An Ideologue of Unreason
Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate.
By H. Stuart Hughes.
Scribner’s. 176 pp. $2.00.
Oswald Spengler’s famous book The Decline of the West was first published in the summer of 1918. Huge in size, formless in presentation, choked with oracular generalities and portentous errors, it was at once and finally rejected by the learned world (except for a few parsons who hoped that its message of woe might pro-mote a stampede into religion). But among the unlearned, especially in Germany, where (as Mr. Hughes sagaciously observes) “a shorter, more lucid book would never have achieved the same reputation for profundity,” its success was immediate. It is a human trait to detect in one’s own misfortunes a crisis of the universe, and in 1918 it was consoling to Germans to learn that their defeat was part of a cosmic process, and that their triumphant enemies were in fact in no better case. Within eight years one hundred thousand copies of Spengler’s book had been sold; it was translated into English and French, Spanish and Italian, Russian and Arabic; then, in 1933, came the Nazis. For a while it seemed, as in retrospect it now seems, that Oswald Spengler was their philosopher.
But philosophers and their disciples do not always recognize each other at first sight, and between Spengler and the Nazis there was an unfortunate misunderstanding which led to an official boycott of his name and books. By 1940, the year of Hitler’s greatest triumph, Spengler’s book was unavailable in Germany. Then, once again, as in 1918, came disaster; once again Germans found it consoling to see their debacle as part of a general decay, outside their control, and affecting even their victors. The general thesis too—with the rise of Bolshevism-seemed now more plausible. In 1950 The Decline of the West was republished in Ger-many; and the popularity in America, if not of Spengler, at least of other more reputable “cyclical historians,” has led many to wonder whether perhaps there may not be something in him after all: whether possibly the learned world may not have been wrong, and the un-critical readers right.
Who was Spengler? What was his philosophy? Was he, or was he not, the philosopher of Nazism? Is he, or is he not, an important thinker? To those who ask these questions Mr. Hughes’s book will be most valuable. Short, clear, scholarly, it faces every important question about Spengler, and, by an extraordinary feat of synthesis, gives an answer to them all. I do not agree with all the answers: I gladly welcome the book.
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Oswald Spengler was one of the great ideologues of unreason. The 19th century was an age of reason, and the weakness of its thinkers was not that they applied reason to all problems (that was their strength), but that they often limited the field of study to what was itself rational. To them history was a chain of scientifically established (or establishable) events, civilization a linear progress from less to greater rationality, continually illustrated by the empirical test of mechanical efficiency. But towards the end of the century a number of important thinkers challenged this view. Anthropologists and psychologists explored the irrational nature and impulses of man; philosophical historians widened their field from technical “civilization” to comprehensive “culture”; and philosophers drew the consequences—that progress is not linear or continuous; that cultures are comparable, stage by stage; and that our “Western” culture is no more immortal than, say, the culture of the Greco-Roman world. Perhaps, even now, it has reached the limit where military dictators must, by trans-forming, prolong it, or barbarians batter it down.
This general climate of thought—the climate created by Burckhardt, who apprehended, and Nietzsche, Sorel, and Pareto, who welcomed such a crisis—is admirably re-created by Mr. Hughes; but where does Spengler fit in? According to Mr. Hughes, Spengler was a thinker in this tradition, the genius whose “incomparable historical imagination” enabled him to illustrate, as never before, the comparison between our now declining culture and those others which have already dissolved. It is true, Mr. Hughes admits, that Spengler is heroically wrong in method: that he deduces facts from his own theories, bases his accounts of whole cultures on fragmentary data, and introduces meaningless abstractions such as “Destiny” to evade, and absurd mumbo-jumbo to conceal, his difficulties. It is true that of the two other cultures on whose evidence he interpreted our own, one (the “Magian”) never existed, and was entirely invented by him. It is true in fact that large parts of the book are pretentious gibberish. Cut all these, says Mr. Hughes disarmingly, are irrelevant objections since Spengler himself rejected in advance the test of mere accuracy. He claimed, by a private process which he portentously named “physiognomic tact,” “instinctively to see through the movement of events” to their ultimate significance; therefore, to protest that he misunderstood the events through which he saw is pedantic and absurd. Spengler in fact completely turned the tables on the 19th-century rationalists. He did not merely, like their great successors, apply his reason to the study of irrational life, he “rejected the whole notion of logical analysis.” He was a pope, a prophet, a seer, whose claim to greatness is that what he saw, though unproven, was sometimes remark-ably true.
At the risk of being classed by Mr. Hughes among those professional historians whose “characteristic literal mindedness has prevented them from accepting the guidance and illumination that Spengler can offer,” I must say that this seems to me a singular defense. Reason and experience are the only tests we can apply even to irrational behavior, and no man has the right to declare his own theories exempt from them. And even if some of Spengler’s generalizations appear significant, these were by no means as original as he claimed. Though Spengler’s oracular claptrap deafened the public, the real study of comparative cultures (based on reason, not on “physiognomic tact”) has an independent history. On that history Spengler, Arthur Rosenberg, and others are simply parasites: lurid obtrusive fungi growing irrelevantly out of the side of the tree.
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The question remains, was Spengler, like Rosenberg, a prophet of Nazism? Mr. Hughes’s discussion on this point seems to me admirable. In all essential matters Spengler was a Nazi. Faced by, the prospect of a possible European revival through barbarism, he welcomed it, and claimed for Germany the leadership in such a revival: the elite of the German race must establish an empire on the ruins of Western Plutodemocracy, thus preserving, against Asiatic hordes, the half-smothered, musical “Faustian soul,” and staying the otherwise inevitable “Decline of the West.” The only differences between Spengler and Hitler were two: first, Spengler, as a social conservative, believed that the old German aristocracy could supply that elite with a radical revolution in German society; secondly, he thought Hitler an inadequate leader: he was not a “hero” but only a “heroic tenor.”
Now in fact, on both these points, Spengler was wrong. The traditional German upper classes were quite incapable of rousing the revolutionary élan necessary for such an achievement: if it were to be carried through at all it could only be done by a new social elite; and Hitler was in fact not an operatic figure but a revolutionary genius. If Spengler had lived in 1940, perhaps he would have admitted as much. But he did not. Dying before he discovered his error, he quarreled with the Nazis on irrelevant grounds. Formally the quarrel was over the interpretation of “race”; in fact Spengler’s crime was different: in repudiating the Nazis on trivial grounds, he had, as Mr. Hughes says, “failed to recognize his own children.” Since his children, by their failure, ultimately justified his doubts, his grandchildren—the neo-Nazis—may yet recognize him.
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