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Faust in the Twilight: Conceptions of the West in Oswald Spengler
‘Nineteen-nineteen was the “Spengler year”. Everyone seemed to be reading him; everyone was wondering just who he was.’ Within eight years of its publication in 1919, sales of The Decline of the West had reached one hundred thousand copies. Why did this weighty and complex tome excite so much interest in the years following the World War I? One of its attractions was that it purported to explain the turbulent past; but it also claimed to forecast the future of the West.
Oswald Spengler’s approach was radical in many respects. He had written a history of civilization in which the West appeared as one of many civilizations, departing from the more conventional contemporary assumption of the West and civilization as virtually synonymous. The cultural world order Spengler presents comprises multiple, organic, self-contained and essentially incommensurable civilizations. His conception of the West is infused with the sense of the organic development of society as an integrated whole within the framework of an essentially self-contained history. Furthermore, his prognosis for the West is a gloomy one of decline and disintegration: this ‘Faustian’ civilization is entering the twilight of its life-cycle. This was a significant departure from conventional assumptions of the innate progressiveness of the West; but it was one that spoke to the insecurities of the era.
Spengler’s work provides a remarkable conception of the West as a civilizational identity moving towards decay and demagoguery, which even today is unsettling. However, the ideas used to construct this conception are not unprecedented. Spengler drew on influences and traditions that represent important elements of Western culture and thinking, including views that are anti-liberal and post- or anti-modern. This chapter comments upon the ideas expressed in Spengler’s key work, The Decline of the West, but also refers to some of his shorter works. These include the essay ‘Prussianism and Socialism’ , published between the first and second volumes of the Decline; and two works published towards the end of his life, Man and Technics and Spengler’s last book The Hour of Decision
. Each of these works develops themes and ideas touched upon in the Decline. They depict the West at a time of great flux in European and world history. At the same time, Spengler’s West is deeply embedded in a broader, complex conception of civilizational history
The Decline of the West provided a grand, panoramic and ultimately pessimistic vision of a gradually decaying Civilization. Although Spengler was not necessarily typical of intellectuals in his era, his work drew on an important intellectual tradition that was suspicious, if not pessimistic, with regard to the prospects and consequences of development and the increased sophistication of Western civilization. Spengler’s pessimistic temperament and keen sense of tragedy enabled him to illuminate a dimension of man’s past as few other historians had done.
Spengler lived during an era of transition and growing tension. He was born into a Germany recently unified, a hybrid society that saw the persistence of feudal institutions within a context of modern capitalism and machine technology; a powerful community still somewhat unsure of how to achieve its role as a force in the world. The genesis of the idea for the Decline came to Spengler during 1911. The Moroccan crisis of that year, which brought Germany to the brink of war with France, was for him a portent of the catastrophe to come. This was an era of arms races, imperialist clashes and developing blocs of alliances. It was also an era of growing militancy and militarism. Spengler’s sense of pessimism and tragedy was enhanced by the personal poverty and hardship that he experienced during the course of World War I when he was writing The Decline of the West. He wrote during an era of trauma and change for Germany. Following defeat and humiliation in the World War I, Germany experienced a period of turbulence under the Weimar Republic. This political system struggled with the extreme economic pressures of hyperinflation, reparations and depression in the 1920s, and eventually crumbled under the pressure of the rise of extremist political groups that brought the National Socialists to power in 1933. Spengler’s work is infused with a sense of shame and dismay at the fate of Germany after the war. There is a palpable sense of betrayal that Spengler places on the shoulders of the German liberals and intellectuals who he believed had undermined the German nation. There is also a sense of threat emanating from revolutionary Russia and the increasing political and economic vitality of the colonial peoples.
Intellectually, this was also an era of uncertainty. Confidence in Western liberal ideas of rationalism and progress was challenged by the scepticism of authors and philosophers such as Georges Sorel, Vilfredo Pareto and
Friedrich Nietzsche. In the nineteenth century, Alexis De Tocqueville and Jacob Burckhardt had raised questions about the wisdom and future of democracy, Burckhardt fearing the manipulation of the masses by tyrants. Nietzsche took Burckhardt’s criticisms of the decadence of contemporary Western society further, forecasting that a new elite, Nietzsche’s supermen, would sweep away the decadence of the nineteenth-century bourgeois society, introducing new values of barbaric simplicity. Scholars such as Freud and Pareto proposed ‘intuitive theories’ of human action, arguing that the basis of human action might lie beyond the level of logical thinking. Such ideas challenged the assumption of man as an innately rational actor; implying human action may be driven by deeper impulses.
In intellectual currents of this era, the view was prevalent that struggle and conflict were forces of growth and renewal. The idea of struggle was integral to both the ideologies of Darwinism and Marxism and was an important element of realpolitik in the political arena Spengler’s images of the productive impact of struggle and his pessimism with regard to the future course of Western civilization reflect these trends, although he rejected Darwinism as based on superficial causality.
Within Germany, some elements of the intellectual community sought to blend the old cosmopolitan and liberal ideas of the Romantics with the realpolitik of the Germany in the machine age. Spengler demonstrates the influence of both of these trends but he stands outside the German historicist tradition that encompasses Hegel, Marx and Weber. His anti-liberal and anti-modern views reject the faith in reason and progress found in these authors, as well as the belief in continuities in history found in Hegel, for instance. On the other hand, Spengler can be located within a tradition of pessimistic thought that is represented in the German context by Nietzsche.
Spengler’s work reflects the influence of his training as a classical scholar. For instance, his conceptualization of history as a cyclical process involving organic cultures demonstrates both his rejection of progressive thought and the influence of classical thinkers. Both Aristotle and Heraclitus had applied the idea of life-cycles as observed in nature to human society. This facilitated the notion of viewing human society as passing through stages of spring, summer, autumn and winter, or youth, maturity and old age. Heraclitus further observed not only the cyclicality of nature but also its transience. Spengler knew the work of Heraclitus well, having written his doctoral thesis on the philosopher. His own work applied this concept of the natural order of things to human history. Spengler viewed cultures as progressing through a cyclical life span while constantly engaged in a process of self-transformation.
Cyclical conceptions of history were not confined to the classical scholars and can also be found in the work of Machiavelli and Vico. The Romantic Movement also adopted them in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In contrast to traditional Christian and secularized Enlightenment views of history in terms of the linear progression of mankind, the Romantic movement preferred to investigate the unique development of distinct cultures which grew like biological organisms. Spengler echoed the Romantics in his presentation of history as the study of an organic society, studying the spirit or Geist of that community as it was expressed through all aspects of society, including art, architecture and philosophy.
One of Spengler’s chief influences and a key proponent of the Romantic Movement was Goethe. His work provided Spengler with the principal character in his conceptualization of the West–Faustian man. The second key influence whom Spengler acknowledged was Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s influence was substantial, although there were points on which Spengler differed from his predecessor. Nietzsche also subscribed to a cyclical view of history believing that contemporary Western civilization was on the verge of major change. The force, which for Nietzsche impelled change, was a ‘will to power’. This is a central theme in Spengler’s Decline. Like Nietzsche, Spengler believed that politics was essentially driven and governed by elites rather than the masses.
Spengler’s perceptions of the West and of cultural world order were carved from this compilation of morphological conceptualizations. His pessimism with regard to the fate of the West is in no small part founded on his perception of civilizational histories as a natural process of growth and decay. His perception of struggle and the will to power as the dynamic forces which drive cultures derived in part from his readings of authors such as Heraclitus and Nietzsche, but were no doubt reinforced by the intellectual and political environment during which he wrote. These forces helped to shape Spengler’s distinctive understanding of the role of civilizations in history and politics.
Civilizations stood at the heart of Spengler’s complex historical philosophy. As John Farrenkopf notes, he played a path-breaking role in choosing to focus on civilizations rather than on nations or peoples as had been conventional in the nineteenth-century historiography. As a classical scholar, he was aware of the significance and vulnerability of civilizations in history. His conception of civilizations is characterized first and foremost by a sense of their plurality, and secondly by their impermanence.
Spengler distinguished between Culture and Civilization. He saw Cultures as single organic entities:
The high Culture … is the waking–being of a single huge organism which makes not only custom, myths, technique and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in itself the vessels of one single form-language and one single history.
Like any other organic being, they enter into a life-cycle which brings them through periods of growth, blossoming, maturity and decline – or childhood, youth, maturity and old age. This process lasted, on average, one thousand years. The transition from a culture at its height to the processes of decline mark the transition from Culture to Civilization: once the ‘inner possibilities’ of a Culture have been achieved, it ‘mortifies, or ‘congeals’ into a Civilization. Civilization is the period when the soul of a Culture has exhausted its truly creative potential, reached fulfilment and becomes mummified in the culture and society of the metropolis.
The distinctions that Spengler draws between Culture and Civilization have precedents in German literature, in, for instance, the work of Kant, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann. Norbert Elias notes that Kant distinguished between ‘civilization’, interpreted as a form of propriety or outward behaviour, in contrast to ‘culture’, conveying a sense of accomplishment. Zivilization was a term which meant something useful, but superficial and second rank in comparison to Kultur. Spengler’s employment of the terms similarly tends to privilege Culture as a more creative and valuable phase of social existence.
Spengler advocated a morphological approach to the study of these organic entities rather than a systematic one. To him, the history of mankind was the history of the separate development and decline of various Cultures and Civilizations. Cultures may intersect and affect one another. However, their development is not interdependent. Cultures were independent entities and mutually incomprehensible. Pursuant to this thesis, Spengler set out to demonstrate that all aspects of a Culture are shaped by the character and dynamic of the Culture rather than by a universal system of progression. Each Culture was perceived to have its own unique soul. The soul shapes a Culture’s world-view, its view of history and of nature. The uniqueness of each Culture is reflected in every aspect of its societies:
There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.
Spengler’s vision of history was of the cyclical life histories of independent cultures, ‘separate worlds of dynamic being’. Therefore, he did not see history as a rational, linear progression of mankind. Spengler rejected teleology and the rationalistic school of history that constantly sought causality instead seeing history as more spontaneous and phenomenal: ‘a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous waxing and waning of organic forms’ rather than ‘a sort of tapeworm industriously adding onto itself one epoch after another’. Therefore, like a human being, within the confines of the natural life-span and aging process, a Culture is in charge of its own quest for fulfilment.
In Spengler’s conception of history, not all populations form ‘peoples’. ‘Culture peoples’ were distinguished from primitive peoples in that they have an inner, spiritual unity that defines them as ‘nations’. Underlying nations, he argued, is an ‘Idea’. The pursuit of this idea forms the quest for the fulfilment of a Culture’s ‘Destiny’. It is the pursuit of ‘Destiny’ that forms ‘world-history’. Thus, the foundations of a Culture as a community were as much normative as objective. Spengler was only truly interested in what he described as ‘world history’. The majority of mankind, he argued, was locked into an ahistorical cycle of life and death. Only Cultures made history.
For Spengler, history was about the quest for spiritual fulfilment. Not all Cultures achieved fulfilment, some being snuffed out through contact with another civilization, as happened with Mexican Culture; others having their creative spirit stifled by the weight of an older, alien Culture, as was the case, argued Spengler, of Arabian and Russian Cultures. Still other Cultures, having proceeded through the stages of growth and decline, lingered on long after their cultural decay as the ‘scrap material’ of history, as in the case of Indian and Chinese Civilizations. What is most significant here is the sense of the histories of Civilizations as independent. The essence of their historical experiences was derived from within, not through interaction with other Cultures. Spengler’s morphological imagery described each Culture as like a seed which contains within it the vital DNA that determines its potential growth. World history becomes like a forest composed of a variety of plants. These plants may coexist, they may compete for light and nutrition and impact upon each others growth, but they remain separate plants.
A Culture’s pursuit of its ‘Idea’ was not perceived as a purely intellectual process, but one of action and struggle. Ideas are realized through actions not words. Struggle is a critical dynamic in Spengler’s reading of history. In this he echoes contemporary modes of thought with regard to the productive impact of conflict in which the stronger wins out. His work is littered with images of battle, warriors and struggles. War is for Spengler a form of creative tension, the dynamic of history. ‘War is the
creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.’ Countries existed for war, and only through war did a nation or ideology demonstrate superiority over another. Although Spengler rejected the Darwinist model of evolution through struggle, his own theories posit a cultural state of nature, nasty and brutish if not always short. The beast of prey appears repeatedly as a metaphor for a strong and vigorous leadership or culture. Pacifism is treated as symptomatic of weakness and decay. The achievement of universal harmony, even through the hegemony of a dominant order, appears to be unattainable. This overall conception of civilizational interaction differs markedly from those that see the evolution of cultures as deriving from interaction and cross-fertilization, or views different cultures as phases of civilizational evolution.
Spengler’s aim in The Decline of the West was to locate the West of the epoch 1800 AD–2000 AD in the broader chronology of Western cultural history, viewed as an organic cycle. His conclusion was that this epoch corresponds to the period of transition in the West’s maturation from Culture to Civilization. The West had already reached its peak and entered into the latter half of its life-cycle, onto the path of gradual decline. Spengler’s understanding of civilizational history leads to a distinctive conception of the West that has profound implications for the way in which he interpreted the West’s relationship with other civilizations. His conception of the West must be understood within the overall thesis of The Decline.His aim was firstly to determine the position of the contemporary West within a hypothetical organic cycle of Culture and Civilizations. Second, he sought to portray the West as a Culture separate from Classical antecedents. As Dannhauser remarks, this is a clear rejection of the traditional Hegelian division of history into ancient, medieval and modern as a process that ‘fudges’ three completely different Cultures and Civilizations. Spengler saw no such continuities in world history.
Each civilization was for Spengler an organic unit, with its own history and life-cycle. In The Decline of the West, Spengler wove an integrated history of the Western culture and politics throughout his text, linking the different stages of growth to architectural styles that characterized them. Spengler’s West was born with the awakening of Faustian Culture in the German plains c.1000 AD. During what is traditionally known as the High Middle Ages, Spengler’s new Faustian culture was characterized by Christianity, the institutions of feudalism, the establishment of imperial authority and the reformed Papacy. This era reached a stage of fulfilment in
the architecture of the Gothic era, but Spengler viewed the West as reaching its pinnacle in the art, architecture and scholarship of the Baroque era. Intellectually, it was a period of free inquiry. Politically it was a time characterized by the authority of the dynastic state. This era also saw the shift of the focus of the Culture to the cities.
The Renaissance however, represented not an era of rebirth and growth, but ‘breakdowns in internal contradictions’. As Werner Dannhauser observes, it represented a rebirth of the classical spirit in a Faustian setting, an occurrence that could not be accommodated in Spengler’s theory of the independence of Cultures. Consequently, the Renaissance is treated as a counter-movement to the Gothic ideal, but one ultimately rooted in the Gothic spirit and form. The Baroque era descended into the charm of the Rococo that for Spengler marked the development of style and form, the real creative spirit of the West beginning to ebb.
The Enlightenment was viewed as an era of criticism and destruction as expressed through rationalism, intellectual and artistic life focusing on the great cities and the political rise of the bourgeoisie. Philosophically, culturally and politically, the nineteenth century was the commencement of ‘winter’ for the West, with intellectualism and money as the key forces in politics. The industrial age was recognized as greatly empowering the West and stemming from the spiritual dynamism and ingenuity of Western culture, but it is treated as a transient phase. It is a phase that Spengler both celebrates and laments as signalling the passing of a purer, pre-industrial era. Spengler saw the twentieth century presaging the new era of blood and warfare, the coming of the new ‘Caesars’ to restore passion and traditional values to politics. The new era would be one of perpetual and total warfare for power between outstanding personalities. The great cities, or megalopolis, would continue as foci, but the cities would be beset with social problems, their intellectual and cultural life essentially sterile. Spengler forecast an eventual descent into a new primitiveness for the West – an end of history. However, while Spengler predicted the onset of major wars, he did not envisage the sudden epochal destruction of the West, but its gradual decline over several generations. This image is one of the West was entering its twilight or sunset years.
Spengler placed a high priority on the internal dynamic or soul of a civilization. To him, the Western or Faustian soul was dynamic, constantly questing, seeking to command nature, to penetrate space and to explore the concept of the infinite. Spengler’s conceptualization of the West and its boundaries are deeply interwoven with the way in which he perceived the spirit of the West.
Spengler attaches great importance to the relationship between Cultures and their territories or locations, a relationship that changes as a Culture
matures. Territory provides not only objective boundaries, but also moulds the community. From the outset, Spengler established a crucial link between territory and community. For him, the Culture of a race arises out of a particular soil and is inextricably bound to it. The shape and nature of a landscape, its flora, light and atmosphere are reflected in a Culture. Populations that migrate to a new soil or homeland gradually change and become a new race. The relationship between land and community is also seen as changing as the locus of a Culture shifts from land to city. A Culture is born on the land, but as cities develop, they become the focus of the Culture. Cities grow into large cosmopoli, becoming densely populated and rigidly constructed. The cities are necessary for the fulfilment of a Culture, but are also the catalyst of its destruction and decay. They act as the terminus of a Civilization.
These preconceptions are important to Spengler’s territorial conceptualization of the West. He sees the West as primarily a culture of north-west Europe, born in the eleventh century on the plain between the rivers Elbe and Tagus. Its character, art and architecture were shaped by the plains and forests of the brooding North, and by its subtle light, hardened by its difficult climate. Spengler portrays the West as blossoming in the Germanic heartland, but not solely confined to this region. He discusses the West as moving westward as it matured and ultimately declined, shifting in its focus from the rural north to the cities of the late nineteenth century, such as New York, London, Paris and Berlin.
This territorial conceptualization of the West is striking, not only for its Germanic locus, but also for what it excludes or marginalizes. The Mediterranean is traditionally viewed as the source of Western culture. Yet Spengler painted the societies of the Mediterranean as on the margins, occupying an ambiguous position, caught between the influences of three Cultures
– the Hellenic and Magian and Western. Spengler also explicitly excluded Russia from the West. ‘The distinction between Russia and the West’, he maintained, ‘cannot be drawn too sharply’. Given that Russia was commonly regarded as one of the great powers of Europe at this time, its exclusion from the West would have been regarded as unusual by many. However, Spengler regarded the Westernization of Russia as essentially superficial. In its soul, Russia was completely alien to the West. The Russian Revolution that Spengler argued, installed an Asiatic regime in Russia, had exacerbated this difference: ‘Russia is lord of Asia. Russia is Asia.’ Spengler’s conception of the relationship between the West and territory is, therefore, both powerful and distinctive.
Spengler’s work is popularly, although often misleadingly, associated with his views on race. Race was for Spengler a ‘decisive element’ in life that
helped shape a Culture. His references to the importance of race and ‘blood’ in a Culture’s history are frequent. However, he treats race as a spiritual, rather than a biological category. Consistent with his organic methodology, Spengler argued that races have roots in and are shaped by the landscape that they inhabit. However, he rejected notions of race as bred by physiological features, or racial identity as a function of blood descent. It was the strength not the purity of a race that Spengler viewed as important. He dismissed physiological definitions of race as symptomatic of the heavy hand of Darwinism. The qualities which defined race were inner qualities, in particular, a sense of a common ideal or destiny–’racial feeling’. Race was a spiritual and cultural bond between people, not a physical one:
In race there is nothing material but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the march of historical Being.
In keeping with this understanding of race, Spengler described the racial boundaries of the West in terms of its spiritual qualities. He describes the West as comprising Faustian races, emanating from Northern Europe, first thrusting outward into the world in the Viking migrations. While Spengler recognized important differences between national groups within the West, he believed they all shared the same Faustian spirit. Consequently, Spengler distinguished the races of the West from the peoples of the Hellenic and Magian cultures of the past and from contemporaries such as the Russian, Jewish and Arabic races.
Spengler’s West is implicitly a predominantly white West. This became more explicit in his later works, where he demonstrated a growing concern with regard to tensions and rivalries between the white races of the West and the ‘coloured races’. The coloured races, by which he meant non-white peoples living both within and outside the territory controlled by the West, resented the imperialist West and were filled with a burning desire to destroy it. This included Russia, which had now removed its ‘white mask’ and become Asiatic ‘with all its soul’. Again, we glimpse Russia as culturally distinct and distant from the West. In both Man and Technics and The Hour of Decision he warned that the coloured races would eventually turn against and conquer the exhausted Faustian man.
Although racial distinctions are critical to Spengler’s schema of civilizations, this does not make him a racialist in the sense of believing in a hierarchy of the races. He dismissed notions of innate racial superiority, or of there being a master race. However, in his later work he did argue that the West was in the process of committing racial suicide through policies such as population control and the employment of medical science to sustain
the weak in society, reducing the vigour and strength of the white races. Furthermore, he argued that the last best hope for the West for resistance and rejuvenation lay in the German people, the youngest and least exhausted of the Western peoples. Therefore, race provided a crucial boundary for Spengler’s West. However, it is more a spiritual and normative boundary than a material one.
Spengler’s philosophy of culture and history was strongly relativist. Not surprisingly then, he rejected the idea that there was one universal truth: ‘There are no eternal truths: every philosophy is the expression of its own and only its own time’. It follows, therefore, that for Spengler, religion was something unique to each Culture, shaped by the spirit of that Culture. He believed that religions evolved and changed as Cultures matured, but remained integrally related to the community. Consequently, Spengler’s West is characterized by unique and evolving religious traditions rather than a community participating in a universal religious experience. His conception of the religious boundaries of the West is distinctive for its Germanic focus and for the emphasis placed on the spirit of the individual.
Disillusioned with contemporary religion, Spengler focused on German Catholic Christianity of the Gothic age as the quintessential religious expression of youthful Western Culture. However, given the historical roots of Judeo-Christian religion, it would be impossible to conceive of the West’s Christian faith as without antecedents, and Spengler did acknowledge these. He discussed Western Christianity’s complex interdependence with the Magian faiths out of which it arose, and traced the development of the Christian Church from an Aramaic peasant faith that had been absorbed by Hellenic society. He noted the significance of the ministry of Paul in the development of a Western church that was Greek, urban and literate in its focus. However, Spengler pointed not only to antecedents from the Hellenic and Magian Cultures, he also traced the elements that linked the Gothic church with pre-Christian paganism, and with the Faustian myths and gods of Valhalla. Spengler saw a unity rather than a tension in the myth-making of the northern pagan and Christian circles, conceiving the consolidation of the German hero-tales and the Arthurian legends as a similar force and movement to the flourishing of Catholic hagiology in the tenth and eleventh centuries. These elements combined in Spengler’s West to give birth to a unique religion of the West.
While acknowledging its antecedents, Spengler firmly distinguished the character of the Western Church from the Hellenic and Magian religions. He emphasized the monotheism of Western religion in contrast to Hellenic. Even more pronounced was the emphasis he placed on the spirit of the individual in Western Christianity. He distinguished Western
Christianity from its antecedents in the nature of man’s relationship with God. He portrayed Hellenic and Magian religions as essentially fatalistic. In contrast, Western man has an individual relationship with his God, a relationship within which the individual assumes some measure of responsibility. In essence, the Western church was distinguished by the participation of the free individual who chooses their fate. The sense of Free Will was central to Spengler’s concept of the Faustian soul. This soul is described as:
An Ego lost in Infinity, an Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity of greater forces; that was all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom.
As a Culture matures, so its form and institutions change. Spengler traced the changes in the West’s religious identity with the shifts in the Faustian religion from its high point in the German Catholic church through the challenges provided by the reformation towards puritanism, described as a fanatical revival of piety which contained within it the seeds of rationalism. This in turn was followed by materialism. For Spengler, this more secular society, governed by rationalism and materialism, represented an element in the West’s ultimate decline. This contrasts to the conception of the creation of a secular society as a mark of the West’s progress and an aspect of its strength. Instead the Protestant faith is portrayed as a diminution of the purity of the earlier church. This stands in contrast to his contemporary, Max Weber, who related the spirit of Protestantism to the success of the West through capitalism.
The boundaries of religion formed a distinct element of Spengler’s conception of the West. Yet once again, these were not boundaries that were materially defined. The religion of the West was organically linked to the inner spirit of the West, a further expression of the unique soul of the West. Evolution and change within Western religion were regarded as related to the maturing of the West.
Spengler’s concept of power was in many ways fairly abstract, containing spiritual and morphological components. Power stemmed in part from the inner spirit of a Culture, in part from the stage of growth that a Culture was experiencing. Spengler considered the West unrivalled due to its status as a still growing Culture, but also to its dynamic character. He conceptualized the West as the only extant Culture still in the phase of fulfilment. Other extant Cultures had either ossified or failed to achieve their potential. This naturally gave the West enormous advantages relative to other Cultures. However, the power of the West both enabled and endangered it. For Spengler, the dynamic and exploratory spirit of the West was demonstrated
by Western science, technology, art and a will to travel. For instance, the Spanish explorers exemplified a spirit unafraid to challenge nature and explore space, pushing aside boundaries on a global scale. The Faustian soul not only inspired the physical conquest of the world, but also the morale of shaping that world. The Faustian ‘will to power’ is one ‘which laughs at all bounds of time and space, which indeed regards the boundless and endless as its specific target’, which seeks to mould and shape the natural and intellectual world. Here we see the West treated as exceptional in terms of its global scope and its transformative impulses.
Spengler argued that the West’s drive to explore the infinite was also expressed intellectually in its mathematics and science, principally physics. Combined with a preoccupation for measurement, these qualities facilitated the development technologies, a theme explored in Man and Technics. In many ways, technology provided the ultimate expression of the Faustian soul. He described the West’s passion for technology as:
…the outward – and upward – straining life-feeling – true descendant, therefore, of the Gothic. … The intoxicated soul wills to fly above Space and Time.
Technology, therefore, evolved from the Faustian spirit. The West’s monopoly of technical power and knowledge translated into economic capacity and wealth. This provided the critical foundation on which the West’s military capacity was built, and the foundation of the West’s unrivalled superiority in the nineteenth century.
However, Spengler’s view of technology is an ambivalent one. While the industrial age is treated as a period of unrivalled Western superiority, it is regarded as transitory rather than the foundation point of unlimited growth and development, again distinguishing Spengler from modernist thinkers. Furthermore, within the fruit of the West’s sources of power lay the seeds of its destruction. Spengler believed that machines that had at first allowed men to enslave nature had now enslaved man. He argued that, on the one hand, technical thinking had become too esoteric and artificial; on the other, mechanization had taken over Western civilization, threatening to poison and sterilise both the natural environment and the soul of Faustian man. Furthermore, he castigated the West for squandering its privileges by foolishly liquidating its monopoly of technical knowledge as more non-Western societies became industrialized. Writing in an era in which Germany was being devastated by economic depression, Spengler was concerned that the privileged but increasingly alienated Western economies had become vulnerable to competition from
low wage economies where the work ethic was stronger. The West’s power in terms of technological capacity is, therefore, treated as exceptional, although under challenge externally from other Cultures, but also internally from the forces that the West’s technical and intellectual capacity had unleashed.
Spengler’s pessimism with regard to the increasingly negative dimensions of technology in the West accorded with his organic thesis on the cycle of Cultures and the finite nature of growth and power. He believed that in the early twentieth century, the West was reaching the limits of achievement, exhausting its inner possibilities in all fields. Consequently, many of the achievements which other commentators would regard as signifying the growth and expansion of the West and its power, indicated for Spengler the consolidation of the West as a creative intellectual force. This is also evident in his attitude to economics and politics, in particular to ideas with regard to capitalism, or the ‘money economy’.
As in other fields, Spengler rejected the idea of a universally valid form of economic thought, seeing economic life as unique to each Culture. However, all economies matured through the cycles of their Cultures. The development of the ‘money economy’ coincided with a Culture becoming increasingly urban. As a Culture matured in the metropoli, money rather than ideas becomes a source of power, and comes to dominate politics. Eventually, the money economy tears away at the soul, and destroys the unity of a Culture. For Spengler modern Western capitalism was such a progression. Curiously for one who admired the spirit of struggle and competition, Spengler did not hold the spirit of capitalism in high esteem. This low regard stems from the perception that capitalism promotes individual aggrandisement rather than the welfare of the community. He characterized it as emanating from the English aspect of the Faustian spirit, depicting Anglo-American society as the heartland of this particular development in Western Civilization. The Culture was, in a sense, moving westward away from its spiritual heartland in Germany and becoming more tawdry and materialistic. In the process, the power of capital, expressed through big business, was dominating and corrupting Western politics.
Spengler, therefore, treats the West as an exceptional Civilization that has achieved unprecedented levels of power. Yet it is not the sheer weight of this capacity that defines the West for Spengler, but its Faustian character. This is also the source of its power. The West’s desire and capacity to explore and shape the rest of the world are inseparable aspects of his conception. At the same time, the power of the West is transient, founded upon the continuing strength of its spirit. As the spirit ebbed towards exhaustion, so the power of the West became vulnerable. This was marked
for Spengler by tendencies towards pacifism, complacency and urban alienation.
A strong normative dimension evidently underpins the boundaries of the West’s identity for Spengler. His cultural communities were constituted around, and driven by, an inner spirit or central idea. Concepts of territory, race, religion and even power were derived from inner sources as much as they were materially generated. Common perceptions, such as ‘race feeling’, and shared traditions and histories helped to generate the ‘peoples of Cultures’ as metaphysical communities. Yet, while the normative dimension is critical to Spengler’s conception of the West, many of the norms, values and institutions commonly associated with the West he regards as transitional or specific to only a part of the West. In this conception, liberal values and institutions, often celebrated as central achievements of the West, mask the realities of power that underlie politics.
Spengler laid great emphasis on the spirit of the individual as a central aspect of the Faustian character. This is most powerfully expressed in his exploration of the exercise of the individual’s free will in Western Christianity. He also observed the emergence of the ‘ego’, the ‘I’, in the languages of the West , and the celebration of the inner-person in Western history and art, in biography, portraiture and drama. However, individualism was not the defining norm of Spengler’s West. The spirit of individualism does not overwhelm or detract from the significance of the community in this conceptualization; it was part of the spirit of that community. Within the West, Spengler recognized some nations as more individualistic than others. For example, the English national spirit was characterized as one of individualism, expressed in its economic institutions through capitalism, and in its political institutions through liberalism. However, Spengler juxtaposes these norms and institutions with those of the Prussian nation whose spirit gives priority to the community. The individual achieves fulfilment within and through the community, through service and obedience. These values are expressed in the bureaucratic authoritarian state through ‘Prussian socialism’, a term which Spengler employs to mean ‘collective instinct’ rather than class theory. In his 1919 work, ‘Prussianism and Socialism’, Spengler represents the tension between ideas which privilege the individual and the community, between capitalism and socialism, as one of the central struggles of modern history. This is not represented as a struggle between the West and outside ideas, but as a battle for ideological supremacy within the West linked to the battle for hegemony between the Anglo-American tradition, representing individualism and capitalism, and the Prussian tradition, representing the collective ideal.
In other areas, norms and values often viewed as central to defining the West are portrayed in Spengler’s work as manifestations of the West as a maturing Culture. For instance, the spirit of rationalism is represented not as an aspect of the West’s growth, but as symptomatic of a Culture whose creative spirit is waning. Spengler saw all later Cultures entering into a period where intellectualism gained prominence and power. Intellectualism, he suggested, with its focus on words and abstract ideas, masked the reality that politics was driven by power. The dominance of intellectualism in the West was signalled by the Enlightenment that introduced the critical spirit of rationalism, a school of thought that Spengler defined as based purely on materialism. This was viewed as a negative force that attacked and undermined the traditions of a Culture, replacing them with empty ideas and catchwords. Rationalism was a new religion which replaced God with force, but which itself had no soul.
Similarly, Spengler had little or no faith in the concepts of rights and freedom as propounded by Enlightenment thinkers, seeing them as symptomatic of a Culture heading towards spiritual decline. Liberalism and socialism were philosophies of an age of theory that Spengler believed was drawing to an end. Based on the principles of liberty and equality, these philosophies promoted a broader distribution of political power through practices such as universal suffrage. But for Spengler, while democracy promised to devolve power to the people, in reality, power remained in the hands of a minority. Those with the real power in the late West manipulated elections, those with money such as big business and those who controlled the Press. He argued:
The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. … There is no proletarian, not even a Communist, movement that has not operated in the interest of money, in the directions indicated by money and for the time permitted by money.
These ideas that promised to free the peoples of the West were enslaving rather than emancipating them. Democracy was but a transition phase to the new era of ‘Caesarism’. Again, there is a sense of the Culture moving westward as it declined, and of the significant tensions within the Culture. The development of many of the unsavoury norms and ideas of late Culture in the West are ascribed to England and the United States. These include the development of political and economic liberal ideas, the press and the extensive financial manipulation of elections. While these were accepted as appropriate to Anglo-American culture, Spengler denounced them as disastrous when transferred to other contexts, such as Germany.
Spengler was, then, very conscious of the importance of the spiritual and normative dimensions of a Culture. However, he was equally conscious of the underlying power structures and forces of politics. These forces were as central to the constitution of the West as other cultures. Spengler’s treatment of the ideas and norms often viewed as representing the West is, therefore, unconventional. A similar trait can be found in the way he viewed the institutions of the West.
In Spengler’s work, no one institution emerges as a permanent or fixed expression of the West. The meaning of institutions is closely related to the context in which they are formed. Hence, Spengler argues that concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘republicanism’ were not constant but meant different things in different cultural contexts. This entails a rejection of the idea of institutions that are universally relevant and highlights once again the contingency of the social forms that emerge from particular Cultures and Civilizations. Spengler identifies no single institution as a permanent expression of the West. His conception of the West accommodated a range of different political traditions and institutions. The norms and institutions underlying authoritarianism, liberalism and socialism are all accounted for in his historical mosaic. In part, they are understood as aspects of the West’s morphological growth, but at other times the coexistence of different ideas expresses different national characteristics within the West.
The state was a central institution of politics for Spengler, the ultimate form of community. World history is referred to as the history of states, and of the wars between them. However, Spengler did not see the state as constituted by abstract universal institutions and norms, but by the spirit of a community at its particular point in history:
The true political shape of any given country is not to be found in the wording of its constitution; it is rather, the unwritten, unconscious laws according to which the constitution is put into effect.
Therefore, Spengler did not delineate a fixed concept of how a state should be constituted. However, he laid great emphasis on the unity of spirit in a community, and on the relationship between the leadership and the people in conceptualizing the nature of particular states. Good leadership was understood as a central quality of a state, but it derived primarily from the skills of the leader – qualities inherited by the ruling classes. As leadership devolved to the lower estates, it became less responsible, more self-interested.
Spengler’s understanding of leadership patterns lead to a distinctive reading of political institutions of the West. The high point of politics in
the West was represented by the dynastic states of Europe, particularly the unified strong leadership the ancien régime of French-formed culture. The rise of the bourgeoisie and concomitantly of urban politics in eighteenth-century Europe marked the beginning of the transition of the West from a Culture to a Civilization , providing the arena for forces that rose to undermine tradition and stability. These forces were the rise of intellectualism and of money: ‘Intellect rejects, money directs – so it runs in every last act of a Culture drama, when the megalopolis has become master over the rest’. The French Revolution, while ‘glorious’ in some respects, also signalled the introduction of the destructive element of ‘the mob’ as a force in politics. The rise of representative and parliamentary politics signalled the civilizational phase of the West. Parliament, then, is another Western institution that Spengler treated with caution, if not scepticism. For Spengler, parliamentary government was a product of English society. In this context he admired its success. But the secret of this success lay in the informal but continued exercise of power by the educated and traditional elite. This helped to maintain a basic political cohesion. On the continent and in Germany, however, Spengler had seen the parliamentary system become a divisive rather than a cohesive force.
Once again, Spengler outlined significant differences in the character of communities within the West, this time with respect to institutions. Spengler represents institutions of representative politics that might be thought to characterize the West, not only as not universal, but also as appropriate only to a subsection of Western civilization. Furthermore, such institutions were treated as transient rather than fixed features of the West. In fact, current Western institutions such as parliamentarianism were predicted to decay with the onset of the new ‘Caesarism’. In fact, Spengler’s discussion is imbued with a sense of decline rather than progress in the quality of the institutions of the modern West.
An understanding of Spengler’s views on civilizations, and on the boundaries within which he conceptualized the West, provides important insights into how he perceived and analysed interaction between the West and other civilizations. His work celebrates the West as a Culture that has achieved unprecedented levels of technical and intellectual growth and control; but it is distinctive in its rejection of theories of broad human progress, and its consciousness of the finite nature of the West’s own development and progress. It is also distinctive in its Germanic focus.
Underlying Spengler’s perception of civilizational interaction is his belief that civilizations are multiple. He acknowledged not only the existence, but
also the importance of other civilizations in human history. The West was not taken as the sole representative of civilization. As Farrenkopf notes, Spengler played a pioneering role in expanding the horizons of European historical inquiry beyond Euro-centric constraints to include non-Western cultures on a roughly even footing with the West. In fact, Spengler was critical of the Euro-centric focus of Western scholarship. He considered Western ‘world history’ as inordinately skewed towards the history of the West and the assumption that the West represented some form of fulfilment in man’s overall development. The West, he complained, ‘rigs the stage’ of world history, regarding itself as ‘the fixed pole’ around which the history of other Cultures revolved.
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