Spengler's influence has been surprisingly significant. Mostly rejected by "mainstream" (read analytic and/or "professional") philosophy but widely embraced by a European public grieving from the annihilation of the first two decades of this century last.
He wasn't an academic of great repute but he's often considered the greatest "Doom Prophet" of the 20th Century - writings that remain compelling almost 100 years on. (We'll take a look at their veracity below.) For that reason, he's seen as having some "outsider" appeal - critiquing the academics better than the academics. Of the vein and writing style of Germanic philosophers popular at the end of the 1800s (but writing with nearly the first quarter of the 20th Century as hindsight).
He's often credited with spawning both the popular Cyclical Views (of society/politics). Many Culture/Civilization Views of late trace back or are moored in his gloomy musings:
I'll offer some original criticisms below.
A crass and incomplete exposition:
i. Their soul (collective experience, not a merely intellectualized abstract idea but a comprehensively lived and internalized worldview) is hammered through shared trauma and historical events of momentous occasion.
ii. This common bond is therefore spiritual and forges (and is forged by) a sense of destiny, shared metaphors, and Culture.
iii. Such a grouping is not just an arbitrary "mass of people" (e.g. - a Population) but must have these shared commonalities.
iv. Peoples outlive specific stages in the development of Culture and Civilization (Spengler's metaphorical Seasons).
i. The purely and inspired creative potentialities and spiritual commitments of early Culture are effaced and dissipate into cold economic efficiencies (a common critique of early 20th Century Reactionary critics like Max Weber, Goethe).
ii. Growth ceases, innovation is stifled, religion is repudiated, stasis and decay are everywhere-present, and art becomes formless.
iii. Consumerist materialism replaces and consumes all other systems of value.
i. Despite that fact, Democracy becomes increasingly Plutocratic and a guise by which thoroughly Autoractic systems come to manage populations.
ii. The Media exists to solely brainwash the masses and serves less to share opinions than to shape them in their entirety.
iii. The Money system and the Media are the main instruments by which Plutocrats manage everyone.
i. On Spengler's view, Money is victorious against Religion, Philosophy, and Science.
ii. These inevitably leads to a painful and ongoing period of incessant warfare and Despotism (Caesarism) until another Culture rises up and overthrows the last.
Dismal, no?
I sometimes think Spengler makes Hobbes look cheery!
Before we take issue with Spengler, I think it's worth looking at some interesting observations he made (regardless of the truth or falsity of the rest of his work, whether in assent or to resist):
Volume I - Introduction
i. "Consider the decline of art and the failing authority of science; the grave problems arising out of the victory of the megalopolis over the country-side, such as childlessness and land-depopulation..."
Volume II - The Soul of the City
i. "But the real miracle is the birth of the soul of a town. A mass-soul of a wholly new kind — whose last foundations will remain hidden from us forever — suddenly buds off from the general spirituality of its Culture. As soon as it is awake, it forms for itself a visible body. Out of the rustic group of farms and cottages, each of which has its own history, arises a totality. And the whole lives, breathes, grows, and acquires a face and an inner form and history. Thenceforward, in addition to the individual house, the temple, the cathedral, and the palace, the town-figure itself becomes a unit objectively expressing the form-language and style-history that accompanies the Culture throughout its life-course."
ii. "It follows, however — and this is the most essential point of any — that we cannot comprehend political and economic history at all unless we realize that the city, with its gradual detachment from and final bankrupting of the country, is the determinative form to which the course and sense of higher history generally conforms. World history is city history."
iii. "The city is intellect. The Megalopolis is "free" intellect. It is in resistance to the “feudal” powers of blood and tradition that the burgherdom or bourgeoisie, the intellectual class, begins to be conscious of its own separate existence. It upsets thrones and limits old rights in the name of reason and above all in the name of "the People", which henceforward means exclusively the people of the city. Democracy is the political form in which the townsman's outlook upon the world is demanded of the peasantry also... The city assumes the lead and control of economic history in replacing the primitive values of the land, which are for ever inseparable from the life and thought of the rustic, by the absolute idea of money as distinct from goods... The City means not only intellect, but also money."
iv. "The spirit-pervaded stone of Gothic buildings, after a millennium of style-evolution, has become the soulless material of this daemonic stone-desert."
v. "These final cities are wholly intellect... not by feeling but by the spirit of commercial enterprise... the houses being merely the stones of which it is assembled."
vi. "In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward, we read of old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty, crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheatre is a sown field, dotted with emergent statues and herms. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable."
Volume II - Nobility and Priesthood
i. "The burgher, too, now looks with contempt upon the countryside, which lies about him dull, unaltered, and patient, and in contrast to which he feels himself more awake and freer and therefore further advanced on the road of the Culture."
Volume II - Historic Pseudomorphoses
i. "Religion is metaphysic and nothing else — "Credo quia absurdum" — and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic — that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true."
Volume II - Philosophy of Politics
i. "To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama."
ii. "A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined."
iii. "What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears."
iv. "And all that they learn in this mindtraining, is what it is considered that they should know — a higher will puts together the picture of their world for them."
v. "Politically gifted peoples do not exist. Those which are supposed to be so are simply peoples that are firmly in the hands of a ruling minority and in consequence feel themselves to be in good form."
Volume II - Money
i. "Money aims at mobilizing all things."
ii. "Our economy-world is ordered by force and mass. A field of money-tensions lies in space and assigns to every object, irrespective of its specific kind, a positive or negative effect-value..."
iii. "All that is possible is to set forth the essential opposition of Apoliinian and Faustian money — the one, money as magnitude, and the other, money as function."
iv. "At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful — now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power."
Volume II - The Machine
i. "The private powers of the economy want free paths for their acquisition of great resources. No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws themselves, in their interests, and to that end they make use of the tool they have made for themselves, democracy, the subsidized party."
ii. "Only high finance is wholly free, wholly intangible."
iii. "The figure of the modern sorcerer — a switchboard with levers and labels at which the workman calls mighty effects into play by the pressure of a finger without possessing the slightest notion of their essence — is only the symbol of human technique in general."
iv. "But for that very reason Faustian man has become the slave of his creation."
iv. "They listened for the laws of the cosmic pulse in order to overpower it. And so they created the idea of the machine a small cosmos obeying the will of man alone."
v. "... the engineer, the priest of the machine, the man who knows it."
Volume I - https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/72344/pg72344-images.html
Volume II - https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283129/page/n497/mode/2up
* Urban vs. Rural divide* Location and City culture* National finances* Democrocay, Despotism, and Autocracy* Election money, Oligarchy, Plutocracy, special interests* Replication Crisis in Science* Rising Childlessness and decreasing birth-rates in Post-Industrial countries* Overreliance on technology and concerns about A.I.* The nature of money and its uses* Ecological degradation* Criticism of the media (left, right, fringe, social, whatever)* Decline of traditional values and religion* Education policy, bias in standards, test scores, and politics* Language norms and standards* Pretenses of the Elite
Given the crossroads many countries and political parties are at, it might be worth considering and reviewing some of the criticisms above (since they still resound with many people) - such tropes still persist and are in use by all sorts of special interest groups (I think I just saw an ad in a top news outlet describing how: Urban elites haved condescendingly ignored the values of country folk)!
Always interesting how an obscure work over 100 years old can still be highly relevant!
I would characterize my views on Spengler in the following way:
Some well-known objections (raised by Popper and others, long before):
i. These are arbitrarily gerrymandered and massaged to fit the narrative (I use narrative here deliberately since he offers no method to substantiate his claims).
ii. Even Nietzsche (who he cites as a major influence) offered some acceptance criteria (if you will): Transvaluation of Values, Eternal Recurrence, etc.
iii. For such reasons his view has often been dismissed as mere poetry or speculative literature among the philosophically inclined.
I'd like to throw a few more into the ring. Organized into a few themes:
America
i. If we go the crass route of consideration by military might: America had already defeated numerous major European powers outright (Britain, France, Spain).
ii. We'd established colonies all over the world, helped win World War One, and acquired almost all the former colonies of North America (Canada excepted) from Russia, Spain, England, Mexico, France, and so on.
iii. Yet despite this outsized global influence, America is barely referenced in either of the two volumes.
i. We might take America to belong to the Faustian Culture group but I think there are substantial reasons to challenge that notion.
ii. Spengler appears to fix the dawn of the Faustian epoch with Valmy and Napolean (America is sidelined in the books).
Given the outsized role that America played 1800's on, this is an unacceptable gap in the "theory" (if we can call it that).
Challenge from Fact
i. This obviously parallels other critiques of Relativism.
i. We would then no longer be doing honest objective inquiry/discovery but merely a treatise on Aesthetics, unsubstantiated opinion, or fictitious speculation.
ii. A work of mere Aesthetics is not by itself bad, but the pretense of Decline of the West is that he's discovered the horrid truth and going to proselytize the bad news.
Challenges from Relativism
i. Metaphor/Metaphors as a concept/as concepts to be analyzed, considered, thought about, and traded like intellectual commodities failed to exist, formulate, or reify in previous societies.
ii. Is Spengler's critique of history only a Western critique (by the logic of his own theory) thereby?
iii. My disdain for the use of naive pictures to guide philosophy is well-known - such metaphors are implicitly invoked, rarely defended, do most of the real work of the theories that rely on them, and are dogmatically held in spite of any reasons to do so.
i. We are simultaneously instructed to see all of history as being wholly divvied up into isolated, non-overlapping, cultural units all while taking a singular and complete description of all such phenomena as seemingly objective Fact.
ii. How is such a position of objectivity possible within such a framework?
iii. What special properties/attributes of a specific Culture give it the seemingly unique ability to take such an eagle-eyed view (and why that Culture over any other)?
iv. If Spengler must conceded that Cultural isolation doesn't occur it seems far more difficult to defend either Cultural discontinuity or inevitability since Cultures can interact.
Knowledge Continuity
i. Ditto for math.
ii. Even if Science is largely Relativist or Socially Constructed, it doesn't imply it can't be transmitted or shared.
iii. This mirrors standard-fare arguments made in the Scientific Realism debate.
i. That metaphor appears to be dubious (given the slow, subtle, but quite constant accretion of global knowledge).
ii. Prior to the late 20th century such knowledge was perhaps invisible (to those cloistered armchair philosophers who also lacked much professional experience outside academia) - now, it's undeniable (insofar as we are making recourse to historical Fact - the transmission of memes and Cultural Artifacts is well substantiated).
i. On that basis we might therefore challenge the circularity/cyclical metaphor he employs as well.
Challenges from Optimistic Finance and Technology
i. Spengler himself notes that Money's nature and relationship to society changes (during the transition from Culture to Civilization). Indeed, the increasing ephemeralization (and abstraction) of money seems essential to its gaining its all-encircling power (as he alleges).
ii. To be more specific, America has one of the most innovative and experimental approaches to the Money system: Bretton Woods II, gift economics, digital currencies, community currencies, Goldbacks, cryptocurrencies, credit cards, and so on all originated here (and nowhere else).
iii. Bimetallism, fiat, and debates regarding gold reserves were also quite influential here (but didn't originate in the United States).
iv. This suggests that some Cultures are less unwittingly guided by the invisible hand of some implicit set of monetary concepts and/or metaphors than they are deliberately crafting and concerned about the relationship of money to society.
i. Nothing prohibits Money from being deliberately crafted on his view (by the logic of his system). That is except for extreme pessimism!
ii. With advances in economic thinking, monetary policy, and finance money itself can be deliberately crafted generally (as well as its interrelationships with and to people)!
Perhaps, the inevitable and dismal sequence of events Spengler foresees is not quite so inevitable after all!
Moreover, Fact shows us that overall suffering, misery, and poverty have diminished greatly (while life expectancy, literacy - something Spengler claims will be discarded, political participation, and dissent have all increased).
i. I don't think we would expect those outcomes if such dismal conclusions (as those propounded far above) were true.
Careful regulation and the creation of international standards (for example: IETF, IEEE, ISO, W3C) can help mitigate the worst of technology and allow for careful and deliberate planning around the introduction of new consumer technologies.
Techno-Optimism insists that the advantages of technology completely outweigh the disadvantages and have greatly increased human freedom and prosperity overall.
Cities and Urban Development
City Dwellers aren't Monolithic Boogeymen
i. Over the rest of the 20th Century we've often seen the most die-hard Religious and Cultural zealots emerging from communities with high population density.
ii. Neighborhoods and regional stakeholders usually disagree immensely on policy and are often the most likely to critique Capitalism (which Spengler equates with Citied interests).
iii. Political and policy demographics vary widely when we take a more nuanced look at Urban demographics.