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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
Seldom has a book, so massive and so erudite, caused such a widespread commotion as did Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. It appealed to a variety of tastes. The preacher of imminent and sensational doomsdays has not lost his attraction with the decline of the religious sanctions attributed to bygone apocalyptics. But a scientific age demands a scientific eschatology, and this Spengler supplied. Popular science had promised only a long protracted cooling of the earth’s crust, or, in moments of soaring imagination, the possibility of a collision with a comet or an invasion from Mars. It was too remote to be really scaring. The morbid eschatological appetite wants the world to go out, not with a fizzle, but with a bang, and the sooner the bang the better. Spengler promised something at once scientific, catastrophic, and fairly soon; though perhaps it was not generally realised that ‘soon’ on the lips of this juggler with milleniums might mean quite a number of centuries.
But the appearance of these volumes—they were first published in 1918—was also well timed to meet a more passing mood. In those days of disillusionment it was gratifying to read this comparative study of the rise and fall of civilisations, this deterministic conception of repeating historical cycles, with its assurances that the signs of the times pointed to a speedy downfall of our own discredited culture. It was particularly gratifying to defeated Germany.
‘Der Mensch und die Technik. Beitrag zu einer Philoso-Phie des Lebens.’ Von Oswald Spengler. (C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Miinchen, 1931.)
2 Such was the title of the English translation of Der Unter-gang des Abendlandes. It is typical of the ‘slow phlegmatic English temperament’ at which Spengler scoffs. An Unter-garg is no ‘decline,’ but a fall, a ruin, a cataclasm.
3 Cf. Andre Levinson: Oswald Spengler in Les Norvelles Littéraires, Nov. 21, 1931.
4 Cf. Manfred Schroeter: Der Streit urn Spengler, published by Beck of Munich.
5 In La Défense de l'Occident (Plon, 1927). An English translation was published by Faber and Gwyer.
6 In his book Time and Western Man; and in his article in the Enemy.
7 ‘Eine langsame, phlegmatische VerHnderung entspricht dem englischen Naturell, nicht der Natur.’ But Spengler adds some more serious and damaging criticism. The Darwinian classification of animals on the principle of anatomical similarity is gratuitous and materialistic. They should be classified, not according to their bodies, but according to their ‘souls’ as manifested in their modes of life. And modes of life should be gradated, as every Thomist knows, according to degrees of independence and self-sufficiency. Spengler's paragraph on this subject is curiously reminiscent of Contra Gentiles, IV, xi. Thus viewed, man is very far removed from the ape. Anatomically, carnivorous man may resemble the nut-eating ape, but his profounder affinities are with lions, tigers and eagles. And against the evolutionist's assumption of an uninterrupted, gradual process he remarks that ‘we should not be able to distinguish geological strata were they not brought about by catastrophes of unknown kind and origin; nor could we distinguish kinds of fossilised animals had they not suddenly appeared, and died out unaltered.’ He adopts, apparently, the ‘mutation theory’ inaugurated by De Vries, and is forced to the conclusion that the origin of man was ‘sudden …. like a flash of lightning, an earthquake …. epoch-making in the highest sense.’
8 We are reminded how Goethe's Faust had sought to revise the ‘In principio erat Verbum,’ and muttered ‘Im Anfang war die Kraft.’—Faust, Part I, 1. 1233.
9 Untergang des Abendlandes, Vol. II, p. 628. All our references to the Decline Of the West are to the 64th-65th editions of Vol. I (1929) and to the 54th-ssth editions of VoL II (1930).
10 Summa Theologica, I, CN, 4.
11 Untergang des Abendlandes, Vol. I, p. 5.
12 Untcrgang des Abendlandes, Vol. II, p. 121.
13 Faust, Part 11, Act 5.
14 Karl Heim, in his ingenious essay on Die religiöse Bedeutung des Schicksalsgedankens, shows that Spengler owes an unacknowledged debt to Hegel's philosophy of history. It seems, nevertheless, that it is rather the ‘Hegel upside-down ’ot Marx nevertheless, that has influenced him. With Marx, Spengler has got rid of the ‘evolution of the Idea,’ no less that the continuity of history which both Hegel and Marx took for granted.
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