Key Thinkers of the Radical Right

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by Mark Sedgwick (ed)


  and European civilizations and barely sketched the broad outlines of the

  others, the effort and knowledge poured into The Decline of the West was

  unequaled until Toynbee’s monumental Study of History, and Spengler’s

  book made a thorough impression on his readers, even those who did not

  accept his hypothesis.

  Key issues and key ideas

  Spengler’s historical philosophy was based on two basic assumptions.

  On the one hand, Spengler assumed the existence of social entities called

  “cultures” ( Kulturen) as the largest possible actors in human history which,

  in itself, has no real philosophical aim or metaphysical sense:

  “Mankind” . . . has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the

  family of butterflies or orchids. “Mankind” is a zoological ex-

  pression, or an empty word. . . . I see, in place of that empty fig-

  ment of one linear history which can only be kept up 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.28

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  Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West

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  These cultures— according to Spengler, nine (the Egyptian, the Babylonian,

  the Indian, the Chinese, the Greco- Roman, the “Magic” or “Arabic,” which

  included early and Byzantine Christianity as well as Islam, the Mexican,

  the Western, and, finally, the Russian)— coexist in time and space and

  thus interact to some degree with each other, but have no real “internal”

  connection with one another. Their evolution thus only follows their

  own inner logic and cannot be influenced by outer factors, except for the

  “Mexican culture,” literally “beheaded” by the conquistadores— a further

  and sad proof for the absence of any proper “sense” in history, if one is to

  believe Spengler.

  Spengler’s second major hypothesis is that the inner evolution of these

  cultures is essentially parallel and corresponds exactly to the evolutionary

  stages of a living being, an idea deeply rooted (as we saw) not only in the

  philosophy of vitalism as it developed during the nineteenth century but

  ultimately going back to antiquity:

  Cultures are organisms, and world- history is their collective biog-

  raphy. Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of

  the Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of

  the individual man, or of the animal, or the tree, or the flower.29

  However, Spengler does not confine his analogies to botanical images. He

  also uses the paradigm of the different ages of man and even the rhythm

  of the four seasons as comparative foil, tying his analysis to a string

  of poignant metaphors all linked to the cycle of life, and differentiated

  enough to permit a subtle and suggestive description of the different evo-

  lutionary steps of each culture, as is also demonstrated through his use of

  these topoi in a series of synchronoptic comparative tables. Though some-

  what long, the following quotation contains not only the blueprint of the

  evolution of each culture in a nutshell and brilliantly illustrates his play

  with historical references and allusions but also demonstrates the literary,

  nearly poetic quality Spengler tried to achieve:

  Every Culture passes through the age- phases of the individual man.

  Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young

  and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the

  morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape

  from the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral

  of Bishop Bernward. The spring wind blows over it. . . . Childhood

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  speaks to us also— and in the same tones— out of early- Homeric

  Doric, out of early- Christian (which is really early- Arabian) art and

  out of the works of the Old Kingdom in Egypt that began with the

  Fourth Dynasty. . . . The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon

  culmination of its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense

  the form- language it has secured for itself, the more assured its

  sense of its own power, the clearer its lineaments. In the spring all

  this had still been dim and confused, tentative, filled with childish

  yearning and fears— witness the ornament of Romanesque Gothic

  church porches of Saxony and southern France, the early- Christian

  catacombs, the Dipylon vases. But there is now the full conscious-

  ness of ripened creative power that we see in the time of the early

  Middle Kingdom of Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratids, in the

  age of Justinian, in that of the Counter- Reformation, and we find

  every individual trait of expression deliberate, strict, measured,

  marvelous in its ease and self- confidence. And we find, too, that

  everywhere, at moments, the coming fulfilment suggested itself;

  in such moments were created the head of Amenemhet III (the

  so- called “Hyksos Sphinx” of Tanis), the domes of Hagia Sophia,

  the paintings of Titian. Still later, tender to the point of fragility,

  fragrant with the sweetness of late October days, come the Cnidian

  Aphrodite and the Hall of the Maidens in the Erechtheum, the

  arabesques on Saracen horseshoe- arches, the Zwinger of Dresden,

  Watteau, Mozart. At last, in the grey dawn of Civilization, the fire

  in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more,

  half- successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that

  is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and

  in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally,

  weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial

  Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the

  darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the

  grave.30

  This description clearly defines the actual situation and imminent fu-

  ture of the Western world, which has entered, since Napoleon (the rough

  equivalent of Alexander), the late stage of the petrification of a culture into

  a civilization ( Zivilisation), characterized by technology, expansion, impe-

  rialism, and mass society, and is expected to fossilize and decline from the

  year 2000 on. This dichotomy between “culture” and “civilization,” central

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  to the understanding of Spengler’s historical philosophy, is another con-

  cept deeply anchored in nineteenth- century German thought, for example

  in Schiller’s 1795 treatise on naïve and sentimental poetry or in Thomas

  Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man.31 Accordingly, Spengler describes

  the current, “civilized” state of the West as follows:

  A century of purely extensive effectiveness, excluding big artistic


  and metaphysical production— let us say frankly an irreligious time

  which coincides exactly with the idea of the world- city— is a time of

  decline. True. But we have not chosen this time. We cannot help it

  if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead

  of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart

  time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our des-

  tiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves

  about it we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in

  his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation,

  and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.32

  One of the consequence of Spengler’s cultural monism is the debate about

  the extent to which cultures and civilizations are able to influence each

  other or even to merge. According to Spengler, who seems to be using

  the classic German concept of the Volksgeist (national character) first de-

  veloped by Herder, each of these nine cultures is characterized by a spe-

  cific, inimitable “soul image” ( Seelenbild) or worldview, which is largely

  inaccessible to anyone from the outside. This also explains why any real

  intercultural dialog or fusion is considered as thoroughly impossible: the

  takeover of the spiritual or artistic creations of other cultures can be based

  only on their misinterpretation and must remain superficial, comparable

  to the use of architectural remnants of bygone societies through mis-

  placed spolia.33

  Whereas such a monolithic hypothesis is not difficult to uphold when

  it comes to describing the evolution of spatially rather isolated cultures

  such as the Chinese, Egyptian, or Indian, it becomes very difficult to argue

  the case for full cultural self- sufficiency for those overlapping each other,

  a fact most notable in Late Antiquity. This problem prompted Spengler to

  surmise that the whole first- millennium Near East was not, in fact, a mere

  “transition” between Classical Antiquity, Western Christianity, and Islam,

  but rather a wholly new and distinct culture (labeled “Arabian” or “Magic”)

  merely borrowing its formal language partly from its Greco- Roman, partly

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  from its Babylonian predecessor, but filling it with a totally new content, a

  feature Spengler calls, in analogy to “pseudomorphosis,” a mineralogical

  phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, Spengler’s endeavor to explain Messianic

  Judaism, Zoroastrianism, early Christianity, and Islam as different

  expressions of a unique cultural worldview distinct from that of other

  cultures has provoked many criticisms, even though it prefigured, at the

  same time, the attempts of recent research to focus less on the differences

  than rather on the intense interactions of the first millennium as a “super-

  market of religions.”34

  Spengler’s determinist view of history has prompted many to label

  him a “pessimist” and to consider his philosophy as ultimately promoting

  fatalism and inaction. Spengler always denied such an attitude and—

  influenced by Nietzsche’s heroic “Amor fati”— invited his readers to adopt

  a “realistic” approach toward the limited possibilities of the aging Western

  culture, to accept the inevitable outcome of the history of the next gen-

  erations, and to do their best within the limits of the possible instead of

  fighting a lost battle for ideals long dead, while fully realizing that “opti-

  mism is cowardice.”35 Thus, in the last lines of the Decline of the West, he

  refers the reader to the philosophy of Stoicism when quoting Seneca in

  order to demonstrate his own view of a “heroic” pessimism, based on the

  acceptance of the inevitable:

  For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and

  at this moment of its development— the moment when money

  is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that is to suc-

  ceed approaches with quiet, firm step— our direction, willed and

  obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any

  other terms life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom

  to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to

  do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set will be accom-

  plished with the individual or against him. Ducunt Fata volentem,

  nolentem trahunt [ fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling].36

  Reception

  The reception of Spengler is essentially bipartite. During the 1920s, he was

  one of the most discussed intellectuals of the Western world, his theory

  considered either as a thorough revolutionizing of the writing of history

  or as the fruit of mere dilettantism. Even though the scholarly reception

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  remained rather skeptical, the poetical qualities of Spengler’s work and

  the suggestiveness of his pessimistic and tragic worldview made him very

  popular with many artists, not only in Europe but also in America. The

  Second World War proved an important hiatus: whereas the previous re-

  ception had focused on his achievements as a comparatist historian of

  past civilizations, his work was now reduced to its prophecy of the end of

  democracy and the rise of Caesarism, and accordingly considered as illib-

  eral. Only since the end of the Cold War has Spengler’s work triggered a

  new interest and led to a reevaluation, which is still in full course.

  Prewar reception

  The early reception of Spengler’s The Decline of the West was a phenom-

  enon of its own: everywhere in Europe, journalists and scholars discussed

  the interest, validity, and shortcomings of Spengler’s “morphology of his-

  tory.” It would take us too long to discuss different positions in detail, even

  more so as the early reception has already been presented and analyzed in

  detail by Manfred Schröter in 1922.37 Let us only stress that the discussion

  around Spengler rapidly became not only a German or even a European

  but an international phenomenon,38 given the rapidity with which his work

  was translated into numerous other languages. Academic historians only

  reluctantly participated in this debate and, with a few notable exceptions

  such as Eduard Meyer or Ernst Kornemann, either ignored Spengler’s

  work or drew attention only to selected inaccuracies related to their own

  fields. Very few historians or philosophers tried to discuss the validity of

  Spengler’s theory in its entirety, an endeavor rendered even more com-

  plex by the intimate links between Spengler’s analysis of the past and his

  claims concerning the advent of Caesarism and an inevitable impending

  showdown between the German and the Anglo- Saxon model of politics

  and society. This topic was mainly developed in Prussianism and Socialism,

  where the conflict is seen as a mere modern variation on the wars be-

  tween Rome and Carthage, Spengler’s personal sympathies lying, un-

  surprisingly, on the German rather than the Anglo- Saxon side, while he

  considered France as historically “finished.�
�39

  With some notable exceptions such as the Hispanic philosophy of

  history, where José Ortega y Gasset and Ernesto Quesada were deeply

  influenced by Spengler, and the juridical profession, where Spengler’s

  theory on Roman and Germanic law was heavily discussed,40 it was

  mainly in the domain of literature that Spengler’s vision of a “declining”

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  West characterized by a dwindling creative impetus made the strongest

  impression. This is not altogether surprising, given that Spengler fo-

  cused in large part on aesthetics41 and tried to confer an inimitable

  literary quality to his own work, once characterized by the German

  novelist Thomas Mann as a “highly entertaining intellectual novel.”42

  Outside Germany, where the book especially interested Thomas Mann

  and Hermann Hesse,43 it seems to have been essentially the English-

  speaking world where Spengler’s thought rapidly entered the literary

  creations of writers as different as Henry Miller, Francis Scott Fitzgerald,

  and H. P. Lovecraft,44 and where even some historians such as Arnold

  Toynbee and Philip Bagby endeavored to develop Spengler’s approaches

  further.

  The rise of National Socialism in 1933 represented a hiatus in the re-

  ception of Oswald Spengler. While Spengler found himself persona non

  grata in Nazi Germany and was publicly attacked by the proponents of

  the new regime as a “reactionary,”45 his patriotic hope (not uncommon

  at that period) that Germany might constitute the nucleus of a future

  European- style Roman Empire was erroneously amalgamated, abroad,

  with the reigning National Socialist ideology and seen as its direct fore-

  runner.46 This was only very partly justified. Admittedly, Spengler helped

  to discredit the Weimar Republic because of his criticism of contempo-

  rary democracy as a mere transition toward Caesarism, and the collapse

  of the Weimar Republic indeed enabled Hitler’s takeover. However, from

  an ideological point of view, National Socialist racial theory and the op-

  timistic hope of creating a thousand- year Reich were fundamentally op-

  posed to Spengler’s belief in the irremediable decline of the West, even

  if under German rule, and his conviction that all human cultures were

 

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