Phylosophy/1. Philosophy of culture

Student Tikhonova A. S.

Donetsk National University of Economics and Trade named after M.Tugan-Baranovsky, Ukraine

Oswald Spengler's philosophy of culture

Philosophy of culture is a branch of philosophy that examines the essence and meaning of culture. Morton White argues that the discipline is much more important than is often recognized, and that his version of holistic pragmatism can accommodate its breadth. Going beyond Quine's dictum that philosophy of science is philosophy enough, White suggests that it should contain the word "culture" in place of "science." He defends the holistic view that scientific belief is tested by experience but that such testing is rightly applied to systems or conjunctions of beliefs, not isolated beliefs. He adds that we test ethical systems by appealing to feelings of moral obligation as well as to sensory experiences.

Philosophy of culture—narrowly defined as a philosophical conception of the various stages of evolving human culture — can be said to date back to F. Nietzsche and in part to the Russian Slavophiles. The central issue was now the opposition between culture as an organic whole and civilization, regarded as the manifestation of a mechanical and utilitarian relationship to life. This view was shared by G. Simmel, O. Spengler, L. Klages, H. Keyserling, J. Ortega y Gasset, and other followers of the school of Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life), as well as by the Russians K. N. Leon’tev, N. Ia. Danilevskii, and N. A. Berdiaev. Danilevskii and Spengler furthermore conceived of individual cultures, whether national or historical, as being absolutely locked into themselves and mutually impermeable; a corollary of this view was the denial of the unity of human culture.

Oswald Spengler, the German historian and author of the seminal, two-volume work, Decline of the West or Der Untergang des Abendlandes, was born in 1880 to a conservative, petit bourgeois German family. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1904, after having initially failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus because of insufficient references. As his editor Arthur Helps suggests, Spengler’s pessimism was inflected by his own frustrated professional ambitions and meager economic means. By 1911, Spengler foresaw war and hoped for an imperial future for Germany, which he feared might deteriorate like Rome after the Punic Wars. Although he voted for Hitler in 1932, by the time of his death in 1936, his books were banned by the Nazis after he criticized their policies of anti-Semitism and publicly opposed their biological ideology.

During the First World War a German historian produced a book which caused quite a stir among intellectuals around the world. By collating events in different (usually non-contemporary) cultures and civilisations, Spengler maintained that it should be possible to fill in gaps in history, and indeed to set out possibilities for the future, although admittedly only in terms of very broad generalisations.

Spengler's book is a work of monumental scholarship, discussing in depth such diverse topics as mathematics, music, architecture, painting, theology and money, with brief but still erudite excursions into other subjects including law, chemistry, linguistics, space-time relativity and literature, integrating them all into a single coherent philosophy.

Most people find it extremely difficult to accept Spengler's basic thesis, namely that cultures and civilisations are living organisms in their own right, just like plants, animals and humans, although of a much higher rank. Each culture has its own distinctive soul, which expresses itself in artistic, scientific, political, economic and religious forms.

Like individual people, cultural organisms differ in character, ability and aptitude. Thus, calculus and the theory of mathematical functions, soaring Gothic cathedrals and a music based on fugal composition all express characteristically Western passions, which include a love for vast wide-open spaces as well as an intense interest in the distant past and concern for the far future.

In a contrasting manner, geometry, statics and sculpture were all creative expressions of a mind obsessed with the corporeal and with here-now – that which produced the Ancient Greek Culture. Similarly, algebra, alchemy and arabesque were all manifestations of another unique culture-personality, as also were acupuncture, Taoism and Chinese art. And in the Hindu world, yoga and dance-forms attained levels of sophistication never equalled elsewhere.

Spengler articulates the “problem of Civilization” as the primary focus of his inquiry because it crystallizes the decline, death, and posthumous extension of world cultures. He differentiates between culture and civilization, suggesting,

“Civilization is the ultimate destiny of the Culture… Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion… petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood” (24),[4].

The distinction between civilization and culture is analogous to the difference between the Greek soul and the Roman intellect. Civilization represents “petrified” or reified culture, divorced from the “soul” and process of becoming, and ultimately signifying the swansong rather than the apex of a culture’s development. For Spengler, the German poet Goethe best epitomizes the dynamic “philosophy of Becoming” through his emphasis on development and growth in his works Wilhelm Meister and Poetry and Truth, in contrast to the static “philosophy of Being” represented by Aristotle and Kant. Goethe’s concept of “living nature” emphasizes this “thing-becoming” and opposes the “world-as-organism, dead nature to living nature, law to form,” which is propagated and expressed by civilization (20),[4].

for Spengler, no two cultures or cultural moments can be the same. He writes, “Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return” (17),[4]. Underscoring the ephemeral, inimitable nature of each culture, Spengler’s view of history and temporality is colored by a profound sense of unrecoverable loss.

Just as a human being reaches puberty during the second, and full adulthood in the third decade of life, a culture also passes through phases of predetermined sequence whose durations do not vary greatly from one higher organism to another9. Its 'springtime' is characterised by strong religious faith, which slowly gives way to increasing intellectuality and materialism. A culture's 'summer' is an era of great creativity: in Europe, this witnessed the crystallisation of a totally new concept in mathematics (calculus) simultaneously in the minds of two people working quite independently – Newton and Leibniz. The same centuries saw the birth of oil painting and the flowering of a style of music completely unknown before the advent of Western Culture.

During 'autumn', life becomes dominated by materialism and by purely rational thought; Spengler uses the term “Civilization” to denote this particular phase. Warfare between the culture's constituent nations increases in intensity, with tensions between various strata of society also reaching breaking point. Eventually, one state becomes vigorous enough to conquer and absorb all others, imposing an authoritarian Imperium. In the Classical world this was achieved by the Romans, and in Peru by the Incas. In Central America, the Aztecs were consolidating their gains when Spanish Westerners intervened. In eastern Asia, it was the state of Qin (Ch'in) which ultimately incorporated the rest, giving the name China to the integrated empire.

If Spengler is right that cultures really are living, organic units, then all those changes are as inevitable as formation of blossom and then fruit on many trees, or as 'necessary' as the emergence of a butterfly from the chrysalis of certain insects16. There is only one alternative – namely sickness followed by premature death of the cultural organism.

Spengler does not discuss later developments in cultures, but it is obvious that without the heritage of Chinese civilisation, there would have been no Tang or Song dynasties, which left us a rich legacy of highly refined art and poetry. Similarly indebted was the Gupta dynasty in India, during which the talented writer Kalidasa composed his poetry and drama. It could therefore be argued that despite various setbacks, the Chinese, Roman, Indian (and Egyptian) empires more than once recovered to regain order and prosperity.

Ultimately, according to Spengler, Western culture is characterized by its restless thrust toward the infinite and unattainable, or the “conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole”.

Yet, according to Spengler, after nearly 900 years of dominance, the Faustian era has reached its death throes. He writes, “the future of the West is not limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time… but a single phenomenon of history” (30),[4]. Like other modernists, he attacked the positivistic, Enlightenment myth of unending progress based on universal criteria. Harbingers of this cultural decay were, among other things, atonal music, avant-garde art produced for oversensitive connoisseurs, manipulation of the public opinion by mass media, and imperialism. Much like Goethe’s Faust becomes shackled by his insatiable quest for knowledge, “Faustian man has become the slave of his creation,” particularly through the machine which enslaves both the worker and entrepreneur (412),[4]. For Spengler, “Caesarism” is another manifestation of this decline, as authority becomes increasingly concentrated in the hand of one person and the modern institutions of the state begin to disintegrate. Even modern writers, such as Nietzsche and Ibsen, who “embraced the possibilities of a true philosophy,” also “exhausted them”.

It would be a pity to ignore Spengler's writings purely on account of their controversial political implications. The Decline of the West, particularly, contains a wealth of information and ideas capable of providing stimulation and enjoyment for a specialist in almost any field of knowledge.

Literature:

1. A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism by Morton White

2. Spengler's Philosophy, and its implication that Europe has 'lost its way'. David L. McNaughton. "Comparative Civilizations Review", USA, Fall 2012, pp. 7-15

3. U. N. Davydov. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). 2010 The Gale Group, Inc.

4. Oswald Spengler, "The Decline of the West," New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

5. Spengler’s Context and Milieu,

http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Oswald_Spengler#cite_note-6