Spengler, Oswald
Spengler, Oswald
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), German universal historian, was born in Blankenburg, in the Harz mountains. Of Protestant parentage, he was descended on his father’s side from a line of mining engineers; his mother’s family was artistically inclined. Both inheritances came together in Spengler—in his scientific interests on the one hand and his stylistic ability and talent for bold, intuitive theoretical formulations on the other.
After attending a humanist Gymnasium in Halle, he studied mathematics and the natural sciences at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Halle. He obtained his doctor’s degree at Halle with a dissertation on Heraclitus. Spengler’s preoccupation with this pre-Socratic Greek philosopher foreshadowed some of the main ideas of his major work: he was to translate “everything flows” into historical relativism and “war, the father of all things” into a self-consciously tough, “heroic” world view. Spengler was a lone wolf—a bachelor, and also an outsider to the German world of learning. Having taught at a number of schools, the last a Hamburg Realgymnasium, he moved to Munich as a private scholar in 1911, at which time he conceived the idea for the work which was to stir up the entire historical profession.
The Decline of the West (1918-1922) was revolutionary less in its basic ideas than in the impressive breadth of its canvas—a feature for which it was readily attacked by professional scholars— and in its elaborate systematization of cultural and historical pessimism. Spengler’s immediate inspiration was his perception that the civilization of the West since the late nineteenth century was exhibiting the same symptoms as ancient civilization in its decline. He acknowledged the influences primarily of Goethe and Nietzsche; to them he owed “practically everything.” From Goethe he derived his “method,” particularly his way of relating scientific insights to cultural phenomena, and his latent historical relativism. From Nietzsche he acquired the “questioning faculty,” his approach to cultural criticism.
In the work of Edward Gibbon, decline had been a historical theme closely circumscribed by time and space; for Spengler it became a metaphysical one. While Gibbon had seen decline in a broader context of the long-range history of human progress, Spengler used it as an argument against the existence of progress. This difference is a measure of Spengler’s dramatic break with the premises of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. His historicism and antirationalism carried the tradition of German romanticism to its ultimate conclusions; he called his work a “German philosophy.” His ponderousness and lack of humor in fact took him far afield from both Goethe and Nietzsche. Thus the blue flower of German romanticism blossomed for the last time in an icy, apocalyptic twentieth-century setting.
The Decline of the West is described in the subtitle as a “morphology of history.” History is not the study of a coherent evolution (Spengler contra Hegel); it is a comparative study of cultures. Spengler dismissed with vehemence the traditional periodization of world history in terms of ancient, medieval, and modern. Instead he concentrated on eight separate cultures: those of Egypt, India, Babylon, China, classical antiquity, Islam, the West (Faustian culture), and Mexico. Each one of these “powerful cultures” imprints upon mankind its own form, has its own idea, passions, life, and death (Spengler’s historical relativism). Each one, like a plant, goes through the appointed course of youth, maturity, and decline (Spengler’s determinism). Each “culture,” in Spengler’s terms, produces its “civilization,” the latter representing a late, declining phase of that culture: a civilization is “a conclusion, the thing become succeeding to the thing becoming, rigidity following expansion,” intellect replacing the soul. For the linear view of history Spengler thus substituted a cyclical theory such as had last been elaborated in the West by Vico in the early eighteenth century (though one had been propounded in the nineteenth century by the Russian writer Nikolai I. Danilevskii).
According to this theory, historical events are symbolic of the “metaphysical structure of historical mankind.” There is a “morphological relationship” between diverse expressions of human activity—between differential calculus and the dynastic state of the time of Louis xiv, for instance, or between the ancient polis and Euclidean geometry. Furthermore, Spengler saw “contemporaneity” in phenomena widely separated in time—in the Trojan war and the crusades, in Homer and the song of the Nibelungs, and so forth. Napoleon was not a pupil of Alexander the Great but his alter ego. Altogether, historical data, instead of being subject to the law of cause and effect, follow a compelling “fate.” Spengler called his work grandiloquently a “philosophy of fate.” In effect, while he could hardly pass for a philosopher, he was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding visionaries.
Applied to twentieth-century Western civilization, Spengler’s theories opened up impressive social perspectives. His insights into atomized life in the big city (the “megalopolis”), into an age of masses, money, and a new Caesarism are penetrating. For all his mystical vision, Spengler actually raised the very issues that agitate contemporary sociologists. And what is more, many of his predictions have come true.
Spengler’s immediate impact on Germany was electrifying. Although accused of charlatanism by most professional scholars, he became one of the most widely read and discussed authors in the 1920s. At the same time, a number of pamphlets that he wrote after the war, while serving as sketches for and elaborations of his general work, drew him deeper and deeper into the bitter political struggles of the Weimar Republic. Preussentum und Sozialismus (1920) was particularly influential, orphic but compelling. It exhorted the Germans to live up to a type that Spengler, in The Decline of the West, had called the “last race”: strong, heroic, Prussian. Spengler’s politics added up to a violent rejection of liberalism, democracy, and the West, and they contributed vitally to the undermining of the young German republic, which was to him nothing but a “business enterprise.” While Spengler is considered by some to have paved the way for National Socialism, he disagreed with the Nazis on various basic issues (such as race) and many times repudiated the movement (Neubau des Deutschen Retches 1924; The Hour of Decision 1933b). The Nazis, however, used him as one of their ideological fathers, although after Hitler’s seizure of power they dismissed him harshly as a magician of decline, a sadist, and so forth. In the end Spengler died a lonely, almost forgotten man.
After World War n The Decline of the West, its prophecies seemingly borne out by events, came into its own, especially in the United States. Arnold Toynbee’s universal history—which conquered America in the late 1940s—was really something of a Spenglerian heresy, Spengler tempered by British empiricism. Spengler, indeed, left a lasting imprint upon modern “metahistorians” like Toynbee, sociologists like Sorokin, and anthropologists like Kroeber. Finally, a pessimistic mid-twentieth century saw itself reflected in Spengler’s grand scheme.
Klemens von Klemperer
WORKS BY SPENGLER
(1918-1922) 1926-1928 The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Authorized translation with notes by Charles F. Atkinson. New York: Knopf. ? Volume 1: Form and Actuality. Volume 2: Perspectives of World History. First published as Der Untergang des Abendlandes.
(1920) 1942 Preussentum und Sozialismus. Munich: Beck. ? Reprinted in Spengler (1933a).
1924 Der Neubau des Deutschen Reiches. Munich: Beck. ? Reprinted in Spengler (1933a).
(1931) 1932 Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life. New York: Knopf. ? First published as Der Mensch und die Technik: Beitrag zu einer Philosophic des Lebens.
1933a Politische Schriften. Munich: Beck.
(1933b) 1934 The Hour of Decision. New York: Knopf. ? First published as Jahre der Entscheidung.
Reden und Aufsdtze. 3d ed. Munich: Beck, 1951. ? Published posthumously. Contains Heraklit and other writings first published between 1904 and 1936.
Letters, 1913-1936. Translated and edited by Arthur Helps. New York: Knopf, 1966. ? First published in German.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, T. W. 1950 Spengler nach dem Untergang. Der Monat 2, no. 20:115-128.
Heller, Erich (1952) 1959 The Disinherited Mind. New York: Meridian.
Hughes, H. Stuart 1952 Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate. New York: Scribner.
Meinecke, B’Hiedrich (1923)1959 Über Spenglers Geschichtsbetrachtung. Pages 181-195 in Friedrich Meinecke, Werke. Volume 4: Zur Theorie und Philosophie der Geschichte. Munich: Oldenbourg.
Schroeter, Manfred 1922 Der Streit um Spengler: Kritik seiner Kritiker. Munich: Beck.
Schroeter, Manfred 1949 Metaphysik des Untergangs: Fine kulturkritische Studie Uber Oswald Spengler. Munich: Leibniz.
Sorokin, Pitirim A. (1950) 1963 Modern Historical and Social Philosophies. New York: Dover. ? First published as Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis.