Oswald Spengler was a German historian, philosopher, and political writer. He is most famous for his "Der Untergang des Abendlandes" (The Decline of the West), the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918 and by 1926 had gone through thirty printings. It was a very influential historical study of the cyclical nature of western civilization, that strengthened the pessimism of the 1920s.
Background
Oswald Spengler was born on May 29, 1880, in Blankenburg, Germany. He was the son of Bernhard and Pauline Spengler. His older brother was born prematurely in 1879 when his mother tried to move a heavy laundry basket and died at the age of three weeks. Oswald's father was a duty-bound, humor- and spirit-less postal official in the Prussian state, his mother a matron who tyrannized the household. One of his aunts, a renowned dancer, died before Spengler could meet her.
Already at the age of three, the hypersensitive child had visions and states of anxiety. The family moved from the Harz mountains to the town of Soest in Westphalia. Later, the family moved to Halle. Oswald had younger sisters Adele, Gertrud, and Hildegard.
Education
Spengler attended the strictly pietistic Francke Foundations (Franckesche Stiftungen). He often stole away in the afternoons and became a voracious reader in the university library, devouring books on history, antiquity, science, and biology. The library became his refuge from the family apartment, where the mother kept most of the rooms closed and Oswald and his younger sisters spent the days in one room.
At age 15, Spengler filled whole booklets with visions and detailed sketches of two fictitious empires, down to administrative procedures and economic statistics. At 17, he wrote a stage play about Moctezuma, probing the encounter of two alien cultures. That briefly resurfaced in "Decline of the West," in which he compared the Aztec civilization to a flower carelessly beheaded by a passer-by. Spengler sent the drama to an uncle who was a theater director in Kassel and was warmly received and hosted there, but nothing became of the play.
He passed his Abitur (university entrance level exams) at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1899 and was exempted from military service due to a heart defect. After studying mathematics, science and philosophy at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and Humboldt University of Berlin, he experienced a great disappointment: his dissertation on Heraklit was initially rejected due to a lack of quoted literature. In 1904 he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree. He also passed a state exam for the teacher's profession with a thesis on the development of the eye in various species.
Career
In 1905, Spengler began his preparatory year in teaching but despised the school setting, suffered a nervous breakdown when he saw his first school and left. Spengler was back to teaching in 1906. A small inheritance from his mother allowed him to quit school in 1911 and move to Munich. Title and idea for "Der Untergang des Abendlandes" were ready as early as 1912, but it took six distressful and lonely years with long nights, terrible food, and cold winters to finish the first volume. Yet he prevailed. During the same period, he wrote two (unpublished) memoranda, one to the emperor, and one to German nobility, as well as the autobiographical sketches that were later published in Eis Heaton.
His book finally was published in September 1918, a few weeks before the end of World War I. With its provocative thesis and illustrative though the often misunderstood title, the book catapulted to bestseller status quickly and brought his author national recognition. The quintessential bachelor Spengler was finally able to live the life of a gentleman of financial independence, if not wealth. His overnight fame gave him access to influential figures and industrialists. Between 1919 and 1924, Spengler sought to promote a conservative revolution by assembling an elite network of industrialists, intellectuals, and a German conservative press cartel. After 1924 and the Hitler-putsch - Spengler despised the National Socialists for their proletarian demeanor - Spengler withdrew from active networking to again live the life of a very private scholar.
He devoted the last 10 years of his life too early and pre-history and metaphysics, applying approaches and asking questions that later were to morph into evolutionary epistemology. The fields of archeology and prehistory, in Spengler's time, were young and fresh and made rapid progress. Spengler saw these as worthy challenges to write a "world history from the beginning" (of humanity). A stroke in the late 1920s affected Spengler's health. Although he recovered, his productivity declined. During his final decade, Spengler produced the anthropological treatise "Der Mensch und die Technik" (Man and Technics) in 1931 as well as a few articles on early history. Two volumes of notes and thoughts about early history (Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte) and metaphysics (Urfragen) were published posthumously in the 1960s. "Der Mensch und die Technik" is currently undergoing a reassessment. Though Spengler erred on many matters, many of his insights from this period proved prescient, as was much of "The Decline of the West."
Spengler declined two University professorships offered to him in the Third Reich. During the "Röhm-Putsch," one of Spengler's friends, music critic Willi Schmid, was killed by the Nazis because he had been confused with journalist Paul Schmitt. Gregor Strasser, with whom Spengler was in contact, was also murdered.
The Nazis started an anti-Spengler campaign but quickly switched to ignoring him. In 1935, Spengler quit his board position in the Nietzsche-Archive because he did not want to agree with the Archive's support of national socialism.
Spengler published a few articles on early history in Hans Erich Stiers History Journal (Die Welt als Geschichte) but otherwise slipped into obscurity. He burned his notes for the second volume of "Years of Decision" because he was not willing to write for confiscation.
Politics
Spengler is regarded as a nationalist and an anti-democrat and was a prominent member of the Conservative Revolution. He has occasionally been called a precursor to Nazism. As much as he hoped for a German resurgence, he didn't like National Socialism, in part because he considered it much too proletarian. His writings are replete with derogatory quotes about National Socialism and its ideology. One short conversation with Hitler in July 1933 led to nothing. Here, Spengler erred: "I have the impression that all of this man is quite common." Spengler massively underestimated the destructive potential of Hitler - as did many of his contemporaries.
After 1933, he quickly grew disillusioned with National Socialism. In 1933, Spengler wrote "Jahre der Entscheidung" (Hour of Decision), also a prophetic book in which he foresaw another world war, the environmental catastrophe (as probably the first environmental thinker) and the dissolution of all colonial empires and the rise of a new caliphate. "Jahre der Entscheidung" was also seen as a manifesto of the conservative opposition against Hitler and became a bestseller but the National Socialist German Workers Party banned it.
Views
Oswald Spengler outlined his views on history in his well-known book The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes). The following are his basic postulates:
1. The "linear" view of history must be rejected, in favor of the cyclical. Heretofore history, especially Western history, had been viewed as a "linear" progression from lower to higher, like rungs on a ladder - an unlimited evolution upward. Western history is thus viewed as developing progressively: Greek ' Roman ' Medieval ' Renaissance ' Modern, or, Ancient ' Medieval ' Modern. This concept, Spengler insisted, is only a product of Western man's ego - as if everything in the past pointed to him, existed so that he might exist as a yet-more perfected form.
This "incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme" can, at last, be replaced by one now discernible from the vantage-point of years and a greater and more fundamental knowledge of the past: the notion of History as moving in definite, observable, and - except in minor ways - unrelated cycles.
2. The cyclical movements of history are not those of mere nations, states, races, or events, but of High Cultures. Spengler listed eight high cultures: Egyptian, Mesoamerican (Mayan/Aztec), Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Classical (Greek/Roman), Arabian, and Western or European. Each High Culture has as a distinguishing feature a "prime symbol." The Egyptian symbol, for example, was the "Way" or "Path," which can be seen in the ancient Egyptians' preoccupation - in religion, art, and architecture (the pyramids) - with the sequential passages of the soul. The prime symbol of the Classical culture was the "point-present" concern, that is, the fascination with the nearby, the small, the "space" of immediate and logical visibility: note here Euclidean geometry, the two-dimensional style of Classical painting and relief-sculpture (you will never see a vanishing point in the background, that is, where there is a background at all), and especially: the lack of facial expression of Grecian busts and statues, signifying nothing behind or beyond the outward.
The "prime symbol" affects everything in the Culture, manifesting itself in art, science, technics, and politics. Each Culture's symbol-soul expresses itself especially in its art, and each Culture has an art form that is most representative of its own symbol. In the Classical, they were sculpture and drama. In Western culture, after architecture in the Gothic era, the great representative form was music - actually the pluperfect expression of the Faustian soul, transcending as it does the limits of sight for the "limitless" world of sound.
Cultures have their own characteristic space concept. The ancient Egyptians saw their world in one dimension, and their architecture, which assumed the basic form of a corridor enclosed in masonry, expressed the notion of "moving down a narrow and inexorably prescribed life-path." The Russians, whom Spengler classifies as non-Western, have a "flat plane" culture, which, when free to do so, expresses itself in low-lying buildings and ethics of undiscriminating brotherhood. The Arabian culture of the Middle East, which Spengler calls Magian, views the world mysteriously, as a cavern in which "light … battles against the darkness." Its architecture is consequently interior-oriented; its religion, magical and dualistic. Altogether, Spengler claims to identify nine (possibly ten) such cultures, which have emerged at various times from "the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity." But he does not rule out the possibility of others being discovered.
3. High Cultures are "living" things - organic in nature - and must pass through the stages of birth-development-fulfillment-decay-death. Hence a "morphology" of history. The high-water mark of a High Culture is its phase of fulfillment - called the "culture" phase. The beginning of decline and decay in a Culture is the transition point between its "culture" phase and the "civilization" phase that inevitably follows. All previous cultures have passed through these distinct stages, and Western culture can be no exception. In fact, its present stage in the organic development-process can be pinpointed.
The "civilization" phase witnesses drastic social upheavals, mass movements of peoples, continual wars, and constant crises. All this takes place along with the growth of the great "megalopolis" - huge urban and suburban centers that sap the surrounding countrysides of their vitality, intellect, strength, and soul. The inhabitants of these urban conglomerations -- now the bulk of the populace - are a rootless, soulless, godless, and materialistic mass, who love nothing more than their panem et circenses. From these come the subhuman "fellaheen" - fitting participants in the dying-out of a culture.
With the civilization phase comes the rule of Money and its twin tools, Democracy and the Press. Money rules over the chaos, and only Money profits by it. But the true bearers of the culture - the men whose souls are still one with the culture-soul - are disgusted and repelled by the Money-power and its fellaheen, and act to break it, as they are compelled to do so - and as the mass culture-soul compels finally the end of the dictatorship of money. Thus the civilization phase concludes with the Age of Caesarism, in which great power come into the hands of great men, helped in this by the chaos of late Money-rule. The advent of the Caesars marks the return of Authority and Duty, of Honor and "Blood," and the end of democracy.
With this arrives the "imperialistic" stage of civilization, in which the Caesars with their bands of followers battle each other for control of the earth. The great masses are uncomprehending and uncaring; the megalopoli slowly depopulate, and the masses gradually "return to the land," to busy themselves there with the same soil-tasks as their ancestors centuries before. The turmoil of events goes on above their heads. Now, amidst all the chaos of the times, there comes a "second religiosity"; a longing return to the old symbols of the faith of the culture. Fortified thus, the masses in a kind of resigned contentment bury their souls and their efforts into the soil from which they and their culture sprang, and against this background, the dying of the Culture and the civilization it created is played out.
But is was his placing of the current West into his historical scheme that aroused the most interest and the most controversy. Spengler, as the title of his work suggests, saw the West as doomed to the same eventual extinction that all the other High Cultures had faced. The West, he said, was now in the middle of its "civilization" phase, which had begun, roughly, with Napoleon. The coming of the Caesars (of which Napoleon was only a foreshadowing) was perhaps only decades away. Yet Spengler did not counsel any kind of sighing resignation to fate, or blithe acceptance of coming defeat and death. In a later essay, Pessimism? (1922), he wrote that the men of the West must still be men, and do all they could to realize the immense possibilities still open to them. Above all, they must embrace the one absolute imperative: The destruction of Money and democracy, especially in the field of politics, that grand and all-encompassing field of endeavor.
Spengler predicted that industrialization would lead to serious environmental problems and that countless species would become extinct. He also predicted that labor from Third World countries would increasingly outcompete Western workers by doing the same work for much lower wages and that industrial production would, therefore, move to other parts of the world, such as East Asia, India, and South America.
According to Spengler, technology has not only made it possible for a man to harness the forces of nature; it has also alienated him from nature. Modern technology now dominates our culture instead of that which is natural and organic. After having made himself the master of nature, man has himself become technology's slave. "The victor crashed, is dragged to death by the team," Spengler summarized.
The Decline of the West was revolutionary less in its basic ideas than in the impressive breadth of its canvas - a feature for which it was readily attacked by professional scholars - and in its elaborate systematization of cultural and historical pessimism. Spengler acknowledged the influences primarily of Goethe and Nietzsche; to them he owed “practically everything.” From Goethe he derived his “method,” particularly his way of relating scientific insights to cultural phenomena, and his latent historical relativism. From Nietzsche he acquired the “questioning faculty,” his approach to cultural criticism.
Spengler's concept of human cultures has some affinity with G. W. F. Hegel's concept of the state. Both envisage an organic unity of human attitudes and activities that express a definite form of the human spirit. Spengler never wrote the promised metaphysical work that might have made clearer the general status of "spirit" in his philosophy of history. But his concept of it certainly differs from Hegel's, for he denies that the spirituality of successive historical units taken together reveals the developing nature of spirit itself. The units have no rational connection with one another, Spengler maintains, denying categorically that one culture can ever really understand, learn from, or (strictly speaking) be influenced by another. The divergence of his approach from Hegel's is even greater in his account of the typical career of a culture. Whereas Hegel attempted to represent not only the succession of historical units but also the succession of stages within each unit, as a rationally (that is, dialectically) ordered sequence, Spengler finds, instead, a pattern analogous to the life cycle of a plant or animal.
Quotations:
"The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play."
"What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears."
"We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man."
"Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes."
"Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect."
"This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us... to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on. This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us... to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on."
"The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort - "happiness." He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering."
"Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike, and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself."
Personality
Oswald devoured Goethe and Schiller, the first of literary influences that would later be joined by such eclectic writers as William Shakespeare, Gerhart Hauptmann, Henrik Ibsen, Maksim Gorky, Honoré de Balzac, Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Hebbel, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and others. Spengler complained of the Franckean focus on Greek and Latin that prevented him from learning "practical languages," and he was forced as a result to teach himself French, English, Italian, and, later, during his university days, Russian, through reading authors in those languages. His fluency in the languages was astounding to many, but he himself never felt comfortable enough with them to correspond with many of the authors he would later read and who would bring to bear influence on his own magnum opus in their own languages.
As a teacher, Spengler was liked by his students. Always well-dressed, he was eager to project the image of a gentleman.
