Five Laws of Civilization According To Nikolai Danilevsky

Discussion

H. Stuart Hughes:

"The development of each “type” or civilization conformed to five basic laws. The first three Danilevsky outlined as follows:

First Law.

Every tribe or family of peoples identified by a language or by a group of languages whose resemblance is perceived directly, without deep philological explorations, constitutes an original historico-cultural type if it is mentally or spiritually capable of historical development and has already outgrown its childhood.

Second Law.

It is necessary that a people enjoy political independence if its potential civilization is to be actually born and developed.

Third Law.

The basic principles of a civilization of one historico-cultural type are not transmissible to the peoples of another historico-cultural type. Each type creates its own civilization under the greater or lesser influence of alien— preceding or synchronous [contemporaneous] — civilizations.

Fourth Law

For his fourth law, Danilevsky cited Greece and Western Europe as brilliant examples:

A civilization of a given historico-cultural type reaches its fullness, variety, and richness only when its “ethnographic material” is diverse and when these ethnographic elements are not swallowed by one body politic, but enjoy independence and make up a federation or political system of states.

Fifth Law

The fifth law set the limits to the creativity of each civilization:

The course of development of historico-cultural types is similar to the life-course of those perennials whose period of growth lasts indefinitely, but whose period of blossoming and fruitbearing is relatively short and exhausts them once and for all.

Comments on the Five Laws

H. Stuart Hughes:

"To a present-day reader, the first two of these laws are doubtless self-explanatory. The third raises one of the basic questions confronting all historians of comparative civilizations—the extent and character of the influence of one civilization on another.

Danilevsky’s answer represented a sensible compromise between the virtual denial of such influence (a position that Spengler was later to adopt) and the notion of the “scholastic succession of nations” on which Vico had heaped his scorn.

In Danilevsky’s view, a nation or civilization could influence another in one of three ways. The first two—colonization and “grafting”—were comparatively superficial and gave unsatisfactory results. The second, in fact, might be positively harmful to the younger nation, since (and here again the metaphor was botanical) one carefully cultivated branch simply exploited for its own benefit the tree on which it had been grafted. The third and only fruitful method of cultural influence was that by which the Romans had learned from the Greeks, and the Western Europeans from both of the classical nations—“an effect that we may compare to the influence of soil fertilization on the organism of plants or ... of improved nourishment on an animal organism.” Such a method produced excellent results so long as the younger society took from the older one only such things as stood “outside the sphere of national character, that is, the results and methods of exact science” and the “technical usages and achievements of the arts and of industry.” But political institutions, re¬ ligion, and the like could foster national creativity only if they remained the spontaneous outgrowth of indigenous sentiments and traditions.

...

All nations, Danilevsky maintained, initially went through a long “ethnographic” period of preparation. This was succeeded by a period of state organization, stimulated by threats from without.

And on this latter phase, there followed an era of true civilization lasting from four to six centuries. Such was the period in Roman history from the Punic Wars to the third century A.D., and in Western European history since the age of humanistic revival and scientific and geographical discoveries.

This period ends, however, when the creative activity of the peoples of a certain “type” dries up: either they relax with what they have already achieved, maintaining the legacy of antiquity as the eternal ideal for the future and growing old in the apathy of self-satisfaction (as, for example, in China), or they advance into antinomies and contradictions that can no longer be resolved from their point of view and that prove that their ideal (like all things human) was incomplete, one-sided, and faulty, or that unfavorable out¬ ward circumstances had diverted its development from its true course; in this case disillusionment grips the peoples and they sink into the apathy of despair. So was it in the Roman world at the time of the spread of Christianity.

Where, then, in this predetermined course of cultural development and decline, did Western Europe stand? Not yet in decay, Danilevsky answered, but past its zenith. Europe was in that afternoon, that autumn, that period of middle age when the time of true creativity is past and the fruits of an earlier season are gathered in. Such a period, in Danilevsky’s view, necessarily brought the most impressive cultural harvest. Unquestionably, the products of the nineteenth century were more numerous and better-adapted to their purposes than the corresponding creations of the sixteenth and seventeenth. Yet, more critically regarded, the nineteenth century would prove to be primarily an era of exact and applied sciences, systematically exploiting the guiding conceptions in philosophy and the arts inherited from the creative activity of the three centuries preceding. And on this era of autumn harvest there would inevitably follow the true winter of cultural sterility.

With Europe nearing its decline, Danilevsky triumphantly concluded, Russia and the Slavic world were at length free to create their own civilization. The artificial dependence of the Slavs on the Germano-Latins would soon be ended. And the young peoples of Eastern Europe would do what no nation had before accomplished: they would prove themselves creative in all the major fields of cultural and social activity. Just as each nation in the past had given its special imprint to the arts and even to the sciences in which it had engaged, so some had excelled in one field, some in another, but none in all."

(https://archive.org/details/oswaldspenglercr0000hugh/page/66/mode/2up?view=theater)