The Decline of the West
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Decline_of_the_West_1922.jpg
The Decline of the West (German: Der Untergang des Abendlandes) is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler, the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918. Spengler revised this volume in 1922 and published the second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History, in 1923.
The book includes the idea of the Islamics being Magian, Greeks being Apollinian, and the Westerners being Faustian, and according to its theories we are now living in the winter time of the Faustian civilization.
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Background
Decline was conceived and begun before the outbreak of World War I, and deliberately looks beyond the fate of Germany to include the fate of the West as a whole. He spent over a decade writing the two volumes, and as a consequence Decline became somewhat disorganized, overlong in places, and polemical.
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Impact
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Overview
Scholars now agree that the word "decline" more accurately renders Spengler's intended meaning, as opposed to the original German word "Untergang." Spengler would explain that he did not mean to describe a catastrophic occurrence, but rather a protracted fall—a twilight or sunset. "Untergang" can be interpreted in both manners, and after the Second World War, most critics and scholars chose to read it in the cataclysmic sense.
Spengler’s world-historical outlook is informed by two philosophers, Goethe and Nietzsche, the former more than the latter. His analytical approach is that of “Analogy. By these means we are enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world.”
Spengler's Cultures
Spengler lists eight High Cultures that have existed:
- Babylonian
- Egyptian
- Chinese / Confucian-Taoist
- Indian / Brahmanic
- Aztec / Mayan
- Hellenic / Classical / Apollonian
- Magian / Arabian
- Faustian / Western
Note: terms separated by a slash Spengler uses interchangeably (perhaps erroneously in retrospect).
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Phases of rise and decline
- Main article: Spengler's civilization model
Spring: Intuition, powerful cultural creation from awakening souls, unity and abundance.
- Religion: Birth of a grand myth signifying a new conception of God. Fear and longing for the world. Earliest metaphysical organization of the world. High scholasticism.
- Art:
- Politics:
Summer: Maturing consciousness. Earliest urban-civil socity and critical thought.
- Religion: Reformation: revolt of the religious moderates against the early religion. Beginnings of a purely philosophical movement. Contrasting idealistic and realistic systems. Mathematical breakthroughs leading to a new conception of the world. Rationalism. The depletion of mysticism from religion.
- Art:
- Politics:
Fall: Urban rise. High point of disciplined organizational strength.
- Religion: Faith in the omnipotence of rationality. Cult of Nature. The height of mathematical thought. The last idealists. Theories of knowledge and logic.
- Art:
- Politics:
Winter: Coming fissure in the world-urban civilization. Exhaustion of mental organization strength. Irreligiousness rises.
- Religion: Materialism: Cults of science, utility, and luck. Ethical-social ideals: philosophy without mathematics, skepticism. The last mathematical thinkers. Decline of abstract thinkers, and the rise of specialized academic philosophy. Spread of the last ideas.
- Art:
- Politics:
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The meaning of History
Spengler distinguishes between ahistorical peoples and peoples caught up in world-history. While he recognizes that all people are a part of history, he argues that only certain cultures imbue a wider sense of historical involvement. Thus some people see themselves as part of a grand historical design or tradition, while others view themselves in a self-contained manner. For the latter, there is no world-historical consciousness.
For Spengler, a world-historical view points toward the meaning of history itself, by breaking the historian or observer out of his crude culturally-parochial classifications of history. By learning about different courses taken by other civilizations, one can better understand their own culture and identity. Those who still maintain a historical view of the world are the very same who continue to "make" history. Spengler asserts that life and mankind as a whole have an ultimate aim. However, he maintains a distinction between world-historical peoples, and ahistorical peoples—the former will have a historical destiny as part of a high Culture, the latter will have a merely zoological fate. World-historical man's destiny is self-fulfillment as a part of his Culture. Further, Spengler asserts that not only is pre-Cultural man without history, he loses his historical weight as his Culture becomes exhausted and becomes a more and more defined Civilization.
For example, Spengler classifies Classical and Indian civilizations as ahistorical, whereas the Egyptian and Western civilizations developed conceptions of historical time. He also rejects a Euro-centric view of history, especially the division of history into the linear "ancient-medieval-modern" rubric. He sees all cultures as necessarily placed on equal footing in the study of world-historical development. From this idea flows a kind of historical relativism or dispensationalism. Historical data, in Spengler's mind, is an expression of its historical time, contingent and relative to that context. Thus, the insights of one era are not unshakeable or valid in another time or culture—"there are no eternal truths." Each man has a duty to look beyond his own Culture to see what men of other Cultures have with equal certainty created for themselves. What is significant is not whether the past thinkers' insights are relevant today, but whether they were exceptionally relevant to the great facts of their own time.
Culture and Civilization
In a footnote, Spengler describes the essential core of his philosophical approach toward history, culture, and civilization:
- "Plato and Goethe stand for the philosophy of Becoming, Aristotle and Kant the philosophy of Being. [This saying of Goethe] must be regarded as the expression of a perfectly definite metaphysical doctrine. I would not have a single word changed of 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 is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding only to make use of the become and the set-fast.” This sentence comprises my entire philosophy."
Spengler adopts an organic conception of culture. Primitive Culture is simply a collection, a sum, of its constituent and incoherent parts (individuals, tribes, clans, etc). Higher Culture, in its maturity and coherence, becomes an organism in its own right, according to Spengler. The Culture is capable of sublimating the various customs, myths, techniques, arts, peoples, and classes into a single strong undiffused historical tendency.
Spengler divides the concepts of culture and civilization, the former focused inward and growing, the latter outward and merely expanding. However, he sees Civilization as the destiny of every Culture. The transition is not a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, classes, or peoples that decides. Whereas Cultures are "things-becoming", Civilizations are the "thing-become." As the conclusion of a Culture's arc of growth, Civilizations are outwardly focused, and in that sense artificial or insincere. Civilizations are what Cultures become when they are no longer creative and growing. For example, Spengler points to the Greeks and Romans, saying that the imaginative Greek culture declined into wholly practical Roman civilization.
Spengler also compares the "world-city" and province, as concepts analogous to civilization and culture respectively. This argument has elements of Marxist conceptions of a core and periphery. The city draws upon and collects the life of broad surrounding regions. He contrasts the “true-type” rural born, with the nomadic, traditionless, irreligious, matter-of-fact, clever, unfruitful, and contemptuous-of-the-countryman city dweller. In the cities he sees only the "mob", not a people, hostile to the traditions that represent Culture (in Spengler's view these traditions are: nobility, church, privileges, dynasties, convention in art, and limits on scientific knowledge). City dwellers possess cold intelligence that confounds peasant wisdom, a new-fashioned naturalism in attitudes towards sex which are a return to primitive instincts, and a dying inner religiousness. Further, Spengler sees in urban wage-disputes and a focus on lavish sport expenditures for entertainment the final aspects that signal the closing of Culture and the rise of the Civilization.
Spengler has a low opinion of Civilizations, even those that engaged in significant expansion, because that expansion was not actual growth. One of his principal examples is that of Roman "world domination." It was not an achievement because the Romans faced no significant resistance to their expansion. Thus they did not so much conquer their empire, but rather simply took possession of that which lay open to everyone. Spengler asserts that the Roman Empire did not come into existence because of the kind of Cultural energy that they had displayed in the Punic Wars. After the Battle of Zama, Spengler believes that the Romans never waged, or even were capable of waging, a war against a competing great military power.
Pseudomorphosis
The concept of pseudomorphosis is one that Spengler introduces as a way of explaining what are in his eyes half-developed or only partially manifested Cultures. Specifically pseudomorphosis entails an older alien Culture so deeply ingrained in a land that a young Culture can not achieve a pure expression of itself. This leads to the young soul being cast in the old moulds, in Spengler's words. Young feelings then stiffen in senile practices, and instead of expanding creatively, it fosters hate toward the other older Culture.
Spengler believes that pseudomorphosis began with the Battle of Actium. Here the gestating Arabian Culture lost to the Classical Civilization. He asserts that it should have been Antony who won. The battle was not the struggle of Rome and Greece that came there to an issue—that struggle had been fought out at Cannae and Zama, where it was Hannibal who stood as champion for Hellenism. Antony’s victory would have freed the Magian Culture, but his defeat imposed Roman Civilization on the young Culture.
In Russia as well, another area Spengler classifies as part of the Magian Culture, he sees a pseudomorphosis as having occurred. Peter the Great distorted the tsarism of Russia to the dynastic form of Western Europe. The burning of Moscow, as Napoleon was set to invade, he sees as an primitive expression of hatred toward the foreigner. This was soon followed by the entry of Alexander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance and the Concert of Europe. Here Russia was forced into an artificial history before its Culture was ready or capable of understanding its burden. This would result in a hatred directed toward Europe, a hatred which Spengler argues poisoned the womb of Magian Culture in Russia.
Race and Culture
Spengler attempts to tie race and Culture together, echoing ideas similar to those of Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellén. These ideas, which were prevalent throughout German culture at the time, were likely the most significant elements for the National Socialists who would later claim Spengler as an intellectual forebear (despite Spengler's disdain for the Nazis—see: Spengler's The Hour of Decision).
Spengler also discusses the national unity of a Culture, a concept to be differentiated from a nation's population. Historical events forge a unified national people—thus he states, “the name ‘Roman’ in Hannibal’s day means a people, in Trajan’s time nothing more than a population.” This idea is analogous to his Culture/Civilization distinction.
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Religion's role
Spengler is neither wholly pro-religion nor anti-religion, but he does differentiate between manifestations of religion that appear within a civilization’s developmental cycle. He sees each culture as having an initial religious identity, which eventually results in a reformation-like period, followed by a period of rationalism, and finally entering a period of second religiousness that correlates with decline. Intellectual creativeness of a Culture's Late period begins after the reformation, usually ushering in new freedoms in science.
The scientific stage associated with post-reformation Puritanism contains the fundamentals of Rationalism. Eventually rationalism spreads throughout the Culture and becomes the dominant school of thought. To Spengler, Culture is synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a religious trend that arises in the countryside, is carried through to the cultural cities, and ends in the materialism in the world-cities.
Spengler described the process by which enlightenment rationalism undermines and destroys itself, passing from unlimited optimism to unqualified skepticism. The Cartesian self-centered rationalism leads to schools of thought that do not cognize outside of their own constructed worlds, ignoring actual every-day life experience. It applies criticism to its own artificial world until it exhausts itself in meaninglessness. In reaction to the educated elites, the masses give rise to the Second Religiousness, which manifests as deeply suspicious of academia and science.
The Second Religiousness appears as a harbinger of the decline of mature Civilization into an ahistorical state. The Second Religiousness occurs concurrently with Caeserism, the final political constitution of Late Civilization. Both the Second Religiousness and Caesarism demonstrate the lack of youthful strength or creativity that the Early Culture once possessed. The Second Religiousness is simply a rehashing of the original religious trend of the Culture.
The State and Caesarism
Spengler’s view of the state is typical for a pre-WWI German conservative. He is anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and pro-authoritarian. He sees a leader’s responsibility as only to a minority that possesses the proper breeding for statesmanship, and which represents the rest of the nation in its historical struggle. Most states, he argues, have only a single social stratum which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading. That class represents the world-historical drive of a State, and within that stratum a skilled and self-contained minority actually holds the reins of power.
Spengler rejects Parliamentarianism as a distinct Civilizational stage like the absolute Polis and the Baroque State were summits. Instead it represents a transitional period between the mature Late-Culture period and the age of state formlessness.
The fault for turning a Culture into a Civilization he lays partly at the feet of the bourgeoisie. At the inflection point he sees an independent and decisive bourgeois intervention in political affairs. The bourgeois is hostile (often violently) toward the absolute state, which represents the traditional institutions, aristocrats and cultural symbols.
Decline is also evidenced by a formlessness of political institutions within a state. As the proper form dissolves, increasingly authoritarian leaders arise, signaling decline. The first step toward formlessness Spengler designates Napoleonism. A new leader assumes powers and creates a new state structure without reference to "self-evident" bases for governance. The new regime is thus accidental rather than traditional and experienced, and relies not on a trained minority but the chance of an adequate successor. Spengler argues that those states with continuous traditions of governance have been immensely more successful than those that have rejected tradition. Spengler posits a two-century or more transitional period between two states of decline: Napoleonism and Caesarism. The formlessness introduced by the first contributes to the rise of the latter.
Spengler predicts that the permanent mass conscription armies will be replaced by smaller professional volunteer armies. From millions, states will revert to armies of hundreds of thousands. However, the professional armies will not be for deterrence, but for waging war. Spengler states that they will precipitate wars upon which whole continents—India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam—will be staked. The great powers will dispose of smaller states, which will come to be viewed merely as means to an end. This period in Civilizational decline he labels the period of Contending States.
Caesarism is essentially the death of the spirit that originally animated a nation and its institutions. It is marked by a government which is formless irrespective of its de jure constitutional structure. The antique forms are dead, despite the careful maintenance of the institutions; those institutions now have no meaning or weight. The only aspect of governance is the personal power exercised by the Caesar. This is the beginning of the Imperial Age.
Spengler notes the urge of a nation toward universalism, idealism, and imperialism in the wake of a major geopolitical enemy’s defeat. He cites the example of Rome after the defeat of Hannibal—instead of forgoing the annexation of the East, Scipio's party moved toward outright imperialism, in an attempt to bring their immediate world into one system, and thus prevent further wars.
Despite having fought wars for democracy and rights during the period of Contending States, the populace can no longer be moved to use those rights. People cease to take part in elections, and the most qualified people remove themselves from the political process. This is the end of great politics. Only private history, private politics, and private ambitions rule at this point. The wars are private wars, "more fearful than any State wars because they are formless." The imperial peace involves private renunciation of war on the part of the immense majority, but conversely requires submission to that minority which has not renounced war. The world peace that began in a wish fo universal reconciliation, ends in passivity in the face of misfortune, as long as it only affects one's neighbor. In personal politics the struggle becomes not for principles for but executive power. Even popular revolutions are no exception: the methods of governing are not significantly altered, the position of the governed remains the same, and the strong few determined to rule remain over top the rest of humanity.
Democracy, media, and money
Spengler asserts that democracy is simply the political weapon of money, and the media is the means through which money operates a democratic political system. The thorough penetration of money's power throughout a society is yet another marker of the shift from Culture to Civilization.
Democracy and plutocracy are equivalent in Spengler's argument. The "tragic comedy of the world-improvers and freedom-teachers" is that they are simply assisting money to be more effective. The principles of equality, natural rights, universal suffrage, and freedom of the press are all disguises for class war (the bourgeois against the aristocracy). Freedom, to Spengler, is a negative concept, simply entailing the repudiation of any tradition. In reality, freedom of the press requires money, and entails ownership, thus serving money at the end. Suffrage involves electioneering, in which the donations rule the day. The ideologies espoused by candidates, whether Socialism or Liberalism, are set in motion, and ultimately serve, only money. "Free" press does not spread free opinion—it generates opinion, Spengler maintains.
Spengler admits that in his era money has already won, in the form of democracy. But in destroying the old elements of the Culture, it prepares the way for the rise of a new and overpowering figure: the Caesar. Before such a leader, money collapses, and in the Imperial Age the politics of money fades away.
Spengler's analysis of democratic systems argues that even the use of one's own constitutional rights requires money, and that voting can only really work as designed in the absence of organized leadership working on the election process. As soon as the election process becomes organized by political leaders, to the extent that money allows, the vote ceases to be truly significant. It is no more than a recorded opinion of the masses on the organizations of government over which they posses no positive influence whatsoever.
Spengler notes that the greater the concentration of wealth in individuals, the more the fight for political power revolved around questions of money. One cannot even call this corruption or degeneracy, because this is in fact the necessary end of mature democratic systems.
On the subject of the press, Spengler is equally as contemptuous. Instead of conversations between men, the press and the "electrical news-service keep the waking-consciousness of whole people and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year." Through the media, money is turned into force—the more spent, the more intense its influence.
For the press to function, universal education is necessary. Along with schooling comes a demand for the shepherding of the masses, as an object of party politics. Those that originally believed education to be solely for the enlightenment of each individual prepared the way for the power of the press, and eventually for the rise of the Caesar. There is no longer a need for leaders to impose military service, because the press will stir the public into a frenzy, clamor for weapons, and force their leaders into a conflict.
The only force which can counter money, in Spengler's estimation, is blood (i.e. race or national identity). As for Marx, his critique of capitalism is put forth in the same language and on the same assumptions as those of Adam Smith. His protest is more a recognition of capitalism's veracity, than a refutation. The only aim is to "confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects."
Criticisms
In 1950, Theodor W. Adorno published an essay entitled "Spengler after the Downfall" (in German: Spengler nach dem Untergang) to commemorate what would have been Oswald Spengler's 70th birthday. Adorno reassessed Spengler's thesis three decades after it had been put forth, in light of the catastrophic collapse of Nazi Germany (although Spengler had not meant "Untergang" in a cataclysmic sense, this was how most authors after WWII interpreted it).
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Related topics
Civilizationational studies:
- Giambattista Vico: Vico wrote Scienza Nuova positing an three stage rise and decline pattern which pertains to every nation's historical path. He was the pioneer of ethnology as a discipline of study.
- Nikolai Danilevsky: a conservative Russian ethnologist, Danilevsky pioneered the use of biological and morphological metaphors in the comparison of cultures.
- Arnold J. Toynbee: Toynbee wrote a similar comparative study of the rise and decline of civilizations, A Study of History, somewhat concurrently with Spengler, which was released much later, around the conclusion of World War II.
- Fernand Braudel: Braudel wrote a comparative history of civilizations during the Cold War in his A History of Civilizations.
- Samuel Huntington: professor Huntington wrote the Clash of Civilizations, a comparative look at civilizations in the post-Cold War international relations order. His work has been likened to Spengler's.
Cultural criticism:
- Francis Parker Yockey: Yockey wrote Imperium, shortly after WWII, which expands upon Spengler's critique of materialism and rationalism.
Race and the state:
Spengler's philosophical background:
Other thinkers influenced by Decline:
- Paul Nitze: author of NSC-68, a foundational document in the U.S. Cold War strategy of containment.
- Shamil Basayev: Chechen warlord given Decline as a gift by a Russian radio journalist. He reportedly read it in one night and settled on his plan to organize life in Chechnya.1
- Kerby Anderson: author of The Decline of a Nation (http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/decline.html), argues cycle of national decline in seven stages with biblical and social science references.
References
- Hughes, H. Stuart. "Preface to the Present Edition." Preface. The Decline of the West. By Oswald Spengler. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. ISBN 0-19-506751-7
- Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Ed. Arthur Helps, and Helmut Werner. Trans. Charles F. Atkinson. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. ISBN 0-19-506751-7
Note 1: Murphy, Kim. (10 September 2004) "Chechen Warlord Always Brazen – but Never Caught", Los Angeles Times, pp. A1.de:Der Untergang des Abendlandes no:Der Untergang des Abendlandes