Famous historical fights: Gramsci vs. Il Duce

With the Murdochs back in the news again,  hegemony springs to mind, and with it the genesis of the idea.

Gramsci developed Marx and Engels’s theory of the economic superstructure, introducing the concept of hegemony into the general lexicon, and got locked up by the Duce for his troubles.

  

VS.

In brief - too, too brief - the theory goes: all aspects of life are determined materially (Marx & Engels, Die Deutsche Ideologie) which is the economic superstructure (Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy), the controlling class of which employs the dissemination of information and judgments about values which justify and retrench that superstructure in terms of its desires (Gramsci, Prison Writings). The family – that is a bourgeois lie which produces new workers. The state – that is a bourgeois weapon to organise against the proles. Art – reflects the bourgeois lifestyle and the economic realities underpinning the apparently universal, objective ideals of Enlightenment.

According to Spengler’s history, the question of free will is the fundamental, sacrosanct dilemma of the Western ideology. Perhaps that is why Marxist determinism failed – fundamental inability to stomach the notion that all aspects of living are determined by the capitalist net. That, and the incessant obsession with revolution for its own sake (valorised in ’68; transformed in ’89 by the anti-Communist/ pro-capitalist revolutions across the Eastern Bloc). And the stupidity of the world envisaged by Marx post-revolution. Seven billion people ‘fishing, hunting and criticising art’ in a harmonious world beyond laws? Get real.

Is it a case of mistaking incidental consequences for deliberate entrapment by ideology? The proliferation of media can be seen as a direct and intentional consequence of 1. The capitalist’s desire for profit; or 2. The capitalist’s desire to fragment the desires of the working/ all classes – and I think the heterodox approach, including all classes in the critique of capitalism works better and sounds less like something from before the Modern Second Peloponnesian War – in order to water down resistance to the capitalist model of political economy. Doesn’t 1 logically precede 2? Hasn’t it been shown abundantly that ideologically-inspired adjustments to the economy will fail, and that the market determines itself?

Don’t get us wrong, Burning Pyre deplores the reductionism of our managerial capitalism, which sees life narrowly as the pursuit of economic interests, but we cannot imply that the ideology precedes the reality. Spirit/ Mind adjusts to material circumstances, Hegel taught. The making of money precedes the desire to make people think that they can only be happy by pursuing the ideology that making more money makes happy.

Hegel über Marxismus!* Duce oltre Gramsci!

On the other hand, we are perfectly willing to accept that something akin to Stockholm Syndrome prevents people from criticising the economic form of capitalism. How much harder is your job if you disagree with the principles on which it is founded, the incentive mechanisms used to ‘gee’ it along, and the organisational structures which are set up by the coal face, so to speak? Cognitive dissonance indeed.

So the Murdochs advance number 1 – making money – whilst influencing minds to their own agenda, which is not necessarily the capitalist one, other than by incidence. Propasphere is a much more accurate term to describe the illusion of objectivity under limited-consensus mass media.

 

*This tete-a-tete draws us into a debate about to what degree Hegel is the herald of liberal democratic capitalism of the Kojéve-Fukuyama variety.

Three Philosophical Conceptions of Causality

Socratic Law of Causality

Everything that happens, happens for a reason; that is, it is a fact that can be accounted for (Theaetetus, 201d).

Galilean Law of Causality

Everything that happens, happens because it is caused physically to happen.

Nietzschean Law of Causality

Everything that happens can be traced back to a 'discourse'; - although this is not a word Nietzsche used (neither Habermas's Diskurs nor Heidegger's Rede). This discourse arises in the will to power.

Both Socrates' 'accounts' and Galileo's concept of physical cause (Will to Power: 551) are manifestations of a discourse of will to power in which penetrating understanding and the instrumentalisation of the world are aspects of the fundamental principle of individuation and its desire for self-actualisation that ‘determines’ in a sense the basis of its functioning.

In being filtered through the individual’s will to power, causes and effects are matched on the basis of an epistemological schema chosen on the basis of prior demands. Ockham’s razor was one such schema, as was Einstein’s dictum that an explanation should be as simple as possible and no simpler. Schema themselves come from the will to power. Some scholars have suggested not unreasonably that the will to power can be traced back to evolutionary or biological demands (e.g., Peter Poellner), although Nietzsche himself cautioned against biological literalism (it's an interpretative schema, remember?) and proferred the metaphor instead.

Why did he fear going beyond the metaphor? There are two reasons; firstly, because he was a realist in observing the constant revisability of the sciences; secondly, because that way idols lie littering the landscape like a thousand Ozymandiases, and there can be only one poem as good as Shelley's by which to remember them. Nietzsche preached what he preached, even if his practice came up short.

But this is the difficulty of rational life – establishing laws and choosing criteria for values.

Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 5 (final part)

Cultural Totalities

Since Spengler's doomsaying, and indeed his whole system, depend on this cultural monism, the most effective response is not to compete in prophecy by predicting either an everlasting one-world civilization or a comfortable chaos, but to demonstrate the pluralism of any culture past or present. The more autonomous (though connected) activities one can identify in a culture, the less likely it becomes that all of them were foreordained to climax and decline in unison.

That was the approach taken by Alfred Weber (Max's brother) right from 1921. Weber accepted the Spenglerian morphology of cultures, each with its own soul or set of symbols and all affected by a cycle of productivity and stagnation. But this, said Weber, was only one strand of history, alongside two others, which he called the social process and the civilization process. That tripartite division reappeared in Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), as the three autonomous "axial principles" of contemporary society: the culture, the political order, and the technical/economic system. Their disjunctions and contradictions, their different "rhythms" and rates of change (plus the fact that the last-named, unlike the first, is cumulative) make Spengler's inexorable doom scenario highly improbable in the absence of external forces. By now, of course, we have gone beyond doomsaying to the second leading idea of The Decline of the West, the notion of cultural totalities.

Arnold Toynbee thought that Spengler's vision of a culture (he called it a civilization) as a closely knit unit with a characteristic soul was "an insight of genius", but no one else has had much use for this Hegelian self-developing essence immune to external influence. (Toynbee, incidentally, piled another mountain of erudition on to Spengler's system but at each crucial point in the argument he introduced inconsistency, triviality, or religiosity, so that his twelve volumes are negligible for the further treatment of Spengler's main ideas.) Twentieth-century scholarship was intolerant of monist abstractions and its whole drift was toward a pluralist and realistically untidy notion of a culture, a civilization, or a society. Clifford Geertz exemplified this in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) when he said that the network of interdependencies within a culture - some direct, others indirect, some practically negligible - did not constitute a rigid system. Therefore there could be no "heroic 'holistic' assault upon the 'basic configurations of this culture', an overarching 'order of orders' from which more limited configurations can be seen as mere deductions." Put "symbols" in place of "deductions" and there goes Spengler's soulful, essentialist culture.

Nevertheless, and respecting as far as possible this tentative approach, there gradually arose after Spengler a sustained interest in what was variously called the science of civilizations, culturology, or comparative macrosociology. For this purpose, it was accepted that large supra-national cultural units can display enough unity or common style to allow of generalization and comparison. What was not taken over from Spengler was the metaphysical prejudice that such units were self-unfolding essences, of which the life-course was foreordained by a unique character or destiny. And there was no patience with the idea that each life-course was rigidly periodized into comparable stages that permitted of analogy and prediction.

Spengler gave the "civilizationists" their subject but not their method. That method is usually positivist, in the manner of "social science", though anthropologists like Alfred Kroeber (Configurations of Culture Growth, 1944) and sociologists like Pitrim Sorokin (Social and Cultural Dynamics, 1937) were not systematically opposed to Spengler's intuitive insights into the styles of various cultures. All these approaches are seen in the proceedings of the International Society for Comparative Study of Civilizations, whether of its first conference in 1961 (The Problems of Civilization, edited by O. Anderle, 1964) or of its meetings from 1978 and 1986 (The Boundaries of Civilizations in Space and Time, edited by M. Melko and L. Scott, 1989). Melko recalls that Spengler's culture morphology was at first overwhelmingly rejected, as dealing in "fictitious entities." He then adds:

But time has given a different answer. Many historians write today with a sharpened awareness of cultural integration and characterization. They seek relationships between politics, economics, and aesthetics, and they dismiss cause-and-effect political history as out of date, something that belongs to the nineteenth century. What they have rejected in the system-builders is their dogmatic periodization. The basic concepts have stood. Civilizations do have meaningful inner relationships, they can be characterized, they can be distinguished from one another.

While the comparative study of civilizations is not yet exempt from acerbic criticism by traditional historians averse to abstraction and generalization, it is striking that their occasional jousts with the civilizationists (and with Toynbee) do little more than repeat the arguments of the controversy unleashed in Germany in the 1920s by The Decline of the West. Then, and later, the element in Spengler's theory that aroused most intense opposition, even scorn, was the assertion that cultures are incommensurable, they have no common standards, they cannot understand or influence each other, and their very science and mathematics are culture-bound. They are monads without windows. It was easy to show that this argument was self-destructive, for how could the Faustian Oswald Spengler know so much about past cultures, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Faustians who read his book? But instead of self-destructing, cultural relativism prospered as one of the most successful ideas of the twentieth century.

Spengler was not the sole inventor of this field of study. It was formed by the confluence of several tributaries, of which Spengler's book was one. It was powerfully encouraged by Marxism's totalizing approach, by functionalism and then structuralism in anthropology, and by systems analysis in social science - as well as by the concern of UNESCO (which financed the above-mentioned conferences) to put peripheral "cultures" on a footing with dominant Western civilization. The relativist tendency of historicism was available to be taken to outright skepticism once Wilhelm Dilthey's vague dream of a philosophical synthesis of social perspectives was abandoned. The Marxist reduction of much culture to class-bound ideology (bourgeois justice, bourgeois science, proletarian art) was a pervasive relativist influence. But Spengler pushed the relativist paradox to the furthest limit, not just to a solipsism of cultures but, since each culture had successive stages that similarly could not understand each other, truth was forced back to ever more restricted social redoubts. When the quite uncontrolled appellation "culture" was transferred from Spengler's vast Hochkultur to petty tribal cultures and thereafter to such vacuous notions as youth culture, counterculture, gay culture, and feminist culture, the number of groups ready to claim cultural isolation became legion.

Academic philosophers were at hand to turn this declension into dogma. Take the case of Michel Foucault. Right from Les Mots et les choses, Foucault said that in place of history he would put an archeology; in place of continuities, traditions, influences, causes, comparisons, and typologies, he would put ruptures, discontinuities, and disjunctions. He would privilege the differences rather than the similarities between the various epochs of the history of consciousness. So regarded, the history of culture loses its narrative and falls apart into "epistemes" or knowledge systems that do not evolve or cumulate; they simply appear alongside one another without rhyme or reason, like Spengler's cultures. Science and culture lose all continuity because, Foucault asserts, there have been several great epochs of epistemic coherence in modern times and the ruptures between them are so profound that they are isolated from one another, untranslatable one into the other, in a word, incommensurable. Each "epistemic field" lives a plant-like cycle until it collapses and is replaced by another in blind succession. The demise of our own particular episteme is nigh and its successor is unpredictable (which incidentally rules out political activity aimed at influencing it, because we could not understand it from within the prison of our episteme).

Critics saw that this was a Spenglerian construction; "melange instable de Spengler et Heidegger", said Michel Amiot, while Hayden White saw in it the same isolating intention as in Spengler, the effort to "effectively isolate men within different, not to say mutually exclusive, universes of discourse, thought and action."(7) Once "we are isolated within our peculiar modalities of experience", then thought is led "into the interior of a given mode of consciousness, where all of its essential mystery, opaqueness and particularity are celebrated as evidence of the irreducible variety of human nature."

The social implications of this bizarre epistemology come readily into view. It is a further step in what Lucien Febvre called the breaking up of "the immense empire of civilization into autonomous provinces." Civilization, truth, and human nature itself are to be fragmented in space and in time. The dethronement of a dominant and supposedly dying Western culture led first to tolerance of other cultures and then, thanks to the absence of any standards (dismissed as "meta-narratives"), to the elevation of any style or pathos that cared to clamor for equal time. From Spengler's eight or nine high cultures via Toynbee's twenty-odd civilizations we arrived at the melee of pathetic particularisms, each complaining "You don't understand me."

If the west were to decline, this could be one way it would go down; but it is hard to believe that a vast civilization that has at its simultaneous disposal (pace Spengler) all the resources of both the classical and the modern scientific cultures could be brought low by disruptive policies that cannot even state their intellectual basis without self-contradiction. Sir Isaiah Berlin rails against them:

Relativists, Spenglerians, positivists, deconstructionists are wrong: communication is possible between individuals, groups, cultures because the values of men are not infinitely many; they belong to a common horizon - the objective, often incompatible, values of mankind, between which it is necessary, often painfully, to choose.(8)

So the conflicts that cultural relativism pretends to explain are not really about communication and understanding but about conflicting choices, contradictory policies, incompatible intentions. To allow that they are all equally objective and, given patience, understandable is not to surrender to any one set of policies as canonical, compulsory, or alone properly human. Quite the contrary, discarding Spenglerian relativism and monism, and their contemporary "post-modern" variations, is a prerequisite to effective criticism of solidarism and other cultural frauds.

1 Matthew Melko, The Nature of Civilizations (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969).

2 Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). Isaacson says in a note (p. 776), "Spengler also fascinated Paul Nitze, who in the late 1930s quit his Wall Street job to go to Harvard and study The Decline of the West."

3 Published with a preface by Arnold Toynbee in London in 1962 from the 1935 Polish original.

4 "The Rise of American Decline", Commentary (May 1988).

5 Richard D. Lehan, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966).

6 Franz Borkenau, End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

7 Michel Amiot, "Le Relativisme culturaliste de Michel Foucault" in Les Temps Modernes (January 1967); and Hayden White, "Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground", History and Theory, vol. 12, 1973.

8 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Halban, 1992).

Genius sometimes comes cheaply

... or free, as the case may be: the entire text of Kojéve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel available here.

Kojéve contends that Hegel’s work is really about man’s struggle to be autonomous, to achieve ‘satisfaction’ in overcoming the Other to whom he is beholden, be it God or capitalism or the socio-historical archetype of the Master. Kojéve congealed the unfolding of history as depicted in (and includes the publication of) the Phenomenology of Spirit and took his cues from there.

The problem of man’s satisfaction is one of the greatest raised by the debate surrounding the Phenomenology. Is Man satisfied in achieving self-consciousness? Is Man satisfied in achieving a self-mastery that is beholden to no one? Is Man satisfied momentarily in the achievement of self-consciousness? Kojéve seems to deny the basis of man’s experience as radically free, or ‘thrown’. How is Man to live in his ‘satisfaction’? - that is the question that is posed in the last chapter of Kojéve's book. And Kojéve seems to be saying - we’ve arrived at the problem of Nietzsche’s Ultimate Man; but that means that Kojéve has regressed some fifty years in the history of thought.

Oswald Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 4

Misusing Terms
For Spengler, cultures did not clash; they succeeded and misunderstood each other. A culture did not meet its fate accidentally, for example by going down to a rival culture, but inexorably, by aging into a war-torn and degraded civilization. The very different clash-of-cultures theory was represented in his day by the Polish philosopher Feliks Koneczny in his book On the Plurality of Civilizations.(3) Koneczny (1862-1949) dealt with civilizations as "the largest extant fractions of humanity", above states and nations (what Spengler called cultures); and he agreed that "Historically and sociologically there is no such thing as mankind." But he held that cultures inevitably conflict, struggling until one or the other is destroyed. Peaceful interpenetration could lead only to bastardization. ("There are no syntheses only poisonous mixtures. . . . We cannot be civilized in two different ways.") So he dismissed Spengler out of hand: "I do not know of a greater absurdity than the doctrine of the fall of civilizations as a result of old age; the Jewish and Chinese go on."
Samuel Huntington revived these notions in less bellicose form in his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs, "The Clash of Civilizations": "Differences do not necessarily mean conflict, and conflict does not necessarily mean violence. Over the centuries, however, differences among civilizations have generated the most prolonged and the most violent conflicts." And he believes that we are in for more of it: "It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic [but] cultural", that is, the clash of cultures. Huntington says the West's "civil wars" - two world wars and the Cold War - were not Spenglerian, but in fact they would seem to correspond exactly to Spengler's period of the contending states; and he writes as if the coming clash of cultures were Spenglerian, when we have seen that it is not. It is nothing against Huntington, of course, that he uses terms differently from Spengler, and he could still be correct in his prognostications. But a closer consideration of Spengler's theory would have enabled Huntington to anticipate the main argument of his critics, such as James Kurth in "The Real Clash" (The National Interest, Fall 1994): namely, that the West's real cultural problems arise from internal corruption, and that a similar bastardization is well advanced, thanks to Western influence, in the cultures Huntington fears - which is why they need not be feared.
A different misuse of Spenglerian terms characterized the late Cold War. When Hans Morgenthau wrote "The Decline of the West" in Partisan Review in 1975, when David Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech) wrote Must the West Decline (1966), or when a score of publicists similarly echoed Spengler, they were thinking of a different "West" (usually NATO) and were concerned with matters of strategy and Great Power rivalry far removed from Spengler's concerns. And when Paul Kennedy studied The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers from an unprofitably narrow economic angle, he was the anti-Spengler in his indifference to the soul and style of cultures. To their credit, neither Spengler nor Toynbee ever mistook the Soviet Union for a culture or a civilization. (Nor, added Spengler, had Japan ever had a culture.) Toynbee called Russia a Western deviant or sport, while Spengler dubbed it a pseudomorphosis, a stunted cultural offshoot inside another, as the Magian (Arab) culture had been inside Hellenism. As early as 1922, Spengler predicted that the Soviet Union would be expansionist and aggressive, and he doubted the Slav's attachment to Western scientific culture; but he never saw that as a possible cause of a decline of the West. The application of his rhetoric to the strategic case brought the familiar fatalist temptation, as Owen Harries noted: "The decline thesis also has an operational purpose. . . . The policy prescription attached to the analysis is not that the country should strive to arrest and reverse the decline, but that it should adjust to it."(4)
inally, Spengler was invoked by those who took "the West" to mean "the white race", and its decline to consist in eclipse by some other race, be the peril yellow, black, brown, or brindle. There is not a word of this in The Decline of the West. True, Faustian man seems very Germanic, but Spengler had an unflattering opinion of other "whites", notably Russians, Italians, and Spaniards; while in the political tracts, the enemy is England. He warned of the danger to Western manufacturing industry from cheap Asian labor, in terms similar to those Sir James Goldsmith uses today. But none of this was part of his scenario for decline; and it would have contradicted his theory of the meaningless succession of cultures for him to pretend to predict where the next one would arise, for that was Incident, not Destiny. That did not prevent Arturo Labriola from claiming that he was following Spengler in his Le Crepuscule de la civilisation: l'Occident et les peuples de couleur, where he made the apocalyptic prediction that a struggle between colored races and European imperialism was about to destroy civilization. Labriola was closer to Koneczny in his view that cultures are necessarily aggressive and destructive; to be sure, his undated book seems to have been written in 1936, when the world looked that way.
More significantly, Labriola admits that his ideas "coincide with Lothrop Stoddard's book." Stoddard is a name seldom heard today, though it crops up in an unexpected place, The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to Maxwell Perkins (The Letters, pp. 289-90), "I read [Spengler] the same summer I was writing The Great Gatsby and I don't think I ever quite recovered from him. He and Marx are the only modern philosophers that still make sense in this horrible mess." He went on to quote Spengler's description of the brutal, ruthless, uncultured realism of late civilized man, and it is possible that Fitzgerald was thinking of this when he depicted the "monied thugs" of his novels, especially Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. But Richard D. Lehan went much further and decided that Spengler's "influence on [Fitzgerald's] work is so great that it is amazing that it has so long been overlooked."(5) He developed a Spenglerian interpretation of the three principal novels: Dick Driver's career in Tender is the Night parallels the decline of the West; Faustian man fights it out with the new Caesar in The Last Tycoon; and Gatsby is the last Faustian, the man of infinite desire. There is even the preposterous suggestion that the narrator's reflection that Gatsby and the characters around him "were all Westerners" refers not to their status in East Coast society but to Spengler's declining West.
What we know for sure is that the villain of The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan, urges people to read a book called "The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard." There is no such book but Fitzgerald gives us a clue when a drunk pulls a book at random off Gatsby's shelves and it is "the Stoddard lectures." So the reference is to Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, an archetypal yellow peril potboiler. The narrator later calls it "stale ideas" and thinks it revealing that Buchanan would be obsessed by such stuff. So Fitzgerald knew his Spengler well enough to conclude that the prophecy that Western culture would be swamped by the colored races was an idea fit for roughnecks.
None of the foregoing reactions to the decline thesis constitutes an answer to Spengler's prophecy, but of course such answers were not lacking. The first and most often advanced was that science and technology have put Western culture into a different case from all preceding cultures, thus postponing the doomed collapse, breaking the cycle of the civilizations, and converting Western culture into world culture. R.G. Collingwood, in his 1927 review of Spengler in Antiquity, ruled that there is no longer "a mere plurality of cultures, but a unity of that plurality, a unity which is the present culture, the heir of all the past."
Progress theorists have taken the same line ever since, especially in America. James T. Shotwell, for example, agreed in 1929 that science had made our civilization not only different from its predecessors but corrosive of their foundations, of their repetitiveness, of their economic limitations, and of their reduction of intercultural relations to domination, predation, and exploitation. (Shotwell's further deduction that, consequently, there would be no more "disasters, Caesarism and Machtpolitik" was, for 1929, ill-timed.) The same ideas were advanced in 1964 in Kenneth Boulding's The Meaning of the Twentieth Century - The Great Transition: the era of civilizations is at an end because the scientific revolution has inaugurated "a new state of man." Similarly, Frye in his 1974 re-evaluation of The Decline of the West in Daedalus foresaw a shift from Western to world culture: "If science is a universal structure of knowledge, it can help mankind to break out of culture-group barriers. . . . [T]he transition would be to something bigger than another culture."
Without necessarily disagreeing, not everyone was enthusiastic about this promised end of separate civilizations. Ludwig von Bertalanffy said that Spengler had been a true prophet but that his "enormous cycle of history is now accomplished", thanks to "globality and technology which, in a way, explode the cyclic scheme" to introduce "a global technological mass society in which old cultural values and individual creativity are replaced by . . . a Brave New World of affluent mediocrity . . . a post-historical age" (Perspectives on General System Theory, 1975).
Another response to Spengler's doom-saying was, roughly speaking, "What's wrong with a bit of doom? Cultural collapse never hurt anyone!" This idea runs back to Vico, who thought that over-refined, vicious, and "effeminate" societies could be reinvigorated by a relapse (ricorso) to primitive religion and heroic barbarism. It was taken up in our day by that lonely genius, Franz Borkenau, who thought that "Spengler is by no means 'done with'" and that his argument had not been answered.(6) In particular, he averred, the fury directed at the "prophet of doom" sprang from "a mixture of self-deification and a fear of death transposed to society." In fact, said Borkenau, the cycle of cultures had not ended and could not, for "history knows no resting point in this up-and-down pattern." A fall into barbarism was no disaster, and could be revivifying; indeed, "the more profound the barbaric downfall, the more creative the subsequent culture." Taking a cheerful view of the supposedly approaching chaos, Borkenau wrote: "For such is the paradox of human affairs that men, by walking with open eyes towards the disintegration of their own civilization, may yet serve and experience the fulness of life. . . . In times such as these there is only one upright attitude: Amor fati."
Some support for this cheerful attitude toward doom came from the civilization scientists studying the sociology of recurrent social collapse. In The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), Joseph A. Tainter rejected Spengler's organic explanation of collapse as "mystical" and suggested that social collapses are "responses to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity." As such, they are not catastrophes, simply relapses to a lower degree of complexity. So social collapse "is an economising process [and] may be the most appropriate response" to unfavorable historical circumstances.
In a way, both the above responses to Spengler amount to saying the same thing, though in a different tone of voice. Both those who predict a global Westernized civilization that survives the death of the great cultures, and those who predict a comfortable, habitable, post-cultural incoherence (sometimes called "chaos") are assuming that science and technology can henceforth sustain a viable society that lacks any particular cultural underpinning, a post-historical high-tech barbarism. If that is indeed the argument, Spengler would have thought he had anticipated it when he insisted on the unity of a culture, even to the point of claiming that each culture had its own science, which could not outlive its cultural context. If Faustian man dies, his science and technology will die with him.

Oswald Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 3

It was in April 1919 that Paul Valery said, fatuously, "Nous autres civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles." ["We civilisations now know why we are mortal".] Spengler claimed to show why, insisting that, unlike anyone before him, he was not talking about the decline of nations or states or empires but of a whole culture, including its youngest offshoots in the New World. America, he specified, was the epitome of civilization and thus "had no future."

Wyndham Lewis said ironically in Time and Western Man (1927), "This thesis is, in itself and apart from anything else, such an immensely popular one that the book was assured an immediate and overwhelming success everywhere, from Moscow to Johannesburg." Doom has gone on being popular ever since, and Francis Fukuyama pointed out that the really successful universal histories written in this century were those, like Spengler's and Toynbee's, that predicted "the decline and decay of Western values and institutions." Frye noticed that the very fact that we talk about "Western culture" is part of this doom-mongering; it is common to go on and say it is "old", that it puts one in mind of latter-day Rome, that things have gone wrong since about Napoleon's day. All such views, he added, "have a more or less muddled version of Spengler's vision as their basis. . . . If we do not acquire our knowledge of Spengler's vision from Spengler we have to get it out of the air, but get it we will; we have no choice in the matter." Ernst Cassirer was no doubt speaking for Germans when he said in The Myth of the State that between the First and Second World Wars, Spengler's very title was enough to inflame imaginations: "At this time many, if not most of us, had realized that something was rotten in the state of our highly prized Western civilization. Spengler's book expressed in a sharp and trenchant way this general uneasiness." But the mood persisted and spread. As late as 1969, Matthew Melko observed that all those systems, whether proposed by Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin, or Kroeber, that involved "the conception of a number of exclusive, durable, mortal macrocultures" have met considerable interest, which "derives, no doubt, from a feeling that our own civilization might be facing the possibility of coming to an end, of 'dying' if you will, as others apparently have in the past."(1)

Whether or not such forebodings were genuine, they served wonderfully as a pretext for a facile pathos, a self-pitying world weariness. The poseur who is the hero of Andre Malraux's La Tentation de l'Occident (1926) tells his Chinese friend that "Europeans are weary of themselves, of their crumbling individualism, of their exaltation"; their art is "an abandoned palace attacked by winter winds, the wall of intellect is gradually falling into ruin. . . ." He reproduces exactly Spengler's view of contemporary art when he says it leaves "an impression of a kind of insanity, an insanity both self-conscious and self-satisfied."

Unfortunately for the case he is making, some of the most insane of that art is an endorsement of Spengler, as in William Butler Yeats' book, The Vision (1925, revised 1938). Yeats explained that in 1918, soon after his marriage, he discovered that his wife was given to automatic writing at the dictation of unseen powers whom he calls "instructors" and who were somehow related to Oswald Spengler. Even though The Decline was not yet published, Mrs. Yeats in a trance wrote out the Spenglerian philosophy, using the identical metaphors and symbols. When the book came out in English, Yeats said, "I found there a correspondence too great for coincidence between most of his essential dates and those I had received [from "the instructors"] before the publication of his first German edition." A friendly critic thinks Yeats was being whimsical but he was in earnest. The book raises the question whether Yeats was sometimes slightly mad; it is dedicated to Ezra Pound who surely was.

The Spenglerian pathos was not always so unsettling. A feeling for the fragility of imperial power and the vulnerability of high culture is no bad thing. Sound and humane policy is more likely made to the tune of Kipling's Recessional, which reminds us we will soon be "one with Nineveh and Tyre", than to the sound of Land of Hope and Glory, with its bombast about setting imperial bounds wider still. Even so, it is a mood that can lead to some fatalistic compromises. Hans Robert Jauss, the literary theorist who pioneered the study of reader-reception, tells us that when he joined the Waffen SS in October 1939, "my reading of Spengler's Decline of the West, a book banned by the Nazis, had made me skeptical about the Hitlerian empire." He could not believe in the thousand-year reich, thanks to Spengler, but he could still join the Waffen SS. Nearer to us is the case of Henry Kissinger, of whom Stanley Hoffmann has said, "Henry, in his melancholy, seems to walk with the spirit of Spengler at his side."

Kissinger himself has said that he conducted policy "with a premonition of catastrophe." He has admitted to "a perverse fascination" with Spengler's historic pessimism, but says he rejected Spengler's notion of the inevitability of decay; indeed, he had said as much in his 1950 Harvard thesis. Nevertheless, critics have claimed to detect a fatalistic defeatism in his policies, something which flowed from a belief that American civilization had passed its high point, like so many before it, and had to accommodate the rising forces represented by the USSR, "Sparta to our Athens." This became, briefly, a political issue in the 1970s, when retired Admiral Elmo Zumwalt said Kissinger had told him such things; Ronald Reagan declared that the Sparta/Athens = USSR/USA analogy was a lapse of faith that was making Kissinger too keen to cut a deal with Moscow. Kissinger said his views were being distorted and misrepresented, and from what we know of his sympathy with the Kantian idea of moral freedom, we can believe him. But at least one of his biographers maintains there is a "kernel of truth" in the suggestion that the former Secretary of State was a case of Spenglerian pessimism.(2)

Elsewhere, too, discussion of Spengler's doomsaying has not been about whether it was plausible or warranted but about the bad moral and political consequences of preaching such doctrines, the encouragement it gave to despair, to anti-cultural and anti-intellectual coarseness, and to callous acceptance of the destruction of our society and its inheritance. Of many such denunciations, Thomas Mann's is most eloquent:

But when I found out that this man wanted his prophecies of death and petrifaction taken in sober earnest; that he was instructing the young not to waste their emotions and passions on culture, art, poetry and such things, but to hold fast to what must inevitably be the future, which they must will in order to will anything at all, to technique and mechanics, administration, perhaps politics; when I perceived that the hand this man held out toward the yearnings and wishes of the human being was actually just the old natural Satanic claw, then I averted my face and put the book out of my sight, lest I find myself admiring so harmful and deadly a work.

Spengler shrugged off these attacks on his fatalism with a Latin tag asserting that, "The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling", but he did proffer several qualifications. The Untergang he was prophesying did not mean a smash-up: "The idea of catastrophe is not implied in the word." It meant rather fulfillment (Vollendung); as Lewis Mumford said, "The title whispered the soothing words downfall, doom, death." It was not mechanical but organic, like growing old, and it is not fatalism to learn to live your age. There were still choices to be made, as between a plundering Anglo-Saxon capitalism and a Prussian socialism based on blood and honor. But Spengler did not live to proffer the most important qualification of all: the phrase "decline of the West", tinged with defeatism and despair, came to be associated with three outcomes that Spengler never envisaged or believed in. They are the "clash of cultures"; the great power rivalry that pitted another "West" against the USSR; and the Yellow Peril that supposedly threatened the white race.

Philosophy: 'The Worst Argument in the World'

James Franklin writes on deceased eccentric David Stove's notion of the worst argument in the world (which means basically a form of idealism). Article here.

Oswald Spengler Reconsidered (1997) - Part 1

Article by Neil McInnes. The National Interest, 1997.

Books have their destinies, says the Latin tag, and they can vary as widely as those of human beings - from those that, in David Hume's heartfelt phrase, fall stillborn from the press but later stir to life as beacons of the mind, to those that are the wonder of a year before falling into oblivion.

It is often said that Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West met that second fate, but the truth is rather different. It was the wonder of the years 1918 to 1922 in Germany (and of 1926 in English-speaking countries), achieving sales so incongruously large in relation to its length and density that one is bound to question (as one does in the cases of Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses and Stephen Hawkings' A Brief History of Time) how many of those who bought the book actually read it. Subsequently, it ran into a barrage of destructive criticism from the guild of historians, while its author, giddy with fame, dabbled so grossly in right-wing politics that in due course he was granted two interviews with Chancellor Hitler. While it became unseemly in academic circles to cite the work, it continued to exert, if only by way of its rifle, an influence that must be admitted to be universal.

Today, looking back, The Decline of the West can be seen to stand at the gate whereby entered such pervasive intellectual fashions as postmodernist relativism, multiculturalism, and hostile suspicion of dead white European males. It inspired more than fashions, however. Spengler's Decline led directly to a new would-be science, the comparative sociology of civilizations, and it animated the twentieth century's avid passion for philosophies of history, which everyone affects to disdain but which, observed Raymond Aron, "nevertheless exercise an influence on the historical conscience of our day." Above all, it inspired a mood, a feeling, a pathos: that of living uneasily through the end of an old, tired, dying culture.

Yet by mid-century it had been written off. In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy W.H. Dray said it had enjoyed "instant but short-lived fame" in the 1920s, and if it was discussed again after the second war that was because of Arnold Toynbee's similar labors and not because of a belated recognition of Spengler's merits. Erich Heller maintained that Spengler "performed one of the most curious feats in the history of modern thought: in a remarkably short time he has achieved a kind of highly topical oblivion." After being "passionately debated" at the time of publication, "his work is by general consent utterly out of date." I shall show that this was, and still is, far from true.

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was an obscure nobody of prodigious erudition and romantic imagination. Born in the Harz mountains to modest circumstances, he took a doctorate at Halle in 1904 and was teaching mathematics in a Munich high school in 1911 when a small inheritance enabled him to retire to his study and work on his magnum opus. He never married; a sister kept house for him. He had fully planned his book when war began in 1914 and he composed it under trying wartime conditions; one sister committed suicide in 1917, another lost her husband at the front, and Spengler was often cold and hungry, writing by candlelight. His two-volume masterpiece came out in 1918 and 1922 and was an enormous success, selling 100,000 copies in a few years. Apart from misunderstandings engendered by the title, its appeal to Germans humiliated by defeat and wracked by revolution and inflation was the message that a similar fate awaited the arrogant victors, including that so-called "young" nation, America. Western culture was dying, and the way cultures die is by deteriorating into urbanized, machine-dominated civilizations, rent by warring states, anarchic democracies, until a Caesar rose to dominate them all. Cold comfort for Germans, but no one was promising better certainly not Weimar's feeble democracy.

There were even hints in the book of a thought Spengler went on to make explicit in a series of partisan tracts and pamphlets, namely that in this twilight era of uncultured civilization there could be a special role for Germany, provided she was no longer "the people of poets and thinkers" but became the land of engineers, industrialists, technicians - and ruthless, anti-democratic, socialist dictators. Culture was finished, passe; the last centuries of Western civilization were to be the time of ruthless realists. (Incidentally, that is the background to a notorious remark, wrongly attributed to Hermann Goering but which actually belongs to the character Thiemann in Hanns Johst's 1933 play Schlageter: "When I hear the word culture . . . I undo the safety-catch of my Browning.") As early as 1921 Spengler wrote, "We Germans will never bring forth another Goethe, but a Caesar, yes." The foundation stone of his extraordinary reputation as a prophet was laid.

Blast from the past: Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, grandson of Prime Minister John Russell and godson of John Stuart Mill. Russell started as a logician and mathematician, but gave up producing original work in these fields after Wittgenstein's publication of the Tractatus. He then turned somewhat resignedly to popularising his views in philosophy, politics and ethics, and has been and is still seen as a proverbial wise man.

Russell dressed in the garb of a classic English liberal, but wore underneath wore the hair shirt of liberal Messianism. He advocated the disarmament of nuclear weapons as a means of preventing unnecessary deaths (the existence of which has prevented more than one conflict boiling over into a World War costing millions upon millions of lives); the intermarriage of the races as a means of eradicating prejudice (which surely would lead to more variations in race and therefore more racial strife than unfortunately exists, as a combination of American identity politics and Brazilian diversity would seem to suggest); and World Government as a means of ending the horror of inequality- therefore relieving David Rockefeller of the task of having any original beliefs of his own. What is interesting about these views is not their actual content, but the reasons why he held them. Russell's every opinion (at least in his later years, after he gave up logic) is saturated with pity for man and the inability to countenance opinions which differ in the slightest from his humanism.

Russell betrays the fervidness of his views perhaps most obviously in his History of Western Philosophy, in his assessments of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. On Machiavelli he writes: ‘His preference for popular government is not derived from any idea of “rights”, but from the observation that popular governments are less cruel, unscrupulous and inconstant than tyrannies.' This is, Russell thinks, an argument against the Italian. Again: 'There are chaotic periods during which obvious knavery frequently succeeds; the period of Machiavelli was one of them. In such times, there tends to be a rapidly growing cynicism, which makes men forgive anything provided it pays.' Finally, 'The world has become more like that of Machiavelli than it was, and the modern man who hopes to refute his philosophy must think more deeply than seemed necessary in the nineteenth century.’

And on Nietzsche:

‘I will admit that I agree with Nietzsche in thinking Dostoevsky's prostration [before God] contemptible’. Nietzsche never said or wrote such a thing (although he did about Pascal, whom Russell also mentions in this passage), and had nothing but praise for the Russian's psychological astuteness as demonstrated in Notes from Underground.

‘An ethic such as that of Christianity or Buddhism has its emotional basis in universal sympathy; Nietzsche’s in a complete absence of sympathy’. Nietzsche didn’t call for the abolition of sympathy, but in fact called to question the supra-ethical consequences of a moral doctrine which ‘feels that [man] cannot be completely happy so long as any living thing is suffering’ (ibid.) Nietzsche said that this was dangerous insofar as it evoked sweeping metaphysical conclusions from facts – an ethic rather redolent of Hume.

Most amusing – and demonstrative of my point about the obstinacy with which Russell held his views – is the imaginary dialogue between Nietzsche and Buddha. Russell is so obviously Buddha’s cutman in this philosophical fight over values that one begins to wonder how secure Russell’s sanity is. The grand narrative of the history of Western philosophy is paused for an imaginary sparring match between a nineteenth century German and a third century BC Indian. Russell even smuggles Jesus into ringside at one point.

The problem is not even necessarily that Russell miscasts Machiavelli and Nietzsche (and Kant and Hegel, among many others), but that his judgments hedge his own rather imperious evaluations of the world; he is so firm in his convictions that his mischaracterisations seem ridiculously imbalanced. Instead of weighing each thinker on his merits, Russell judges the history of Western philosophy according to its utility in his own messianic-moralistic worldview.

Russell is important as a social commentator because of his affinity of opinion with many of the leading figures of the present globalising revolution. I am certain that I know with which camp Russell would throw his lot in in the current debate over the range and influence of political correctness. Nevertheless, Russell, as a man of brilliant insight into logical and philosophical affairs, and with a great interest in improving the education and dignity of the common man, remains the last most important public intellectual in British history.

Oswald Spengler: 'Pessimism?'

Spengler's essay of 1922, after the publication of the second volume of his masterwork, Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), Spengler sought to justify his belief that the West was on an inevitable and intractable decline, and that the sophistication and advances in the arts and humanities were evidence of a regression in the 'spiritual' qualities (meant in the Hegelian, non-religious sense) of the West.

I'm working on some teaching material to introduce Spengler to the wider audience he deserves. Watch this space.

‘A completely radical institution for truth is not possible here’.

Twats.

Nietzsche is justified in saying of the University in his letter to Erwin Rohde of 15 December 1870, ‘A completely radical institution for truth is not possible here’. Schopenhauer, too, was no fan of this institution.

The award-winning Friesan.com sees in contemporary philosophy only 'sterility, obscurantism, and tendentiousness'.

On the bankruptcy of the synthetic a priori

1.

For Kant, an analytic proposition ‘contains within the predicate the identity of the subject’ (cf. ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’). Quine had something to say about the vagueness of a predicate's being able to 'contain' a definition within itself, but this point of his 'Two Dogmas' was already attacked by the time Wittgenstein invented analytic philosophy.

2.

For Wittgenstein, an analytic proposition is something which is defined by its 'results' (i.e., its application) and the way in which these results co-determine the definition of the subject of the predicate. For example, the proposition 'the straightest line between two points is always at the same time the shortest distance' is for Wittgenstein an analytic one. Like Kant, an analytic proposition is for Wittgenstein not determined by experience. Unlike Kant, however, Wittgenstein thought that the same applied to synthetic a priori knowledge. For him we define a shortest line to be the straightest within two points. This is not something which we test against our representations (not a synthesis of regulative principles in the mind and the intuitions of our experience); nor is it something which we recognise as having no criterion against which to test it (as Hume said in book one of his Treatise on Human Nature). Empirical information simply doesn't come into it. The shortest distance between two lines can't be 'shown' to be analytic; it is simply defined as such. The shortest distance is in all cases the straightest line because the definition is co-determined by these two constituents. So, analytic propositions cannot divine the consequences of their rules because their meanings are contained in their results (e.g., the angles of a triangle add up to 180°; if they did not, we’d be talking about a different shape). In spite of this, such propositions must count as analytic because they are valid by definition, because if their validity is affected, then so is their meaning. To those geometries which show the actual shortest distance between two points to be a curved line (through the assumption that space-time itself is curved) we attribute a different meaning than the geometry in which the rule concerning shortest lines applies. We recognise that the rule does not hold in this case, but we also recognise that this is a special case of the rule, which exists alongside the ordinary rule. Of course, one could argue that the ordinary rule about the shortest distance between two points is determined by the limits of our powers of mental representation, even if it has no absolute ontological validity.

3.

Kant thought that Euclidian geometry held in all cases and determined the possibility of mental-visual representations. This seems to be true for the majority of our actual visual representations (our 'intuitions' as he put it in the 'Transcendental Aesthetic') – with the crucial exception of the parallel postulate. This is disproved on so simple an object as a globe bisected with lines of latitude and longitude. The globe shows that parallel lines - which are defined as the sum of two right angles each - converge at the apex of the globe. The fact that we can actually represent this to ourselves in our field of vision sounded the death-knell for Kant’s theory of the transcendental limits of representation. Modern speculation about ghost particles, etc, too, shows that our knowledge of the world needn’t be predetermined by the limits of what is in some sense directly representable to us. In other words, the theory of transcendental idealism has no ultimate bearing on our knowledge of the world, and cannot provide a foundation to a fruitful and realistic ontology.

The problem is that Kant’s doctrine of Transcendental Idealism led him to treat propositions as if they were the tools of a static thing – the mind – projecting its results onto the world, as if a synthetic priori proposition belonged to a storehouse in the mind, which ensures its correctness in virtue of its transcending space and time, which form the basic constituents of empirical experience. Wittgenstein demolished this transcendental ontology of the separation of mind and world by suggesting that the binding force of an a priori proposition is the formulation of the sentence and the use of the constituent terms in relation to what already exists in space and time. The analytic proposition, therefore, is not a ‘regulative principle’ or doctrinal postulate that determines the possibility of existing and future objective knowledge. This point is made forcefully in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Grammar, and certainly more succinctly than this. Wittgenstein thereby avoided the ontological problems to which transcendental idealism succumbed.

Fucking epiphany

I introduce to you a welcome moment from my life. Writing on Wittgenstein's existentialism reminds me of one of the first great 'epiphanies' of my life, where everything seemed to resolve itself of its own accord, as if the problems resulting from the imprisonment in my own consciousness suddenly seemed solved. I experienced for the first time the truth of Nietzsche's Dionysian experience. This clip = Genius plot-structure + genius soundtrack + unabashed nationalism (Herodotean/ Periclean nationalism, not the nationalism of the present day, which is a proletarian and self-abasing attempt to grasp votes) + purity of ideal. I am still grateful to the moment in November 2003 when I stumbled accidentally upon this film. It proves the truth of Hegel's philosophy of the master-slave dialectic, that the truth is on the side of the happy man (Ch.4 of the Phenomenology).

NOTE: there is actually dialogue in the theatrical version.

Wittgenstein's early existentialism

When Wittgenstein said early on in his career that 'The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.43) he was following his doctrine of 'hard' solipsism to its logical extreme. What he meant, in his inimitable way, was that the life-circumstances of a person - a happy man, say - is entirely informed by personal, privative experience, and that when an unhappy person seeks to solve his or her problems, he or she thinks firstly of the external conditions that go with - or were formative to - the life of the happy person, and secondly thinks that the internal conditions of his own life refer to a ground of experience that is universal (which Kant called 'transcendental apperception') and universally translatable, i.e., the person denies or simply does not recognise the fact that solipsism - that one's thoughts and feelings are in fact one's only concrete reference point - is the actual blunt fact of consciousness. This does not imply that the person is in fact the only 'real' mind in the world, as Cartesian solipsism does, or that knowledge is impossible, as the Pyrrhonists thought.

We recognise in this that we are tied by the neck with the millstone of the experience of our own solipsism and with the frustration of failing to break out of ourselves. Whereas this sounds pessimistic, it is in fact the key to the overcoming of the Angst of existentialism, of the problem of Sisyphus. Sisyphus's problem is that he is trapped in his own consciousness, a consciousness that is shackled to the eternity of a self-defeating object. What will solve Sisyphus's problem is if he ceased to be who he is, either by transforming his identity, or in the extreme sense, by ending his life. The other alternative, the one Camus advocates, is to take to the absurdity and make it part of oneself, as one triumphs over a disability in accepting it. Of course, one may try to transform the material conditions of one's life, but that brings us back to the first point of the unhappy man above, that he projects the conditions of his failing life into a future state of affairs without accounting for the problem of his own solipsism. It is summed up in the proverb: 'When you go on holiday, you take your problems with you'.

What, then, is Wittgenstein's solution? It is one with his view of philosophy - you strive to dissolve it, not attempt to solve it as if it were a problem of mathematics or science. Its dissolution comes from within consciousness and according to the conditions of its existence, but not as a formula, or even as a piece of poetry. It is really rather a feeling, completely pre-linguistic and pre-cognitive. Psychoanalysis fails (and Wittgenstein talked about this at Cambridge in the 1930s - see the book Philosophical Occasions 1912-51) because it attempts to deal rationally with the life-conditions of the individual, as if a series of propositions about that person's experience could untangle the problems of a person's life and show him how best to live on. Wittgenstein tries to show that those classes of propositions dealing with the materiality of the world fail utterly to express the privacy of the mind, which is where the problem lies. Where they succeed, we are talking again about something that you and I can talk about, and what you and I can talk about can be understood, at least in some way, by others, through the mechanics of translation and linguistics.

'The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?... There are indeed things that cannot be put into words' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 6.521-6.522).