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Oswald Spengler

The German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) is famous for his "Decline of the West". He held that civilizations, like biological organisms, pass through a determinable life cycle and that the modern West was approaching the end of such a cycle.

Oswald Spengler was born at Blankenburg am Harz on May 29, 1880, the son of a postal official. Although mathematics and natural science were his major subjects at the University of Halle, he received his doctorate for a dissertation on Heraclitus in 1904. After recovering from a nervous breakdown in 1905-1906, Spengler taught in secondary schools until a small inheritance from his mother allowed him in 1911 to move to Munich as a private scholar. Spengler never married.

Exempted from military service because of poor health, Spengler wrote the major part of The Decline of the West during the war years under conditions of great economic hardship. The first volume appeared in 1918, the second in 1922.

The Decline of the West is an impassioned attack against the values of modern post-Enlightenment civilization - of intellect, social equality, peace, and urban culture. Borrowing from the anti-intellectualist tradition of German conservative thought, he rejects the possibility of scientific history. History is never "correct" or "erroneous" but only "deep" or "shallow." Human history as such has no meaning. In place of the traditional Europeocentric conception of a linear history of human civilization, Spengler offers a "Copernican" view of history in which Western (or Faustian) civilization since A.D. 1000 constitutes merely one of eight historic cultures. Each culture has a wholly individual way of looking at the world which permeates all its cultural expressions, even its mathematics and science. No understanding is possible between men of different cultures. Nevertheless, the similarity of the life processes of birth, growth, and decay makes possible a "comparative morphology of history." A culture is born out of the historyless mass of humanity the moment "a great soul awakens."

All cultures in their beginning are aristocratic, dominated by the heroic estates of the warrior noble and priest. The maturation of a culture is a process of intellectualization, urbanization, social leveling, and the growing domination of money. In this process the creative essence of the culture is progressively lost until the culture, now become shallow, gives way to a soulless megalopolitan "civilization." In the West this transformation occurred in the 19th century. Democracy, behind which hides the dictatorship of money, then opens the path to Caesarism and the dissolution of the culture into total formlessness. Democracy, parliamentarism, egalitarianism, proletarian socialism, pacifism, humanitarianism, and attempts at "world improvement" and social reform, Spengler concluded, were all symptoms of a decadent civilization. The moral to be learned from world history is that "ever in History it is life and life only - race quality, the triumph of the will to power" which counts.

The Decline of the West catapulted Spengler to fame. He became a political prophet for disillusioned German national conservatives stunned by defeat in World War I. Beginning with his essay "Prussianism and Socialism" (1920), in which he sought to lay the basis for a new revolutionary conservatism which identified socialism with service to the state, Spengler devoted himself to free-lance political writings against the Weimar Republic, which he detested. Despite his strident opposition to democracy, his idealization of authoritarian and military values, and his almost paranoid racism, he regarded the Nazis with mistrust. As an elitist, he was repelled by their demagogic appeal.

The Nazis regarded Spengler as one of their intellectual forerunners. Adolf Hitler received him in 1933. Nevertheless the critical tone of his Hour of Decision (1933) resulted in the condemnation of the book and the man by the Nazis. Spengler died on May 8, 1936.

Further Reading

The best English-language introduction to Spengler's thought is H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (1952). Other books include E. H. Goddard and P. A. Gibbons, Civilisation or Civilisations: An Essay on the Spenglerian Philosophy of History (1926), and William Harlan Hale, Challenge to Defeat: Modern Man in Goethe's World and Spengler's Century (1932). An extensive discussion of Spengler is in Pitirim A. Sorokin, Modern Historical and Social Philosophies (1963; first published in 1950 as Social Philosophies of an Age of Crisis), and a brief chapter on him is in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (1952).

Additional Sources

Fischer, Klaus P., History and prophecy: Oswald Spengler and The decline of the West, Durham, N.C.: Moore Pub. Co., 1977.

Hughes, H. Stuart (Henry Stuart), Oswald Spengler, New Brunswick, U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers, 1992.

 
 

Spengler, pencil drawing by K. Grossmann, 1920; in a private collection
(click to enlarge)
Spengler, pencil drawing by K. Grossmann, 1920; in a private collection (credit: Deutsche Fotothek, Dresden)
(born May 29, 1880, Blankenburg, Ger. — died May 8, 1936, Munich) German philosopher. A schoolmaster before he turned to writing, Spengler is remembered for his influential The Decline of the West, 2 vol. (1918 – 22), a study in the philosophy of history. He contended that civilizations pass through a life cycle, blossoming and decaying like natural organisms, and that Western culture is irreversibly past its creative stage and headed into eclipse. Though acclaimed by a public disillusioned in the wake of World War I, his work was criticized by both professional scholars and the Nazi Party, despite some affinities with its dogma.

For more information on Oswald Spengler, visit Britannica.com.

 

Spengler, Oswald (Blankenburg, 1880-1936, Munich), a historical philosopher, moved after a brief career as a teacher in Hamburg (1908-11) to Munich, where he spent the rest of his life as a writer and private scholar. He is chiefly known for Der Untergang des Abendlandes (2 vols., 1918-22, reissued 1969), which has affinities to attitudes associated with fin de siècle. Spengler prophesied the decline of the Western world and the corresponding rise of Asiatic and African powers. He was influenced in his theory of the history of civilization by J. G. Herder, Goethe, and Nietzsche, but K. F. Vollgraff (1792-1863), a professor of law and politics at Munich University, and Jacob Burckhardt were forerunners of his pessimistic assessment of the future of the Western world. Adopting the principle of cyclic progression, Spengler asserted that growth (Blüte), maturity (Reife), and decline (Verfall) apply not only to nations, but also to whole continents. Spengler nevertheless saw himself as a spokesman of Germany, professing a firm belief in the principle of austerity, which he associated with the Prussian tradition. He predicted the disastrous results of the National Socialist regime, but retained the greatest faith in the Germanic race as being the least ‘saturated’ (saturiert) in Europe; he included the Jews living in Germanic countries, explicitly detaching himself from anti-Semitism.

Spengler's approach is biological, anthropological, and sociological with a strong emphasis on the significance of industrialism and technology as the prime forces in the destruction of culture. In Der Mensch und die Technik (1931) he claimed that only dreamers (Träumer) ignored this fact and defined optimism as cowardice. Urfragen. Fragmente aus dem Nachlaß, ed. A. M. Koktanek and M. Schröter, appeared in 1965, Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte followed in 1966, and correspondence (Briefe 1913-36) was published by the same editors in 1963.

 
Philosophy Dictionary: Oswald Spengler

Spengler, Oswald (1880-1936) German historian and philosopher of history. Spengler was educated at various universities, and gained his doctorate with a thesis on Heraclitus. His fame depends entirely on Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918, trs. as The Decline of the West, 1932), whose oracular pessimism captured the mood of Germany after the First World War. Spengler saw history not as a linear progression, but as the flowering of a number (either nine or ten) of self-contained cultures, each with a characteristic spiritual tone, or conception of the space within which they are to act. The work was important in making a decisive break with the Hegelian concept of history as a process governed by reason. Instead Spengler's metaphors are biological: cultures go through a self-contained process of growing, going through their seasons, and perishing. There are no historically intelligible laws to this process. His speculations have been extensively criticized as insensitive to the interactions of cultures and to the thoughts and intentions of agents involved in the process.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Spengler, Oswald
(spĕng'glər, Ger. ôs'vält shpĕng'glər) , 1880–1936, German historian and philosopher. His studies covered many fields, among them mathematics, science, philosophy, history, and art. His major work, The Decline of the West (2 vol., 1918–22; tr. 1926–28), brought him worldwide fame. Spengler maintained that every culture passes a life cycle from youth through maturity and old age to death. Western culture, he believed, had proceeded through this same cycle and had entered the period of decline, from which there was no escape. Spengler upheld the ideal of obedience to the state and supported German hegemony in Europe. His refusal to support Nazi theories of racial superiority led to his ostracism after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Bibliography

See critical study by H. S. Hughes (1952).

 
Quotes By: Oswald Spengler

Quotes:

"It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture."

"The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom."

"Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country."

"The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious."

"In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman."

 
Wikipedia: Oswald Spengler

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (Blankenburg am Harz May 29, 1880May 8, 1936, Munich) was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West in which he puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations. After Decline was published in 1918, Spengler produced his Prussianism and Socialism in 1920, in which he argued for an organic version of socialism and authoritarianism. He wrote extensively throughout World War I and the interwar period, and supported German hegemony in Europe. The National Socialists held Spengler as an intellectual precursor. But Spengler's pessimism about Germany and Europe's future, his refusal to support Nazi ideas of racial superiority, and his work the Hour of Decision, which is critical of the Nazis, gained him ostracism after 1933.

Biography

Oswald Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg at the foot of the Harz mountains, the eldest of four children, and the only boy. His family was typically conservative German petit-bourgeoisie. His father, originally a mining technician, who came from a long line of mineworkers, was a post office bureaucrat. His childhood home was emotionally reserved, and the young Spengler turned to books and the great cultural personalities for succor. He suffered imperfect health, and was a lifelong sufferer of migraine headaches and an anxiety complex.

At the age of ten, his family moved to the university city of Halle. Here Spengler received a classical education in high school, studying Greek, Latin, mathematics and natural sciences. Here, too, he developed his affinity for the arts — especially poetry, drama, and music — and came under the influence of the ideas of Goethe and Nietzsche. He even experimented with a few artistic creations, some of which still survive.

After his father's death in 1901, Spengler attended several universities (Munich, Berlin, and Halle) as a private scholar, taking courses in a wide range of subjects: history, philosophy, mathematics, natural science, literature, the classics, music, and fine arts. His private studies were undirected. In 1903, he failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus because of insufficient references, which effectively ended a chance for a career in academia. In 1904, he received his Ph.D., and in 1905 suffered a nervous breakdown.

Scholars remark that his life seemed rather uneventful. He briefly served as a teacher in Saarbrücken and then Düsseldorf. And from 1908 to 1911, he taught at a practical high school (Realgymnasium) in Hamburg. There he taught science, German history, and mathematics.

In 1911, following his mother's death, he moved to Munich, where he would live until his death in 1936. He lived as a cloistered scholar, supported by his modest inheritance. Spengler lived on very limited means and was marked by loneliness. He owned no books, and took jobs as a tutor or writing for magazines to earn extra money.

He began work on the first volume of Decline intending to focus on Germany within Europe at first, but was deeply affected by the Agadir Crisis, and widened the scope of his study. Spengler was inspired by Otto Seeck's work The Decline of Antiquity in naming his own effort. The book was completed in 1914, but publishing was delayed by World War I. During the war, his inheritance was largely useless because it was invested overseas, thus Spengler lived in genuine poverty for this period.

When Decline came out in 1917, it was a wild success because of the perceived national humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and economic depression fueled by hyperinflation seemed to prove Spengler right (Spengler had in fact believed that Germany would win while he was writing the book). It comforted Germans because it seemingly rationalized their downfall as part of larger world-historical processes. It was widely successful outside of Germany as well, and by 1919 had been translated into several other languages. He rejected a subsequent offer to become Professor of Philosophy at the University of Goettingen, saying he needed time to focus on writing.

The book was widely discussed, even by those who had not read it. Historians took umbrage at an amateur effort by an untrained author and his unapologetically non-scientific approach. Thomas Mann compared reading Spengler's book to reading Schopenhauer for the first time. Academics gave it a mixed reception. Max Weber described Spengler as a "very ingenious and learned dilettante" while Karl Popper described the thesis as "pointless".The great historian of antiquity Eduard Meyer thought highly of Spengler, although he also had some criticisms of him. Spengler's obscurity, intuitionalism, and mysticism were easy targets, especially for the Positivists and neo-Kantians who saw no meaning in history. The critic and æsthete Count Harry Kessler thought him unoriginal and rather inane, especially with regards to his work on Nietzsche. Ludwig Wittgenstein, however, shared Spengler's cultural pessimism. Spengler's work became an important foundation for the social cycle theory.

A 1928 Time review of the second volume of Decline described the immense influence and controversy Spengler's ideas enjoyed during the 1920s: "When the first volume of The Decline of the West appeared in Germany a few years ago, thousands of copies were sold. Cultivated European discourse quickly became Spengler-saturated. Spenglerism spurted from the pens of countless disciples. It was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathize or revolt. It still remains so."[1]

In the second volume, published in 1920, Spengler argued that German socialism was different from Marxism, and was in fact compatible with traditional German conservatism. In 1924, following the social-economic upheaval and inflation, Spengler entered politics in an effort to bring Reichswehr general Hans von Seeckt to power as the country's leader. But the effort failed and Spengler proved ineffective in practical politics. In 1931, he published Man and Technics, which warned against the dangers of technology and industrialism to culture. He especially pointed to the tendency of Western technology to spread to hostile "Colored races" that would then use the weapons against the West. It was poorly received because of its anti-industrialism. This book contains the well-known Spengler quote, "Optimism is cowardice."[2]

Despite voting for Hitler over Hindenburg in 1932, Spengler found the Führer vulgar. He met Hitler in 1933 and after a lengthy discussion remained unimpressed, saying that Germany didn't need a "heroic tenor (Heldentenor: one of several conventional tenor classifications) but a real hero ("Held")." He publicly quarreled with Alfred Rosenberg, and his pessimism and remarks about the Führer earned himself isolation and public silence. He further rejected offers from Joseph Goebbels to give public speeches. However, Spengler did become a member of the Academy of Germany in the course of the year.

The Hour of Decision, published in 1934, was a bestseller, but was later banned by the Nazis for its critiques of National Socialism. Spengler's criticisms of liberalism were welcomed by the Nazis, but Spengler disagreed with their biological ideology and anti-Semitism. While racial mysticism played a key role in his own worldview, Spengler had always been an outspoken critic of the pseudoscientific racial theories professed by the Nazis and many others in his time, and was not inclined to change his views upon Hitler's rise to power. Although himself a German nationalist, Spengler also viewed the Nazis as too narrowly German, and not occidental enough to lead the fight against other peoples. The book also warned of a coming world war in which Western Civilization risked being destroyed, and was widely distributed abroad before eventually being banned in Germany. A Time review of The Hour of Decision noted his international popularity as a polemicist, observing that "When Oswald Spengler speaks, many a Western Worldling stops to listen."[3] The review recommended the book for "readers who enjoy vigorous writing," who "will be glad to be rubbed the wrong way by Spengler's harsh aphorisms" and his pessimistic predictions.[4]

He spent his final years in Munich, listening to Beethoven, reading Molière and Shakespeare, buying several thousand books, and collecting ancient Turkish, Persian and Hindu weapons. He made occasional trips to the Harz mountains, and to Italy. Shortly before his death, in a letter to a friend, he remarked that "the German Reich in ten years will probably no longer exist." He died of a heart attack on May 8, 1936, three weeks before his 56th birthday and exactly nine years before the fall of the Third Reich.

Although he was highly influential and internationally popular during the interwar period, Oswald Spengler's work fell into intellectual disrepute and obscurity following World War II. One of the main reasons he was widely disliked or ignored is that he had been a leading opponent of the Weimar Republic. Only recently has interest in Spengler been rekindled. His concepts, opinions, theories, and predictions remain controversial among admirers and detractors alike.[5]

Influence

  • In the July 10, 1920 issue of Illustrated London News, G. K. Chesterton took issue with both pessimists (such as Spengler) and their optimistic critics, arguing that neither took into consideration human choice: "The pessimists believe that the cosmos is a clock that is running down; the progressives believe it is a clock that they themselves are winding up. But I happen to believe that the world is what we choose to make it, and that we are what we choose to make ourselves; and that our renascence or our ruin will alike, ultimately and equally, testify with a trumpet to our liberty."
  • Spengler's concept of the "Faustian" outlook was an important part of Herman Kahn's book The Year 2000. Kahn used the Spenglerian term to describe cultures that value continual, restless striving. He did not use it to refer to Faust's bargain or pact.
  • Communal readings of The Decline Of The West held great influence over the founding members of the Beat Generation. Spengler's vision of the cyclical nature of civilization and the contemporaneity of the end of the Western European cycle led William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to look for the seeds of the next cycle in the communities of which they were a part.
  • In Germany the direction of his works is doubted today since it was also popular with supporters of National Socialism.
  • James Blish's Cities in Flight tetralogy explicitly lists Spengler's theories as an influence on the future history of the Cities.
  • It was sometimes believed Spengler was an intellectual influence on Charles Lindbergh's thinking as the controversial leader of the movement to keep America out of World War II, particularly on Lindbergh's view that Western nations should put aside their political differences and form an alliance against "foreign races" instead of fighting amongst themselves[6]. Lindbergh also echoed Spengler's concern about the effects of industrialization and materialism on Western Civilization, and as well as Spengler's pessimism about the future.[7].
  • The Hour of Decision influenced Malcolm X's views on economics and his critiques of capitalism. Malcolm X agreed with Spengler's prediction that class conflict would eventually be surpassed by racial conflict. When asked about Karl Marx, Malcolm X (who had never read Marx) stated that he agreed with Spengler's view of social class and economic systems as secondary to racial identity.[11]
  • In the DVD commentary to Ghostbusters, actor and screenwriter Harold Ramis says that his character Egon Spengler's last name was in honor of Oswald Spengler, while the first name "Egon" came from a Czech childhood friend of Ramis's.
  • Spengler was also an influence upon the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell and his circle, including the cultural historian John David Ebert and the author John Lobell.

Spengler's works

Der Untergang des Abendlandes in German. Original 1919.
  • Prussianism and Socialism. 1920
  • Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, ISBN 0-89875-983-8.
  • The Hour of Decision: Germany & World-Historical Evolution, ISBN 1-4102-0266-6
(Jahre der Entscheidung).
  • Aphorisms.
  • Selected Essays.

Further reading

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
  • Twilight of the Evening Lands: Oswald Spengler — A Half Century Later by John F. Fennelly (New York, Brookdale Press, 1972) ISBN 0-912650-01-X.
  • Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890 edited by Philip Rees, 1991, ISBN 0-13-089301-3.
  • Prophet of Decline: Spengler on world history and politics by John Farrenkopf (Publisher: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 2001) ISBN 0-8071-2653-5 ISBN 0-8071-2727-2.
  • Hughes, H. Stuart. "Preface to the Present Edition." Preface. The Decline of the West: An Abridged Edition. By Oswald Spengler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-19-506751-7.

External links


Persondata
NAME Spengler, Oswald Arnold Gottfried
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION German historian and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH May 29, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Blankenburg am Harz, Germany
DATE OF DEATH May 8, 1936
PLACE OF DEATH Munich, Germany

pms:Oswald Spengler


 
 

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