Reflections on Oswald Spengler - Steve Kogan

Spengler And The Totalitarians

From the desk of Steve Kogan on Thu, 2010-12-30 10:38

This is Part 1 of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

In a late autobiographical sketch, Saul Bellow writes that when he was young "Smart Jewish schoolboys in Chicago were poring over Spengler at night." F. Scott Fitzgerald said The Decline was one of the formative books in his life, and Henry Miller read him in his cramped Brooklyn apartment and later wrote a glowing account of his experience. Begun just before and completed soon after World War I, The Decline of the West not only struck a nerve in readers from America to Russia but also generated a “Spengler controversy” among historians, philosophers, and theologians that enhanced its notoriety between the two world wars (1).

By the 1930s, however, its reputation took a darker turn; for, with the growing menace of Hitler Germany and the now suspicious echoes of National Socialism in Spengler’s ties to Nietzsche and conviction that a new "Caesarism" was inevitable, he became falsely associated with the Nazi movement, to the point where George Orwell, the best of a new and self-declared generation of leftwing writers, could say in "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1942) that Spengler subscribed to "a programme which at any rate for a while could bring together" the likes of Hitler, Pétain, Hearst, Ezra Pound, Father Coughlin, and the Mufti of Jerusalem, men who "support or have supported Fascism" and "are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings."

In point of fact, no twentieth-century thinker could have been further from Orwell's ungodly crew than Oswald Spengler and nowhere more emphatically than in The Hour of Decision (1933), in which he described political discourse in his time as "superficial," "small-minded," and filled with "absurd catchwords" in place of judgment and long-range understanding. Although he thought that Mussolini had certain political gifts that might come to fruition, he noted that fascism "had its origin in the city mobs" and that Mussolini's international project for "the combating of Bolshevism . . . arose out of imitating the enemy and is therefore full of dangers." As for Hitlerism, Spengler had contempt for the Nazi belief in "race purity" and called the term "grotesque." His interview with Hitler at Bayreuth in 1933 disappointed him, and the newly installed Chancellor soon had no use for him either. After the publication of The Hour, public attacks against Spengler were followed by censorship of the work and the banning of his name from the German press. Refusing to participate in the Nazi debasement of German thought, Spengler broke with the Nietzsche Archive in 1935 and with its presiding figure, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who, to her "great grief," was "informed that you are taking an attitude of strong opposition to the Third Reich and its Führer, and that your departure from the Nietzsche Archive, which sincerely reveres the Führer, is connnected with this." She goes on to say that she has "experienced your speaking with great energy against our highly honoured new ideal," and, in his introduction to Arthur Helps' edition of

Spengler's letters, A. M. Koktenek remarks that Spengler's "repugnance" to Hitler dates "from the days of the Munich Putsch in 1923," that "one is struck by the fate that befell so many of Spengler's correspondents," and that it is an open question "whether Spengler, if he had lived longer, would have escaped from Hitler's executioners. His connection with many proscribed men involved the death penalty."

The Hour of Decision alone held dangers for its author. As one ardent Nazi follower wrote to him, "Like almost all of us young Germans, I have rejoiced in this year of Hitler's leadership, and it surprises (not to say shocks) us that you do not mention this man at all in your book, and obviously seem to regard him as a quantité negligeable." Apparently, Gunther Gründel also resented being treated as a minimus by the renowned historian, since he ends his letter by noting that Spengler did not reply to "my polite congratulations on your fiftieth birthday or the dissertation I once sent you" and that he will regard himself "as having a free hand" if Spengler does not respond. In a note on this threat, Helps observes that "Spengler did not answer this letter" and that Gründel subsequently attacked him in print. Coupled with Gründel's vulgar display of self-importance and mock politesse was the unspoken accusation that Spengler was not only a traitor but an apostate as well. As Gründel remarked, Spengler had spoken in The Decline and again in The Hour of an "organic transition from the era of the masses to aristocratic Caesarism," yet The Hour nonplussed him, since Spengler did not proclaim National Socialism as the destiny that Gründel said his "logic demands."

Spengler's "logic" demanded no such thing. Although his predictions of a coming Caesar seemed to be in accord with Nazi rhetoric (and even more with Mussolini's), The Hour veered off in the opposite direction. Spengler had indeed spoken eloquently of the "Prussian" spirit both in this work and in Prussianism and Socialism (1920), but he drew a sharp line between its code of values and the nihilism of all modern mass movements, and in The Hour he warned the nation that in revolutionary times such as Germany was now facing, "Sound ideas are exaggerated into self-glorification by fanatics," and a leader who "thinks and feels as a product of the mass" will be treated by history "as a mere demagogue." Hitler's anonymous presence in the work underscores Spengler's view of his character and political origins, for, during the postwar crisis of the 1920s, all sides were thinking and feeling "as a product of the mass." As Spengler saw it, Germany was bent on finding a strong-man to satisfy its chaotic and unprincipled demands: "Everyone wrote to tell his future dictator what to do. Everyone demanded discipline from other people, because he was incapable of disciplining himself."

Taking a stand against this descent into license, Spengler was chiefly concerned with what a leader might be rather than what he would do, and what Spengler wanted above all for Germany was a man who had been shaped in the "Old-Prussian 'style'" of honor, loyalty, self-discipline, and statesmanship, qualities that might possibly provide a "foundation" for Germany to persevere and be "slowly trained for its difficult future." In his understanding, "Prussianism" was neither a slogan nor a program but "a very superior thing which sets itself against every sort of majority- and mob-rule; above all, against the dominance of the mass character." He was well aware that England and France held a very different view of the Prussian model; and even today, long after Simone Weil

refuted the idea of an "unchanging Germany," the word "Prussian" can still evoke the idea of "absolute command and obedience" (2) and the old belief that a deep-rooted streak of ruthlessness runs through German history. What mattered to Spengler, however, was not the politics of the word but what he meant by it as "soul discipline," for which "a great educational effort is essential," particularly now, when "The battle for the planet has begun." Gründel and his "young Germans," their ears ringing with Hitler's fantasies, thought they were hearing an echo of their master's voice; yet they also doubted the reliability of a thinker who seemed to be speaking their language yet had nothing but scorn for "the levelling out of brains," the belief "that we carry within us a new order," and above all scorn for the mob's hatred of the individual, whereby all those "who think for themselves, are felt to be enemies." It did not take long after the publication of The Hour for those who "rejoiced in this year of Hitler's leadership" to conclude that Spengler was not one of them.

With the banning of his book and public ostracism, Spengler might well have felt the ring closing in on him and, more importantly in his eyes, another ring closing around Germany as the nation fell under the spell of a leader that he had recently warned against in The Hour of Decision, a creature of "the herd-feeling," with no sense at all that Germany must be "slowly trained for its difficult future." Indeed, the exact opposite was taking place, for Hitler was rapidly perverting the "Old-Prussian 'style'" into an instrument of demagoguery, terror, and national self-destruction.

Spengler's public life ended soon after the appearance of The Hour, which was also the moment of Hitler's triumph. He continued to maintain his scholarly contacts and pursuits, and more than one person must have remarked, as a Prince Pückler did in a letter to Spengler, that there was "now in public an incomprehensible, anxious, silence" about his works, "which are nevertheless to be found in every house that I know."

One can only guess at the strains under which Spengler was living. He had often been in poor health and died of a heart attack before he reached his fifty-sixth birthday in 1936. "It is noteworthy," writes Koktenek, "that letters which might have harmed Spengler in the Hitler period, certainly after June 30, 1934, were destroyed by him and, after his death by his heirs." In none of the letters in the Helps edition does Spengler indicate any fears for his own safety, although, in a letter to Josef Goebbels, in which he turns down Goebbels' request for a timely article before the national elections, he says that he is willing to consider writing "on important occasions of foreign policy" but only if Goebbels can use his influence to end "the unmeasured attacks to which I have been subjected recently in certain organs of the national Press," in particular "two articles . . . in the Kreuzzeitung, in which I was described, among other things, as a traitor to my country." Given the official silencing of Spengler that soon went into effect, one can assume that Goebbels concurred with the editor, if he was not, in fact, the gray eminence behind the articles himself. From the evidence that remains, it seems fairly certain that Goebbels and lesser propagandists sought to exploit Spengler's celebrity status so that he would become, as Gründel wrote, "the chief crown witness for National Socialism." Nevertheless, four years earlier Spengler had provided ample evidence for them to suspect that he would be of doubtful value to their project.

Spengler did indeed have something to dread, but it was not Orwell's utopian "prospect of a world of free and equal human beings." In a lecture delivered in Hamburg in 1929 titled "Germany in Danger," he warned of the nation's perilous position at home in a revolutionary time, and in The Hour he expanded his warnings to include internal and external threats to the west itself. His clarity and prescience are evident on the very first pages of the book, in which he makes a brief but comprehensive judgment about the destructive nature of Germany's National Socialists: their mania for propaganda and persecution and dangerous illusion "that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it," thus bringing the nation to the point where "We stand, it may be, close before a second world war." Twelve years after the publication of the work, Germany lay in ruins.

As for the regime of the Soviet socialists, which he described in 1933 as the world's great instructor in "propaganda, murder, and insurrection," Spengler had predicted its fall as early as The Decline; and in The Hour he made another strikingly accurate prediction that neither its crimes nor disappearance would have any effect in later decades on masses of westerners, who would continue to denigrate their institutions, carry on campaigns for one fantasy of world reform or another, ally themselves with colonial demagogues, and remain wilfully blind to the storm of events that was heralded by the Great War, which "was but the first flash and crash from the fateful thundercloud which is passing over this century." As Spengler wrote in The Hour, "It would make no difference if the voice of Moscow ceased to dictate. It has done its work, and the work goes forward of itself."

Even more remarkable than their accuracy is the fact that Spengler made these forecasts in the earliest years of Soviet and Nazi rule. In effect, he was writing a history of the future, in whose predictive value he had complete confidence. By contrast, he had nothing but scorn for the "cowardly optimism" of western intellectuals, opinion-makers, and their followers, whose

wish-picture of the future is set in place of facts . . . This type of mind is obsessed by concepts - the new gods of the Age - and it exercises its wits on the world as it sees it. "It is no good," it says; "we could make it better; here goes, let us set up a program for a better world!" . . . Those who doubt it are narrow reactionaries, heretics, and, what is worse, people devoid of democratic virtue: away with them! In this wise the fear of reality was overcome by intellectual arrogance, the darkness that comes from ignorance of all things of life, spiritual poverty, lack of reverence, and, finally, world-alien stupidity - for their is nothing stupider than the rootless urban intelligence.

Spengler's character sketch of yesterday's "rootless urban intelligence" is a living portrait of the left today, which agitates unceasingly on behalf of its deranged, utopian schemes, even for the reform of the planet's atmosphere, and at the same time shuts its eyes to the murderous history of twentieth-century dictatorships and the terror campaign of a new and global Islamic jihad. In this latest grotesque spectacle of "world-alien stupidity," the left attacks every attempt to counter the threat, whose danger signs were already clear to Spengler in 1933 when he remarked on the "great success" of the Islamic drive to supplant "the Christian missionary" in Africa, "penetrating in these days as far as the

Zambesi in Nyassaland. Where a Christian school stood yesterday, a mosque stands tomorrow . . . and the Christian priest is suspected above all because he represents a white ruling race, against which Mohammedan propaganda, political rather than dogmatic, directs itself with cool decision." A similar jihadist drive persists to this day, only this time directed "with cool decision" on a planetary scale. Like other passages in The Hour, this thumb-nail sketch of an alien and hostile intelligence has even greater force now than it did in its time, yet it also catches a mood of anxiety that was in the air at the turn of the century and eerily recalls the penultimate line in the opening paragraph of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds: "Yet across the gulf of space . . . intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

Spengler said as much in the sphere of actualities when he turned from the ambitions of Germany's political "fanatics" to the "ruling herd" further east "called the Communist Party" and the ascendancy of Japan, all of which he saw as portents of a "mighty destiny" that would be "far more terrible than the ages of Caesar and Napoleon."

Had Spengler been writing fiction, The Hour of Decision might have been regarded, like The War of the Worlds, as imaginative writing of the first order; but as he was bringing his earlier observations on "world-fear" into his discussions on modern mass psychology, drawing painful conclusions about "the universal dread of reality," and confronting readers with "the relentless course of things, senseless chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries" (in a voice emanating from Nazi Germany, no less), the work was buried in obscurity, and Spengler became a kind of ghost in our midst, figuratively walking the battlements of the western world, like the armored ghost of Hamlet's father at Elsinore, each one a disturbing reminder of a recent war, a portent of yet another war, and a voice of outrage over recent shameful deeds: in Hamlet, the imminent second war between Norway and Denmark and the wedding triumph of the king's brother and assassin, "that incestuous, that adulterate beast"; and, in The Hour of Decision, the First World War, the League of Nations ("that swarm of parasitic holiday-makers on the Lake of Geneva") and "The Fascist formations of this decade," which "will pass into new, unforeseeable forms." In 1922, he had sensed "the quiet, firm step" of Caesarism on the move, and in The Hour he was convinced that "Caesar's legions are returning to consciousness."

Except for a few scattered readers, Spengler's final work has fallen into the world's collective memory hole, and The Decline has fared only slightly better, yet the force of his central idea is more pronounced than ever and can be felt in wide-ranging public discussions on threats to western institutions. His name, on the other hand, appears in print more frequently than one might suppose and remains with us as the emblem of "Spenglerian gloom." It is as though 1984 and The Trial had enjoyed a brief but dazzling success and then had died on the shelves, leaving behind a disturbing view of the modern world and the ominous terms "Orwellian" and "Kafkaesque."

The demise of his reputation would not have troubled him, however, for Spengler believed that his ideas would live even if his works went unread. Like his contemporaries

Franz Kafka and Blaise Cendrars, who experienced life and literature in the same breath, Spengler saw himself as a philosopher with the spirit of the times pulsing in his veins. Kafka made a similar observation about August Strindberg when he learned that his fiancé Felice Bauer was attending "a regular course of lectures . . . And lectures on Strindberg at that! We are his contemporaries and his successors. One has only to close one's eyes and one's own blood delivers lectures on Strindberg." As Spengler remarked in "Pessimism?" (1921), his aim in The Decline "was to present an image of the world to be lived with, rather than to devise a system for professional philosophers to brood over," and in The Hour he wrote with characteristic certainty that "I offer no wish-picture of the future, still less a program for its realization . . . but a clear picture of the facts as they are and will be. I see further than others." This was not a boast but a practical assessment of his gifts, yet, in his preface of 1917, he also insisted that his world view belonged to his generation and shared a common characteristic with every epoch-making idea, which "is only in a limited sense the property" of its author.

Despite his ventures into public life, Spengler was a deeply private man who lived with his vision continually before his inner eye, and, although he challenged critics who labeled him a "pessimist," what held his attention above all was the decline itself, which he regarded as the expression of a crisis in the soul of western culture. Kafka had come to the same conclusion in 1921 when he wrote to Max Brod of "the frightful inner predicament of these generations." It was a predicament that he also found within himself, having absorbed, as he writes somewhere, all the negative tendencies of the age. Spengler's world view similarly bears the combined stamp of his generation and his personality. In his preface of 1922, he writes that a genuine philosopher recapitulates his times not only in his work but also in his life and that a thinker does not invent the truth of his age "but rather discovers it within himself. It is himself over again." In one of the best observations ever made about Spengler, Koktenek remarks that the German historian Leopold von Ranke

once said he would like to exclude his own personality. Not so Spengler. He himself is there in every line he writes. . . . Observe how many subjective feelings are expressed in his writings! One is conscious of the whole gamut, if one may so express it, of the emotional theme.

Unlike Kafka, however, who found release in imaginative literature, Spengler survived "the misery and disgust of these years" (3) by diving into the entire record of human experience - history, mathematics, politics, the sciences, religion, philosophy, economics, and the arts - all of which he wove into a work that is at once encyclopedic, soulful, and severe in its attempt to see a way through "the frightful inner predicament of these generations."

Steve Kogan was a Professor of English for over thirty years at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in the City University of New York. He holds a Ph.D. in English (Columbia, 1980).

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(1) The Russian religious thinker Nikolai Berdyaev was a particularly astute reader of The Decline, which first appeared in Germany in 1918. Spengler completed a second volume in 1922 and a revised first volume one year later. The English translation, by Charles Francis Atkinson, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, the first book in 1926, the second in 1928. Spengler's last work, The Hour of Decision, appeared in Germany in 1933 and in an English translation one year later, also by Atkinson and also published by Knopf. In almost all instances, citations of a philosophical or cultural-historical nature are taken from The Decline and those that concern World War I and its aftermath from The Hour. Titles such as "Destiny and Causality" and "Symbolism and Space" refer to chapters in The Decline. Citations from Spengler's correspondence are taken from The Letters of Oswald Spengler: 1913-1936, trans. and ed. Arthur Helps, with an introduction by A. M. Koktanek, Knopf, 1966. The original version of my essay is fully documented. My bibliography is available on request.

(2) Simone Weil, "The Great Beast: Some Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism" (1939-40), Selected Essays, trans. Richard Rees, Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 95-96. Weil's critique of the resurging rhetoric about "eternal France" and "unchanging Germany" before World War II appears toward the beginning of the essay, pp. 91-101.

(3) Spengler's words from his preface of 1922 echo his letter to Hans Klöres on December 18, 1918, in which he speaks of his "disgust and shame over recent ignominious events." Helps lists them as "The military collapse, the abdication of William II, the proclamation of a Bavarian Free State, and the Armistice."

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4622

Rhythms of History

From the desk of Steve Kogan on Wed, 2011-01-05 19:18

This is Part 2 (A) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

Between 1911 and 1914, Spengler’s presentiments of an "approaching World-War" took a historical turn, and he began to see the present crisis as the contemporary form of a recurring phenomenon in the history of other cultures. The prime feature of this ever-recurring catastrophe, as he saw it, was the transformation of an old, form-filled, and soul-expanding culture into a nihilistic and outwardly-expanding empire of a "world-city" civilization, with the world war corresponding to the first phase of "the Classical Age from Cannae to Actium" (216-31 B.C.), as "The later Egyptian historian concealed under the name 'Hyksos period' the same crisis which the Chinese treat under the name 'Period of the Contending States.'" In Spengler's world-picture, this "age-phase" also coincides in


the Arabian world with the ascendancy of "Baghdad - a resurrected Ctesiphon, symbol of the downfall of feudal Arabism - and this first world-city of the new Civilization became from 800 to 1050 the theatre of the events which led from Napoleonism to Caesarism, from the Caliphate to the Sultanate." In his introduction, Spengler remarks that above and beyond all the correspondences that were appearing to him "in every increasing volume . . . there stood out the fact that these great groups of morphological relations, each one of which symbolically represents a particular sort of mankind in the whole picture of world-history, are strictly symmetrical in structure." In the third chapter of Volume I, he underscores the complete design of this picture: "Every Culture, every adolescence and maturing and decay of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically necessary stages and periods, has a definite duration, always the same, always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol."

The last phrase is both telling and unexpected. Spengler’s time-frames are remarkably constant, as he reckons them, yet he does not conclude that they recur with mathematical certainty but that they have the weight of a significance, a thought that grows out of his insistent impression that these periodic regularities have a "rhythm" that corresponds to the age-phases of an individual life, hence that there is something musical about these recapitulations (1). Since these "stages and periods" are "intrinsically necessary," causality plays no part in the process, in the same sense that a musical development appears with inevitable sureness at a particular moment in the score of a master yet is in no way "caused" by the central theme. What is decisive for Spengler is not the "How?" but "the When? of things, the specifically historical problem of destiny," with its "mystery-clouded, far-echoing sound symbols 'Past' and 'Future.'" Both here and throughout The Decline, Spengler turns to the arts to express what he means by the "livingness and directedness and fated course of real Time," indeed all that "we actually feel at the sound of the word," which "is clearer in music than in language, and in poetry rather than prose." Although history follows no laws, it is nevertheless filled with form and meaning, which for Spengler unfolds through the "deep logic of becoming."

Spengler's critics have been quick to declare that his "metaphysical passages are . . . murky and superficial" (2), yet in every chapter he provides the lexicon:

We have before us a symbol of becoming in every bar of our music from Palestrina to Wagner, and the Greeks a symbol of the pure present in every one of their statues. The rhythm of a body is based upon a simultaneous relation of the parts, that of a fugue in the succession of elements in time.

It is one of the premises of The Decline that the discipline of history is inseparable from a disciplined study of the arts, both of which require the combined resources of scholarship and refined skeptical inquiry, "sympathy, observation, comparison, immediate and inward certainty, intellectual flair," and a trained eye for analogy and symbolic expression. I have never come across any reference to Sigmund Freud in Spengler's works and letters, and indeed he had nothing but scorn for the field of "scientific psychology . . . however remarkable as a study of cerebral anatomy"; yet he might have been surprised to discover that Freud did not fit his mold, for that controversial

investigator of dream symbolism had a highly cultivated knowledge of literature, the arts, and history, a healthy dose of skepticism regarding “the over-estimation” of consciousness “in the course of psychic events,” including intellectual and artistic work, a conviction that dreams have a history, and a suspicion that “Friedrich Nietzsche was right when he said that in a dream ‘there persists a primordial part of humanity which we can no longer reach by a direct path,’" all of which can be found in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the classic study of form and meaning in dreams and recurring childhood fears and fixations.

Spengler himself provides a suggestive parallel to Freud when he writes that "the awakening of the inner life," which "marks the frontier between child and . . . man," is linked to a fearful "depth-experience" of time and space. As with Spengler vis à-vis Freud, I do not know if Freud ever read The Decline, but, if he did, he might have recognized something of his own concerns and literary bent in the following passage from "Symbolism and Space":

It is because there is this deep and significant identity [between death and space] that we so often find the awakening of the inner life in a child associated with the death of some relation. The child suddenly grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is, something that has become wholly matter, wholly space, and at the same moment it feels itself as an individual being in an alien extended world. "From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance," said Tolstoi once.

In Spengler's understanding of history as "soul-study," the earliest appearance of every "grand culture" is marked by a similarly fateful moment of perception, in which the spirituality of a particular people is born out of its own unique experience of "world-fear" in relation to space, time, and death:

Every great symbolism attaches its form-language to the cult of the dead, the forms of disposal of the dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead. The Egyptian style begins with the tomb-temples of the Pharoahs, the Classical with the geometrical decoration of the funerary urns, the Arabian with catacombs and sarcophagus, the Western with the cathedral wherein the sacrificial death of Jesus is re-enacted daily under the hands of the priest. . . . It was when the idea of the impending end of the world spread over Western Europe (about the year 1000) that the Faustian soul of this religion was born.

Unlike Freud, whose world view was informed by his clinical research into psychological conflicts and pathologies, Spengler drew sharp distinctions between eras of creation and dissolution; yet there is an unmistakable echo of Freudian dream analysis in Spengler's belief that his patterns of historical recurrence open a "world of most mysterious connexions" and that, if we are receptive to their empirical content and symbolic character and are tactful in our judgments, they "will tell us of themselves how much lies hidden there."

In keeping with his aesthetically-oriented reading of history, Spengler rejects all systematic approaches to historiography and proceeds instead by means of questions, analogies, philosophical arguments, and whole chapters of illustrative analysis. Moreover, as Koktenek observes, he is always present in his writing, one characteristic of which is to engage the reader directly in his thoughts, as he does almost immediately after he declares that the age-phases of a culture recur ‘with the emphasis of a symbol”:

What is the meaning of . . . the rhythm of the political, intellectual and artistic "becoming" of all Cultures? Of the 300-year period of the Baroque, of the Ionic, of the great mathematics, of Attic sculpture, of mosaic painting, of counterpoint, of Galilean mechanics? What does the ideal life of one millenium for each Culture mean in comparison with the individual man's "three-score years and ten?"

The crucial word in the passage, on which everything else depends, is "rhythm." In a note at the bottom of the page, Spengler remarks on the periodic "distances apart of the three Punic Wars, and the series . . . Spanish Succession War, Silesian Wars, Napoleonic Wars, and the World War," which he says are "comprehensible only as rhythmic" recurrences.

As the rhythm and tempo of a musical score are open to subtle yet profoundly different interpretations, so too Spengler argues that history is not available to the strict terms of scientific analysis, for "It is one of the tacit, but none the less firm, presuppositions of nature-research that 'Nature' (die Natur) is the same for every consciousness and for all times," whereas real historical study "rests on an equally certain sense of the contrary; what it presupposes as its origin is a nearly indescribable sensitive faculty within, which is continuously labile under continuous impressions, and is incapable therefore of possessing what may be called a centre of time."

A straight-line history of the world is therefore meaningless in his eyes, together with any notion of universal progress or division of history into "ancient, medieval, and modern," a western world view born in the mysticism of "the great Joachim of Floris (c. 1145-1202)" and secularized since the seventeenth century to the point where "the sacrosanct three-phase system" became endowed with progressivist notions that brought history "exactly to one's own standpoint." For Spengler, this is history cut to the mold of a program, thus

making of some formula - say, the "Age of Reason," Humanity, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom, the conquest of nature, or world-peace - a criterion whereby to judge whole millenia of history.

All such readings of the past are arbitrary, writes Spengler, and lack a sense of proportion and natural limits. The involuntary side of history and human nature is ignored, and ideals of all sorts are held to be universal when in fact they belong to their own time and place and often become dated by the sheer force of events. By the same token, their creators overlook the fact that "Cognition and judgment too are acts of living men" and are therefore not exempt from the human condition. In the language of an earlier time,

Whatsoever is told us, and what ever we learne, we should ever remember, it is man, who delivereth, and man that receiveth: It is a mortall hand, that presents it, and a mortall hand, that receives it. . . . I alwaies call reason, that apparance or shew of discourses, which every man deviseth or forgeth in himself (3).

In his preface of 1922, Spengler predicates the world view of The Decline on this same principle, remarking that "the essense of what I have discovered . . . is true for me, and as I believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time." Setting definable limits to the life-span of his thoughts, Spengler insists in his introduction that

my own philosophy is able to express and reflect only the Western (as distinct from the Classical, Indian, or other) soul, and that soul only in its present civilized phase by which its conception of the world, its practical range and its sphere of effect are specified.

History for Spengler admits of no universal truths but only truths "in relation to a particular mankind," yet what they lose in timeless validity they gain in inward value as expressions of "a superlative human individuality."

Spengler’s unique culture-worlds are the record of this human heritage, which becomes all the more rich and profound when viewed through the experience of irreversible time. It is this inseparable connection between life and death that gives real-world meaning to “the deep logic of becoming,” which Spengler can only describe as a kind of spontaneous inevitability, or "living" destiny, as a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy conveys a sense of fatality that never stultifies the work but becomes evermore complex, subtle, and mysterious the more we steep ourselves in every aspect of the text.

This habit of "intelligent saturation" (4) is at the heart of aesthetic vision and is a recurring theme in numerous accounts of artists who are known to have spent hours in rapt attention to a landscape or a work of art, among them Da Vinci, Constable, Turner, Delacroix, and Cézanne. For Spengler, the historian who practices a similar discipline will become capable of feeling "the become in its becoming" and gradually come to experience the "inner necessity" of a culture in all its manifestations. It is one of Spengler's compelling motives for turning, as he so often does, to masterpieces of art, music, and literature for his illustrative examples, precisely because they are heightened forms of sensation and therefore belong to the same world of impressions in which we all experience life. Pascal says somewhere that if we practice kneeling, we will end by believing, and so it is for Spengler with regard to the spirituality that inheres in a great work of art. We have only to stop thinking and start absorbing the impressions that the work generates in us, and they will lead us by degrees into its world of form and meaning. History for Spengler is just such a world, in which "Countless shapes that emerge and vanish, pile up and melt again" nevertheless embody "those pure forms which underlie all human becoming." Plato’s Ideas exist in a timeless realm of Being, the philosophical equivalent of what Spengler calls the “noonday” clarity of the Olympian myths, a Classical nude statue, or Doric temple; whereas his “pure forms" originate in time as the “inner form” of a destiny, in which great events, philosophies, scientific

discoveries, and artistic masterworks have an aura of historical inevitability - the impression that everything about them, both in themselves and in relation to their time and place, is just so and could be no other.

In a related discussion on chance and "the unforeseen," Spengler distinguishes between the Incidental and Destiny and argues that the "Destiny-idea" of a culture holds true even if the incidental happenings of an era had turned out differently:

Imagine Columbus supported by France instead of by Spain, as was in fact highly probable at one time. Had Francis I been the master of America, without doubt he and not the Spaniard Charles V would have obtained the imperial crown. The early Baroque period from the Sack of Rome to the Peace of Westphalia, which was actually the Spanish century in religion, intellect, art, politics and manners,would have been shaped from Paris and not from Madrid. Instead of the names of Philip, Alva, Cervantes, Calderon, Velasquez we should be talking to-day of great Frenchman who in fact - if we may thus roundly express a very difficult idea - remained unborn.

"The Incidental," he continues, "chose the Spanish gesture," but the "inward logic of that age . . . remained the same."

By contrast, if we regard history strictly as a collection of facts, its “anecdotal foreground" and "pragmatic aspect" often take on the character of a "comic-opera" of "ridiculous incidents":

Do not the deaths of Gustavus Adolphus and Alexander seem like expedients of a nonplussed playwright? Hannibal a simple intermezzo, a surprise intrusion in Classical history; or Napoleon's "transit" more or less of a melodrama?

Seen through "the logic of Destiny," however, everything that occurs "in the whirl of becoming" reflects an underlying theme, again by analogy to music:

Supposing that [Napoleon] himself, as "empirical person," had fallen at Marengo - then that which he signified would have been actualized in some other form. A melody, in the hands of a great musician, is capable of a wealth of variations; it can be entirely transformed so far as the simple listener is concerned without altering itself [in a fundamental way], which is quite another matter.

This is not a "what if?" view of history but of history as an almost mystical field of unrealized variations:

The epoch of German national union accomplished itself through the person of Bismarck, that of the Wars of Freedom [against Napoleon] through broad and almost nameless events; but either theme, to use the language of music, could have been "worked out" in other ways. . . . Goethe might - possibly - have died young, but not his "idea." Faust and Tasso would not have been written, but they would have "been" in a deeply mysterious sense, even though they lacked the poet's elucidation.

Western classical music is not the only art that Spengler requires for the study of history, but it is the one that comes closest to defining what he means by the apprehension of a destiny.

Our classical music also provides countless examples of "unborn" events through the uses of silence and, in one striking instance, even as the unheard introduction of a "Destiny-idea." A cultivated German of the old school once described a rehearsal recording to me in which the conductor Bruno Walter made this very point about the first bar of Beethoven's C Minor Symphony. According to the account, Walter stops the orchestra shortly after the thunderclaps of those all-too familiar opening four notes and, with a soft-spoken “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” instructs his musicians not to come crashing down on them but to feel the exact instant of the opening eighth note rest as an inrushing silent beat. Thus, the moment in which the symphony begins was for Walter both intangible and decisive for the performance of the entire work. Even in this brief report, I could sense that it was not just his words but the whole manner of the man that spoke to his musicians and drew from them that special quality of warmth and richness which so many listeners could feel in his conducting.

In a documentary on the Berlin Philharmonic, a tympanist recounts a similar experience of Wilhelm Furtwängler even when he was not conducting, which occurred one day when the orchestra was rehearsing before the maestro arrived for the session. The performer was following the score when he suddenly heard the music gain a richness that had been missing until then. He looked up and saw that Furtwängler had just come through the door and was standing in the rear. And that was Furtwängler, says the tympanist. He was so entirely made of music that his silent presence alone could inspire people with its spirit. A contemporary of Anton Chekhov's, who experienced his unassuming dignity first-hand, similarly remarked that in his presence one felt oneself wanting to rise to one's better nature.

How is it that these feelings have so much objective truth in them? The answer, says Spengler, is “physiognomic tact”: the ability to assimilate the significant facts and impressions of an event and grasp their import in the moment. In Daniel Benioff’s novel City of Thieves, the author’s Russian grandfather describes this faculty in relation both to musical performance and the playing of chess:

When I was fourteen, I quit the club. I had learned that I was a good player but would never be a great one. Friends of mine at Spartak, whom I had beaten consistently when we were younger, had left me far behind, advancing to a plane I could not access no matter how many games I played, how many books I read, how many endgame problems I worked on in bed at night. I was like a well-trained pianist who knows which notes to hit but can’t make the music his own. A brilliant player understands the game in a way he can never quite articulate; he analyzes the board and knows how to improve his position before his brain can devise an explanation for the move. I didn’t have the instincts.

Like the “brilliant player” of Lev Benioff’s memories, who “understands the game in a way he can never quite articulate,” Spengler’s "born historian" is capable of “various kinds of intuition – such as illumination, inspiration, artistic flair, experience of life,” and “the power of ‘sizing men up,’” which can only be "felt with a deep wordless understanding." Lev’s “well-trained pianist” who “can’t make the music his own” likewise recalls Spengler’s critique of the academic historian, whose empirical research will never lead him to “the heart of things” in the unfolding of human events, whereas "The artist or the real historian" sees “the becoming of a thing" with the "inward certainty" of vision.

For Spengler, as for Nietzsche, one of the chief expressions of "inward certainty" is music, the western art form par excellence for both and "the only art," writes Spengler, “whose means" can free us "from the spell of the light-world and its facts." It is this "spell" that governs "our waking-consciousness," which "is now so dominated by one sense only, so thoroughly adapted to the eye-world, that it is incapable of forming, out of the impressions it receives, a world of the ear." There is an inherited tradition in these words that stems from Arthur Schopenhauer's reflections on music in The World as Will and Representation (1818-19), which Wagner incorporated in his commemorative essay on Beethoven in 1870 and the pianist Alfred Brendel updated in 1991 in an article on Furtwängler in The New York Review of Books: "In an age such as ours which is fascinated by language and linguistics it is easy to forget that organized thinking is possible without the help of words."

____________

(1) Both in The Decline and "Pessimism?" Spengler states that his association of rhythm and destiny with sensory alertness is rooted in experience. His point is aptly illustrated in the American vernacular toward the end of Busby Berkeley's film Strike Up the Band (1940), in which Paul Whiteman, the classically trained creator of "symphonic jazz," tells the high school bandleader Jimmy Connor: "Sometimes I think rhythm almost runs the world. In a little baby, the first thing that starts is his rhythm. His little heart starts to beat. . . . And in your own car, if the engine is missing and jerking or you feel the bump of a tire, it's the rhythm that tells you that something's wrong. And if you call a doctor, the first thing he does is check your rhythm. He feels your pulse to find if your rhythm is solid and your beat is strong. So, Jimmy, when we get to the last eight bars of the big tune and the old ticker kind of slows down, no matter what's wrong with us, the last thing to stop is our rhythm." For Spengler, the high cultures likewise have a "pulse-beat" that is extinguished at their death.

(2) H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952, p. 155. On the same page, Hughes even pretends to be a more careful writer than Spengler, a vanity that leads him to reduce Spengler's reading of modern times almost to a cliché, since all he supposedly needs to do "To make his point" is eliminate "the determinism of inevitable decline" and say that "present signs . . . point to cultural

sterility, war, and dictatorship." In a related argument, John F. Fennelly agrees with Hughes and Koktanek that Spengler's "metaphysical superstructure" is based on "dogmatic exactitudes" that detract from the work. See his discussion in Twilight of the Evening Lands: Oswald Spengler - A Half Century Later, The Brookdale Press, 1972, pp. 59-61.

(3) Michel de Montaigne, "An Apologie of Raymond Sebond," The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1603), The Modern Library, 1933, pp. 508-09.

(4) T. S. Eliot, "Ben Jonson," Essays on Elizabethan Drama, Harcourt, Brace and Company (1956), p. 67, in which Eliot speaks of the need for "intelligent saturation in [Jonson's] work as a whole."


Rhythms of History

Steve Kogan on Thu, 2011-01-13 11:00

This is Part 2 (B) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

In his early notebooks and The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche draws a sharp line between aesthetic understanding and systematic thought, a distinction that informs his philosophical argument on the limits of science and objective research. Guided by his critique, Spengler questioned the scientific model of historiography in German education, in which history was now

seen as Nature (in the objective sense of the physicist) and treated accordingly . . . The habits of the scientific researcher were eagerly taken as a model, and if, from time to time, some student asked what Gothic, or Islam, or the Polis was, no one inquired why such symbols of something living inevitably appeared just then, in that form, and for that space of time. Historians were content, whenever they met one of the innumerable similarities between widely discrete historical phenomena, simply to register it, adding some clever remarks as to the marvels of coincidence, dubbing Rhodes the "Venice of Antiquity" and Napoleon the "modern Alexander," or the like; yet it was just these cases . . . that needed to be treated with all possible seriousness . . . in order to find out what strangely-constituted necessity, so completely alien to the causal, was at work.

For Spengler, the contrast with Nietzsche could not have been more complete. The differences were evident to him not only in The Birth of Tragedy but also in the author's "Attempt at a Self-Criticism" in the 1886 edition, in which Nietzsche observes that in the book "the suggestive sentence is repeated several times, that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon" and that "the whole book knows only an artistic meaning and crypto-meaning behind all events . . . ." When Spengler speaks of a


"strangely-constituted necessity" at work in history, "so completely alien to the causal," he is thinking of destiny as just such an aesthetic phenomenon, which he defines by analogy to Goethe's concept of the prime or Urphänomen, the idea-image that for Goethe is the visible organizing form of any living thing. In Erich Heller's words, Goethe's aim was to understand nature without losing sight "of the world in which man actually lives, of everything that matters to him as a human being, of sights, sounds, touches, smells, tastes, loves and hatred," beyond which we find ourselves "in an unrealizable infinity of potential abstractions" (1). It was the surface of life that held the key to its organizing forms, or "prime phenomena," and when Friedrich Schiller remarked that "This has nothing to do with experience, it is an idea," Goethe replied that he could even see his ideas "with my eyes." In Spengler's concise formulation, "The prime phenomenon is that in which the idea of becoming is presented net. To the spiritual eye of Goethe the idea of the prime plant was clearly visible in the form of every individual plant that happened to come up, or even could possibly come up." When Goethe told Schiller that he could see his ideas “with my eyes,” he was speaking of thought-pictures that emerged from his close observation of natural phenomena, which in turn served as organizing images of their changing features and development. "As naturalist,” writes Spengler, "every line he wrote was meant to display the image of a thing-becoming, the 'impressed form' living and developing." Goethe did, in fact, make a number of contributions to biology, but for Spengler the idea of the Urphänomen was even more valuable in the field of history, not only in visual terms ("the 'impressed form' living and developing") but also musical, whose implications for a philosophy of history he learned from his second great instructor, Friedrich Nietzsche.

The original title of Nietzsche's first published work was The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, a title that sums up Spengler's understanding of his thought process and the nature of his prose. In "Nietzsche and His Century" (1924), an address delivered at the Nietzsche Archive on the anniversary of the philosopher's eightieth birthday, Spengler observed that he was "the only born musician" among "the great German intellectuals" and that he neither shaped nor systematically analyzed his material but

lived, felt, and thought by ear. He was, after all, hardly able to use his eyes. His prose is not "written," it is heard - one might even say sung. The vowels and cadences are more important than the similes and metaphors. What he sensed as he surveyed the ages was their melody, their meter. He discovered the musical keys of foreign cultures. Before him no one knew of the tempo of history. A great many of his concepts - the Dionysian, the Pathos of Distance, the Eternal Recurrence - are to be understood quite musically. . . . He was the first to experience as a symphony the image of history that had been created by scholarly research out of data and numbers - the rhythmic sequence of ages, customs, and attitudes.

Among those attending the commemoration, more than one attentive reader of The Decline would have heard Spengler's allusion to his own vision of history "out of the spirit of music":

One soul listens to the world-experience in A flat major, another in F minor; one apprehends it in the Euclidean spirit, another in the contrapuntal, a third in the Magian spirit. From the purest analytical Space and from Nirvana to the most somatic reality of Athens, there is a series of prime symbols each of which is capable of forming a complete world out of itself.

H. Stuart Hughes remarks that Spengler was deeply taken by “the language of music,” meaning its vocabulary, but it was his entire experience of the art that gives his metaphors the stamp of truth. “One soul listens to the world experience in A flat major, another in F minor”: the great composers would have sensed a musical reality in his words and not simply taken them as a figure of speech. According to the pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva, for example, Shostakovitch told her that he envisioned his twenty-four preludes and fugues (one pair for each key in the twelve-tone scale) as a microcosm all its own; and, unless my attribution is in error, it was Claudio Arrau who said that when he was a child he heard every note on the keyboard as a distinct landscape, with its own weather, mood, and topography.

Spengler offers similar examples of the “world-experience” in sound, in which the instrumentation of a Gluck or Beethoven can evoke “distances, lights, shadows, storms, driving clouds, lightning flashes, colours etherealized and transcendent," while three bars of Wagner can create “A whole world of soul,” with tone-colors “of starry midnight, of sweeping clouds, of autumn . . . world-fear, impending doom.” For Spengler, the forms and very instruments of western classical music answered to the realities he perceived, and even in translation his prose style encompasses a whole range of “word-sounds” that give The Decline its special character as a tone-poem of history. Spengler may have drawn upon himself what Hughes calls “the scorn of the judicious,” but there is nothing injudicious in the idea of music as a tonal representation of reality, and those who speak of his “dogmatic exactitudes” have never taken him seriously when he speaks of the musical character of his ideas, nor have they reflected on the extraordinary subtleties of which musical precision is capable. Hughes manages to botch the subject altogether when he writes that The Decline is "not to be read as a logical sequence" but as a "contrapuntal arrangement, in which no one idea necessarily follows another," which betrays an ignorance both of the form of the work and the art of the fugue itself.

Spengler, however, would have taken all such failures of comprehension in stride, for he had meditated long and hard on Nietzsche's distinction in The Birth of Tragedy between the "aesthetic listener" and "Socratic-critical persons," and in his preface of 1922 he explicitly states that The Decline "addresses itself solely to readers who are capable of living themselves into the word-sounds and pictures as they read." A nice musical illustration of his contrast between systematic and intuitive logic can be found in the unusual baton work of Furtwängler, who distained the metronome yet, "with his peculiar beat . . . gets results of exactitude as well as of richness of sound" (2). Both his audiences and members of his orchestra came under his spell, in which he seemed to be conducting as though "under hypnosis . . . wrapped in sound and his inner vision," through which "was distilled organized tone bent to an emotional end." Commenting on the performance

of a masterpiece such as Beethoven's C Minor Symphony, Furtwängler himself remarks in Spenglerian terms that

a symphonic piece originates with two, three, or four themes, which experience each other, enable each other to grow and become - like, say, individual characters in a Shakespearean play - what destiny has in store for them. . . . the question of tempo is one that cannot be separated from the interpretation of a piece as a whole, its spiritual image.

Hughes calls The Decline “a massive stumbling-block in the path of true knowledge,” but his “men of learning” conveniently ignored or never knew the kind of “true knowledge” that the great conductors of the time literally had at their fingertips. Furtwängler, in particular, found a kindred spirit in Spengler's aesthetic understanding of the "Destiny-idea":

We bring out that which is in the causal by means of a physical or epistemological system, through numbers, by reasoned classification; but the idea of destiny can be imparted only by the artist working through media like portraiture, tragedy and music.

Spengler sums up these contrasts with one of the central maxims of his work: "Real history is heavy with fate but free of laws."

Goethe's unwillingness to investigate organic life apart from "the world in which man actually lives" is echoed on the first page of "Destiny and Causality," in which Spengler states that no science or hypothesis "can ever get in touch with that which we feel when we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound" of words such as fate, destiny, and doom, which demand "life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect." Hence, every chapter of The Decline is written in view of surface impressions, the character traits of people, events, and landmark achievements, and always "the 'impressed form' living and developing." By extension, "The visible foregrounds of history . . . have the same significance as the outward phenomena of the individual man," including "his bearing, his air, his stride, his way of speaking and writing," so that "'knowledge of men' implies also knowledge of those superlative human organisms that I call Cultures, and of their mien, their speech, their acts - these terms being meant as we mean them already in the case of individuals."

Since human events and creations for Spengler belong to "a historical world" and are "involved in the common destiny of mortality," the real question that "genuine historical work" has to ask of philosophies and religions is not whether they possess "an everlasting and unalterable objectiveness" and are based on "imperishable doctrines" but what they represent as "life-symbols" and "what kind of man comes to expression in them. . . . For me, therefore, the test of value to be applied to a thinker is his eye for the great facts of his own time."

Sizing up his intellectual contemporaries, Spengler finds them complacent, narrow-minded, and, for all practical purposes, disconnected from the age "upon which we ourselves are now entering":

Why is it that the mere idea of calling upon one of them to prove his intellectual eminence in government, diplomacy, large-scale organization, or direction of any big colonial, commercial or transport concern is enough to evoke our pity? . . . Whenever I take up a work by a modern thinker, I find myself asking: has he any idea whatever of the actualities of world-politics, world-city problems, capitalism, the future of the state, the relation of technics to the course of civilization, Russia, Science? . . . far better to become a colonist or an engineer, to do something, no matter what, that is true and real, than to chew over once more the old dried-up themes under cover of an alleged "new wave of philosophic thought" . . . . And I maintain that to-day many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practise the dull craft of experimental psychology.

It is "far better . . . to do something, no matter what, that is true and real." This is the Spengler who never gets in the books. What we find instead are arguments, as when Heller insists that there is something wicked about Spengler's urging the young to become engineers and "build aeroplanes, no matter what they carry; roads, no matter where they may lead; weapons, no matter what 'values' they defend, or attack. For absolute scepticism is our intellectual fate, absolute engineering our historical Destiny."

The title of Heller's book is The Disinherited Mind, yet of all the German-speaking writers and thinkers he discusses, from Goethe and Burckhardt to Kafka and Karl Kraus, Spengler is the only one he sees strictly in terms of "mind," more precisely, a perverted mind: "Spengler's history is untrue because the mind which has conceived it is, despite its learning and seeming subtlety, a crude and wicked mind." In attempting to solve "a perfectly legitimate problem" regarding the search for meaning in history, Spengler has bent all the resources of his intellect toward a "catastrophic" conclusion and "reduced to a wicked kind of absurdity a tendency of the mind which is certainly not unfashionable yet: the habit of applying to historical necessity for the marching orders of the spirit." Heller's military image sums up his critique, for the "marching orders" of Spengler's Destiny not only require us to fulfill "the business of 'civilization'" but also demand that we "march" in lockstep, no questions asked. In other words, "the mind which has conceived" The Decline is organized around a totalitarian impulse, and, in Heller’s leap to a far-fetched conclusion, the more Spengler’s predictions turn out to be correct, the greater his "affinities . . . to the very stuff that will determine the evil future." By the same logic, Marx, Lenin, and Hitler should have been clairvoyants, yet their programs led to disaster, as Spengler knew they would.

In his one-eyed view of Spengler's "mind," Heller cannot help but distort his thoughts, for he cannot hear the man who is speaking:

Whenever I take up a work by a modern thinker, I find myself asking: has he any idea whatever of the actualities of world-politics, world-city problems, capitalism, the future of the state, the relation of technics to the course of civilization, Russia, Science?

This is not the voice of a thinker who participates in the mental habits of his contemporaries. Spengler's distinctive style alone should have given Heller pause, for it is unmistakably his own, even in his chapters on science and technology; and he also fails to modify his conclusions in light of their genuine questions and often unusual perceptions, as when he claims with abrupt finality that Spengler’s "acceptance of Destiny" denies human freedom and is nothing more than "a conscious decision for the false values; and this is the classical definition of sin and wickedness."

This is an extraordinary charge to level at a work that views history as "soul study" and "world-fear" as the hidden center of human consciousness. No philosopher who failed to realize "the full pathos of human freedom" could have made the following observation about existential fear or perceived it as the unheard music of all great accomplishment:

This world-fear is assuredly the most creative of all prime feelings. . . . Like a secret melody that not every ear can perceive, it runs through the form-language of every true art-work, every inward philosophy, every important deed, and, although those who can perceive it in that domain are the very few, it lies at the root of the great problems of mathematics.

In Spengler’s world view, this “secret melody” is capable of “infinitely-varied” expression, particularly in the ”springtime” blossoming, "summer" growth, and ”autumn” ripening of a culture, when human freedom, in all its tragic dignity, is in consonance with nature’s “cosmic beat.” With the onset of “early winter,” however, it grows less and less distinct. The urban world increasingly dominates the landscape, and a seismic uprooting from the order of nature takes place among men of the “final cities,” who become more and more filled with the tensions of a heightened “waking-consciousness.”

In today’s “Faustian” megalopolis, the most dynamic city-civilization history has ever known, time itself seems to be dominated by the pace of "inventions that crowd one upon another,” and our natural "world-fear" is compounded by the terrors of modern war and the anxieties of a disquieting peace:

Ever since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and latterly, millions, of men have stood ready to march, and mighty fleets renewed every ten years have filled the harbors. It is a war without war, a war of overbidding in equipment and preparedness, a war of figures and tempo and technics, and the diplomatic dealings have been not of court with court, but of headquarters with headquarters.

As weapons become ever more lethal and complex, “The place of the permanent armies as we know them will gradually be taken by professional forces,” yet the coming centuries will continue to experience “catastrophes of blood and terror.” Hence the craving for escape through pacifism and other "wish-pictures of the future," a craving that arises just when "we must have the courage to face facts as they are." For Spengler, this necessity defines “the full pathos of human freedom” in our time, for in his eyes it was touch and go whether the west would survive or go under. As he surveyed the historical

landscape of the 1930s, Spengler was convinced that "The white world is governed primarily by idiots," yet he continued to believe that

The traditions of an old monarchy, of an old aristocracy, of an old polite society . . . in so far as they possess honour, abnegation, discipline, the genuine sense of a great mission . . . can become a centre which holds together the being-stream of an entire people and enables it to outlast this time and make its landfall in the future.

Four years after Spengler died, England rallied by the skin of its teeth around an aristocrat with "the courage to face facts as they are," a quality that Cendrars experienced in his very language as "the living word of Churchill," who spoke of "'blood, toil, tears, and sweat'" without any recourse to "preconceived theories" or "received ideas" and "without ever losing sight of the earth" (3).

All the values and traditions of the high cultures, writes Spengler, are rooted in a land-based and "form-filled" society; hence his respect not only for "Prussianism" but also for England's historical continuities, "Parliamentarism," in particular, with the added "circumstance that this form had grown up in the full bloom of Baroque and, therefore, had Music in it." By contrast, he saw nothing but danger in the illusions of world reform that were gaining ascendancy among the "Late" men, who were now living in “land-alien” cities, "cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural experiencing of destiny, time, and death.” In a wartime lecture for the BBC on Jack London, Orwell made a related observation when he noted that socialist ideals originated in the urban centers of Europe, whereas London took readers to far-away places and confronted them, as Kipling had, with the raw brutalities of life. For Spengler, it was an open question whether metropolitan man would have any remaining instincts and values "to face facts as they are." As he noted in The Decline, "We ourselves, in a very few years, have learned to take little or no notice of events that before the War would have horrified the world; who to-day seriously thinks about the millions that perish in Russia?"

Spengler must have anticipated dozens of variations on Heller's theme that his philosophy denies human freedom, for he made it a point to qualify "the risky word 'freedom'" in the closing pages of his introduction and the penultimate line of the work: "We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing." These are not "marching orders" but an expression of the choice that underlies the meaning of responsibility, in this case the obligation to become conscious of our historical life-crisis, confront the forces of dissolution in the west, and work to bring about a "politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty thoughtfulness and duty-sense that keeps the whole in fine condition for the decisive battle of its history." If the west is to prevail, writes Spengler, we will need our best judgment, a will to succeed, and the "creative piety" that for us "adheres only to forms that are older than the [French] Revolution and Napoleon," to which he adds the following note: "Including the Constitution of the United States of America. Only thus can we account for the reverence that the American cherishes for it, even where he clearly sees its insufficiency."

These are not theories but challenging responses to modern actualities, yet nothing of Spengler's practical wisdom or sense of "living history" finds its way into Heller’s critique. Instead, he does as other critics have done by over-intellectualizing a work that is “intuitive and depictive through and through" and then takes Spengler’s “Destiny-idea” so far afield that its author becomes an ideologue of "the Absolute," like Hegel and Marx, but with “a perverted mind” of sinister intent. In place of Hegel's "metaphysical" and Marx's "messianic-social" idealism (4), Spengler has made "the spiritual bankruptcy" of the age "our history, our Absolute, our guiding principle" and "appears merely concerned with lending Destiny a hand in the business of destruction."

There is a psychological insight derived from Freudian analysis which states that when intelligent people make foolish remarks it is because a defense mechanism has been triggered to shield them from an uncomfortable fact. Spengler's celebration of modern science, mathematics, and engineering seems to have disturbed Heller in just this way, for it runs so entirely contrary to his values that he cannot help but stretch his argument to the point of aligning him with today's "enemies of the spirit," this despite all that Spengler has to say about the authentic spirituality that he is convinced still remains for us to fulfill. Unlike Nietzsche, who regarded the quest for systematic knowledge in Greece and in the modern world as a symptom of cultural decay, Spengler sees in our "twilight" sciences the return of the western soul "to the forms of early Gothic religiousness," in which

The uniting of the several scientific aspects into one will bear all the marks of the great art of counterpoint. An infinitesimal music of the boundless world-space - that is the deep unresting longing of this soul, as the orderly statuesque and Euclidean Cosmos was the satisfaction of the Classical.

One cannot read Spengler's chapters on mathematics and the sciences and rationally conclude that he is "merely concerned with lending Destiny a hand in the business of destruction," and no one could come to this conclusion unless he ignored Spengler's own conception of his work.

From the outset of his project, Spengler was inspired by the conviction that he had discovered a language of the soul in the raw data of history:

Before my eyes there seems to emerge, as a vision, a hitherto unimagined mode of superlative historical research . . . a comprehensive Physiognomic of all existence, a morphology of becoming for all humanity that drives onward to the highest and last ideas: a duty of penetrating the world-feeling not only of our proper soul but of all souls whatsoever that have contained grand possibilities and have expressed them in the field of actuality as grand Cultures.

Spengler’s vision was his own, yet he acknowledged "those to whom I owe practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty." In The Disinherited Mind, Heller compares the two with insight and judgment, yet he never mentions them in his chapter on Spengler, and this silence sums up

everything that is wrong with his critique. His treatment of Spengler's understanding of destiny, symbolic expression, and organic development is therefore inherently skewed, since these are the three principal themes that Spengler made his own through his readings in Goethe and Nietzsche, namely, the identification of destiny with life and not with a concept of life, the interpretation of history through poetic vision, and the distinction between what is alive, "form-filled," and productive in a culture and what is lifeless, formless, and destructive. Spengler respects the "fact-men" of our time not because they are fulfilling an inexorable law of "the Absolute" but because they are in daily contact with how the world actually works, in the same way that "The Pre-Socratics were merchants and politicians en grand" and Chinese philosophers "from Kwan-tsi (about 670) to Confucius (550-478) were statesmen, regents, lawgivers like Pythagoras and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Liebniz," while "Goethe, besides being a model minister . . . busied himself again and again with the question of American economic life and its reactions on the Old World, and with that of the dawning era of machine-industry." Spengler not only celebrates these men-of-the-world philosophers but also identifies with them in embracing his times as they did theirs:

To me, the depths and refinement of mathematical and physical theories are a joy; by comparison, the aesthete and the physiologist are fumblers. I would sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel structure, a precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many chemical and optical processes, than all the pickings and stealings of present-day "arts and crafts," architecture and painting included.

John F. Fennelly thinks that Spengler is right about the architecture and wrong about modernist painting, but his argument is irrelevant, for it disregards Spengler's qualifying words “To me” and “I would sooner have.” Spengler is not attempting to prove a point but using examples to illustrate a preference, and, even if there was much about the new art that he ignored or did not know, his response was not superficial. Of all the writers of the time, Cendrars probably had the most intimate knowledge of the European art world just before and after World War I; yet he said much the same as Spengler in his 1926 farewell to "the modern painters" and again in 1945 of Picasso and the French modernist poets when he wrote in L'homme foudroyé that they had turned away from the common stream of life, noting, by contrast, that he had sung of railroads in The Trans-Siberian (1913) and that pilots themselves had brought the airplane into literature "quite naturally - and not as a theme."

Spengler echoes this distinction when he remarks more than once that works of art are created whole and not "thought out." This is the sum of what he means about his own work when he writes that The Decline is not an intellectual construction but a world-vision born of its age and rediscovered in himself. By extension, when he speaks of "understanding the world" he is not referring to a condition of thought but a productive relationship to actualities, which he defines in his preface of 1922 as "being equal to the world." For Spengler, The Decline was a mirror of this equivalence, a deed of historical consciousness written in the language of metaphor, as the book of nature for Galileo was written in the language of mathematics.

________________

(1) Erich Heller, "Goethe and the Scientific Truth," The Disinherited Mind: Essays in German Literature and Thought, Farrar, Straus and Cudahay, 1957, p. 22. All references to Heller on Spengler are taken from "Oswald Spengler and the Predicament of the Historical Imagination" in this work.

(2) John Ardoin, The Furtwängler Record, Amadeus Press, 1994, p. 29. The subsequent references to Furtwängler are also taken from Ardoin.

(3) Blaise Cendrars, Sky (Le Lotissement du ciel, 1949), trans. Nina Rootes, Paragon House, 1992, p. 31.

(4) The alleged idealism of The Communist Manifesto is predicated on "the abolition of all existing social relations," a nihilistic goal that Spengler correctly termed "an aim without a future."


History As An Aesthetic Phenomenon


This is Part 3 of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

In translation, “the decline of the west” recalls Edward Gibbon's “the decline and fall of the Roman empire,” but “der untergang des abendlandes” projects an image of time and space in the decline of "the evening lands," hence the "twilight of the west" (1). To visualize the title in this way is to prepare oneself for what follows, for it is not an introduction to a narrative or a theory of history but an image that evokes a particular region at a particular time of day, and it expresses an entire world view by association with the earth and sky. Myths are made of such stuff, as Spengler underscores in his many discussions of the early high cultures, and they are also the key to his "soul-portraits" of history, which he depicts in view of Nietzsche’s writings on the Olympian myths and the mythopoeic imagination.

Spengler's poetic cast of mind owes much to Goethe, but his understanding of the character and power of myth is epitomized in the opening lines of The Birth of Tragedy:


We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics, once we perceive not merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollinian and Dionysian duality . . . The terms Dionysian and Apollinian we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the discerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, in concepts, but in the intensely clear figures of their gods.

By extension, Classical mythology speaks in shapes and symbols that condense life and thought into "a concentrated image of the world." In a comment on the unparalleled clarity of Homer's imagery, Nietzsche states that, "For a genuine poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a vicarious image that he actually beholds in place of a concept." The world as history appeared to Spengler as just such a vision of life in all its vividness and transience, in which he saw "the decline of the west" as one instance of “an ordered and obligatory sequence” common to all the high cultures and indeed to all living things, for which the words “birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals.”

Spengler reminds us more than once that time is that ambiguous “something” through which life flows inexorably forward in "the becoming," hardens into "the become," and is the actual medium of history, “the course of human events,” in Jefferson’s excellent phrase. It is the realm of happenings, which are ever-new yet trace a recurring path for which history provides decisive lessons:

As then, at the commencement of the Imperium Romanum, so today, the form of the world is being remoulded from its foundations, regardless of the desires and intentions of “the majority” or of the number of victims demanded by every such decision. But who understands this? Who is facing it? . . . Life in danger, the real life of history, comes once more into its own. Everything has begun to slide . . .

For Spengler, therefore, “the twilight of the west” is an image of "the becoming" in our time, in which old forms and certainties dissolve among the lengthening shadows, and the west increasingly loses the sense of stability that it possessed as late as the decade before World War I. Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939) is an elegy on this loss:

Christ! What's the use of saying that one oughtn't to be sentimental about "before the war"? I am sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It's quite true that if you look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That's true even of the war. But it's also true that people then had something that we haven't got now.

What? It was simply that they didn't think of the future as something to be terrified of. It isn't that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole worked harder, lived less comfortably and died more painfully. . . . but what they didn't know was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things would go on as they'd known them. . . . Their good and evil would remain good and evil. They didn't feel the ground they stood on shifting under them.

Had Orwell known the works of Spengler the way he knew his Dickens, Wells, and Kipling, he would have seen in Spengler’s “We stand, it may be, close before a second world war” a mirror of England's own anxieties scarcely three years after Spengler's death:

War is coming. 1941, they say. . . . I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. It's all going to happen. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. . . . The bad times are coming, and the stream-lined men are coming too. What's coming afterwards I don't know, it hardly even interests me. I only know that if there's anything you care a curse about, better say good-bye to it now, because everything you've ever known is going down, down, into the muck, with the machine-guns rattling all the time.

Spengler could not have said it better. “It’s all going to happen” is Orwell’s colloquial equivalent of Spengler’s “mighty destiny,” whose portents he recognized in “The Fascist formations of this decade.” He had felt it coming in the early 1920s, and by the time he wrote The Hour of Decision he was convinced that the fate of the west would depend as never before on men with "strong instincts" and a "superior eye for the things of reality," as Hitler's first great nemesis, Churchill, proved to be.

In the aftermath of the Great War, whose "profound shock" left a "spiritual chaos in its wake," Spengler's most troubling question concerned the stunted character-types that were increasingly taking center stage, and he wondered if there were any statesmen who could see "beyond their time, their continent, their country, even the circle of their own activities," especially since "the raison d'être of grave questions is precisely that they should call forth the best efforts of the best brains. And when we see how, all the world over (2), they are whittled down, lied down, to the level of small fictional problems, so that small men with small ideas and small expedients can make themselves important . . . then may we well despair of the future."

Spengler’s career, like Nietzsche’s, was marked by a deep aversion to “small men with small ideas,” and, from the beginning, both men followed their own path, as their revered Goethe had followed his. One measure of Spengler’s creative intellect can be found in the analogies that he draws between his work and the Renaissance treatment of space, for it was his ambition to see into the future as the Renaissance masters had discovered the art and science of portraying distances in depth. Elsewhere, he remarks that he is reading the “signs and symbols” of history in order that we may chart a course into the unknown, as the Vikings sailed into the stormy distances of the North Atlantic.

When he undertook his epic project, Spengler was living in poverty and obscurity in Munich, yet he was inwardly atune to his age. He identified with Nietzsche's lonely struggle against "a prevailing formlessness" (3) in modern life, and, in the aftermath of the First World War, the forebodings of other nineteenth-century thinkers and writers reached an even deeper level of intensity in such works as Cendrars' The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre Dame (1919), T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922),

Franz Kafka's The Castle (1926), John Dos Passos's Orient Express (1927) and U.S.A. (1938), and T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), in particular the concluding scenes of the Turkish hospital in Damascus and the Turkish army's collapse, a narrative structure that recalls Thucydides' concluding chapters on the plague at Athens and the defeat of the Sicilian expedition. In many ways, the true home of The Decline is among these works. It was neither written for professional historians, nor does it rest comfortably in their midst. Spengler particularly admired the historical novels of Stendhal and Sir Walter Scott and frequently refers to the writing of history as a literary art, noting that Ranke, a master of empirical research, "is credited with the remark that, after all, Scott's 'Quentin Durward' was the true history-writing" (4).

In keeping with this premise, Spengler declares in his preface of 1922 that The Decline is "intuitive and depictive through and through, written in a language which seeks to present objects and relations illustratively instead of offering an army of ranked concepts." Given this unambiguous and accurate portrayal of the work, Heller's image of Spengler's "marching orders" is especially unfortunate, not only because Spengler refuses to deploy "an army of ranked concepts" but also because he calls upon our affective faculties so that we may experience for ourselves the "word-sounds and pictures” of his prose. This capacity, which is exercised in the reading of poetry and imaginative prose, is a defining trait of Nietzsche's "aesthetic reader," and, like his mentor in The Birth of Tragedy, Spengler insists that it is equally necessary for the cultivation of a historical sensibility. He even describes the conception of The Decline as a moment of poetic illumination, in which "historical relations and connexions . . . presented themselves" to him in the form of "symbol and expression." In Chapter I, he provides an aesthetic context for his vision and observes that "the organism of a pure history-picture, like the world of Plotinus, Dante and Giordano Bruno, is intuitively seen, inwardly experienced, grasped as a form or symbol and finally rendered in poetical and artistic conceptions."

Spengler restates an ancient principle when he writes that "Poetry and historical study are kin" and that, in the end, one must examine "History poetically" (5). Although standards of objectivity must prevail in "the science of historical spade-work," the material itself remains quintessentially human and expressive and therefore cannot be delved without the help of an "intangible sensitive faculty within." Defining “true history writing” by the light of his own "poetical and artistic conceptions," he proceeds from facts and impressions to the “collective biography” of a culture, whose inner life can be traced in its outward features, as Shakespeare could sense "a world-secret" in a plot and as Rembrandt's portraits are character studies that convey the weight of a life in a single image, "history captured in a moment."

Thus, the writing of history for Spengler is an art, not a science, and the "spade-work" of research on "facts . . . and figures only a means, not an end." Once we approach "real historical vision," however, we enter "the domain of significances," the world of meaning and expression, in which the crucial words are not "'correct' and 'erroneous' but 'deep' and 'shallow.'" Empirical evidence only takes us to the beginning of historical insight, which he sees as a glimpse into the forces "at work in the depths." Since everything historical for Spengler represents "the expression of a soul," the study of history is ultimately an

exploration of intangibles that lie beyond the strict bounds of "Reason, system, and comprehension," which "kill as they 'cognize.'" In his notebooks of the early 1870s, Nietzsche said the same in different words when he defined concepts as "the graveyard of perceptions," and related oppositions appear in the works of nineteenth-century thinkers and writers from Goethe to Dostoevsky: witness Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who kills "for a theory" and is reborn in prison only after great mental suffering, when he is no longer "consciously reasoning at all; he could only feel. Life had taken the place of logic and something quite different must be worked out in his mind."

In an extended discussion on Dostoevsky, Spengler remarks that “his passionate power of living was comprehensive enough” to embrace his “two fatherlands, Russia and Europe”; and this same comprehensive energy is at work in Spengler’s philosophy of “the becoming,” which embraces not only the past and present, but also the future, whose shape he foresees through his own passionate life-sense of where we are heading:

I see, long after A. D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of to-day's and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness.

Global wars, fantastical cities, and miraculous machines: Spengler’s world-picture was indeed "only in a limited sense" the property of its author, for his futuristic visions have their parallels in countless films and novels of the time, notably Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, published in the same year as The Hour of Decision.

Given the nature of the work, The Decline could not help but appeal to artists and writers, since every chapter is filled with vivid impressions of the tangible surface of history, whose intangible "life-feelings" and "form-languages" require "the eye of an artist” to be understood,

and of an artist who can feel the whole sensible and apprehensible environment dissolve into a deep infinity of mysterious relationships. So Dante felt, and so Goethe felt. To bring up, out of the web of world-happenings, a millenium of organic culture-history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of its inmost spirituality - such is the aim. Just as one penetrates the lineaments of a Rembrandt portrait or a Caesar-bust, so the new art [of "physiognomic" analysis] will contemplate and understand the grand, fateful lines in the visage of a Culture as a superlative human individuality.

I once asked a historian friend of mine at NYU what he thought of Spengler, to which he replied that he had once been attracted to him but had long outgrown his heady speculations. Spengler would have said that his youthful excitement had been trained out of him and that the "the eye of an artist" was the last thing that his teachers would have required. There is no getting around the divide between Spengler and his critics, who see errors in his work and a flawed theory of history, whereas he takes them to task for what

he regards as their poor judgment, lack of psychological and aesthetic flair, and above all superficiality.

Of the two sides, Spengler has had the better argument, for his detractors have been tone deaf to the precision of his prose, have never adequately explored his nineteenth-century background, and lack his eye for the determining facts of our time. Heller may be the most gifted reader of them all, yet even he gets it wrong when he writes that Spengler's key to "our historical Destiny" is "absolute engineering," for he not only ignores Spengler's accurate picture of the developmental process at the heart of modern industry but also avoids the crucial question that he raises about the potential limits of this "Destiny":

As the horse-powers run to millions and milliards . . . these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more and more immaterial, ever less noisy. The wheels, rollers, and levers are vocal no more. All that matters withdraws itself into the interior. . . . There have been fears, thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But so long as there are worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no existence. When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails . . . then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries.

Casting a backward glance, Spengler sees another limit to the "intellectual intoxication" of the machine culture and "the miracle of the Cosmopolis":

But always the splendid mass-cities harbour lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man - in Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of those wretched upper-floor tenaments of Rome.

What makes these parallels all the more telling for Spengler is that they appear in the same age-phase of each culture's “collective biography" - Classical, Gothic, Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Asian, and Central American - "an immense wealth of actual forms - the Living, with all its immense fullness, depth and movement." There is no "pessimism" here, and even when he writes of "the hard cold facts" of modern life he evokes the same vibrant sense of an age that he sees in his earlier seasons of history.

When Spengler speaks of the biography or portrait of a culture, he has in mind a specific orientation to individuality that is for him west-European in origin, beginning with the voyages of the Vikings and later followed by the sky-reaching thrusts of the Gothic cathedral, which he sees as prime expressions of a soaring sense of self and hunger for the limitless, comparable to the journies of "the heroes of the Grail and Arthurian and Siegfried sagas," who are "ever roaming in the infinite." Faustian "life-feelings" pervade the cathedral's interior as well, not only in its vast recesses but also in the "space-commanding" sounds of the organ and the use of the incorporeal light-world as a medium

of art through sheets of stained glass windows, with their representations of the human drama in subjects taken from secular and Scriptural history. A corresponding drama in stone appears in the expressive faces of the sculptures that rise above us at the very portals of the cathedral. It is an altogether singular art in the world of sacred architecture, as painting became in the frescoes of Giotto, who abandoned the stylized forms and ornately transcendent visions of Byzantine art for religious narrative cycles of extraordinary intimacy and emotion. It is but a step to the great age of western portraiture, which extends from Bellini, Raphael, and Titian in Italy to Hans Holbein, Dürer, Velasquez, and, in Holland, Franz Hals and, above all, Rembrandt, the epitome of soulful seeing into the human face.

In the northern sagas, Spengler also sees a uniquely western world view of landscape and solitude that comes to fruition both in western landscape art and literature, notably Shakespeare's King Lear and in quintessential form during the Easter scene in Goethe's Faust, in which an experience of intense yearning ends in a moment of discovery in the midst of limitless space:

A longing pure and not to be described

drove me to wander over woods and fields,

and in a mist of hot abundant tears

I felt a world arise and live for me.

For Spengler, the storm scene on the heath in King Lear represents the prime western embodiment of the infinity-feeling in the sphere of tragedy, in which Shakespeare unfolds "the destiny of King Lear" through a swirl of action that gradually reveals a network of

dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges; spiritual threads weave themselves into the action incorporeal and transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the secondary tragedy of Gloster's house. Lear is at the last a mere name, the axis of something unbounded. This conception of destiny . . . touches the bodily Euclidean not at all, but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the fool and the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of suffering.

Were he living today, Spengler would find ample confirmation that our "historical becoming" still bears the impress of the prime western drive into "the unbounded," as in today's world-wide systems of travel and communication and deep probings of cosmic and sub-atomic space (6).

Hence, we are not the "pupils and successors" of the Classical world but "simply its adorers"; for, in all that we have absorbed of antiquity, we have remained entranced by the one culture most nearly opposite to our own in its striving for the corporeal clarity of

"the near," whose embodiment of "the pure Present . . . so often roused Goethe's admiration in every product of the Classical life," sculpture in particular (7). Both in two and three-dimensional Euclidean figures, for example, parallel lines remain as equidistant from each other in extension as they are directly before our eyes (8); yet, in the Faustian interpretation of space, they come together with equal inevitability in the perspective grids of western landscape art, where the play of light and color enhances the effect of infinite distance through aerial perspective. For Spengler, the greatest symbol of "the optically definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present" in Classical art is the Doric column, whose equivalent spirit in mathematics is expressed in the mastery of finite magnitudes, in "history-writing" in the "fine pieces" that "set forth matters within the political present of the writer," and in the restrictions of time and place in drama, in which events unfold like "beads on a string," while "The Greek scene is never a landscape; in general, it is nothing, and at best may be described as a basis for moveable statues."

Picking up the Lear theme in a later chapter, Spengler contrasts Classical stasis with "Faustian soul-space," which he calls a "drama of perspectives" both in painting and literature:

In Shakespeare, who was born when Michelangelo died and ceased to write when Rembrandt came into the world, dramatic infinity, the passionate overthrow of all static limitations, attained the maximum. His woods, seas, alleys, gardens, battlefields lie in the afar, the unbounded. Years fly by in the space of minutes. The mad Lear between the fool and the reckless outcast on the heath, in the night and the storm, the unutterably lonely ego lost in space - here is the Faustian life-feeling!

Spengler's passages on Lear rank with the best in Shakespeare studies and shine with the precision of a poet's gift for thinking through images “in place of a concept." What he calls "prime symbols" are simply his most concentrated images of the cultures, as G. Wilson Knight speaks of the "extended metaphors" in Shakespearean drama that are particular to the character and plot of every work.

Echoing his many references to Classical and Shakespearean tragedy, Spengler sees history itself as "the drama of a number of mighty Cultures," each with "its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death." In an essay that foreshadows Spengler's fate among later historians, R. G. Collingwood accuses Spengler of insulating cultures from one another (Fennelly calls them "water-tight compartments"), but these images, like Heller’s “marching orders of the spirit,” reduce a vision to a system and his cultures into rigid constructions, no matter how often Spengler insists that the terms "Euclidean," "Magian," and "Faustian" are to be understood as symbolic representations of once-living and now ultimately unknowable worlds. As close as we may come to understanding them, at their core there will always be an incommunicable experience that we may intuit but never fully comprehend. Goethe grounded his philosophical reflections in the related belief that wonder is the highest form of perception, and Nietzsche continued this line of thought in "Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense" (1873) when he remarked that nature "is acquainted . . . only with an X which remains inaccessible and

undefinable for us." Hence the inescapable presence of the intangible in every "perceptual metaphor," which is "individual and without equals and is therefore able to elude all classification."

Der Untergang des Abendlandes thus presents itself on every page as a picture of history conceived by a "philosopher-artist" (9), which Collingwood and others were incapable of discussing except as a construct. Spengler, however, explicitly states that his vision of cultures as separate organisms is itself symbolic and represents an early "winter" expression of a western orientation to life, through which he sees every culture, like every individual, developing in existential solitude. So too, in Shakespeare's tragic figures, "We are sensible of the immense inner distance between the persons, each of whom at bottom is only talking with himself. Nothing can overcome this spiritual remoteness." As Melville richly observed of the dramatist himself, what "makes Shakespeare, Shakespeare" is precisely "those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of Reality" (10).

Spengler's hundreds of references to figures from every field of history should have alerted his critics to his parallels between the soul-types of a culture and cultures as spiritual biographies, whose expressive features can "tell us of themselves how much lies hidden there." The image of Goethe is present even in these thoughts, in the sense that Goethe meant, "as he avowed himself," that his works were "only fragments of a single great confession." In Shakespeare's Lives, Samuel Schoenbaum refers to the Goethean model and traces a line of nineteenth-century thought in which Shakespeare's literary development was similarly regarded as a figurative biography of an inner life. Keats' remark that the plays are comments on his life of allegory is a concise expression of this view, which was later extended to include the developmental character of "the Shakespearean moment," as Patrick Crutwell has described the English Renaissance in its transition from Elizabeth to James I.

To repeat, for Spengler the decisive moment in the life of a culture is the birth itself of a new "world-soul," whose deepest meanings are revealed in its "springtime" myths, epics, and religious architecture. For Nietzsche, the birth of Greek tragedy was just such a creation, in whose decline he saw parallels to the increasing formlessness of modern life. Spengler, on the other hand, drew inspiration from the "Faustian" origins of the northern European world, and he believed that it still had the potential to tap into its passion for long-range exploration and discovery to foresee its "landfall in the future."

______________________

(1) Fennelly combines both in the title of his book on Spengler, Twilight of the Evening Lands.

(2) Including Japan, whose once "splendid State" now appears to have been "poisoned by the Democratic and Marxian decaying forms of the White nations," The Hour of Decision, pp. 65-66.

(3) In "Nietzsche and His Century," available online at Philweb: The Oswald Spengler Collection. My references to "Prussianism and Socialism" and "Pessimism?" are also taken from this site.

(4) Spengler took his stand in a major debate on the writing of history that was taking place on both sides of the Atlantic and not in the academy alone. See Theodore Roosevelt's "History as Literature" (1913), in which he demonstrates a respectable knowledge of the great cultures and a surprising appreciation of Goethe, whom he calls "as profound a thinker as Kant." It is impossible to imagine any political leader today who is even remotely comparable to Roosevelt either in thought or prose.

(5) "For history has a certain affinity to poetry and may be regarded as a kind of prose poem." Quintillian, Institutes, in Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's "Histories": Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy, Methuen & Co Ltd., 1964, p. 27. Campbell notes that in the Renaissance classical rhetoric "influenced the concept of history as a form of creative writing, opposed to the idea of history as a set of records."

(6) In a letter to Eduard Spranger (April 5, 1936), Spengler remarks that "Culture is for me an inward form of historical 'becoming' and not a sum of similar objects." It is a key principle of The Decline, yet Collingwood erroneously insists that "what [Spengler] called a 'culture'" was only "a constellation of historical facts . . . in which every detail fitted into every other as placidly as the pieces of a jig-saw puzzle lying at rest on a table." An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 1940, p. 75.

(7) With regard to the Classical temple, Spengler notes that "direction in depth is eliminated" through its many subtle curvatures and "a carefully toned-off ratio" in the variation of "swell and inclination and distance" from "corners to the centres of the sides," so that "the whole corpus is given a something that swings mysterious about a centre." Hence, "While the Gothic soars, the Ionic hovers," I:177.

(8) In "Symbolism and Space," Spengler reflects at some length on the Euclidean "structure of Classical corporeality" in relation to "the pure space-feeling" of our "group of geometries," I: 176n.

(9) Nietzsche, "The Philosopher" (1872), Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Beazeale, Humanities Press International, Inc., 1979, p. 15.

(10) Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850), in Moby-Dick, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1967, p. 541.



The History Of A Metaphor (1)



Like speaks to like. In a singular observation on The Decline, Jorge Luis Borges remarks on a rare quality of Spengler's "virile pages, written between 1912 and 1917," which "were never contaminated by the hatred peculiar to those years" (1). It is a striking comment to make about a philosophy of history, for it does not address Spengler's ideas or scholarship but the moral character of the work in relation to its times. In this respect, Borges’ "Capsule Biography" belongs to the genre of the exemplary portrait and is closer to the spirit of Plutarch's Lives than to modern criticism.

Steeped in the history of Rome and convinced that it held lessons for our "twilight" age (2), Spengler might have described Borges' remark itself as a Roman observation, for it recalls the ideal of the stoic hero: manly, self-possessed, and rising above the passions of the times. Like Goethe and Nietzsche, Spengler was a master of vigorous and concise expression, and his thoughts emerge from a seemingly bottomless well of learning in flashes of insight and descriptive analysis. The central ideas of The Decline came to him with the clarity of a vision, and when his work was completed he was surprised to find that he had created a philosophy, "a German philosophy" at that. If we recall the sheer range of artists and thinkers who were drawn to his work, from Furtwängler to Berdyaev and the gifted science-fiction writer James Blish, then Borges' description of his "virile pages" is accurate indeed.

No comparable audience appears on Hughes' radar screen. In the split between Spengler's admirers and detractors, those who "find in him a source of profound intellectual excitement" have "refused to be warned" away by the scholarly world, and Hughes himself finds their commentaries "inexact, impressionistic, and frequently naive." Outside Germany, in particular, The Decline may have “won the admiration of the half-educated," yet it also earned "the scorn of the judicious," with Collingwood leading the way. As Fennelly approvingly observes, Spengler treats his "cultural life-cycles with a rigidity that has been wholly unacceptable to his critics."

In their rush to judgment, it never occurs to "the judicious" that if they were right, then the quality of Spengler's prose would mirror the "dogmatic exactitudes" of his thought. In other words, dogma in, dogma out, yet this is clearly not the case, for his descriptive passages are suffused with insight and color, particularly when he interprets his subjects through his symbolic seasons of history, as in his opening discussion of the Gospels in the early "Magian" world:

The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. In all the great creations of those years there is nothing which can be set beside it. . . . . Jesus's utterances . . . are those of a child in the

midst of an alien, aged, and sick world. . . . Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of those fishermen and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesareth in the midst of the age of the great Tiberius . . . while round them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples, their refined Western society, their noisy mob-diversions, their Roman cohorts, their Greek philosophy. When the friends and disciples of the sufferer had grown grey . . . they put together, from the sayings and narratives generally current in their small communities, a biography so arresting in its inward appeal that it evolved a presentation-form of its own, of which neither the Classical nor the Arabian Culture has any example - the Gospel. Christianity is the one religion in the history of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the emblem and the central point of the whole creation.

The underlying music of the passage, its “deep logic of becoming,” is brilliantly organized around Spengler’s central theme of the birth of a new “world-soul,” beginning with “the infant Christianity” and closing on the “Destiny-idea” of Christ’s own birth and death. Spengler's interpretive analysis of the Gospel-world is a model of history writing that is both vivid and true (3), and it is also noteworthy that his ”word-sounds and pictures” have a Wagnerian intensity that is never entirely absent from his work. In the passage cited above, this operatic quality is reflected in his richly emblematic pictures of "Late-city" Classical culture and the Magian "springtime," which he treats as a counterpoint of two contrasting historical leitmotifs, as Wagner composed his music dramas by interweaving the motifs of his music with his librettos (as a celebration of Easter, Parsifal is literally a springtime opera). All this is beyond the reach of critics for whom Spengler's "metaphysical structure" is "wholly unacceptable."

Along the same lines but written for a wider audience, Donald Kagan refers to H. G. Wells, Pitirim Sorokin, and Spengler as "amateur historians" and remarks that "Each man and his work won considerable notoriety, but all were easily dismissed by professional historians" (4), as though Emery Neff were not one of them, nor could there be any other serious audience for Spengler's work. Borges, however, was not concerned with Spengler's place among scholars in the field but with his solitary labors in the midst of hardship and the power of his prose, which communicates a sense of high drama in the growth and disappearance of the great cultures of the world, each with its own

new possibilities of self-expression, which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species species of plant has its peculiar blossoms or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field.

Taking this passage in its most reductive sense, Kagan's “professional historians” have labeled him a "cyclical" and “biological determinist,” yet its context is not theoretical but poetic and religious; for, in their freshness and particularity, his “springtime” cultures are like the lilies of the field in the Gospel of St. Luke, whose splendor is both immediate and complete. “They neither toil nor spin” means that their beauty is not an end result but prime. Likewise Spengler's cultures, whose spirit owes nothing to causality but flows

from within as the spontaneous expression of a particular humanity. Hence their “soul-language” speaks to our capacity for wonder and contemplation, such as Wordsworth exercised when he stood before his field of daffodils.

My comparison with Wordsworth is deliberate, for Spengler's contrast between causal analysis and pastoral vision has its origins in a long line of philosophy and literature that dates from the time of Goethe, Blake, and Wordsworth. Spengler was primarily familiar with its German antecedents, but a brief digression on American literature may illuminate his thinking best of all, for it appears with striking clarity in several classics of American poetry and prose, among them Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" (1875) and Herman Melville's Billy Budd (c. 1890). Whitman's poem is a study in contrasts between the systematic and visionary mind, whose tensions he resolves by wandering alone in nature to be open to direct experience. It is a quintessential emblem of romantic poetry and corresponds to Faust's walking "over woods and fields" and Wordsworth's wandering "lonely as a cloud":

When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. (5)

Whitman's poem dramatizes in blank verse what Spengler would reflect upon half a century later:

Reason, system and comprehension kill as they "cognize." That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity.

In Billy Budd, the terms of this opposition recall the Gospel message that the letter kills but the spirit gives life; for, when Budd stands on the mainyard at the moment of his execution and spontaneously cries "God bless Captain Vere!" he appears in a state of pastoral grace, like "a singing-bird on the point of launching from the twig," with a noose prepared by military law and logic around his neck (6). Melville ends his tale with a ballad on Budd’s last night before his execution, written by an anonymous sailor “with an artless poetic temperament,” in which Billy imagines himself merging with the sea when he will be dropped "Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep," his lifeless body wrapped in underwater vegetation among the "oozy weeds" as he sinks into the unconscious, ocean-world of sleep and dreams.

There are any number of literary associations between dream-visions and the sea, as in Shakespeare's Richard III and The Tempest and Wordsworth's The Prelude (1799-1805), but an even closer parallel to the symbolism of spiritual depth may be found in the closing lines of Wagner's Das Rheingold (1853), whose magic ring must be returned to its solitary place beneath the Rhine, beneath Wotan's newly created fortress of Valhalla - the world of systematic structures, law, and power - to be appreciated in aimless innocence by the Rhinemaidens, for

Traulich und true ist's nur in der Tiefe: falsch und feig ist, was dort oben sich freut!

"Only in the depths is there tenderness and truth. What is false and cowardly rejoices above."

Like Goethe's stanza on the life-force that surges through everything ("Wenn im Unendlichen dasselbe"), which Spengler took as his epigraph for The Decline, the words of the Rhinemaidens’ echo in Spengler's philosophy of history, for he insists that cultures have a spiritual depth that is not accessible to systematic thought, which kills the living spirit. It was in this frame of mind that Goethe remarked, "No one can be more afraid of numbers than I"; and Ernst Cassirer similarly notes that

When the botanist Link tried to illustrate Goethe's theory of the metamorphosis of plants by means of an abstract model, he vigorously objected. "In such efforts," he declared, "only the last formless sublimated abstraction is left, and the subtlest organic life is joined to the completely formless and bloodless universal phenomena of nature." (7)

So too, Whitman felt his own vitality drain away when he was "shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them."

In arguing for the living identity of things in contrast to "bloodless" models of nature, Goethe voiced a reaction against mechanism that was shared by writers throughout the nineteenth century, among them Thoreau, Dickens, and Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground (1864), in which the underground man rails against mathematical logic and the celebration of science and progress in the exhibition halls of London's Crystal Palace.

The terms of this debate were established prior to these writers, however, and nowhere was the religious position stated more vividly than in William Blake's "Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau" (c. 1800):

The Atoms of Democritus And Newton's Particles of light Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,

Where Israel's tents do shine so bright.

Closer to home among the classics of German thought, Spengler writes that his world cultures "belong, like the plants and animals, to the living Nature of Goethe, and not to the dead Nature of Newton."

When Renaissance Platonists spoke of "sweet harmonies" and the secret "hieroglyphics" of beauty, they had specific principles of Pythagorean proportion in mind, and, although not mathematically precise, Spengler's forerunners had a well-defined understanding of such terms as "world-view" and "inner form." When Spengler, for example, states that his method of entering into the unique worlds of different cultures "is the method of living into (erfühlen) the object, as opposed to dissecting it," he not only echoes Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned" (“We murder to dissect”) but also recalls a key term of historical study in Johann Gottfried Herder’s Philosophy of History (1774): "First sympathize with the nation, go into the era, into the geography, into the entire history, feel yourself into it," which, according to Neff, marks "the first appearance of the verb einfühlen.”

Historical thinking for Herder thus requires a receptive understanding of the special characteristics of a people and its world, including its landscape, which Spengler refers to as the “mother-region” of a culture. As Neff observes in The Poetry of History, ruins, fragmentary forms, alien religions, folk culture, all this and more disclosed a richness, in Herder's words, that "the mole's eye of this most enlightened century" could not see. As in Spengler’s view of history ("the Living, with all its immense fullness, depth and movement”), "The stuff of history, Herder now believed, was action, instinct, atmosphere, the spirit of a people in its geographical setting. History should be displayed as 'pictures,' not analyzed into abstract generalizations. Its charm was 'absence,' remoteness."

For Spengler, it is precisely here that history challenges our powers of interpretation, since everything that once comprised “the Living" is now accessible only through its remains, and it was his conviction that the once living "depths of an alien soul" could only be reached through a "deep wordless understanding." Spengler is indeed writing in the language of poetic vision, for his "wordless understanding" in the historical sphere echoes Whitman's in the natural world when he wandered into the night and looked up "in perfect silence at the stars."

In his chapter "The Living Past," Neff discusses the new approaches that Herder and others brought to the study of ancient poetry, myth, and religion, which Spengler, like Nietzsche before him, wove into his readings of the past and modern times. In this respect, it would be more accurate to describe him as a mythopoeic than a biological determinist, for when he speaks of "Euclidean," "Magian," and "Faustian" consciousness his defining examples are taken from myth and epic poetry, in which "Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality":

These very earliest creations of the young soul tell us that there is a relationship between the Olympian figures, the statue and the corporeal Doric column; between the

domical basilica, the "Spirit" of God and the arabesque; between Valhalla and the Mary myth, the soaring nave and instrumental music.

Drawing the thought-provoking conclusion that "all 'knowing' of Nature, even the exactest, is based on a religious faith," Spengler asks us to consider the various "form-languages" in which “nature-knowledge” has been written:

For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved with inward certainty of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized light-rays, errant ions, flying and colliding gas particles, magnetic fields, electric currents and waves – are they not one and all Faustian visions, closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the upthrust of Gothic architecture, the Viking’s voyaging into unknown seas, the longings of Columbus and Copernicus? . . . Are they not, in short, our passionate directedness, our passion of the third dimension, coming to symbolic expression in the imagined Nature-picture as in the soul image? . . . (8)

The "Nature" of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of bodies, a physics of the near. The Arabian Culture owned the arabesque and the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious efficient substantialities. . . . And the outcome of Faustian man's Nature idea was a dynamic of unlimited span, a physics of the distant.

Conceived "with the eye of an artist," Spengler's most incisive and evocative passages are informed by his observations on art, mythology, and epic poetry, for it is here that he finds his historical emblems in their clearest and most expressive form:

Olympus rests on the homely Greek soil, the Paradise of the Fathers is a magic garden somewhere in the Universe, but Valhalla is nowhere. Lost in the limitless, it appears with its inharmonious gods and heroes the supreme symbol of solitude. Siegfried, Parzeval, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures. Read the wondrous awakening of the inner life in Wolfram's Parzeval. The longing for the woods, the mysterious compassion, the ineffable sense of forsakeness - it is all Faustian and only Faustian. (9)

Spengler's association of mythology with the "springtime" of a culture completes a line of thought that extends from Goethe and Herder to Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, whose opening sections recall Herder's fascination with cultural origins in "the dark regions of the soul."

Early in his career, Herder traveled from Riga through the Baltic and North Sea to France, and, "With his quick turn to generalization," as Neff remarks, Herder’s new-found awareness of the North Atlantic brought to mind the spirit of the Norse sagas and presented a very different picture from the Mediterranean of Homeric Greece and the earth of ancient Egypt. Like Melville in Billy Budd, who directs the reader to great themes and passions "Down among the groundlings," Herder found himself

on the open boundless sea among a little state of men who have severer laws than the republic of Lycurgus; in the midst of a wholly different, living and moving Nature . . . past the lands where of yore skalds and Vikings with sword and song wandered through the sea . . .

Spengler draws upon this vision when he reflects upon "the old Northern life-feeling, the Viking infinity-wistfulness" and "the idea of the high-seas voyage . . . as a liberation, a symbol." A utilitarian would say that it was the unique design and construction of the ships that allowed for the journies, but for Spengler it was the longing itself that created the technologies it needed. The term "Faustian" is his emblem of this urge.

Reading "the course of human events" through symbolic interpretation therefore has a history of its own; and just as humanity "walks through forests of symbols" in Baudelaire's "Correspondences" (1857), Herder views history as though it were a symbolic pastoral scene. In Ideas on History (1784-91), the achievements of a culture represent "the flower of its existence"; the empires of Egypt and China sprang "from a root" and rested "on themselves" like firmly grounded trees; and, although "the very appearance of the flower is a sign that it must fade," there are analogous flowers, as it were, in every age: "Shakespeare was no Sophocles, Milton no Homer, Bolingbroke no Pericles: yet they were in their kind, and in their situation, what those were in theirs."

In The Decline, we walk through a similar landscape of history, in which "Cultures, people, languages, truths, gods, landscapes, bloom and age as the oak and the stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves." In Spengler's version of Herder's rooted empires, once civilizations have aged and taken their final forms,"they may, like a worn-out giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches toward the sky for hundreds and thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic world."

Beginning with the title itself, Der Untergang des Abendlandes is rich in allusions and metaphors drawn from the natural world of forests, fields, skies, the sea, the four seasons, the human life-cycle, and the progression of a day from morning and noon to evening and night. Returning to the principle that "Poetry and historical study are kin, " Spengler instructs us in the art of aesthetic perception when he cautions the reader that his "Faustian vision . . . is not a postulate but an experience" and that in order to understand him we should meditate on his analogy between history and organic life, "letting the world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon the imagination." In all the commentary that I have read, none of Spengler's detractors has ever followed his instruction or even mentioned it. Moreover, they have deliberately yet quite unconsciously done the opposite by turning “an experience” into “a postulate.” Hence their critiques of his “biological determinism” and "water-tight compartments" of history, theoretical models that suffer from the same "bloodless" categorizing that Goethe objected to when he said that Link's systematizing of his views on plant development turned "the subtlest organic life" into an abstraction. If Kagan’s “professional historians” were able to dismiss Spengler “easily,” it is because they were incapable of setting aside their own training and assumptions, even as an intellectual exercise, and not only lacked

the creative impulse to allow the language of metaphor to work “unreservedly upon the imagination" but also ignored an obvious artistic precedent for Spengler’s recurring phases of history, in which the four seasons, from the Limbourg brothers’ Book of Hours through Vivaldi, Breughel, Poussin, Haydn, and James Thomson, served as a traditional organizing principle for religious, artistic, and poetic material.

Where the decisive terms of inquiry are not "'correct' and 'erroneous' but 'deep' and 'shallow'" what is required are not proofs but what Goethe calls productive ideas. The arts teach us this lesson at every turn. A portrait by Rembrandt is neither more nor less “true” than a portrait by Holbein or Cézanne, all of which are masterpieces of observation yet very different in technique, naturalistic effects, and cultural background and values. Taking a lesson from Nietzsche's "questioning faculty," Spengler argues that objective knowledge itself derives from a web of presuppositions, in which "everything depends on whether that being, the being for whom [a fact] occurs or did occur, is or was Classical or Western, Gothic or Baroque." As for the patterns that he sees in history, even when he speaks of the rhythmic order of his cycles, he maintains that they are illustrative images and recur not only like the seasons of the year and the life cycle of an individual but also the hours of the day and "majestic wave-cycles" of the sea. At best, they are no more than approximations of what he means by the sense of inevitability in the human sphere. In Billy Budd, Melville similarly has no recourse except by “indirection” to describe the depth of Claggart’s malevolence, the hinge on which the story turns: “This portrait I essay, but I shall never hit it.”

_______________

(1) Juan Luis Borges, "Oswald Spengler: A Capsule Biography" (1936), in Borges: A Reader, E. P. Dutton, 1981, p. 87.

(2) In "The Relation between the Cultures," for example, Spengler writes that, although we no longer look to Roman law for "principles of eternal validity . . . the relation between Roman existence and Roman law-ideas gives it a renewed value for us. We can learn from it how we have to build up our law out of our experience," II: 83.

(3) In his final pages, Hughes defends The Decline as a powerful work of "imaginative literature," in the sense that "The 'Magian' culture," for example, "may never have existed," although the idea can still "deepen our imaginative comprehension" of the region's "art and religion." To divorce the imagination from what Spengler calls the "fact-world," however, is to dismiss his philosophy of history out of hand, and it also undercuts the nature and uses of metaphor in all great poetry and prose.

(4) Donald Kagan, "The Changing World of World Histories," New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1984, p. 42.

(5) In "Science and Beauty" (1979), Isaac Asimov claims that the poem justifies know-nothings who think that they "can just take a look at the night sky, get a quick beauty fix, and go off to a nightclub." The poem must have struck a nerve, since he cannot speak of it without mockery, nor can he tolerate the idea that even one person should not have been captivated by "the learn'd astronomer."

(6) Among the many Christian allusions toward the end of the tale, "the vapory fleece hanging low in the East" at the moment of execution "was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision"; the mast and mainyard form a cross, and sailors traced the spar until it was "reduced to a mere dockyard boom," yet "To them a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross."

(7) Ernst Cassirer, "Goethe and Kantian Philosophy," in Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, Harper & Row, 1963, p. 81. On "the dread of mechanism" in American literature, see Jack Beatty, "Trapped in the 'NASA-Speak' Machine, New York Times Op-Ed, March 9, 1986.

(8) The relationship between "the imagined Nature-picture" and "the soul image" was a subject of interest to Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. See Gino Segrè, Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics, Viking, 2007, pp. 105-106.

(9) Forsaken in the limitless, unlike Christ on the Cross in Matthew 27, who fulfills a "Magian" destiny when he utters the first words of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" whose silent reply appears in line 3: "But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel."


The History Of A Metaphor (2)


This is Part 4 (B) of "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

Early in The Decline, Spengler cautions the reader that the “Destiny-idea,” like "inward certainty," will always elude strict analysis, although it makes perfect sense in the high arts and among those whose vocation seems innate, such as Spengler's "born" historian, physicist, or leader. Michaelangelo believed that his statues existed fully formed within their blocks of stone; Leonardo said that a drawing should be complete in its very first line, and Spengler would have found an exact parallel to the awakening of a cultural destiny in Delacroix's reflections on the origins of a pictorial masterpiece:


The first outlines through which an able master indicates his thought contains the germ of everything significant that the work will offer. Raphael, Rembrandt, Poussin . . . they make a few rapid strokes on the paper, and it seems that there is not one of them but has its importance. For intelligent eyes, the life of the work is already to be seen everywhere . . . it has scarcely opened to the light, and already it is complete. (1)

The great interpreters of classical music could have said the same of the works in their repertoire. About Furtwängler, in particular, Brendel writes that "No other musician in my experience conveyed so strongly the feeling that the fate of a piece (and of its performance) was sealed with its first bar, and that its destiny would be fulfilled by the last"; and powerful leaders, for good or ill, have also experienced "the deep logic of becoming" at key moments in their lives. Winston Churchill said it best and for all the right reasons when he wrote in The Gathering Storm that when he was offered "the chief power in the State," on May 10, 1940, just before Dunkirk, "I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial."

The "collective biography" of a culture for Spengler is marked by a similar awakening, and the nations in its orbit not only share certain general features but can also be distinguished by their own continuities of character. Spengler's critics take him to task for compartmentalizing cultures into separate worlds, when in fact his observation is drawn from experience and is vividly expressed in every classic European and American work of literature that is rooted in a social world. Orwell himself unwittingly made a fine Spenglerian observation when he reflected that

there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

Written in England's darkest days of the Second World War, The Lion and the Unicorn (1940-41) epitomizes in homely, intimate prose what Spengler means by the soul of a culture, with its own "distinctive and recognizable" character that "stretches into the future and the past" and "persists, as in a living creature." In celebrating England's “living” history, Orwell found inspiration in the conservative view in which he was raised and never wholly relinquished, as he states in "Why I Write" (1947). Toward the beginning of The Hour, Spengler makes a keen observation on this view when he notes that, unlike the ideologues of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke “argued that on his side of the Channel men demanded their due as Englishmen and not as human beings, and he was right" (2).

Both writers also share a high regard for prose style and what Orwell calls his "love [of] the surface of the earth," two traits that are evident in the way they develop their historical themes through a series of vivid impressions that are punctuated by concise and telling observations. Spengler remarks more than once that we all make judgments out of our store of such impressions and that those who have not lost contact with the “cosmic beat” still possess an instinctive life-sense of irreversible time. The childhood "photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece" expresses just such a recognition.

Spengler's philosophy of "organic" cultures, which "grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field," is born of this common heritage of the human condition and speaks to "that deeply-felt relationship between plant destiny and human destiny which is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry." If one thinks of Shakespeare's "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May" or Whitman's "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd," one has a vivid reminder that Spengler is not articulating a theory so much as an experience of history, whose world cultures appear all the sharper to our senses and all the more poignant in our reflections when viewed in light of implacable time, wars and social upheavals, and an indifferent universe.

It is the same experience that Herder depicts in Ideas on History, in which

every thing in history is transient: the inscription on her temple is, evanescence and decay. We tread on the ashes of our forefathers, and stalk over the entombed ruins of human institutions and kingdoms. Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome flit before us like shadows: like ghosts they rise from their graves, and appear to us in the field of history.

Surveying this panorama of the past, Herder concludes that "in new places new capacities are developed; the ancient of the ancient places irrevocably pass away."

Spengler mentions Herder only once in The Decline, yet his introduction both includes and sharpens Herder's vision of history in a single concentrated image of growth and decline, in which every culture is born in its own "mother" landscape and is an expression of inner drives writ large:

I see, in place of that empty figure of one linear history . . . the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle (3); each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death.

Like the monumental openings of Beethoven's Third and Fifth symphonies, Spengler's declaration speaks to the entire character of his work, in which he writes as though he were defending the unique identity of individuals, even to the last stages of cultural decline and death. A striking parallel may be found in Ranier Marie-Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), in which Rilke defends the idea of a personal death in contrast to the "factory-like" deaths in modern hospitals, where "the different lethal terminations belong to the disease and not to the people."

For all his cycles of history, therefore, Spengler's style is both fluid and evocative; and although he has been taken to task for his "dogmatic exactitudes," he is essentially speaking in the language of metaphor and analogical relationships, whose purpose is to illustrate what amounts to a deep belief in the individual identity and “livingness” of cultures. The character of England likewise appears to Orwell by analogy to “a living creature"; and it was just this process of individuation that Albert Schweitzer had in mind when he observed in "Goethe the Philosopher" that, in Goethe's view, "nature's design . . . is realized to the extent to which each creature achieves fully its own life."

As I remarked earlier, Spengler sees the high cultures as individual biographies of a people in the field of world history. Moreover, their birth takes place in a moment that is filled with a special pastoral grace of childhood, since the life-cycle of every culture originates for him in the "Super-personal unity and fullness" of a "Rural-intuitive," "Springtime," and "dream-heavy Soul" (4). So too, from Blake and Wordsworth to Friedrich Froebel’s Mother Play and Children’s Songs (1844), Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1859), and Orwell’s celebration of a pastoral upbringing in Coming Up for Air, childhood is envisioned as its own complete world in a rural setting.

The romantic background of Spengler's symbolism again makes itself felt; for, as in Wagner's forest setting of Siegfried's childhood and youth, Spengler's "springtime" cultures represent the birth of a "Rural-intuitive" child-spirit in the realm of history, whose "primitive strength" contains the original source of meaning that flows through a culture and shapes the physiognomy of its development. Seen in this light, Spengler's "prime symbols" of "Euclidean," "Magian," and "Faustian" consciousness correspond to what Wordsworth in The Prelude calls "spots of time / Which with distinct preeminence retain / A fructifying virtue" and "chiefly seem to have their date / In our first childhood." For Wordsworth, these moments occurred when he had his first visual and auditory sensations among "the green plains" and "fields and groves" near his "Beloved Derwent, fairest of streams."

With the exception of Hughes, Spengler's critics say nothing about this tradition, and Hughes cites it only to denigrate Spengler's adaptation of Goethe and Herder as "a pretentious blowing-up of the biological or botanical metaphors that had haunted the whole nineteenth century." At no point does he relate them to the idea of primal childhood consciousness, which is central to this network of analogies (5). To borrow Robert Frost's words from "Education by Poetry," Hughes is not at home in metaphor and therefore does not appreciate the figurative content of his material.

Whatever limitations Spengler's analogies may have, and all metaphors have their limits, as Frost observes, they define an approach to history that is particularly sensitive to a culture’s "own idea, its own life, will and feeling," even in its most direct borrowings from the past. Despite Collingwood's insistence, Spengler does not ignore the subject of cultural inheritance, but, as he demonstrates in his discussions of the Renaissance, even when a culture feels deeply connected to another, its adaptations have meanings that

differ from their source. In Spengler's words, "It is not products that 'influence,' but creators that absorb" (6), and here too the unconscious plays its part:

[Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo] strove to be "Classical" in the Medicean sense; and yet it was they themselves who in one and another way . . . shattered the dream. . . . What they intended was to substitute proportion for relation, drawing for light-and-air effect, Euclidean body for pure space. But neither they nor others of their time produced a Euclidean-static sculpture - for that was possibly only once, in Athens. In all their work one feels a secret music, in all their forms the movement-quality and the tending into distances and depths. They are on their way, not to Phidias but to Palestrina, and they have come thither not from Roman ruins but from the still music of the cathedral.

Spengler not only speaks eloquently of the High Renaissance masters but also makes the accurate observation that their achievements are far more Gothic than Classical in feeling and expression (7). It is a telling instance of his general theme that, just as events are transient, so too "an old significance never returns." Similarly, in Herder's words, the Greek tragedians "ate, as Aeschylus says, at Homer's table, but prepared for their guests a different feast."

For Spengler, therefore, no interpretation of history can be true without being true to life. Hence his attraction to Goethe's philosophy of the becoming, in which he found "a perfectly definite metaphysical doctrine" of organic development:

I would not have one single word changed in this: "The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason (Vernunft) is concerned only to strive toward the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding (Verstand) only to make use of the become and the set-fast" (to Eckerman). This sentence comprises my entire philosophy.

In any serious study of philosophy, one reads Hegel, Kant, and Nietzsche as a matter of course, whereas one discovers Goethe’s almost at random as one becomes familiar with his works.

Echoes of Goethean philosophy in European thought are similary diffuse yet unmistakable. Kierkegaard, for example, distinguishes between “the becoming” and “the become” when he writes that we live forwards and understand backwards, while in Benedetto Croce's History - Its Theory and Practice (1916), we read that "Every history becomes chronicle when it is no longer thought but only recorded in abstract words, which were once upon a time concrete and expressive." Similarly, in "Clio Rediscovered" (1903), G. M. Trevelyan argues that "the past was once real as the present and uncertain as the future," which is to say that the past was once a becoming. Furthermore, Trevelyan states, "You can dissect the body of a man, and argue thence the general structure of the bodies of other men," but insofar as history represents real lives once lived, it cannot be contained within the boundaries of science. In short, "You cannot dissect a mind." Taking the work of Carlyle on the English civil wars as a model, he concludes that, "irrespective

of 'cause and effect,' we want to know the thoughts and deeds of Cromwell's soldiers, as one of the higher products and achievements of the human race, a thing never to be repeated, that once took shape and was." Spengler sums up this point of view in the following terse remark: "Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated."

In another of his lessons from the arts, Spengler writes that all the great landscape painters of the west understood this principle through their disciplined powers of observation. To borrow his examples, whether we consider the works of Claude Lorrain, the Dutch painters, or Corot, we see the face of nature "in the physiognomic sense, something uniquely-occurring, unforeseen, brought to light for the first and last time." So too, Cézanne said that new motifs appeared to him merely by shifting his gaze left or right, and for Constable not even two leaves on a tree were alike.

In "Clio Rediscovered," Trevelyan’s response to all "that once took shape" was to favor historical narrative, but Spengler sensed a mystery in "the become" that could only be expressed figuratively through a kind of poetic prose. His seasons of history, in particular, derive from Goethe's four stages of a culture in Epochs of the Spirit and, in Spengler's adaptation, "agree with this entirely":

Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age. It is a young a trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, that reveals itself in the morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the Faustian landscape from the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim cathedral of Bishop Bernward. The spring wind blows over it. "In the works of the old-German architecture," says Goethe, "one sees the blossoming of an extraordinary state."

The "cosmic beat" continues in the maturation of a culture: the summer ripening of the Ionic in the Classical world, the era from Augustine to Mohammed in the Magian, and the centuries from Galileo to Newton and Leibniz in the Baroque, in which forms are "virile, austere," and "controlled":

Still later, tender to the point of fragility, fragrant with the sweetness of late October days, come the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Hall of the Maidens in the Erectheum, the arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the Zwinger of Dresden, Watteau, Mozart.

Finally, with the onset of winter, "the fire in the Soul dies down." The twilight deepens, the spirit of a culture begins to chill,

and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the long daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave. The spell of a "second religiousness" comes upon it, and Late-Classical man turns to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, of the Sun - those very cults into which a soul just born in the East has been pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness.

The “soul just born in the east” is Christianity, and, as in Vol. II, Spengler's Magian "springtime" has pronounced affinities with Parsifal, in which Wagner's redemptive hero

restores the spiritually ailing kingdom of Amfortas on Good Friday, having been reborn himself that morning (“never did I see such mild and gentle grasses, flowers and blooms”); while the construction and impending doom of Valhalla in the Ring foreshadow Spengler's hardened civilizations approaching their inevitable end in the landscape of their birth, a fitting counterpart to Wagner’s Earth, or Erda-spirit of primal knowledge and destiny (Imperial Rome longing to be back "in the womb of the mother, in the grave").

The full burden of The Decline is therefore not in its readings of the past but in their implications for our own moment in time, for, as Spengler writes in his preface to the first edition, "Although a philosophy of history is its scope and subject, it possesses also a certain deeper significance as a commentary on the great epochal moment of which the portents were visible when the leading ideas were being formed." Several pages later, we read that these signs also prefigure "the still untravelled stages" of the future and in Vol. II that its decisive features will be wars for global supremacy and cities spread over enormous tracts of land, with “notions of traffic and communication which we would regard as fantastic to the point of madness.”

All the advances that we take for granted - superhighways, jet travel, the internet - belong to a world that Spengler’s generation would have already regarded as “fantastic to the point of madness,” and in time to come our own “notions of traffic and communication” will also seem as dated as the biplanes and steam engines of the 1920s. As Spengler would say, it is “ever thus.” The present passes into history, all that was particular to the life of an age will become increasingly remote, and nothing that a culture experienced as its actuality will ever be "exactly transferable just as it [was] into the experiential living and knowing of another Culture." It is precisely here, in "the finest and deepest elements" of a high culture, that we arrive at what "is incommunicable" through unaided reason alone.

Spengler reminds us that there is another faculty, however, that is available to us, for we also possess a language of the intangible, which speaks in symbol and metaphor and is the only way of making the "incomprehensible comprehensible." For Spengler, the principle that governs this language is best expressed in the last line of the Mystic Chorus at the end of Goethe's Faust: "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis" - "Everything transitory is only a metaphor." It is the underlying maxim of his work, whose finest passages are written in view of poetry, as Nietzsche says of all good prose:

Poems and battles, Isis and Cybele, festivals and Roman Catholic masses, blast furnaces and gladiatorial slavery, money, machinery - all these are equally signs and symbols in the world-picture of the past that the soul presents to itself and would interpret: "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis."

History for Spengler does not reveal any advance of the spirit, as it does for Hegel, yet its "signs and symbols" represent an inexhaustible world of expressive facts by which soul speaks to soul, beyond the reach of words. To cite Goethe once again, "The highest to which man can attain is wonder," which Beethoven put in the most personal terms

possible when that most solitary of all composers inscribed at the top of his score for the Missa Solemnis: ”From the heart – may it return to the heart.”

The sheer range of Spengler's “emotional theme,” therefore, not only flows from his personality, as Koktanek observes, but also mirrors his attempt to "enter into" and interpret all that belongs to "the world-picture of the past." His ambition was not unique. Hegel had felt this same hunger to interpret what Spengler calls the "Riddle of History" when he wrote The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807); and it also led the youthful Herder on a journey into "new thoughts emerging from the human soul, half-comprehensible, half-obscure, my perspective of fragments, groves, torsos, archives of the human race - everything!" Literature knows a similar drive among the encyclopedic novelists, such as Balzac, Tolstoy, and Joyce; and in American literature, it takes a singularly tragic turn in the figure of Melville's Captain Ahab, whose quest to harpoon Moby Dick is a function of his deeper drive to know what is “beyond all utterance” and penetrate the final secret behind the silence of appearances:

"Hark ye yet again - the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!"

Those who are familiar with the development of symbolist literature and the rise of symbolic analysis in the study of dreams, folk tales, myths, and religions should not be surprised that the turn of the century also saw the appearance of a symbolic treatment of history.

Spengler's habit of mind is so deeply grounded in poetry that “the whole voiceless language of Nature” also speaks to him with "the immediacy of vision," most eloquently at the opening of Vol. II:

Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you - a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadow, this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free - he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will. . . . This midget swarm that dances on and on, that solitary bird still flying through the evening, the fox approaching furtively the nest - these are little worlds of their own within another great world. An animalcule in a drop of water, too tiny to be perceived by the human eye, though it lasts but a second and has but a corner of this drop as its field - nevertheless is free and independent in the face of the universe. The giant oak, upon one of whose leaves the droplet hangs, is not.

Every image draws us deeper into Spengler’s evening landscape, from an over-arching sky to forest and meadow, a single bush and twig, a gnat amid a “midget swarm,” a bird in flight, a lone fox, and even an "animalcule in a drop of water." There is a great stillness over everything, yet the scene is filled with insects and animals and the passive motions

of flowers closing in the setting sun and twigs stirring in the wind. Our first impression is of pastoral repose, but we no sooner become aware of our separateness “in the presence of this blind dreamlike earthbound existence” than the mood turns to "enigmatic fear." The passage is pure Spengler in its counterpoint of dramatic oppositions and the soaring direction of his thought. From a darkening, Grimms brothers' landscape, the passage grows to metaphysical proportions in evoking that same “world-fear” out of which his culture-souls were born.

Spengler's “word-pictures” are indeed worth a thousand words. His abend landscape recalls not only the title image of his work but also the deep twilight world of Caspar David Friedrich's wooded landscapes, the ties to the Black Forest in German history and culture, and, in twentieth-century literature, the dread of isolation in the face of overwhelming forces, a feeling that accompanies what Spengler sees as the inevitable winter "twilight of the west.”

Spengler is no more out of date than the classic twentieth-century writers who share some aspect of his sensibility. Images of an individual trapped in wintertime in fact recur among a surprising number of modern works, and in Kafka’s writings, in particular, they intensify his pervading theme of the hopeless journey. In The Castle (1926), the land surveyor K. is called to his assignment during winter, when landmarks are obliterated; in "The Bucket Rider" (1919), the narrator ascends “into the regions of the ice mountains" and is "lost forever,” and, in "The Country Doctor" (1919), the narrator leaves for his patient at night as “a thick blizzard of snow filled all the wide spaces between him and me," only to find it impossible to return home “through the snowy wastes," where he is "exposed to the frost of this most unhappy of ages.” Other examples include the snowfall over Ireland in James Joyce's "The Dead" (1916), the atmosphere of entrapment in a Swiss alpine sanitarium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924), the entire convict literature of the Gulag, and the mood of harshness and rigidity that dominates 1984, which is announced at the very beginning through “a bright cold day in April,” a “vile wind,” “a swirl of gritty dust," and the window pane of Winston Smith’s apartment, through which “the world looked cold” outside.

Orwell's division of the world into three warring blocs also has its counterpart in Spengler’s future wars “for the heritage of the whole world,” in which “continents will be staked" and "new technics and tactics played and counterplayed”; likewise Orwell's “Hate Week” and "Two-Minutes Hate”:

. . . in the background, unseen, the new forces are fighting one another by buying the press. No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will become quiet and go home. . . . A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined.

The systematic enforcement of controlled agitation requires a constant drum-beat of inflammatory slogans and shifting targets, a process that Orwell elsewhere likens to a blow-torch, which can be turned in any direction at will. In Spengler's words, "What the

Press wills, is true. Its commanders evoke, transform, interchange truths," and "the needle of public opinion," precise as any gauge, swings round to the new party line. As in 1984, agitprop is cynically directed toward the thought-control of entire populations by "The dictature of party leaders" who aim to bring people "en masse . . . under their own mind-training" for the sake of limitless power. For Spengler, this dynamic recalls the rigorous “expression-will of early Gothic . . . but cold, controlled, and Civilized" in the worst sense of the word. On June 18, 1940, four days before the fall of France, Churchill exploited the conventional picture of the Gothic to the same effect when he warned England that,

if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

By 1940, the word “civilized” had indeed taken on a sinister meaning. In a grim corroboration of Churchill’s speech, Orwell begins The Lion and the Unicorn with the following terse remark: "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me.”

Ever since the French Revolution, writes Spengler, modern civilization has been taking shape as the "Faustian" equivalent of the city-civilizations of earlier cultures. It is during this phase that the tensions of “waking-consciousness become more and more dangerous,” the pulse of nature’s rhythms become increasingly faint, and old towns and cities are bypassed, disappear, or are radically transformed. In his memoirs, Chateaubriand notes that the medieval festivals of Brittany that he knew as a child had all but vanished and that in the aftermath of the revolution the social and political world in which people would be raised would no longer outlast their lives. A little over a century later, Orwell would develop this motif in his picture of England on the eve of World War II, as the narrator in Coming Up for Air returns to his childhood town on the Thames and discovers a semi-industrial city that he last knew as a type of the old English village. Everywhere he sees ghosts of his past until it occurs to him that he is the ghost and that a harsh new world has taken the place of the old (8), with its rows of "faked-up Tudor housing," the river covered "with a film of oil on it from the motor-boats," cheap suburban lawn sculpture "where the beechwoods used to be," a Truefitt Stockings factory that is now "making bombs as well as stockings," and a nearby RAF aerodrome. "Funny," he says to himself. "It was exactly to escape the thought of war that I'd come here. But how can you, anyway. It's in the air you breathe."

In an earlier time and a new country, the Rip Van Winkle effect was the subject of mirthful optimism about the workings of history and fate. An eternal child in a sleepy colonial village, Rip makes his final escape from his scolding wife one day by taking a long country walk and scrambling "unconsciously . . . to one of the highest parts of the Kaatskill mountains," where he meets the ghosts of Henry Hudson's crew, is knocked insensible by their Holland gin, and sleeps through the American Revolution, the metamorphosis of his quiet hamlet into a thriving town, and the happy transformation of his domestic life.

Bowling's hyper-active eye looks out upon a very different world, and grimmer yet the tensions of "waking-consciousness" in Spengler's "stone Colossus," whose growth can be charted in the rise of the "late-season" cities of nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction, documentary literature, and poetry: the soul-deadening Coketown of Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), the teeming streets of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62), the "colossal conceptions of modern barbarity" in Rimbaud's Illuminations (c. 1870), the dark tenaments of Cendrars' Easter in New York (1912), and "the monstrous scenery" of "slag-heaps, belching chimneys, blast-furnaces, canals, and gaso-meters" in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). They are the twilight cities of what Spengler calls "the hard cold facts of a late life," like the "dull canal / On a winter evening round behind the gashouse" in Eliot's The Waste Land.

________________

(1) Eugène Delacroix, Journal (1822-54), trans. Walter Pach, Crown Publishers, 1937, p. 551.

(2) This was not a theoretical argument for Burke but the position of Parliament itself: "In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles I called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, 'Your subjects have inherited this freedom,' claiming their franchises not on abstract principles 'as the rights of men,' but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers." Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965, p. 36

(3) "Firmly bound [to a] mother-region" even when the culture expands in its "world-city" phase. "Ubicunque lingua Romana, ibi Roma" is a late-Classical expression of this idea, the globalization of "Faustian" technics its "late-Western" form. On the ties between a "mother" landscape and its culture, Spengler offers the following examples, among others: In Egypt, "The sacred way from the gate-buildings to the tomb-chamber, the picture of life, is a stream - it is the Nile itself become one with the prime-symbol of direction. . . . And just so, in some mysterious fashion, the Euclidean existence is linked with the multitude of little islands and promontories of the Aegean, and the passionate Western, roving in the infinite, with the broad plains of Franconia and Burgundy and Saxony."

(4) See Spengler's characterization of "Spring" in "Table I. 'Contemporary' Spiritual Epochs," Vol. I.

(5) Consider, for example, Billy Budd's name and innate innocence, coupled with his origins as an infant foundling and resemblance to Adam in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, whereby Melville's tale reaches the heights of nineteenth-century plant symbolism,

whose apotheosis appears in the transfiguration scene when Budd is dropped from the spar, "and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended, and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn."

(6) Spengler, "The Relations between the Cultures," The Decline, II: 55. On the same page, Spengler exclaims, "What a wealth of psychology there is in the probings, rejections, choices, transvaluations, errors, penetrations, and welcomings! - and not only between Cultures which immediately touch each other . . . but also as between a living Culture and the form-world of a dead one whose remains still stand visible in the landscape." One gets no sense from Collingwood and his successors that Spengler even considered these relationships, much less gave them prominent attention in Vol. II.

(7) On p. 58 of Vol. II, Spengler lists twelve key features of Classical art known to Renaissance artists that had no "influence" on their work. Vasari's Lives provides a principle reason, for one cannot read it without appreciating just how deeply Gothic Christianity still permeates their world. Michaelangelo, to cite a telling instance, was renowned among his contemporaries as a Dante scholar of the first order.

(8) Unlike the radical changes that he portrays in the novel, Orwell's celebration of England's continuities in The Lion and the Unicorn speaks to its central purpose as a contribution to the war effort, as were his broadcasts for the BBC.


Closing Thoughts On Spengler (1)



Conceived in view of an imminent world war, The Decline of the West bids a long farewell to a vanishing world, whose fate is mirrored in the "blossoming and fading" of other "once flourishing cultures" (1). Their end is all the more poignant in that they are "sublimated life-essences," like "the flowers of the field," which is also the "mother" landscape of their prime symbols, or "first visible structure, / So that what first appears, even in plants, is the child" (2). Hence Spengler's "Rural-intuitive" epoch of a culture's awakening, such as the "infant Christianity," born in the "springtime" of the Magian world, and "that deeply-felt relationship between plant destiny and human destiny which is an eternal theme of all lyrical poetry."

A decade later, Spengler would speak of destiny exclusively in terms of global war and spiritual disintegration. His "fateful thundercloud which is passing over this century" is a symbol of this doom and one of the most concentrated images in all his works. Like Borges, Miller, and his other admirers, I too revelled in the densely-packed language of


The Decline and the drama of its "virile pages"; yet when I began to reflect upon his emblematic storm cloud, it seemed to say more about the man and his times than I felt I could ever express. For weeks I could get nothing into perspective until a familiar sound from U.S.A. pierced my mental fog and made it all come clear. It was the voice of John Dos Passos in "Meester Veelson," beginning with the president's triumphal entry into France in December, 1918; and in the moment I recalled it I was drawn once more to the catastrophic years in which Spengler wrote The Decline, only this time in view of the human cost and of worse to come:

At the station in Paris he stepped from the train onto a wide red carpet that led him, between rows of potted palms, silk hats, legions of honor, decorated busts of uniforms, frock-coats, rosettes, boutonnières, to a Rolls-Royce. (Did Meester Veelson see the women in black, the cripples in their little carts, the pale anxious faces along the streets; did he hear the terrible anguish of the cheers as they hurried him and his new wife to the Hôtel de Murat, where in rooms full of brocade, gilt clocks, Buhl cabinets, and ormolu cupids the presidential suite had been prepared?)

Beginning with delegates from twenty-seven nations, "the grand assembly of the peace conference" finally came down to the leaders of the three principal powers,

Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Three old men shuffling the pack, dealing out the cards: the Rhineland, Danzig, the Polish Corridor, the Ruhr, self-determination of small nations, the Saar, League of Nations, mandates, the Mespot, Freedom of the Seas, Transjordania, Shantung, Fiume, and the Island of Yap: machinegun fire and arson starvation, lice, cholera, typhus; oil was trumps.

For Dos Passos, the peace was just as grotesque as the war. The Hôtel du Marat and Palace of Versailles appeared like ghosts of old-world opulence against the background of Europe's devastation, and, in the ensuing spectacle of the treaty makers, "Three old men" began playing a high-stakes game, with economic policy itself the strategic principle, and "oil was trumps."

From Spengler's point of view, the table had been prepared in the midst of the war, and the subsequent treaty, followed by new rounds of economic warfare through "the Bolshevik economic offensive expressed in the Five Year Plan" and "the Dawes and Young plans," only helped to guarantee the outbreak of another war :

In 1916 there set in, side by side with the military war, a systematic economic war, to be carried on when the other came inevitably to an end, and from then onward the war aims were oriented more and more in that direction. The Treaty of Versailles was not

intended to create a state of peace but to organize the relation of forces in such a way that this aim could at any time be secured by fresh demands and measures. Hence the handing over of the colonies and the merchant fleet . . . and finally the reparations, which England, at least, intended not as war indemnification but as a permanent burden on German industry until it should collapse. . . . What it really amounts to is that the life of one's own nation has to be gained at the cost of destroying that of others. It is the struggle on the keel of the overturned boat. And when all other means are exhausted, then the oldest and most primitive, the military means, will come into their own again.

In Spengler's reading of events, Europe had reached the edge of the storm by 1878, its course marked by global colonization, world-scale economic rivalries, the modernization of war, and "competitive arming for potential wars." Looking back at the enormity of the disaster and its consequences for the west, Spengler asks if it is even clear who won and who lost. "In 1918," he writes, "we thought we knew." In reality, the whole of Europe lost, the proof being that the war's "great problems are today as far from solution as ever." Nor could it be otherwise, he concludes, for "The truth is, a new form of world has arisen, as the precondition for future crises which must one day set in with crushing force."

By the 1930s, it would have taken a hard dose of the old Allied propaganda to believe that the Great War would be "the war to end all wars." This was the slogan that Jean Renoir addressed in his cinematic masterpiece The Grand Illusion (1937), but it is only now, after the failure of the League of Nations to oppose Japanese and Italian aggression, the subsequent failure of French and English diplomacy to appease Hitler's ambitions, and the current state of the United Nations as a clearing house for terrorism, that we have finally caught up with Spengler's prediction that "the oldest and most primitive, the military means, will come into its own again." Today its time has come, from the so-called "rogue states" of Iran and North Korea to the jihadist militias of Hamas, Hezballah, and the Taliban, the quasi-military drug cartels of Asia and Central and South America, and the world-wide network of Al Qaeda, all of which are exploiting the increasing loss of authority, will, and national identity in the west and its steady drift toward formlessness. A telling symbol of this growing void is the fact that Hitler and Stalin, the rulers of one-time powerful yet inherently chaotic regimes, have once again become models of totalitarian leadership, Hitler and Nazi ideology in the jihadist world, and Stalin among such tyrants as Castro, Vladimir Putin (with direct ties to the KGB), and, before his overthrow by American forces, Saddam Hussein.

Spengler's storm cloud sums up a terrifying world-picture that confronts us from the beginning in The Hour of Decision: we live in times that are "far more terrible than the ages of Caesar and Napoleon," the world has become possessed of a "frightful reality," the sheer danger of life "comes once more into its own," and History, with a capital H, reappears "as it really is - tragic, permeated by destiny," fate, and chance. Once again, as in The Decline, Spengler reads human history almost as a fact of nature, here depicted as an uncontrollable. destructive force: "Thunderstorms, earthquakes, lava-streams; these are near relatives of the purposeless, elemental events of world history."

Those who know their classics have heard this voice before. It is one of the oldest on record, and it comes down to us from the very beginning of our literary heritage:

As inhuman fire sweeps on in fury through the deep angles of a drywood mountain and sets ablaze the depth of the timber and the blustering wind lashes the flame along, so Achilleus swept everywhere with his spear like something more than a mortal harrying them as they died, and the black earth ran blood. (3)

Like his other "near relatives" of war and social crisis, Spengler's "fateful thundercloud" belongs to that same "dominion of force" that is for Simone Weil "The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad," which she describes as "the purest and loveliest of mirrrors" for those who "perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very centre of human history" (4).

Fires, floods, and tempests are among the many "inhuman" events of nature that Homer associates with war; yet, as Weil demonstrates, in the Iliad force takes many forms, and its universal sway is such that "In this poem there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck" to it. Grief and humiliation are as universal as slaughter, a soldier who triumphs one day can be destroyed the next, and the rage of the conquering hero, which deprives him of reason and pity, has its counterpart in the blind fear that petrifies his victim. In this ruthless equation, "both, at the touch of force, experience its inevitable effects: they become deaf and dumb" and are thereby "turned to stone." By its very nature, writes Weil, "nobody really possesses it."

How then is the Iliad "the purest and loveliest" of its "mirrors"? The answer lies in "the extraordinary sense of equity which breathes through" the work, so much so that "the note of incurable bitterness that continually makes itself heard" has the unique quality of proceeding "from tenderness," which "spreads over the whole human race, impartial as sunlight":

Never does the tone lose its colouring of bitterness; yet never does the bitterness drop into lamentation. Justice and love, which have hardly any place in this study of extremes and of unjust acts of violence, nevertheless bathe the work in their light without ever becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent. . . . The whole of the Iliad lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience - the destruction of a city. This calamity could not tear more at the heart had the poet been born in Troy. But the tone is not different when the Achaeans are dying, far from home.

Weil's insight into Homer, as exquisite as any in The Birth of Tragedy, gives new meaning and a new emotional coloring to Nietzsche's thesis on the Greek union of Dionysian fury and Apollinian form. Spengler would have especially admired the phrase "impartial as sunlight," for it is an exact word-picture of what he means by the "noonday" clarity that the Greeks achieved in their finest creations and with the strictest economy of means, above all in the Doric temple. It is this concentration on the "pure Present" of the "near and completely viewable" that is for Spengler a defining trait of the "Euclidean

soul," and he would have been struck as well by Weil's classically-oriented thinking in her definition of force in somatic terms as "that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing":

Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and in the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us.

How different the "Faustian life-feeling" in Spenger's eyes, which longs to discover the hidden workings of nature and bend them to its will through the power of machines. Hence

the significance of the perpetuum mobile dreamed of by those strange Dominicans like Petrus Peregrinus, which would wrest almightiness from God. Again and again they succumbed to this ambition . . . They listened for the laws of the cosmic pulse in order to overpower it. And so they created the idea of the machine as a small cosmos obeying the will of man alone.

Later still, Leonardo and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus will envision feats of engineering that reach "as far as doth the mind of man" (5), and, in our own time, as Spengler writes, "The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it." Moreover, this "intellectual intoxication" has far from run its course. In 1927, Collingwood insisted that Spengler's predictive claims were worthless (6), yet his eye for the future was as accurate as General Billy Mitchell's, who foresaw the supremacy of air power eight years before Collingwood wrote his essay. In December, 1941, nineteen years after Vol. II of The Decline appeared, carrier-based Japanese planes almost crippled America's Pacific fleet in just under two hours. Six months later, three of those carriers succumbed to U. S. Navy dive bombers within minutes of each other, and in 1945 two Japanese cities were vaporized in seconds. As in the Iliad but augmented by what the military calls "force multipliers" of seemingly limitless power, "Somebody was here, and in the next minute there is nobody here at all."

So much for "those dreamers," writes Weil, "who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past." In the 1920s and '30s, Cendrars knew similar dreamers who "believed in the coming of socialism," whereas "I could foresee nothing but the ancient slaughters ... war modernized by science" (7). By 1916, he had seen enough to convince him that this would be our future. In L'homme foudroyé, he recalls a soldier on the western front who disappeared in a shell-burst right before his eyes, and in The Trans-Siberian (1913) he took readers on a journey through apocalyptic scenes of the Russo-Japanese War, the first of his many exposures to "war modernized by science." It was this work that led Dos Passos to call him the Homer of "Turbines, triple-expansion engines . . . speed, flight, annihilation," which have become our own "cruel and avenging gods" (8).

Spengler began The Decline just before The Trans-Siberian was published and died in the year that the third part of U.S.A. appeared. Weil's essays on the Iliad and the origins of

Hitlerism were written between 1938 and 1940, and Orwell began 1984 toward the end of World War II and completed it in 1948. Although he rarely mentions the writers of his time, I like to think that if Spengler had read these works he would have recognized their authors as "superlative types" and keen observers of the modern scene, far different from the mass of intellectual "fumblers" and the carnival tricksters of the cultural avant-garde, whom he scornfully dismissed as ""pretentious fashionable artists, weight lifters with cardboard dumbells." It is worth noting that all four writers - Cendrars, Dos Passos, Orwell, and Weil - had witnessed the downward slide up close. The central vision of U.S.A. is the waste of a generation; both Weil and Cendrars were present at the fall of France in 1940 and associated its collapse with the uprooting of Christian faith in the French Enlightenment; Orwell's original title for 1984 was "The Last Man in Europe," and even Cendrars' break with his fellow artists and writers has a Spenglerian ring to it. As he writes in L'homme foudroyé, "not a year passed between 1924 and 1936 without my spending one, three, or nine months in the Americas, chiefly South America (when others were going to Moscow), that's how tired I was of the old Europe and despaired of its future and the future of the white race."

A traveller and adventurer since his teens, Cendrars saw combat from 1914 to 1916 and reported on Hitler's invasion of Belgium in 1940 (Chez l'Armée anglaise). Dos Passos saw the Great War as an ambulance driver after graduating Harvard, undertook an extensive trip through the middle east soon after the Armistice, and was the most cultivated, well-travelled, and politically courageous of the great American novelists of his time. Orwell went from Eton to the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, lived among the working poor in England and France, served with Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, and resumed work as an author and journalist, which included wartime broadcasts on the BBC. Weil recapitulated Orwell's early life by going from the École Normale Supérieure to teaching and political action, working in factories until her health gave out, and deepening her political education during her brief time in Spain, after which she had a conversion of a kind to Christianity and in her few remaining years attempted to work for the French Resistance in London, where she wrote her last and greatest work, The Need for Roots (1943). Spengler, by contrast, was a scholar and thinker from first to last, and, although he enjoyed wide contacts and a wide public audience, he lived far differently than Weil, the only other philosophically-oriented writer in this group.

I am drawn to these writers because of their distinctive voices, intellectual energy, and grounding in reality, in the same sense as Maxwell Geismar said of Dos Passos, that he "really knew what had happened to his society" (9). One feels their special connection to the age in almost all their works, and yet, although their affinities are close, they are not interchangeable, for we are dealing with highly charged personalities, among which Spengler's stands alone. Even in the case of Weil, whose analysis of tyranny and propaganda is second to none, we are always aware of the warmth of her intelligence, as we are of deep human sympathies in the writings of Cendrars, Orwell, and Dos Passos. All four had an aversion to intellectual conformity, but not even Cendrars, who detested the French "intelligentsia," could have cut the avant-garde to the quick as Spengler did, for he had been one of them when he came of age as a writer and witnessed the all-too-human path of their decline, which he describes as a gradual descent from invention and

discovery to a sterile aestheticism as their celebrity status increased. He continued to keep a place in his heart for Modigliani and enjoyed the company of Léger, a fellow veteran who had been gravely wounded in the Argonne, as he had been near the Somme, but as he wrote in his farewell to that once inspiring group, "The modern painters have profoundly disappointed me." This too came from the heart and spoke to a wound of another kind, as Spengler did when he wrote of surviving "the misery and disgust of these years."

Everything that Spengler felt about Germany's defeat and subsequent failures is summed up in that phrase, yet, unlike Dos Passos and the others, he rarely mentions actual human suffering; and it is a remarkable fact that this same thinker, whose two major works are practically symphonic in their range of feelings and impressions, can also sound as implacable as the "first crash" from "the fateful thundercloud that is passing over this century." Words such as “all,” “only,” “no one,” “no longer,” "must," and “no more” come readily to his pen, especially in The Hour of Decision, whose every page conveys a warning that "History recks nothing of human logic," that "The pacifism of the century of Liberalism must be overcome if we are to go on living," and that "No one living in any part of the world of today will be happy," although "many will be able to control by the exercise of their own will the greatness or insignificance of their life-course. As for those who seek comfort merely, they do not deserve to exist."

Spengler is hard (10), and not for his erudition only, nor even for his challenging use of "certain basic terms," such as being and becoming, world and soul, and space and time, "which carry strict and in some cases novel connotations." The man himself is hard, to the point where his words are often misinterpreted by association with the rhetoric of Hitler's cult of power. When Spengler says, for example, that "those who seek comfort merely . . . do not deserve to exist," his words ring in our ears, as they did in Gunther Gründel's, with an instant echo of the Leader's voice. What Gründel admired we despise, but it was a false echo in 1934 and remains false today; for Spengler says almost the same about the future of Germany when he warns that the Nazis' political triumph came too easily "to open the eyes of the victors" and that if any western nation, especially his own, continues to ignore its dangerous position in the world, then "fate - and what a fate! - will submerge us without mercy."

Spengler got it right about Germany. He was also quick to see that Marxism had become a school for third-world revolutionaries, and he reads like today's news when he speaks of the renewed threats to the nations of the west:

For the first time since the siege of Vienna by the Turks they have again been put on the defensive, and they will have to commit great forces, both spiritual and military, into the hands of very great men if they intend to weather the first mighty storm, which will not be long in coming.

The prospects are not good. In the closing pages of The Hour, Spengler writes that "The white ruling nations have abdicated from their former rank. They negotiate today where yesterday they would have commanded, and tomorrow they will have to flatter if they are

even to negotiate." Tomorrow has come, and our enemies are now throwing our pandering back in our face. In an article on President Obama's decision to chair a meeting of the U. N. Security Council on nuclear nonproliferation without "Naming names, or identifying actual threats" (National Review, September 5, 2009), Anne Bayefsky remarks that "the spectacle of proclaiming affection for world peace in the abstract" will be taken as yet another sign of appeasement by all "rogue states," especially Iran. "As a Teheran newspaper close to the regime snickered in July: 'Their strategy consists of begging us to talk with them.'”

If Heller had read Spengler's prediction in light of these words, he would have taken them as further proof that Spengler was attuned to "the destructive tendencies of the age" because he himself had "a crude and wicked mind." As we saw earlier, nothing that Spengler could have said in his defense would have shaken Heller from his position, for he ignored the fact that Spengler was issuing real warnings, and he compounded this failure with a confused religious argument against the predictive accuracy of his "Destiny-idea." This was his contribution to the vexed question of the "Spengler problem," behind which every critic had his own reason for shutting his eyes. Whereas Hitlerites like Gründel were disappointed and then outraged by Spengler's critique of the Nazi revolution, and Fennelly's "men of learning" found fault with his scholarship, his methodology, and famous "pessimism," Heller disputes the indisputable by claiming that he "is not a historian, but a false prophet" and that the test of a true prophet is not whether his projections are right or wrong but how pure and sincere he is in his "concern for the things threatened by human sin and divine anger." It never once crosses his mind to consider the historical analysis that led Spengler to his conclusions or that there might be something to the idea that there is a fatality at work in human affairs. Unlike Berdyaev, who distinguishes between Spengler's "atrophied religious sense" and the brilliance of his intuitions, Heller wants to have it both ways and argues that a "false prophet" is more likely to be right the more he is complicit in "the evil future." One has only to replace Spengler's name with Dostoevsky's and his argument falls apart.

Weil would have been incapable of constructing a thesis along Heller's line of reasoning, not so much because of its flimsiness, although that too, but because her religious thinking, as strict as Spengler's insights, led her to the same conclusion as his that the salvation of the soul is the central teaching of the Gospels, that Christ expressed it perfectly when he said "My kingdom is not of this world," and that "'Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's' means: "Fit yourselves to the powers of the fact-world, be patient, suffer, and ask it not whether they are 'just.'"

The "fact-world" is Spengler's chosen sphere and in every time-frame he examines. His reports from the future are almost always on target not only because he has a solid working knowledge of science and history but also because of his command of current events and freedom from wishful thinking and ideological bias of any kind. In The Decline, he writes that "Everything depends on our seeing our position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it we cannot evade it"; and in The Hour he speaks of a wholesale flight from reality among masses of people and party ideologues of all persuasions, who crave illusions in place of facts and indulge in an

"evil sentimentality" that celebrates one utopian ideal or another - the workers' state, world peace, etc. - all of which are "artificial and lifeless," ignore what men "were and are and not what they ought to be," and cannot be put into practice except through a particular "craze for organization which, becoming an aim in itself, produces bureaucracies that either collapse through their own hollowness or destroy the living order." In his analysis of mob hatred for "the living order," Spengler's critique of Europe's radical movements reads like an update of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, which Spengler both knew and admired.

Spengler is no more a clairvoyant than anyone else. When he says "I see further than others," he is not only thinking of all that he knows of the present but also commenting on his certainty that "the forces which will sway the future are no other than those of the past." Cultures may differ, but the forces remain the same; and, as "at the commencement of the Imperium Romanum, so today, the form of the world is being remoulded from its foundations, regardless of the desires and intentions of 'the majority' or of the number of victims demanded by every such decision." The Hour of Decision could well be subtitled "The Metamorphosis of Power," for it is the constant theme of his observations on imperial Rome, western history after the establishment of the ruling nation-states, and world history ever since "The first flash and crash of the fateful thundercloud which is passing over this century."

Orwell was off the mark when he included Spengler in the fascist orbit, yet his wartime writings on London and Kipling call attention to the subject of power in a way that sheds light on a trait of temperament that Spengler shares with them. In "Rhythms of History," I noted Orwell's observation that both writers draw our attention to far-flung places where brutality is the norm, but he also suggests that they are able to describe this side of life convincingly because it corresponds to a streak of brutality in themselves. Indeed, Orwell had it himself or he could not have engaged in "the dirty work of Empire" (11) or depicted a fictional tyranny so menacingly real that readers behind the Iron Curtain were suprised to learn that its author had not lived under the Soviet regime. He had read its literature, anatomized its propaganda, and escaped its clutches in the nick of time in Spain, yet no amount of empirical knowledge without the emotional certainty of what hatred, deception, and ruthlessness feel like could have created the world of 1984. When I finished reading the novel for the first time, I threw it across the room as though it were a hateful thing, and there are moments in Spengler that have also caused me to recoil.

______________

(1) Nikolai Berdyaev, "The Pre-Death Thoughts of Faust" (1922). Berdyaev Online Bibliotek Library.

(2) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "The Metamorphosis of Plants" (1797), trans. Christopher Middleton, in Selected Poems, Suhrkamp / Insel Publishers, 1983, p. 155.

(3) The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore, The University of Chicago Press, 1951, Book XX, 417, ll. 490-94.

(4) Simone Weil, "The Iliad or The Poem of Force" (1939), trans. Mary McCarthy, in Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Milles, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986, p. 192.

(5) Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus (1588), Washington Square Press, 1959, I, i, l. 64. And again, "Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war / Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp's bridge / I'll make my servile spirits to invent!" I, i, ll. 99-101.

(6) See R. G. Collingwood, "Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles," Antiquity, 1927. For a contrasting and highly perceptive rereading of The Decline, see Adda B. Bozeman, "Decline of the West? Spengler Reconsidered," The Virginia Quarterly, Spring, 1983.

(7) Blaise Cendrars, L'homme foundroyé, Denoël, 1945, p. 343 (trans. mine).

(8) John Dos Passos, "Homer of the Trans-Siberian," Orient Express, Harper and Brothers, 1927, p. 165.

(9) Maxwell Geismar, Introduction to The Big Money (1936), the third volume of U.S.A., Washington Square Press, 1961, p. 3.

(10) On the contrast between the dogmatic simplicities of "multicultural" studies and the intellectual demands of The Decline, see Thomas Bertonneau, "The Jargon of Mock Ethnicity: Multiculturalism and Diversity as Virtual Thinking," Praesidium, Fall, 2001.

(11) George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant" (1936), Penguin, 1970, I: 266.


Closing Thoughts On Spengler (2)


This final Part 5 (B) concludes "'I See Further Than Others': Reflections On Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West and The Hour of Decision", a serial essay by Steve Kogan.

It is rare for Spengler to speak of the actual death of a culture. The past for him is "living history," and even the end-time Cosmopolis that he envisions will be rooted in a "life-feeling" all its own. Its core impulses, however, like those of earlier city-civilizations,


will be fact-oriented and materialistic rather than soulful and inward, and eventually the body itself will die, the last remains of "the great petrifact."

As in Weil's reading of the Iliad, but far less emphatically, The Decline "lies under the shadow of the greatest calamity the human race can experience - the destruction of a city" (1); yet it lacks the qualities of justice and compassion in Homer that "bathe the work in their light without ever becoming noticeable themselves, except as a kind of accent." No such accent is heard in The Decline, nor could it be, since the Iliad for Spengler belongs to "the spiritual childhood of the Doric," whereas The Decline is an "early winter" expression of an irreligious, or "unphilosophical philosophy - the last that West Europe will ever know."

During the long twilight of the west, the "late man" lives in the last rays of its culture. In 1984, they are reflected in Orwell's beloved English classics (2), and for Spengler, they glow in the art and music of the west; but where Orwell's "last man in Europe" is worn down and finally broken by a totalitarian state, Spengler's cultures are doomed by life itself:

All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the arts themselves. One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be - though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet of notes may remain - because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.

There is no sad reflection on the ruins of time, no grim commentary such as Hamlet's in the graveyard scene, only the dark finality of Kafka's epitaph on existence, "The meaning of life is that it stops" (3). Hence Spengler's icy detachment when he depicts the death of "the great Cultures," for those same "majestic wave-cycles" that mirror their "becoming" end in a seascape of complete desolation: "They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste." All that was alive in a culture disappears into the abyss, as all of Moby-Dick would have been swallowed up by "the great shroud of the sea" if Ishmael had not miraculously survived to tell the story of the Pequod; that same Ishmael who heard Father Mapple's magnificent sermon on the Book of Jonah before setting out on his voyage and who, before the services began, gazed upon the chapel's memorial tablets of sailors who "placelessly perished without a grave" and was uplifted by the sudden thought that "Faith, like a jackel, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope."

Spengler has no such faith. His very temperament goes against the grain of Christian optimism, yet he sees "the ungraspable phantom of life" that Ishmael sees and with an equally vivid sense of its urgency in human consciousness. This recognition, which recurs throughout The Decline, reaches the height of metaphysical drama in his reading of the confrontation between Jesus and Pilate, when the world of facts and the world of religious truths stood face to face in a scene that is "appallingly distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism." To the Roman Procurator's unforgettable question "'What is truth?' . . . the silent feeling of Jesus answers . . . by that other which is decisive

in all things of religion - 'What is actuality?'" For Spengler, this encounter marks the turning point in the life of Jesus, an encounter that he knew in another form in Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor," in which Christ returns when the Inquisitorial fires begin. The Inquisitor has him arrested and confronts him with a long argument against his message of spiritual freedom. Christ remains silent throughout and at the end replies with a kiss on the Inquisitor's "bloodless aged lips." Spengler was deeply attracted to Dostoevsky and knew of his spiritual rebirth in the Czarist prisons of Siberia. He regarded his figure of Alyosha Karamazov as a type of the nascent Russian soul; and he may also have had the tale in mind when he remarked in Vol. II that if Dostoevsky had written his life of Christ, "as he always intended to do - [it] would have been a genuine gospel like the Gospels of primitive Christianity."

Spengler's chapters on Russia and early Christianity have an unspoken presence in the darkest scene of all in The Decline, in which he depicts the death of a culture as the final triumph of the "fact-world" over the spirit. In this brief anti-Gospel of history, a "Second Religiousness" appears but drained of all redemptive meaning and as barren as the final "winter" epochs of the past. Here there are no "lilies of the field," no parables taken from life, and no real confrontations, nothing but a religion that seems tragically meaningless in the face of a dead civilization and nature's implacable indifference:

In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. . . . And while in high places there is eternal alterance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts forever. . . . Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and the alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it - but it is there.

This is the "fact-world" in its starkest and most unforgiving form, where the "eternal alterance of victory and defeat" is as desolate as "the alterance of land and sea," and not even those who have "overcome all doubts forever" seem to know anything more than a "holy, still Being" that resembles the peace of the grave. It is not the end of history but the end of a history, whose early stages now confront us in the dangers that Spengler spells out in The Hour.

In his introduction to The Decline, Spengler hints at Russia's significance for the fate of the west, and in The Hour he reads our future in light of radical movements from the French Revolution to the Soviet regime, whose work of subversion and murder Khrushchev would later sum up when he said "We will bury you," which was not only a concise expression of its aims against the west but also a sinister echo of what Bolshevism had wrought upon masses of Russians as early as the civil war (1918-23). It took Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago to expose the full horror of what Spengler understood in 1922 when he asked "who to-day seriously thinks of the millions that perish in Russia?"

In The Hour of Decision, Spengler accurately portrayed the regime as a modern form of "Asiatic" savagery, and he also predicted that a new culture would be born from the Russian soul; but he never linked the two, nor, so far as I know, did anyone else in the west foresee that the spirit of Dostoevsky would survive a prison system that was spread across a world "of ice and virgin forest" and bore the imprint of Stalin's malevolence in the very "course of the stars":

It was the end of November, and a recent snowstorm had whipped up enormous drifts around the building. The sky was clearing, with the beginning of a severe frost, and the stars glittered as always in winter, with a gloomy power and a remote indifference to all that is alive. (4)

Like other Russian writers who were raised to be "Soviet citizens" and were later thrown into the camps, Lev Razgon understood to the last bitter dregs that the only real aim of Marxist propaganda was destruction. In The Hour of Decision, Spengler describes the Soviet leadership as "a ruling horde, called the Communist Party," which uses "murder as a routine administrative method," and he explicitly calls Trotsky a "Bolshevik mass-murderer"; but what is even more interesting is that nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russian writers anticipated what Heller calls "the evil future" in terms that accord with Spengler's philosophy of history. Unlike his western critics, writes Berdyaev, Russians would not have been "taken aback" by The Decline, for "All the Russian religious thinkers have . . . sensed a certain sacred terror at the perishing of culture and the ensuing triumph of civilisation." In Berdyaev's concluding words, "This -- is our style of book."

Berdyaev had only read the projected contents of Vol. II when he wrote his essay, but he had already gleaned from Prussianism and Socialism that "Spengler sees in the Russian East that new world, which will come to replace the dying world of the West"; and to his Russian readers he also observed that "for us these thoughts are of interest, this turning of the West towards Russia, these expectations, connected with Russia." Nevertheless, Spengler does not allow us to forget that he is writing as a westerner in "an irreligious time," in which "we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization" and not "on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or Mozart time." As Berdyaev notes, Spengler's thoughts bear the mark of a culture that "has lost its faith and is tending toward decline." Moreover, writes Berdyaev, Spengler is unusual in that he does not grieve over this loss or struggle to find a way back. Living in a "cold" time, he makes a virtue of necessity and absorbs what has gone before to the maximum of his intellect, his intuition, and whatever remains to him of old-world soul.

Berdyaev sees Spengler clearly because he sees the man. He knows that there is a "Spengler problem," yet he not only acknowledges but also insists that Spengler is "exceptionally gifted, at times close to genius in certain of his intuitions," a point he makes several times. What compels his attention is not Spengler's mind alone but the entire character of this "exceptionally gifted" thinker, which for him is split between the man of high culture and the man of civilization, between soul and soullessness, and which is strangely untouched by the depths of spirituality that he himself has sounded.

Here is a philosopher-historian who has "examined the role of Christianity within the fate of European culture" and knows that "culture is religious by its nature," yet he sees no common humanity in the workings of history, no "single mankind" to give it meaning, a discrepancy that Beryaev calls "the most striking side of his book." In everything from the Greek classics and Christianity to science, art, and mathematics, Spengler "has been able to express very noble thoughts," but "he does not understand the religious life of mankind," and "In this is his tragedy."

Berdyaev's conclusion depends upon his prior observations. He does not say that Spengler's case is tragic because he is an unbeliever but because, for all his "noble thoughts," there is a universal fact about the interior world that escapes him. He can "feel" himself into the inwardness of a Beethoven string quartet, the conspicuous care for the past and future in Egyptian architecture, and the eternal Present in the Classical soul, but he remains an outsider, as distant from "the religious life of mankind" as the spiritual distances that he sees among the high cultures of the world.

One does not have to be a believer to experience what Berdyaev calls mankind's "bond of fate." Of the modern thinkers I have read, no one has understood human affliction in Christian terms more clearly than Weil, yet she says that she only got as far as the foot of the Cross; while Orwell, a professed unbeliever, nevertheless affirmed his faith in common human decency and believed that fraternity was the only spiritual value that could replace God in an irreligious time. Seen in this light, what Berdyaev means by his pronouncement is that there is something profoundly incomplete about Spengler, for he is incapable of experiencing any sense of communion with his fellow man. In Berdyaev's understanding of The Decline, this incapacity amounts to a "spiritual deformity" that is "almost its monstrous defect."

There is a telling passage in Spengler's early letters in which he also seems disconnected from himself. Writing to Hans Klöres in October, 1914, he sees with uncommon clarity that France "displays for the last time her best qualities, a sense of honour and personal courage: all the quicker will the marasma settle in in the coming years"; and he sees as well that the future of Germany "is unfortunately equally unconsoling, if one thinks and feels as a man of culture." One assumes that Spengler includes himself among those who despair that "The ray of inward culture from the time of Goethe . . . has been completely extinguished by this war," yet seven months later he writes to Klöres that he does not "regret" the loss of "the Germany of Goethe" but simply regards it "as a fact."

What then is Spengler "as a fact?" He states in no uncertain terms that the war has "completely extinguished" the soul of Goethe's Germany, yet shortly before the outbreak of hostilities, he tells Klöres that he is "deeply buried" in his manuscript, and he remains hard at work until its publication, despite privations, loneliness, and bouts of depression. Through it all, he is sustained by the guiding lights of Goethe and Nietzsche, the two great exemplars of German culture "to whom I owe practically everything," as he will write in 1922. He himself is living proof that his cultural heritage has not been "completely extinguished by this war," yet he does not seem to recognize that this too is a fact.

Borges draws a compelling picture of Spengler's solitary existence at this time, but there is a sense in which Spengler is a solitude even to himself, since he gives no weight to his own example. It is a "ray of inward culture," after all, that he carries within himself and in just that productive sense which Goethe believed was the true test of ideas. By contrast, writers such as Razgon and Solzhenitsyn never lost faith in the power of the individual to keep the human flame alive; and from Kafka, Freud, and Thomas Mann to Niels Bohr, Albert Schweitzer, and Furtwängler the Goethean ideal was likewise not "completely extinguished by this war" (5).

Among my culture heroes cited in these pages, Spengler will always remain an enigmatic and disturbing figure who "thinks and feels as a man of culture" yet lacks the human touch that the others have in overplus. I say this despite all that I have learned from him and all that I too admire in his "very noble thoughts." Had the voice of Dos Passos not come to my aid, I might never have taken Berdyaev's critique to heart or understood what was missing for me in Spengler's "fateful thundercloud"; for, although he speaks brilliantly of "world-fear" and the "mighty destiny" that is even now "whirling" whole nations "in confusion, exalting them, destroying them," there is no intimate human presence to relate to in his work other than his richly personal prose, no feeling of compassion over the recurring spectacle of waste and loss, as in the Iliad and U.S.A., and no unfolding of a "painful mystery," such as A. C. Bradley saw in Shakespeare's tragedies.

There is, however, and again by contrast, something of Jack London's Wolf Larsen in Spengler's critique of pacifism in The Hour of Decision ("Man is a beast of prey. I shall say it again and again"), and there is even more of Napoleon's icy mind, which moved with ease, as Larsen's did, across whole areas of knowledge and experience yet remained similarly unbending in its lack of human sympathies. Spengler sees him as the first of the "late men," and there are no less than twenty-three references to him in The Decline and fifteen in The Hour. When Spengler wrote "I see further than others" he was repeating almost word for word a remark that Napoleon once made about himself (6).

In yet another arresting parallel, there are two big things that neither saw and this too in similar ways, for when Napoleon crossed the Nieman River into Russia, he had no real grasp of the physical and spiritual forces that would soon converge against him; and it is striking to see a similar blind spot in Spengler regarding the German army of August 1914, about which he made one of the few telling errors that I have come across among his many predictions and with the same fatal lack of skepticism that led Napoleon to exclaim to the Compte de Narbonne in March, 1812 that his fears of Russia's vastness, her "barbarity," and even "a gigantic effort on her part" would prove groundless:

Facts will dispel all these fears. Barbarian nations are superstitious and have simple ideas. A single blow delivered at the heart of the Russian empire, at Moscow the Great, Moscow the Holy, will in a single instant put this whole blind and apathetic mass at my mercy.

Spengler speaks in the same disastrous Napoleonic mode when he tells Klöres in his early wartime letter, "I am a thorough optimist. We shall win and in such a way that the great sacrifices will be richly compensated." This was a far cry from Spengler's later observation that all of Europe lost the war, and, as far as I can tell, the only German sacrifices that were richly compensated were Spengler's own struggles to complete The Decline. In November, 1915, he writes to Klöres that he has again been rejected for military service on account of his health, and he goes on to describe his "sleeplessness, severe headaches, and my frightful nervous sensibility," to which he adds,

For the last few weeks I have been working day and night, literally right through the night, sitting by a candle owing to the lack of kerosene, trying to collect and transcribe whatever was possible, and getting a quantity of collections of notes ready for the printer. Nevertheless, it was for me a sort of walk to execution - it can't be expressed otherwise.

The dark times ended with the success of his work, but there was one problem that remained intractable, which was writing itself as a way of life for him. Although he tells Klöres in May, 1915 that his "task . . . is more valuable" to Germany than any active service he could perform even if he were well, six months later he confesses to "the feeling that I must see my life spoilt because its whole reality is carried out on paper." In "Pessimism?" he distances himself from writers and thinkers whose work is not "in the service of active living," and his passion for history as "a vast treasure . . . of experience" is for me his most sympathetic trait. I know just what he means when he says that there are "long days when paper disgusts one," and he sends me back to Goethe once more when he tells Klöres, "If you read the misunderstood Tasso, Goethe's most profound drama, you will discover deep down this self-contempt of the 'mere writer.'"

This is the Spengler who draws me in, yet a moment later he begins to harden his position in that peremptory way of his, first when he claims that "Shakespeare had this feeling even stronger, for the caricature of the poet [Cinna] in Julius Caesar is self-ridicule," and then when he turns to his favorite example of a man "who is to himself a Destiny" and writes that "Napoleon also in later years had a repulsion towards people who wrote books" and that "One will always be envious of Napoleon . . . because he always was able to realize his ideas without any opposition."

I shudder at the thought of such a man, yet Spengler knew his Bonaparte better than he did his Julius Caesar, for his chilling exaggeration highlights one of the great seductions of Napoleon's public image, which was his apparent freedom from common constraints, to the point where it seemed that he might fulfill his ambition to establish what he called "a new society" across Europe through the sheer force of his intellect, his energy, and will. It took the Battle of Borodino, Russia's scorched earth policy, and the frightful retreat in the winter of 1812 to set in motion his decline; and it likewise took Russia's greatest nineteenth-century novelists to anatomize the disastrous consequences of his "Destiny-idea," Tolstoy in epic form in War and Peace and Dostoevsky in psychological terms in Crime and Punishment. As for his French critics, Chateaubriand cut through Napoleon envy in one deft stroke when he remarked in his memoirs that "Bonaparte had nothing good-natured about him. Tyranny personified, he was hard and cold: that

coldness formed an antidote to his fiery imagination; he found in himself no word, he found only a deed, and a deed ready to grow angry at the slightest display of independence: a gnat that flew without his permission was a rebellious insect to his mind."

Both in victory and defeat, the man who was "to himself a Destiny" taught the author of The Decline a harsh lesson on the fate of nations. Spengler never forgot that Germany had long been a battleground of foreign armies, and, as Weil observes in The Great Beast, it was Napoleon himself who "awoke German nationalism by his conquests and oppression. . . . German romanticism, one of whose aspects is power-worship . . . dates from the time when the whole strength of the country was strained to breaking-point against Bonaparte."

For Spengler, the central event of the Befreiungskrieg, or War of Liberation, was the awakening itself. Like the young Nietzsche, who wrote in The Birth of Tragedy that "the German spirit . . . like a knight sunk in slumber," will one day "find itself awake in all the morning freshness following a tremendous sleep," Spengler believed that "the Prussian standard" was one of those "wordless ideas" that lives "by inheritance" and "still sleeps in the depths of our soul as a permanent potentiality. It is to be reached only through the living example and moral self-discipline of a ruling class, not by a flow of words or force."

The last phrase speaks to the principle means by which the Nazis gained ascendancy and indulged their delusions of omnipotence. As in Weil's analysis of force, Spengler remarks on the blinding effects of sudden triumph through "the intoxication of the moment," when "Elements come into power which regard the enjoyment of that power as an event in itself and would fain perpetuate a state of things which is tenable for moments only." To rely on coercion and the ideological "compulsion of a program" is a weakness, not a strength and no substitute for a national heritage, which has grown and been tested over time, and therefore "if a stable foundation is to be laid for a great future, one on which coming generations may build, ancient tradition must continue effective."

Although his words fell on deaf ears, Spengler's lesson itself has been time tested and is even now coming to consciousness among untold numbers of Americans who have never heard of him yet have awoken to their inbred faith in the nation's founding documents. The Decline wears well. In his comment on "the reverence" in which "the American" holds the Constitution, Spengler notes that every remnant of political forms "that are older than the [French] Revolution and Napoleon . . . will before long rise to incalculable values and bring about historical effects which no one yet imagines possible."

This was yet another of Spengler's predictions that came true "before long" and in a way that he too could not have imagined. By 1929, as in 1911, he saw the portents of an imminent world war, yet nothing in his bleak analysis of England and America allowed for the possibility that the power of "ancient tradition" would soon come alive in their second allied effort, nor could he nor anyone else have guessed that even Stalin would appeal to the Soviet masses' love of "Mother Russia" should a world war break out.

Spengler noted that America was overtaking England as a naval power, yet he understood it least of all the major states, and, like so many European writers and thinkers since the nineteenth century, he uncharacteristically followed the prevailing group-think in The Hour of Decision when he described it as a nation populated by raw immigrants, "alien" and "foreign-thinking," with an "intellectually primitive upper class, obsessed as it is by the thought of money," and a way of life that is "organized exclusively from the economic side and consequently lacks depth." His misjudgment of the nation's character was ingrained in him from the beginning of his career, as we see in his letter of October 1914 to Klöres, in which he could not have been more wrong when he said that "a completely soulless Americanism [would] rule" Germany after the Great War was over.

Spengler had a true insight into the conservative strain in American life, yet nothing could shake his ignorance of a nation for whom "the War" was merely "a novel sport," its religion "a sort of obligatory entertainment," and its people a mass "of trappers, drifting from town to town in the dollar-hunt, unscrupulous and dissolute; for the law is only for those who are not cunning or powerful enough to ignore it." By contrast, even the old Hollywood got it right in Meet John Doe (1941) when Henry Connell, a hard-boiled newspaper editor who has been drinking more than is good for him, tries to warn a naive "John Doe" that the paper's new owner is a would-be dictator who has elevated Doe to national prominence as a political screen for his aims. Connell even touches on the notion that "the War was a novel sport" for Americans when he says to Doe that he saw his father killed before his eyes and a moment later exclaims,

I like what we got here! I like it! . . . And we don't want anybody coming around changing it, do we? . . . And when they do I get mad! I get boiling mad. . . . I get mad for a lot of other guys besides myself—I get mad for a guy named Washington! And a guy named Jefferson—and Lincoln. Lighthouses, John! Lighthouses in a foggy world!

Spengler never put the case for founding traditions more concisely than Robert Riskin did in his screenplay, with its Christian-political image of our democratic lights shining "in a foggy world" (7).

It pleases me to think that it took an American novelist to provide what was missing for me in The Hour of Decision and help me organize my thoughts; and it was only by chance that I recently discovered a little-known classic of American journalism that describes the first shock of "the fateful thundercloud" in a way that I had never read before. The book was With the Allies (1914) by Richard Harding Davis, the nation's most renowned war correspondent of his time. Davis had covered several battle zones around the world, beginning with Cuba in the Spanish-American War, and he was in the thick of things once more during the first weeks of August 1914, when the German army attempted to cripple France by way of neutral Belgium and avert the threat of a two-front war with Russia in the east and England and France in the west.

Borges writes that Spengler identified with Germany's isolation and felt that he too, like his nation, was alone. This existential sense of "Germany in danger" would always color his patriotism, yet he accepted the invasion of Belgium without any thought of its

military or political risks or that it might even be fatally flawed, as indeed it was (8). In his letter to Klöres on October 25, 1914, in which he made his blind prediction of a German victory, he was carried away by "the intoxication of the moment" for the only time in his life:

The possession of Belgium alone, which will certainly remain German, is an enormous gain: 8,000,000 inhabitants, a harbour on the Channel, a gigantic industry, and a very old civilization. Also we shall get what we need, an African Colonial Empire. The invasion of England is technically possible and is included in the plans of the General Staff. I assume that it will take place at the beginning of November.

Those who accused Spengler of Nazi sympathies were looking in the wrong place for his conception of a powerful German state, which was not to be found in the racist "herd" mentality of 1933 but in the Germany of 1914, whose "old-Prussian 'style'" he regarded as a legitimate weapon of "high policy," as it had been in the War of Liberation against Napoleon and again at Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, "which just barely staved off a general offensive of the armies poised at our borders by preventing Italy's declaration of war" (9). For Spengler, 1813, 1870, and 1914 are the key dates in modern German history when "the Prussian standard" welled up in defense of "this masterpiece of a state, our most genuine and personal creation - so personal that no other people has been able to comprehend or imitate it, hating it instead like everything daemonic and inscrutable."

If this dark view was fueled by fears of a highly organized state, as Spengler says it was, the German army of 1914 made it a reality in the infamous "rape of Belgium," in which masses of people fled before the advancing juggernaut, civilians were executed to enforce a brutal occupation, and what Spengler welcomed as the possession of "a very old civilization" was laid waste from Brussels to the German border, most heart-wrenchingly the medieval-Renaissance city of Louvain (Leuven), an exquisite example of the period to which he refers as the late springtime of the Gothic world.

It was Davis who brought the onslaught home to me and in the same Homeric language as Spengler's "Thunderstorms" and "lava-streams" of history. Like so many others of his generation, Davis had been schooled in the classics, but it was the voice of a first-rate American journalist that spoke to his readers as he reported the three-day march of the German army through Brussels, which he first witnessed in front of the Hôtel de Ville and from his own hotel room later that night:

After an hour, from beneath my window, I still could hear them; another hour and another went by. They still were passing. Boredom gave way to wonder. The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a mountain. It was not of this earth, but mysterious, ghostlike. It carried all the mystery and menace of a fog rolling toward you across the sea. . . . And when early in the morning I went to the window the chain of steel was still unbroken.

It is "war modernized by science," in which a mechanized flood of men and equipment moves "like a river of steel" and "as smoothly and as compactly as an Empire State express." Davis' prose is as unrelenting as the thing itself: "This was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute strength of a steam roller." The singing of the men "in absolute rhythm and beat" is "like the blows from giant pile-drivers," and even when "the machine halted" at night, "the silence awoke you, as at sea you wake when the screw stops." In the end, Davis declares, "all modern inventions" had gone into perfecting "this monstrous engine, with its pontoon bridges, its wireless, its hospitals, its aeroplanes," and "its field telephones" through which "the vanguard talked to the rear."

For several days, With the Allies stopped me in my tracks. Here was an eye-witness account of an invasion that Spengler welcomed without any regard for "a very old civilization" or the hot-button issue of Belgium's neutrality. Was Heller somehow right after all? Was Spengler's "Destiny-idea" the projection of an urge to hand the west its "marching orders" toward an "evil future"? Could he himself be one of "the enemies of the spirit"? He tells us in no uncertain terms that he regards Germany's loss of "the inward ray" simply "as a fact," takes pride in embracing "the hard cold facts of a late life," and sees "no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim" in history "but only facts."

The old confusions once again, and once again a Spengler problem at their core, for he is no ordinary fact-man but believes that "All that is, symbolizes," that "From this property of being significant nothing is exempt," and that nature itself "is a possession which is saturated through and through with the most personal connotations." Nevertheless, since "every kind of significance," like everything actual, "is also transient" (10), the fact-world provides "no tribunal of the spirit." Moreover, The Decline itself is bound by this constraint, insofar as "my own philosophy is able to express and reflect only the Western . . . soul, and that soul only in its present civilised phase."

No separation between a historical and a religious sensibility could be more complete, since for Spengler "There is no bridge . . . between the course of history and the existence of a divine world-order," between Pilate and Christ, Spengler's vision of history and Dante's, or, for that matter, between Spengler and Heller. All the old beliefs have been shattered "in the moving crush of facts," as he writes in Vol. II, and they point with "the emphasis of a symbol" toward a twilight, soulless age. Here too, Bonaparte provides a key to Spengler's thinking; for, ever since "Napoleon and his violent-arbitrary government by order," we have entered the "time of Contending States," when respites between "catastrophes of blood and terror" are marked by futile cries for "reconciliation of the peoples and for peace on earth":

The Hague Conference of 1907 was the prelude of the World War; the Washington Conference of 1921 will have been that of other wars. . . . The only moral that the logic of things permits to us now is that of the climber on the face of the crag - a moment's weakness and all is over.

All or nothing. That was how Spengler saw Germany's position in 1914 and the condition of Europe by 1922. His predictive accuracy was equally extreme, both zero and a hundred percent, for he was as wrong in his forecasts of a Germany victory as he was right in his perspective on the future of the west. The radical terms of his argument are clearly disturbing ("a moment's weakness and all is over"), yet they help explain why he says little about the ravages "of the World War," only that we have entered a time that is "far more terrible than the ages of Caesar and Napoleon."

On the other hand, Spengler has much to say about the ravages of revolution and cultural decay, which are for him the true enemies of the spirit in "the course of history":

Such is the trend of Nihilism. It occurs to no one to educate the masses to the level of true culture . . . . On the contrary, the structure of society is to be levelled down to the standard of the populace. General equality is to reign, everything is to be equally vulgar. The same way of getting money and the same pleasures to spend it on: panem et circenses - no more is wanted, no more would be understood. Superiority, manners, taste, and every description of inward rank are crimes. Ethical, religious, national ideas, marriage for the sake of children, the family, State authority: all these are old-fashioned and reactionary. . . . Bolshevism does not menace us, it governs us. Its idea of equality is to equate the people and the mob, its liberty consists in breaking loose from the Culture and its society.

Bread and circuses: in this one memorable phrase, the Roman poet Juvenal epitomizes all that the masses wanted in post-republican Rome. Spengler cites it five times in The Hour, and in The Decline he recalls the view from the heights in Juvenal's "This I will, thus I command," the concise expression of what he means by "violent-arbitrary government by order." Hence his focus on classical Rome, which has left us a more detailed record of this phase than any other culture and whose one recognizable name in the popular mind sums up for him the political character of every imperial age:

The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations that marks the beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists and ideologues what they like - in the world of facts it means the transition from government in the style and pulse of a strict tradition to the sic volo, sic jubeo of the unbridled personal régime. . . . None of the innumerable revolutions of this era - which more and more become blind outbreaks of uprooted megalopolitan masses - has ever attained, or ever had the possibility of attaining an aim. What stands is only the historical fact of an accelerated demolition of ancient forms that leaves the path clear for Caesarism.

When he speaks of "the moving crush of facts," Spengler has in mind not only the Great War but also revolutions and insurrections from Germany to China and the collapse of old empires in Europe and the middle east, a global train wreck that wrought incalculable damage to "ancient tradition" and which Dos Passos bitterly describes in Orient Express as "the great bloody derailment of the War."

Whatever "idealists and ideologues" might have made of it, for Spengler the "accelerated demolition of ancient forms" meant that the survival of the west was at stake. Anything less than "the courage to face facts as they are" was for him an evasion of responsibility; and to those who cannot help but keenly feeel the passing of "the inward ray," the only comfort that he offers is that they are still capable of a "brave pessimism" and that our twilight time still possesses the "creative possibilities" of a "civilised spirituality." It is that or nothing, for "The age itself is radical," and unless the west lives up to its potential and accepts that "there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with the coldest and most abstract means," it will not even have a future, since other "powerful intelligences" have dedicated themselves to its destruction. No utopian beliefs or party programs can answer to our needs. Indeed, their only effective influence is to hasten the end, most conspicuously through the politics of the left, which increasingly subverts the institutions of the west in every field and provides de facto support for the aims of radical Islam, Marxist-inspired dictatorships, and gangster drug cartels, all of which have made alarming inroads into the nations of the north-Atlantic region. In "Prussianism and Socialism," Spengler addresses the "latecomers" of the west and offers the following terms of survival: "Ideologies are a thing of the previous century. We no longer want ideas and principles. We want ourselves." It is heartening, if not surprising, to discover that a similar thought is alive today among millions of Americans who still cherish the "creative piety" that inheres in "forms that are older than the [French] Revolution" and have not lost their faith in the Declaration or the Constitution. In a recent survey by the respected pollster Scott Rassmusen, dated August 3, 2010, we learn that, by a large majority and in opposition to their ruling elites, "The American people don't want to be governed from the left, right or center. They want to govern themselves."

________________

(1) In Weil's essay on the Iliad, cited in Part 5 (A). Troy was not the only city to fall under this shadow in the ancient world. On the destruction that "left cities burned and wealth plundered" across the Eastern Mediterranean region, see Thomas Bertonneau, “'The Catastrophe': What the End of Bronze Age Civilization Means for Modern Times," Praesidium (Winter 2009).

(2) See the conversation on Newspeak between Winston Smith and his friend Syme, who predicts that, in the coming decades, "The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron - they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be." George Orwell, 1984, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1949, p. 47.

(3) More precisely, Kafka's presumed epitaph on existence, since the line has been widely attributed to him but never documented, as far as I know. The thought is pure Kafka all the same.

(4) Lev Razgon, "Jailers," in True Stories (1989), trans. John Crowfoot, Ardis Publishers, 1997, p. 229.

(5) Interestingly enough, over a hundred leading lights of the time, including Freud, Einstein, and Richard Strauss, celebrated Goethe in a collection of writings that was partly intended as a contribution to German wartime propaganda. On the publication of Das Land Goethes 1914-1916, see Matthew von Unwerth, Freud's Requiem (2005). Freud's brief essay "On Transience" ("Vergänglichkeit") appears in translation in the appendix. It was written at the same time as Spengler was concentrating his efforts on The Decline and invokes the same Goethean theme of "Alles vergänglich" that is central to the work. Unlike Spengler, however, Freud was deeply troubled by the war. In November 1914, he writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé, "I know that science is only apparently dead, but humanity seems to be really dead."

(6) "I see farther into the future than others . . ." From "Conversation, 1817, reported in English." In The Mind of Napoleon, J. Christopher Herold, Columbia University Press, 1955, p. 202.

(7) "And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not," St. John, I:5. There are direct parallels to the Gospels at key moments in Frank Capra's celebrated work, particularly in the dialogue, music, and lighting during the final moments of the film (midnight on Christmas Eve). In the last line of the screenplay, for example, the scene directions call for swelling music, "suggesting emergence from darkness and confusion to light and understanding."

(8) For a detailed overview of the Schlieffen plan and its many weaknesses, see John Keegan, "War Plans," An Illustrated History of the First World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), pp. 19-39.

(9) In "Prussianism and Socialism," section 1, opening paragraph.

(10) For a particular instance of this world-view, see the passage cited in the third paragraph of this section ("All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the arts themselves"). As a final point about Spengler in relation to Freud, it is worth noting that Freud reflected on this same thought in "Vergänglichkeit" and in similar Spenglerian terms: "A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely. . . . A time may indeed come when the pictures and statues which we admire to-day will crumble to dust, or a race of men may follow us who no longer understand the works of our poets and thinkers . . . but since the value of all this beauty and perfection is determined only by its significance for our own emotional lives, it has no need to survive us and is therefore independent of absolute duration." In Freud's Requiem, pp. 216-17.


Volkmar Weiss and the Spenglerian Cycle of History


From the desk of Michael Presley on Sun, 2011-01-02 18:52

With the on-going publication by The Brussels Journal of Steve Kogan's overview of Oswald Spengler, it may be relevant to mention the work of a present-day social scientist who has attempted to explain Western civilizational decline from a quasi-Spenglerian perspective. In The Population Cycle Drives Human History—from a Eugenic Phase into a Dysgenc Phase and Collapse (Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3, Fall 2007) Dr. Volkmar Weiss of the German Central Office for Genealogy in Leipzig writes: “In his book The Decline of the West [Spengler] comprehended the essential elements of the downward spiral in a typological way, without proving his conclusions statistically.” However, “In order to interpret this behavior and to predict its outcome, we need more insights than the analogies by Spengler of the growth and final decay of all cultures.” Accordingly, Weiss approaches the subject of decline from a bio-genetic perspective using population genetics, IQ, and demographic shifts as explanations.

Weiss begins discussing the Aristotelian “Cycle of Constitutions.” Offering an anecdote from his school days he writes:

“About 50 years ago, in the former Communist East Germany, I asked my schoolteacher what would happen after Communism? He answered: Nothing else, because Communism is the final stage of human history.”

Now, after the fall of the Soviet empire, his teacher’s faith in Communism strikes us as naïve. Yet Weiss contrasts the teacher's faith with that of current Western notions of the democratic ideal offered as a universal replacement for all peoples, regardless of their cultural or biological history. We observe concrete instances in NATO excursions into Afghanistan, the previous Balkan campaigns, and the United States invasion of Iraq. Nevertheless, the regime of Western democracies cannot be arbitrarily transferred, and in any case, permanence is never guaranteed. Weiss remarks on the Aristotelian conception of a hierarchy of governmental forms where the good or ordered constitution is followed by its opposite. Thus the progression from monarchy to aristocracy, and oligarchy to democracy inevitably leads to more degenerate forms. However, for reasons to be discussed, Western-style democracy cannot sustain itself and the cycle starts anew:

“Democracy inevitably degenerates into a corrupt government of the plebs and mobocracy. A dictatorship of the proletariat, which in the name of democracy redistributes without any constraints from poor to rich, from the brave and diligent to the paupers, destroys the economic power of the society in its roots. Finally, the people will hail an autocrat as savior, and after a complete breakdown the cycle starts again.”

For Weiss, examples are commonplace, but some, while known, are not intuitively obvious in their manifestation. For instance, he explains the history of Russia as being in abject decline from at least the late 19th century, wherein the era of Soviet Communism was just another step on the road to final decay inasmuch as the tyranny of Stalin was

replaced by the “oligarchy of the Politburo.” Underlying the current political-social-cultural climate, one discovers the presence of a transforming demographic shift resulting in a definite qualitative decline within the population genotype. Associated with demographic shifting is the inexplicable lowering of birth rates to sub-replacement levels among the indigenous group . Weiss views the group as an organic entity, and as such the survival of any organism is primarily dependent upon its ability to reproduce. As Aristotle remarked in De Anima, only through reproduction can the individual participate in immortality. So too the civilization.

The political cycle is different for those groups not possessing the necessary intellectual capital to sustain the high level historically demonstrated within Western social political order, although the end is the same:

“States with only short phases of upswing and a low average IQ have no chance to reach the stage of fully developed democracy at all, but oscillate between oligarchy and tyranny, before they are drawn into the abyss.”

Hence the wrongheadedness of Western elite's attempts to impose the democratic ideal on peoples whose natures could never be accepting of the gift.

Weiss documents how Western economic practices inhibit the organic demands for population maintenance. For instance, the introduction of women into the workplace, and the general level of consumerism that allows people to “forget” their biological duty to the species as they work for “things” (consumables external to their biological nature), exacerbates decline. In a contradictory manner, the equalitarian ideology coupled with Third World immigration in effect lowers the “civilizational IQ” necessary for the maintenance of a preexisting technological base—the ordered ground of our externally oriented consumer society. This has the effect of taxing both the social and technological infrastructure to the point where it cannot be sufficiently maintained.

With regard to declining population Weiss writes:

“It is crucial to understand that...regulation of population density and behavioral changes being in a feedback loop, a full cycle requires the complete destruction of social hierarchy and a total disorientation of the female individuals— i.e., their diversion away from the successful reproduction and rearing of offspring. Today’s humans call such behavior 'emancipation' and 'feminism'."

For Weiss, it is the general introduction of universal political suffrage and the idea of equality against hierarchy that indicates the beginning of the point of no return. There does not appear to be any hope for the West, as we are, in this respect, very late into the game.

The upshot of his ecological-genetic analysis is simply that the lowered global IQ (really, the dilution of the Western genotype) must result in a commensurate inability to maintain

a Western derived technological infrastructure. In turn, this inability will usher in an emerging “Dark Age.” He is not optimistic:

“A population with a destroyed hierarchy as a whole is becoming more and more incompetent and unable to act, and the individuals are fighting each other. In an overcrowded cage with rhesus monkeys we see murder and homicide, and with rodents apathy, sterility and cannibalism.”

In conclusion Weiss understands the historical cycle as a Spenglerian organic process that must play itself out. If this is so, then our best days are behind us, at least until the beginnings of the inevitable cyclic upswing.

Dr. Weiss' original journal article may be accessed at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/6557/1/MPRA_paper_6557.pdf



http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/6557/1/MPRA_paper_6557.pdf

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