Spengler And The Totalitarians

From the desk of Steve Kogan on Thu, 2010-12-30 10:38

This is Part 1 of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The
Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

In a late autobiographical sketch, Saul Bellow writes that when he was young "Smart
Jewish schoolboys in Chicago were poring over Spengler at night." F. Scott Fitzgerald
said The Decline was one of the formative books in his life, and Henry Miller read him in
his cramped Brooklyn apartment and later wrote a glowing account of his experience.
Begun just before and completed soon after World War I, The Decline of the West not
only struck a nerve in readers from America to Russia but also generated a “Spengler
controversy” among historians, philosophers, and theologians that enhanced its notoriety
between the two world wars (1).

By the 1930s, however, its reputation took a darker turn; for, with the growing menace of
Hitler Germany and the now suspicious echoes of National Socialism in Spengler’s ties
to Nietzsche and conviction that a new "Caesarism" was inevitable, he became falsely
associated with the Nazi movement, to the point where George Orwell, the best of a new
and self-declared generation of leftwing writers, could say in "Looking Back on the
Spanish War" (1942) that Spengler subscribed to "a programme which at any rate for a
while could bring together" the likes of Hitler, Pétain, Hearst, Ezra Pound, Father
Coughlin, and the Mufti of Jerusalem, men who "support or have supported Fascism" and
"are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and
dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings."

In point of fact, no twentieth-century thinker could have been further from Orwell's
ungodly crew than Oswald Spengler and nowhere more emphatically than in The Hour of
Decision (1933), in which he described political discourse in his time as "superficial,"
"small-minded," and filled with "absurd catchwords" in place of judgment and long-range
understanding. Although he thought that Mussolini had certain political gifts that might
come to fruition, he noted that fascism "had its origin in the city mobs" and that
Mussolini's international project for "the combating of Bolshevism . . . arose out of
imitating the enemy and is therefore full of dangers." As for Hitlerism, Spengler had
contempt for the Nazi belief in "race purity" and called the term "grotesque." His
interview with Hitler at Bayreuth in 1933 disappointed him, and the newly installed
Chancellor soon had no use for him either. After the publication of The Hour, public
attacks against Spengler were followed by censorship of the work and the banning of his
name from the German press. Refusing to participate in the Nazi debasement of German
thought, Spengler broke with the Nietzsche Archive in 1935 and with its presiding figure,
Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who, to her "great grief," was "informed that you are taking
an attitude of strong opposition to the Third Reich and its Führer, and that your departure
from the Nietzsche Archive, which sincerely reveres the Führer, is connnected with this."
She goes on to say that she has "experienced your speaking with great energy against our
highly honoured new ideal," and, in his introduction to Arthur Helps' edition of
Spengler's letters, A. M. Koktenek remarks that Spengler's "repugnance" to Hitler dates
"from the days of the Munich Putsch in 1923," that "one is struck by the fate that befell
so many of Spengler's correspondents," and that it is an open question "whether Spengler,
if he had lived longer, would have escaped from Hitler's executioners. His connection
with many proscribed men involved the death penalty."

The Hour of Decision alone held dangers for its author. As one ardent Nazi follower
wrote to him, "Like almost all of us young Germans, I have rejoiced in this year of
Hitler's leadership, and it surprises (not to say shocks) us that you do not mention this
man at all in your book, and obviously seem to regard him as a quantité negligeable."
Apparently, Gunther Gründel also resented being treated as a minimus by the renowned
historian, since he ends his letter by noting that Spengler did not reply to "my polite
congratulations on your fiftieth birthday or the dissertation I once sent you" and that he
will regard himself "as having a free hand" if Spengler does not respond. In a note on this
threat, Helps observes that "Spengler did not answer this letter" and that Gründel
subsequently attacked him in print. Coupled with Gründel's vulgar display of self-
importance and mock politesse was the unspoken accusation that Spengler was not only a
traitor but an apostate as well. As Gründel remarked, Spengler had spoken in The Decline
and again in The Hour of an "organic transition from the era of the masses to aristocratic
Caesarism," yet The Hour nonplussed him, since Spengler did not proclaim National
Socialism as the destiny that Gründel said his "logic demands."

Spengler's "logic" demanded no such thing. Although his predictions of a coming Caesar
seemed to be in accord with Nazi rhetoric (and even more with Mussolini's), The Hour
veered off in the opposite direction. Spengler had indeed spoken eloquently of the
"Prussian" spirit both in this work and in Prussianism and Socialism (1920), but he drew
a sharp line between its code of values and the nihilism of all modern mass movements,
and in The Hour he warned the nation that in revolutionary times such as Germany was
now facing, "Sound ideas are exaggerated into self-glorification by fanatics," and a leader
who "thinks and feels as a product of the mass" will be treated by history "as a mere
demagogue." Hitler's anonymous presence in the work underscores Spengler's view of his
character and political origins, for, during the postwar crisis of the 1920s, all sides were
thinking and feeling "as a product of the mass." As Spengler saw it, Germany was bent
on finding a strong-man to satisfy its chaotic and unprincipled demands: "Everyone wrote
to tell his future dictator what to do. Everyone demanded discipline from other people,
because he was incapable of disciplining himself."

Taking a stand against this descent into license, Spengler was chiefly concerned with
what a leader might be rather than what he would do, and what Spengler wanted above
all for Germany was a man who had been shaped in the "Old-Prussian 'style'" of honor,
loyalty, self-discipline, and statesmanship, qualities that might possibly provide a
"foundation" for Germany to persevere and be "slowly trained for its difficult future." In
his understanding, "Prussianism" was neither a slogan nor a program but "a very superior
thing which sets itself against every sort of majority- and mob-rule; above all, against the
dominance of the mass character." He was well aware that England and France held a
very different view of the Prussian model; and even today, long after Simone Weil
refuted the idea of an "unchanging Germany," the word "Prussian" can still evoke the
idea of "absolute command and obedience" (2) and the old belief that a deep-rooted
streak of ruthlessness runs through German history. What mattered to Spengler, however,
was not the politics of the word but what he meant by it as "soul discipline," for which "a
great educational effort is essential," particularly now, when "The battle for the planet has
begun." Gründel and his "young Germans," their ears ringing with Hitler's fantasies,
thought they were hearing an echo of their master's voice; yet they also doubted the
reliability of a thinker who seemed to be speaking their language yet had nothing but
scorn for "the levelling out of brains," the belief "that we carry within us a new order,"
and above all scorn for the mob's hatred of the individual, whereby all those "who think
for themselves, are felt to be enemies." It did not take long after the publication of The
Hour for those who "rejoiced in this year of Hitler's leadership" to conclude that Spengler
was not one of them.

With the banning of his book and public ostracism, Spengler might well have felt the ring
closing in on him and, more importantly in his eyes, another ring closing around
Germany as the nation fell under the spell of a leader that he had recently warned against
in The Hour of Decision, a creature of "the herd-feeling," with no sense at all that
Germany must be "slowly trained for its difficult future." Indeed, the exact opposite was
taking place, for Hitler was rapidly perverting the "Old-Prussian 'style'" into an
instrument of demagoguery, terror, and national self-destruction.

Spengler's public life ended soon after the appearance of The Hour, which was also the
moment of Hitler's triumph. He continued to maintain his scholarly contacts and pursuits,
and more than one person must have remarked, as a Prince Pückler did in a letter to
Spengler, that there was "now in public an incomprehensible, anxious, silence" about his
works, "which are nevertheless to be found in every house that I know."

One can only guess at the strains under which Spengler was living. He had often been in
poor health and died of a heart attack before he reached his fifty-sixth birthday in 1936.
"It is noteworthy," writes Koktenek, "that letters which might have harmed Spengler in
the Hitler period, certainly after June 30, 1934, were destroyed by him and, after his
death by his heirs." In none of the letters in the Helps edition does Spengler indicate any
fears for his own safety, although, in a letter to Josef Goebbels, in which he turns down
Goebbels' request for a timely article before the national elections, he says that he is
willing to consider writing "on important occasions of foreign policy" but only if
Goebbels can use his influence to end "the unmeasured attacks to which I have been
subjected recently in certain organs of the national Press," in particular "two articles . . .
in the Kreuzzeitung, in which I was described, among other things, as a traitor to my
country." Given the official silencing of Spengler that soon went into effect, one can
assume that Goebbels concurred with the editor, if he was not, in fact, the gray eminence
behind the articles himself. From the evidence that remains, it seems fairly certain that
Goebbels and lesser propagandists sought to exploit Spengler's celebrity status so that he
would become, as Gründel wrote, "the chief crown witness for National Socialism."
Nevertheless, four years earlier Spengler had provided ample evidence for them to
suspect that he would be of doubtful value to their project.
Spengler did indeed have something to dread, but it was not Orwell's utopian "prospect of
a world of free and equal human beings." In a lecture delivered in Hamburg in 1929 titled
"Germany in Danger," he warned of the nation's perilous position at home in a
revolutionary time, and in The Hour he expanded his warnings to include internal and
external threats to the west itself. His clarity and prescience are evident on the very first
pages of the book, in which he makes a brief but comprehensive judgment about the
destructive nature of Germany's National Socialists: their mania for propaganda and
persecution and dangerous illusion "that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it,"
thus bringing the nation to the point where "We stand, it may be, close before a second
world war." Twelve years after the publication of the work, Germany lay in ruins.

As for the regime of the Soviet socialists, which he described in 1933 as the world's great
instructor in "propaganda, murder, and insurrection," Spengler had predicted its fall as
early as The Decline; and in The Hour he made another strikingly accurate prediction that
neither its crimes nor disappearance would have any effect in later decades on masses of
westerners, who would continue to denigrate their institutions, carry on campaigns for
one fantasy of world reform or another, ally themselves with colonial demagogues, and
remain wilfully blind to the storm of events that was heralded by the Great War, which
"was but the first flash and crash from the fateful thundercloud which is passing over this
century." As Spengler wrote in The Hour, "It would make no difference if the voice of
Moscow ceased to dictate. It has done its work, and the work goes forward of itself."

Even more remarkable than their accuracy is the fact that Spengler made these forecasts
in the earliest years of Soviet and Nazi rule. In effect, he was writing a history of the
future, in whose predictive value he had complete confidence. By contrast, he had
nothing but scorn for the "cowardly optimism" of western intellectuals, opinion-makers,
and their followers, whose

wish-picture of the future is set in place of facts . . . This type of mind is obsessed by
concepts - the new gods of the Age - and it exercises its wits on the world as it sees it. "It
is no good," it says; "we could make it better; here goes, let us set up a program for a
better world!" . . . Those who doubt it are narrow reactionaries, heretics, and, what is
worse, people devoid of democratic virtue: away with them! In this wise the fear of
reality was overcome by intellectual arrogance, the darkness that comes from ignorance
of all things of life, spiritual poverty, lack of reverence, and, finally, world-alien stupidity
- for their is nothing stupider than the rootless urban intelligence.

Spengler's character sketch of yesterday's "rootless urban intelligence" is a living portrait

of the left today, which agitates unceasingly on behalf of its deranged, utopian schemes,
even for the reform of the planet's atmosphere, and at the same time shuts its eyes to the
murderous history of twentieth-century dictatorships and the terror campaign of a new
and global Islamic jihad. In this latest grotesque spectacle of "world-alien stupidity," the
left attacks every attempt to counter the threat, whose danger signs were already clear to
Spengler in 1933 when he remarked on the "great success" of the Islamic drive to
supplant "the Christian missionary" in Africa, "penetrating in these days as far as the
Zambesi in Nyassaland. Where a Christian school stood yesterday, a mosque stands
tomorrow . . . and the Christian priest is suspected above all because he represents a
white ruling race, against which Mohammedan propaganda, political rather than
dogmatic, directs itself with cool decision." A similar jihadist drive persists to this day,
only this time directed "with cool decision" on a planetary scale. Like other passages in
The Hour, this thumb-nail sketch of an alien and hostile intelligence has even greater
force now than it did in its time, yet it also catches a mood of anxiety that was in the air at
the turn of the century and eerily recalls the penultimate line in the opening paragraph of
H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds: "Yet across the gulf of space . . . intellects vast and
cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely
drew their plans against us."

Spengler said as much in the sphere of actualities when he turned from the ambitions of
Germany's political "fanatics" to the "ruling herd" further east "called the Communist
Party" and the ascendancy of Japan, all of which he saw as portents of a "mighty destiny"
that would be "far more terrible than the ages of Caesar and Napoleon."

Had Spengler been writing fiction, The Hour of Decision might have been regarded, like
The War of the Worlds, as imaginative writing of the first order; but as he was bringing
his earlier observations on "world-fear" into his discussions on modern mass psychology,
drawing painful conclusions about "the universal dread of reality," and confronting
readers with "the relentless course of things, senseless chance, and real history striding
pitilessly through the centuries" (in a voice emanating from Nazi Germany, no less), the
work was buried in obscurity, and Spengler became a kind of ghost in our midst,
figuratively walking the battlements of the western world, like the armored ghost of
Hamlet's father at Elsinore, each one a disturbing reminder of a recent war, a portent of
yet another war, and a voice of outrage over recent shameful deeds: in Hamlet, the
imminent second war between Norway and Denmark and the wedding triumph of the
king's brother and assassin, "that incestuous, that adulterate beast"; and, in The Hour of
Decision, the First World War, the League of Nations ("that swarm of parasitic holiday-
makers on the Lake of Geneva") and "The Fascist formations of this decade," which "will
pass into new, unforeseeable forms." In 1922, he had sensed "the quiet, firm step" of
Caesarism on the move, and in The Hour he was convinced that "Caesar's legions are
returning to consciousness."

Except for a few scattered readers, Spengler's final work has fallen into the world's
collective memory hole, and The Decline has fared only slightly better, yet the force of
his central idea is more pronounced than ever and can be felt in wide-ranging public
discussions on threats to western institutions. His name, on the other hand, appears in
print more frequently than one might suppose and remains with us as the emblem of
"Spenglerian gloom." It is as though 1984 and The Trial had enjoyed a brief but dazzling
success and then had died on the shelves, leaving behind a disturbing view of the modern
world and the ominous terms "Orwellian" and "Kafkaesque."

The demise of his reputation would not have troubled him, however, for Spengler
believed that his ideas would live even if his works went unread. Like his contemporaries
Franz Kafka and Blaise Cendrars, who experienced life and literature in the same breath,
Spengler saw himself as a philosopher with the spirit of the times pulsing in his veins.
Kafka made a similar observation about August Strindberg when he learned that his
fiancé Felice Bauer was attending "a regular course of lectures . . . And lectures on
Strindberg at that! We are his contemporaries and his successors. One has only to close
one's eyes and one's own blood delivers lectures on Strindberg." As Spengler remarked in
"Pessimism?" (1921), his aim in The Decline "was to present an image of the world to be
lived with, rather than to devise a system for professional philosophers to brood over,"
and in The Hour he wrote with characteristic certainty that "I offer no wish-picture of the
future, still less a program for its realization . . . but a clear picture of the facts as they are
and will be. I see further than others." This was not a boast but a practical assessment of
his gifts, yet, in his preface of 1917, he also insisted that his world view belonged to his
generation and shared a common characteristic with every epoch-making idea, which "is
only in a limited sense the property" of its author.

Despite his ventures into public life, Spengler was a deeply private man who lived with
his vision continually before his inner eye, and, although he challenged critics who
labeled him a "pessimist," what held his attention above all was the decline itself, which
he regarded as the expression of a crisis in the soul of western culture. Kafka had come to
the same conclusion in 1921 when he wrote to Max Brod of "the frightful inner
predicament of these generations." It was a predicament that he also found within
himself, having absorbed, as he writes somewhere, all the negative tendencies of the age.
Spengler's world view similarly bears the combined stamp of his generation and his
personality. In his preface of 1922, he writes that a genuine philosopher recapitulates his
times not only in his work but also in his life and that a thinker does not invent the truth
of his age "but rather discovers it within himself. It is himself over again." In one of the
best observations ever made about Spengler, Koktenek remarks that the German historian
Leopold von Ranke

once said he would like to exclude his own personality. Not so Spengler. He himself is
there in every line he writes. . . . Observe how many subjective feelings are expressed in
his writings! One is conscious of the whole gamut, if one may so express it, of the
emotional theme.

Unlike Kafka, however, who found release in imaginative literature, Spengler survived
"the misery and disgust of these years" (3) by diving into the entire record of human
experience - history, mathematics, politics, the sciences, religion, philosophy, economics,
and the arts - all of which he wove into a work that is at once encyclopedic, soulful, and
severe in its attempt to see a way through "the frightful inner predicament of these
generations."

Steve Kogan was a Professor of English for over thirty years at the Borough of
Manhattan Community College in the City University of New York. He holds a Ph.D. in
English (Columbia, 1980).
________________

(1) The Russian religious thinker Nikolai Berdyaev was a particularly astute reader of
The Decline, which first appeared in Germany in 1918. Spengler completed a second
volume in 1922 and a revised first volume one year later. The English translation, by
Charles Francis Atkinson, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, the first book in 1926, the
second in 1928. Spengler's last work, The Hour of Decision, appeared in Germany in
1933 and in an English translation one year later, also by Atkinson and also published by
Knopf. In almost all instances, citations of a philosophical or cultural-historical nature are
taken from The Decline and those that concern World War I and its aftermath from The
Hour. Titles such as "Destiny and Causality" and "Symbolism and Space" refer to
chapters in The Decline. Citations from Spengler's correspondence are taken from The
Letters of Oswald Spengler: 1913-1936, trans. and ed. Arthur Helps, with an introduction
by A. M. Koktanek, Knopf, 1966. The original version of my essay is fully documented.
My bibliography is available on request.

(2) Simone Weil, "The Great Beast: Some Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism"
(1939-40), Selected Essays, trans. Richard Rees, Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 95-
96. Weil's critique of the resurging rhetoric about "eternal France" and "unchanging
Germany" before World War II appears toward the beginning of the essay, pp. 91-101.

(3) Spengler's words from his preface of 1922 echo his letter to Hans Klöres on
December 18, 1918, in which he speaks of his "disgust and shame over recent
ignominious events." Helps lists them as "The military collapse, the abdication of
William II, the proclamation of a Bavarian Free State, and the Armistice."

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4622

Rhythms of History

From the desk of Steve Kogan on Wed, 2011-01-05 19:18

This is Part 2 (A) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The
Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

Between 1911 and 1914, Spengler’s presentiments of an "approaching World-War" took

a historical turn, and he began to see the present crisis as the contemporary form of a
recurring phenomenon in the history of other cultures. The prime feature of this ever-
recurring catastrophe, as he saw it, was the transformation of an old, form-filled, and
soul-expanding culture into a nihilistic and outwardly-expanding empire of a "world-city"
civilization, with the world war corresponding to the first phase of "the Classical Age
from Cannae to Actium" (216-31 B.C.), as "The later Egyptian historian concealed under
the name 'Hyksos period' the same crisis which the Chinese treat under the name 'Period
of the Contending States.'" In Spengler's world-picture, this "age-phase" also coincides in
the Arabian world with the ascendancy of "Baghdad - a resurrected Ctesiphon, symbol of
the downfall of feudal Arabism - and this first world-city of the new Civilization became
from 800 to 1050 the theatre of the events which led from Napoleonism to Caesarism,
from the Caliphate to the Sultanate." In his introduction, Spengler remarks that above and
beyond all the correspondences that were appearing to him "in every increasing
volume . . . there stood out the fact that these great groups of morphological relations,
each one of which symbolically represents a particular sort of mankind in the whole
picture of world-history, are strictly symmetrical in structure." In the third chapter of
Volume I, he underscores the complete design of this picture: "Every Culture, every
adolescence and maturing and decay of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically necessary
stages and periods, has a definite duration, always the same, always recurring with the
emphasis of a symbol."

The last phrase is both telling and unexpected. Spengler’s time-frames are remarkably
constant, as he reckons them, yet he does not conclude that they recur with mathematical
certainty but that they have the weight of a significance, a thought that grows out of his
insistent impression that these periodic regularities have a "rhythm" that corresponds to
the age-phases of an individual life, hence that there is something musical about these
recapitulations (1). Since these "stages and periods" are "intrinsically necessary,"
causality plays no part in the process, in the same sense that a musical development
appears with inevitable sureness at a particular moment in the score of a master yet is in
no way "caused" by the central theme. What is decisive for Spengler is not the "How?"
but "the When? of things, the specifically historical problem of destiny," with its
"mystery-clouded, far-echoing sound symbols 'Past' and 'Future.'" Both here and
throughout The Decline, Spengler turns to the arts to express what he means by the
"livingness and directedness and fated course of real Time," indeed all that "we actually
feel at the sound of the word," which "is clearer in music than in language, and in poetry
rather than prose." Although history follows no laws, it is nevertheless filled with form
and meaning, which for Spengler unfolds through the "deep logic of becoming."

Spengler's critics have been quick to declare that his "metaphysical passages are . . .
murky and superficial" (2), yet in every chapter he provides the lexicon:

We have before us a symbol of becoming in every bar of our music from Palestrina to
Wagner, and the Greeks a symbol of the pure present in every one of their statues. The
rhythm of a body is based upon a simultaneous relation of the parts, that of a fugue in the
succession of elements in time.

It is one of the premises of The Decline that the discipline of history is inseparable from a
disciplined study of the arts, both of which require the combined resources of scholarship
and refined skeptical inquiry, "sympathy, observation, comparison, immediate and
inward certainty, intellectual flair," and a trained eye for analogy and symbolic
expression. I have never come across any reference to Sigmund Freud in Spengler's
works and letters, and indeed he had nothing but scorn for the field of "scientific
psychology . . . however remarkable as a study of cerebral anatomy"; yet he might have
been surprised to discover that Freud did not fit his mold, for that controversial
investigator of dream symbolism had a highly cultivated knowledge of literature, the arts,
and history, a healthy dose of skepticism regarding “the over-estimation” of
consciousness “in the course of psychic events,” including intellectual and artistic work, a
conviction that dreams have a history, and a suspicion that “Friedrich Nietzsche was right
when he said that in a dream ‘there persists a primordial part of humanity which we can
no longer reach by a direct path,’" all of which can be found in Freud's The Interpretation
of Dreams (1900), the classic study of form and meaning in dreams and recurring
childhood fears and fixations.

Spengler himself provides a suggestive parallel to Freud when he writes that "the
awakening of the inner life," which "marks the frontier between child and . . . man," is
linked to a fearful "depth-experience" of time and space. As with Spengler vis à-vis
Freud, I do not know if Freud ever read The Decline, but, if he did, he might have
recognized something of his own concerns and literary bent in the following passage
from "Symbolism and Space":

It is because there is this deep and significant identity [between death and space] that
we so often find the awakening of the inner life in a child associated with the death of
some relation. The child suddenly grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is, something that
has become wholly matter, wholly space, and at the same moment it feels itself as an
individual being in an alien extended world. "From the child of five to myself is but a
step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance," said
Tolstoi once.

In Spengler's understanding of history as "soul-study," the earliest appearance of every

"grand culture" is marked by a similarly fateful moment of perception, in which the
spirituality of a particular people is born out of its own unique experience of "world-fear"
in relation to space, time, and death:

Every great symbolism attaches its form-language to the cult of the dead, the forms of
disposal of the dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead. The Egyptian style begins
with the tomb-temples of the Pharoahs, the Classical with the geometrical decoration of
the funerary urns, the Arabian with catacombs and sarcophagus, the Western with the
cathedral wherein the sacrificial death of Jesus is re-enacted daily under the hands of the
priest. . . . It was when the idea of the impending end of the world spread over Western
Europe (about the year 1000) that the Faustian soul of this religion was born.

Unlike Freud, whose world view was informed by his clinical research into psychological
conflicts and pathologies, Spengler drew sharp distinctions between eras of creation and
dissolution; yet there is an unmistakable echo of Freudian dream analysis in Spengler's
belief that his patterns of historical recurrence open a "world of most mysterious
connexions" and that, if we are receptive to their empirical content and symbolic
character and are tactful in our judgments, they "will tell us of themselves how much lies
hidden there."
In keeping with his aesthetically-oriented reading of history, Spengler rejects all
systematic approaches to historiography and proceeds instead by means of questions,
analogies, philosophical arguments, and whole chapters of illustrative analysis.
Moreover, as Koktenek observes, he is always present in his writing, one characteristic of
which is to engage the reader directly in his thoughts, as he does almost immediately after
he declares that the age-phases of a culture recur ‘with the emphasis of a symbol”:

What is the meaning of . . . the rhythm of the political, intellectual and artistic
"becoming" of all Cultures? Of the 300-year period of the Baroque, of the Ionic, of the
great mathematics, of Attic sculpture, of mosaic painting, of counterpoint, of Galilean
mechanics? What does the ideal life of one millenium for each Culture mean in
comparison with the individual man's "three-score years and ten?"

The crucial word in the passage, on which everything else depends, is "rhythm." In a note
at the bottom of the page, Spengler remarks on the periodic "distances apart of the three
Punic Wars, and the series . . . Spanish Succession War, Silesian Wars, Napoleonic
Wars, and the World War," which he says are "comprehensible only as rhythmic"
recurrences.

As the rhythm and tempo of a musical score are open to subtle yet profoundly different
interpretations, so too Spengler argues that history is not available to the strict terms of
scientific analysis, for "It is one of the tacit, but none the less firm, presuppositions of
nature-research that 'Nature' (die Natur) is the same for every consciousness and for all
times," whereas real historical study "rests on an equally certain sense of the contrary;
what it presupposes as its origin is a nearly indescribable sensitive faculty within, which
is continuously labile under continuous impressions, and is incapable therefore of
possessing what may be called a centre of time."

A straight-line history of the world is therefore meaningless in his eyes, together with any
notion of universal progress or division of history into "ancient, medieval, and modern," a
western world view born in the mysticism of "the great Joachim of Floris (c. 1145-1202)"
and secularized since the seventeenth century to the point where "the sacrosanct three-
phase system" became endowed with progressivist notions that brought history "exactly
to one's own standpoint." For Spengler, this is history cut to the mold of a program, thus

making of some formula - say, the "Age of Reason," Humanity, the greatest happiness
of the greatest number, enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom, the
conquest of nature, or world-peace - a criterion whereby to judge whole millenia of
history.

All such readings of the past are arbitrary, writes Spengler, and lack a sense of proportion
and natural limits. The involuntary side of history and human nature is ignored, and
ideals of all sorts are held to be universal when in fact they belong to their own time and
place and often become dated by the sheer force of events. By the same token, their
creators overlook the fact that "Cognition and judgment too are acts of living men" and
are therefore not exempt from the human condition. In the language of an earlier time,
 Whatsoever is told us, and what ever we learne, we should ever remember, it is man,
who delivereth, and man that receiveth: It is a mortall hand, that presents it, and a mortall
hand, that receives it. . . . I alwaies call reason, that apparance or shew of discourses,
which every man deviseth or forgeth in himself (3).

In his preface of 1922, Spengler predicates the world view of The Decline on this same
principle, remarking that "the essense of what I have discovered . . . is true for me, and as
I believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time." Setting definable limits to the
life-span of his thoughts, Spengler insists in his introduction that

my own philosophy is able to express and reflect only the Western (as distinct from the
Classical, Indian, or other) soul, and that soul only in its present civilized phase by which
its conception of the world, its practical range and its sphere of effect are specified.

History for Spengler admits of no universal truths but only truths "in relation to a
particular mankind," yet what they lose in timeless validity they gain in inward value as
expressions of "a superlative human individuality."

Spengler’s unique culture-worlds are the record of this human heritage, which becomes
all the more rich and profound when viewed through the experience of irreversible time.
It is this inseparable connection between life and death that gives real-world meaning to
“the deep logic of becoming,” which Spengler can only describe as a kind of spontaneous
inevitability, or "living" destiny, as a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy conveys a sense of
fatality that never stultifies the work but becomes evermore complex, subtle, and
mysterious the more we steep ourselves in every aspect of the text.

This habit of "intelligent saturation" (4) is at the heart of aesthetic vision and is a
recurring theme in numerous accounts of artists who are known to have spent hours in
rapt attention to a landscape or a work of art, among them Da Vinci, Constable, Turner,
Delacroix, and Cézanne. For Spengler, the historian who practices a similar discipline
will become capable of feeling "the become in its becoming" and gradually come to
experience the "inner necessity" of a culture in all its manifestations. It is one of
Spengler's compelling motives for turning, as he so often does, to masterpieces of art,
music, and literature for his illustrative examples, precisely because they are heightened
forms of sensation and therefore belong to the same world of impressions in which we all
experience life. Pascal says somewhere that if we practice kneeling, we will end by
believing, and so it is for Spengler with regard to the spirituality that inheres in a great
work of art. We have only to stop thinking and start absorbing the impressions that the
work generates in us, and they will lead us by degrees into its world of form and
meaning. History for Spengler is just such a world, in which "Countless shapes that
emerge and vanish, pile up and melt again" nevertheless embody "those pure forms
which underlie all human becoming." Plato’s Ideas exist in a timeless realm of Being, the
philosophical equivalent of what Spengler calls the “noonday” clarity of the Olympian
myths, a Classical nude statue, or Doric temple; whereas his “pure forms" originate in
time as the “inner form” of a destiny, in which great events, philosophies, scientific
discoveries, and artistic masterworks have an aura of historical inevitability - the
impression that everything about them, both in themselves and in relation to their time
and place, is just so and could be no other.

In a related discussion on chance and "the unforeseen," Spengler distinguishes between

the Incidental and Destiny and argues that the "Destiny-idea" of a culture holds true even
if the incidental happenings of an era had turned out differently:

Imagine Columbus supported by France instead of by Spain, as was in fact highly

probable at one time. Had Francis I been the master of America, without doubt he and not
the Spaniard Charles V would have obtained the imperial crown. The early Baroque
period from the Sack of Rome to the Peace of Westphalia, which was actually the
Spanish century in religion, intellect, art, politics and manners,would have been shaped
from Paris and not from Madrid. Instead of the names of Philip, Alva, Cervantes,
Calderon, Velasquez we should be talking to-day of great Frenchman who in fact - if we
may thus roundly express a very difficult idea - remained unborn.

"The Incidental," he continues, "chose the Spanish gesture," but the "inward logic of that
age . . . remained the same."

By contrast, if we regard history strictly as a collection of facts, its “anecdotal

foreground" and "pragmatic aspect" often take on the character of a "comic-opera" of
"ridiculous incidents":

Do not the deaths of Gustavus Adolphus and Alexander seem like expedients of a
nonplussed playwright? Hannibal a simple intermezzo, a surprise intrusion in Classical
history; or Napoleon's "transit" more or less of a melodrama?

Seen through "the logic of Destiny," however, everything that occurs "in the whirl of
becoming" reflects an underlying theme, again by analogy to music:

Supposing that [Napoleon] himself, as "empirical person," had fallen at Marengo - then
that which he signified would have been actualized in some other form. A melody, in the
hands of a great musician, is capable of a wealth of variations; it can be entirely
transformed so far as the simple listener is concerned without altering itself [in a
fundamental way], which is quite another matter.

This is not a "what if?" view of history but of history as an almost mystical field of
unrealized variations:

The epoch of German national union accomplished itself through the person of
Bismarck, that of the Wars of Freedom [against Napoleon] through broad and almost
nameless events; but either theme, to use the language of music, could have been
"worked out" in other ways. . . . Goethe might - possibly - have died young, but not his
"idea." Faust and Tasso would not have been written, but they would have "been" in a
deeply mysterious sense, even though they lacked the poet's elucidation.
Western classical music is not the only art that Spengler requires for the study of history,
but it is the one that comes closest to defining what he means by the apprehension of a
destiny.

Our classical music also provides countless examples of "unborn" events through the uses
of silence and, in one striking instance, even as the unheard introduction of a "Destiny-
idea." A cultivated German of the old school once described a rehearsal recording to me
in which the conductor Bruno Walter made this very point about the first bar of
Beethoven's C Minor Symphony. According to the account, Walter stops the orchestra
shortly after the thunderclaps of those all-too familiar opening four notes and, with a soft-
spoken “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” instructs his musicians not to come crashing down on
them but to feel the exact instant of the opening eighth note rest as an inrushing silent
beat. Thus, the moment in which the symphony begins was for Walter both intangible
and decisive for the performance of the entire work. Even in this brief report, I could
sense that it was not just his words but the whole manner of the man that spoke to his
musicians and drew from them that special quality of warmth and richness which so
many listeners could feel in his conducting.

In a documentary on the Berlin Philharmonic, a tympanist recounts a similar experience

of Wilhelm Furtwängler even when he was not conducting, which occurred one day when
the orchestra was rehearsing before the maestro arrived for the session. The performer
was following the score when he suddenly heard the music gain a richness that had been
missing until then. He looked up and saw that Furtwängler had just come through the
door and was standing in the rear. And that was Furtwängler, says the tympanist. He was
so entirely made of music that his silent presence alone could inspire people with its
spirit. A contemporary of Anton Chekhov's, who experienced his unassuming dignity
first-hand, similarly remarked that in his presence one felt oneself wanting to rise to one's
better nature.

How is it that these feelings have so much objective truth in them? The answer, says
Spengler, is “physiognomic tact”: the ability to assimilate the significant facts and
impressions of an event and grasp their import in the moment. In Daniel Benioff’s novel
City of Thieves, the author’s Russian grandfather describes this faculty in relation both to
musical performance and the playing of chess:

When I was fourteen, I quit the club. I had learned that I was a good player but would
never be a great one. Friends of mine at Spartak, whom I had beaten consistently when
we were younger, had left me far behind, advancing to a plane I could not access no
matter how many games I played, how many books I read, how many endgame problems
I worked on in bed at night. I was like a well-trained pianist who knows which notes to
hit but can’t make the music his own. A brilliant player understands the game in a way he
can never quite articulate; he analyzes the board and knows how to improve his position
before his brain can devise an explanation for the move. I didn’t have the instincts.
Like the “brilliant player” of Lev Benioff’s memories, who “understands the game in a
way he can never quite articulate,” Spengler’s "born historian" is capable of “various
kinds of intuition – such as illumination, inspiration, artistic flair, experience of life,” and
“the power of ‘sizing men up,’” which can only be "felt with a deep wordless
understanding." Lev’s “well-trained pianist” who “can’t make the music his own”
likewise recalls Spengler’s critique of the academic historian, whose empirical research
will never lead him to “the heart of things” in the unfolding of human events, whereas
"The artist or the real historian" sees “the becoming of a thing" with the "inward
certainty" of vision.

For Spengler, as for Nietzsche, one of the chief expressions of "inward certainty" is
music, the western art form par excellence for both and "the only art," writes Spengler,
“whose means" can free us "from the spell of the light-world and its facts." It is this
"spell" that governs "our waking-consciousness," which "is now so dominated by one
sense only, so thoroughly adapted to the eye-world, that it is incapable of forming, out of
the impressions it receives, a world of the ear." There is an inherited tradition in these
words that stems from Arthur Schopenhauer's reflections on music in The World as Will
and Representation (1818-19), which Wagner incorporated in his commemorative essay
on Beethoven in 1870 and the pianist Alfred Brendel updated in 1991 in an article on
Furtwängler in The New York Review of Books: "In an age such as ours which is
fascinated by language and linguistics it is easy to forget that organized thinking is
possible without the help of words."

____________

(1) Both in The Decline and "Pessimism?" Spengler states that his association of rhythm
and destiny with sensory alertness is rooted in experience. His point is aptly illustrated in
the American vernacular toward the end of Busby Berkeley's film Strike Up the Band
(1940), in which Paul Whiteman, the classically trained creator of "symphonic jazz," tells
the high school bandleader Jimmy Connor: "Sometimes I think rhythm almost runs the
world. In a little baby, the first thing that starts is his rhythm. His little heart starts to beat.
. . . And in your own car, if the engine is missing and jerking or you feel the bump of a
tire, it's the rhythm that tells you that something's wrong. And if you call a doctor, the
first thing he does is check your rhythm. He feels your pulse to find if your rhythm is
solid and your beat is strong. So, Jimmy, when we get to the last eight bars of the big tune
and the old ticker kind of slows down, no matter what's wrong with us, the last thing to
stop is our rhythm." For Spengler, the high cultures likewise have a "pulse-beat" that is
extinguished at their death.

(2) H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate, Charles Scribner's Sons,
1952, p. 155. On the same page, Hughes even pretends to be a more careful writer than
Spengler, a vanity that leads him to reduce Spengler's reading of modern times almost to
a cliché, since all he supposedly needs to do "To make his point" is eliminate "the
determinism of inevitable decline" and say that "present signs . . . point to cultural
sterility, war, and dictatorship." In a related argument, John F. Fennelly agrees with
Hughes and Koktanek that Spengler's "metaphysical superstructure" is based on
"dogmatic exactitudes" that detract from the work. See his discussion in Twilight of the
Evening Lands: Oswald Spengler - A Half Century Later, The Brookdale Press, 1972, pp.
59-61.

(3) Michel de Montaigne, "An Apologie of Raymond Sebond," The Essayes of

Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1603), The Modern Library, 1933, pp. 508-09.

(4) T. S. Eliot, "Ben Jonson," Essays on Elizabethan Drama, Harcourt, Brace and
Company (1956), p. 67, in which Eliot speaks of the need for "intelligent saturation in
[Jonson's] work as a whole."

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4629

Rhythms of History

Steve Kogan on Thu, 2011-01-13 11:00

This is Part 2 (B) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The
Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

In his early notebooks and The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche draws a sharp line
between aesthetic understanding and systematic thought, a distinction that informs his
philosophical argument on the limits of science and objective research. Guided by his
critique, Spengler questioned the scientific model of historiography in German education,
in which history was now

seen as Nature (in the objective sense of the physicist) and treated accordingly . . . The
habits of the scientific researcher were eagerly taken as a model, and if, from time to
time, some student asked what Gothic, or Islam, or the Polis was, no one inquired why
such symbols of something living inevitably appeared just then, in that form, and for that
space of time. Historians were content, whenever they met one of the innumerable
similarities between widely discrete historical phenomena, simply to register it, adding
some clever remarks as to the marvels of coincidence, dubbing Rhodes the "Venice of
Antiquity" and Napoleon the "modern Alexander," or the like; yet it was just these cases .
. . that needed to be treated with all possible seriousness . . . in order to find out what
strangely-constituted necessity, so completely alien to the causal, was at work.

For Spengler, the contrast with Nietzsche could not have been more complete. The
differences were evident to him not only in The Birth of Tragedy but also in the author's
"Attempt at a Self-Criticism" in the 1886 edition, in which Nietzsche observes that in the
book "the suggestive sentence is repeated several times, that the existence of the world is
justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon" and that "the whole book knows only an
artistic meaning and crypto-meaning behind all events . . . ." When Spengler speaks of a
"strangely-constituted necessity" at work in history, "so completely alien to the causal,"
he is thinking of destiny as just such an aesthetic phenomenon, which he defines by
analogy to Goethe's concept of the prime or Urphänomen, the idea-image that for Goethe
is the visible organizing form of any living thing. In Erich Heller's words, Goethe's aim
was to understand nature without losing sight "of the world in which man actually lives,
of everything that matters to him as a human being, of sights, sounds, touches, smells,
tastes, loves and hatred," beyond which we find ourselves "in an unrealizable infinity of
potential abstractions" (1). It was the surface of life that held the key to its organizing
forms, or "prime phenomena," and when Friedrich Schiller remarked that "This has
nothing to do with experience, it is an idea," Goethe replied that he could even see his
ideas "with my eyes." In Spengler's concise formulation, "The prime phenomenon is that
in which the idea of becoming is presented net. To the spiritual eye of Goethe the idea of
the prime plant was clearly visible in the form of every individual plant that happened to
come up, or even could possibly come up." When Goethe told Schiller that he could see
his ideas “with my eyes,” he was speaking of thought-pictures that emerged from his
close observation of natural phenomena, which in turn served as organizing images of
their changing features and development. "As naturalist,” writes Spengler, "every line he
wrote was meant to display the image of a thing-becoming, the 'impressed form' living
and developing." Goethe did, in fact, make a number of contributions to biology, but for
Spengler the idea of the Urphänomen was even more valuable in the field of history, not
only in visual terms ("the 'impressed form' living and developing") but also musical,
whose implications for a philosophy of history he learned from his second great
instructor, Friedrich Nietzsche.

The original title of Nietzsche's first published work was The Birth of Tragedy out of the
Spirit of Music, a title that sums up Spengler's understanding of his thought process and
the nature of his prose. In "Nietzsche and His Century" (1924), an address delivered at
the Nietzsche Archive on the anniversary of the philosopher's eightieth birthday,
Spengler observed that he was "the only born musician" among "the great German
intellectuals" and that he neither shaped nor systematically analyzed his material but

lived, felt, and thought by ear. He was, after all, hardly able to use his eyes. His prose
is not "written," it is heard - one might even say sung. The vowels and cadences are more
important than the similes and metaphors. What he sensed as he surveyed the ages was
their melody, their meter. He discovered the musical keys of foreign cultures. Before him
no one knew of the tempo of history. A great many of his concepts - the Dionysian, the
Pathos of Distance, the Eternal Recurrence - are to be understood quite musically. . . . He
was the first to experience as a symphony the image of history that had been created by
scholarly research out of data and numbers - the rhythmic sequence of ages, customs, and
attitudes.

Among those attending the commemoration, more than one attentive reader of The
Decline would have heard Spengler's allusion to his own vision of history "out of the
spirit of music":
 One soul listens to the world-experience in A flat major, another in F minor; one
apprehends it in the Euclidean spirit, another in the contrapuntal, a third in the Magian
spirit. From the purest analytical Space and from Nirvana to the most somatic reality of
Athens, there is a series of prime symbols each of which is capable of forming a complete
world out of itself.

H. Stuart Hughes remarks that Spengler was deeply taken by “the language of music,”
meaning its vocabulary, but it was his entire experience of the art that gives his
metaphors the stamp of truth. “One soul listens to the world experience in A flat major,
another in F minor”: the great composers would have sensed a musical reality in his
words and not simply taken them as a figure of speech. According to the pianist Tatiana
Nikolayeva, for example, Shostakovitch told her that he envisioned his twenty-four
preludes and fugues (one pair for each key in the twelve-tone scale) as a microcosm all its
own; and, unless my attribution is in error, it was Claudio Arrau who said that when he
was a child he heard every note on the keyboard as a distinct landscape, with its own
weather, mood, and topography.

Spengler offers similar examples of the “world-experience” in sound, in which the

instrumentation of a Gluck or Beethoven can evoke “distances, lights, shadows, storms,
driving clouds, lightning flashes, colours etherealized and transcendent," while three bars
of Wagner can create “A whole world of soul,” with tone-colors “of starry midnight, of
sweeping clouds, of autumn . . . world-fear, impending doom.” For Spengler, the forms
and very instruments of western classical music answered to the realities he perceived,
and even in translation his prose style encompasses a whole range of “word-sounds” that
give The Decline its special character as a tone-poem of history. Spengler may have
drawn upon himself what Hughes calls “the scorn of the judicious,” but there is nothing
injudicious in the idea of music as a tonal representation of reality, and those who speak
of his “dogmatic exactitudes” have never taken him seriously when he speaks of the
musical character of his ideas, nor have they reflected on the extraordinary subtleties of
which musical precision is capable. Hughes manages to botch the subject altogether when
he writes that The Decline is "not to be read as a logical sequence" but as a "contrapuntal
arrangement, in which no one idea necessarily follows another," which betrays an
ignorance both of the form of the work and the art of the fugue itself.

Spengler, however, would have taken all such failures of comprehension in stride, for he
had meditated long and hard on Nietzsche's distinction in The Birth of Tragedy between
the "aesthetic listener" and "Socratic-critical persons," and in his preface of 1922 he
explicitly states that The Decline "addresses itself solely to readers who are capable of
living themselves into the word-sounds and pictures as they read." A nice musical
illustration of his contrast between systematic and intuitive logic can be found in the
unusual baton work of Furtwängler, who distained the metronome yet, "with his peculiar
beat . . . gets results of exactitude as well as of richness of sound" (2). Both his audiences
and members of his orchestra came under his spell, in which he seemed to be conducting
as though "under hypnosis . . . wrapped in sound and his inner vision," through which
"was distilled organized tone bent to an emotional end." Commenting on the performance
of a masterpiece such as Beethoven's C Minor Symphony, Furtwängler himself remarks
in Spenglerian terms that

a symphonic piece originates with two, three, or four themes, which experience each
other, enable each other to grow and become - like, say, individual characters in a
Shakespearean play - what destiny has in store for them. . . . the question of tempo is one
that cannot be separated from the interpretation of a piece as a whole, its spiritual image.

Hughes calls The Decline “a massive stumbling-block in the path of true knowledge,” but
his “men of learning” conveniently ignored or never knew the kind of “true knowledge”
that the great conductors of the time literally had at their fingertips. Furtwängler, in
particular, found a kindred spirit in Spengler's aesthetic understanding of the "Destiny-
idea":

We bring out that which is in the causal by means of a physical or epistemological

system, through numbers, by reasoned classification; but the idea of destiny can be
imparted only by the artist working through media like portraiture, tragedy and music.

Spengler sums up these contrasts with one of the central maxims of his work: "Real
history is heavy with fate but free of laws."

Goethe's unwillingness to investigate organic life apart from "the world in which man
actually lives" is echoed on the first page of "Destiny and Causality," in which Spengler
states that no science or hypothesis "can ever get in touch with that which we feel when
we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound" of words such as fate, destiny, and
doom, which demand "life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing
and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect." Hence, every chapter of The Decline
is written in view of surface impressions, the character traits of people, events, and
landmark achievements, and always "the 'impressed form' living and developing." By
extension, "The visible foregrounds of history . . . have the same significance as the
outward phenomena of the individual man," including "his bearing, his air, his stride, his
way of speaking and writing," so that "'knowledge of men' implies also knowledge of
those superlative human organisms that I call Cultures, and of their mien, their speech,
their acts - these terms being meant as we mean them already in the case of individuals."

Since human events and creations for Spengler belong to "a historical world" and are
"involved in the common destiny of mortality," the real question that "genuine historical
work" has to ask of philosophies and religions is not whether they possess "an everlasting
and unalterable objectiveness" and are based on "imperishable doctrines" but what they
represent as "life-symbols" and "what kind of man comes to expression in them. . . . For
me, therefore, the test of value to be applied to a thinker is his eye for the great facts of
his own time."

Sizing up his intellectual contemporaries, Spengler finds them complacent, narrow-

minded, and, for all practical purposes, disconnected from the age "upon which we
ourselves are now entering":
 Why is it that the mere idea of calling upon one of them to prove his intellectual
eminence in government, diplomacy, large-scale organization, or direction of any big
colonial, commercial or transport concern is enough to evoke our pity? . . . Whenever I
take up a work by a modern thinker, I find myself asking: has he any idea whatever of the
actualities of world-politics, world-city problems, capitalism, the future of the state, the
relation of technics to the course of civilization, Russia, Science? . . . far better to become
a colonist or an engineer, to do something, no matter what, that is true and real, than to
chew over once more the old dried-up themes under cover of an alleged "new wave of
philosophic thought" . . . . And I maintain that to-day many an inventor, many a diplomat,
many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practise the dull craft of
experimental psychology.

It is "far better . . . to do something, no matter what, that is true and real." This is the
Spengler who never gets in the books. What we find instead are arguments, as when
Heller insists that there is something wicked about Spengler's urging the young to
become engineers and "build aeroplanes, no matter what they carry; roads, no matter
where they may lead; weapons, no matter what 'values' they defend, or attack. For
absolute scepticism is our intellectual fate, absolute engineering our historical Destiny."

The title of Heller's book is The Disinherited Mind, yet of all the German-speaking
writers and thinkers he discusses, from Goethe and Burckhardt to Kafka and Karl Kraus,
Spengler is the only one he sees strictly in terms of "mind," more precisely, a perverted
mind: "Spengler's history is untrue because the mind which has conceived it is, despite its
learning and seeming subtlety, a crude and wicked mind." In attempting to solve "a
perfectly legitimate problem" regarding the search for meaning in history, Spengler has
bent all the resources of his intellect toward a "catastrophic" conclusion and "reduced to a
wicked kind of absurdity a tendency of the mind which is certainly not unfashionable yet:
the habit of applying to historical necessity for the marching orders of the spirit." Heller's
military image sums up his critique, for the "marching orders" of Spengler's Destiny not
only require us to fulfill "the business of 'civilization'" but also demand that we "march"
in lockstep, no questions asked. In other words, "the mind which has conceived" The
Decline is organized around a totalitarian impulse, and, in Heller’s leap to a far-fetched
conclusion, the more Spengler’s predictions turn out to be correct, the greater his
"affinities . . . to the very stuff that will determine the evil future." By the same logic,
Marx, Lenin, and Hitler should have been clairvoyants, yet their programs led to disaster,
as Spengler knew they would.

In his one-eyed view of Spengler's "mind," Heller cannot help but distort his thoughts, for
he cannot hear the man who is speaking:

Whenever I take up a work by a modern thinker, I find myself asking: has he any idea
whatever of the actualities of world-politics, world-city problems, capitalism, the future
of the state, the relation of technics to the course of civilization, Russia, Science?
This is not the voice of a thinker who participates in the mental habits of his
contemporaries. Spengler's distinctive style alone should have given Heller pause, for it is
unmistakably his own, even in his chapters on science and technology; and he also fails
to modify his conclusions in light of their genuine questions and often unusual
perceptions, as when he claims with abrupt finality that Spengler’s "acceptance of
Destiny" denies human freedom and is nothing more than "a conscious decision for the
false values; and this is the classical definition of sin and wickedness."

This is an extraordinary charge to level at a work that views history as "soul study" and
"world-fear" as the hidden center of human consciousness. No philosopher who failed to
realize "the full pathos of human freedom" could have made the following observation
about existential fear or perceived it as the unheard music of all great accomplishment:

This world-fear is assuredly the most creative of all prime feelings. . . . Like a secret
melody that not every ear can perceive, it runs through the form-language of every true
art-work, every inward philosophy, every important deed, and, although those who can
perceive it in that domain are the very few, it lies at the root of the great problems of
mathematics.

In Spengler’s world view, this “secret melody” is capable of “infinitely-varied”

expression, particularly in the ”springtime” blossoming, "summer" growth, and ”autumn”
ripening of a culture, when human freedom, in all its tragic dignity, is in consonance with
nature’s “cosmic beat.” With the onset of “early winter,” however, it grows less and less
distinct. The urban world increasingly dominates the landscape, and a seismic uprooting
from the order of nature takes place among men of the “final cities,” who become more
and more filled with the tensions of a heightened “waking-consciousness.”

In today’s “Faustian” megalopolis, the most dynamic city-civilization history has ever
known, time itself seems to be dominated by the pace of "inventions that crowd one upon
another,” and our natural "world-fear" is compounded by the terrors of modern war and
the anxieties of a disquieting peace:

Ever since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and latterly, millions, of men have stood
ready to march, and mighty fleets renewed every ten years have filled the harbors. It is a
war without war, a war of overbidding in equipment and preparedness, a war of figures
and tempo and technics, and the diplomatic dealings have been not of court with court,
but of headquarters with headquarters.

As weapons become ever more lethal and complex, “The place of the permanent armies
as we know them will gradually be taken by professional forces,” yet the coming
centuries will continue to experience “catastrophes of blood and terror.” Hence the
craving for escape through pacifism and other "wish-pictures of the future," a craving that
arises just when "we must have the courage to face facts as they are." For Spengler, this
necessity defines “the full pathos of human freedom” in our time, for in his eyes it was
touch and go whether the west would survive or go under. As he surveyed the historical
landscape of the 1930s, Spengler was convinced that "The white world is governed
primarily by idiots," yet he continued to believe that

The traditions of an old monarchy, of an old aristocracy, of an old polite society . . . in

so far as they possess honour, abnegation, discipline, the genuine sense of a great mission
. . . can become a centre which holds together the being-stream of an entire people and
enables it to outlast this time and make its landfall in the future.

Four years after Spengler died, England rallied by the skin of its teeth around an
aristocrat with "the courage to face facts as they are," a quality that Cendrars experienced
in his very language as "the living word of Churchill," who spoke of "'blood, toil, tears,
and sweat'" without any recourse to "preconceived theories" or "received ideas" and
"without ever losing sight of the earth" (3).

All the values and traditions of the high cultures, writes Spengler, are rooted in a land-
based and "form-filled" society; hence his respect not only for "Prussianism" but also for
England's historical continuities, "Parliamentarism," in particular, with the added
"circumstance that this form had grown up in the full bloom of Baroque and, therefore,
had Music in it." By contrast, he saw nothing but danger in the illusions of world reform
that were gaining ascendancy among the "Late" men, who were now living in “land-
alien” cities, "cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural
experiencing of destiny, time, and death.” In a wartime lecture for the BBC on Jack
London, Orwell made a related observation when he noted that socialist ideals originated
in the urban centers of Europe, whereas London took readers to far-away places and
confronted them, as Kipling had, with the raw brutalities of life. For Spengler, it was an
open question whether metropolitan man would have any remaining instincts and values
"to face facts as they are." As he noted in The Decline, "We ourselves, in a very few
years, have learned to take little or no notice of events that before the War would have
horrified the world; who to-day seriously thinks about the millions that perish in Russia?"

Spengler must have anticipated dozens of variations on Heller's theme that his philosophy
denies human freedom, for he made it a point to qualify "the risky word 'freedom'" in the
closing pages of his introduction and the penultimate line of the work: "We have not the
freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing."
These are not "marching orders" but an expression of the choice that underlies the
meaning of responsibility, in this case the obligation to become conscious of our
historical life-crisis, confront the forces of dissolution in the west, and work to bring
about a "politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty
thoughtfulness and duty-sense that keeps the whole in fine condition for the decisive
battle of its history." If the west is to prevail, writes Spengler, we will need our best
judgment, a will to succeed, and the "creative piety" that for us "adheres only to forms
that are older than the [French] Revolution and Napoleon," to which he adds the
following note: "Including the Constitution of the United States of America. Only thus
can we account for the reverence that the American cherishes for it, even where he
clearly sees its insufficiency."
These are not theories but challenging responses to modern actualities, yet nothing of
Spengler's practical wisdom or sense of "living history" finds its way into Heller’s
critique. Instead, he does as other critics have done by over-intellectualizing a work that
is “intuitive and depictive through and through" and then takes Spengler’s “Destiny-idea”
so far afield that its author becomes an ideologue of "the Absolute," like Hegel and Marx,
but with “a perverted mind” of sinister intent. In place of Hegel's "metaphysical" and
Marx's "messianic-social" idealism (4), Spengler has made "the spiritual bankruptcy" of
the age "our history, our Absolute, our guiding principle" and "appears merely concerned
with lending Destiny a hand in the business of destruction."

There is a psychological insight derived from Freudian analysis which states that when
intelligent people make foolish remarks it is because a defense mechanism has been
triggered to shield them from an uncomfortable fact. Spengler's celebration of modern
science, mathematics, and engineering seems to have disturbed Heller in just this way, for
it runs so entirely contrary to his values that he cannot help but stretch his argument to
the point of aligning him with today's "enemies of the spirit," this despite all that
Spengler has to say about the authentic spirituality that he is convinced still remains for
us to fulfill. Unlike Nietzsche, who regarded the quest for systematic knowledge in
Greece and in the modern world as a symptom of cultural decay, Spengler sees in our
"twilight" sciences the return of the western soul "to the forms of early Gothic
religiousness," in which

The uniting of the several scientific aspects into one will bear all the marks of the great
art of counterpoint. An infinitesimal music of the boundless world-space - that is the deep
unresting longing of this soul, as the orderly statuesque and Euclidean Cosmos was the
satisfaction of the Classical.

One cannot read Spengler's chapters on mathematics and the sciences and rationally
conclude that he is "merely concerned with lending Destiny a hand in the business of
destruction," and no one could come to this conclusion unless he ignored Spengler's own
conception of his work.

From the outset of his project, Spengler was inspired by the conviction that he had
discovered a language of the soul in the raw data of history:

Before my eyes there seems to emerge, as a vision, a hitherto unimagined mode of

superlative historical research . . . a comprehensive Physiognomic of all existence, a
morphology of becoming for all humanity that drives onward to the highest and last
ideas: a duty of penetrating the world-feeling not only of our proper soul but of all souls
whatsoever that have contained grand possibilities and have expressed them in the field
of actuality as grand Cultures.

Spengler’s vision was his own, yet he acknowledged "those to whom I owe practically
everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning
faculty." In The Disinherited Mind, Heller compares the two with insight and judgment,
yet he never mentions them in his chapter on Spengler, and this silence sums up
everything that is wrong with his critique. His treatment of Spengler's understanding of
destiny, symbolic expression, and organic development is therefore inherently skewed,
since these are the three principal themes that Spengler made his own through his
readings in Goethe and Nietzsche, namely, the identification of destiny with life and not
with a concept of life, the interpretation of history through poetic vision, and the
distinction between what is alive, "form-filled," and productive in a culture and what is
lifeless, formless, and destructive. Spengler respects the "fact-men" of our time not
because they are fulfilling an inexorable law of "the Absolute" but because they are in
daily contact with how the world actually works, in the same way that "The Pre-Socratics
were merchants and politicians en grand" and Chinese philosophers "from Kwan-tsi
(about 670) to Confucius (550-478) were statesmen, regents, lawgivers like Pythagoras
and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Liebniz," while "Goethe, besides being a model
minister . . . busied himself again and again with the question of American economic life
and its reactions on the Old World, and with that of the dawning era of machine-
industry." Spengler not only celebrates these men-of-the-world philosophers but also
identifies with them in embracing his times as they did theirs:

To me, the depths and refinement of mathematical and physical theories are a joy; by
comparison, the aesthete and the physiologist are fumblers. I would sooner have the fine
mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and
elegance of many chemical and optical processes, than all the pickings and stealings of
present-day "arts and crafts," architecture and painting included.

John F. Fennelly thinks that Spengler is right about the architecture and wrong about
modernist painting, but his argument is irrelevant, for it disregards Spengler's qualifying
words “To me” and “I would sooner have.” Spengler is not attempting to prove a point
but using examples to illustrate a preference, and, even if there was much about the new
art that he ignored or did not know, his response was not superficial. Of all the writers of
the time, Cendrars probably had the most intimate knowledge of the European art world
just before and after World War I; yet he said much the same as Spengler in his 1926
farewell to "the modern painters" and again in 1945 of Picasso and the French modernist
poets when he wrote in L'homme foudroyé that they had turned away from the common
stream of life, noting, by contrast, that he had sung of railroads in The Trans-Siberian
(1913) and that pilots themselves had brought the airplane into literature "quite naturally -
and not as a theme."

Spengler echoes this distinction when he remarks more than once that works of art are
created whole and not "thought out." This is the sum of what he means about his own
work when he writes that The Decline is not an intellectual construction but a world-
vision born of its age and rediscovered in himself. By extension, when he speaks of
"understanding the world" he is not referring to a condition of thought but a productive
relationship to actualities, which he defines in his preface of 1922 as "being equal to the
world." For Spengler, The Decline was a mirror of this equivalence, a deed of historical
consciousness written in the language of metaphor, as the book of nature for Galileo was
written in the language of mathematics.
________________

(1) Erich Heller, "Goethe and the Scientific Truth," The Disinherited Mind: Essays in
German Literature and Thought, Farrar, Straus and Cudahay, 1957, p. 22. All references
to Heller on Spengler are taken from "Oswald Spengler and the Predicament of the
Historical Imagination" in this work.

(2) John Ardoin, The Furtwängler Record, Amadeus Press, 1994, p. 29. The subsequent
references to Furtwängler are also taken from Ardoin.

(3) Blaise Cendrars, Sky (Le Lotissement du ciel, 1949), trans. Nina Rootes, Paragon
House, 1992, p. 31.

(4) The alleged idealism of The Communist Manifesto is predicated on "the abolition of
all existing social relations," a nihilistic goal that Spengler correctly termed "an aim
without a future."

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4642

History As An Aesthetic Phenomenon

From the desk of Steve Kogan on Thu, 2011-01-20 21:22

This is Part 3 of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of
the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

In translation, “the decline of the west” recalls Edward Gibbon's “the decline and fall of
the Roman empire,” but “der untergang des abendlandes” projects an image of time and
space in the decline of "the evening lands," hence the "twilight of the west" (1). To
visualize the title in this way is to prepare oneself for what follows, for it is not an
introduction to a narrative or a theory of history but an image that evokes a particular
region at a particular time of day, and it expresses an entire world view by association
with the earth and sky. Myths are made of such stuff, as Spengler underscores in his
many discussions of the early high cultures, and they are also the key to his "soul-
portraits" of history, which he depicts in view of Nietzsche’s writings on the Olympian
myths and the mythopoeic imagination.

Spengler's poetic cast of mind owes much to Goethe, but his understanding of the
character and power of myth is epitomized in the opening lines of The Birth of Tragedy:
 We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, once we perceive not merely
by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision, that the continuous
development of art is bound up with the Apollinian and Dionysian duality . . . The terms
Dionysian and Apollinian we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the discerning
mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, in concepts, but in the
intensely clear figures of their gods.

By extension, Classical mythology speaks in shapes and symbols that condense life and
thought into "a concentrated image of the world." In a comment on the unparalleled
clarity of Homer's imagery, Nietzsche states that, "For a genuine poet, metaphor is not a
rhetorical figure but a vicarious image that he actually beholds in place of a concept."
The world as history appeared to Spengler as just such a vision of life in all its vividness
and transience, in which he saw "the decline of the west" as one instance of “an ordered
and obligatory sequence” common to all the high cultures and indeed to all living things,
for which the words “birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals.”

Spengler reminds us more than once that time is that ambiguous “something” through
which life flows inexorably forward in "the becoming," hardens into "the become," and is
the actual medium of history, “the course of human events,” in Jefferson’s excellent
phrase. It is the realm of happenings, which are ever-new yet trace a recurring path for
which history provides decisive lessons:

As then, at the commencement of the Imperium Romanum, so today, the form of the
world is being remoulded from its foundations, regardless of the desires and intentions of
“the majority” or of the number of victims demanded by every such decision. But who
understands this? Who is facing it? . . . Life in danger, the real life of history, comes once
more into its own. Everything has begun to slide . . .

For Spengler, therefore, “the twilight of the west” is an image of "the becoming" in our
time, in which old forms and certainties dissolve among the lengthening shadows, and the
west increasingly loses the sense of stability that it possessed as late as the decade before
World War I. Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939) is an elegy on this loss:

Christ! What's the use of saying that one oughtn't to be sentimental about "before the
war"? I am sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It's quite true that if you
look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That's
true even of the war. But it's also true that people then had something that we haven't got
now.

What? It was simply that they didn't think of the future as something to be terrified of.
It isn't that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole
worked harder, lived less comfortably and died more painfully. . . . but what they didn't
know was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves,
things would go on as they'd known them. . . . Their good and evil would remain good
and evil. They didn't feel the ground they stood on shifting under them.
Had Orwell known the works of Spengler the way he knew his Dickens, Wells, and
Kipling, he would have seen in Spengler’s “We stand, it may be, close before a second
world war” a mirror of England's own anxieties scarcely three years after Spengler's
death:

War is coming. 1941, they say. . . . I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had
taught me, and it was this. It's all going to happen. All the things you've got at the back of
your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a
nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. . . . The bad times are coming, and the
stream-lined men are coming too. What's coming afterwards I don't know, it hardly even
interests me. I only know that if there's anything you care a curse about, better say good-
bye to it now, because everything you've ever known is going down, down, into the
muck, with the machine-guns rattling all the time.

Spengler could not have said it better. “It’s all going to happen” is Orwell’s colloquial
equivalent of Spengler’s “mighty destiny,” whose portents he recognized in “The Fascist
formations of this decade.” He had felt it coming in the early 1920s, and by the time he
wrote The Hour of Decision he was convinced that the fate of the west would depend as
never before on men with "strong instincts" and a "superior eye for the things of reality,"
as Hitler's first great nemesis, Churchill, proved to be.

In the aftermath of the Great War, whose "profound shock" left a "spiritual chaos in its
wake," Spengler's most troubling question concerned the stunted character-types that
were increasingly taking center stage, and he wondered if there were any statesmen who
could see "beyond their time, their continent, their country, even the circle of their own
activities," especially since "the raison d'être of grave questions is precisely that they
should call forth the best efforts of the best brains. And when we see how, all the world
over (2), they are whittled down, lied down, to the level of small fictional problems, so
that small men with small ideas and small expedients can make themselves important . . .
then may we well despair of the future."

Spengler’s career, like Nietzsche’s, was marked by a deep aversion to “small men with
small ideas,” and, from the beginning, both men followed their own path, as their revered
Goethe had followed his. One measure of Spengler’s creative intellect can be found in the
analogies that he draws between his work and the Renaissance treatment of space, for it
was his ambition to see into the future as the Renaissance masters had discovered the art
and science of portraying distances in depth. Elsewhere, he remarks that he is reading the
“signs and symbols” of history in order that we may chart a course into the unknown, as
the Vikings sailed into the stormy distances of the North Atlantic.

When he undertook his epic project, Spengler was living in poverty and obscurity in
Munich, yet he was inwardly atune to his age. He identified with Nietzsche's lonely
struggle against "a prevailing formlessness" (3) in modern life, and, in the aftermath of
the First World War, the forebodings of other nineteenth-century thinkers and writers
reached an even deeper level of intensity in such works as Cendrars' The End of the
World Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame (1919), T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922),
Franz Kafka's The Castle (1926), John Dos Passos's Orient Express (1927) and U.S.A.
(1938), and T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), in particular the
concluding scenes of the Turkish hospital in Damascus and the Turkish army's collapse, a
narrative structure that recalls Thucydides' concluding chapters on the plague at Athens
and the defeat of the Sicilian expedition. In many ways, the true home of The Decline is
among these works. It was neither written for professional historians, nor does it rest
comfortably in their midst. Spengler particularly admired the historical novels of
Stendhal and Sir Walter Scott and frequently refers to the writing of history as a literary
art, noting that Ranke, a master of empirical research, "is credited with the remark that,
after all, Scott's 'Quentin Durward' was the true history-writing" (4).

In keeping with this premise, Spengler declares in his preface of 1922 that The Decline is
"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." Given
this unambiguous and accurate portrayal of the work, Heller's image of Spengler's
"marching orders" is especially unfortunate, not only because Spengler refuses to deploy
"an army of ranked concepts" but also because he calls upon our affective faculties so
that we may experience for ourselves the "word-sounds and pictures” of his prose. This
capacity, which is exercised in the reading of poetry and imaginative prose, is a defining
trait of Nietzsche's "aesthetic reader," and, like his mentor in The Birth of Tragedy,
Spengler insists that it is equally necessary for the cultivation of a historical sensibility.
He even describes the conception of The Decline as a moment of poetic illumination, in
which "historical relations and connexions . . . presented themselves" to him in the form
of "symbol and expression." In Chapter I, he provides an aesthetic context for his vision
and observes that "the organism of a pure history-picture, like the world of Plotinus,
Dante and Giordano Bruno, is intuitively seen, inwardly experienced, grasped as a form
or symbol and finally rendered in poetical and artistic conceptions."

Spengler restates an ancient principle when he writes that "Poetry and historical study are
kin" and that, in the end, one must examine "History poetically" (5). Although standards
of objectivity must prevail in "the science of historical spade-work," the material itself
remains quintessentially human and expressive and therefore cannot be delved without
the help of an "intangible sensitive faculty within." Defining “true history writing” by the
light of his own "poetical and artistic conceptions," he proceeds from facts and
impressions to the “collective biography” of a culture, whose inner life can be traced in
its outward features, as Shakespeare could sense "a world-secret" in a plot and as
Rembrandt's portraits are character studies that convey the weight of a life in a single
image, "history captured in a moment."

Thus, the writing of history for Spengler is an art, not a science, and the "spade-work" of
research on "facts . . . and figures only a means, not an end." Once we approach "real
historical vision," however, we enter "the domain of significances," the world of meaning
and expression, in which the crucial words are not "'correct' and 'erroneous' but 'deep' and
'shallow.'" Empirical evidence only takes us to the beginning of historical insight, which
he sees as a glimpse into the forces "at work in the depths." Since everything historical
for Spengler represents "the expression of a soul," the study of history is ultimately an
exploration of intangibles that lie beyond the strict bounds of "Reason, system, and
comprehension," which "kill as they 'cognize.'" In his notebooks of the early 1870s,
Nietzsche said the same in different words when he defined concepts as "the graveyard of
perceptions," and related oppositions appear in the works of nineteenth-century thinkers
and writers from Goethe to Dostoevsky: witness Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment,
who kills "for a theory" and is reborn in prison only after great mental suffering, when he
is no longer "consciously reasoning at all; he could only feel. Life had taken the place of
logic and something quite different must be worked out in his mind."

In an extended discussion on Dostoevsky, Spengler remarks that “his passionate power of

living was comprehensive enough” to embrace his “two fatherlands, Russia and Europe”;
and this same comprehensive energy is at work in Spengler’s philosophy of “the
becoming,” which embraces not only the past and present, but also the future, whose
shape he foresees through his own passionate life-sense of where we are heading:

I see, long after A. D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread
over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of to-
day's and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the
point of madness.

Global wars, fantastical cities, and miraculous machines: Spengler’s world-picture was
indeed "only in a limited sense" the property of its author, for his futuristic visions have
their parallels in countless films and novels of the time, notably Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(1927) and Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, published in the same year as The Hour
of Decision.

Given the nature of the work, The Decline could not help but appeal to artists and writers,
since every chapter is filled with vivid impressions of the tangible surface of history,
whose intangible "life-feelings" and "form-languages" require "the eye of an artist” to be
understood,

and of an artist who can feel the whole sensible and apprehensible environment
dissolve into a deep infinity of mysterious relationships. So Dante felt, and so Goethe
felt. To bring up, out of the web of world-happenings, a millenium of organic culture-
history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of its inmost spirituality - such
is the aim. Just as one penetrates the lineaments of a Rembrandt portrait or a Caesar-bust,
so the new art [of "physiognomic" analysis] will contemplate and understand the grand,
fateful lines in the visage of a Culture as a superlative human individuality.

I once asked a historian friend of mine at NYU what he thought of Spengler, to which he
replied that he had once been attracted to him but had long outgrown his heady
speculations. Spengler would have said that his youthful excitement had been trained out
of him and that the "the eye of an artist" was the last thing that his teachers would have
required. There is no getting around the divide between Spengler and his critics, who see
errors in his work and a flawed theory of history, whereas he takes them to task for what
he regards as their poor judgment, lack of psychological and aesthetic flair, and above all
superficiality.

Of the two sides, Spengler has had the better argument, for his detractors have been tone
deaf to the precision of his prose, have never adequately explored his nineteenth-century
background, and lack his eye for the determining facts of our time. Heller may be the
most gifted reader of them all, yet even he gets it wrong when he writes that Spengler's
key to "our historical Destiny" is "absolute engineering," for he not only ignores
Spengler's accurate picture of the developmental process at the heart of modern industry
but also avoids the crucial question that he raises about the potential limits of this
"Destiny":

As the horse-powers run to millions and milliards . . . these machines become in their
forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over
with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever
more and more immaterial, ever less noisy. The wheels, rollers, and levers are vocal no
more. All that matters withdraws itself into the interior. . . . There have been fears,
thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But so long as there
are worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no existence. When, and only
when, the crop of recruits for this army fails . . . then nothing can hinder the end of this
grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.

Casting a backward glance, Spengler sees another limit to the "intellectual intoxication"
of the machine culture and "the miracle of the Cosmopolis":

But always the splendid mass-cities harbour lamentable poverty and degraded habits,
and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw
man - in Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London and
Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of
those wretched upper-floor tenaments of Rome.

What makes these parallels all the more telling for Spengler is that they appear in the
same age-phase of each culture's “collective biography" - Classical, Gothic, Middle
Eastern, Egyptian, Asian, and Central American - "an immense wealth of actual forms -
the Living, with all its immense fullness, depth and movement." There is no "pessimism"
here, and even when he writes of "the hard cold facts" of modern life he evokes the same
vibrant sense of an age that he sees in his earlier seasons of history.

When Spengler speaks of the biography or portrait of a culture, he has in mind a specific
orientation to individuality that is for him west-European in origin, beginning with the
voyages of the Vikings and later followed by the sky-reaching thrusts of the Gothic
cathedral, which he sees as prime expressions of a soaring sense of self and hunger for
the limitless, comparable to the journies of "the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and
Siegfried sagas," who are "ever roaming in the infinite." Faustian "life-feelings" pervade
the cathedral's interior as well, not only in its vast recesses but also in the "space-
commanding" sounds of the organ and the use of the incorporeal light-world as a medium
of art through sheets of stained glass windows, with their representations of the human
drama in subjects taken from secular and Scriptural history. A corresponding drama in
stone appears in the expressive faces of the sculptures that rise above us at the very
portals of the cathedral. It is an altogether singular art in the world of sacred architecture,
as painting became in the frescoes of Giotto, who abandoned the stylized forms and
ornately transcendent visions of Byzantine art for religious narrative cycles of
extraordinary intimacy and emotion. It is but a step to the great age of western
portraiture, which extends from Bellini, Raphael, and Titian in Italy to Hans Holbein,
Dürer, Velasquez, and, in Holland, Franz Hals and, above all, Rembrandt, the epitome of
soulful seeing into the human face.

In the northern sagas, Spengler also sees a uniquely western world view of landscape and
solitude that comes to fruition both in western landscape art and literature, notably
Shakespeare's King Lear and in quintessential form during the Easter scene in Goethe's
Faust, in which an experience of intense yearning ends in a moment of discovery in the
midst of limitless space:

A longing pure and not to be described

drove me to wander over woods and fields,

and in a mist of hot abundant tears

I felt a world arise and live for me.

For Spengler, the storm scene on the heath in King Lear represents the prime western
embodiment of the infinity-feeling in the sphere of tragedy, in which Shakespeare
unfolds "the destiny of King Lear" through a swirl of action that gradually reveals a
network of

dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges; spiritual threads weave
themselves into the action incorporeal and transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by
the counterpoint of the secondary tragedy of Gloster's house. Lear is at the last a mere
name, the axis of something unbounded. This conception of destiny . . . touches the
bodily Euclidean not at all, but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the
fool and the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön group; the
first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of suffering.

Were he living today, Spengler would find ample confirmation that our "historical
becoming" still bears the impress of the prime western drive into "the unbounded," as in
today's world-wide systems of travel and communication and deep probings of cosmic
and sub-atomic space (6).

Hence, we are not the "pupils and successors" of the Classical world but "simply its
adorers"; for, in all that we have absorbed of antiquity, we have remained entranced by
the one culture most nearly opposite to our own in its striving for the corporeal clarity of
"the near," whose embodiment of "the pure Present . . . so often roused Goethe's
admiration in every product of the Classical life," sculpture in particular (7). Both in two
and three-dimensional Euclidean figures, for example, parallel lines remain as equidistant
from each other in extension as they are directly before our eyes (8); yet, in the Faustian
interpretation of space, they come together with equal inevitability in the perspective
grids of western landscape art, where the play of light and color enhances the effect of
infinite distance through aerial perspective. For Spengler, the greatest symbol of "the
optically definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present" in Classical art is the
Doric column, whose equivalent spirit in mathematics is expressed in the mastery of
finite magnitudes, in "history-writing" in the "fine pieces" that "set forth matters within
the political present of the writer," and in the restrictions of time and place in drama, in
which events unfold like "beads on a string," while "The Greek scene is never a
landscape; in general, it is nothing, and at best may be described as a basis for moveable
statues."

Picking up the Lear theme in a later chapter, Spengler contrasts Classical stasis with
"Faustian soul-space," which he calls a "drama of perspectives" both in painting and
literature:

In Shakespeare, who was born when Michelangelo died and ceased to write when
Rembrandt came into the world, dramatic infinity, the passionate overthrow of all static
limitations, attained the maximum. His woods, seas, alleys, gardens, battlefields lie in the
afar, the unbounded. Years fly by in the space of minutes. The mad Lear between the fool
and the reckless outcast on the heath, in the night and the storm, the unutterably lonely
ego lost in space - here is the Faustian life-feeling!

Spengler's passages on Lear rank with the best in Shakespeare studies and shine with the
precision of a poet's gift for thinking through images “in place of a concept." What he
calls "prime symbols" are simply his most concentrated images of the cultures, as G.
Wilson Knight speaks of the "extended metaphors" in Shakespearean drama that are
particular to the character and plot of every work.

Echoing his many references to Classical and Shakespearean tragedy, Spengler sees
history itself as "the drama of a number of mighty Cultures," each with "its own idea, its
own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death." In an essay that foreshadows
Spengler's fate among later historians, R. G. Collingwood accuses Spengler of insulating
cultures from one another (Fennelly calls them "water-tight compartments"), but these
images, like Heller’s “marching orders of the spirit,” reduce a vision to a system and his
cultures into rigid constructions, no matter how often Spengler insists that the terms
"Euclidean," "Magian," and "Faustian" are to be understood as symbolic representations
of once-living and now ultimately unknowable worlds. As close as we may come to
understanding them, at their core there will always be an incommunicable experience that
we may intuit but never fully comprehend. Goethe grounded his philosophical reflections
in the related belief that wonder is the highest form of perception, and Nietzsche
continued this line of thought in "Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873) when he
remarked that nature "is acquainted . . . only with an X which remains inaccessible and
undefinable for us." Hence the inescapable presence of the intangible in every "perceptual
metaphor," which is "individual and without equals and is therefore able to elude all
classification."

Der Untergang des Abendlandes thus presents itself on every page as a picture of history
conceived by a "philosopher-artist" (9), which Collingwood and others were incapable of
discussing except as a construct. Spengler, however, explicitly states that his vision of
cultures as separate organisms is itself symbolic and represents an early "winter"
expression of a western orientation to life, through which he sees every culture, like every
individual, developing in existential solitude. So too, in Shakespeare's tragic figures, "We
are sensible of the immense inner distance between the persons, each of whom at bottom
is only talking with himself. Nothing can overcome this spiritual remoteness." As
Melville richly observed of the dramatist himself, what "makes Shakespeare,
Shakespeare" is precisely "those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-
forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of Reality"
(10).

Spengler's hundreds of references to figures from every field of history should have
alerted his critics to his parallels between the soul-types of a culture and cultures as
spiritual biographies, whose expressive features can "tell us of themselves how much lies
hidden there." The image of Goethe is present even in these thoughts, in the sense that
Goethe meant, "as he avowed himself," that his works were "only fragments of a single
great confession." In Shakespeare's Lives, Samuel Schoenbaum refers to the Goethean
model and traces a line of nineteenth-century thought in which Shakespeare's literary
development was similarly regarded as a figurative biography of an inner life. Keats'
remark that the plays are comments on his life of allegory is a concise expression of this
view, which was later extended to include the developmental character of "the
Shakespearean moment," as Patrick Crutwell has described the English Renaissance in its
transition from Elizabeth to James I.

To repeat, for Spengler the decisive moment in the life of a culture is the birth itself of a
new "world-soul," whose deepest meanings are revealed in its "springtime" myths, epics,
and religious architecture. For Nietzsche, the birth of Greek tragedy was just such a
creation, in whose decline he saw parallels to the increasing formlessness of modern life.
Spengler, on the other hand, drew inspiration from the "Faustian" origins of the northern
European world, and he believed that it still had the potential to tap into its passion for
long-range exploration and discovery to foresee its "landfall in the future."

______________________

(1) Fennelly combines both in the title of his book on Spengler, Twilight of the Evening
Lands.
(2) Including Japan, whose once "splendid State" now appears to have been "poisoned by
the Democratic and Marxian decaying forms of the White nations," The Hour of
Decision, pp. 65-66.

(3) In "Nietzsche and His Century," available online at Philweb: The Oswald Spengler
Collection. My references to "Prussianism and Socialism" and "Pessimism?" are also
taken from this site.

(4) Spengler took his stand in a major debate on the writing of history that was taking
place on both sides of the Atlantic and not in the academy alone. See Theodore
Roosevelt's "History as Literature" (1913), in which he demonstrates a respectable
knowledge of the great cultures and a surprising appreciation of Goethe, whom he calls
"as profound a thinker as Kant." It is impossible to imagine any political leader today
who is even remotely comparable to Roosevelt either in thought or prose.

(5) "For history has a certain affinity to poetry and may be regarded as a kind of prose
poem." Quintillian, Institutes, in Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's "Histories": Mirrors of
Elizabethan Policy, Methuen & Co Ltd., 1964, p. 27. Campbell notes that in the
Renaissance classical rhetoric "influenced the concept of history as a form of creative
writing, opposed to the idea of history as a set of records."

(6) In a letter to Eduard Spranger (April 5, 1936), Spengler remarks that "Culture is for
me an inward form of historical 'becoming' and not a sum of similar objects." It is a key
principle of The Decline, yet Collingwood erroneously insists that "what [Spengler]
called a 'culture'" was only "a constellation of historical facts . . . in which every detail
fitted into every other as placidly as the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle lying at rest on a
table." An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 1940, p. 75.

(7) With regard to the Classical temple, Spengler notes that "direction in depth is
eliminated" through its many subtle curvatures and "a carefully toned-off ratio" in the
variation of "swell and inclination and distance" from "corners to the centres of the
sides," so that "the whole corpus is given a something that swings mysterious about a
centre." Hence, "While the Gothic soars, the Ionic hovers," I:177.

(8) In "Symbolism and Space," Spengler reflects at some length on the Euclidean
"structure of Classical corporeality" in relation to "the pure space-feeling" of our "group
of geometries," I: 176n.

(9) Nietzsche, "The Philosopher" (1872), Philosophy and Truth: Selections from
Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Beazeale, Humanities
Press International, Inc., 1979, p. 15.

(10) Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850), in Moby-Dick, W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc. 1967, p. 541.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4649
The History Of A Metaphor (1)

From the desk of Steve Kogan on Wed, 2011-01-26 17:14

This is Part 4 (A) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The
Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

Like speaks to like. In a singular observation on The Decline, Jorge Luis Borges remarks
on a rare quality of Spengler's "virile pages, written between 1912 and 1917," which
"were never contaminated by the hatred peculiar to those years" (1). It is a striking
comment to make about a philosophy of history, for it does not address Spengler's ideas
or scholarship but the moral character of the work in relation to its times. In this respect,
Borges’ "Capsule Biography" belongs to the genre of the exemplary portrait and is closer
to the spirit of Plutarch's Lives than to modern criticism.

Steeped in the history of Rome and convinced that it held lessons for our "twilight" age
(2), Spengler might have described Borges' remark itself as a Roman observation, for it
recalls the ideal of the stoic hero: manly, self-possessed, and rising above the passions of
the times. Like Goethe and Nietzsche, Spengler was a master of vigorous and concise
expression, and his thoughts emerge from a seemingly bottomless well of learning in
flashes of insight and descriptive analysis. The central ideas of The Decline came to him
with the clarity of a vision, and when his work was completed he was surprised to find
that he had created a philosophy, "a German philosophy" at that. If we recall the sheer
range of artists and thinkers who were drawn to his work, from Furtwängler to Berdyaev
and the gifted science-fiction writer James Blish, then Borges' description of his "virile
pages" is accurate indeed.

No comparable audience appears on Hughes' radar screen. In the split between Spengler's
admirers and detractors, those who "find in him a source of profound intellectual
excitement" have "refused to be warned" away by the scholarly world, and Hughes
himself finds their commentaries "inexact, impressionistic, and frequently naive."
Outside Germany, in particular, The Decline may have “won the admiration of the half-
educated," yet it also earned "the scorn of the judicious," with Collingwood leading the
way. As Fennelly approvingly observes, Spengler treats his "cultural life-cycles with a
rigidity that has been wholly unacceptable to his critics."

In their rush to judgment, it never occurs to "the judicious" that if they were right, then
the quality of Spengler's prose would mirror the "dogmatic exactitudes" of his thought. In
other words, dogma in, dogma out, yet this is clearly not the case, for his descriptive
passages are suffused with insight and color, particularly when he interprets his subjects
through his symbolic seasons of history, as in his opening discussion of the Gospels in
the early "Magian" world:

The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of
this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. In all the great creations of those years there is
nothing which can be set beside it. . . . . Jesus's utterances . . . are those of a child in the
midst of an alien, aged, and sick world. . . . Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of
those fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesareth in the midst of the age of the
great Tiberius . . . while round them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and
temples, their refined Western society, their noisy mob-diversions, their Roman cohorts,
their Greek philosophy. When the friends and disciples of the sufferer had grown grey . . .
they put together, from the sayings and narratives generally current in their small
communities, a biography so arresting in its inward appeal that it evolved a presentation-
form of its own, of which neither the Classical nor the Arabian Culture has any example -
the Gospel. Christianity is the one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of
a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the
whole creation.

The underlying music of the passage, its “deep logic of becoming,” is brilliantly
organized around Spengler’s central theme of the birth of a new “world-soul,” beginning
with “the infant Christianity” and closing on the “Destiny-idea” of Christ’s own birth and
death. Spengler's interpretive analysis of the Gospel-world is a model of history writing
that is both vivid and true (3), and it is also noteworthy that his ”word-sounds and
pictures” have a Wagnerian intensity that is never entirely absent from his work. In the
passage cited above, this operatic quality is reflected in his richly emblematic pictures of
"Late-city" Classical culture and the Magian "springtime," which he treats as a
counterpoint of two contrasting historical leitmotifs, as Wagner composed his music
dramas by interweaving the motifs of his music with his librettos (as a celebration of
Easter, Parsifal is literally a springtime opera). All this is beyond the reach of critics for
whom Spengler's "metaphysical structure" is "wholly unacceptable."

Along the same lines but written for a wider audience, Donald Kagan refers to H. G.
Wells, Pitirim Sorokin, and Spengler as "amateur historians" and remarks that "Each man
and his work won considerable notoriety, but all were easily dismissed by professional
historians" (4), as though Emery Neff were not one of them, nor could there be any other
serious audience for Spengler's work. Borges, however, was not concerned with
Spengler's place among scholars in the field but with his solitary labors in the midst of
hardship and the power of his prose, which communicates a sense of high drama in the
growth and disappearance of the great cultures of the world, each with its own

new possibilities of self-expression, which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There
is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each limited
in duration and self-contained, just as each species species of plant has its peculiar
blossoms or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These cultures, sublimated life-
essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field.

Taking this passage in its most reductive sense, Kagan's “professional historians” have
labeled him a "cyclical" and “biological determinist,” yet its context is not theoretical but
poetic and religious; for, in their freshness and particularity, his “springtime” cultures are
like the lilies of the field in the Gospel of St. Luke, whose splendor is both immediate and
complete. “They neither toil nor spin” means that their beauty is not an end result but
prime. Likewise Spengler's cultures, whose spirit owes nothing to causality but flows
from within as the spontaneous expression of a particular humanity. Hence their “soul-
language” speaks to our capacity for wonder and contemplation, such as Wordsworth
exercised when he stood before his field of daffodils.

My comparison with Wordsworth is deliberate, for Spengler's contrast between causal

analysis and pastoral vision has its origins in a long line of philosophy and literature that
dates from the time of Goethe, Blake, and Wordsworth. Spengler was primarily familiar
with its German antecedents, but a brief digression on American literature may illuminate
his thinking best of all, for it appears with striking clarity in several classics of American
poetry and prose, among them Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
(1875) and Herman Melville's Billy Budd (c. 1890). Whitman's poem is a study in
contrasts between the systematic and visionary mind, whose tensions he resolves by
wandering alone in nature to be open to direct experience. It is a quintessential emblem of
romantic poetry and corresponds to Faust's walking "over woods and fields" and
Wordsworth's wandering "lonely as a cloud":

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns
before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. (5)

Whitman's poem dramatizes in blank verse what Spengler would reflect upon half a
century later:

Reason, system and comprehension kill as they "cognize." That which is cognized
becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the
other hand, vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity.

In Billy Budd, the terms of this opposition recall the Gospel message that the letter kills
but the spirit gives life; for, when Budd stands on the mainyard at the moment of his
execution and spontaneously cries "God bless Captain Vere!" he appears in a state of
pastoral grace, like "a singing-bird on the point of launching from the twig," with a noose
prepared by military law and logic around his neck (6). Melville ends his tale with a
ballad on Budd’s last night before his execution, written by an anonymous sailor “with an
artless poetic temperament,” in which Billy imagines himself merging with the sea when
he will be dropped "Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep," his
lifeless body wrapped in underwater vegetation among the "oozy weeds" as he sinks into
the unconscious, ocean-world of sleep and dreams.
There are any number of literary associations between dream-visions and the sea, as in
Shakespeare's Richard III and The Tempest and Wordsworth's The Prelude (1799-1805),
but an even closer parallel to the symbolism of spiritual depth may be found in the
closing lines of Wagner's Das Rheingold (1853), whose magic ring must be returned to
its solitary place beneath the Rhine, beneath Wotan's newly created fortress of Valhalla -
the world of systematic structures, law, and power - to be appreciated in aimless
innocence by the Rhinemaidens, for

Traulich und true

ist's nur in der Tiefe:
falsch und feig
ist, was dort oben sich freut!

"Only in the depths is there tenderness and truth. What is false and cowardly rejoices
above."

Like Goethe's stanza on the life-force that surges through everything ("Wenn im
Unendlichen dasselbe"), which Spengler took as his epigraph for The Decline, the words
of the Rhinemaidens’ echo in Spengler's philosophy of history, for he insists that cultures
have a spiritual depth that is not accessible to systematic thought, which kills the living
spirit. It was in this frame of mind that Goethe remarked, "No one can be more afraid of
numbers than I"; and Ernst Cassirer similarly notes that

When the botanist Link tried to illustrate Goethe's theory of the metamorphosis of
plants by means of an abstract model, he vigorously objected. "In such efforts," he
declared, "only the last formless sublimated abstraction is left, and the subtlest organic
life is joined to the completely formless and bloodless universal phenomena of nature."
(7)

So too, Whitman felt his own vitality drain away when he was "shown the charts and
diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them."

In arguing for the living identity of things in contrast to "bloodless" models of nature,
Goethe voiced a reaction against mechanism that was shared by writers throughout the
nineteenth century, among them Thoreau, Dickens, and Dostoevsky in Notes from the
Underground (1864), in which the underground man rails against mathematical logic and
the celebration of science and progress in the exhibition halls of London's Crystal Palace.

The terms of this debate were established prior to these writers, however, and nowhere
was the religious position stated more vividly than in William Blake's "Mock On, Mock
On, Voltaire, Rousseau" (c. 1800):

The Atoms of Democritus

And Newton's Particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
 Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

Closer to home among the classics of German thought, Spengler writes that his world
cultures "belong, like the plants and animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to
the dead Nature of Newton."

When Renaissance Platonists spoke of "sweet harmonies" and the secret "hieroglyphics"
of beauty, they had specific principles of Pythagorean proportion in mind, and, although
not mathematically precise, Spengler's forerunners had a well-defined understanding of
such terms as "world-view" and "inner form." When Spengler, for example, states that his
method of entering into the unique worlds of different cultures "is the method of living
into (erfühlen) the object, as opposed to dissecting it," he not only echoes Wordsworth's
"The Tables Turned" (“We murder to dissect”) but also recalls a key term of historical
study in Johann Gottfried Herder’s Philosophy of History (1774): "First sympathize with
the nation, go into the era, into the geography, into the entire history, feel yourself into
it," which, according to Neff, marks "the first appearance of the verb einfühlen.”

Historical thinking for Herder thus requires a receptive understanding of the special
characteristics of a people and its world, including its landscape, which Spengler refers to
as the “mother-region” of a culture. As Neff observes in The Poetry of History, ruins,
fragmentary forms, alien religions, folk culture, all this and more disclosed a richness, in
Herder's words, that "the mole's eye of this most enlightened century" could not see. As
in Spengler’s view of history ("the Living, with all its immense fullness, depth and
movement”), "The stuff of history, Herder now believed, was action, instinct,
atmosphere, the spirit of a people in its geographical setting. History should be displayed
as 'pictures,' not analyzed into abstract generalizations. Its charm was 'absence,'
remoteness."

For Spengler, it is precisely here that history challenges our powers of interpretation,
since everything that once comprised “the Living" is now accessible only through its
remains, and it was his conviction that the once living "depths of an alien soul" could
only be reached through a "deep wordless understanding." Spengler is indeed writing in
the language of poetic vision, for his "wordless understanding" in the historical sphere
echoes Whitman's in the natural world when he wandered into the night and looked up
"in perfect silence at the stars."

In his chapter "The Living Past," Neff discusses the new approaches that Herder and
others brought to the study of ancient poetry, myth, and religion, which Spengler, like
Nietzsche before him, wove into his readings of the past and modern times. In this
respect, it would be more accurate to describe him as a mythopoeic than a biological
determinist, for when he speaks of "Euclidean," "Magian," and "Faustian" consciousness
his defining examples are taken from myth and epic poetry, in which "Every myth of the
great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality":

These very earliest creations of the young soul tell us that there is a relationship
between the Olympian figures, the statue and the corporeal Doric column; between the
domical basilica, the "Spirit" of God and the arabesque; between Valhalla and the Mary
myth, the soaring nave and instrumental music.

Drawing the thought-provoking conclusion that "all 'knowing' of Nature, even the
exactest, is based on a religious faith," Spengler asks us to consider the various "form-
languages" in which “nature-knowledge” has been written:

For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved with inward certainty
of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized light-rays, errant ions, flying and colliding
gas particles, magnetic fields, electric currents and waves – are they not one and all
Faustian visions, closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the upthrust of Gothic
architecture, the Viking’s voyaging into unknown seas, the longings of Columbus and
Copernicus? . . . Are they not, in short, our passionate directedness, our passion of the
third dimension, coming to symbolic expression in the imagined Nature-picture as in the
soul image? . . . (8)

The "Nature" of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in the nude statue, and
out of it logically there grew up a static of bodies, a physics of the near. The Arabian
Culture owned the arabesque and the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this
world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious efficient
substantialities. . . . And the outcome of Faustian man's Nature idea was a dynamic of
unlimited span, a physics of the distant.

Conceived "with the eye of an artist," Spengler's most incisive and evocative passages are
informed by his observations on art, mythology, and epic poetry, for it is here that he
finds his historical emblems in their clearest and most expressive form:

Olympus rests on the homely Greek soil, the Paradise of the Fathers is a magic garden
somewhere in the Universe, but Valhalla is nowhere. Lost in the limitless, it appears with
its inharmonious gods and heroes the supreme symbol of solitude. Siegfried, Parzeval,
Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures. Read the wondrous
awakening of the inner life in Wolfram's Parzeval. The longing for the woods, the
mysterious compassion, the ineffable sense of forsakeness - it is all Faustian and only
Faustian. (9)

Spengler's association of mythology with the "springtime" of a culture completes a line of

thought that extends from Goethe and Herder to Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy,
whose opening sections recall Herder's fascination with cultural origins in "the dark
regions of the soul."

Early in his career, Herder traveled from Riga through the Baltic and North Sea to
France, and, "With his quick turn to generalization," as Neff remarks, Herder’s new-
found awareness of the North Atlantic brought to mind the spirit of the Norse sagas and
presented a very different picture from the Mediterranean of Homeric Greece and the
earth of ancient Egypt. Like Melville in Billy Budd, who directs the reader to great
themes and passions "Down among the groundlings," Herder found himself
 on the open boundless sea among a little state of men who have severer laws than the
republic of Lycurgus; in the midst of a wholly different, living and moving Nature . . .
past the lands where of yore skalds and Vikings with sword and song wandered through
the sea . . .

Spengler draws upon this vision when he reflects upon "the old Northern life-feeling, the
Viking infinity-wistfulness" and "the idea of the high-seas voyage . . . as a liberation, a
symbol." A utilitarian would say that it was the unique design and construction of the
ships that allowed for the journies, but for Spengler it was the longing itself that created
the technologies it needed. The term "Faustian" is his emblem of this urge.

Reading "the course of human events" through symbolic interpretation therefore has a
history of its own; and just as humanity "walks through forests of symbols" in
Baudelaire's "Correspondences" (1857), Herder views history as though it were a
symbolic pastoral scene. In Ideas on History (1784-91), the achievements of a culture
represent "the flower of its existence"; the empires of Egypt and China sprang "from a
root" and rested "on themselves" like firmly grounded trees; and, although "the very
appearance of the flower is a sign that it must fade," there are analogous flowers, as it
were, in every age: "Shakespeare was no Sophocles, Milton no Homer, Bolingbroke no
Pericles: yet they were in their kind, and in their situation, what those were in theirs."

In The Decline, we walk through a similar landscape of history, in which "Cultures,

people, languages, truths, gods, landscapes, bloom and age as the oak and the stone-
pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves." In Spengler's version of Herder's rooted empires,
once civilizations have aged and taken their final forms,"they may, like a worn-out giant
of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches toward the sky for hundreds and
thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world."

Beginning with the title itself, Der Untergang des Abendlandes is rich in allusions and
metaphors drawn from the natural world of forests, fields, skies, the sea, the four seasons,
the human life-cycle, and the progression of a day from morning and noon to evening and
night. Returning to the principle that "Poetry and historical study are kin, " Spengler
instructs us in the art of aesthetic perception when he cautions the reader that his
"Faustian vision . . . is not a postulate but an experience" and that in order to understand
him we should meditate on his analogy between history and organic life, "letting the
world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon the imagination." In all
the commentary that I have read, none of Spengler's detractors has ever followed his
instruction or even mentioned it. Moreover, they have deliberately yet quite
unconsciously done the opposite by turning “an experience” into “a postulate.” Hence
their critiques of his “biological determinism” and "water-tight compartments" of history,
theoretical models that suffer from the same "bloodless" categorizing that Goethe
objected to when he said that Link's systematizing of his views on plant development
turned "the subtlest organic life" into an abstraction. If Kagan’s “professional historians”
were able to dismiss Spengler “easily,” it is because they were incapable of setting aside
their own training and assumptions, even as an intellectual exercise, and not only lacked
the creative impulse to allow the language of metaphor to work “unreservedly upon the
imagination" but also ignored an obvious artistic precedent for Spengler’s recurring
phases of history, in which the four seasons, from the Limbourg brothers’ Book of Hours
through Vivaldi, Breughel, Poussin, Haydn, and James Thomson, served as a traditional
organizing principle for religious, artistic, and poetic material.

Where the decisive terms of inquiry are not "'correct' and 'erroneous' but 'deep' and
'shallow'" what is required are not proofs but what Goethe calls productive ideas. The arts
teach us this lesson at every turn. A portrait by Rembrandt is neither more nor less “true”
than a portrait by Holbein or Cézanne, all of which are masterpieces of observation yet
very different in technique, naturalistic effects, and cultural background and values.
Taking a lesson from Nietzsche's "questioning faculty," Spengler argues that objective
knowledge itself derives from a web of presuppositions, in which "everything depends on
whether that being, the being for whom [a fact] occurs or did occur, is or was Classical or
Western, Gothic or Baroque." As for the patterns that he sees in history, even when he
speaks of the rhythmic order of his cycles, he maintains that they are illustrative images
and recur not only like the seasons of the year and the life cycle of an individual but also
the hours of the day and "majestic wave-cycles" of the sea. At best, they are no more than
approximations of what he means by the sense of inevitability in the human sphere. In
Billy Budd, Melville similarly has no recourse except by “indirection” to describe the
depth of Claggart’s malevolence, the hinge on which the story turns: “This portrait I
essay, but I shall never hit it.”

_______________

(1) Juan Luis Borges, "Oswald Spengler: A Capsule Biography" (1936), in Borges: A
Reader, E. P. Dutton, 1981, p. 87.

(2) In "The Relation between the Cultures," for example, Spengler writes that, although
we no longer look to Roman law for "principles of eternal validity . . . the relation
between Roman existence and Roman law-ideas gives it a renewed value for us. We can
learn from it how we have to build up our law out of our experience," II: 83.

(3) In his final pages, Hughes defends The Decline as a powerful work of "imaginative
literature," in the sense that "The 'Magian' culture," for example, "may never have
existed," although the idea can still "deepen our imaginative comprehension" of the
region's "art and religion." To divorce the imagination from what Spengler calls the "fact-
world," however, is to dismiss his philosophy of history out of hand, and it also undercuts
the nature and uses of metaphor in all great poetry and prose.

(4) Donald Kagan, "The Changing World of World Histories," New York Times Book
Review, November 11, 1984, p. 42.
(5) In "Science and Beauty" (1979), Isaac Asimov claims that the poem justifies know-
nothings who think that they "can just take a look at the night sky, get a quick beauty fix,
and go off to a nightclub." The poem must have struck a nerve, since he cannot speak of
it without mockery, nor can he tolerate the idea that even one person should not have
been captivated by "the learn'd astronomer."

(6) Among the many Christian allusions toward the end of the tale, "the vapory fleece
hanging low in the East" at the moment of execution "was shot through with a soft glory
as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision"; the mast and mainyard form
a cross, and sailors traced the spar until it was "reduced to a mere dockyard boom," yet
"To them a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross."

(7) Ernst Cassirer, "Goethe and Kantian Philosophy," in Rousseau, Kant and Goethe,
Harper & Row, 1963, p. 81. On "the dread of mechanism" in American literature, see
Jack Beatty, "Trapped in the 'NASA-Speak' Machine, New York Times Op-Ed, March 9,
1986.

(8) The relationship between "the imagined Nature-picture" and "the soul image" was a
subject of interest to Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. See
Gino Segrè, Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, Viking, 2007, pp.
105-106.

(9) Forsaken in the limitless, unlike Christ on the Cross in Matthew 27, who fulfills a
"Magian" destiny when he utters the first words of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?" whose silent reply appears in line 3: "But thou art holy, O thou
that inhabitest the praises of Israel."

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4659

The History Of A Metaphor (2)

From the desk of Steve Kogan on Wed, 2011-02-02 20:00

This is Part 4 (B) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The
Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

Early in The Decline, Spengler cautions the reader that the “Destiny-idea,” like "inward
certainty," will always elude strict analysis, although it makes perfect sense in the high
arts and among those whose vocation seems innate, such as Spengler's "born" historian,
physicist, or leader. Michaelangelo believed that his statues existed fully formed within
their blocks of stone; Leonardo said that a drawing should be complete in its very first
line, and Spengler would have found an exact parallel to the awakening of a cultural
destiny in Delacroix's reflections on the origins of a pictorial masterpiece:
 The first outlines through which an able master indicates his thought contains the germ
of everything significant that the work will offer. Raphael, Rembrandt, Poussin . . . they
make a few rapid strokes on the paper, and it seems that there is not one of them but has
its importance. For intelligent eyes, the life of the work is already to be seen everywhere .
. . it has scarcely opened to the light, and already it is complete. (1)

The great interpreters of classical music could have said the same of the works in their
repertoire. About Furtwängler, in particular, Brendel writes that "No other musician in
my experience conveyed so strongly the feeling that the fate of a piece (and of its
performance) was sealed with its first bar, and that its destiny would be fulfilled by the
last"; and powerful leaders, for good or ill, have also experienced "the deep logic of
becoming" at key moments in their lives. Winston Churchill said it best and for all the
right reasons when he wrote in The Gathering Storm that when he was offered "the chief
power in the State," on May 10, 1940, just before Dunkirk, "I was conscious of a
profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole
scene. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a
preparation for this hour and this trial."

The "collective biography" of a culture for Spengler is marked by a similar awakening,

and the nations in its orbit not only share certain general features but can also be
distinguished by their own continuities of character. Spengler's critics take him to task for
compartmentalizing cultures into separate worlds, when in fact his observation is drawn
from experience and is vividly expressed in every classic European and American work
of literature that is rooted in a social world. Orwell himself unwittingly made a fine
Spenglerian observation when he reflected that

there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as

individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy
Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a
flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past,
there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940
have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the
child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except
that you happen to be the same person.

Written in England's darkest days of the Second World War, The Lion and the Unicorn
(1940-41) epitomizes in homely, intimate prose what Spengler means by the soul of a
culture, with its own "distinctive and recognizable" character that "stretches into the
future and the past" and "persists, as in a living creature." In celebrating England's
“living” history, Orwell found inspiration in the conservative view in which he was raised
and never wholly relinquished, as he states in "Why I Write" (1947). Toward the
beginning of The Hour, Spengler makes a keen observation on this view when he notes
that, unlike the ideologues of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke “argued that on his
side of the Channel men demanded their due as Englishmen and not as human beings,
and he was right" (2).
Both writers also share a high regard for prose style and what Orwell calls his "love [of]
the surface of the earth," two traits that are evident in the way they develop their
historical themes through a series of vivid impressions that are punctuated by concise and
telling observations. Spengler remarks more than once that we all make judgments out of
our store of such impressions and that those who have not lost contact with the “cosmic
beat” still possess an instinctive life-sense of irreversible time. The childhood
"photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece" expresses just such a recognition.

Spengler's philosophy of "organic" cultures, which "grow with the same superb
aimlessness as the flowers of the field," is born of this common heritage of the human
condition and speaks to "that deeply-felt relationship between plant destiny and human
destiny which is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry." If one thinks of Shakespeare's
"Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May" or Whitman's "When lilacs last in the
dooryard bloom'd," one has a vivid reminder that Spengler is not articulating a theory so
much as an experience of history, whose world cultures appear all the sharper to our
senses and all the more poignant in our reflections when viewed in light of implacable
time, wars and social upheavals, and an indifferent universe.

It is the same experience that Herder depicts in Ideas on History, in which

every thing in history is transient: the inscription on her temple is, evanescence and
decay. We tread on the ashes of our forefathers, and stalk over the entombed ruins of
human institutions and kingdoms. Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome flit before us like
shadows: like ghosts they rise from their graves, and appear to us in the field of history.

Surveying this panorama of the past, Herder concludes that "in new places new capacities
are developed; the ancient of the ancient places irrevocably pass away."

Spengler mentions Herder only once in The Decline, yet his introduction both includes
and sharpens Herder's vision of history in a single concentrated image of growth and
decline, in which every culture is born in its own "mother" landscape and is an expression
of inner drives writ large:

I see, in place of that empty figure of one linear history . . . 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 (3); 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.

Like the monumental openings of Beethoven's Third and Fifth symphonies, Spengler's
declaration speaks to the entire character of his work, in which he writes as though he
were defending the unique identity of individuals, even to the last stages of cultural
decline and death. A striking parallel may be found in Ranier Marie-Rilke's The
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), in which Rilke defends the idea of a personal
death in contrast to the "factory-like" deaths in modern hospitals, where "the different
lethal terminations belong to the disease and not to the people."
For all his cycles of history, therefore, Spengler's style is both fluid and evocative; and
although he has been taken to task for his "dogmatic exactitudes," he is essentially
speaking in the language of metaphor and analogical relationships, whose purpose is to
illustrate what amounts to a deep belief in the individual identity and “livingness” of
cultures. The character of England likewise appears to Orwell by analogy to “a living
creature"; and it was just this process of individuation that Albert Schweitzer had in mind
when he observed in "Goethe the Philosopher" that, in Goethe's view, "nature's design . . .
is realized to the extent to which each creature achieves fully its own life."

As I remarked earlier, Spengler sees the high cultures as individual biographies of a

people in the field of world history. Moreover, their birth takes place in a moment that is
filled with a special pastoral grace of childhood, since the life-cycle of every culture
originates for him in the "Super-personal unity and fullness" of a "Rural-intuitive,"
"Springtime," and "dream-heavy Soul" (4). So too, from Blake and Wordsworth to
Friedrich Froebel’s Mother Play and Children’s Songs (1844), Whitman’s “Out of the
Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1859), and Orwell’s celebration of a pastoral upbringing in
Coming Up for Air, childhood is envisioned as its own complete world in a rural setting.

The romantic background of Spengler's symbolism again makes itself felt; for, as in
Wagner's forest setting of Siegfried's childhood and youth, Spengler's "springtime"
cultures represent the birth of a "Rural-intuitive" child-spirit in the realm of history,
whose "primitive strength" contains the original source of meaning that flows through a
culture and shapes the physiognomy of its development. Seen in this light, Spengler's
"prime symbols" of "Euclidean," "Magian," and "Faustian" consciousness correspond to
what Wordsworth in The Prelude calls "spots of time / Which with distinct preeminence
retain / A fructifying virtue" and "chiefly seem to have their date / In our first childhood."
For Wordsworth, these moments occurred when he had his first visual and auditory
sensations among "the green plains" and "fields and groves" near his "Beloved Derwent,
fairest of streams."

With the exception of Hughes, Spengler's critics say nothing about this tradition, and
Hughes cites it only to denigrate Spengler's adaptation of Goethe and Herder as "a
pretentious blowing-up of the biological or botanical metaphors that had haunted the
whole nineteenth century." At no point does he relate them to the idea of primal
childhood consciousness, which is central to this network of analogies (5). To borrow
Robert Frost's words from "Education by Poetry," Hughes is not at home in metaphor and
therefore does not appreciate the figurative content of his material.

Whatever limitations Spengler's analogies may have, and all metaphors have their limits,
as Frost observes, they define an approach to history that is particularly sensitive to a
culture’s "own idea, its own life, will and feeling," even in its most direct borrowings
from the past. Despite Collingwood's insistence, Spengler does not ignore the subject of
cultural inheritance, but, as he demonstrates in his discussions of the Renaissance, even
when a culture feels deeply connected to another, its adaptations have meanings that
differ from their source. In Spengler's words, "It is not products that 'influence,' but
creators that absorb" (6), and here too the unconscious plays its part:

[Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo] strove to be "Classical" in the Medicean sense;

and yet it was they themselves who in one and another way . . . shattered the dream. . . .
What they intended was to substitute proportion for relation, drawing for light-and-air
effect, Euclidean body for pure space. But neither they nor others of their time produced
a Euclidean-static sculpture - for that was possibly only once, in Athens. In all their work
one feels a secret music, in all their forms the movement-quality and the tending into
distances and depths. They are on their way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they
have come thither not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral.

Spengler not only speaks eloquently of the High Renaissance masters but also makes the
accurate observation that their achievements are far more Gothic than Classical in feeling
and expression (7). It is a telling instance of his general theme that, just as events are
transient, so too "an old significance never returns." Similarly, in Herder's words, the
Greek tragedians "ate, as Aeschylus says, at Homer's table, but prepared for their guests a
different feast."

For Spengler, therefore, no interpretation of history can be true without being true to life.
Hence his attraction to Goethe's philosophy of the becoming, in which he found "a
perfectly definite metaphysical doctrine" of organic development:

I would not have one single word changed in this: "The Godhead is effective in the
living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the
set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason (Vernunft) is concerned only to strive toward
the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding (Verstand) only to
make use of the become and the set-fast" (to Eckerman). This sentence comprises my
entire philosophy.

In any serious study of philosophy, one reads Hegel, Kant, and Nietzsche as a matter of
course, whereas one discovers Goethe’s almost at random as one becomes familiar with
his works.

Echoes of Goethean philosophy in European thought are similary diffuse yet

unmistakable. Kierkegaard, for example, distinguishes between “the becoming” and “the
become” when he writes that we live forwards and understand backwards, while in
Benedetto Croce's History - Its Theory and Practice (1916), we read that "Every history
becomes chronicle when it is no longer thought but only recorded in abstract words,
which were once upon a time concrete and expressive." Similarly, in "Clio Rediscovered"
(1903), G. M. Trevelyan argues that "the past was once real as the present and uncertain
as the future," which is to say that the past was once a becoming. Furthermore, Trevelyan
states, "You can dissect the body of a man, and argue thence the general structure of the
bodies of other men," but insofar as history represents real lives once lived, it cannot be
contained within the boundaries of science. In short, "You cannot dissect a mind." Taking
the work of Carlyle on the English civil wars as a model, he concludes that, "irrespective
of 'cause and effect,' we want to know the thoughts and deeds of Cromwell's soldiers, as
one of the higher products and achievements of the human race, a thing never to be
repeated, that once took shape and was." Spengler sums up this point of view in the
following terse remark: "Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated."

In another of his lessons from the arts, Spengler writes that all the great landscape
painters of the west understood this principle through their disciplined powers of
observation. To borrow his examples, whether we consider the works of Claude Lorrain,
the Dutch painters, or Corot, we see the face of nature "in the physiognomic sense,
something uniquely-occurring, unforeseen, brought to light for the first and last time." So
too, Cézanne said that new motifs appeared to him merely by shifting his gaze left or
right, and for Constable not even two leaves on a tree were alike.

In "Clio Rediscovered," Trevelyan’s response to all "that once took shape" was to favor
historical narrative, but Spengler sensed a mystery in "the become" that could only be
expressed figuratively through a kind of poetic prose. His seasons of history, in
particular, derive from Goethe's four stages of a culture in Epochs of the Spirit and, in
Spengler's adaptation, "agree with this entirely":

Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its
childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young a 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. "In the works of the old-German
architecture," says Goethe, "one sees the blossoming of an extraordinary state."

The "cosmic beat" continues in the maturation of a culture: the summer ripening of the
Ionic in the Classical world, the era from Augustine to Mohammed in the Magian, and
the centuries from Galileo to Newton and Leibniz in the Baroque, in which forms are
"virile, austere," and "controlled":

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 Erectheum, the
arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the Zwinger of Dresden, Watteau, Mozart.

Finally, with the onset of winter, "the fire in the Soul dies down." The twilight deepens,
the spirit of a culture begins to chill,

and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the long daylight and back in the
darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave. The spell of a
"second religiousness" comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns to the practice of the
cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun - those very cults into which a soul just born in the
East has been pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness.

The “soul just born in the east” is Christianity, and, as in Vol. II, Spengler's Magian
"springtime" has pronounced affinities with Parsifal, in which Wagner's redemptive hero
restores the spiritually ailing kingdom of Amfortas on Good Friday, having been reborn
himself that morning (“never did I see such mild and gentle grasses, flowers and
blooms”); while the construction and impending doom of Valhalla in the Ring
foreshadow Spengler's hardened civilizations approaching their inevitable end in the
landscape of their birth, a fitting counterpart to Wagner’s Earth, or Erda-spirit of primal
knowledge and destiny (Imperial Rome longing to be back "in the womb of the mother,
in the grave").

The full burden of The Decline is therefore not in its readings of the past but in their
implications for our own moment in time, for, as Spengler writes in his preface to the first
edition, "Although a philosophy of history is its scope and subject, it possesses also a
certain deeper significance as a commentary on the great epochal moment of which the
portents were visible when the leading ideas were being formed." Several pages later, we
read that these signs also prefigure "the still untravelled stages" of the future and in Vol.
II that its decisive features will be wars for global supremacy and cities spread over
enormous tracts of land, with “notions of traffic and communication which we would
regard as fantastic to the point of madness.”

All the advances that we take for granted - superhighways, jet travel, the internet - belong
to a world that Spengler’s generation would have already regarded as “fantastic to the
point of madness,” and in time to come our own “notions of traffic and communication”
will also seem as dated as the biplanes and steam engines of the 1920s. As Spengler
would say, it is “ever thus.” The present passes into history, all that was particular to the
life of an age will become increasingly remote, and nothing that a culture experienced as
its actuality will ever be "exactly transferable just as it [was] into the experiential living
and knowing of another Culture." It is precisely here, in "the finest and deepest elements"
of a high culture, that we arrive at what "is incommunicable" through unaided reason
alone.

Spengler reminds us that there is another faculty, however, that is available to us, for we
also possess a language of the intangible, which speaks in symbol and metaphor and is
the only way of making the "incomprehensible comprehensible." For Spengler, the
principle that governs this language is best expressed in the last line of the Mystic Chorus
at the end of Goethe's Faust: "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis" - "Everything
transitory is only a metaphor." It is the underlying maxim of his work, whose finest
passages are written in view of poetry, as Nietzsche says of all good prose:

Poems and battles, Isis and Cybele, festivals and Roman Catholic masses, blast
furnaces and gladiatorial slavery, money, machinery - all these are equally signs and
symbols in the world-picture of the past that the soul presents to itself and would
interpret: "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis."

History for Spengler does not reveal any advance of the spirit, as it does for Hegel, yet its
"signs and symbols" represent an inexhaustible world of expressive facts by which soul
speaks to soul, beyond the reach of words. To cite Goethe once again, "The highest to
which man can attain is wonder," which Beethoven put in the most personal terms
possible when that most solitary of all composers inscribed at the top of his score for the
Missa Solemnis: ”From the heart – may it return to the heart.”

The sheer range of Spengler's “emotional theme,” therefore, not only flows from his
personality, as Koktanek observes, but also mirrors his attempt to "enter into" and
interpret all that belongs to "the world-picture of the past." His ambition was not unique.
Hegel had felt this same hunger to interpret what Spengler calls the "Riddle of History"
when he wrote The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807); and it also led the youthful Herder
on a journey into "new thoughts emerging from the human soul, half-comprehensible,
half-obscure, my perspective of fragments, groves, torsos, archives of the human race -
everything!" Literature knows a similar drive among the encyclopedic novelists, such as
Balzac, Tolstoy, and Joyce; and in American literature, it takes a singularly tragic turn in
the figure of Melville's Captain Ahab, whose quest to harpoon Moby Dick is a function
of his deeper drive to know what is “beyond all utterance” and penetrate the final secret
behind the silence of appearances:

"Hark ye yet again - the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as
pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some
unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the
unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!"

Those who are familiar with the development of symbolist literature and the rise of
symbolic analysis in the study of dreams, folk tales, myths, and religions should not be
surprised that the turn of the century also saw the appearance of a symbolic treatment of
history.

Spengler's habit of mind is so deeply grounded in poetry that “the whole voiceless
language of Nature” also speaks to him with "the immediacy of vision," most eloquently
at the opening of Vol. II:

Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun.
Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you - a feeling of enigmatic fear in the
presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent
meadow, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them.
Only the little gnat is free - he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he
will. . . . This midget swarm that dances on and on, that solitary bird still flying through
the evening, the fox approaching furtively the nest - these are little worlds of their own
within another great world. An animalcule in a drop of water, too tiny to be perceived by
the human eye, though it lasts but a second and has but a corner of this drop as its field -
nevertheless is free and independent in the face of the universe. The giant oak, upon one
of whose leaves the droplet hangs, is not.

Every image draws us deeper into Spengler’s evening landscape, from an over-arching
sky to forest and meadow, a single bush and twig, a gnat amid a “midget swarm,” a bird
in flight, a lone fox, and even an "animalcule in a drop of water." There is a great stillness
over everything, yet the scene is filled with insects and animals and the passive motions
of flowers closing in the setting sun and twigs stirring in the wind. Our first impression is
of pastoral repose, but we no sooner become aware of our separateness “in the presence
of this blind dreamlike earthbound existence” than the mood turns to "enigmatic fear."
The passage is pure Spengler in its counterpoint of dramatic oppositions and the soaring
direction of his thought. From a darkening, Grimms brothers' landscape, the passage
grows to metaphysical proportions in evoking that same “world-fear” out of which his
culture-souls were born.

Spengler's “word-pictures” are indeed worth a thousand words. His abend landscape
recalls not only the title image of his work but also the deep twilight world of Caspar
David Friedrich's wooded landscapes, the ties to the Black Forest in German history and
culture, and, in twentieth-century literature, the dread of isolation in the face of
overwhelming forces, a feeling that accompanies what Spengler sees as the inevitable
winter "twilight of the west.”

Spengler is no more out of date than the classic twentieth-century writers who share some
aspect of his sensibility. Images of an individual trapped in wintertime in fact recur
among a surprising number of modern works, and in Kafka’s writings, in particular, they
intensify his pervading theme of the hopeless journey. In The Castle (1926), the land
surveyor K. is called to his assignment during winter, when landmarks are obliterated; in
"The Bucket Rider" (1919), the narrator ascends “into the regions of the ice mountains"
and is "lost forever,” and, in "The Country Doctor" (1919), the narrator leaves for his
patient at night as “a thick blizzard of snow filled all the wide spaces between him and
me," only to find it impossible to return home “through the snowy wastes," where he is
"exposed to the frost of this most unhappy of ages.” Other examples include the snowfall
over Ireland in James Joyce's "The Dead" (1916), the atmosphere of entrapment in a
Swiss alpine sanitarium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924), the entire
convict literature of the Gulag, and the mood of harshness and rigidity that dominates
1984, which is announced at the very beginning through “a bright cold day in April,” a
“vile wind,” “a swirl of gritty dust," and the window pane of Winston Smith’s apartment,
through which “the world looked cold” outside.

Orwell's division of the world into three warring blocs also has its counterpart in
Spengler’s future wars “for the heritage of the whole world,” in which “continents will be
staked" and "new technics and tactics played and counterplayed”; likewise Orwell's
“Hate Week” and "Two-Minutes Hate”:

. . . in the background, unseen, the new forces are fighting one another by buying the
press. No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass
and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying
and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will become quiet and go home. . . .
A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined.

The systematic enforcement of controlled agitation requires a constant drum-beat of

inflammatory slogans and shifting targets, a process that Orwell elsewhere likens to a
blow-torch, which can be turned in any direction at will. In Spengler's words, "What the
Press wills, is true. Its commanders evoke, transform, interchange truths," and "the needle
of public opinion," precise as any gauge, swings round to the new party line. As in 1984,
agitprop is cynically directed toward the thought-control of entire populations by "The
dictature of party leaders" who aim to bring people "en masse . . . under their own mind-
training" for the sake of limitless power. For Spengler, this dynamic recalls the rigorous
“expression-will of early Gothic . . . but cold, controlled, and Civilized" in the worst
sense of the word. On June 18, 1940, four days before the fall of France, Churchill
exploited the conventional picture of the Gothic to the same effect when he warned
England that,

if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have
known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and
perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

By 1940, the word “civilized” had indeed taken on a sinister meaning. In a grim
corroboration of Churchill’s speech, Orwell begins The Lion and the Unicorn with the
following terse remark: "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead
trying to kill me.”

Ever since the French Revolution, writes Spengler, modern civilization has been taking
shape as the "Faustian" equivalent of the city-civilizations of earlier cultures. It is during
this phase that the tensions of “waking-consciousness become more and more
dangerous,” the pulse of nature’s rhythms become increasingly faint, and old towns and
cities are bypassed, disappear, or are radically transformed. In his memoirs,
Chateaubriand notes that the medieval festivals of Brittany that he knew as a child had all
but vanished and that in the aftermath of the revolution the social and political world in
which people would be raised would no longer outlast their lives. A little over a century
later, Orwell would develop this motif in his picture of England on the eve of World War
II, as the narrator in Coming Up for Air returns to his childhood town on the Thames and
discovers a semi-industrial city that he last knew as a type of the old English village.
Everywhere he sees ghosts of his past until it occurs to him that he is the ghost and that a
harsh new world has taken the place of the old (8), with its rows of "faked-up Tudor
housing," the river covered "with a film of oil on it from the motor-boats," cheap
suburban lawn sculpture "where the beechwoods used to be," a Truefitt Stockings factory
that is now "making bombs as well as stockings," and a nearby RAF aerodrome. "Funny,"
he says to himself. "It was exactly to escape the thought of war that I'd come here. But
how can you, anyway. It's in the air you breathe."

In an earlier time and a new country, the Rip Van Winkle effect was the subject of
mirthful optimism about the workings of history and fate. An eternal child in a sleepy
colonial village, Rip makes his final escape from his scolding wife one day by taking a
long country walk and scrambling "unconsciously . . . to one of the highest parts of the
Kaatskill mountains," where he meets the ghosts of Henry Hudson's crew, is knocked
insensible by their Holland gin, and sleeps through the American Revolution, the
metamorphosis of his quiet hamlet into a thriving town, and the happy transformation of
his domestic life.
Bowling's hyper-active eye looks out upon a very different world, and grimmer yet the
tensions of "waking-consciousness" in Spengler's "stone Colossus," whose growth can be
charted in the rise of the "late-season" cities of nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction,
documentary literature, and poetry: the soul-deadening Coketown of Dickens’ Hard
Times (1854), the teeming streets of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London
Poor (1861-62), the "colossal conceptions of modern barbarity" in Rimbaud's
Illuminations (c. 1870), the dark tenaments of Cendrars' Easter in New York (1912), and
"the monstrous scenery" of "slag-heaps, belching chimneys, blast-furnaces, canals, and
gaso-meters" in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). They are the twilight cities of
what Spengler calls "the hard cold facts of a late life," like the "dull canal / On a winter
evening round behind the gashouse" in Eliot's The Waste Land.

________________

(1) Eugène Delacroix, Journal (1822-54), trans. Walter Pach, Crown Publishers, 1937, p.
551.

(2) This was not a theoretical argument for Burke but the position of Parliament itself: "In
the famous law of the 3rd of Charles I called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to
the king, 'Your subjects have inherited this freedom,' claiming their franchises not on
abstract principles 'as the rights of men,' but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a
patrimony derived from their forefathers." Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution
in France (1790), Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965, p. 36

(3) "Firmly bound [to a] mother-region" even when the culture expands in its "world-
city" phase. "Ubicunque lingua Romana, ibi Roma" is a late-Classical expression of this
idea, the globalization of "Faustian" technics its "late-Western" form. On the ties between
a "mother" landscape and its culture, Spengler offers the following examples, among
others: In Egypt, "The sacred way from the gate-buildings to the tomb-chamber, the
picture of life, is a stream - it is the Nile itself become one with the prime-symbol of
direction. . . . And just so, in some mysterious fashion, the Euclidean existence is linked
with the multitude of little islands and promontories of the Aegean, and the passionate
Western, roving in the infinite, with the broad plains of Franconia and Burgundy and
Saxony."

(4) See Spengler's characterization of "Spring" in "Table I. 'Contemporary' Spiritual

Epochs," Vol. I.

(5) Consider, for example, Billy Budd's name and innate innocence, coupled with his
origins as an infant foundling and resemblance to Adam in the Garden of Eden before the
Fall, whereby Melville's tale reaches the heights of nineteenth-century plant symbolism,
whose apotheosis appears in the transfiguration scene when Budd is dropped from the
spar, "and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces,
Billy ascended, and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn."

(6) Spengler, "The Relations between the Cultures," The Decline, II: 55. On the same
page, Spengler exclaims, "What a wealth of psychology there is in the probings,
rejections, choices, transvaluations, errors, penetrations, and welcomings! - and not only
between Cultures which immediately touch each other . . . but also as between a living
Culture and the form-world of a dead one whose remains still stand visible in the
landscape." One gets no sense from Collingwood and his successors that Spengler even
considered these relationships, much less gave them prominent attention in Vol. II.

(7) On p. 58 of Vol. II, Spengler lists twelve key features of Classical art known to
Renaissance artists that had no "influence" on their work. Vasari's Lives provides a
principle reason, for one cannot read it without appreciating just how deeply Gothic
Christianity still permeates their world. Michaelangelo, to cite a telling instance, was
renowned among his contemporaries as a Dante scholar of the first order.

(8) Unlike the radical changes that he portrays in the novel, Orwell's celebration of
England's continuities in The Lion and the Unicorn speaks to its central purpose as a
contribution to the war effort, as were his broadcasts for the BBC.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4669

Closing Thoughts On Spengler (1)

From the desk of Steve Kogan on Thu, 2011-02-10 16:12

This is Part 5 (A) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The
Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

Conceived in view of an imminent world war, The Decline of the West bids a long
farewell to a vanishing world, whose fate is mirrored in the "blossoming and fading" of
other "once flourishing cultures" (1). Their end is all the more poignant in that they are
"sublimated life-essences," like "the flowers of the field," which is also the "mother"
landscape of their prime symbols, or "first visible structure, / So that what first appears,
even in plants, is the child" (2). Hence Spengler's "Rural-intuitive" epoch of a culture's
awakening, such as the "infant Christianity," born in the "springtime" of the Magian
world, and "that deeply-felt relationship between plant destiny and human destiny which
is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry."

A decade later, Spengler would speak of destiny exclusively in terms of global war and
spiritual disintegration. His "fateful thundercloud which is passing over this century" is a
symbol of this doom and one of the most concentrated images in all his works. Like
Borges, Miller, and his other admirers, I too revelled in the densely-packed language of
The Decline and the drama of its "virile pages"; yet when I began to reflect upon his
emblematic storm cloud, it seemed to say more about the man and his times than I felt I
could ever express. For weeks I could get nothing into perspective until a familiar sound
from U.S.A. pierced my mental fog and made it all come clear. It was the voice of John
Dos Passos in "Meester Veelson," beginning with the president's triumphal entry into
France in December, 1918; and in the moment I recalled it I was drawn once more to the
catastrophic years in which Spengler wrote The Decline, only this time in view of the
human cost and of worse to come:

At the station in Paris he stepped from the train onto a wide red carpet that led him,
between rows of potted palms, silk hats, legions of honor, decorated busts of uniforms,
frock-coats, rosettes, boutonnières, to a Rolls-Royce. (Did Meester Veelson see the
women in black, the cripples in their little carts, the pale anxious faces along the streets;
did he hear the terrible anguish of the cheers as they hurried him and his new wife to the
Hôtel de Murat, where in rooms full of brocade, gilt clocks, Buhl cabinets, and ormolu
cupids the presidential suite had been prepared?)

Beginning with delegates from twenty-seven nations, "the grand assembly of the peace
conference" finally came down to the leaders of the three principal powers,

Clemenceau,
Lloyd George,
Woodrow Wilson,
Three old men shuffling the pack,
dealing out the cards:
the Rhineland, Danzig, the Polish Corridor, the Ruhr, self-determination of small
nations, the Saar, League of Nations, mandates, the Mespot, Freedom of the Seas,
Transjordania, Shantung, Fiume, and the Island of Yap:
machinegun fire and arson
starvation, lice, cholera, typhus;
oil was trumps.

For Dos Passos, the peace was just as grotesque as the war. The Hôtel du Marat and
Palace of Versailles appeared like ghosts of old-world opulence against the background
of Europe's devastation, and, in the ensuing spectacle of the treaty makers, "Three old
men" began playing a high-stakes game, with economic policy itself the strategic
principle, and "oil was trumps."

From Spengler's point of view, the table had been prepared in the midst of the war, and
the subsequent treaty, followed by new rounds of economic warfare through "the
Bolshevik economic offensive expressed in the Five Year Plan" and "the Dawes and
Young plans," only helped to guarantee the outbreak of another war :

In 1916 there set in, side by side with the military war, a systematic economic war, to
be carried on when the other came inevitably to an end, and from then onward the war
aims were oriented more and more in that direction. The Treaty of Versailles was not
intended to create a state of peace but to organize the relation of forces in such a way that
this aim could at any time be secured by fresh demands and measures. Hence the handing
over of the colonies and the merchant fleet . . . and finally the reparations, which
England, at least, intended not as war indemnification but as a permanent burden on
German industry until it should collapse. . . . What it really amounts to is that the life of
one's own nation has to be gained at the cost of destroying that of others. It is the struggle
on the keel of the overturned boat. And when all other means are exhausted, then the
oldest and most primitive, the military means, will come into their own again.

In Spengler's reading of events, Europe had reached the edge of the storm by 1878, its
course marked by global colonization, world-scale economic rivalries, the modernization
of war, and "competitive arming for potential wars." Looking back at the enormity of the
disaster and its consequences for the west, Spengler asks if it is even clear who won and
who lost. "In 1918," he writes, "we thought we knew." In reality, the whole of Europe
lost, the proof being that the war's "great problems are today as far from solution as ever."
Nor could it be otherwise, he concludes, for "The truth is, a new form of world has arisen,
as the precondition for future crises which must one day set in with crushing force."

By the 1930s, it would have taken a hard dose of the old Allied propaganda to believe
that the Great War would be "the war to end all wars." This was the slogan that Jean
Renoir addressed in his cinematic masterpiece The Grand Illusion (1937), but it is only
now, after the failure of the League of Nations to oppose Japanese and Italian aggression,
the subsequent failure of French and English diplomacy to appease Hitler's ambitions,
and the current state of the United Nations as a clearing house for terrorism, that we have
finally caught up with Spengler's prediction that "the oldest and most primitive, the
military means, will come into its own again." Today its time has come, from the so-
called "rogue states" of Iran and North Korea to the jihadist militias of Hamas, Hezballah,
and the Taliban, the quasi-military drug cartels of Asia and Central and South America,
and the world-wide network of Al Qaeda, all of which are exploiting the increasing loss
of authority, will, and national identity in the west and its steady drift toward
formlessness. A telling symbol of this growing void is the fact that Hitler and Stalin, the
rulers of one-time powerful yet inherently chaotic regimes, have once again become
models of totalitarian leadership, Hitler and Nazi ideology in the jihadist world, and
Stalin among such tyrants as Castro, Vladimir Putin (with direct ties to the KGB), and,
before his overthrow by American forces, Saddam Hussein.

Spengler's storm cloud sums up a terrifying world-picture that confronts us from the
beginning in The Hour of Decision: we live in times that are "far more terrible than the
ages of Caesar and Napoleon," the world has become possessed of a "frightful reality,"
the sheer danger of life "comes once more into its own," and History, with a capital H,
reappears "as it really is - tragic, permeated by destiny," fate, and chance. Once again, as
in The Decline, Spengler reads human history almost as a fact of nature, here depicted as
an uncontrollable. destructive force: "Thunderstorms, earthquakes, lava-streams; these
are near relatives of the purposeless, elemental events of world history."
Those who know their classics have heard this voice before. It is one of the oldest on
record, and it comes down to us from the very beginning of our literary heritage:

As inhuman fire sweeps on in fury through the deep angles

of a drywood mountain and sets ablaze the depth of the timber
and the blustering wind lashes the flame along, so Achilleus
swept everywhere with his spear like something more than a mortal
harrying them as they died, and the black earth ran blood. (3)

Like his other "near relatives" of war and social crisis, Spengler's "fateful thundercloud"
belongs to that same "dominion of force" that is for Simone Weil "The true hero, the true
subject, the centre of the Iliad," which she describes as "the purest and loveliest of
mirrrors" for those who "perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very centre of human
history" (4).

Fires, floods, and tempests are among the many "inhuman" events of nature that Homer
associates with war; yet, as Weil demonstrates, in the Iliad force takes many forms, and
its universal sway is such that "In this poem there is not a single man who does not at one
time or another have to bow his neck" to it. Grief and humiliation are as universal as
slaughter, a soldier who triumphs one day can be destroyed the next, and the rage of the
conquering hero, which deprives him of reason and pity, has its counterpart in the blind
fear that petrifies his victim. In this ruthless equation, "both, at the touch of force,
experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb" and are thereby "turned to
stone." By its very nature, writes Weil, "nobody really possesses it."

How then is the Iliad "the purest and loveliest" of its "mirrors"? The answer lies in "the
extraordinary sense of equity which breathes through" the work, so much so that "the
note of incurable bitterness that continually makes itself heard" has the unique quality of
proceeding "from tenderness," which "spreads over the whole human race, impartial as
sunlight":

Never does the tone lose its colouring of bitterness; yet never does the bitterness drop
into lamentation. Justice and love, which have hardly any place in this study of extremes
and of unjust acts of violence, nevertheless bathe the work in their light without ever
becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent. . . . The whole of the Iliad
lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience - the
destruction of a city. This calamity could not tear more at the heart had the poet been
born in Troy. But the tone is not different when the Achaeans are dying, far from home.

Weil's insight into Homer, as exquisite as any in The Birth of Tragedy, gives new
meaning and a new emotional coloring to Nietzsche's thesis on the Greek union of
Dionysian fury and Apollinian form. Spengler would have especially admired the phrase
"impartial as sunlight," for it is an exact word-picture of what he means by the "noonday"
clarity that the Greeks achieved in their finest creations and with the strictest economy of
means, above all in the Doric temple. It is this concentration on the "pure Present" of the
"near and completely viewable" that is for Spengler a defining trait of the "Euclidean
soul," and he would have been struck as well by Weil's classically-oriented thinking in
her definition of force in somatic terms as "that x that turns anybody who is subjected to
it into a thing":

Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a
corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and in the next minute there is nobody here at all;
this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us.

How different the "Faustian life-feeling" in Spenger's eyes, which longs to discover the
hidden workings of nature and bend them to its will through the power of machines.
Hence

the significance of the perpetuum mobile dreamed of by those strange Dominicans like
Petrus Peregrinus, which would wrest almightiness from God. Again and again they
succumbed to this ambition . . . They listened for the laws of the cosmic pulse in order to
overpower it. And so they created the idea of the machine as a small cosmos obeying the
will of man alone.

Later still, Leonardo and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus will envision feats of engineering that
reach "as far as doth the mind of man" (5), and, in our own time, as Spengler writes, "The
entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it."
Moreover, this "intellectual intoxication" has far from run its course. In 1927,
Collingwood insisted that Spengler's predictive claims were worthless (6), yet his eye for
the future was as accurate as General Billy Mitchell's, who foresaw the supremacy of air
power eight years before Collingwood wrote his essay. In December, 1941, nineteen
years after Vol. II of The Decline appeared, carrier-based Japanese planes almost crippled
America's Pacific fleet in just under two hours. Six months later, three of those carriers
succumbed to U. S. Navy dive bombers within minutes of each other, and in 1945 two
Japanese cities were vaporized in seconds. As in the Iliad but augmented by what the
military calls "force multipliers" of seemingly limitless power, "Somebody was here, and
in the next minute there is nobody here at all."

So much for "those dreamers," writes Weil, "who considered that force, thanks to
progress, would soon be a thing of the past." In the 1920s and '30s, Cendrars knew
similar dreamers who "believed in the coming of socialism," whereas "I could foresee
nothing but the ancient slaughters ... war modernized by science" (7). By 1916, he had
seen enough to convince him that this would be our future. In L'homme foudroyé, he
recalls a soldier on the western front who disappeared in a shell-burst right before his
eyes, and in The Trans-Siberian (1913) he took readers on a journey through apocalyptic
scenes of the Russo-Japanese War, the first of his many exposures to "war modernized by
science." It was this work that led Dos Passos to call him the Homer of "Turbines, triple-
expansion engines . . . speed, flight, annihilation," which have become our own "cruel
and avenging gods" (8).

Spengler began The Decline just before The Trans-Siberian was published and died in the
year that the third part of U.S.A. appeared. Weil's essays on the Iliad and the origins of
Hitlerism were written between 1938 and 1940, and Orwell began 1984 toward the end of
World War II and completed it in 1948. Although he rarely mentions the writers of his
time, I like to think that if Spengler had read these works he would have recognized their
authors as "superlative types" and keen observers of the modern scene, far different from
the mass of intellectual "fumblers" and the carnival tricksters of the cultural avant-garde,
whom he scornfully dismissed as ""pretentious fashionable artists, weight lifters with
cardboard dumbells." It is worth noting that all four writers - Cendrars, Dos Passos,
Orwell, and Weil - had witnessed the downward slide up close. The central vision of
U.S.A. is the waste of a generation; both Weil and Cendrars were present at the fall of
France in 1940 and associated its collapse with the uprooting of Christian faith in the
French Enlightenment; Orwell's original title for 1984 was "The Last Man in Europe,"
and even Cendrars' break with his fellow artists and writers has a Spenglerian ring to it.
As he writes in L'homme foudroyé, "not a year passed between 1924 and 1936 without
my spending one, three, or nine months in the Americas, chiefly South America (when
others were going to Moscow), that's how tired I was of the old Europe and despaired of
its future and the future of the white race."

A traveller and adventurer since his teens, Cendrars saw combat from 1914 to 1916 and
reported on Hitler's invasion of Belgium in 1940 (Chez l'Armée anglaise). Dos Passos
saw the Great War as an ambulance driver after graduating Harvard, undertook an
extensive trip through the middle east soon after the Armistice, and was the most
cultivated, well-travelled, and politically courageous of the great American novelists of
his time. Orwell went from Eton to the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, lived among the
working poor in England and France, served with Republican forces in the Spanish Civil
War, and resumed work as an author and journalist, which included wartime broadcasts
on the BBC. Weil recapitulated Orwell's early life by going from the École Normale
Supérieure to teaching and political action, working in factories until her health gave out,
and deepening her political education during her brief time in Spain, after which she had
a conversion of a kind to Christianity and in her few remaining years attempted to work
for the French Resistance in London, where she wrote her last and greatest work, The
Need for Roots (1943). Spengler, by contrast, was a scholar and thinker from first to last,
and, although he enjoyed wide contacts and a wide public audience, he lived far
differently than Weil, the only other philosophically-oriented writer in this group.

I am drawn to these writers because of their distinctive voices, intellectual energy, and
grounding in reality, in the same sense as Maxwell Geismar said of Dos Passos, that he
"really knew what had happened to his society" (9). One feels their special connection to
the age in almost all their works, and yet, although their affinities are close, they are not
interchangeable, for we are dealing with highly charged personalities, among which
Spengler's stands alone. Even in the case of Weil, whose analysis of tyranny and
propaganda is second to none, we are always aware of the warmth of her intelligence, as
we are of deep human sympathies in the writings of Cendrars, Orwell, and Dos Passos.
All four had an aversion to intellectual conformity, but not even Cendrars, who detested
the French "intelligentsia," could have cut the avant-garde to the quick as Spengler did,
for he had been one of them when he came of age as a writer and witnessed the all-too-
human path of their decline, which he describes as a gradual descent from invention and
discovery to a sterile aestheticism as their celebrity status increased. He continued to keep
a place in his heart for Modigliani and enjoyed the company of Léger, a fellow veteran
who had been gravely wounded in the Argonne, as he had been near the Somme, but as
he wrote in his farewell to that once inspiring group, "The modern painters have
profoundly disappointed me." This too came from the heart and spoke to a wound of
another kind, as Spengler did when he wrote of surviving "the misery and disgust of these
years."

Everything that Spengler felt about Germany's defeat and subsequent failures is summed
up in that phrase, yet, unlike Dos Passos and the others, he rarely mentions actual human
suffering; and it is a remarkable fact that this same thinker, whose two major works are
practically symphonic in their range of feelings and impressions, can also sound as
implacable as the "first crash" from "the fateful thundercloud that is passing over this
century." Words such as “all,” “only,” “no one,” “no longer,” "must," and “no more”
come readily to his pen, especially in The Hour of Decision, whose every page conveys a
warning that "History recks nothing of human logic," that "The pacifism of the century of
Liberalism must be overcome if we are to go on living," and that "No one living in any
part of the world of today will be happy," although "many will be able to control by the
exercise of their own will the greatness or insignificance of their life-course. As for those
who seek comfort merely, they do not deserve to exist."

Spengler is hard (10), and not for his erudition only, nor even for his challenging use of
"certain basic terms," such as being and becoming, world and soul, and space and time,
"which carry strict and in some cases novel connotations." The man himself is hard, to
the point where his words are often misinterpreted by association with the rhetoric of
Hitler's cult of power. When Spengler says, for example, that "those who seek comfort
merely . . . do not deserve to exist," his words ring in our ears, as they did in Gunther
Gründel's, with an instant echo of the Leader's voice. What Gründel admired we despise,
but it was a false echo in 1934 and remains false today; for Spengler says almost the
same about the future of Germany when he warns that the Nazis' political triumph came
too easily "to open the eyes of the victors" and that if any western nation, especially his
own, continues to ignore its dangerous position in the world, then "fate - and what a fate!
- will submerge us without mercy."

Spengler got it right about Germany. He was also quick to see that Marxism had become
a school for third-world revolutionaries, and he reads like today's news when he speaks of
the renewed threats to the nations of the west:

For the first time since the siege of Vienna by the Turks they have again been put on
the defensive, and they will have to commit great forces, both spiritual and military, into
the hands of very great men if they intend to weather the first mighty storm, which will
not be long in coming.

The prospects are not good. In the closing pages of The Hour, Spengler writes that "The
white ruling nations have abdicated from their former rank. They negotiate today where
yesterday they would have commanded, and tomorrow they will have to flatter if they are
even to negotiate." Tomorrow has come, and our enemies are now throwing our
pandering back in our face. In an article on President Obama's decision to chair a meeting
of the U. N. Security Council on nuclear nonproliferation without "Naming names, or
identifying actual threats" (National Review, September 5, 2009), Anne Bayefsky
remarks that "the spectacle of proclaiming affection for world peace in the abstract" will
be taken as yet another sign of appeasement by all "rogue states," especially Iran. "As a
Teheran newspaper close to the regime snickered in July: 'Their strategy consists of
begging us to talk with them.'”

If Heller had read Spengler's prediction in light of these words, he would have taken them
as further proof that Spengler was attuned to "the destructive tendencies of the age"
because he himself had "a crude and wicked mind." As we saw earlier, nothing that
Spengler could have said in his defense would have shaken Heller from his position, for
he ignored the fact that Spengler was issuing real warnings, and he compounded this
failure with a confused religious argument against the predictive accuracy of his
"Destiny-idea." This was his contribution to the vexed question of the "Spengler
problem," behind which every critic had his own reason for shutting his eyes. Whereas
Hitlerites like Gründel were disappointed and then outraged by Spengler's critique of the
Nazi revolution, and Fennelly's "men of learning" found fault with his scholarship, his
methodology, and famous "pessimism," Heller disputes the indisputable by claiming that
he "is not a historian, but a false prophet" and that the test of a true prophet is not whether
his projections are right or wrong but how pure and sincere he is in his "concern for the
things threatened by human sin and divine anger." It never once crosses his mind to
consider the historical analysis that led Spengler to his conclusions or that there might be
something to the idea that there is a fatality at work in human affairs. Unlike Berdyaev,
who distinguishes between Spengler's "atrophied religious sense" and the brilliance of his
intuitions, Heller wants to have it both ways and argues that a "false prophet" is more
likely to be right the more he is complicit in "the evil future." One has only to replace
Spengler's name with Dostoevsky's and his argument falls apart.

Weil would have been incapable of constructing a thesis along Heller's line of reasoning,
not so much because of its flimsiness, although that too, but because her religious
thinking, as strict as Spengler's insights, led her to the same conclusion as his that the
salvation of the soul is the central teaching of the Gospels, that Christ expressed it
perfectly when he said "My kingdom is not of this world," and that "'Give unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar's' means: "Fit yourselves to the powers of the fact-world, be
patient, suffer, and ask it not whether they are 'just.'"

The "fact-world" is Spengler's chosen sphere and in every time-frame he examines. His
reports from the future are almost always on target not only because he has a solid
working knowledge of science and history but also because of his command of current
events and freedom from wishful thinking and ideological bias of any kind. In The
Decline, he writes that "Everything depends on our seeing our position, our destiny,
clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it we cannot evade it";
and in The Hour he speaks of a wholesale flight from reality among masses of people and
party ideologues of all persuasions, who crave illusions in place of facts and indulge in an
"evil sentimentality" that celebrates one utopian ideal or another - the workers' state,
world peace, etc. - all of which are "artificial and lifeless," ignore what men "were and
are and not what they ought to be," and cannot be put into practice except through a
particular "craze for organization which, becoming an aim in itself, produces
bureaucracies that either collapse through their own hollowness or destroy the living
order." In his analysis of mob hatred for "the living order," Spengler's critique of Europe's
radical movements reads like an update of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the
Revolution in France, which Spengler both knew and admired.

Spengler is no more a clairvoyant than anyone else. When he says "I see further than
others," he is not only thinking of all that he knows of the present but also commenting
on his certainty that "the forces which will sway the future are no other than those of the
past." Cultures may differ, but the forces remain the same; and, as "at the commencement
of the Imperium Romanum, so today, the form of the world is being remoulded from its
foundations, regardless of the desires and intentions of 'the majority' or of the number of
victims demanded by every such decision." The Hour of Decision could well be subtitled
"The Metamorphosis of Power," for it is the constant theme of his observations on
imperial Rome, western history after the establishment of the ruling nation-states, and
world history ever since "The first flash and crash of the fateful thundercloud which is
passing over this century."

Orwell was off the mark when he included Spengler in the fascist orbit, yet his wartime
writings on London and Kipling call attention to the subject of power in a way that sheds
light on a trait of temperament that Spengler shares with them. In "Rhythms of History," I
noted Orwell's observation that both writers draw our attention to far-flung places where
brutality is the norm, but he also suggests that they are able to describe this side of life
convincingly because it corresponds to a streak of brutality in themselves. Indeed, Orwell
had it himself or he could not have engaged in "the dirty work of Empire" (11) or
depicted a fictional tyranny so menacingly real that readers behind the Iron Curtain were
suprised to learn that its author had not lived under the Soviet regime. He had read its
literature, anatomized its propaganda, and escaped its clutches in the nick of time in
Spain, yet no amount of empirical knowledge without the emotional certainty of what
hatred, deception, and ruthlessness feel like could have created the world of 1984. When
I finished reading the novel for the first time, I threw it across the room as though it were
a hateful thing, and there are moments in Spengler that have also caused me to recoil.

______________

(1) Nikolai Berdyaev, "The Pre-Death Thoughts of Faust" (1922). Berdyaev Online
Bibliotek Library.
(2) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "The Metamorphosis of Plants" (1797), trans.
Christopher Middleton, in Selected Poems, Suhrkamp / Insel Publishers, 1983, p. 155.

(3) The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore, The University of Chicago Press,
1951, Book XX, 417, ll. 490-94.

(4) Simone Weil, "The Iliad or The Poem of Force" (1939), trans. Mary McCarthy, in
Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Milles, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986, p. 192.

(5) Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus (1588), Washington Square
Press, 1959, I, i, l. 64. And again, "Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war / Than was
the fiery keel at Antwerp's bridge / I'll make my servile spirits to invent!" I, i, ll. 99-101.

(6) See R. G. Collingwood, "Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles,"
Antiquity, 1927. For a contrasting and highly perceptive rereading of The Decline, see
Adda B. Bozeman, "Decline of the West? Spengler Reconsidered," The Virginia
Quarterly, Spring, 1983.

(7) Blaise Cendrars, L'homme foundroyé, Denoël, 1945, p. 343 (trans. mine).

(8) John Dos Passos, "Homer of the Trans-Siberian," Orient Express, Harper and
Brothers, 1927, p. 165.

(9) Maxwell Geismar, Introduction to The Big Money (1936), the third volume of
U.S.A., Washington Square Press, 1961, p. 3.

(10) On the contrast between the dogmatic simplicities of "multicultural" studies and the
intellectual demands of The Decline, see Thomas Bertonneau, "The Jargon of Mock
Ethnicity: Multiculturalism and Diversity as Virtual Thinking," Praesidium, Fall, 2001.

(11) George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), Penguin, 1970, I: 266.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4674

Closing Thoughts On Spengler (2)

From the desk of Steve Kogan on Wed, 2011-02-16 18:59

This final Part 5 (B) concludes "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald
Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve
Kogan.

It is rare for Spengler to speak of the actual death of a culture. The past for him is "living
history," and even the end-time Cosmopolis that he envisions will be rooted in a "life-
feeling" all its own. Its core impulses, however, like those of earlier city-civilizations,
will be fact-oriented and materialistic rather than soulful and inward, and eventually the
body itself will die, the last remains of "the great petrifact."

As in Weil's reading of the Iliad, but far less emphatically, The Decline "lies under the
shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience - the destruction of a city"
(1); yet it lacks the qualities of justice and compassion in Homer that "bathe the work in
their light without ever becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent." No
such accent is heard in The Decline, nor could it be, since the Iliad for Spengler belongs
to "the spiritual childhood of the Doric," whereas The Decline is an "early winter"
expression of an irreligious, or "unphilosophical philosophy - the last that West Europe
will ever know."

During the long twilight of the west, the "late man" lives in the last rays of its culture. In
1984, they are reflected in Orwell's beloved English classics (2), and for Spengler, they
glow in the art and music of the west; but where Orwell's "last man in Europe" is worn
down and finally broken by a totalitarian state, Spengler's cultures are doomed by life
itself:

All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the arts themselves. One day
the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be - though
possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes may remain - because the last eye and the
last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

There is no sad reflection on the ruins of time, no grim commentary such as Hamlet's in
the graveyard scene, only the dark finality of Kafka's epitaph on existence, "The meaning
of life is that it stops" (3). Hence Spengler's icy detachment when he depicts the death of
"the great Cultures," for those same "majestic wave-cycles" that mirror their "becoming"
end in a seascape of complete desolation: "They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines,
flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste." All
that was alive in a culture disappears into the abyss, as all of Moby-Dick would have
been swallowed up by "the great shroud of the sea" if Ishmael had not miraculously
survived to tell the story of the Pequod; that same Ishmael who heard Father Mapple's
magnificent sermon on the Book of Jonah before setting out on his voyage and who,
before the services began, gazed upon the chapel's memorial tablets of sailors who
"placelessly perished without a grave" and was uplifted by the sudden thought that "Faith,
like a jackel, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her
most vital hope."

Spengler has no such faith. His very temperament goes against the grain of Christian
optimism, yet he sees "the ungraspable phantom of life" that Ishmael sees and with an
equally vivid sense of its urgency in human consciousness. This recognition, which
recurs throughout The Decline, reaches the height of metaphysical drama in his reading
of the confrontation between Jesus and Pilate, when the world of facts and the world of
religious truths stood face to face in a scene that is "appallingly distinct and
overwhelming in its symbolism." To the Roman Procurator's unforgettable question
"'What is truth?' . . . the silent feeling of Jesus answers . . . by that other which is decisive
in all things of religion - 'What is actuality?'" For Spengler, this encounter marks the
turning point in the life of Jesus, an encounter that he knew in another form in
Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor," in which Christ returns when the Inquisitorial fires
begin. The Inquisitor has him arrested and confronts him with a long argument against
his message of spiritual freedom. Christ remains silent throughout and at the end replies
with a kiss on the Inquisitor's "bloodless aged lips." Spengler was deeply attracted to
Dostoevsky and knew of his spiritual rebirth in the Czarist prisons of Siberia. He
regarded his figure of Alyosha Karamazov as a type of the nascent Russian soul; and he
may also have had the tale in mind when he remarked in Vol. II that if Dostoevsky had
written his life of Christ, "as he always intended to do - [it] would have been a genuine
gospel like the Gospels of primitive Christianity."

Spengler's chapters on Russia and early Christianity have an unspoken presence in the
darkest scene of all in The Decline, in which he depicts the death of a culture as the final
triumph of the "fact-world" over the spirit. In this brief anti-Gospel of history, a "Second
Religiousness" appears but drained of all redemptive meaning and as barren as the final
"winter" epochs of the past. Here there are no "lilies of the field," no parables taken from
life, and no real confrontations, nothing but a religion that seems tragically meaningless
in the face of a dead civilization and nature's implacable indifference:

In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished
soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. . . . And while in high places
there is eternal alterance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that
mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts forever. . . . Only
with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its
aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and the
alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or
we may lament it - but it is there.

This is the "fact-world" in its starkest and most unforgiving form, where the "eternal
alterance of victory and defeat" is as desolate as "the alterance of land and sea," and not
even those who have "overcome all doubts forever" seem to know anything more than a
"holy, still Being" that resembles the peace of the grave. It is not the end of history but
the end of a history, whose early stages now confront us in the dangers that Spengler
spells out in The Hour.

In his introduction to The Decline, Spengler hints at Russia's significance for the fate of
the west, and in The Hour he reads our future in light of radical movements from the
French Revolution to the Soviet regime, whose work of subversion and murder
Khrushchev would later sum up when he said "We will bury you," which was not only a
concise expression of its aims against the west but also a sinister echo of what
Bolshevism had wrought upon masses of Russians as early as the civil war (1918-23). It
took Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago to expose the full horror of what Spengler
understood in 1922 when he asked "who to-day seriously thinks of the millions that
perish in Russia?"
In The Hour of Decision, Spengler accurately portrayed the regime as a modern form of
"Asiatic" savagery, and he also predicted that a new culture would be born from the
Russian soul; but he never linked the two, nor, so far as I know, did anyone else in the
west foresee that the spirit of Dostoevsky would survive a prison system that was spread
across a world "of ice and virgin forest" and bore the imprint of Stalin's malevolence in
the very "course of the stars":

It was the end of November, and a recent snowstorm had whipped up enormous drifts
around the building. The sky was clearing, with the beginning of a severe frost, and the
stars glittered as always in winter, with a gloomy power and a remote indifference to all
that is alive. (4)

Like other Russian writers who were raised to be "Soviet citizens" and were later thrown
into the camps, Lev Razgon understood to the last bitter dregs that the only real aim of
Marxist propaganda was destruction. In The Hour of Decision, Spengler describes the
Soviet leadership as "a ruling horde, called the Communist Party," which uses "murder as
a routine administrative method," and he explicitly calls Trotsky a "Bolshevik mass-
murderer"; but what is even more interesting is that nineteenth and early twentieth-
century Russian writers anticipated what Heller calls "the evil future" in terms that accord
with Spengler's philosophy of history. Unlike his western critics, writes Berdyaev,
Russians would not have been "taken aback" by The Decline, for "All the Russian
religious thinkers have . . . sensed a certain sacred terror at the perishing of culture and
the ensuing triumph of civilisation." In Berdyaev's concluding words, "This -- is our style
of book."

Berdyaev had only read the projected contents of Vol. II when he wrote his essay, but he
had already gleaned from Prussianism and Socialism that "Spengler sees in the Russian
East that new world, which will come to replace the dying world of the West"; and to his
Russian readers he also observed that "for us these thoughts are of interest, this turning of
the West towards Russia, these expectations, connected with Russia." Nevertheless,
Spengler does not allow us to forget that he is writing as a westerner in "an irreligious
time," in which "we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization" and not "on
the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or Mozart time." As Berdyaev notes,
Spengler's thoughts bear the mark of a culture that "has lost its faith and is tending toward
decline." Moreover, writes Berdyaev, Spengler is unusual in that he does not grieve over
this loss or struggle to find a way back. Living in a "cold" time, he makes a virtue of
necessity and absorbs what has gone before to the maximum of his intellect, his intuition,
and whatever remains to him of old-world soul.

Berdyaev sees Spengler clearly because he sees the man. He knows that there is a
"Spengler problem," yet he not only acknowledges but also insists that Spengler is
"exceptionally gifted, at times close to genius in certain of his intuitions," a point he
makes several times. What compels his attention is not Spengler's mind alone but the
entire character of this "exceptionally gifted" thinker, which for him is split between the
man of high culture and the man of civilization, between soul and soullessness, and
which is strangely untouched by the depths of spirituality that he himself has sounded.
Here is a philosopher-historian who has "examined the role of Christianity within the fate
of European culture" and knows that "culture is religious by its nature," yet he sees no
common humanity in the workings of history, no "single mankind" to give it meaning, a
discrepancy that Beryaev calls "the most striking side of his book." In everything from
the Greek classics and Christianity to science, art, and mathematics, Spengler "has been
able to express very noble thoughts," but "he does not understand the religious life of
mankind," and "In this is his tragedy."

Berdyaev's conclusion depends upon his prior observations. He does not say that
Spengler's case is tragic because he is an unbeliever but because, for all his "noble
thoughts," there is a universal fact about the interior world that escapes him. He can
"feel" himself into the inwardness of a Beethoven string quartet, the conspicuous care for
the past and future in Egyptian architecture, and the eternal Present in the Classical soul,
but he remains an outsider, as distant from "the religious life of mankind" as the spiritual
distances that he sees among the high cultures of the world.

One does not have to be a believer to experience what Berdyaev calls mankind's "bond of
fate." Of the modern thinkers I have read, no one has understood human affliction in
Christian terms more clearly than Weil, yet she says that she only got as far as the foot of
the Cross; while Orwell, a professed unbeliever, nevertheless affirmed his faith in
common human decency and believed that fraternity was the only spiritual value that
could replace God in an irreligious time. Seen in this light, what Berdyaev means by his
pronouncement is that there is something profoundly incomplete about Spengler, for he is
incapable of experiencing any sense of communion with his fellow man. In Berdyaev's
understanding of The Decline, this incapacity amounts to a "spiritual deformity" that is
"almost its monstrous defect."

There is a telling passage in Spengler's early letters in which he also seems disconnected
from himself. Writing to Hans Klöres in October, 1914, he sees with uncommon clarity
that France "displays for the last time her best qualities, a sense of honour and personal
courage: all the quicker will the marasma settle in in the coming years"; and he sees as
well that the future of Germany "is unfortunately equally unconsoling, if one thinks and
feels as a man of culture." One assumes that Spengler includes himself among those who
despair that "The ray of inward culture from the time of Goethe . . . has been completely
extinguished by this war," yet seven months later he writes to Klöres that he does not
"regret" the loss of "the Germany of Goethe" but simply regards it "as a fact."

What then is Spengler "as a fact?" He states in no uncertain terms that the war has
"completely extinguished" the soul of Goethe's Germany, yet shortly before the outbreak
of hostilities, he tells Klöres that he is "deeply buried" in his manuscript, and he remains
hard at work until its publication, despite privations, loneliness, and bouts of depression.
Through it all, he is sustained by the guiding lights of Goethe and Nietzsche, the two
great exemplars of German culture "to whom I owe practically everything," as he will
write in 1922. He himself is living proof that his cultural heritage has not been
"completely extinguished by this war," yet he does not seem to recognize that this too is a
fact.
Borges draws a compelling picture of Spengler's solitary existence at this time, but there
is a sense in which Spengler is a solitude even to himself, since he gives no weight to his
own example. It is a "ray of inward culture," after all, that he carries within himself and
in just that productive sense which Goethe believed was the true test of ideas. By
contrast, writers such as Razgon and Solzhenitsyn never lost faith in the power of the
individual to keep the human flame alive; and from Kafka, Freud, and Thomas Mann to
Niels Bohr, Albert Schweitzer, and Furtwängler the Goethean ideal was likewise not
"completely extinguished by this war" (5).

Among my culture heroes cited in these pages, Spengler will always remain an enigmatic
and disturbing figure who "thinks and feels as a man of culture" yet lacks the human
touch that the others have in overplus. I say this despite all that I have learned from him
and all that I too admire in his "very noble thoughts." Had the voice of Dos Passos not
come to my aid, I might never have taken Berdyaev's critique to heart or understood what
was missing for me in Spengler's "fateful thundercloud"; for, although he speaks
brilliantly of "world-fear" and the "mighty destiny" that is even now "whirling" whole
nations "in confusion, exalting them, destroying them," there is no intimate human
presence to relate to in his work other than his richly personal prose, no feeling of
compassion over the recurring spectacle of waste and loss, as in the Iliad and U.S.A., and
no unfolding of a "painful mystery," such as A. C. Bradley saw in Shakespeare's
tragedies.

There is, however, and again by contrast, something of Jack London's Wolf Larsen in
Spengler's critique of pacifism in The Hour of Decision ("Man is a beast of prey. I shall
say it again and again"), and there is even more of Napoleon's icy mind, which moved
with ease, as Larsen's did, across whole areas of knowledge and experience yet remained
similarly unbending in its lack of human sympathies. Spengler sees him as the first of the
"late men," and there are no less than twenty-three references to him in The Decline and
fifteen in The Hour. When Spengler wrote "I see further than others" he was repeating
almost word for word a remark that Napoleon once made about himself (6).

In yet another arresting parallel, there are two big things that neither saw and this too in
similar ways, for when Napoleon crossed the Nieman River into Russia, he had no real
grasp of the physical and spiritual forces that would soon converge against him; and it is
striking to see a similar blind spot in Spengler regarding the German army of August
1914, about which he made one of the few telling errors that I have come across among
his many predictions and with the same fatal lack of skepticism that led Napoleon to
exclaim to the Compte de Narbonne in March, 1812 that his fears of Russia's vastness,
her "barbarity," and even "a gigantic effort on her part" would prove groundless:

Facts will dispel all these fears. Barbarian nations are superstitious and have simple
ideas. A single blow delivered at the heart of the Russian empire, at Moscow the Great,
Moscow the Holy, will in a single instant put this whole blind and apathetic mass at my
mercy.
Spengler speaks in the same disastrous Napoleonic mode when he tells Klöres in his early
wartime letter, "I am a thorough optimist. We shall win and in such a way that the great
sacrifices will be richly compensated." This was a far cry from Spengler's later
observation that all of Europe lost the war, and, as far as I can tell, the only German
sacrifices that were richly compensated were Spengler's own struggles to complete The
Decline. In November, 1915, he writes to Klöres that he has again been rejected for
military service on account of his health, and he goes on to describe his "sleeplessness,
severe headaches, and my frightful nervous sensibility," to which he adds,

For the last few weeks I have been working day and night, literally right through the
night, sitting by a candle owing to the lack of kerosene, trying to collect and transcribe
whatever was possible, and getting a quantity of collections of notes ready for the printer.
Nevertheless, it was for me a sort of walk to execution - it can't be expressed otherwise.

The dark times ended with the success of his work, but there was one problem that
remained intractable, which was writing itself as a way of life for him. Although he tells
Klöres in May, 1915 that his "task . . . is more valuable" to Germany than any active
service he could perform even if he were well, six months later he confesses to "the
feeling that I must see my life spoilt because its whole reality is carried out on paper." In
"Pessimism?" he distances himself from writers and thinkers whose work is not "in the
service of active living," and his passion for history as "a vast treasure . . . of experience"
is for me his most sympathetic trait. I know just what he means when he says that there
are "long days when paper disgusts one," and he sends me back to Goethe once more
when he tells Klöres, "If you read the misunderstood Tasso, Goethe's most profound
drama, you will discover deep down this self-contempt of the 'mere writer.'"

This is the Spengler who draws me in, yet a moment later he begins to harden his position
in that peremptory way of his, first when he claims that "Shakespeare had this feeling
even stronger, for the caricature of the poet [Cinna] in Julius Caesar is self-ridicule," and
then when he turns to his favorite example of a man "who is to himself a Destiny" and
writes that "Napoleon also in later years had a repulsion towards people who wrote
books" and that "One will always be envious of Napoleon . . . because he always was
able to realize his ideas without any opposition."

I shudder at the thought of such a man, yet Spengler knew his Bonaparte better than he
did his Julius Caesar, for his chilling exaggeration highlights one of the great seductions
of Napoleon's public image, which was his apparent freedom from common constraints,
to the point where it seemed that he might fulfill his ambition to establish what he called
"a new society" across Europe through the sheer force of his intellect, his energy, and
will. It took the Battle of Borodino, Russia's scorched earth policy, and the frightful
retreat in the winter of 1812 to set in motion his decline; and it likewise took Russia's
greatest nineteenth-century novelists to anatomize the disastrous consequences of his
"Destiny-idea," Tolstoy in epic form in War and Peace and Dostoevsky in psychological
terms in Crime and Punishment. As for his French critics, Chateaubriand cut through
Napoleon envy in one deft stroke when he remarked in his memoirs that "Bonaparte had
nothing good-natured about him. Tyranny personified, he was hard and cold: that
coldness formed an antidote to his fiery imagination; he found in himself no word, he
found only a deed, and a deed ready to grow angry at the slightest display of
independence: a gnat that flew without his permission was a rebellious insect to his
mind."

Both in victory and defeat, the man who was "to himself a Destiny" taught the author of
The Decline a harsh lesson on the fate of nations. Spengler never forgot that Germany
had long been a battleground of foreign armies, and, as Weil observes in The Great Beast,
it was Napoleon himself who "awoke German nationalism by his conquests and
oppression. . . . German romanticism, one of whose aspects is power-worship . . . dates
from the time when the whole strength of the country was strained to breaking-point
against Bonaparte."

For Spengler, the central event of the Befreiungskrieg, or War of Liberation, was the
awakening itself. Like the young Nietzsche, who wrote in The Birth of Tragedy that "the
German spirit . . . like a knight sunk in slumber," will one day "find itself awake in all the
morning freshness following a tremendous sleep," Spengler believed that "the Prussian
standard" was one of those "wordless ideas" that lives "by inheritance" and "still sleeps in
the depths of our soul as a permanent potentiality. It is to be reached only through the
living example and moral self-discipline of a ruling class, not by a flow of words or
force."

The last phrase speaks to the principle means by which the Nazis gained ascendancy and
indulged their delusions of omnipotence. As in Weil's analysis of force, Spengler remarks
on the blinding effects of sudden triumph through "the intoxication of the moment," when
"Elements come into power which regard the enjoyment of that power as an event in
itself and would fain perpetuate a state of things which is tenable for moments only." To
rely on coercion and the ideological "compulsion of a program" is a weakness, not a
strength and no substitute for a national heritage, which has grown and been tested over
time, and therefore "if a stable foundation is to be laid for a great future, one on which
coming generations may build, ancient tradition must continue effective."

Although his words fell on deaf ears, Spengler's lesson itself has been time tested and is
even now coming to consciousness among untold numbers of Americans who have never
heard of him yet have awoken to their inbred faith in the nation's founding documents.
The Decline wears well. In his comment on "the reverence" in which "the American"
holds the Constitution, Spengler notes that every remnant of political forms "that are
older than the [French] Revolution and Napoleon . . . will before long rise to incalculable
values and bring about historical effects which no one yet imagines possible."

This was yet another of Spengler's predictions that came true "before long" and in a way
that he too could not have imagined. By 1929, as in 1911, he saw the portents of an
imminent world war, yet nothing in his bleak analysis of England and America allowed
for the possibility that the power of "ancient tradition" would soon come alive in their
second allied effort, nor could he nor anyone else have guessed that even Stalin would
appeal to the Soviet masses' love of "Mother Russia" should a world war break out.
Spengler noted that America was overtaking England as a naval power, yet he understood
it least of all the major states, and, like so many European writers and thinkers since the
nineteenth century, he uncharacteristically followed the prevailing group-think in The
Hour of Decision when he described it as a nation populated by raw immigrants, "alien"
and "foreign-thinking," with an "intellectually primitive upper class, obsessed as it is by
the thought of money," and a way of life that is "organized exclusively from the
economic side and consequently lacks depth." His misjudgment of the nation's character
was ingrained in him from the beginning of his career, as we see in his letter of October
1914 to Klöres, in which he could not have been more wrong when he said that "a
completely soulless Americanism [would] rule" Germany after the Great War was over.

Spengler had a true insight into the conservative strain in American life, yet nothing
could shake his ignorance of a nation for whom "the War" was merely "a novel sport," its
religion "a sort of obligatory entertainment," and its people a mass "of trappers, drifting
from town to town in the dollar-hunt, unscrupulous and dissolute; for the law is only for
those who are not cunning or powerful enough to ignore it." By contrast, even the old
Hollywood got it right in Meet John Doe (1941) when Henry Connell, a hard-boiled
newspaper editor who has been drinking more than is good for him, tries to warn a naive
"John Doe" that the paper's new owner is a would-be dictator who has elevated Doe to
national prominence as a political screen for his aims. Connell even touches on the notion
that "the War was a novel sport" for Americans when he says to Doe that he saw his
father killed before his eyes and a moment later exclaims,

I like what we got here! I like it! . . . And we don't want anybody coming around
changing it, do we? . . . And when they do I get mad! I get boiling mad. . . . I get mad for
a lot of other guys besides myself—I get mad for a guy named Washington! And a guy
named Jefferson—and Lincoln. Lighthouses, John! Lighthouses in a foggy world!

Spengler never put the case for founding traditions more concisely than Robert Riskin did
in his screenplay, with its Christian-political image of our democratic lights shining "in a
foggy world" (7).

It pleases me to think that it took an American novelist to provide what was missing for
me in The Hour of Decision and help me organize my thoughts; and it was only by
chance that I recently discovered a little-known classic of American journalism that
describes the first shock of "the fateful thundercloud" in a way that I had never read
before. The book was With the Allies (1914) by Richard Harding Davis, the nation's most
renowned war correspondent of his time. Davis had covered several battle zones around
the world, beginning with Cuba in the Spanish-American War, and he was in the thick of
things once more during the first weeks of August 1914, when the German army
attempted to cripple France by way of neutral Belgium and avert the threat of a two-front
war with Russia in the east and England and France in the west.

Borges writes that Spengler identified with Germany's isolation and felt that he too, like
his nation, was alone. This existential sense of "Germany in danger" would always color
his patriotism, yet he accepted the invasion of Belgium without any thought of its
military or political risks or that it might even be fatally flawed, as indeed it was (8). In
his letter to Klöres on October 25, 1914, in which he made his blind prediction of a
German victory, he was carried away by "the intoxication of the moment" for the only
time in his life:

The possession of Belgium alone, which will certainly remain German, is an enormous
gain: 8,000,000 inhabitants, a harbour on the Channel, a gigantic industry, and a very old
civilization. Also we shall get what we need, an African Colonial Empire. The invasion
of England is technically possible and is included in the plans of the General Staff. I
assume that it will take place at the beginning of November.

Those who accused Spengler of Nazi sympathies were looking in the wrong place for his
conception of a powerful German state, which was not to be found in the racist "herd"
mentality of 1933 but in the Germany of 1914, whose "old-Prussian 'style'" he regarded
as a legitimate weapon of "high policy," as it had been in the War of Liberation against
Napoleon and again at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, "which just barely staved off a
general offensive of the armies poised at our borders by preventing Italy's declaration of
war" (9). For Spengler, 1813, 1870, and 1914 are the key dates in modern German history
when "the Prussian standard" welled up in defense of "this masterpiece of a state, our
most genuine and personal creation - so personal that no other people has been able to
comprehend or imitate it, hating it instead like everything daemonic and inscrutable."

If this dark view was fueled by fears of a highly organized state, as Spengler says it was,
the German army of 1914 made it a reality in the infamous "rape of Belgium," in which
masses of people fled before the advancing juggernaut, civilians were executed to enforce
a brutal occupation, and what Spengler welcomed as the possession of "a very old
civilization" was laid waste from Brussels to the German border, most heart-wrenchingly
the medieval-Renaissance city of Louvain (Leuven), an exquisite example of the period
to which he refers as the late springtime of the Gothic world.

It was Davis who brought the onslaught home to me and in the same Homeric language
as Spengler's "Thunderstorms" and "lava-streams" of history. Like so many others of his
generation, Davis had been schooled in the classics, but it was the voice of a first-rate
American journalist that spoke to his readers as he reported the three-day march of the
German army through Brussels, which he first witnessed in front of the Hôtel de Ville
and from his own hotel room later that night:

After an hour, from beneath my window, I still could hear them; another hour and
another went by. They still were passing. Boredom gave way to wonder. The thing
fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there
open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny,
inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a
mountain. It was not of this earth, but mysterious, ghostlike. It carried all the mystery and
menace of a fog rolling toward you across the sea. . . . And when early in the morning I
went to the window the chain of steel was still unbroken.
It is "war modernized by science," in which a mechanized flood of men and equipment
moves "like a river of steel" and "as smoothly and as compactly as an Empire State
express." Davis' prose is as unrelenting as the thing itself: "This was a machine, endless,
tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute strength of a steam roller."
The singing of the men "in absolute rhythm and beat" is "like the blows from giant pile-
drivers," and even when "the machine halted" at night, "the silence awoke you, as at sea
you wake when the screw stops." In the end, Davis declares, "all modern inventions" had
gone into perfecting "this monstrous engine, with its pontoon bridges, its wireless, its
hospitals, its aeroplanes," and "its field telephones" through which "the vanguard talked
to the rear."

For several days, With the Allies stopped me in my tracks. Here was an eye-witness
account of an invasion that Spengler welcomed without any regard for "a very old
civilization" or the hot-button issue of Belgium's neutrality. Was Heller somehow right
after all? Was Spengler's "Destiny-idea" the projection of an urge to hand the west its
"marching orders" toward an "evil future"? Could he himself be one of "the enemies of
the spirit"? He tells us in no uncertain terms that he regards Germany's loss of "the
inward ray" simply "as a fact," takes pride in embracing "the hard cold facts of a late
life," and sees "no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim" in history "but only facts."

The old confusions once again, and once again a Spengler problem at their core, for he is
no ordinary fact-man but believes that "All that is, symbolizes," that "From this property
of being significant nothing is exempt," and that nature itself "is a possession which is
saturated through and through with the most personal connotations." Nevertheless, since
"every kind of significance," like everything actual, "is also transient" (10), the fact-world
provides "no tribunal of the spirit." Moreover, The Decline itself is bound by this
constraint, insofar as "my own philosophy is able to express and reflect only the
Western . . . soul, and that soul only in its present civilised phase."

No separation between a historical and a religious sensibility could be more complete,

since for Spengler "There is no bridge . . . between the course of history and the existence
of a divine world-order," between Pilate and Christ, Spengler's vision of history and
Dante's, or, for that matter, between Spengler and Heller. All the old beliefs have been
shattered "in the moving crush of facts," as he writes in Vol. II, and they point with "the
emphasis of a symbol" toward a twilight, soulless age. Here too, Bonaparte provides a
key to Spengler's thinking; for, ever since "Napoleon and his violent-arbitrary
government by order," we have entered the "time of Contending States," when respites
between "catastrophes of blood and terror" are marked by futile cries for "reconciliation
of the peoples and for peace on earth":

The Hague Conference of 1907 was the prelude of the World War; the Washington
Conference of 1921 will have been that of other wars. . . . The only moral that the logic
of things permits to us now is that of the climber on the face of the crag - a moment's
weakness and all is over.
All or nothing. That was how Spengler saw Germany's position in 1914 and the condition
of Europe by 1922. His predictive accuracy was equally extreme, both zero and a
hundred percent, for he was as wrong in his forecasts of a Germany victory as he was
right in his perspective on the future of the west. The radical terms of his argument are
clearly disturbing ("a moment's weakness and all is over"), yet they help explain why he
says little about the ravages "of the World War," only that we have entered a time that is
"far more terrible than the ages of Caesar and Napoleon."

On the other hand, Spengler has much to say about the ravages of revolution and cultural
decay, which are for him the true enemies of the spirit in "the course of history":

Such is the trend of Nihilism. It occurs to no one to educate the masses to the level of
true culture . . . . On the contrary, the structure of society is to be levelled down to the
standard of the populace. General equality is to reign, everything is to be equally vulgar.
The same way of getting money and the same pleasures to spend it on: panem et
circenses - no more is wanted, no more would be understood. Superiority, manners, taste,
and every description of inward rank are crimes. Ethical, religious, national ideas,
marriage for the sake of children, the family, State authority: all these are old-fashioned
and reactionary. . . . Bolshevism does not menace us, it governs us. Its idea of equality is
to equate the people and the mob, its liberty consists in breaking loose from the Culture
and its society.

Bread and circuses: in this one memorable phrase, the Roman poet Juvenal epitomizes all
that the masses wanted in post-republican Rome. Spengler cites it five times in The Hour,
and in The Decline he recalls the view from the heights in Juvenal's "This I will, thus I
command," the concise expression of what he means by "violent-arbitrary government by
order." Hence his focus on classical Rome, which has left us a more detailed record of
this phase than any other culture and whose one recognizable name in the popular mind
sums up for him the political character of every imperial age:

The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations that marks the
beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists and ideologues what they like - in
the world of facts it means the transition from government in the style and pulse of a
strict tradition to the sic volo, sic jubeo of the unbridled personal régime. . . . None of the
innumerable revolutions of this era - which more and more become blind outbreaks of
uprooted megalopolitan masses - has ever attained, or ever had the possibility of attaining
an aim. What stands is only the historical fact of an accelerated demolition of ancient
forms that leaves the path clear for Caesarism.

When he speaks of "the moving crush of facts," Spengler has in mind not only the Great
War but also revolutions and insurrections from Germany to China and the collapse of
old empires in Europe and the middle east, a global train wreck that wrought incalculable
damage to "ancient tradition" and which Dos Passos bitterly describes in Orient Express
as "the great bloody derailment of the War."
Whatever "idealists and ideologues" might have made of it, for Spengler the "accelerated
demolition of ancient forms" meant that the survival of the west was at stake. Anything
less than "the courage to face facts as they are" was for him an evasion of responsibility;
and to those who cannot help but keenly feeel the passing of "the inward ray," the only
comfort that he offers is that they are still capable of a "brave pessimism" and that our
twilight time still possesses the "creative possibilities" of a "civilised spirituality." It is
that or nothing, for "The age itself is radical," and unless the west lives up to its potential
and accepts that "there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in the
energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with the coldest and most
abstract means," it will not even have a future, since other "powerful intelligences" have
dedicated themselves to its destruction. No utopian beliefs or party programs can answer
to our needs. Indeed, their only effective influence is to hasten the end, most
conspicuously through the politics of the left, which increasingly subverts the institutions
of the west in every field and provides de facto support for the aims of radical Islam,
Marxist-inspired dictatorships, and gangster drug cartels, all of which have made
alarming inroads into the nations of the north-Atlantic region. In "Prussianism and
Socialism," Spengler addresses the "latecomers" of the west and offers the following
terms of survival: "Ideologies are a thing of the previous century. We no longer want
ideas and principles. We want ourselves." It is heartening, if not surprising, to discover
that a similar thought is alive today among millions of Americans who still cherish the
"creative piety" that inheres in "forms that are older than the [French] Revolution" and
have not lost their faith in the Declaration or the Constitution. In a recent survey by the
respected pollster Scott Rassmusen, dated August 3, 2010, we learn that, by a large
majority and in opposition to their ruling elites, "The American people don't want to be
governed from the left, right or center. They want to govern themselves."

________________

(1) In Weil's essay on the Iliad, cited in Part 5 (A). Troy was not the only city to fall
under this shadow in the ancient world. On the destruction that "left cities burned and
wealth plundered" across the Eastern Mediterranean region, see Thomas Bertonneau,
“'The Catastrophe': What the End of Bronze Age Civilization Means for Modern Times,"
Praesidium (Winter 2009).

(2) See the conversation on Newspeak between Winston Smith and his friend Syme, who
predicts that, in the coming decades, "The whole literature of the past will have been
destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron - they'll exist only in Newspeak
versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into
something contradictory of what they used to be." George Orwell, 1984, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., 1949, p. 47.

(3) More precisely, Kafka's presumed epitaph on existence, since the line has been widely
attributed to him but never documented, as far as I know. The thought is pure Kafka all
the same.
(4) Lev Razgon, "Jailers," in True Stories (1989), trans. John Crowfoot, Ardis Publishers,
1997, p. 229.

(5) Interestingly enough, over a hundred leading lights of the time, including Freud,
Einstein, and Richard Strauss, celebrated Goethe in a collection of writings that was
partly intended as a contribution to German wartime propaganda. On the publication of
Das Land Goethes 1914-1916, see Matthew von Unwerth, Freud's Requiem (2005).
Freud's brief essay "On Transience" ("Vergänglichkeit") appears in translation in the
appendix. It was written at the same time as Spengler was concentrating his efforts on
The Decline and invokes the same Goethean theme of "Alles vergänglich" that is central
to the work. Unlike Spengler, however, Freud was deeply troubled by the war. In
November 1914, he writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé, "I know that science is only
apparently dead, but humanity seems to be really dead."

(6) "I see farther into the future than others . . ." From "Conversation, 1817, reported in
English." In The Mind of Napoleon, J. Christopher Herold, Columbia University Press,
1955, p. 202.

(7) "And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not," St. John,
I:5. There are direct parallels to the Gospels at key moments in Frank Capra's celebrated
work, particularly in the dialogue, music, and lighting during the final moments of the
film (midnight on Christmas Eve). In the last line of the screenplay, for example, the
scene directions call for swelling music, "suggesting emergence from darkness and
confusion to light and understanding."

(8) For a detailed overview of the Schlieffen plan and its many weaknesses, see John
Keegan, "War Plans," An Illustrated History of the First World War (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2001), pp. 19-39.

(9) In "Prussianism and Socialism," section 1, opening paragraph.

(10) For a particular instance of this world-view, see the passage cited in the third
paragraph of this section ("All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the arts
themselves"). As a final point about Spengler in relation to Freud, it is worth noting that
Freud reflected on this same thought in "Vergänglichkeit" and in similar Spenglerian
terms: "A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account
less lovely. . . . A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire
to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the
works of our poets and thinkers . . . but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is
determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive
us and is therefore independent of absolute duration." In Freud's Requiem, pp. 216-17.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4678

Volkmar Weiss and the Spenglerian Cycle of History

From the desk of Michael Presley on Sun, 2011-01-02 18:52

With the on-going publication by The Brussels Journal of Steve Kogan's overview of
Oswald Spengler, it may be relevant to mention the work of a present-day social scientist
who has attempted to explain Western civilizational decline from a quasi-Spenglerian
perspective. In The Population Cycle Drives Human History—from a Eugenic Phase into
a Dysgenc Phase and Collapse (Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Vol.
32, No. 3, Fall 2007) Dr. Volkmar Weiss of the German Central Office for Genealogy in
Leipzig writes: “In his book The Decline of the West [Spengler] comprehended the
essential elements of the downward spiral in a typological way, without proving his
conclusions statistically.” However, “In order to interpret this behavior and to predict its
outcome, we need more insights than the analogies by Spengler of the growth and final
decay of all cultures.” Accordingly, Weiss approaches the subject of decline from a bio-
genetic perspective using population genetics, IQ, and demographic shifts as
explanations.

Weiss begins discussing the Aristotelian “Cycle of Constitutions.” Offering an anecdote

from his school days he writes:

“About 50 years ago, in the former Communist East Germany, I asked my

schoolteacher what would happen after Communism? He answered: Nothing else,
because Communism is the final stage of human history.”

Now, after the fall of the Soviet empire, his teacher’s faith in Communism strikes us as
naïve. Yet Weiss contrasts the teacher's faith with that of current Western notions of the
democratic ideal offered as a universal replacement for all peoples, regardless of their
cultural or biological history. We observe concrete instances in NATO excursions into
Afghanistan, the previous Balkan campaigns, and the United States invasion of Iraq.
Nevertheless, the regime of Western democracies cannot be arbitrarily transferred, and in
any case, permanence is never guaranteed. Weiss remarks on the Aristotelian conception
of a hierarchy of governmental forms where the good or ordered constitution is followed
by its opposite. Thus the progression from monarchy to aristocracy, and oligarchy to
democracy inevitably leads to more degenerate forms. However, for reasons to be
discussed, Western-style democracy cannot sustain itself and the cycle starts anew:

“Democracy inevitably degenerates into a corrupt government of the plebs and

mobocracy. A dictatorship of the proletariat, which in the name of democracy
redistributes without any constraints from poor to rich, from the brave and diligent to the
paupers, destroys the economic power of the society in its roots. Finally, the people will
hail an autocrat as savior, and after a complete breakdown the cycle starts again.”

For Weiss, examples are commonplace, but some, while known, are not intuitively
obvious in their manifestation. For instance, he explains the history of Russia as being in
abject decline from at least the late 19th century, wherein the era of Soviet Communism
was just another step on the road to final decay inasmuch as the tyranny of Stalin was
replaced by the “oligarchy of the Politburo.” Underlying the current political-social-
cultural climate, one discovers the presence of a transforming demographic shift resulting
in a definite qualitative decline within the population genotype. Associated with
demographic shifting is the inexplicable lowering of birth rates to sub-replacement levels
among the indigenous group . Weiss views the group as an organic entity, and as such the
survival of any organism is primarily dependent upon its ability to reproduce. As
Aristotle remarked in De Anima, only through reproduction can the individual participate
in immortality. So too the civilization.

The political cycle is different for those groups not possessing the necessary intellectual
capital to sustain the high level historically demonstrated within Western social political
order, although the end is the same:

“States with only short phases of upswing and a low average IQ have no chance to
reach the stage of fully developed democracy at all, but oscillate between oligarchy and
tyranny, before they are drawn into the abyss.”

Hence the wrongheadedness of Western elite's attempts to impose the democratic ideal on
peoples whose natures could never be accepting of the gift.

Weiss documents how Western economic practices inhibit the organic demands for
population maintenance. For instance, the introduction of women into the workplace, and
the general level of consumerism that allows people to “forget” their biological duty to
the species as they work for “things” (consumables external to their biological nature),
exacerbates decline. In a contradictory manner, the equalitarian ideology coupled with
Third World immigration in effect lowers the “civilizational IQ” necessary for the
maintenance of a preexisting technological base—the ordered ground of our externally
oriented consumer society. This has the effect of taxing both the social and technological
infrastructure to the point where it cannot be sufficiently maintained.

With regard to declining population Weiss writes:

“It is crucial to understand that...regulation of population density and behavioral

changes being in a feedback loop, a full cycle requires the complete destruction of social
hierarchy and a total disorientation of the female individuals— i.e., their diversion away
from the successful reproduction and rearing of offspring. Today’s humans call such
behavior 'emancipation' and 'feminism'."

For Weiss, it is the general introduction of universal political suffrage and the idea of
equality against hierarchy that indicates the beginning of the point of no return. There
does not appear to be any hope for the West, as we are, in this respect, very late into the
game.

The upshot of his ecological-genetic analysis is simply that the lowered global IQ (really,
the dilution of the Western genotype) must result in a commensurate inability to maintain
a Western derived technological infrastructure. In turn, this inability will usher in an
emerging “Dark Age.” He is not optimistic:

“A population with a destroyed hierarchy as a whole is becoming more and more

incompetent and unable to act, and the individuals are fighting each other. In an
overcrowded cage with rhesus monkeys we see murder and homicide, and with rodents
apathy, sterility and cannibalism.”

In conclusion Weiss understands the historical cycle as a Spenglerian organic process that
must play itself out. If this is so, then our best days are behind us, at least until the
beginnings of the inevitable cyclic upswing.

Dr. Weiss' original journal article may be accessed at http://mpra.ub.uni-

muenchen.de/6557/1/MPRA_paper_6557.pdf

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4628