Oswald Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 2

Those later political pamphlets (which are acutely analyzed by Rolf Peter Sieferle in Die Konservative Revolution, Frankfurt, 1995) are said by some critics to reveal the secret meaning of The Decline, but if so that was not what fascinated so many readers, especially outside Germany. Spengler's political career was actually rather pathetic, as so often is the case when an unsophisticated scholar gets taken up by men of power. A Dutch researcher has lately discovered that, made famous by his big book, Spengler became adviser to a conspiratorial network of Ruhr industrialists and political and paramilitary activists in Berlin and Bavaria, and thus found himself on the fringes of a national-conservative plot to overthrow the Weimar Republic. He wisely retreated to his study, but despite being still ambivalent about Nazism, let himself be wheeled in several times to see Hitler. He decided Hitler was a Dummkopf who had nothing of the coming Caesar. He found the Nazis' racism stupid, their economic policies shortsighted, and their "socialism" far removed from the old-fashioned Prussian state-capitalism Spengler intended by that name. Although Ernst Junger tried to claim him for the movement, dedicating Der Arbeiter (1932) to him, the Nazis saw that he was too reactionary for them, and his big book was banned. So Spengler was caught in a crossfire: Theodor Adorno said, "In Germany he was ostracized as a pessimist and a reactionary. . . . Abroad he was considered one of those ideologically responsible for the relapse into barbarism."

Getting back to Spengler's one important work, it was (according to the tide he first proposed to his publisher) a "morphology of world history", that is, an account of the successive, meaningless, unconnected rises and falls that constitute what is improperly (because monistically) called the history of humanity. Such cyclical theories are as old as the Greeks and Romans, but what was original to Spengler was his suggestion about what it was that rose and fell: a culture. For him that meant an ideal or a style that characterized a whole group of societies over a long period, and which was expressed in or symbolized by everything they did, from music to mathematics, from economy to architecture. According to Spengler, there had been eight or nine such cultures in history, and the two he paid most attention to were the Apollonian, which arose in the heroic age of Greece and died in the Roman Empire, and the Faustian, which arose in Western Europe a thousand years before and was now in its declining stage.

That stage told the same tragic story in each case, and Spengler called it by a familiar German pejorative, "civilization" - the age of the big city, war, democracy, and finally, Caesarism. When it culminated, that culture was dead, and for a time men lived without history, until one day, one could not know when or where, a new soul or ideal would be born and find expression in a new culture. That culture would flower and flourish in its turn and then decline and die. The cultures were external to each other, neither influencing nor inheriting; in fact, they could not understand each other and their relations consisted of deliberate misunderstanding. So, of course, their succession had no cumulative sense, no meaning. This, then, was not a philosophy of history so much as a science of civilizations; not a positive science, though, because its method was intuition, feeling, and analogy.

Northrop Frye said that every single element of this construction ("one of the world's great Romantic poems") has been utterly refuted a dozen times, and yet that its leading ideas are "as much part of our mental outlook today as the electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians." We can test that proposition by separating out the leading ideas from the profusion of learning, poesy, mysticism, and oracle that is The Decline of the West. They are two: the conviction that the West is doomed and that its sun is already setting; and the assertion that culture comes in totalities, monads that are not connected by any bridges that could escape cultural relativism.

Prophet of Doom

The doomsaying was what most readers got out of the book. Said Charles and Mary Beard, in The American Spirit (1942),

Whatever meaning the arbitrary and fanciful divisions into epochs may have carried in the author's brain, Spengler's judgment of history certainly conveyed to American readers the notion that 'Western civilization' was doomed and that another Caesar, the conquering man of blood and iron, would bring it to an end.

The rest of the book was taken as "evidence" for that proposition; only historians and scholars with special interests could cope with the mass of learned allusions, artistic judgments, and stunning analogies in the sections on past cultures. For the rest of us, Spengler was saying that all past cultures eventually fell into the state of civilization and then collapsed. We have been in such a state since Napoleon, so our end is nigh, meaning within the next century or so.

Decline and fall had been a familiar and portentous theme ever since the history of the collapse of the Roman Empire was pieced together, but the suggestion that modern societies could go the same way was little more than a rhetorical or poetic flourish, and one not taken seriously by the confident and optimistic nineteenth century. Nietzsche sought to shake that confidence, and Georges Sorel mocked it in Les Illusions du progres (1908), but as Erich Kahler said in The Meaning of History (1965),

Those ideas, at the time . . . went almost unnoticed by the broad public. The world-shaking and value-shaking catastrophe of the First World War was needed to prepare the ground for their thriving and widespread influence. The man of the hour was Spengler.