8. The Prophecies of Oswald Spengler
or, He Wasn’t Wrong … Just Early
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
– George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress
“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History
A darkly contrarian landmark in the reckoning of world history: this was Der Untergang des Abendlandes – The Decline of the West. From out of the blue its first volume appeared in July 1918, shortly before the cataclysm of the First World War came to its fateful end; the author was an unknown German schoolmaster named Oswald Spengler, who had left his profession to embark on the precarious career of an independent scholar. The second and concluding volume of The Decline of the West followed in 1922, and in those years of upheaval and crisis its message of inevitable decay seemed prophetic, delivered by a massive work on the philosophy of history (935 pages in the English translation, exclusive of indices!) that became an unlikely bestseller in Germany, and later throughout the world.
Certain contradictions can be found in Spengler’s ideas, but then, it might be said that author himself was a mass of contradictions. In his declared outlook he was thoroughly Prussian, a stern advocate of strength, order, duty, and discipline; yet was subject to chronic episodes of anxiety and terrifying nightmares (“I never had a month without thoughts of suicide”, he once admitted), suffered severe migraine headaches (which on one occasion caused short term memory loss), and was afflicted with extreme near-sightedness and a serious heart condition, which prevented his service in the army (heart failure ultimately killed him in 1936 at age 55). In his writing he celebrated man as a “beast of prey”, describing warlike policies as admirable and pacifism as decadent; yet his sister Hildegarde characterized him as soft and unstable, a man who wept often in the theater or when impressed with a beautiful work of art. In his politics he was an arch-conservative who was violently opposed to the Weimar Republic and voted for the Nazis in their ascent to power; yet also denounced the anti-Semitism and racial theories of the Nazis as idiotic, thought Hitler was a fool, and steadfastly refused to become a member of the Nazi party himself – all of which eventually led to the suppression of his works in Germany, with any mention of him forbidden in the press. It may be that these contradictions were the product of a conflict within himself, a conflict mirrored in his environment: of a European civilization supposedly devoted to moral and material progress, yet riven by struggles for power between its member states, and devoted to brutal imperialism abroad. Further, he was a product of an upstart Germany forged in war under Prussian militarism, a powerful new nation that sought its “rightful” place in a Europe fearful of its ascendancy; a situation which somehow had be reconciled with an insecure, intelligent, and acutely sensitive nature. As he put it in the Preface to the Revised Edition of Volume I of The Decline of the West:
“A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the world which was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but rather discovers within himself. It is himself over again: his being expressed in words; the meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so far as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life are identical.”
Ultimately, it was in The Decline of the West itself that the most profound of Spengler’s intellectual contradictions were formulated. Though he was an ardent champion of Germany and its Kultur, the work’s major thesis was that world history consisted of a whole succession of great cultures, each of which was a self-contained entity that had its own outlook, its own accomplishments, its own art, its own importance – as opposed to the notion, generally current at the time (and perhaps, to a great extent, still), that history proceeded in a single path from the ancient through the medieval to the modern, with the West representing the culmination of a continuous line of progress. From The Decline of the West, Volume I, Chapter I: Introduction:
“Thanks to the subdivision of history into ‘Ancient’, ‘Medieval’, and ‘Modern’ – an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme, which has, however, entirely dominated our historical thinking – we have failed to perceive the true position in the general history of higher mankind of the little part-world which has developed on West European soil from the time of the German-Roman Empire, to judge of its relative importance and above all to estimate its direction.
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“It is not only that the scheme circumscribes the area of history. What is worse, it rigs the stage. The ground of West Europe is treated as a steady pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it – and great histories of millennial duration and mighty faraway Cultures are made revolve around this pole in all modesty. It is a quaintly conceived system of sun and planets! We select a single bit of ground as the natural center of the historical system, and make it the central sun. From it all events of history receive their real light, from it their importance is judged in perspective. But it is in our own West-European conceit alone that this phantom ‘world-history’, which a breath of skepticism would dissipate, is acted out.”
Thus an early version of multi-culturalism, incredibly enough, would seem to have been conceived by Spengler (in apparent contradiction to his fervent nationalism). In The Decline of the West he identified eight “high cultures”: Classical, Western, Arabian, Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, Indian, and Mexican, each of which he felt had its own unique “soul” or spirit (or perhaps “worldview”, in reference to a previous essay by the present author) – a particular outlook which permeated it in the aggregate. Only the first three cultures received any detailed treatment by Spengler, however, the spirit of Classical culture being characterized as Apollinian, that of Western culture as Faustian, and that of Arabian as Magian. In particular, he contrasted an Apollinian spirit devoted to an eternal present, with a Faustian that instead sought limitlessness and infinity. Again, from The Decline of the West, Volume I, Chapter I: Introduction:
“The memory of the Classical man – so to call it, though it is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls a notion derived from our own – is something different, since past and future, as arraying perspectives in the working consciousness, are absent and the ‘pure Present’, which so often roused Goethe’s admiration in every product of the Classical life and in sculpture particularly, fills that life with an intensity that to us is perfectly unknown.
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“As regards Classical history-writing, take Thucydides. The mastery of this man lies in his truly Classical power of making alive and self-explanatory the events of the present, and also in his possession of the magnificently practical outlook of the born statesman who has himself been both general and administrator. In virtue of this quality of experience (which we unfortunately confuse with the historical sense proper), his work confronts the merely learned and professional historian as an inimitable model, and quite rightly so. But what is absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective, the power of surveying the history of centuries, that which for us is implicit in the very conception of a historian. The fine pieces of Classical history-writing are invariably those which set forth matters within the political present of the writer, whereas for us it is the direct opposite, our historical masterpieces without exception being those which deal with a distant past. Thucydides would have broken down in handling even the Persian Wars, let alone the general history of Greece, while that of Egypt would have been utterly out of his reach. He, as well as Polybius and Tacitus (who like him were practical politicians), loses his sureness of eye from the moment when, in looking backwards, he encounters motive forces in any form that are unknown in his practical experience. For Polybius even the First Punic War, for Tacitus even the reign of Augustus, are inexplicable. As for Thucydides, his lack of historical feeling – in our sense of the phrase – is conclusively demonstrated on the very first page of his book by the astounding statement that before his time (about 400 B.C.) no events of importance had occurred in the world!”
Spengler also went on to contrast the Apollinian spirit with that of ancient Egypt (though he did not assign a special name to the latter):
“The Egyptian soul, conspicuously historical in its texture and impelled with primitive passion towards the infinite, perceived past and future as its whole world, and the present (which is identical with waking consciousness) appeared to him as simply the narrow common frontier of two immeasurable stretches. The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of care – which is the spiritual counterpoise of distance – care for the future expressed in the choice of granite or basalt as craftsman’s materials, in the chiseled archives, in the elaborate administrative system, in the net of irrigation works, and, necessarily bound up therewith, care for the past. The Egyptian mummy is a symbol of the first importance. The body of the dead man was made everlasting, just as his personality, his ‘Ka’, was immortalized through the portrait-statuettes, which were often made in many copies and to which it was conceived to be attached by a transcendental likeness.
“There is a deep relation between the attitude that is taken towards the historic past and the conception that is formed of death, and this relation is expressed in the disposal of the dead. The Egyptian denied mortality, the Classical man affirmed it in the whole symbolism of his Culture. The Egyptians embalmed even their history in chronological dates and figures. From pre-Solonian Greece nothing has been handed down, not a year-date, not a true name, not a tangible event – with the consequence that the later history (which alone we know) assumes undue importance – but for Egypt we possess, from the 3rd millennium and even earlier, the names and even exact reign-dates of many of the kings, and the New Empire must have had a complete knowledge of them.
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“In opposition to this mighty group of Egyptian life-symbols, we meet at the threshold of the Classical Culture the custom, typifying the ease with which it could forget every piece of its inward and outward past, of burning the dead.”
However, though each of the high cultures differed fundamentally in spirit, and thus differed in the life and art expressed by that spirit, it was Spengler’s contention that the same basic pattern of development and decline was shared by all, a pattern that was identifiable through a proper application of historical analogy. From The Decline of the West, Volume I, Chapter I: Introduction:
“The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.
“It is, and always has been, a matter of knowledge that the expression-forms of world-history are limited in number, and that eras, epochs, situations, persons, are ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon has hardly ever been discussed without a side-glance at Caesar and Alexander – analogies of which, as we shall see, the first is quite morphologically inacceptable and the second is correct – while Napoleon himself conceived of his situation as akin to Charlemagne’s. The French Revolutionary Convention spoke of Carthage when it meant England, and the Jacobins styled themselves as Romans. Other such comparisons, of all degrees of soundness and unsoundness, are those of Florence with Athens, Buddha with Christ, primitive Christianity with modern Socialism, the Roman financial magnate of Caesar’s time with the Yankee. Petrarch, the first passionate archaeologist (and is not archaeology itself an expression of the sense that history is repetition?) related himself mentally to Cicero, and but lately Cecil Rhodes, the organizer of British South Africa, who had in his library specially prepared translations of the classical lives of the Caesars, felt himself akin to the Emperor Hadrian. The fated Charles XII of Sweden used to carry Quintus Curtius’s life of Alexander in his pocket, and to copy that conqueror was his deliberate purpose.”
According to Spengler, the basic pattern followed by all high cultures is one similar to that of organic life: birth, followed by a vigorous youth, maturity, a fading old age, and finally death:
“We know it to be true of every organism that the rhythm, form, and duration of its life, and all the expression-details of that life as well, are determined by the properties of its species. No one, looking at the oak, with its millennial life, dare say that it is at this moment, now, about to start on its true and proper course. No one as he sees a caterpillar grow day by day expects that it will go on doing so for two or three years. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, we take our ideas as to the course of the future from an unbridled optimism that sets at naught all historical, i.e. organic, experience, and everyone therefore sets himself to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof but on predilection. He works upon unlimited possibilities – never a natural end – and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans artlessly the continuation of his structure.
“Mankind”, however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. “Mankind” is a zoological expression, or an empty word. But conjure away the phantom, break the magic circle, and at once there emerges an astonishing wealth of actual forms – the Living with all its immense fullness, depth, and movement – hitherto veiled by a catchword, a dry-as-dust scheme, and a set of personal “ideals”. I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image, each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will, and feeling, its own death.”
The period of youthful vigor of a society was called its Kultur by Spengler (simply rendered as Culture in the English translation, though not, as will be seen, with complete accuracy): a time of creative development in the arts, modes of life, and the organization of society, that may last for roughly a thousand years or so. This is always eventually followed by Zivilisation (rendered as Civilization in English), when truly important creativity has ended (and with it genuine “history”), survived only by barren quests for money and imperial power, under the rule of hegemonic “Caesarism”. During the transition between the two comes the “era of Contending States”, when various power centers struggle to achieve dominion over all the others within a given high culture. An important point of these ideas is that, according to Spengler, the transformation of Kultur into Zivilisation, like the cycle of birth and decline for living organisms, is inevitable. From The Decline of the West, Volume I, Chapter I:
“What is Civilization, understood as the organic-logical sequel, fulfillment, and finale of a culture?
“For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.
“So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the meaning of the fact – which can only be disputed by vain phrases – that the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An imagination directed purely to practical objects – they had religious laws governing godward relations as they had other laws governing human relations, but there was no specifically Roman saga of gods – was something which is not found at all in Athens. In a word, Greek soul – Roman intellect; and this antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is it only to the Classical that it applies. Again and again there appears this type of strong-minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the hands of this type lies the intellectual and material destiny of each and every “late” period. Such are the men who carried through the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Roman Civilizations, and in such periods do Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism ripen into definitive world-conceptions which enable a moribund humanity to be attacked and re-formed in its intimate structure. Pure Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-down of forms that have become inorganic or dead.”
In English, the terms “culture” and “civilization” have related but somewhat different meanings; for example, one might speak of a primitive culture, but not civilization. Evidently, in German the terms are further differentiated, the concept of Kultur generally dealing with matters of an artistic, intellectual, and religious nature, while Zivilisation is concerned with the political, economic, and social spheres – this differentiation sometimes becoming even more pronounced, in usages that express outright opposition: natural versus artificial, creativity versus sterility, intuition versus rationalism, vitality versus decadence. Thus Spengler’s employment of the terms for his idea of the two phases of society was natural, and his meanings should be kept in mind when reading the English translation (as in regard, for instance, to his statement that “Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated.”)
An essential feature of Spengler’s Zivilisation is the eventual appearance of Caesarism:
“By the term “Caesarism” I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that Augustus in Rome, and Huang Ti in China, Amasis in Egypt, and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead, and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centered in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place. It is the recidive of a form-fulfilled world into primitivism, into the cosmic-historyless. Biological stretches of time once more take the place vacated by historical periods.
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“Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of the Contending States, torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. A hundred years more and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies. Already by Caesar’s time reputable people had almost ceased to take part in the elections. It embittered the life of the great Tiberius that the most capable men of his time held aloof from politics and Nero could not even by threats compel the Equites to come to Rome in order to exercise their rights. This is the end of the great politics.”
These concepts of a multitude of high cultures possessing their own unique spirits, of Kultur inevitably transforming into Zivilisation in tandem with a period of Contending States, and the coming of a hegemonic Caesarism of formless power, constitute the most basic tenets of The Decline of the West. But Spengler also delved extensively into matters concerning art, religion, mathematics, architecture, technology, music, literature, economics, science, and urban life, insofar as these related to his basic premises. Indeed, in studying The Decline of the West it becomes apparent that its author was widely read – amazingly so – the vast range of knowledge he accumulated serving to inform his intuitive “gestalt” vision of history.
However, whatever his erudition, Spengler’s methodology and conclusions were certainly unconventional; and no matter how far reaching, any individual’s inventory of knowledge must always be limited, in both extent and accuracy. Thus it should not be surprising, perhaps, that after its publication and initial popular success, The Decline of the West was greeted with a wave of scholarly criticism, which at first was uniformly negative, attacking it for various errors of detail, for its intuitive (as opposed to scientific) approach, and perhaps most of all for its message of inevitable decay and fall. In fact, Spengler may well have erred by stating his positions too dogmatically (particularly as influenced by his conservative ideology), and in attempting to build an excessively detailed structure of historical analogies upon his fundamental premises. Yet certain of those premises eventually gained support from important voices, first from Manfred Schroeter, who felt that Spengler’s intuitive methods were essential to an understanding of history (complementing the systematic approach of others), while the highly respected historian Eduard Meyer came to endorse Spengler’s comparative technique of cultural study and his thesis of decline (while criticizing some of his subsidiary conclusions).
In any case, the controversy finally died down, while in the meantime Spengler turned to contemporary politics. In between the two volumes of The Decline of the West he produced Prussianism and Socialism [Preussentum und Sozialismus], in which he expounded on his conservative (and often idiosyncratic) political views. His “Prussianism” was a fairly conventional expression of prevailing German conservatism, but the “Socialism” he advocated was one without effective labor unions or the right to strike, which instead was to be completely dedicated to service to the state. Thus, in spite of his thoroughgoing opposition to Bolshevism, his version of socialism bore a striking resemblance – ironically – to that which would hereafter be practiced in the Soviet Union.
Though Spengler made many attempts to influence the political situation in Germany, in the end he largely failed. His call for advancement by merit in the hierarchy of the ruling order would not have appealed to the established gentry; his advocacy of socialism, even in a corporatism devoted to state service, could not wholly recommend itself to conservatives (though many of his ideas did find favor with them); and of course his Prussian concept of socialism could only be rejected by democratic socialists. Thus his proposals essentially fell between chairs, having limited attraction for any major sector of society – and most importantly, he himself was an intellectual, rather than a politician or organizer. At any rate, Germany’s disordered state of affairs began to stabilize in 1924, and in this new atmosphere of moderation the Weimar Republic, which Spengler so despised, came to receive a widespread, if often grudging, acceptance.
Frustrated in his ambition to influence the political situation (in spite of continued attempts to do so), Spengler turned to his first love, the study of history. Specifically, he commenced an effort construct an account of human pre-history – that is, the story of early cultures that preceded the “high cultures” dealt with in The Decline of the West. The work that was intended to result was titled Urfragen (Primal Questions), but unfortunately little progress was ever made on it, aside from an accumulation of notes. This was due to the monumental nature of the effort, coupled with the limited knowledge about the prehistory of mankind in Spengler’s day – as well as the unfortunate fact that his health was beginning to fail.
Nevertheless, in 1931 he produced Man and Technics [Der Mensch und die Technik], a short but extraordinary volume that dealt with the meaning of technology within the wider context of the “technique of living” (technics), as it has evolved from prehistory to the modern era. From Chapter I:
“If we are to understand the essence of Technics, we must not start from the technics of the machine age, and still less from the misleading notion that the fashioning of machines and tools is the aim of technics. For, in reality, technics is immemorially old, and moreover it is not something historically specific, but something immensely general.
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“Technics is not to be understood in terms of the implement. What matters is not how one fashions things, but what one does with them; not the weapon, but the battle. Modern warfare, in which the decisive element is tactics – that is, the technique of running the war, the techniques of inventing, producing, and handling the weapons being only items in the process as a whole – points a general truth. There are innumerable techniques in which no implements are used at all, that of a lion outwitting a gazelle, for instance, or that of diplomacy. Or, again, the technics of administration, which consists in keeping the State in form for the struggles of political history.
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“Every struggle with a problem calls for a logical technique. There is a technique of the painter’s brush-strokes, of horsemanship, of navigating an airship. Always it is a matter of purposive activity, never of things. And it is just this that is so often overlooked in the study of pre-history, in which far too much attention is paid to things in museums and far too little to the innumerable processes that must have been in existence, even though they may have vanished without leaving a trace.“Every machine serves some one process and owes its existence to thought about this process. All our means of transport have developed out of the ideas of driving and rowing, sailing and flying, and not out of any concept such as that of a wagon or of a boat. Methods themselves are weapons. And consequently technics is in no wise a “part” of economics, any more than economics (or, for that matter, war or politics) can claim to be a self-contained “part” of life.”
Moreover, the manner in which the human species employs and develops technics is unique to it, in fact is essential to its very nature, as noted in Chapter II:
“Bees, termites, beavers build wonderful structures. Ants know agriculture, road-making, slavery, and war-management. Nursing, fortification, organized migration are found widely spread. All that man can do, one or another sort of animal has achieved. Free-moving life in general contains tendencies that exist, dormant, as potentialities. Man achieves nothing that is not achievable by life as a whole.
“And yet – all this has at bottom nothing whatever to do with human technics. This generic technique is unalterable; that is what the word “instinct” means.
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“The unique fact about human technics, on the contrary, is that it is independent of the life of the human genus. It is the one instance in all the history of life in which the individual frees himself from the compulsion of the genus. One has to meditate long upon this thought if one is to grasp its immense implications. Technics in man’s life in conscious, arbitrary, alterable, personal, inventive. It is learned and improved. Man has become the creator of his tactics of living – that is his grandeur and his doom. And the inner form of this creativeness we call culture – to be cultured, to cultivate, to suffer from culture. The man’s creations are the expression of this being in personal form.”
However, the development of technics has also separated the human species from nature, placing it in opposition to forces that cannot, in the end, be defeated. From Chapter III:
“And this soul strides forward in an ever-increasing alienation from all Nature. The weapons of the beasts of prey are natural, but the armed fist of man with its artificially made, thought-out, and selected weapon is not. Here begins “Art” as a counter-concept to “Nature”. Every technical process of man is an art and is always so described – so, for instance, archery and equitation, the art of war, the arts of building and government, of sacrificing and prophesying, of painting and versification, of scientific experiment. Every work of man is artificial, unnatural, from the lighting of a fire to the achievements that are specifically designated as “artistic” in the high Cultures. The privilege of creation has been wrested from Nature. “Free will” itself is an act of rebellion and nothing less. Creative man has stepped outside the bounds of Nature, and with every fresh creation he departs further and further from her, becomes more and more her enemy. That is his “world-history”, the history of a steadily increasing, fateful rift between man’s world and the universe – the history of a rebel that grows up to raise his hand against his mother.
“This is the beginning of man’s tragedy – for Nature is the stronger of the two. Man remains dependent on her, for in spite of everything she embraces him, like all else, within herself. All the great cultures are defeats. Whole races remain, inwardly destroyed and broken, fallen into barrenness and spiritual decay, as corpses on the field. The fight against Nature is hopeless and yet – it will be fought out to the bitter end.”
The development of human technics also carries a meaning that is not dwelled on by those who continue to advance it, as Spengler had already touched upon in Chapter I:
“Movement on these paths we call Progress. This was the great catchword of last century. Men saw history before them like a street on which, bravely and ever forward, marched “mankind” – meaning by that term the white races, or more exactly the inhabitants of their great cities, or more exactly still the “educated” amongst them.
“But whither? For how long? And what then?
“It was a little ridiculous, this march on infinity, towards a goal which men did not seriously think about or clearly figure to themselves or, really, dare to envisage – for a goal is an end. No one does a thing without thinking of the moment when he shall have attained that which he willed. No one starts a war, or a voyage, or even a mere stroll, without thinking of its direction and its conclusion. Every truly creative human being knows and dreads the emptiness that follows upon the completion of a work.
“To development belongs fulfillment – every revolution has a beginning, and every fulfillment is an end. To youth belongs age; to arising, passing; to life, death.”
And of all the high cultures, it is the West that has brought the development of technics to its highest level, impelled by its own Faustian desire for limitless and infinity. From Chapter V:
“Man, evidently, was tired of merely having plants and animals and slaves to serve him, and robbing Nature’s treasures of metal and stone, wood and yarn, of managing her water in canals and wells, of breaking her resistances with ships and roads, bridges and tunnels and dams. Now he meant, not merely to plunder her of her materials, but to enslave and harness her very forces so as to multiply his own strength. This monstrous and unparalleled idea is as old as the Faustian Culture itself. Already in the tenth century we meet with technical constructions of a wholly new sort. Already the steam engine, the steamship, and the air machine are in the thoughts of Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus. And many a monk busied himself in his cell with the idea of Perpetual Motion.
“This last idea never thereafter let go its hold on us, for success would mean the final victory over “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura), a small world of one’s own creation moving like the great world, in virtue of its own forces and obeying the hand of man alone. To build a world oneself, to be oneself God – that is the Faustian inventor’s dream, and from it has sprung all our designing and re-designing of machines to approximate as nearly as possible to the unattainable limit of perpetual motion.”
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“Finally, with the coming of rationalism, the belief in technics almost becomes a materialistic religion. Technics is eternal and immortal like God the Father, it delivers mankind like God the Son, and it illumines us like God the Holy Ghost. And its worshipper is the progress-philistine of the modern age which runs from Lamettrie to Lenin.”
But what those of the West can achieve, the peoples of the non-Western world may be able to imitate, turning the achievements against their originators:
“And so presently the “natives” saw into our secrets, understood them, and used them to the full. Within thirty years the Japanese became technicians of the first rank, and in their war against Russia they revealed a technical superiority from which their teachers were able to learn may lessons. Today more or less everywhere – in the Far East, India, South America, South Africa – industrial regions are in being, or coming into being, which, owing to their low scales of wages, will face us with a deadly competition.
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“The exploited world is beginning to take its revenge on its lords. The innumerable hands of the colored races – at least as clever, and far less exigent – will shatter the economic organization of the whites at its foundations. The accustomed luxury of the white workman, in comparison with the coolie, will be his doom. The labor of the white is itself coming to be unwanted. The huge masses of men centered in the Northern coal areas, the great industrial works, the capital invested in them, whole cities and districts, are faced with the probability of going under in the competition. The center of gravity of production is steadily shifting away from them, especially since even the respect of the colored races for the white has been ended by the World War. This is the real and final basis of the unemployment that prevails in the white countries. It is no mere crisis, but the beginning of a catastrophe.”
And finally, the very achievements of technics, opposed to nature as they necessarily are, will ultimately produce a deadly reckoning for humanity itself:
“But it is of the tragedy of the time that this unfettered human thought can no longer grasp its own consequences. Technics has become as esoteric as the higher mathematics which it uses, while physical theory has refined its intellectual abstractions from phenomena to such a pitch that (without clearly perceiving the fact) it has reached the pure foundations of human knowing. The mechanization of the world has entered on a phase of highly dangerous over-tension. The picture of the earth, with its plants, animals, and men, has altered. In a few decades most of the great forests have gone, to be turned into news-print, and climatic changes have been thereby set afoot which imperil the land-economy of whole populations. Innumerable animal species have been extinguished, or nearly so, like the bison; while races of humanity have been brought almost to vanishing-point, like the North American Indian and the Australian.
“All things organic are dying in the grip of organization. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fashion. We think only in horse-power now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power; we cannot survey a countryside full of pasturing cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of meat-supply; we cannot look at the beautiful old handwork of an unspoilt primitive people without wishing to replace it by a modern technical process. Our technical thinking must have its actualization, sensible or senseless. The luxury of the machine is the consequence of a necessity of thought. In last analysis, the machine is a symbol, like its secret ideal, perpetual motion – a spiritual and intellectual, but no vital necessity.”
All this from a voice of 1931.
Two years after the dire predictions of Man and Technics there appeared Spengler’s final published work, titled The Hour of Decision in its English translation [Jahre der Entscheidung in the original German]. In it, he returned to the subject of contemporary politics, impelled to do so by the rise to power of the Nazi party, and his concern for the fate of Germany under its rule. From the book’s Introduction:
“No one can know what forms, situations, and personalities will arise out of this upheaval, or the reactions which may result from outside. Every revolution makes the external situation of a country worse, and that fact alone requires statesmen of Bismarck's order to deal with it. We stand, it may be, close before a second world war, unable to gauge the distribution of forces or to foresee its means or aims – military, economic, revolutionary. We have no time to limit ourselves to home politics; we have to be “in form” to deal with any conceivable occurrence. Germany is not an island. If we fail to see our relation to the world as – for us in particular – the important problem, fate – and what a fate! – will submerge us without mercy.”
Spengler certainly welcomed the end of the Weimar Republic and the “revolution” that replaced it with the Third Reich. However, he by no means considered Hitler to be a statesman “of Bismarck’s order”, and in The Hour of Decision expressed a number of subtle criticisms of the new regime. These were not immediately recognized, and so the book’s publication was permitted, initially gaining it a wide distribution. But those in power eventually caught on, and then the new work was vociferously condemned, the appearance of a second and concluding part for it becoming impossible.
And so, having become politically isolated, as well personally (by his own reclusiveness), engaged in a project dealing with the prehistory of mankind that could not possibly be completed, and in increasingly poor health, Oswald Spengler died of heart failure on May 8, 1936.
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A crucial feature of Spengler’s historical writing (in fact, perhaps its very essence) lay in its element of prophecy. That is, that the course of future history, in its broad outline, could be predicted, based on recurrent patterns that could be seen in every advanced culture. As he put it in Chapter I, Volume I of The Decline of the West:
“In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untraveled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfillment – the West-European-American.”
What, then, was the result of Spengler’s attempt? Could he truly be called a prophet?
In the matter of a key prediction for the future of the West, that it would see the rise of a hegemonic power after a “period of contending states”, Spengler’s analysis does indeed appear to have been prophetic. Just as the city-states of Greece, having expended themselves in endless internecine wars, eventually fell under the rule of a power on the periphery – first Macedonia, then Rome – so too did the West, in the destructive aftermath of the World Wars, come to be dominated by another power on the periphery: namely the United States, in a position so commanding that it can only be described as a hegemony. Currently, the domain of this hegemonic power includes an “anglosphere” made up of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the entirety of the original Western homeland of Europe, plus Japan and South Korea (occupied by the U.S. as a result of war), along with the crucial outpost of Israel in the Middle East. The marked subordination of the subject members of the hegemony could clearly be discerned no later than the Suez Crisis of 1956, and the degree of this subordination has only increased over the years, as recently seen in the lockstep deference by the member states to U.S.-led NATO during the Russia-Ukraine war. It is true that Russia and China currently stand in opposition to the Western hegemony; but then, Rome itself never overcame either Parthia or the German tribes. The existence of external opposition does not mean that hegemony does not exist within its own extensive sphere.
However, while its central point was well-founded, certain details of Spengler’s prediction of a new hegemony have proved to be less accurate. From The Decline of the West, Volume II, Chapter XI:
“The place of the permanent armies as we know them will gradually be taken by professional forces of volunteer war-keen soldiers, and from millions we shall revert to hundreds of thousands. But ipso facto this second century will be one of actually Contending States. These armies are not substitutes for war – they are for war, and they want war. Within two generations it will be their will that prevails over that of all the comfortables put together. In these wars of theirs for the heritage of the whole world, continents will be staked, India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam, called out, new technics and tactics played and counterplayed. The great cosmopolitan foci of power will dispose at their pleasure of smaller states – their territory, their economy and their men alike – all that is now merely province, passive object, means to end, and its destinies are without importance to the great march of things.”
Certainly, the prediction that the mass conscript armies of Spengler’s day would be eventually replaced by smaller volunteer forces was amazing; who else could have foreseen such a thing? But Spengler also evidently thought that a Western hegemonic power would be established by armies like those of the later Roman Republic, through direct conquest and subjugation. Instead, an outstanding characteristic of the West’s hegemony has been its subtlety. That is, after the end of the Second World War, its dominance has largely been established by economic and political subordination of the national territories within it, carried out in a process of globalization. The subject nations within the hegemony are by no means sovereign, as they do not determine the most critical elements of international policy for themselves; such matters are decided in Washington D.C., any serious deviance from which has become untenable, if not unthinkable. On the other hand, the positions of the subordinate national leaders are confirmed and supported under the hegemony's umbrella of a “rules based order”, economic integration, and, of course, military might. This military power is exerted through a huge system of bases scattered across the world, though to a large extent it remains a potential threat of force, as the possibilities of atomic warfare are too fantastically destructive to contemplate, and the conventional military campaigns of the West have by no means been universally successful since the end of the Second World War. In any case, given the great differences that Spengler himself observed between the Western and Classical cultures, it should not be surprising, perhaps, that their respective hegemonic powers would be established in quite different ways.
Another of Spengler’s key predictions was that the Western Kultur would be transformed into Zivilisation, with creativity in the high arts suffering a serious decline, in accompaniment to the period of contending states and the rise of hegemony. Of course, the problem with evaluating such a contention is that it is highly subjective; different people may have very different ideas concerning the arts. Spengler himself, conservative that he was, felt that a pattern of artistic failure had already commenced in the nineteenth century. However, an extension of the decline into the mid to late twentieth century would seem much more reasonable; in which case it might be said that symphonic music of importance largely ended with such composers as Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Vaughn Williams, that painting has seen little that is truly profound since Guernica, and that architecture has degenerated into brutalism and twisted grotesqueries. Even the cinema, that hybrid child of serious and popular art, can be seen as steadily declining in its serious aspect after 1975, while popular music itself has had nothing really new to say in years. All this is a matter of point of view, it must be admitted, but within that view a cogent case can be made for this premise: that in the West, the Great Art is dead.
The transformation into Zivilisation would also be followed, eventually, by the rise of “Caesarism” in the West, according to Spengler. Obviously, Western society is not (yet) presided over by an autocrat who rules purely by arbitrary decree, but matters may have advanced further in this direction than is generally imagined. For the President of the United States has the power, at least in theory, to order all-out nuclear warfare, a degree of power that no Caesar ever possessed, or even dreamed of. Of course, those around the president would not permit such an order to be transmitted, unless the immediate situation should seem dire enough to justify it. Yet such a situation did indeed exist in October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when President Kennedy could have instigated World War III with the Soviet Union with the full support of his administration and, most importantly, the military high command. That he did not was his own decision to make. More generally, it might be noted that the legislative branch of the U.S. government has become increasingly subordinate to the executive in the most important matters of foreign policy; no declaration of war has been issued by the Congress since December 1941, though of course a number of wars have been prosecuted in that time, none of which have involved the immediate defense of the nation. And just recently the chief executive of the United States has ordered, solely on his own initiative, an attack upon natural gas pipelines between Russia and Western Europe, an action of the most serious consequences, which could easily be interpreted as an act of war. Would not such an act have befitted a Caesar?
As Spengler observed in Chapter IV of Man and Technics: “…the State is the internal order of a people for its external purpose.” Thus whoever decides such external purpose effectively becomes the State.
It might also be observed that in the United States the democratic process has lately come under serious threat, with claims of foreign influence and widespread fraud (unsubstantiated by genuine evidence) being made in regard to the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, which have further inflamed increasingly partisan divisions. So it may be that, at some point in the future, the abandonment of democracy may generally be welcomed as a relief from partisan conflict and civil unrest, just as the accession of Octavian as Caesar Augustus was welcomed in Rome as a relief from civil war. And in the same way that the true position of Augustus was camouflaged under the ambiguous title of “Princeps” (“first one”), as he presided over the hollowed forms of the Republic, so too may the position of a new Caesar be camouflaged under the office of “President for Life”, or perhaps the more acceptable “President for the Duration of the Emergency”.
The various predictions described above did not turn out to be Spengler’s final word, however, for with the passage of time he made some critical adjustments to them, as presented in his penultimate published work, Man and Technics. The original prognosis for our society, described in The Decline of the West, was that it would likely see an extended existence as a Zivilisation for many centuries, as was the case for the Classical, Egyptian, and Chinese high cultures. Instead, Spengler now saw the coming of a much more rapid and catastrophic downfall. (It is interesting that the German word “untergang” can imply either decline or downfall, thus the translation of the title Der Untergang des Abendlandes into English actually conveyed more accurately the author’s original intention, an unusual example of such.) As related above, one of the causes of this downfall was to be the acquisition of the West’s technology, the basis of its supremacy, by the “colored races”. Obviously, such acquisition has in fact taken place, but it was not really a project of nefarious intent by alien actors; what Spengler did not foresee was that the West’s own elites would deliberately encourage and accelerate the effort, for their financial and political benefit, by exporting entire industries abroad, in order to exploit lower paid labor, and avoid bothersome regulations concerning safety and pollution. So outrageous a possibility had not even occurred to him.
The more fundamental cause of the West's downfall, however, was to lie in its own Faustian nature – its desire for limitlessness and infinity, as expressed in never-ending growth. Indeed, it is clear that the hand of man has come to lie heavy on the planet, so heavy that increasingly ominous signs of an impending catastrophe have appeared: of cataclysmic climate change, of debilitating epidemics, of resource depletion, of degradation of the oceans, of pervasive chemical pollution, of species extinction. Certain technological measures (as typical for the West, and described as “green”) are being attempted in response, but whether they will be successful is by no means obvious. The replacement of conventional energy sources with alternative ones, such as solar and wind energy, will require a massive effort, involving sizable increases in mining and manufacturing, further straining the situation; the world’s population continues to grow, but even more seriously the non-Western population seeks to imitate the more lavish, resource-intensive scale of life in the West; deteriorating conditions will result in supply chain disruptions, hindering efforts to deal with accumulating crises, or even to continue business as usual; while in the meantime episodes of conflict, such as the Russia-Ukraine war, and the West’s involvement, will exacerbate every problem – but competition for dwindling resources will likely produce even more destructive conflicts in the future.
So perhaps, in our own age, we can at last understand Spengler’s final and most terrible prophecy, his prophecy of apocalypse:
“Today we stand on the summit, at the point when the fifth act is beginning. The last decisions are taking place, the tragedy is closing.
“Every high Culture is a tragedy. The history of mankind as a whole is tragic. But the sacrilege and the catastrophe of the Faustian are greater than all others, greater than anything Aeschylus or Shakespeare ever imagined. The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him – forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not – to follow its course. The victor, crashed, is dragged to death by the team.”
– from Man and Technics, Ch. V, The Last Act: Rise & End of the Machine Culture
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Sources
The Decline of the West: Sketch of a Morphology of World History [Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte], by Oswald Spengler; Volume One: Form and Actuality [Erster Band: Gestalt und Wirklichkeit] originally published 1918, revised edition 1923; Volume Two: Perspectives of World-History [Zweiter Band: Welthistorische Perspektiven] published 1922; English translation and notes by Charles Francis Atkinson, Volume One published 1926, Volume Two 1928.
An abridged version of The Decline of the West combining both volumes is also available, assembled by Helmut Werner and published 1959, with an English version prepared by Arthur Helps from the Atkinson translation, published 1961. The abridgement is somewhat less than half the length of the original text.
Prussianism and Socialism [Preussentum und Sozialismus], by Oswald Spengler, published 1920; English translation by Donald O. White in Selected Essays, published 1967
Man and Technics: a Contribution to a Philosophy of Life [Der Mensch und die Technik: Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens], by Oswald Spengler, published 1931; English translation by Charles Francis Atkinson, published 1932.
The Hour of Decision, Part One: Germany and World Historical Evolution [Jahre der Entscheidung, Erster Teil: Deutschland und die Weltgeschichtliche Entwicklung], by Oswald Spengler, published 1933; English translation by Charles Francis Atkinson, published 1934. (No second part was produced due to suppression of the work by the German authorities.)
Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate, by H. Stuart Hughes, published 1952, revised edition 1962. This was the first important assessment of Spengler and his writing to appear in English. It offers a number of astute observations about the structure and composition of The Decline of the West, as well as a particularly useful summary of the work of Spengler’s predecessors in the field of cyclical history.
Twilight of the Evening Lands: Oswald Spengler – a Half Century Later, by John F. Fennelly, published 1972. In addition to presenting a summary of Spengler’s life and ideas, this book also attempted to gauge the applicability of the predictions of The Decline of the West to the contemporary world (of the early 1970s and onward).
History and Prophecy: Oswald Spengler and The Decline of the West, by Klaus P. Fischer, published 1977. This book is particularly valuable for its lengthy sketch of Spengler’s biography, evidently drawing on the work of Koktanek (listed below). It also presents an extended treatment of Spengler’s philosophical ideas.
Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics, by John Farrenkopf, published 2001. A very thorough analysis of Spengler’s life and work, the most extensive available in English. It is notable for its reassessment of the importance of Man and Technics, and its observations on Spengler’s studies in human prehistory.
Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit [Oswald Spengler in His Age], by Anton Mirko Koktanek, published 1968. The definitive biography of Spengler, which unfortunately has never been translated into English. Fischer termed it “the only reliable biography of Oswald Spengler” in his notes for Chapter II of History and Prophecy.
“Sociogenesis of the Antithesis Between Kultur and Zivilisation in German Usage”, from the book The Civilizing Process [Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation] by Elias Norbert, published in two volumes 1939; English translation by Edmund Jephcott. An informative exposition on the inferences of meaning present in the terms Kultur and Zivilisation, and their origin.
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A Personal Afterword
I first became acquainted with the work of Oswald Spengler a few years after the turn of the millennium, acquiring a 1939 two-in-one volume of The Decline of the West in the Atkinson translation, along with its abridged version, plus Man and Technics, and the books on Spengler by H. Stuart Hughes and John Farrenkopf. The term “acquainted with” may not be powerful enough, though, for the experience was really more like a revelation (or perhaps being hit over the head). It marked a crucial point in the evolution in my outlook – an evolution that had begun on September 11, 2001, though not because of what happened in New York City on that day; but rather, an article I stumbled across in Scientific American magazine, reviewing a book about M. King Hubbert’s prediction that oil production would “peak” and then decline. I hadn’t imagined that such a thing could be possible, if only because I hadn’t thought about it at all. But at that point I (belatedly) began to realize, in a serious way, that our world may not be as depicted in the public sphere of the major media, which also gave little attention to such matters. In any event, it turned out that Hubbert had certainly been right about conventional oil production in the United States (as opposed to unconventional production from fracking, tar sands, and deepwater drilling, which is much more expensive – with implications for the accessibility of energy – and may not have the same longevity). Conventional oil peaked in the U.S. in the early 1970s, and it is far from certain how long the current “fracking boom” will last.
Like Hubbert, Spengler made a number of predictions, though his were much broader, concerning the future of the world as a whole. And as I read The Decline of the West and Man and Technics, I once again came to realize that things were not as they seemed, but in a more fundamental way – that Western society itself may have peaked and entered decline, for it appeared that some of Spengler’s prophecies had already been fulfilled … and others might be soon. His prediction of the rise of a hegemon after a period of contending states had clearly become reality with the ascendancy of the United States after the World Wars, and his further prediction of a transformation of Kultur into Zivilisation also seemed to have been accomplished in a dwindling of the creative arts. The spectre of an incipient Caesarism and an accompanying deterioration of democracy could be seen in the encroachment of the executive power of the government over the legislative in the sphere of foreign policy, and incidentally in the elevation of Bush Junior to the presidency by the highest court in the land; a spectre that has only assumed a more substantial and threatening shape in later years, with heated controversies over the legitimacy of the results of the last two presidential elections. And finally, and most tragically, accumulating crises have lent support to the prediction that West’s own Faustian nature, which impelled its spectacular ascendancy, would also bring about its even more spectacular, and utterly catastrophic, downfall.
Of course, in spite of his prophetic insight (or perhaps because of what inspired it), Oswald Spengler also had certain faults (as everyone does), the most prominent being evident in his excessiveness – his tendencies to dogmatism, overstatement, and partisanship, which were only magnified by the atmosphere of exceptional nationalism that so completely pervaded Germany in his era. His conservatism, and bitterness at the defeat of 1918, led him into the same error committed by most German conservatives in the years between the wars: namely, that their enmity to the Weimar Republic, as a product of defeat, blinded them to the fact that their support for a rising Third Reich might produce something much worse, indeed horrifically worse. As alluded to above, there seem to have been two, contradictory Spenglers: Spengler the observer had employed a uniquely powerful gestalt intuition to produce an impressive theory of history from an extensive accumulation of knowledge; while Spengler the believer simply followed wherever his preconceptions, prejudices, and overpowering tribal instinct might tend to lead him. But then, it might also be said that a certain zealousness (possibly developing into excessiveness) is, by long tradition, a trait that is by no means incompatible with the role of prophet.
Given the importance of Spengler’s ideas, and the evident validity of the predictions derived from them, it might seem surprising that his work does not have wider recognition in our society. Such has not always been the case, as Farrenkopf relates in the final chapter of Prophet of Decline:
“Interestingly, several foreign policy practitioners and international relations scholars evidenced varying degrees of interest in Spengler’s ideas. They include George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, Paul Nitze, Louis Halle, [Hans] Morgenthau, [Arnold] Toynbee, [James T.] Shotwell, [E.H.] Carr, Raymond Aron, Reinhold Niebuhr, Adda Bozeman, and [James] Joll. Kennan waded persistently through The Decline of the West ‘with the help of a dictionary’ during a vacation in Germany when he was a young man. Harvard seemed to attract its share of young ‘Spenglerians’. Kissinger produced a massive undergraduate thesis at Harvard on Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant. One of Kissinger’s biographers notes that ‘Spengler also fascinated Paul Nitze, who in the late 1930s quit his Wall Street job to go to Harvard and study The Decline of the West.’ Halle reported receiving poor grades at Harvard as he neglected his class assignments to devote himself to ‘a course of reading that represented the interest in Spengler’s vision’ aroused by his high school German teacher. Morgenthau apparently always kept his copy of Spengler’s major work within easy reach on his bookshelf. Toynbee was so awed by the experience of reading the first volume in German of The Decline of the West that he related how he ‘wondered at first whether [his] whole inquiry [into world history] had been disposed of by Spengler before even the questions, not to speak of the answers, had fully taken shape in [his] own mind.’”
I suspect that the lack of regard for Spengler’s work, as viewed by Western society, is largely due to its fundamentally un-Western nature. In direct contradiction to the Faustian desire for limitlessness, Spengler instead predicts very definite limits; rather than expansion to the stars, that the technological mastery of the West will ultimately produce its own annihilation; in place of the triumph of Western Man, the triumph of an implacable Nature. Further, Spengler’s own conservatism was in trenchant opposition to the inherent bias toward liberalism in the West (in the sense of a general embrace of innovation). Though this conservatism sometimes led to errors of belief, it may also have allowed him to be more objective about Western society, studying its nature from an intellectual position that was largely outside of it.
In any case, it may be that the passage of time will be enough to produce a more positive view of Spengler’s work. For example, the earlier assessments of Hughes, Fenelly, and Fischer made in the years 1952-1977 dismissed Man and Technics as a minor effort, barely worthy of consideration; and given the state of the world when they wrote, this was perhaps understandable – the book’s analysis of the West’s technological development no doubt seemed quaint and outmoded, given the huge advances that had already been made, and the further triumphs promised by simple extrapolation of the trend. Fission reactors did not (yet) produce electricity that was too cheap to meter, but was not fusion power only thirty years away? Would not the inevitable advent of the aircar (a dream that is still pursued) solve all problems of personal transportation? Had not the popular movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which made a serious effort to achieve technical accuracy, predicted that a huge base would exist on the moon by the year of its title, which would also see a manned mission to the moons of Jupiter (eclipsing so minor a feat as a journey to Mars)? But when the year 2001 actually arrived, and Farrenkopf’s Prophet of Decline was published, its author produced an entirely new appraisal of Man and Technics, one supported by the very different reality that had come to be. And incidentally, this was also the year that an IPCC Assessment Report first stated that increased global temperatures were likely due to human activity…
One of Spengler’s most basic propositions was that of differing spirits or worldviews for the various high cultures, and certain aspects of this position have also gained increased support in later years, most particularly from study of the Antikythera Mechanism, an artifact that was recovered from an ancient Greek shipwreck in 1901. The true significance of the item, which initially appeared to be only a lump of corroded metal, was not understood for many decades, until research and a series of x-rays began to disclose its secrets. In reality it was a highly sophisticated device, a gear operated analog computer for predicting celestial events – much more sophisticated than anything previously thought possible for the Greeks of antiquity. So complex a mechanism must have been the result of an extended period of development, and other geared movements of its kind must also have been produced; but not only do we lack any other surviving examples, there are no mentions of such devices in all the literature that has come down from the ancient world, apart from a mention in Cicero’s De re publica of something similar that was supposed to have been constructed by Archimedes. In short, such mechanisms had no wide distribution in Classical society, and were not generally considered to be important. Compare this to the development of geared movements in Western society, which immediately produced a proliferation of public clocks, then improved versions of smaller size for private homes, and finally watches and even chronometers, which transformed navigation at sea. Again, a similar process can be seen in the importation of the Chinese invention of gunpowder, which in the West had vastly greater significance due to the rapid development of cannon, which revolutionized warfare. In other words, the Faustian mindset has always had a very different attitude to the exploitation of technical innovations, which has led to its global dominance – and perhaps its eventual doom.
Having become aware of the significance of Spengler’s work, the reader might well desire to become further acquainted with it, regarding which a few “words to the wise” may be in order. Firstly, though he was certainly a scholar, Spengler was not actually an academic (though he was trained as one; his use of footnotes was quite haphazard, to say the least), and often was not at all impartial in stating his positions. As Hughes put it in Chapter I of Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate:
“In studying Spengler, then, we must constantly be on guard against his bewildering shifts of character: now he is the sober historian; now the lofty seer of the future; now the cool, detached observer; and eventually the impassioned participant, forgetting in his excitement his former pretensions to objectivity.”
Also, the organization of Spengler’s major work, The Decline of the West, was by no means a conventional one of stating a thesis, and then pursuing its examination on a systematic and undeviating course until a conclusion is reached. From Chapter V of Hughes’ book:
“Hence the lapidary, pictorial quality of Spengler’s writing. It is, as he himself noted in the preface to his revised first volume, ‘intuitive and depictive through and through, written in a language which seeks to present objects and relations illustratively instead of offering an army of ranked concepts. It addresses itself solely to readers who are capable of living themselves into the word-sounds and pictures as they read.’ To others, trained in a smoother and more continuous style of exposition, the Decline may look like a disconnected series of massive, boldly-hewn segments of undifferentiated thought and deeply-colored imagery.
“More closely regarded, however, Spengler’s writing reveals its own characteristic logic. Its very repetitions and constant returns to familiar guiding principles begin to conform to a special sort of design. This pattern, Spengler subsequently complained, eluded nearly all his readers. They failed to grasp that thoughts like his could be conveyed only through examples, and that to fasten too literally-mindedly on any one of them meant to lose sight of its relation to the others. ‘For here everything hangs so tightly that to take one particular point out of context is already to fall into error.’
“Hence even the back-trackings and repetitions play their part, indeed are nearly indispensable, in the tightly woven, all-interrelated effect that the author seeks to convey. Actually the Decline can hardly be said to start and end at any particular point. It is not to be read as a logical sequence. It is rather – to use the language of music to which Spengler was so deeply attracted – a theme and variations, a complex contrapuntal arrangement, in which no one idea necessarily follows another, but in which a group of ideas, whose mutual relationship is symbolically experienced rather than specifically understood, summon, answer, and balance one another in the sort of lofty cosmic harmony that Goethe’s angels had proclaimed in the prologue and concluding stanzas of Faust.”
A final aspect of Spengler’s work that might be mentioned is its aesthetic, or literary quality, which I’ve always regarded as being quite remarkable, as might be gathered from the lengthy quotations presented above (which of course had been translated very skillfully by Charles Francis Atkinson. In any case, I felt that Spengler certainly stated his positions much more effectively than I ever could.) That his work can be viewed as artistic (or even poetic) seems entirely appropriate, given the emphasis that he placed on art in his treatment of cyclical history, an emphasis that was quite unique; indeed, he was really something of an artist himself. Others have also held Spengler’s style of writing in high regard: Manfred Schroeter was impressed by the “demoniacal strength” of it (a good way of stating the matter, I think), while Thomas Mann (no less) spoke of the “literary brilliance” of The Decline of the West. As Hughes put it in Chapter X of Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate:
“As literature, the Decline is without equal in the field of cyclical writing. Spengler's pictorial, figurative language, his talent for finding the images and personalities that set off in high relief an entire epoch of the past – these give to his work a character of excitement, of tension, and of evocative melancholy. He is a master of the telling epithet, of contrasts epitomized in a single abstract noun, of the alternation of involved, architectural sentences with the short hammer blows of unqualified assertion. In its final form the Decline becomes the elaborate reconstruction of a vision, a series of ‘perspectives’ – as Spengler himself puts it – shot boldly into the past and future.”