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Canonball
Discussing Volume I Of "The Decline Of The West" By Oswald Spengler
In this episode of Canonball we discuss Volume I of "The Decline Of The West," which, subtitled "Form And Actuality," was written by Oswald Spengler and published in 1918.
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Oswald Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg in Brunswick, which at that time was part of the German Empire and today is in central Germany. He went to high school, he went to college, and in 1903 he failed what we might today call his dissertation, which was on Heraclitus and was titled The Fundamental Metaphysical Thought of the Heracletian Philosophy. He didn't pass the first time, but then in 1904, the following year, he tried again and he did pass. He got his Ph.D. at the age of 24. And I would like to know in more detail what schooling would have been like at that time, what would have been required for him to get this Ph.D., because of course now, at least in the U.S., to have a Ph.D. when you're 24 is very young. Almost nobody does that ever. So I'm wondering if this Ph.D. might have been a little bit more equivalent to what we would today call a master's. But one thing we can take away from it is that he was studying the classics, he was studying Heraclitus in detail in his early 20s. Then in order to get a teaching certificate to be a high school teacher, he had to write a second dissertation and that ended up being called The Development of the Organ of Sight in the Higher Realms of the Animal Kingdom. So that's now in a different field that's more related to biology. But already now, probably in his mid-20s, we have this combination of philosophical and historical study with scientific and biological studies specifically related to how something develops. In this case, he was looking in particular at how sight develops, but this gradual development of something over a long period of time would later be relevant to his most famous book or pair of books. But that second dissertation was approved and he got his teaching certificate. So then from 1908 to 1911, he's now 28 to 31, he worked at an elementary school in Hamburg and he taught science, German history, and math. In 1911, his mother died and he received an inheritance that was big enough so that he didn't have to have a full-time job and he moved to Munich. And when he was there, he was studying independently and living off of this inheritance, but he lived a very modest life during this period and he apparently owned no books, but he must have been getting them from somewhere. He also worked as a tutor and wrote for magazines in order to make a little extra money. When World War I came around a few years later, he was exempt from military service because of a serious heart problem and I wonder if it was that problem that would kill him at a relatively young age. But the war affected his life because apparently his inheritance was invested overseas and so he didn't have access to it. It was somehow sanctioned or closed off to him because of the war. So he was living modestly before and during the war he was reportedly living in real poverty. Spengler said that he completed The Decline of the West in 1914, but it wasn't published until the summer of 1918, which was as the war was ending. He finished his book apparently just as the war started and then it was published four years later. The book was a huge success and he became famous overnight. And in 1918 was published the first volume, which we're looking at this week. And even after the first volume, the book was very hotly debated. Max Weber, who is best known for The Protestant Ethic in the Spirit of Capitalism, called Spengler a very ingenious and learned dilettante. And I wasn't able to quickly pull up a more detailed criticism of Spengler from Weber. That would be interesting to see if one exists. And this book definitely has its strengths and its weaknesses, but calling someone an ingenious and learned dilettante is basically an ad hominem. If Weber had specific criticisms of Spengler's book, he should lay them out somewhere. Calling somebody a dilettante sounds like I have more credentials than you, you haven't done your work in a serious way, and then dropping the subject. And that might well be true, but you have to say why. Because as we just saw in briefly looking at Spengler's CV when he wrote Decline of the West, he wasn't really plugged into any major institutions. He wasn't particularly well connected. He seems to be a typical image of the lone scholar in the wilderness writing in isolation. And it's easy to criticize somebody like that by looking down your nose and drawing attention to the absence of prestigious names in his background. But that says absolutely nothing about his ideas. The question is, what is he saying? How does he make his case? Is that valid? And the reason why I would have liked to find a more detailed criticism from Weber is because I can guess at some of the things that he might have said, and we'll get into that. But I think an important reflex is that when somebody calls someone a name in a debate context, they call them a dilettante, for example. Even if the personsaying it is somebody famous like Weber, the appropriate response has to be that by itself is an ad hominem, it's irrelevant, it can be disregarded. But getting back to Spengler's life, in 1922, he published volume two of Decline of the West. And then later in the 1932 election in Germany, he voted for Hitler over Hindenburg. But in 1934, he published a book called The Hour of Decision, which was a bestseller, but it was reportedly banned because of its critique of national socialism. That book apparently also warns of a coming world war that may destroy Western civilization. So that might be an interesting book to check out as well. He spent the last few years of his life apparently reading books, listening to music, and collecting ancient Turkish, Persian, and Indian weapons, which is an interesting hobby that he apparently had. On May 8th, 1936, Spengler died of a heart attack in Munich at the age of 55. And I've now read volume one of Decline of the West, and I'm about halfway through volume two, which hopefully we will be looking at next week. And his argument in general is that history is the story of the lives and deaths of various cultures and civilizations. And he uses those words in a very specific way that's a little bit difficult to summarize, but briefly we can say a culture comes first and then a civilization comes out of the culture. But the civilization is not necessarily more advanced than the culture. It's just another stage in this process. And this results in a historical philosophy that has a few traits. One is a criticism of what we would today call Eurocentrism. This is a term that's sometimes thought of as post-colonial, as brought into Europe from outside of it, a criticism that says, you guys talk about history, but you're really talking about European history. And Spengler, way back in 1918 or even before 1914, talks about how the European understanding of history at that time was very centered on the history of Europe. And he talks about how we overweigh certain centuries and periods, like, for example, the centuries since the Renaissance and even particular decades get more weight than entire millennia get in ancient Egypt and ancient China. And he talks a lot about those periods as well. One point that he makes is that just as the physicist has learned to value all space equally, the historian also should look at all time equally and not unduly emphasize or overlook any particular period or any particular country. And another thing that he criticizes a lot is something that has persisted to this day, this notion of history as being in three categories, ancient, medieval, and modern, or classical, medieval, and modern. And he says that his view of history as the story of the lives of these different, we can say cultures, but that's not the best word because in his description, the culture is one section of this overarching thing. That view naturally leads to these other thoughts. For example, if you're looking at the rise and fall of these different historical beings like ancient Egypt or ancient China or the Roman empire, then it doesn't make sense to use this classical, medieval, modern scheme because that suggests a unbroken line of progression that doesn't make sense in the framework that he has laid out. And this view also leads naturally to viewing all historical space equally, regardless of their distance in time or in geographical space, even if it's far away in another country or long ago in time. You should not wait that differently than something that happened only a few decades ago. And within that framework, he talks about the Faustian spirit. And Faustian is a word he uses for Western European, and he very explicitly excludes Russia from it. He talks about the Russian spirit as being distinct. Something that we've talked about on this podcast before is whether Russia is part of Europe. And apparently even in Russia, this remains a topic of debate. But for Spengler, Russia was separate from Western Europe. And now that I say that, I'm realizing that he might have agreed that Russia is part of Europe, but it's not part of what he's talking about specifically related to Western Europe. That I don't know. But when he's talking about the Faustian, he's not talking about Russia. And at one point, he makes a comparison between two interpretations of Greek and Roman culture and two aspects of Faust. And I guess that's why he uses the word Faustian to refer to Western Europe. And maybe I missed it, but the connection there was not completely clear to me. But when you hear the word Faustian, he's talking about sort of the main character in his story, Western Europe, or a particular section of the story of Western Europe, which began in about the...the year 1,000 and is coming to an end approaching the year 2,000. And that's why his book is called Decline of the West. He viewed himself and his time as being toward the end of this long arc of 1,000 years. And a strong aspect of this book is that Spengler was clearly very learned. He knew a lot about a lot of different topics. Some people refer to him as a polymath. Not only did he know a lot about history, but he also knew a fair amount about music. He knew a fair amount about math. He knew a fair amount about art history, history of painting, sculpture, architecture. And I think one of the things he must have been doing when he was living on his inheritance and living basically in poverty during the war was devouring information on these topics, reading as much as he could. Of course, during the war, he was apparently mostly done with this book, but maybe he was still adding stuff to it. But before that, there was a period when he wasn't working full-time, and I think he had some source. Since he didn't own books, he must have been going to a library or something. And he was learning as much as he could on these topics, and he'd already studied them in school. And so he's able to make these very interesting connections from different points in history. So he'll say that Pythagoras appeared in the arc of Greek history at about the same time that Descartes appeared in the arc of Faustian history, and that both of these guys articulated a notion of number that was somehow an expression of the historical process that they were living in, that the Greek understanding of number was all about magnitude, and the Faustian understanding of number is gradually moving away from that. It's trying to shake off this classical notion of number, and that Descartes was the beginning of that or somehow significant in that. And when he says something like that, you think, oh, that's very interesting. I'd never made that connection before. Obviously, Pythagoras and Descartes are very significant mathematical minds, but I'd never thought that they both appear at a certain time relative to the context that they're in and that they're somehow proportional. Or he'll make some connection between Gothic architecture and Baroque music, between a cathedral and a fugue. So that's not necessarily two separate processes, but it's two aspects of one, but he says that these are connected. They are expressions or manifestations of the same spirit in some way, that they can't be separated the way that we usually separate them in our minds as being completely distinct forms of art. And he'll even go further and say that calculus is Faustian the way that the fugue is Faustian, that Archimedes maybe anticipated calculus in a certain way, but Greek mathematics was different because somehow the Greek spirit was different. And he talks about the morphology of these different manifestations, how they are changed versions of the same thing. Even the laws that came out in Western Europe were somehow characteristic of that time and place in a way that ancient Chinese laws were not. And not to say that ancient China wasn't characteristic of itself, he would say that it was, that everything that ancient China was doing was somehow manifesting its own spirit in a connected but varying way. Now, the trouble is what he does not do, and I would have loved to have seen, is make a map of these different arcs that he's talking about. And it doesn't have to be that they all add up to a thousand years and they all have this period for 200 years and that period for a hundred years or whatever. But part of his thesis is that if you put all of these historical processes side by side, they have similar features. They happened at different times, but some of the fundamental characteristics are the same. And that's a very interesting thought. It's very significant if you can demonstrate it. But I would have liked to have seen all of those side by side in a totally clear way. And what you have instead is he points out these connections, not in a random way. He's going very systematically, but it's not systematic in the way that I'm describing, where you could almost have it graphically laid out on a page. You could have one column that's the Faustian process, one column that's ancient Greece, one column that's ancient China, one column that's ancient Egypt, and you could point out the rough ways in which these processes resemble each other. And that's probably a very 21st century way to think about this kind of book that requires a bunch of graphic design that certainly wasn't impossible in 1918, but it would have been very unconventional and people would have said, why does this guy have so many pictures in his book or something? But that might've been part of Weber's criticism if he had made it or if he made it somewhere, which is that Spengler has this idea and he gives examples of what he's talking about, but he doesn't exhaustively demonstrate it. And it also assumes the existence of some kind of unclear concepts like culture and.civilization. Spengler was apparently very into both Goethe and Nietzsche, and that's pretty clear from how he writes. He's much more subdued than Nietzsche. Nietzsche will often have exclamation points in the middle of his prose, and Spengler is more calm than that. But he sometimes waxes a little bit Nietzschean in that he'll say things that sound cool and feel cool, but they're not the kind of thing that's very easy to prove, though they may well be true in some other way. But I'm very intrigued by this book and by Spengler, not only because it's about the history of Europe, a topic that's very close to my heart, but because he is trying to get at a more scientific approach to history. Now, he doesn't do that in a terribly scientific way, and we can ask, and we should, questions like, how can you make a distinction like Faustian if you don't know exactly when it began? Okay, it was about a thousand years ago, but what made a French knight in the 10th century stop being whatever they were before that and start being Faustian? Did some of them switch over in the middle of their lives? Were there some holdovers into the 12th century who were still whatever they were before culturally? And if you can't draw clear lines around it, does the thing exist? And on one level that's valid, but on another it might be invalid, because probably meteorologists would have a hard time telling you exactly where a cloud ends. You know that that part is the cloud, and you know that this part over here is not the cloud, but could they tell you down to the millimeter exactly where the cloud has ended at a given moment? And that's the kind of thing that we're dealing with here, and we don't therefore say clouds don't exist. But he was trying to get at an aggregate understanding of human activity. What is going on on the larger scale? What patterns can we see overall, and what can that tell us about human activity and about our own lives? Now a caveat that I have to put here is that this is a dense and rich book that has a lot to think about, and there were parts where he was talking about topics that I knew something about, and I thought that the connections that he made and his observations were very interesting, and there were other parts where he's talking about history that I don't know anything about, and I don't have any context for it. And so I'm following along, but since I don't know either the figures or the culture that he's talking about, I have to sort of take his word for it. But I found when I knew the context that he was talking about, what he was saying made a lot of sense, whatever that phrase means. It made sense. Maybe it fits into a narrative. It's coherent in some way. That doesn't necessarily mean it's true, but it made sense. So it's possible that if you knew all of the ancient Egyptian history, for example, that he apparently knew, or all of the ancient Chinese history, that this book would just be fireworks from beginning to end, and everything that he's saying makes perfect sense, but you have to know what he's talking about to see it. What I've said so far is my response to the book based on my knowledge of history and my approach to everything which is to be skeptical. And even if you're not convinced by this notion that history is best explained not by a long, unbroken linear progression, but by these processes that have a definite, predictable, deterministic trajectory, this is still a very interesting book to read with a lot of interesting thoughts in it. It might almost be worth it to do a historical survey where you say, first, I'm gonna study everything that he talks about in this book. I'm gonna look at the index and every entry that I see about which I know nothing or almost nothing, I'm gonna go read up on that topic. And then, after I've done that, taking a year to do it, I'm gonna read this book and see the connections that he makes between all these topics. I think that would be a reasonable way to approach this book, because not only would that be a way to get even more out of it and to really evaluate what he's talking about, but in the process of doing that you would end up learning a bunch of interesting history that you would not have known about otherwise. So whether you agree with Spengler or not, it would be time well spent. But just in case we're never able to do that, we can get an overview of some of Spengler's ideas by looking at some passages from Volume 1 of Decline of the West, which is subtitled Form and Actuality. And in this first passage, he's laying out the question or series of questions that he's going to try to answer. And we see here what he means by the subtitle Form and Actuality. He talks about the forms in which an actuality, something more essential somehow, appears. Spengler writes, Is there a logic of history? Is there, beyond all the casual and incalculable elements of the separate events, something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms, social, spiritual, and political, which we see so clearly? Are not these actualities indeed secondary or derived from that something?Does world history present to the seeing-eye certain grand traits, again and again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what are the limits to which reasoning from such premises may be pushed? Is it possible to find in life itself? For human history is the sum of mighty life courses which already have had to be endowed with ego and personality, and customary thought and expression by predicating entities of a higher order like the classical, or the Chinese culture, modern civilization, a series of stages which must be traversed, and traversed moreover in an ordered and obligatory sequence. For everything organic, the notions of birth, death, youth, age, lifetime are fundamentals. May not these notions, in this sphere also, possess a rigorous meaning which no one has as yet extracted? In short, is all history founded upon general biographical archetypes? The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear like the corresponding decline of the classical culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of being. If, therefore, we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what the forms of its manifestation are, and how far these forms, peoples, tongues, and epochs, battles and ideas, states and gods, arts and craftworks, sciences, laws, economic types, and world ideas, great men and great events, may be accepted and pointed to as symbols." And we looked at this a little bit already, but in this next passage, he is talking about how the understanding of world history at that time was basically centered on European history, and it was heavily focused on a particular period. And he calls that the Ptolemaic system of history. He compares it to the Copernican system, and that's, of course, comparing a view of the universe centered on the Earth and everything revolving around it to a view of the universe or the solar system as centered on the Sun and everything revolving around that. That instead of having history revolve around the history of Europe, Europe is one object among many histories. And there may be an older example of somebody making this point, but I would have attributed this kind of thinking to Edward Said in the late 20th century and to coming from outside of Europe. But here you have a German historian writing at the very beginning of the 20th century about this exact point. And toward the end, he says that in some ways, those other cultures actually surpass classical history. He's not only saying we ignore or downplay these other histories, he's saying in some ways they are superior to Greek and Roman history. Spengler writes, This is no exaggeration. With a gesture of embarrassment. As for the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that they do not fit in with what, entirely ignore them? The most appropriate designation for this current West European scheme of history, in which the great cultures are made to follow orbits around us as the presumed center of all world happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history. The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Copernican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the classical or the Western culture, as against the cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico. Separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power." In this next passage, he compares his view of history to that of the professional historian. And in doing so, he acknowledges that he is not a professional historian, but he might say that that's not worth much, at least because of this shortcoming. And also he, here as in other places, criticizes the ancient medieval modern scheme of history. Spengler writes, quote, I see world history as a picture of endless formations and transformations.of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the contrary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm, industriously adding on to itself one epoch after another. But the series' ancient, medieval, modern history has at last exhausted its usefulness." End quote. And later he says a bit more about what he's trying to do. And I think in part because this is translated from German, there are sometimes some interesting hyphenated words, pairings of words that are not usually paired together in English. And that's probably because I've heard that in German, it's much easier to combine words in that way. But that results in some interesting phrases that are actually usable in English as well. And one of them comes up here. He uses expression forms and it's hyphenated. And this is a term that he uses for this concept that we're talking about, where all of the things that a certain historical process produces, all the art, the laws, the science, are the outward expression. They are the form, the expressed form of some somehow inner spiritual thing. And he uses the noun expression form for that. And another one that comes up later, it's not in this passage, but I liked it, is for a spoken word, he uses the phrase sound symbol. And sometimes it's useful to replace a word by another word to make you more aware of what the thing is. Sometimes a word can start to hide the thing that it symbolizes, that it's referring to, because the word is so familiar. And then you start to think of the symbol instead of what it's referring to. And shaking up your mind by replacing that word with another word sometimes helps you to stop doing that. And calling a word a sound symbol does that very well. It reminds us that a word is just that. It is a symbol in the form of a sound. It's not the thing that we're talking about. Anyway, he uses that one somewhere else, but here he uses expression form, which is interesting also. Spengler writes, quote, Our narrower task, then, is primarily to determine, from such a world survey, the state of West Europe and America as at the epoch of 1800 to 2000, to establish the chronological position of this period in the ensemble of Western culture history. Its significance is a chapter that is in one or other guise necessarily found in the biography of every culture and the organic and symbolic meaning of its political, artistic, intellectual, and social expression forms. Considered in the spirit of analogy, this period appears as chronologically parallel, contemporary in our special sense, with the phase of Hellenism and its present culmination, marked by the World War, corresponds with the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman Age. Rome, with its rigorous realism, uninspired, barbaric, disciplined, practical, Protestant Prussian, will always give us, working as we must by analogies, the key to understanding our own future. End quote. In this next passage, he's talking about how he uses the words culture and civilization. And we touched on this before, but here he lays it out pretty clearly. And he acknowledges that this isn't how these words are usually used. They're usually not well-defined, but he is using them in a specific, relatively technical way. And an example he gives is that of Greek culture petrifying into Roman civilization. And he comes down pretty hard on Rome here. Spengler writes, quote, Looked at in this way, the decline of the West comprises nothing less than the problem of civilization. We have before us one of the fundamental questions of all higher history. What is civilization? Understood as the organic logical sequel, fulfillment, and finale of a culture. For every culture has its own civilization. In this work, for the first time, the two words hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical distinction are used in a periodic sense to express a strict and necessary organic succession. The civilization is the inevitable destiny of the culture. And in this principle, we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution. 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, intellectual age, and the stone built petrifying world city following mother earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again. So for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest secrets of the late classical period. What but this can be the meaning of the fact, which can only be disputed by vain phrases, that the Romans were barbarians who did not proceed but closed a great development.Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the Hellenic culture and nothingness. An imagination directed purely to practical objects, they had religious laws governing godward relations as they had other laws governing human relations, but there was no specifically Roman saga of gods, was something which is not found at all in Athens. In a word, Greek, soul, Roman intellect, and this antithesis is the differentia between culture and civilization." In this next passage, he's talking about the philosophical historical framework in which he views the West to be in decline, and how even if it looks outwardly as if the West has this infinite trajectory upward, it's actually in a stage that has occurred many times before in history, and by connecting its current stage to the parallel stage in other historical processes, we can chart its future. And I'm not totally convinced by Spengler's argument in general, but that's not because by agreeing with his argument, you have to also accept this conclusion, which is that the West is in some kind of terminal decline. You can't disagree with an argument because you don't like the conclusion that it leads to. Now is a suitable time to remember that Spengler is also known for having said, Optimism is cowardice. Here he writes, Quote, That the secret of historical form does not lie on the surface, that it cannot be grasped by means of similarities of costume and setting, and that in the history of men, as in that of animals and plants, there occur phenomena showing deceptive similarity, but inwardly without any connection. For example, Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashid, Alexander and Caesar, the German wars upon Rome and the Mongol onslaughts upon West Europe, and other phenomena of extreme outward dissimilarity but of identical import, for example Trajan and Ramses II, the Bourbons and the Attic demos, Mohammed and Pythagoras, that the 19th and 20th centuries, hitherto looked on as the highest point of an ascending straight line of world history, are in reality a stage of life which may be observed in every culture that has ripened to its limit, a stage of life characterized not by socialists, impressionists, electric railways, torpedoes, and differential equations, for these are only body constituents of the time, but by a civilized spirituality which possesses not only these but also quite other creative possibilities, that as our own time represents a transitional phase which occurs with certainty under particular conditions, there are perfectly well-defined states, such as have occurred more than once in the history of the past, later than the present-day state of West Europe, and therefore that the future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time towards our present ideals, but a single phenomenon of history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which covers a few centuries and can be viewed and, in essentials, calculated from available precedence." And this next passage is a little longer, and he's talking about how he came upon this approach. He gives an anecdote from his own life, and he says that in 1911, he saw the war coming, and he wanted to write a book about how that war was the development not of a few years but of centuries, and he said in doing that, he realized that everything is connected to everything else, and you can't study anything in history without studying everything. This is a problem that we have all encountered and with which we can all sympathize. And he says that just as in nature, in history, everything affects everything else, and so in order to study any part of history, you have to somehow get at the underlying structure of it, the basic components on which it runs. And in doing that, he started to see all of these connections, and then what he was studying changed shape. So he went from studying something relatively specific, though starting from the centuries-long causes of anything is a pretty broad topic to begin with, and from there he gets to this more abstract and conceptual investigation. Spengler writes, quote, Spengler forced itself on me that for an effective understanding of the epoch, the area to be taken into the foundation plan must be very greatly enlarged, and that in an investigation of this sort, if the results were to be fundamentally conclusive and necessary results, it was impossible to restrict oneself to a single epoch and its possible actualities, or to confine oneself to a pragmatical framework, or evendo without purely metaphysical and highly transcendental methods of treatment. It became evident that a political problem could not be comprehended by means of politics themselves, and that frequently important factors at work in the depths could only be grasped through their artistic manifestations or even distantly seen in the form of scientific or purely philosophical ideas. Even the politico-social analysis of the last decades of the 19th century, a period of tense quiet between two immense and outstanding events, the one which, expressed in the Revolution and Napoleon, had fixed the picture of West European actuality for a century, and another of at least equal significance that was visibly and ever more rapidly approaching, was found in the last resort to be impossible without bringing in all the great problems of being in all their aspects. For in the historical, as in the natural, world picture, there is found nothing, however small, that does not embody in itself the entire sum of fundamental tendencies. And thus the original theme came to be immensely widened. A vast number of unexpected, and in the main entirely novel, questions and interrelations presented themselves. And finally it became clear that no single fragment of history could be thoroughly illuminated unless and until the secret of world history itself, to wit the story of higher mankind as an organism of regular structure, had been cleared up. And hitherto this had not been done, even in the least degree. From this moment on, relations and connections previously often suspected, sometimes touched on but never comprehended, presented themselves in ever-increasing volume. The forms of the arts linked themselves to the forms of war and state policy. Deep relations were revealed between political and mathematical aspects of the same culture, between religious and technical conceptions, between mathematics, music, and sculpture, between economics and cognition forms. Clearly and unmistakably there appeared the fundamental dependence of the most modern physical and chemical theories on the mythological concepts of our Germanic ancestors, the style congruence of tragedy and power techniques and up-to-date finance, and the fact, bizarre at first but soon self-evident, that oil painting perspective, printing, the credit system, long-range weapons, and contrapunctal music in one case, and the nude statue, the city-state, and coin currency, discovered by the Greeks, in another, were identical expressions of one and the same spiritual principle. And beyond and above all, there stood out the fact that these great groups of morphological relations, each one of which symbolically represents a particular sort of mankind in the whole picture of world history, are strictly symmetrical in structure. It is this perspective that first opens out for us the true style of history. Belonging itself as symbol and expression to one time and therefore inwardly possible and necessary only for present-day western man, it can but be compared, distantly, to certain ideas of ultra-modern mathematics in the domain of the theory of groups. These were thoughts that had occupied me for many years, though dark and undefined until enabled by this method to emerge in tangible form. Therefore, I saw the present, the approaching world war, in a quite other light. It was no longer a momentary constellation of casual facts due to national sentiments, personal influences, or economic tendencies endowed with an appearance of unity and necessity by some historian's scheme of political or social cause and effect, but the type of a historical change of phase occurring within a great historical organism of definable compass at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago. The mark of the great crisis is its innumerable, passionate questionings and probings. In our own case, there were books and ideas by the thousand, but scattered, disconnected, limited by the horizons of specialisms as they were, they incited, depressed, and confounded, but could not free. Hence, though these questions are seen, their identity is missed. Consider those art problems that, though never comprehended in their depths, were evinced in the disputes between form and content, line and space, drawing in color, in the idea of impressionism and the music of Wagner. Consider the decline of art and the failing authority of science, the grave problems arising out of the victory of the megalopolis over the countryside, such as childlessness and land depopulation, the place in society of a fluctuating fourth estate, the crisis in materialism, in socialism, in parliamentary government, the position of the individual vis-a-vis the state, the problem of private property with its pendant the problem of marriage. Skipping ahead. But herein precisely lies the inward necessity of the stock-taking doctrine, so to call it. It had to come. It could only come at this time. Our skepticism is not an attack upon, but rather the verification of, our stock of thoughts and works. It confirms all that has been sought and achieved for generations past, in that it integrates all the truly living tendencieswhich it finds in the special spheres, no matter what their aim may be. Above all, there discovered itself the opposition of history and nature, through which alone it is possible to grasp the essence of the former. As I have already said, man as an element and representative of the world is a member not only of nature, but also of history, which is a second cosmos, different in structure and complexion, entirely neglected by metaphysics in favor of the first." This next passage is an example of those kinds of connections I was talking about. Here he talks about how Greek math was reflected in, he says, classical ornament, but that might have been architecture or it could have been other forms of ornamentation as well. And in the same way, calculus was somehow reflected in Gothic architecture, and in both cases this happened centuries before the actual math was developed. And he says the ideas actualized in the forms, one is tempted to think that he means they were somehow using the math before they knew exactly how to articulate it, but I think he means it in a more nebulous spiritual way. Spengler writes, quote, the style of any mathematic which comes into being then depends wholly on the culture in which it is rooted, the sort of mankind it is that ponders it. The soul can bring its inherent possibilities to scientific development, can manage them practically, can attain the highest levels in its treatment of them, but is quite impotent to alter them. The idea of the Euclidean geometry is actualized in the earliest forms of classical ornament, and that of the infinitesimal calculus in the earliest forms of Gothic architecture, centuries before the first learned mathematicians of the respective cultures were born, end quote. He has a number of nice passages talking about music, and he connects music to math and vice versa in a number of ways, but he also talks about how what's usually called classical music, ironically, if we were going to be using Spengler's terms it might be better called Faustian music, though it's tricky because it does also have its connections to ancient Greek music, but we're mostly talking about music that was produced since the middle ages, and mostly between about 1600 and 1900, but he talks sometimes about the connections between various concepts or thought structures that he attributes to the Faustian, one of them being a notion of the infinite or of infinite space, and how those ideas connect to different aspects of Faustian art, one of them being music. Spengler writes, quote, the free organ playing of Bach and his time was nothing if it was not analysis, analysis of a strange and vast tone world, and similarly it is in conformity with the western number thinking, and in opposition to the classical, that our string and wind instruments have been developed not singly, but in great groups, strings, woodwind, brass, ordered within themselves according to the compass of the four human voices. The history of the modern orchestra, with all its discoveries of new and modification of old instruments, is in reality the self-contained history of one tone world, a world moreover that is quite capable of being expressed in the forms of the higher analysis, end quote. And this next passage is the one where he's connecting Pythagoras to Descartes and to the other guys around him, I had briefly mentioned this one earlier, and he uses that to talk about the classical and the Faustian notion of number, and he also talks about the mathematical function as a distinct and characteristic Faustian invention. Spengler writes, quote, at the moment exactly corresponding to that at which the classical soul, in the person of Pythagoras, discovered its own proper Apollonian number, the measurable magnitude, the western soul in the persons of Descartes and his generation, Pascal Fermat Desargues discovered a notion of number that was the child of a passionate Faustian tendency towards the infinite. Number as pure magnitude, inherent in the material presentness of things, is paralleled by numbers as pure relation, and if we may characterize the classical world, the cosmos, as being based on a deep need of visible limits and composed accordingly as a sum of material things, so we may say that our world picture is an actualizing of an infinite space in which things visible appear very nearly as realities of a lower order, limited in the presence of the illimitable. The symbol of the West is an idea of which no other culture gives even a hint, the idea of function. The function is anything rather than an expansion of, it is complete emancipation from any pre-existent idea of number. With the function, not only the Euclidean geometry, and with it the common human geometry of children and laymen based on everyday experience, but also the Archimedean arithmetic cease to have any value for the really significant mathematic of Western Europe."passage, he's talking about how we emphasize certain periods of history over others, and that's entirely subjective. Those histories look important to us, but they're not necessarily important to historians from another culture. And he uses an interesting metaphor. You have to be careful with metaphors because they can sound nice and not actually correspond to anything real, but this one is interesting. He talks about how a certain period of time looks more important to us, but the moon also looks bigger than the planets. Just because something looks a certain way doesn't mean that it is that way. And so it's possible that something much more remote from us, the 18th century BC, might actually be much more important or bigger than a more modern period that we're more familiar with. He writes, quote, a similar emancipation of world history from the accidental standpoint, the perpetually redefined modern period is both possible and necessary. It is true that the 19th century AD seems to us infinitely fuller and more important than, say, the 19th century BC, but the moon too seems to us bigger than Jupiter or Saturn. The physicist has long ago freed himself from pre-possessions as to relative distance. The historian, not so. We permit ourselves to consider the culture of the Greeks as an ancient related to our own modern. Were they in their turn modern in relation to the finished and historically mature Egyptians of the court of the great Thutmose who lived a millennium before Homer? For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of world history. For the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and judges by 4,000 years of Chinese history, these centuries generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty, 206 BC to 220 AD, which in his world history are epoch-making. To liberate history then from that thraldom to the observer's prejudices, which in our own case has made of it nothing more than a record of a partial past leading up to an accidental present, with the ideals and interests of that present as criteria of the achievement and possibility, is the object of all that follows." In this next passage he's talking about how at some level, some deeper level, a mathematician, and he might have put other people also in this group, is an expression of the soul of the culture to which he belongs. And this may be particularly challenging because we think of mathematics as something universal, and maybe in a certain way it is, but Spengler is arguing that ways of viewing number are not necessarily universal. They are culturally rooted to different periods of history. It would be more palatable to say this about architecture or music, but he's saying it about math. Spengler writes, quote, "...it is from this standpoint, as a chapter of physiognomic, that we have just treated of mathematics. We were not concerned with what this or that mathematician intended, nor with the savant as such or his results as a contribution to an aggregate of knowledge, but with the mathematician as a human being, with his work as a part of the phenomenon of himself, with his knowledge and purposes as a part of his expression. This alone is of importance to us here. He is the mouthpiece of a culture which tells us about itself through him, and he belongs as personality, as soul, as discoverer, thinker, and creator, to the physiognomy of that culture. Every mathematic, in that it brings out and makes visible to all the idea of a number that is proper to itself and inborn in its conscious being, is, whether the expression form be a scientific system, or, as in the case of Egypt, an architecture, the confession of a soul. If it is true that the intentional accomplishments of a mathematic belong only to the surface of history, it is equally true that its unconscious element, its number as such, and the style in which it builds up its self-contained cosmos of forms, are an expression of its existence, its blood." In this next one, he's talking about how different cultures have related to history, and he gives the example of how the ancient Egyptians kept very detailed records and even preserved the bodies of some of their leaders so well that we can still see them today in museums. And also, in the Faustian period, or at least as he points out, since Dante, we also have a pretty good sense of the dates at which things happened. But in ancient Greece, all of the dates are very messy. We have a general sense of when things happened based on who was writing about whom, but it's not nearly as precise. And normally, we would think of that kind of record-keeping itself as a historical development, that in the old times people didn't keep such detailed records. And that's true to a certain extent, except the ancient Egyptians, who were much older than the classical Greeks, did keep them. And here he's not necessarily making a judgment about this, he's simply pointing out a difference. Spengler writes, quote, "...the Egyptians, who preserved their past in memorials of stone and hieroglyph so purposefully that we, four thousand years after them, can..."determine the order of their king's reign, so thoroughly eternalize their bodies that today the great pharaohs lie in our museums, recognizable in every lineament, a symbol of grim triumph. While of Dorian kings, not even the names have survived. For our own part, we know the exact birthdays and deathdays of almost every great man since Dante, and moreover, we see nothing strange in the fact. But in the time of Aristotle, the very zenith of classical education, it was no longer known with certainty if Lucipus, the founder of Adamism and a contemporary of Pericles, i.e. hardly a century before, had ever existed at all, much as though for us the existence of Giordano Bruno was a matter of doubt and the Renaissance had become pure saga." Later he's talking about how thought systems cease to be when there is no one left who can think them or perceive them. And he says that the art of Rembrandt and Mozart will end not when the physical copies of these things are gone, but when there is not one person left who can perceive them. And he also gives an example of ancient Egyptian astronomers who looked at the stars in a certain way and says that their star world is now gone because we don't look at the stars the way they did. Spengler writes, quote, "...the primitive phenomenon of the great culture will itself have disappeared someday, and with it the drama of world history, I and man himself, and beyond man the phenomenon of plant and animal existence on the earth's surface, the earth, the sun, the whole world of sun systems. All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the arts themselves. One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be, though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes may remain, because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. Every thought, faith, and science dies as soon as the spirits in whose world their eternal truths were true and necessary are extinguished. Dead even are the star worlds which appeared, a proper world to the proper eye, to the astronomers of the Nile and the Euphrates, for our eye is different from theirs, and our eye in its turn is mortal." End quote. In this next one he's again talking about how music relates to the Faustian concept of space, and Spengler really writes very well about classical music. He writes, Quote, It was an obligatory consequence also of this way of conceiving actuality that the instrumental music of the great eighteenth-century masters should emerge as a master art, for it is the only one of the arts whose form-world is inwardly related to the contemplative vision of pure space. In it, as opposed to the statues of classical temple and forum, we have bodiless realms of tone, tone intervals, tone seas. The orchestra swells, breaks, and ebbs. It depicts distances, lights, shadows, storms, driving clouds, lightning flashes, colors, etherealized and transcendent. Think of the instrumentation of Gluck and Beethoven. Contemporary, in our sense, with the Canon of Polykleitos, the treatise in which the great sculptor laid down the strict rules of human body build which remained authoritative till beyond Lecippus. We find the strict canon, completed by Stamets about 1740, of the Sonata movement, of four elements which begins to relax in late Beethoven quartets and symphonies, and finally, in the lonely, utterly infinitesimal tone world of the Tristan music, frees itself from all earthly comprehensibleness. The prime feeling of a loosing, redemption, solution, of the soul in the infinite, of a liberation from all material heaviness which the highest moments of our music always awaken – sets free also the energy of depth that is in the Faustian soul, whereas the effect of the classical artwork is to bind and to bound, and the body feeling secures, brings back the eye from distance to a near and still that is saturated with beauty." And here's another one where he first again connects music and math, and then he talks in particular about the violin and about chamber music, which within classical music is music for smaller groups, for 2 to 10 or 12 people, groups that are smaller than an orchestra, though the line is blurry because there's also such a thing as a chamber orchestra. Here I imagine Spengler was thinking of 2 to 5, which is the most typical kind of chamber music. He writes, quote, When Newton and Leibniz, about 1670, discovered the infinitesimal calculus, the fugal style was fulfilled. And when, about 1740, Euler began the definitive formulation of functional analysis, Stamets and his generation were discovering the last and ripest form of musical ornamentation, the four-part movement, as vehicle of pure and unlimited motion. For at that time, there was still this one step to be taken. The theme of the fugue is. That of the new sonata movement becomes. And the issue of its working out is inIn the one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of pictures we get a cyclic succession, and the real source of this tone language was in the possibilities realized at last of our deepest and most intimate kind of music, the music of the strings. Certain it is that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of full illumination. Here, in chamber music, Western art as a whole reaches its highest point. Here our prime symbol of endless space is expressed as completely as the spearman of polykleitos expresses that of intense bodiliness. When one of those ineffably yearning violin melodies wanders through the spaces expanded around it by the orchestration of Tartini or Nardini, Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, we know ourselves in the presence of an art beside which that of the Acropolis is alone worthy to be set." In this next one he talks about struggle as an ethical principle, and he says that while the ancient Greek city-states fought constantly in their philosophy, they didn't have fighting and struggle as an ethical principle, whereas the Faustian has, he says, overcoming of resistance, resistances as a typical impulse. Spengler writes, quote, If ever there was a group of nations that kept the struggle for existence constantly before its eyes, it was the classical culture. All the cities, big and little, fought one another to sheer extinction, without plan or purpose, without mercy, body against body, under the stimulus of a completely anti-historical instinct. But Greek ethics, notwithstanding Heraclitus, were far from making struggle an ethical principle. The Stoics and the Epicureans alike preached abstention from it as an ideal. The overcoming of resistances may far more justly be called the typical impulse of the Western soul. Activity, determination, self-control are postulates. To battle against the comfortable foregrounds of life, against the impressions of the moment, against what is near, tangible, and easy, to win through to that which has generality and duration, and links past and future. These are the sum of all Faustian imperatives from earliest Gothic to Kant and Fichte, and far beyond them again to the ethos of immense power and will exhibited in our states, our economic systems, and our techniques. The carpe diem, the saturated being, of the classical standpoint is the most direct contrary of that which is felt by Goethe and Kant and Pascal, by church and free thinker, as a lone possessing value, active, fighting, and victorious being." And I think that is a good point on which to close. If you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you will send it to a friend who you think will enjoy it as well, and go over to my website, VollrathPublishing.com, pick up some books for yourself, for your family, for your friends, and do your part to support independent book publishing, because we do not want Amazon to become the only place from which you can buy books. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.