SPENGLER, OSWALD

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was born in Blankenburg, Germany, on May 29, and attended the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Halle, where he studied mathematics and the natural sciences, which led to his becoming a secondary school teacher of mathematics in Hamburg. He abandoned teaching in 1911 to work on his magnum opus—The Decline of the West (1918–1922)—which he did steadily during the World War I. He intentionally published the first volume to coincide with the German military defeat and industrial collapse of 1918, and the second four years later. From this time until his death in Munich on May 8, he wrote other, shorter books and pamphlets on social and political subjects, including Man and Technics (1931).

Despite his marginal status in the German academic world and the controversy with which his ideas were greeted, Spengler's influence on social science was far greater than that of those who tried furiously to refute him. His impact derives from the fact that in examining the nature of Western Europe and North America he makes predictions about its future, drawing inferences based on a metaphysical reading of history during a period of serious crisis.

The key to Spengler's philosophical anthropology and accompanying philosophy of history is his use of the Faustian legend in popular German literature to interpret modern technology. According to him, humans are the only predators able to select and design weapons for attacking nature and each other. At some point around the tenth century this ability developed to such an extent in Western European culture that humans seized for themselves the prerogatives of domination over nature. This inexorable destiny is a radical break with earlier periods of thought, in which humans saw themselves as subject to nature; yet it was a destiny made possible by nature, when nature gave human beings both mental superiority and hands. The hands are fundamentally weapons. More than a tool of tool, as described by Aristotle, the hand perfects itself in conflict more than manufacture. Indeed just as Spengler interprets the plough as a weapon against plant life, so he sees instruments of worship as arms against the devil. But Spengler does not confuse technology with tools or technological objects. Technology is a set of procedures or practical means for producing a particular end in view. In Spengler's words, technology is the tactics of living, a conception that goes beyond human life. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, he identifies life with struggle, a fierce and merciless struggle that springs from the will to power, with the machine being the subtlest of all possible weapons.

Having placed the origin of Faustian culture in the Nordic countries, Spengler interprets the Enlightenment as the moment when the machine replaced the Creator. The machine became a god, with factories for temples and engineers for priests, whose mysteries were the esoteric features of mechanization. Nineteenth-century machine age industrialization imposed itself on nature with standardized, inert forms that are hostile to the natural world and the precursors of decline. But in order to feed the technological-machinist army Western Europe and North America furthered the destruction of nature across the globe, creating an untameable monster that threatens to conquer humans themselves and lead culture to a grandiose suicide. The tragedy of humanity lies in humans raising their hands against their own mother—nature. All the great cultures defeats. The struggle against nature is a struggle without hope, even though people pursue it to the end.

Contrary to the views of Enlightenment theorists such as Henri de Saint-Simon or Auguste Comte, the domination of nature by Faustian technology does not seek human emancipation, but is the manifestation of a blind will to power over the infinite. As Hermínio Martins (1998) argues, Spengler rejects the rationality of technological history. The history of Western European and North American technology is simply human tragedy because the infinite is always greater than efforts to tame it. Inspired also by Nietzsche's cyclic vision of history, Spengler sees culture, rooted in the soil, being replaced by civilization, in which the intellect prevails, decaying again eventually into culture.

The significance that Spengler attributes to technology, his defense of science-as-technology, his cultural pessimism, and his hostility to liberal, democratic values and institutions were commented on by Max Weber, and influenced thinking during the Nazi regime, despite the fact that he rejected national socialism completely in 1934. Many of his insights and expressions regarding the essentially non-transferable character of Western European and North American technological culture as a destiny, the will to power as the foundation of technology, and the conceptual and ontological dependency of science on technology are further echoed in Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger, as well as in some members of the first generation of the Frankfurt school.

JOSÉ LUÍS GARCIA

SEE ALSO Faust; German Perspectives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hughes, H. Stuart. (1952). Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Martins, Hermínio. (1998). "Technology, Modernity, Politics". In The Politics of Postmodernity, eds. James Good, and Irving Velody. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Spengler, Oswald. (1918 [1922]). Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West], 2 vols. Munich: C. H. Beck. English translation by Charles Francis Atkinson (London: George Allen & Unwin [1926/1928]).

Spengler, Oswald. (1931). Der Mensch und die Technik: Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens [The Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life]. Munich: C. H. Beck. English translation by Charles Francis Atkinson (London: George Allen & Unwin [1932]).