelty. In fact bringing in the kR^isha-puruSha’s insights might have helped tighten Spengler’s own thought. The Germanic world seems to have been much impressed by Hugo de Vries mutation hypothesis of evolution, which also impinged on Swiss Gebser who was influenced by Spengler too. While de Vries rediscovered and initially tried to claim credit for Mendelian genetics he did make some key biological discoveries like recombination in the colorfully titled work: ``Befruchtung+++(=fertilization)+++ und Bastardierung’’. However, the German word got less of its more far reaching implications in the Spenglerian sense.
While today much maligned or appropriated,the Spenglerian movement was correct in seeing the biological analogy for civilizational evolution. It is just that the original iteration of the movement did not keep track with the biology which was developing around them, even as the more modern iterates neglect the tremendous leap in our biological understanding. Some of that irony is seen in Hugo de Vries who lived a long life spanning on one side the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics & the apprehension of then new Darwinian theory and the neo-Darwinian foundations of biology by Haldane et al at the other end close to his death. In middle of that frenetic period de Vries, despite his important contributions, faded away.
Some times the mathematization of science can result in precise formulation of a science but also loss of the more general appreciation of its implications. This is what happened with the neo-Darwinian synthesis and its more general implications were largely lost to the less mathematically oriented philosophers after the mid 1930s until computers made it more understandable for a wider audience closer to our times, while also injecting in the new mathematical ideas and beauty from chaos and dynamical systems into the mix.