decline of the West is obvious enough. Spengler shares his conviction of
it with a great measure of good Europeans. For several generations the
disaster has been in the air. The Great War was but an episode. Rousseau
had some ideas on the subject. No sooner had the Germans after Kant
invented the notions of Culture, Progress, Spirit, than the critics rose
to prove that their culture was moribund and their spirit sleeping.
Since Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Europe’s religious decline has been
taken for granted. Tolstoi and Nordau from contrary directions met in
calling modern art the herald of the fall. Rimbaud, Blake, Dostoevski,
Whitman, were the sort of prophets who declared the death of Western
Europe, although it was to predict a new spiritual rise. Long past its
zenith is the myth that the “modern age” is a height rather than a
decline from the medieval. The notion that the Middle Ages were “Dark
Ages” is relegated to Chautauqua.
Spengler’s value (and it is very real) lies in his attitude toward this
decline of the West and in the method whereby he establishes it. His
attitude is poetic. He despises the Superman construction whereby
Nietzsche cheated his despair of tomorrow: he is closer to the marvelous
poet Rimbaud who accepted the complete negation of all values, without
hope of heavens or nirvanas, and who, yet, made of his acceptance a last
song. Spengler is in love with winter. So bitter-passionate is his
embrace of the death he feels in his own soul that he has written a vast
book to prove the inevitability of his love. The romantic “proves” the
perfection of his lady by showing how the birds and the trees and the
winds sing her praises. Thus has Spengler bent the art and mathematics
of the Greeks, the religion of the Jews and Arabs, the cultures of
Egypt, India and China to his one loved purpose: he has made them over
into ineluctable signs of the winter upon Europe.
Before such thorough passion one must be respectful. This is a song—a
death song the Prussian is singing. The work of art is a matter of
focus. Here a man with the whole world’s learning in his hand has
_focused_ it to make refrain for a great downgoing. He has seen mankind
whole, in order to make that whole the accomplice of his own particular
end. He has warped history, maimed philosophy, chain-ganged science,
perverted art. But he is an artist himself. He has written a book which
is poor history, worse anthropology, perhaps. So was Dante’s “Divina
Commedia.”
Spengler, I have said, is a poet, his metaphysics eclectic rather than
sound, his historical research vast rather than uniformly deep.
Spengler’s masters, as regards the material with which he works out his
conception, are almost legion, nor has he always done them justice. The
notion of a culture-organism, independent, impenetrable, yet somehow
mirroring the universe within its autonomous self, and moved only by God
in the mysterious shape of Destiny, is very close to Leibnitz with his
Monads. Spengler, indeed, is an instance, with Whitehead and Bertrand
Russell, of the revival of Leibnitz, whose realistic, pluralistic
universe was for a time submerged under the idealistic waves of Kant and
Hegel. To this Leibnitzian base, Spengler adds a good measure of Hegel.
His treatment of mathematics, science, history, all the attributes of
culture from geometry to esthetics, as expressions of Spirit and as
subjective, is Hegelian or Kantian idealism. On the other hand, his
radical differentiation of mathematical time (which is reversible) from
the irreversible Time which he calls Destiny brings to mind Bergson who
opposed creative Time, the signature of Life, to the false, spatial,
materialistic time which he condemns as a constructed figment of the
intellect. Spengler’s anti-intellectualism, whereas it is as logical as
Hegel, springs from Bergson, as does, likewise, his hostility to the
geneticisms of Darwin and of Marx. His treatment, however, of the
art-phenomena of any age as physiognomic traits of its people is a
brilliant evolution of what Taine and Renan themselves derived from
Hegel.
Spengler avows Goethe as his master. He is forever quoting Goethe,
appealing to him as the scientific and philosophic source of his
conception. And he is right, in so far as both these men are poets.
Spengler is very far from the ideas of Goethe; but in his use of ideas
toward an absolute, mythmaking end, he is allied to the creator of
Faust.
Goethe’s philosophic master was Spinoza. This manifest fact would be
inadmissible to Spengler who regards Goethe as the last master of the
Faustian soul and Spinoza as an anomalous survival, out of time and out
of place, from the alien Magian or Arabian culture. Spengler’s thesis of
intact, autonomous culture-organisms does not allow that a master from
one culture can do more than impede the evolution of another. Spinoza,
he declares, shows his strangeness from Western (Faustian) Culture in
that he lacks the _force-element_ which is that culture’s primary trait.
Faust denotes force tending toward the infinite. But why cannot the same
be said of the personal nature of any of the Hebrew prophets or of
Prometheus? In Spinoza, it is true that this trait of personal force is
assimilated—or, rather, it is equated—in that balance of individual
wills whose sum is God. The point is that whereas Goethe as artist
depicted personal force in Faust, he transcended it as a philosopher
precisely in his acceptance of the Spinozistic synthesis of forces.
Goethe, maturing as a thinker, transcended the concept of personal will
as ultimate. Spengler has taken Goethe’s esthetic creation of the
individual, _willing_ Faust, and made of it a philosophic symbol for an
entire culture.
Let us take Spengler for a while, as he demands to be taken, critically.
My notes of specific disagreements with the Spenglerian presentation of
facts and of conclusions would cover many pages. This is no place to
print them. Yet I cannot avoid some minimum of analytical discussion.
The major thesis is the critical issue. Spengler considers the culture
as an organism. He discerns in history a number of such cultures. He
examines the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Indian (Hindu), the Classical
(Greek and Roman), the Magian (Jewish-Persian—early Christian-Arab), and
the Western or Faustian (roughly Western Europe since 900 C.E.). He
discovers in each of these cultures a regular life span of four seasons:
spring, summer, autumn, winter. They sum to about one thousand years.
The form and length of this course never varies. Each culture has a
_soul_: this it expresses through a chief spiritual attitude, through an
individual vision of life and through a specific symbol. The
mathematics, science, art, religion, political, financial and economic
forms of every culture express its soul, its vision—are symbols of its
attitude toward life. These expressions go, with the culture itself,
through the seasons to decrepitude from youth. Each epoch in any culture
is strictly homogeneous with the “contemporary” epoch of any other
culture. In the spring, that is, of Classical culture, you will find
manifestations in every activity of man which are analogous to those of
the spring of Western or of Chinese culture. Each culture lives out its
own destiny, dies its own death. No other culture can do more than
impede it, even as one tree may impede another’s sunlight. There is no
interpenetration. There is no mutual understanding. It is an illusion on
the part of the Western soul to believe it understands the Chinese, the
Arabian, the Greek. The inherent growth of each culture is a matter not
of geneticisms and material evolutions, but of Destiny. There is no
cause and effect; there are monadlike cultural units, mapped through
irreversible Time from birth to death.
Now, the trouble with these organisms is that they are placed _in
vacuo_. They are described as evolving their destiny sheerly out of
themselves, without relational struggle, drama, reaction, interference.
And yet they are also described as having the nature of biologic
organisms: i. e., they have youth, maturity, old age; they have a
specific lifespan. But no organisms known to man exist in this utter
isolation. One and all, they arise from other organisms like them, they
live in a continuum of interaction with other organisms like them, they
give birth before death or in death to other organisms like them. The
culture-organisms of Spengler do not seem to be really alive: they are
mere synthetic constructions of the author. In order to prove them
alive, Spengler has been forced to a progressive and virtuosic deforming
of the facts.
When I say that the Spenglerian culture-organism, absolute, monadlike,
impenetrable, does not exist, I do not mean that there is no valid view
of cultures as organic within their rise and fall. Before I can come to
this, I must examine in at least one detail the Spenglerian proof.
Each culture, Spengler undertakes to show, has a soul unique and
radically different from that of any other culture. (If this is so, why
is there such strict analogy in the forms, seasons and lifespan of all
cultures?) This soul’s Weltanschauung is its own. And its prime symbol
is its idea of space or of extension. From this symbol each culture-soul
constructs its mathematics, its sciences, its religion, its
architecture, etc. They are all expressions of the prime symbol.
Therefore every mathematics, science system, religion, etc., differs
radically from every other. Moreover, there is no one mathematics, no
one system of physics, etc. There are as many as there are cultures.
Each is true, and true uniquely for _its_ culture.
To prove his thesis of the individual prime symbol of each culture,
Spengler bravely ventures to establish that Greek “number” and “space”
and “mathematics” differ radically from the Western. The Classical prime
symbol is the finite unit, the entity, the _here and now_. It denies
infinitude, past, future. It considers space as the mere emptiness
between objects. Therefore it looks on number (Pythagoras) as the
essence of all things: and by all things it means literally things
perceptible to the senses. From this prime symbol has come the Classical
esthetic unit—the human body: the Greek tragedy of episode and exterior
fate: the political unit, a small city (polis): the coin, etc. But the
Western (Faustian) soul has infinity as its prime symbol. Space for it
is infinite and comes prior to the objects which have their being
_within_ it. Western mathematics is, therefore, one of function,
analysis, relation. Its geometry is non-Euclidean. Its State is a cosmic
empire. Its money is credit, not the coin. Its signal art is not
sculpture but atmospheric painting and contrapuntal music. Its
architecture is not the interiorless Greek temple, but the infinitely
soaring Gothic church.
To make his thesis absolute instead of merely suggestive, Spengler is
forced to explain away the Dionysian (anti-Apollonian) element in Greek
culture and the Renaissance in Western Europe: to ignore the mystical in
Pythagoras and Plato, together with the Aristotelian elements of
medieval thought and modern science. The idea of the infinite and of
aspiration toward it existed, indeed, in Greece. It came over,
organically, from Egypt. Classic Greece did not lose it, but formed it,
rather; and transformed it. Moreover, the modern mathematics is
different from the classic and the Newtonian only in so far as it is a
growth. Infinity was a problem evaded by the classical geometers:
admitted as insoluble by the Cartesians: and _eliminated as solved_ by
the non-Euclidean mathematicians of the nineteenth century. The
Classical attitude toward ultimate problems was a status of childhood.
It admitted only the object and the material. So it evolved
materialistic systems like those of Thales, Democritus, Heraclitus; or
turned the abstractions of ideas into quasi materials called essences,
as in Plato. The Faustian attitude was one of adolescence. It stressed
the unsolved and aspirational: the concept of infinite space, the
autonomy of the personal will. Faust is a growth from Œdipus; even as
the Cathedral is a growth from the Temple. To differentiate the prime
symbols of cultures which so obviously were interpenetrated, not alone
one by the other, but each by still other cultures (such as the Egyptian
and the Hebrew), is to do them violence. It is an unnecessary
abstraction. Why Spengler wanted to make this abstraction we shall see
in the sequel.
Here is a book packed with intricate allusions. To criticize it in
detail would take almost page for page. I must confine myself to one
more example. One of the cultures discussed by Spengler is the
Arabian—the culture of the Magian soul. Its prime space-symbol is the
_world-cave_. It lacks the force element of the Faustian, and the
unit-object notion of the Greek. The individual, here, is a mere passive
emanation within God, as within an aloof yet immanent and defining Cave.
The Arab arch, the mosque-dome, the mosaic painting, are alike
expressions of this symbol. As are also algebra (the arithmetic of
indefinite number), the arguments of Talmudry, the fatalism of the
Moslem. The Magian culture-soul was born about the first year of our
era. Precultural to it was the whole pre-Christian history of Judea,
Persia, Arabia. Now, as “springtime scriptures,” come the Gospels, come
the philosophies of Origen, Philo, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Mani. With
Augustine and the Nestorians we are at the summer. Mohammed marks the
decline into the autumnal dryness whose strawlike flowers are the Arab
and Judaic thinkers of Babylon and Spain.
Perhaps this amazing violence done to such various spirits as ancient
Hebrew prophet, Berber mystic, Alexandrian pseudepigraphist, Arab Moslem
and Granadan Moor, in the attempt to enclose them all within one organic
cultural conception, born at the birth of Christ, reaching summer about
400, drooping in 800 and dead with the _rigor mortis_ of “civilization”
at the year 1,000, will most briefly prove the dangers of the
Spenglerian method.
Of course, there are analogies between St. Augustine and Ibn Gabirol.
Are there, then, none between Faust and Job? between the writers of the
Upanishads and Whitman? between the sculptors of Egypt and the painters
of Spain? If Maimonides is a “Magian Winter man,” why is Aquinas a
“Faustian Spring man”? If kinship of “prime symbol” bring Philo,
Plotinus, Mohammed, Rabbi Akiba and Jehuda Halevi together as seasonal
expressions of a single culture, why not prove for the entire world one
spiritual Body, one organic culture—with its systoles and diastoles, of
course, its tides, its shifts, and yet as well with its deep unity of
purpose, its continuity of form and of method of creation?
Death is a breaking up; a lapse from unity into multiplicity. When a
human being dies, only his unity is gone. Disease means _dis-wholeness_.
Spengler breaks up the world into these absolute cultures which are
really fragments, because there is the tendency toward death—toward
disunity—in his own high Prussian soul. _He_ is breaking and so is his
particular portion of the world. Let him, therefore, make conscription
of all the wisdom of his world to prove that his experience is the Law.
Nowhere is the man’s will to see crooked plainer than in his virtual
ignoring of the Jews. The whole Scriptural era before the Gospels is set
aside as “inorganic”—not cultural at all. Now, Spengler’s thesis is that
the pure mystical religious ethos is the trait of the birth of a
culture. Legalism, materialism, socialism, communism, the various
systems of utilitarianism, mark that culture’s end and herald the “state
of suspended death” which he calls civilization and which, with all its
wintry signs, he declares now to be upon the European and American
worlds. But if, hypothetically, he had deigned to consider the Hebrews
and Jews as a culture, what would he have found? Mosaism (read:
materialism, legalism, utilitarianism) came first! “Civilization” or
death came before culture or birth. And from this winter a gradual
unfolding toward the spring of the prophets. He would have found matter
even more disquieting than that. For this “organism” of the Jews is
hopelessly irregular: its seasons and states recur and are intermingled.
Nor does Spengler’s millennial limit for the entire story tell one-half
of its creative tale. He would have found, moreover, that this
hypothetic culture interpenetrated with others: revived and created
others, was revived by others.
And, looking from the Jews back to his Greeks and Faustians, he would
have found a similar intricate story. He would have found, in other
words, hope in lieu of his dear despair. Wherefore he looked elsewhere,
reasoned otherwise.
The culture-organism is a notion abstracted from human life. It _is_ an
abstraction. And abstractions are needed for intellectual work. They are
right when they are fruitful. To regard the life of Greece as a strict
cultural whole is wrong: yet pragmatically it may be correct to do so,
since it enables us to get the results which observation in isolated
status alone brings. The danger rises when we forget that abstractions
are of use qua abstractions. Take them for real and they turn monsters.
Indeed, the idea of the periodic rise and fall of man is probably a
similar abstraction. Yet it is justified so long as we employ it either
to criticize the past or to envisage a greater future. Both of these
acts require the analytic method: and analysis _is_ abstraction. And now
we are at the root of what ails Spengler. His “cultures” are counters of
the analyst. And these he has turned into a poet’s bodies. This is why
his book, although its impulse is poetic, cannot rank as great poetic
art. He tells us a good deal about the cultures which have filled the
world. And much of what he says is true and is profound. Nowhere, for
instance, have I encountered better comment on German music, on the deep
significances of Classic and Gothic architecture. Yet the cultures
themselves, whereof he speaks as breathing entities, do not become
plastically real. We learn much in detail about their traits. _They_
neither breathe for us nor move. They cannot. For they are not persons
of a drama: they are tools of an argument.
Human spirit takes forms, of course, and all forms die. But the
_constant_ is the human spirit. And it is poor philosophy to take its
forms as really abstracted from each other. Even the painter of a group
of persons must relate them, one and all, upon his canvas if he aims to
achieve esthetic truth.
Among the forms of human spirit are the arts which rise and fall; are
social entities like state and city, which are builded and broken. But
the Spenglerian assumption that the human spirit has no other life than
in the splendor of great buildings, great realms, great arts, is a
profanation. To prove that the abstraction called Rome was “decadent” in
the year 400 is not to prove that Man, then, was less great than in the
days when Caesar strutted. It may require a peculiar conjunction of
poetic genius and social readiness to produce a Vergil. But there are
other ways to the light. And some of them are always open.
Spengler feels death in his own soul. Wherefore he marshals a whole
retrospect of life to funeral him in true Prussian glory. But human
history is subtler. Man is a variable constant. He can achieve greatness
with the ruins of a world as his sole instruments, as well as with the
aid of outward fortune. Here, too, the evidence of the Jew might have
saved Spengler—from the writing of his book! Variant circumstance has
infinitely varied the expressions of this people. They have been warlike
and humble; unphilosophical and, later, abstruse beyond the Greeks and
Hindus. They have had no drama and flooded the stage: no worldly arts at
all, and later supplied such arts for all the world. They have been
pastoral, and adverse from the soil. They have been creators,
politically, of Greek polis, of Oriental empires, and of invisible,
Platonic Zions.
Only in so far as Man remained alive among the Jews was Jewish culture a
constant. And this is true of any culture. The undying kernel is
humanity: this is the locus of organic growth and of organic permanence
which Spengler should have studied. For cultures are never isolate. Cut
them off from their immersion in other cultures—in Life, they will die
uprooted. They move upon and within each other: they fall to rise, fade
to be transfigured.
Above all, the human spirit, in any cultural body, is capable of
_unprecedented transformation_, provided an unprecedented new element of
life comes fertilely upon it. This is the destiny of evolution. And
evolution is true, however discarded the mechanistic form of it may be
which Darwin degraded from Lamarck. _And this crucial fact—that the
culture, if to be regarded as an organism at all, must be taken as a
transforming organism; an organism related to the genus, not to the
individual, to the possibly infinite genus, not to the sharply delimited
and mortal person—is entirely ignored by Spengler._
Look on cultures, not as biologic bodies with their youth and age, but
as indefinite series like those in mathematics, and you have a fertile
abstraction in lieu of a dead one. These series have, each, their inner
laws, perhaps, but they are intertwined and any figure belonging in one
place to one series may differently occupy other series. Paul, then, who
in the Spenglerian sense was a “winter man” for the Jews, could be a
“spring man” for Western Europe. And Jesus, his strict contemporary in
time and race, could have in him all seasons.
Or take America. Spengler would rightly say that America was born of the
dying of European culture. So he condemns us to the _rigor mortis_ of
civilization; to a noisier Egyptian fellahdom. But what of the new
mythmakers, the springtime men, those creatures of pure ethos—Whitman,
Lincoln, Melville, Thoreau? In an organic body, shut by Destiny, they
have no place, and Spengler doubtless would deny them. In a life series,
self-contained yet indefinitely progressing, they are in place. For with
such a series each integer is at once the conclusion of what came before
and the outset of an infinity beyond....
_1926_
8. THE MODERN DISTEMPER
(_A diagnosis through Joseph Wood Krutch and Bertrand Russell_)
a.
In the days when all men of a nation shared a view of life—worshiping
Jehovah and obeying Torah, dwelling within the cosmos of the Catholic
Church, accepting the divine right of their king or of their reason—it
was possible for the author and critic to make his individual
contribution without explicitly stating the philosophic ground on which
he rested. The base of his point of view was common, and was commonly
understood. The personal variation was what mattered. This, of course,
is the contrary of our modern state. It is precisely the foundations of
human vision—hence of human thought and of language—that have shifted.
In place of essential harmony in the premises of intellectual action,
there is chaos. But the American writer, despite this obvious fact,
seldom honors his public with a clear-cut statement of what his
philosophy and his religion are. He may even go so far as to deny that
he possesses any, and make of his lack a virtue.