Home > Positioning > Persons > Spengler

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)

Spengler held that world history is not one story but the lives of separate high Cultures, each of which is born, grows, matures and dies in a course as fixed as that of a plant. Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West, 1918–22) laid the Cultures side by side and read them by their corresponding stages, and on that comparison foretold the West’s entry into its final phase. He called the method morphology and took it from Goethe; he set it against both the linear scheme of ancient, medieval and modern history and the evolutionary thinking of Darwin’s century. The book made him famous in the years after Germany’s defeat.

Oswald Spengler was born on 29 May 1880 in Blankenburg, in the Duchy of Brunswick. He studied at Munich, Berlin and Halle, and took his doctorate at Halle in 1904 with a dissertation on the metaphysics of Heraclitus. After brief posts elsewhere he taught mathematics, science and history at a Hamburg Gymnasium from 1908 to 1911, then gave up teaching and lived in Munich as a private scholar on a small inheritance, writing the Decline through the war years. His later books include Preussentum und Sozialismus (1919), Der Mensch und die Technik (1931) and Jahre der Entscheidung (1933). A nationalist and an opponent of the Weimar Republic, he voted for Hitler in 1932 but, after meeting him in 1933, was unimpressed, and his criticism of the regime’s racial doctrine left him isolated; Jahre der Entscheidung, a bestseller in 1933, was soon suppressed. He died in Munich on 8 May 1936.

Key concepts

Morphology of history. “Goethe gave me method, Nietzsche the questioning faculty,” Spengler wrote. From Goethe he took the study of living form, reading a type from its instances and grasping each by its shape rather than explaining it by causes. He applied it to history: each Culture is an organism, the comparison of Cultures is a comparison of forms, and what a historian needs is not causal explanation but physiognomic insight into the character of a whole. He called the familiar sequence of ancient, medieval and modern “the Ptolemaic system of history”, which puts the West at the centre, and offered his own as its Copernican replacement, in which no Culture holds a privileged place.

The high Cultures. Spengler counted eight: the Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Classical or Apollonian, Magian or Arabian, and Western or Faustian. Each is expressed by a prime symbol that shapes its mathematics, art, religion and politics alike: the Apollonian by the bounded, present body, the Faustian by infinite space, the Magian by the world as a cavern. Each runs the same course through springtime, summer, autumn and winter, and epochs at the same stage of different Cultures are “contemporaneous”, homologous in the way organs of different species are, whatever their dates.

Culture and Civilisation. Civilisation is the last stage of a Culture, what a Culture becomes once its creative impulse is spent: the world city in place of the country, money and mass politics in place of tradition, expansion in place of inner growth, and at the end Caesarism, rule by force and personality. Rome was the Civilisation of the Classical Culture, and the West, on Spengler’s reading, had entered its own Civilisation in the nineteenth century. The decline of the title is this passage, not a collapse.

Pseudomorphosis. Borrowing a term from mineralogy, where a crystal forms inside the cast of another, Spengler described a young Culture that grows up within the forms of an older one and cannot find its own expression. His principal case was the Magian Culture, arising under the dominance of the late Classical world.

Man and technics. Der Mensch und die Technik (1931) treated technics as the tactics of life, and man as a beast of prey whose technics, in the Faustian machine age, had become a power that its makers could no longer master.

Where Spengler stops

His contemporaries pressed the method before the conclusions. Otto Neurath’s Anti-Spengler (1921) took the book apart doctrine by doctrine, from its phases of culture to its morphology and its characterisation of cultures. R. G. Collingwood, in “Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles” (Antiquity, 1927), objected that Spengler cut history into self-contained Cultures, each with its own essence, and so could not account for what one age inherits from another; for Collingwood history was a continuous process in which later periods take up the problems earlier ones left.

The fixed life course was the point at which Arnold Toynbee, the other great comparative historian of civilisations, parted from him: Toynbee kept the comparison but held that civilisations rise and fall by how they meet challenges, not by a predetermined span.

Key works

See also: Evolution · Civilisation as morphology · Philosophy of history · Goethe · Nietzsche · Collingwood · Toynbee