TIME, DECLINE, AND THE NEUROAESTHETICS OF THE SUBLIME: EMIL CIORAN, OSWALD SPENGLER, AND THE CULTURAL MORPHOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Abstract

This article examines the intersection of Emil Cioran’s phenomenology of temporal decay, Oswald Spengler’s morphological theory of cultural decline, and contemporary neuroaesthetic research grounded in predictive processing and embodied cognition. While both Cioran and Spengler share an intuition of civilisational exhaustion, they articulate decline through distinct epistemological frameworks: Spengler embeds it within a cyclical, quasi-organic model of cultural morphology, whereas Cioran internalises decline as an existential disturbance of consciousness, shaped by insomnia, scepticism, and a mysticism without God. To situate their dialogue within current scientific paradigms, the article integrates empirical findings from neuroaesthetics, particularly studies demonstrating co-activation of reward circuitry, modulation of the default mode network, and interoceptive recalibration during intense aesthetic experience. Reinterpreting Cioran’s and Spengler’s concepts through predictive-processing theory, the article proposes that cultural decline can be understood as a destabilisation of high-level priors that ordinarily organise perception, affect, and temporal orientation. Decline thus appears not only as a historical or philosophical construct but also as a disruption in the brain’s hierarchies of prediction and sense-making. The article argues that aesthetic experience—and especially the sublime—emerges simultaneously as a cultural phenomenon, a neurobiological event, and an existential confrontation with temporal finitude. Under conditions of historical or subjective destabilisation, art functions both diagnostically, by revealing tensions in cultural or cognitive structures, and compensatorily, by offering transient reorganisation of perceptual and affective priors. Bringing Cioran and Spengler into conversation with contemporary neuroscience, the article reframes cultural decline as an interplay between morphology, consciousness, and the predictive brain.