by Kerry Bolton
As the civilisation, or what Vico called the “nation”, progressed away from the poetic/imaginative and into the reasonable/rationalistic, the creative impulse is lost, and society reverts to barbarism, or what Spengler called the Fellaheen; historically and culturally passé and exhausted; like Hindu or Arab villagers dwelling in the shadows of ancient monuments. The epochs of Vico are analogues to those of Spengler:
Vico saw the increasing agnosticism of “reasonable man” and his loss of faith, like Spengler, as a prelude to collapse. At this epoch “man begins to think too much”, that is to say, he tries to weigh and measure everything, in what Vico called the “barbarism of the intellect”, and destroys the foundations on which the civilisation had been constructed over centuries. Everything is in flux. There is no sense of permanence. We see it pervasively today in the fleeting notions of culture determined consumer marketing trends. Vico identified three epochs of decay:
I: “It [providence] first ordains that there be found among these peoples a man like Augustus to arise and establish himself as a monarch and, by force of arms, take in hand all the institutions and all the laws, which, though sprung from liberty, no longer avails to regulate and hold it within bounds.
II: “Then, if providence does not find such a remedy within, it seeks it outside .... [P]rovidence decrees that they become slaves by the natural law of the gentes which springs from this nature of nations, and that they become subject to better nations. ... Herein two great lights of natural order shine forth. First, that he who cannot govern himself must let himself be governed by another who can. Second, that the world is always governed by those who are naturally fittest.
III: “But if the peoples are rotting in that ultimate civil disease and cannot agree on a monarch from within, and are not conquered and preserved by better nations from without, then providence for their extreme ill has its extreme remedy at hand .... By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of [the intellect] than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense”.99
Again there are analogues with Spengler. The first type of decay mentioned by Vico corresponds to the “Age of Caesarism” accompanied by a revival of faith, or “Second religiousness” over rationalism,100 where a great leader imposes his will on a dying civilisation and provides it with an impressive finale on the world stage, rather than its slinking off to die. Here Vico uses the example of a literal Roman Caesar, Augustus.
The third form of decay is analogous to Spengler’s use of the word Fellaheen, as a description of a hitherto great people that have become culturally exhausted and subsist as only bystanders of history. They have returned to a barbarous existence not through lack of intelligence, but through “the barbarism of the intellect”, which intellectualises the founding ethos of a vibrant culture out of existence.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Carl Jung, while a student at Basel University faculty of medicine, rejected the materialistic and mechanistic science of his teachers. From an early period he condemned academia “for having stuffed a passel of materialistic rubbish into the gaping mouths of those guttersnipes, the educated proletariat.” He referred to this as resulting in “the moral instability of the upper echelons of society and the total brutalization of the working man”.101 Sherry comments that it is important to understand that Jung, like many other scientists in the German-speaking world, was schooled in a tradition rooted in the scientific works of Goethe rather than in Darwin’s Origin of Species”.102 Here we see the fundamental difference of world-views between the German and English, with England as the harbinger of the age of materialism, of liberalism and capitalism, reflected in its science. Goethe influenced Oswald Spengler’s morphology of history, and he also influenced Jung’s morphology of the psyche.
Sherry states that although Goethe as a scientist was a “keen empiricist”, he also “opposed the mechanistic model proposed by Bacon and employed by Newton … He rejected a mathematically abstract approach to science for one that included both the sensual reality of the thing observed and the imaginative faculty of the observer. This technique of Anschauung (‘direct vision’) reflected Goethe’s artistic-poetic temperament and was used to study Nature in a holistic, organic way”.103 While visiting the botanical garden at Palermo he had a sudden insight into the underlying character of plants, which he called the Ur-pflanze (“archetypal plant”). Jung’s study of “archetypes of the soul”104 is analogous to the Goethean study of the archetypes of plants and animals.
Modern science can no longer discount Goethe’s plant archetypes. In recent years genetic studies of mutant flowers indicate that a single gene triggers the growth of flowers in plants, which sets off the myriad of changes needed to produce a flower. “The discovery is part of a wider series of breakthroughs in the study of flower development which have confirmed the theory, originally put forward by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe more than 200 years ago, that the different organs in a flower, such as petals and stamens, are all variations on a single theme”.105 This suggests that life, including human life, has archetypal forms that unfold. It was a morphological approach that was adapted by Spengler to the study of history.
Oswald Spengler
Goethe was the basis of Spengler’s historical method. He is cited throughout The Decline of The West. Of the method of historical morphology developed from Goethe, Spengler states:
“Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past history and future world-history. The deep, and scarcely appreciated, idea of Goethe, which he discovered in his ‘living nature’ and always made the basis of his morphological researches, we shall here apply – in its most precise sense – to all the formation of man’s history, whether fully matured, cut off in the prime, half opened or stifled in the seed. It is the method of living into (erfühlen) the object, as opposed to dissecting it”.106
This is what Spengler calls Goethe’s “looking into the heart of things”, “but the century of Darwin is as remote from such a vision as it is possible to be”. We look in vain for any treatment of history that is “entirely free from the methods of Darwinism”.107 Spengler credits Goethe with describing the “epochs of the spirit” of a civilisation that agrees with his own, preliminary, early, late, and civilised stages,108 which Goethe called in an 1817 essay, Epochs of the Spirit, the Ages of Poetry, Theology, Philosophy, and the Prosaic. They equate with Spengler’s seasonal metaphors (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) which he calls “spiritual epochs”.
The Age of Poetry is one of myth and imagination. The Age of the Holy or the Age of Theology, is one of religion and awe before the divine. Already in this epoch rationalism enters and “reason” destroys what it is reasoning about, proceeding with the Age of Reason (Age of Philosophy) or the Enlightenment as it is called in Western civilisation. The historical life-course ends with the Prosaic Age, which is the culmination of the prior epoch in rationalising mystery to extinction. This ends in confusion as the masses, detached from all spirituality, blindly attempt to find alternatives to the shallowness of the Prosaic Age.109
Spengler remains the most recognised exponent of what has been persistently called German “cultural pessimism”, distinct from the Anglo-American and French positivist utopian faith in perpetual progress. It is however nothing more than the “pessimism” of recognising that all organisms die, and are replaced by other organisms that go through the same life cycles, unless they are prematurely aborted by external factors such as invasion or natural disaster.
The Weimar era (1919-1933), during which Spengler wrote and lectured, starkly showed the character of Civilization in the degeneracy wrought by Germany’s wartime defeat. There were no barriers to experimentation in the arts and mora
ls, and society sunk into depravity comparable to the mythic Sodom and Gomorra. However, there was nothing novel about this. The depravity had been enacted many times before over millennia.
Spengler made a comparative study of the cultural epochs of the Indian, Egyptian, Chinese, Classical, Arabian, and Western civilisations. He showed that each have analogous cycles of birth (Spring), adolescence (Summer), maturity (Autumn), and decay (Winter).
At the Spring epoch the population is “rural-intuitive”: “there are no great cities, but an intellectual ferment has begun”. For the West this “epoch” was around A.D. 900 to 1300, and included Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante. From this proceeds the “culture-period” during which the Kulturvolk reach their highest stature. This corresponds to the Summer epoch. Cities are developing but they belong solely to the culture. The city has not yet become a megapolis, ascribed to the Winter epoch. Traditions are important at this stage. They involve the recognition of a noble élan, Faith and Church, hierarchy and dynasty, with the privileges and obligations that go with them. In art, a convention of tradition is maintained. In science, man stands in awe of God’s universe, and does not strive to become God. His science unfolds God’s creation, and does not try to supplant or improve it. The arts and sciences serve tradition, not as in the Winter epoch, questioning and undermining the foundations of the culture in the name of “progress”. The culture has not yet been ossified by intellectualism, rationalism and materialism. This Summer epoch in the West is ascribed to ca. 1300 to late 1600s. Towards the end of this epoch there is an impoverishment of religion, which Spengler identifies with Puritanism, which gives money a religious sanctity, and sets the stage for the triumph of city over village; factory over village market; proletarian over craftsman and peasant; plutocrat and oligarch over landed-aristocrat; intellectual over priest; in a word all that we now call “modern”.
The Autumn epoch, the “Age of Reason”, sees the development of the great soulless cities, the city as a money-centre, intellectualism and scepticism, the time of Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau; where religion becomes rationalised and intellectualised, and the spiritual nexus is further broken, harbouring the materialism of the next epoch.
The 19th century inaugurates the Winter epoch where “population” no longer means people/volk/ethnos, but rootless masses: proletarians and bourgeois. The city has become a megapolis, a world-financial-centre with a rootless population drawn from the world, like Rome in its decline, or New York. This rootlessness and “cosmopolitanism” is lauded as superior to the “old fashioned” and “narrow-minded” parochial person who does not “keep up with the times”, and “fears change”. This is international-urban civilisation, where the population is “shapeless, fluctuating, irreligious”, as Spengler stated. There is no sense of ethos or ethnos. The workers of the land are held in the lowest regard. Marx referred to the “idiocy of rural life”, because he was not an agent for the type of historical change envisaged by Marx. The peasant is looked on as a “yokel”, whereas in a healthy culture-organism he is the well-spring of a healthy ethnos, and the literal sustainer of the nation. There is a shift to the cities as industry displaces agriculture and cottage industry. “The spiritual creative force has been lost”. “Abstract thinking” degenerates into the “professional scientific lecture-desk philosophy”’. “In politics the whole tendency is away from the individual culture that made the people great, and towards internationalism, pacifism, and socialism” wrote Spengler.
Marx lauded the axial shift of a culture from country to city, from peasant and craftsman to bourgeois and factory worker, as part of a “progressive” dialectical process, while Spengler saw this as symptomatic of cultural decay. This was the transition from the Spring and Summer epochs of a culture to the Autumn and Winter epochs of a civilisation. Marx wrote of this:
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
“The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff”.110
Where Spengler saw decline into decay and death for a culture-organism, Marx saw the march of “progress”, as do the present day ideologues of “American Exceptionalism”.
Amaury de Riencourt
Amaury de Riencourt came to similar conclusions on the character of culture, civilisation and the rhythmic cycles of historical life. Like Spengler he went beyond viewing the sum total of history as a lineage of “facts”, without having a feel for the “thoughts, emotions, ideas and aspirations” of those who make history. “Facts are only the outer shell”, he wrote, “the crystallization and materialization of ideas and emotions”. History is “life itself” and has, like other organisms, both a “cyclical rhythm and a linear tension”. While the West focuses on history as a lineal unfolding, on the other hand the pulse of historical rhythm shows “a definite pattern of recurrences which is clearly visible in all human societies: they are born, they grow and they die – and often enough they are followed by other societies in formation who feed off their rotting corpses like maggots – the Persians in Babylon, the Classical Greeks in Egypt, the Germanic hordes in the Roman Empire”.111
“What we have to discover is the grand cycle of history, that which takes into account the whole of a particular society’s life – its arts, sciences, religions, philosophies, politics, economics, all of which are intimately connected and interrelated. It has to be all-inclusive”.112
De Riencourt, having intimate knowledge of the Orient, referred to the “giant wheel of history”, and like the German historical thinkers, distinguished between the epochs of Kultur and Civilization:
“Those now familiar words we are now going to use in an unfamiliar fashion, in the periodic sense of youth followed by maturity, in the sense of organic succession. Instead of coinciding in time, Civilisation follows and fulfils the Culture which was tending toward it during the life span of a particular society. In this sense, each organic society has ‘its’ own culture and ‘its’ own Civilisation”.113
Rene Guénon
H. T. Hansen in his introduction to Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World describes him as “Guénon’s leading Italian representative”. Evola cited Guénon throughout Revolt Against the Modern World, the title itself being reminiscent of Guénon’s Crisis of the Modern World, published in France in 1927. It is Guénon who wrote of the concepts of the “axis of the world”, and the “Tree of Life” as the way for the return to the Absolute. It was Guénon who provided a spiritual analysis for the crisis of the modern world.
Guénon was born in Bloise, France, in 1886. He was initi
ated into the tradition of Shiva by a Hindu sect. Troubled by the anti-religious agitation of the French intelligentsia, he became an initiate of Sufism, although regarding Hinduism as the best means of reviving a lost spirituality in the West, particularly since Hinduism remains a living tradition. Because of the ultimate kinship of Europeans with the Indo-Aryans, he regarded Hinduism as more amenable to the Western psyche.
Guénon moved to Cairo in 1930, where he remained until his death in 1951. He wrote numerous books on tradition and on the need of the West to reconnect to the Absolute.114 This connection he saw running through all traditions (hence, the “Perennial Tradition”): the Hindu concept of yoga, the Buddhist nirvana, the Sufi tahaqquq (self-realisation in God), and the Catholic deificatio.
Dr. Martin Lings115 who became part of Guénon’s household in Cairo and is the English translator of Guénon, summarised his doctrine:
“The Mysteries and especially the Greater Mysteries are explicitly or implicitly the main theme of Guénon’s writing, even in The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity. The troubles in question are shown to have sprung ultimately from loss of the mystical dimension, that is, the dimension of the mysteries of esotericism. He traces all the troubles in the modern world to the forgetting of the higher aspects of religion. He was conscious of being a pioneer, and I will end simply by quoting something he wrote of himself, ‘All that we shall do or say will amount to giving those who come afterwards facilities which we ourselves were not given. Here as everywhere else it is the beginning of the work that is hardest’”.116