Oswald Spengler Conquers History—Again and Again

– by Mirna Rudan Lisak, PhD

There are authors who interpret the world, and there are those who create a vision of the world. Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (Blankenburg, 29 May 1880–Munich, 8 May 1936), German philosopher, cultural historian and political thinker, member of the German Academy (now: Goethe Institute), achieved both. Indeed, if journalism reflects current events, and literature is a universal value permanently implemented in a long spiral of time, Spengler can be considered both a publicist and a writer at the same time. His monumental book The Decline of the West—Outlines of a Morphology of World-History is not only a direct product of its historical moment, but it has stood the test of time much like good wine does: the older it is, the better it gets. Although a hundred years have passed since the book’s publication (the first volume was printed in 1918, the second in 1922), Spengler is not losing his strength—perhaps because he did not limit his interpretations of historical trends and current world events but boldly opened them to the distant future. Along the way, he entwined numerous historical directions with an innovative theory of cyclical development of cultures, basing unusually dynamic hypotheses equally on mathematics, science, and art. His enormous knowledge propelled him so high that he had an overview of the whole world. Hence, in his book he writes that, at certain times and in different parts of the world, unique and unrepeatable cultures rise, flourish, and develop all their expressive possibilities only to eventually die and pass to a state of immobility.

The book The Decline of the West—Outlines of a Morphology of World-History, written by the German philosopher, cultural historian, and political thinker Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), has stood the test of time much like good wine does: the older it is, the better it gets. Although a hundred years have passed since the book’s publication, Spengler is not losing his strength—perhaps because he did not limit his interpretations of historical trends and current world events but boldly opened them to the distant future

Civilization at the end of a cyclical development of cultures

The Decline of the West had immediate and great success. After the end of the First World War, in a defeated, humiliated, and impoverished Germany the book was accepted with approval, and by 1926 it was sold in a hundred thousand copies. Nevertheless, Spengler’s ideas were immediately characterized as pessimistic because he rejected the hitherto accepted image of linear history, expressed in an eternally ascending movement from antiquity, through the Middle Ages, all the way to the new age. Instead, he understood cultures as organisms that express their belonging to Goethe’s living nature, not Newton’s abstract forms. According to this view, each culture, without exception, initially manifests the character of youth, at its peak the character of maturity, and finally, when all its strength and possibilities are exhausted, the character of old age. Although it is a specific life cycle that irrevocably leads to its own end, in the moment of reaching the point of self-destruction, culture turns into a civilization which—as the exact opposite of its fertility—is yet to last for centuries. In other words, just as every Mozart has his Salieri, every culture has its civilization. However, its extinct creativity, according to Spengler, is doomed to expand without the real inner strength necessary for true creation.

A three-quarter measure of the multipolar world

Spengler distinguished between eight high cultures: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, classical (ancient), Arab (Islamic, or magical), and Western or European-American. The latter he also called “Faustian culture” because of its unbridled longing for infinity—spatial and temporal at the same time. Stepping into his dynamic comparative construct is demanding because he used selected methodological instruments to form an experimental style that is light years away from the easily understandable classical expression. Such a modernist interpretation of man and the world requires an awareness that is almost at the level of the author’s vision. This is not an elegant waltz in the wake of the famous celestial wheel from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead, every written line breaks a complex multipolar system analogous to the planetary model of the atom and forms a dizzying unity of the micro- and macrocosm, which simultaneously brings the reader to the many circular paths of different cultures and their civilizations. This unmistakable feeling of the world is expressed by a thinker who, in addition to studying mathematics and natural sciences, was also proficient in history, philosophy, and the arts. It is precisely for this reason that his interpretation of history cannot be read chronologically. For Spengler, analogous phenomena in individual cultures are “simultaneous” in a strict sense. This means that any “diversity of identity” always occurs at a specific time within a precisely measured form of cultural development. Hence, metaphor and comparison are irreplaceable tools in his analogical thinking, which renders all academic figures, as listed by rhetoric, irrelevant. For example, “simultaneity” exists “between Napoleon and Alexander the Great, between the Crusades and the Trojan War, between Homer and the Song of the Nibelungs, between the construction of Egyptian pyramids, Doric temples, and Gothic cathedrals.” (Thurnher, R. Oswald Spengler, in: The Decline of the West, Demetra, Zagreb, 1998)

A literary approach to philosophical discussion

At the time, a literary approach to philosophical discussion was unprecedented in the academic community. But Spengler’s uniqueness stemmed from his exceptional gift for writing, which forced him, like the French Surrealists, to give a high methodological meaning to the notion of analogy. And then “the word AS, spoken or silent, becomes the most enchanting of all words with which to measure the power of human imagination and play out the highest destiny of the spirit.” (Machiedo, V. French Surrealism—Book I, Konzor, Zagreb, 2002) It was from such an analogous scheme as well as from the aforementioned “simultaneity” that Spengler’s vision of the space-time continuum arose. It even revealed to him the current spirit of the time, whose dying art Wagner, like Turner, had already dispersed into infinity, preventing Spengler from becoming a classical artist in his own right. Spengler understood that, in a culture that had just turned into a civilization, alongside modernists like Joyce (Ulysses is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year) there was no more room for “beautiful literature.” Reiner Thurnher explains this in the preface to The Decline of the West, stating that “the expression of the sense of life of his time was neither art nor literature; it could only be a radically sceptical philosophy that was supposed to describe the existing historical condition. To produce it, to shape it, to complete it—that was his task.” Despite this fact, or perhaps precisely because of it, the swirling space of Spengler’s book amazes the reader with its superior synthesis of as many as fourteen branches of human activity at the highest literary level.

First Spengler Prize to Houellebecq

Among writers, it is not easy to single out just one Spengler’s heir. In terms of his writing method, in which he cyclically moved through history to repetitively upgrade his basic thought, perhaps the closest to him is Thomas Bernhard, known for his whirlwinds of words, actions, and emotions, which, with each step, followed the same, but spirally wider path, always returning to offer a more comprehensive view of the chosen topic. “It is the extension of the domain of struggle,” Michel Houellebecq might humorously say, and as the great narrator of the nonsensical life of the individual doomed to exist in today’s equally vacuous (Western) world, he was the first to win the newly founded Spengler Prize in 2018. The prize was the culmination of the conference 100 Years after the Publication of “The Decline of the West”: Oswald Spengler in an Age of Globalisation, organized in the German region of Eifel to mark and celebrate the jubilee anniversary of Spengler’s masterpiece. Furthermore, Karl Ove Knausgård, like no other, developed Spengler’s vision to the extreme, following his idea that—after all topics have been exhausted and even recycled—the autobiography of a civilized writer will impose itself as the last haven of creation. This is also confirmed by other authors who have renounced fiction in favour of everyday life, raising the question whether we are indeed witnessing the death of literature. It is precisely in the here and now, which abounds in interpretations of interpretations, reproductions of reproductions, and explanations of explanations that after decades of unjust oblivion Spengler is re-actualized. Headlines such as The Decline of the West? Spengler Reconsidered, The Unexpected Return of Oswald Spengler, or Spengler Today are becoming increasingly common in the world press and academic community. Here in Croatia, in addition to The Decline of the West I and II (Demetra 1998 and 2000), new translations of Spengler’s books were published in 2019 and 2020. The AGM publishing house finally brought out a new version of Man and Technics (the first one after the 1991 Laus edition), while The Hour of Decision, Aphorisms, The Spirit of Our Time, and Heraclitus were translated and printed for the first time.

A clash of visionaries and belated travellers

It must not be forgotten that Spengler was extremely interesting to his contemporaries, including Thomas Mann, who stood out for his ambivalent points of view. In 1922, in German Letters, which he periodically published in the American journal The Dial, he first referred to the enormous success of Spengler’s book, describing it as “a two-volume Colossus, whose blatantly catastrophic title must have already reached American audiences.” But as early as 1924, in the essay On Spengler’s Teaching (Über die Lehre Spenglers), written for the Allgemeine Zeitung, he lashed out at Spengler’s idea that Western culture had become a thing of the past, abandoning the world to civilization, in which intellect prevails over spirit to celebrate materialism and herald a time of imperialism and ruthless wars. As if this were not enough, he made Spengler—eleven years after his death—a prominent protagonist of his last great novel entitled (is it a coincidence?) Doctor Faustus, where, too, he had no sympathy for the philosopher embodied in the character of Dr. Chaim Breisacher. Mann had been brought up in the spirit of humanism, and he believed that “man was given the gift of mind to shape the world and lessen future evils” and not to play a game of mental stunts, connections, comparisons, and analogies. Yet, if we look at Mann’s literature phenomenologically and bear in mind that, according to Bukowski, style is the answer to everything, his reaction is not incomprehensible at all. Mann was a man of culture who, like a belated traveller, found himself in civilization, and although he was—like Spengler—a contemporary of Joyce and Schönberg, he extended, in the manner of Rachmaninoff, his no less important, equally valuable, and extremely saturated last classical art deep into modernism. By attacking Spengler, Mann actually resisted civilization, but one of his assumptions led him into a trap: he believed that a thinker who openly expresses his understanding of man advocates this understanding as the correct mode of human conduct.

If Spengler were alive today, he would surely ask whether the Ukrainian war was just Putin’s war, especially given his claim that artists do not create epochs but that epochs create artists, thus politicians as well, seeking, depending on the level of their internal development, a precisely determined president, ruler, or emperor

Russian imperialism

Spengler, like his role model Nietzsche, did not portray the world as he wanted, but as it was. To explain the will to power, Nietzsche even organized his philosophy like a jurist, in the form of a law consisting of series of “articles.” Spengler went on to argue that compassion, unfortunately, could not diminish the fact that the history of mankind was above all a history of warfare, theft, domination, and hierarchy, even when the latter was seemingly absent. Analogous to antiquity, when the West was at the same stage of development, Spengler predicted that “the Germans will never again produce another Goethe but may produce another Caesar,” which more than a decade later secured him a reception with the Führer himself. However, theory is one thing and practice is quite another, so he opposed Hitler’s rise with the famous statement: “Germany does not need a heroic tenor, but a real hero.” And today, in line with Spengler’s idea that pacifism is the first symptom of weakness of a civilization because it opens its space to non-pacifists, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also refers to The Decline of the West when lamenting the “old age” and “impotence” of Faustian culture. However, quite unexpectedly and almost paradoxically, it was the aggression of Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine that reunited and “revived” the Western world in a common sense of true values. UN Secretary-General António Gutteres is therefore right when he claims that war is absurd in the 21st century, but at the same time he forgets that neither Putin and Russia are the West nor are they in the 21st century: with a real-time phase shift, Russian culture is developing in parallel, apparently transforming into a civilization whose hunger for expansion is ready for the same brutalities that Western civilization was ready for during the world wars.

Instead of globalization, a collision of civilizations

Towards the end of his life, Spengler analysed the “duality of Russia.” He warned that, like the Western man, who has his eyes permanently on the stars, the Russian man also gazes into the distance, but his double-headed eagle only seemingly turns one head to the East, while, in fact, always and exclusively observing Europe. If Spengler were alive today, he would surely ask whether the Ukrainian war was just Putin’s war, especially given his claim that artists do not create epochs but that epochs create artists—thus politicians as well. Spengler believed that, depending on the level of its internal development, an epoch seeks a specific kind of president, ruler, or emperor: nomenclature is irrelevant here. And while the internal clock of civilization is beating unstoppably, the wheel that has been turning will not stop until it closes its full circle. This is why the Ukrainian war is not a local war but a clash of civilizations, in which globalism―whose decades-long domination has strongly shaken Spengler’s idea that cultures do not and cannot understand each other (he argued that, to the average Chinese, Kant is merely a curiosity)―today falls apart, forcing Francis Fukuyama to reconsider his theory of “the end of history,” that is, of a world in which the economic cohesion of states eliminates the possibility of war between great powers. Indignant at the abuse of The Decline of the West during the rise of fascism and having refused Goebbels’s offer to write propaganda for the Nazis, Spengler spent his last years in internal emigration wondering whether world peace was possible. He regretted not studying Russia as deeply as he wanted to, but today it is clear that he did not have to: as he had defied Nazism just before his death, announcing that “in ten years, there will be no Third Reich,” history once again proves Adorno’s claim that “the forgotten Spengler takes his revenge by threatening to be right in the end. (…) Spengler has hardly found an opponent worthy of him: collective amnesia provides the escape.”

Banned, Oswald Spengler died in complete isolation on 8 May 1936. Less than ten years later, in 1945, on the same day Nazi Germany signed its capitulation.