So far Decline of the West Volume I has been different than expected. Every discussion of Spengler that I have seen has only encompassed his 8 high cultures and cyclical history. Thus far volume I has focused mostly on Spengler's metaphysics and somehow this is completely ignored by commentators. I don't think there is much for us to discuss from a Fascist perspective, but my notes on this are the longest of anything we've read and the length of this post will probably reflect that. If the idle lurker doesn't care for metaphysics, he can go ahead and skip this post, but I think an understanding of Spengler's metaphysics is central to understanding his view of history. Spengler (or possibly the translator) uses much of his own vocabulary throughout and I've tried to summarize this reading to be as understandable as possible.
Spengler begins by discussing the purpose behind his philosophy of history. He sees traditional historians, including Classical historians like Thucydides and Tacitus, as short sighted. They do not consider a cyclical view of history. This is kind of an autistic criticism, because creating an all-encompassing philosophy of world history was never the intention of these historians. Thucydides and Tacitus were not compiling a history of the world; they were merely recording events they lived through as they saw them. I find it even more curious that Spengler seems to praise Eastern cultures despite them having no historians at all. I took an interest in the warring states period for a time and how surprised I was to discover they did not have their own Thucydides! Despite this, I do agree with Spengler's assessment that history should not be viewed simply as the passing of one event to the next. I found a few of Spengler's other historical anecdotes to be inaccurate throughout. For example, in his discussion of mathematics, he claims that the Classical man would be unable to understand abstract mathematics because he is rooted in Actuality, yet one need only to examine Euclid to see discussion of primes and number theory. This is just one example and I think it would be rather pointless to pick apart Spengler's arguments in this manner as they don't encompass the true subject of this book.
Back to the subject of history, Spengler describes how it was previously discussed as either a fanciful or strictly factual phenomenon based on the writer's particular interests. This obscures much of our knowledge of ancient times as Romans, Greeks, Mesopotamians, and the Chinese would replace their history with myth. Spengler says the object of his "Decline of the West" is the liberation of history from the observer's prejudices. Spengler later boldly declares that this "physiognomic of world-happening" will indeed be the LAST Faustian philosophy. A materialist conception of history leads to setting up of usefulness ideals such as "enlightenment" and "world peace" as aims of world history, to be reached by the "march of progress," an idea that is in direct conflict with our ideals and further separates the Marxist ideals from the Fascist ones.
The "Decline of the West" comprises nothing less than the problem of Civilization. Spengler defines Civilization as the inevitable destiny of the Culture. Civilizations are an end, but they are reached again and again by man's inward necessity. Spengler borrows from Nietzsche's revaluation of values when he says that pure civilization consists of a progressive taking down of forms that have become inorganic or dead. Later Spengler says the high cultures of his time (German, French, etc) would no longer exist in hundreds of years. Reading through that the first time, I thought this was purely anti-national, but in the context here we can see that it fits. The German of today is definitely not the German of 300 years ago, even though Germany has continued to exist. The German, and every other culture, has progressively shed forms and revaluated their values for better or worse. However, Spengler fails to notice the racial element that exists at the core of every culture. While some forms will be shed, an unalterable racial soul remains, as we saw some of our previous readings such as the works of Tacitus.
The first volume, "Form and Actuality," starts from the form-language of the high Cultures (Faustian, Apollinian, Magian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Babylonian) and attempts to penetrate to the roots of their origins. The second volume, "World-historical Perspectives," starts from the facts of Actuality and from the historical practice of higher mankind to obtain an essential historical experience that we can set to work upon the formation of our own future. Spengler proposes we can use his cyclical view of history not only to predict later stages of our civilization, but also to uncover the secrets of our long forgotten past. He considers two people "contemporaries" if they exist in the same relative time of their respective civilizations, which I find to be one of the more interesting concepts in these chapters. "Higher history," related to life and becoming, is the actualization of a Culture. Culture, with a capital C, is Spengler's concept of culture as the body of an idea. It is the sum of its visible, tangible, and comprehensive expressions. I could probably go on and on about the material contained in just the introduction, but I'll assume everything else is covered in more detail later and move on.
Spengler approaches history from the viewpoint of a skeptic, denying the existence of a higher thought consisting of general and eternal truths, and asserts that his philosophy of history can only ever be applicable to Faustian man. This is the heart of Spengler's cultural relativism that is spread throughout this volume. The biggest weakness of his analysis has already been discussed, and that is the lack of the racial element. Spengler completely neglects the facts of race and the demographic changes in regions through the ages. He includes Persians among the Magians, along with semites. He believes the people who built ancient Egypt are the same people who were still there 2000 years later showing no cultural or technical progress, who stopped building pyramids and instead tossed their dead into the Valley of the Kings. He says that the musical and artistic tastes of one Culture will be unpleasant to members of another Culture for reasons one cannot identify. Spengler does identify that race exists on page 179, but likens the difference between races to the differences between individuals. While individuals can "agree to disagree," such a thing cannot be said of races who have different ideas of justice and honor or conflicting behaviors due to differences in intelligence and genetics.
Alongside Spengler's cyclical view of history is his concept of "Destiny." Just as there is a necessity of cause and effect as the logic of space, there is a necessity of Destiny as the logic of time. Spengler has a linear view of time (this must be understood to be separate from the cyclical view of history, which is specific to civilizations rather than time itself) where time is a direct, irreversible, living process. Causality is the reasonable and law-bound badge of our waking and reasoning existence. Destiny is an inner certainty that not describable; it is the living idea of becoming, which reveals itself intuitively. We see this Destiny concept in Mein Kampf in the many mentions of "providence." The causation-free living grace that can only be experienced as an inward certainty. The title of this volume, "Form and Actuality," takes several forms throughout this volume: destiny and causality, time and space, history and nature, form and law, etc. where Form is the hallmark of Faustian man and Actuality makes up the quintessential Apollinian. Space (Actuality) is an instant of time, the snapshot of Spengler's cyclical history that makes up conventional history. Time (Form) is the Nietzschean Will to Power and the infinite while space is the intellect as morality and denial of instinct.
Spengler sees nature as the sum of law imposed necessities. Nature is a strict image projected by a knowing intellect, bound to a set of natural laws. The laws of nature exclude incident and causality; they are "the become" rather than "becoming." Conversely, becoming has no number and lies beyond the realm of cause and effect. History, in the conventional sense, is not pure becoming, but an image created from the consciousness of the historian, in which the becoming dominates the become. Spengler believes the idea of Goethe's "living nature" was true history and pure becoming. In Spengler's view, nature is something real and timeless. It existed before history and will exist after it, and he believes Faustian history is nearing its end. How does this mesh with the Fascist conception of "natural law"? I don't think there's any conflict here. While Spengler doesn't believe Actuality suits Faustian man, we still recognize and respect its existence. While Faustian man may yearn for higher purpose, the rules of nature still exist and must be obeyed.
As I alluded to earlier in this post, Spengler incorporates mathematics into his view of history. Mathematics and the principle of causality lead to a naturalistic chronology and a historical ordering of the phenomenal world. Spengler treats mathematics as an ontological structure more basic than science or the science of mathematics. It is especially clear here that Spengler had a significant influence on Heidegger's early thought. Spengler believes numerical thought has a direct influence on the worldview of a Culture and becomes a view of the universe. In his view, there are as many "number-worlds" as there are higher cultures. Most of Spengler's mathematical ideas were discussed in our reading of Timaeus and I already stated my disagreement with his view of Western vs Classical mathematics, so I won't get further into it here.
The last thing I'll discuss in this post are the stages of a Culture as defined by Spengler. We often see the "good times create weak men, etc" meme attributed to Spengler's philosophy, but Spengler separates the lifecycle of a Culture by the arts or, simply, "style." Style, as a Spenglerian concept, is the outward expression of the soul of a people. First is the timid, despondent, naked expression of a newly awakened soul which is searching for a relation between itself and the world. Then the style-history reaches manhood and Culture changes into the intellectualism of the great cities that will dominate the countryside. Grand symbolism withers and worldly arts dominate. Next is the golden age of style. The soul of the people depicts its happiness, conscious of its self-completion, representing a return to nature. The arts exist as a sensitive longing to the infinite. Finally, the style fades out and is left with the flat and senile classicism of the Hellenistic megalopolis. Money represents the power of a civilization and economic forces dominate politics and culture. The rootless cosmopolitans of the world cities become the economic center and the city culture radiates outward. Style in this period is a tedious game with dead forms to keep up the illusion of a living art. This was the world of Spengler's day and even more so of our own.
I will save Spengler's further discussion of the arts for the next half of Volume I. He covers some in this volume, but it would be incomplete without the discussion from the following chapters and I run a real danger of hitting the character limit at this rate. While much of this doesn't directly pertain to Fascist ideologies and there are some flaws, I think it has been a valuable read. The influence with regard to views of history and the arts that Spengler had on the minds behind National Socialism is clear. The influence this had on Rosenberg in particular, just based on comparison with his Myth of the Twentieth Century, is tremendous. This has been a very slow, dense read and it's understandable if you want to read something lighter between Volume I and II. I also understand wanting to just power through it, so I'm fine either way.