Oswald Spengler

Bio

From Encyclopedia.com :

"Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), German universal historian, was born in Blankenburg, in the Harz mountains. Of Protestant parentage, he was descended on his father’s side from a line of mining engineers; his mother’s family was artistically inclined. Both inheritances came together in Spengler—in his scientific interests on the one hand and his stylistic ability and talent for bold, intuitive theoretical formulations on the other.

After attending a humanist Gymnasium in Halle, he studied mathematics and the natural sciences at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Halle. He obtained his doctor’s degree at Halle with a dissertation on Heraclitus. Spengler’s preoccupation with this pre-Socratic Greek philosopher foreshadowed some of the main ideas of his major work: he was to translate “everything flows” into historical relativism and “war, the father of all things” into a self-consciously tough, “heroic” world view. Spengler was a lone wolf—a bachelor, and also an outsider to the German world of learning. Having taught at a number of schools, the last a Hamburg Realgymnasium, he moved to Munich as a private scholar in 1911, at which time he conceived the idea for the work which was to stir up the entire historical profession."

(https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/history/historians-european-biographies/oswald-spengler)

The influence of Spengler's work, The Decline of the West

" the 'influence' of Decline on the literature of the 20th century can be felt far and wide: D.H. Lawrence, Carl Jung and Henry Miller all expressed their debt to the book, with the later expressing regret that he didn't write certain passages of it himself; T.S Eliot cites the book as a major influence on his The Waste Land; Scott Fitzgerald said that Spenglers book had a tremendous impact upon him, along with The Waste Land, while writing The Great Gatsby; W.B. Yeats, in light of the parallels between his A Vision, which was written before Decline had been translated into English, and Spengler's book, postulated a hypothetical common 'instructor' or 'muse' to explain the similarities in the results they seemed to arrive at quite independently of each other, recognizing in Spengler a 'kindred spirit'; Joseph Campbell recalled that he read the book seven times, and said that Spengler had become for him a "major prophet"; Arnold Toynbee's magnum opus A Study of History can be read, in large part, as a responce to Spengler's book, a protracted effort to surmount its conclusions; Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg held 'private readings' of the book and developed their friendship around it; Henry Kissinger, who, in a speech he gave in the 1950's, warned Americans about the need for a "heroic and deliberate effort" to "arrest narcissism" and "the collapse which starts at the moment of seemingly greatest achievement", is said to have given Richard Nixon a copy of the book, in an apparently ironic gesture, weeks before his resignation in 1974, the very same book he had been urging Nixon to read for years (Kissinger's honors thesis was called The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant, and develops a 'historicity' through a synthesis of those writers); when Michel Foucault was asked during an interview whether he would like his own efforts being situated alongside that of Spengler's he produced only a wry smile, and Terence Mckenna had a copy in his famous library that burnt down at the Esalen institute in Big Sur.

Decline belonged to a massive body of literature which took shape between the first and second world wars on the 'Crisis of Civilization', and which includes, among others, works like Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), Guenon's The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), Freud's Civilization and its Discontents (1929), Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1932), and is often seen, retrospectively, as a kind of manifesto of the pessimistic spirit which plagues Civilization like a demonic double; but it has also acquired the reputation for being not just an embodiment of doubts about the very project of Civilization, but a masterful work of metaphysical poetry (Miller once described it as a "stupendous morphological, or phenomenological, tone-poem"), and thus itself a product of the high culture of the West, and thus, like Foucault, carrying "out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture". It is certainly noteworthy that its author has gained the reputation, rare among 'historians', for being a 'prophet'.

In a biography of the author that he wrote in the midst of the Cold War, the American historian Stewart Hughes saw the reading public of Decline divided into two very distinct camps: one hostile and the other enthusiastically receptive. Viewing the book "in the broadest possible perspective," from a position in the very middle of the century, Hughes described it as "a manifestation of an enormous effort of intellectual re-evaluation that has characterized our century." From this point of view, "the passage of time has permitted us to make a judgement: with fifty years of history behind us, with the rise of totalitarianism, the advent of mass culture, the experience of two world wars and the prospect of a third, we are at length in a position to evaluate Spengler as political controversialist, as prophet, and as diagnostician of our time."

Spengler's morphological 'physiognomy' of history stands between Nietzsche's geneology and Foucault's archaeology: seen in retrospect, Decline appears like a missing link between Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Geneology of Morals, and Foucault's Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason."

(http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-decline-of-west-by-oswold-spengler.html)

Publications

WORKS BY SPENGLER:

(1918-1922) 1926-1928 The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Authorized translation with notes by Charles F. Atkinson. New York: Knopf. → Volume 1: Form and Actuality. Volume 2: Perspectives of World History. First published as Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

(1920) 1942 Preussentum und Sozialismus. Munich: Beck. → Reprinted in Spengler (1933a).

1924 Der Neubau des Deutschen Reiches. Munich: Beck. → Reprinted in Spengler (1933a).

(1931) 1932 Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life. New York: Knopf. → First published as Der Mensch und die Technik: Beitrag zu einer Philosophic des Lebens.

1933a Politische Schriften. Munich: Beck.

(1933b) 1934 The Hour of Decision. New York: Knopf. → First published as Jahre der Entscheidung.

Reden und Aufsdtze. 3d ed. Munich: Beck, 1951. → Published posthumously. Contains Heraklit and other writings first published between 1904 and 1936.

Letters, 1913-1936. Translated and edited by Arthur Helps. New York: Knopf, 1966. → First published in German.

Discussion

Henry Kissinger on Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant

Excerpted from the website, 'Madness and Civilization', which paraphrases the content of the Honor's Thesis by Kissinger:

"Kissinger adopts a novel methodology by trying to convey the essence of each author's work in that individual's own style. (This is especially significant in the section on Spengler because of the latter's poetic and metaphysical passages.) Kissinger argues that purely analytical criticism of Spengler and, to some extent Toynbee, "falsifies the real essence of [their] philosophy." Kissinger's pairing of Spengler and Toynbee, contemporaries who share a cyclical view of history, with the [eighteenth] century German philosopher Kant is central to his thesis. His historicism develops from this union.

Kissinger begins "The Meaning of History" by posing its central question as a paradox-- i.e., actions in retrospect appear inevitable, yet we act with the conviction of choice. Kissinger asks how we can reconcile our knowledge that events seem to occur irrevocably with our inward experience of freedom.

Kissinger confronts a second question in his introductory chapter-- the question of historical understanding. [...] Kissinger poses this epistemological question: Is history an open book... that contains in itself all the asperations of mankind as well as the key to the world's purpose? Or does history reveal a series of meaningless incidents, a challenge to our normative concepts, only through conformity to which it can obtain significance? Is meaning, in short, an attribute of reality or a metaphysical construction attendant on our recognition of significance?

How Kissinger answers this question of historical understanding is significant. He concludes that the meaning of history cannot be derived empirically from the facts themselves. He rejects the principle of verifiability proposed by the logical positivists; the latter maintain that facts are true if they correspond to reality. Kissinger argues that anthropological research shows that different cultures create their own views of reality-- facts are by no means absolute. [...] Kissinger writes that "an inward experience cannot be proved by empirical data. A philosophy of history without a profound metaphysics will forever juxtapose surface data and can never satisfy the totality of man's desire for meaning." Instead, we must approach history philosophically, because the questions we ask of it will determine the answers it yields.

Thus meaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical context. Just as every man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world, just as the scientist can find in nature only what he puts in it in the formulation of his hypothesis, just as every question determines at least the range of answers, so history does not exhibit the same portent to everybody but yields only the meanings inherent in the nature of the our query. Therefore, too, the philosophy of history is inseparable from metaphysics, and involves a deep awareness of the mysteries and possibilities not only of nature but of human nature.

Meaning in history lies in the philosophical approach we take toward it. Kissinger equates the philosophy of history with metaphysics, describing it as "metaphysics of a very high order." The question he then confronts is: how did Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant address the problem of necessity and freedom in history? How did their metaphysical beliefs resolve this paradox? "In the reaction of the various thinkers to the problem of human necessity and human freedom, in their capacity to experience depths inaccessible to reason alone, lies the answer to the meaning of history."

Kissinger next presents an extended commentary on the philosophy and works of each thinker. [...] He discusses Spengler's Decline of the West, Toynbee's A Study of History, Kant's Idea for a Universal History, Essay on Eternal[/Perpetual] Peace, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Pure Reason in detail. The contrast between the views of Spengler and Toynbee and those of Kant provides the key to Kissinger's thesis.

Paraphrasing Spengler, Kissinger explains that "the history of each culture [consists of] a ripening and deepening of its soul-picture."

Returning to the central paradox of necessity and freedom, he finds that both Spengler and Toynbee emphasize the necessity of historical occurrence-- i.e., the cyclical recurrence of historical patterns. Their metaphysical approaches diminish the... element of human freedom in history. It is on this basis that Kissinger ultimately judges their philosophies of history as inadequate explanations of history's meaning.

Kissinger is attracted to the poetical lyricism of Spengler's work and to his tragic vision. He takes from Spengler a feeling for history's "becoming"-- a feeling that Spengler attributes in his philosophy to the influence of Goethe. History is life and development, movement and destiny. [...]

Kissinger observes that:

Purely analytical criticism of Spengler will, however, never discover the profounder levels of his philosophy. These reside in his evocation of those elements of life that will ever be the subject of an inner experience, in his intuition of a mystic relationship to the infinite... . Spengler's vision encompassed an approach to history which-- whatever our opinion of his conclusions-- transcended the mere causal analysis of data and the shallow dogmatism of many progress theories. [...] After all has been said, the conviction remains that Spengler has found a poetry in life which rises above the barren systematization of its manifestations.

Yet Kissinger faults Spengler's philosophy... for the view that great cultures develop organically in a determined pattern. Spengler sees a fatedness in historical occurrences that attracts Kissinger... . This fatedness, however, leaves out the inner dimension of freedom and the role of choice in history.

Similarly, Kissinger finds elements to admire in Toynbee's scholarship. His own writings are heavily influenced by Toynbee's analysis of civilizations-- particularly the factors involved in their breakdown. [...] But overall, Kissinger finds Toynbee's philosophy lacking, because it does not address the element of freedom in history either.

Gap. p. 34

Against this background, Kissinger turns to Kant. He sees in Kant's thought as counterbalancing the determinism of Spengler and Toynbee. Kant's metaphysical and epistemological idealism provides Kissinger with an understanding of the element of freedom in history. The contrast between the determinism of Spengler and Toynbee and the indeterminism of Kant is central to Kissinger's argument."

(http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-meaning-of-history-reflections-on.html)

Source: Kissinger's honors thesis was called The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant,