So—how do you get started? I don’t think paying for classes or lessons is necessary. There are plenty of materials online which are free to use. More importantly, however, all education is self-education. You only learn when you yourself put in the effort. You cannot pay tutors to memorize the vocabulary on your behalf. This guide is meant to be entirely practical. I will tell you which resources are out there, where you can find them online, and how you can effectively use them to aid in your studies.

Attic Greek

Attic Greek was the dialect of ancient Athens during its classical height. It is the language of Plato, Thucydides, the tragedians, and was later adopted as the literary standard across the Greek-speaking world. The Greeks spoke different variants of their language depending on their geographical location, their ethnicity (e.g., Aeolians, Achaeans, Ionians, Dorians), and the time period in which they lived. Attic Greek is a member of the Ionic branch of the Greek language and is named after the region whence it emerged (Attica, which includes Athens and the surrounding area). It later became the basis for Koine [Common] Greek which spread around the Mediterranean region and Middle East in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests. If you learn Attic Greek, you should be able to also read Koine Greek. However, Homeric Greek—the older, literary style of Homer—is another matter. It might prove challenging to first learn Attic Greek and then expect to be able to read Homer. The recommendations I make in this guide are primarily for learning Attic Greek.

Foundations

Of the many textbooks available, the important thing is not which one you choose, but that you choose one and commit to it. That being said, I do have an unorthodox suggestion: Beginner’s Greek Book by Benner and Smyth (1906). You can access the text on Archive.org with this link (https://archive.org/details/cu31924012536243/).

There are a few reasons behind this suggestion. First, the lessons are rather short—usually around 5 pages per lesson. Each lesson ends with a set of translation exercises (both from Greek to English and from English to Greek). The brevity of each lesson permits the student some flexibility. Depending on your own schedule, you might elect to do one lesson per day. In theory, you could finish the entire book in roughly 60 days.

However, I wouldn’t recommend this as this doesn’t give you enough time to practice your retention of grammar and vocabulary. I would split up each of the 60 lessons into 3 very manageable pieces:

1) Reading the lesson.
The goal here is to read the lesson all the way through and to learn whatever grammar is taught in that particular lesson. For example, Lesson I (pg. 29 - 30) focuses on the present indicative active Ω-verbs in the active voice. You should read through each section (§40 - 47 for Lesson I) carefully and seek to memorize what is being taught. When Benner & Smyth tell you what the “stem” of a Greek verb is, jot down a note and memorize it. When they tell you what a “thematic vowel” is, write it down and memorize it. This can be tedious, but failure to do so at this stage will simply create a headache later on. If you find any of their explanations unsatisfactory or vague, do not be afraid to search it up using google, ChatGPT, or Grok. There are plenty of resources out there. Also, when reading the lessons, say the words in Greek out loud. This will help your pronunciation and, eventually, you will develop an intuition for where the accents go on these Greek words.

2) Vocabulary.
You need to be using Anki. Anki is a free, open-source flashcard program that uses spaced repetition to help you remember information more efficiently. Instead of showing you every card every day, Anki schedules each card based on how well you know it. Easy cards reappear after longer intervals, and difficult cards show up sooner. This method is based on cognitive science research showing that spacing out review sessions strengthens long-term memory. You can download Anki here (https://apps.ankiweb.net/).

There are already large Anki sets out there for Attic Greek which can be found rather easily with a quick search online. Those are fair game but just know that you may be out of sync with your textbook. I recommend making your own Anki set as you go along. Typing the words out in Greek with the proper accentuation and diacritical markings can be a bit of a hassle so save yourself some time and just use Grok or ChatGPT to make the set for you. Open the PDF of Benner & Smyth, and zoom in on the vocabulary section for Lesson I (§46, on page 30). Take a screenshot (winkey + shift + s) and paste that screenshot into a Grok or ChatGPT window and say something like “Turn this screenshot into an Anki-ready CSV (UTF-8) with two columns: Greek word (with full accents/breathings) and English meaning.”

It should create a CSV file that, when opened in Notepad, looks something like this:

If it includes any text other than the vocabulary (for example, a header saying GREEK VOCAB), delete that portion. Double check to make sure Grok or ChatGPT transcribed the vocabulary correctly. Sometimes, it makes mistakes (albeit rarely with this task). Now is your opportunity to fix them.

Go into Anki and look at the bottom. There should be 3 buttons including one that says “Import File”). Click it. Import the file provided to you by Grok or ChatGPT.

You need to make sure you have the right field separator (essentially, this is what tells Anki which is side 1 and which is side 2 of the digital flashcard).

Click import and you should be all set to go. At the vocabulary stage of every lesson, you should repeat this process. Click “Default” to start grinding vocabulary. As you go through the vocabulary, Anki will ask you at the bottom how difficult the word was. Depending on how difficult the word was to recall, it will calculate how long it should be until you see that word again. Memorizing vocabulary is perhaps the single most important thing as you work toward the ability to read Greek unaided.

3) Exercises.
This is where I believe Benner & Smyth really shines. The preface tells us that the book intends to prepare the student to read Xenophon’s Anabasis. Accordingly, the vocabulary and exercises revolve around battles, sieges, heroic stands, and political intrigues which are all rendered in Xenophon’s characteristically crisp Attic prose. Instead of grinding through dull, artificial examples, you get to translate lines about hoplites charging the enemy, cavalry ambushes, and generals rallying their troops. It is immediately engaging and, from the very beginning, prepares you to read one of the greatest works from Classical Antiquity.

My recommendation is, again, to break up each lesson into these 3 sessions. You can do one session a day (each of which would take you no more than 30 minutes). You can get through the book’s 60 lessons in roughly 180 days. If that pace is too fast or too slow, just adjust accordingly. You can do 5 lessons a week, or you can do 1 lesson a week. That depends on how much time you have and how motivated you are.

Reading Greek

If you’ve followed my suggestions so far, then you are primed to read Xenophon’s Anabasis. The Anabasis is Xenophon’s firsthand account of a Greek mercenary army’s long, perilous march home through hostile territory after their employer’s bid for the Persian throne ends in disaster. Most of you will enjoy it thoroughly.

I recommend using Geoffrey Steadman’s PDFs which are available for free on his website (https://geoffreysteadman.com/). Just click on the author whom you wish to read. You should start with Xenophon’s Anabasis (https://geoffreysteadman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/xen.anabasisbk1.04jan25.pdf). His PDFs are ideal since they pair the original Greek text with facing-page vocabulary and concise grammatical notes. This lets you stay immersed in the text without constantly flipping to a lexicon. However, you may still find the need to consult a lexicon every now and then. I recommend the “Middle Liddell” (available on Archive.org https://archive.org/details/intermediategree002716mbp/page/n5/mode/2up). A quick google search can also help. Alternatively, you can pull the Greek text on Perseus (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0201) and just click on the word in question.

Here is how you should go about using Steadman’s PDFs.

First, memorize the vocabulary. Steadman puts the most basic vocabulary for reading the text at the beginning of the PDF (pg. viii) under Running Core Vocabulary. These are all the words that occur eight times or more. You should know how to create Anki decks now but I would recommend keeping these under a different profile so as not to create repetition in your original deck (plus, your vocabulary is becoming a bit more specialized now that you’re reading a specific text).

Click “File” on the top left. Click “Switch profile”. Click “Add”. Name it “Xenophon Book 1”. Now add your specialized vocabulary list under this profile as shown previously. 90% of this vocabulary will already be known to you if you’ve gone through Benner & Smyth. A little refresher will not hurt you though if you’ve taken a break at any point. Once you’ve memorized that vocabulary, you should be set to begin reading and translating Xenophon’s Anabasis (assuming you’ve also memorized the grammar and morphology). I would recommend doing about 5 lines per session. As you find it becoming easier, ramp up from there. Focus on depth over speed.

If you’re looking for a good translation to compare yours to, check out the Cornell University Press series on Xenophon. They have excellent translations. However, they will not be 1:1 with the Greek, so don’t fret if you find minor differences between yours and theirs.

You don’t need to start with Xenophon’s Anabasis, however. I recommend it due to the simplicity of its style and its engaging content. If you’d prefer, you can start with any of the other PDFs that Steadman has available for free online. Just, don’t be surprised if you find some of the others strange. I would recommend going through Xenophon first. Then, Lysias’ On the Murder of Eratosthenes (which is also written in a clear style with simple syntax). From there, try your hand at Plato. The more difficult authors (Aristotle, the Tragedians, Thucydides, etc.) will take more time getting used to. But the same approach can be used.

Other Advice

Stay consistent.

Get Anki or another flashcard app on your phone so you can grind vocabulary anywhere.

Memorize the paradigms for the nouns and verbs. They chart out every possible form a word can take. Greek is a highly inflected language, meaning that the endings (and sometimes the beginnings) of words will change to indicate their grammatical role in a sentence. Benner & Smyth give you the full, unadulterated morphological charts in the back of the book starting on page 280. You need to memorize these as you go along. There are 63 of them (§592 - 655). I would recommend quizzing yourself on these regularly as you go through the book. As you finish each lesson, flip to the back of the book and find the corresponding section that lays out whatever paradigm you just learned. Quiz yourself on it until you’ve mastered it. Create a quizlet if you have to—up to you.

Memorize the definite articles (§632, page 299 of Benner & Smyth) first. They’re easy. And, provided they are attached to a noun, they will tell you what gender, number, and case the noun is in. If you’re not able to immediately parse the noun, knowing the definite article is a bit of a shortcut.

Use google. For example, if you don’t know what a definite article is… google it.

Read the full entries in Benner & Smyth. You might be tempted to speed through the grammatical explanations prior to the vocabulary and exercises of each lesson. If you do this, you will be confused later on.

Accentuation. This is a tricky one. Accentuation rules are one of the biggest sticking points in Greek, and most beginners either ignore them or struggle with them later. Don’t try to memorize all the rules upfront, but get familiar with acute, grave, circumflex, and the concept of recessive accent.

Lexicon. A lexicon is a Greek dictionary, but to use it well you need to know a few things. Always look up the lemma (the base form of the word, not the exact form you see in the text). For nouns, that’s the nominative singular; for verbs, it’s the first-person singular present active. Many forms will look different from their lemma, so learn your principal parts to track them down quickly. Choose the meaning that fits your context, not just the first one listed. I recommend purchasing a copy of the “Middle Liddell”. You can find it for free online (https://archive.org/details/intermediategree002716mbp/page/n5/mode/2up).

Attikos. A nice app for iOS that comes preprogrammed with many Greek texts. It allows you to press down individual words in the Greek text to reveal a definition plus it fully parses said word (that is, it shows the case, number, and gender if it’s a noun; person, number, tense, voice, and mood if it’s a verb). Be careful however, as this might make you lazy. (https://attikos.org/)

Take Smyth’s advice and don’t focus too much on learning the dual. The dual is a grammatical number that refers specifically to two of something as opposed to the singular (one) or plural (three or more). It’s rare enough in Attic prose where you don’t need to prioritize memorizing it early on.

If you want more detailed entries on Greek grammar, consult Smyth’s other book, Greek Grammar (https://archive.org/details/greekgrammar0000smyt/page/n5/mode/2up). This is a reference book for Greek grammar. Do not try and teach yourself with this book until you’ve mastered the basics. Use it to look things up as needed.

Good luck!

In a 1934 letter to the journal’s lead editor, Spengler outlined his plans.

Spengler to Hans Erich Stier

Munich, June 6th, 1934

That is very good news! I hope that the journal will be started now without further difficulties… As regards my contributions, I have divided the whole period—the history of the second millennium B.C., under a number of special essays, one of which I hope to be able to deliver every month. The titles will be something as follows:

1. Tartessos and Alaschia

   (also trade, sea traffic, writing and speech in western Mediterranean).

2. The Achaeans

   (the contrast between pit and dome graves).

3. Kefti and Kreti

   (the Kreti belong to the layer of the Sea Peoples, the Kefti belong to the Minoan Culture).

4. The Ionians

   (the history of western Asia Minor and its connection with Crete).

5. The ‘Sons of Anak’ (Sea Peoples problem. ának = άναξ).

6. The Etruscans (early history of Italy in connection with Greece).

7. The War Chariot and its Significance in World-History.

8. Origin and formation of the classic ‘peoples’.

9. Armenians and Aramaeans.

10. The movements of peoples in inner Asia and inner Africa in the second millennium and their cause (Indo-Germanic problem).

You will be able to deduce some of the content from these titles. I have been thinking about these questions for ten years, and have gradually arrived at quite divergent results from those of contemporary research. As for the book by [Altheim], I had just read it. It is the most valuable work on Roman history since Munzer’s Adelsparteien and promises a history of Rome that can finally replace Mommsen’s. Unfortunately, [Eduard] Meyer never got there. However, Altman still has to free himself from the conventional understanding of the terms Etruscan and Italic, which Duhn in particular created. Etruscan is a loose term used by the later Romans for everything north of the Tiber river. Historically, it is a confusion of races, languages, and cultures, which first must be sorted out. Then, in part, there is a very close connection with simultaneous movements and locations in Greece, Carthage, and eastern Spain.

With best regards, your very honorable Oswald Spengler

The results of Spengler’s plan were mixed. He only lived another two years after penning this letter. One can imagine how amazing his insights would have been had he lived another decade or so to finish this project. But perhaps, as Spengler suggests in that letter, we can deduce their content from the titles. So, for the foreseeable future, that is what I’ll be doing.

Some of these titles became fully-finished pieces that Spengler managed to publish in his lifetime. If you have a copy of the German Reden und Aufsätze (published posthumously by his niece), you will find some one hundred or more pages on the topic of Tartessos and Alaschia! Unfortunately, this has yet to be translated into English. There, we also find an introduction to these collection of planned essays, titled, “On World History of the Second Millennium Before Christ”. I am planning on translating it within the next few days so be tuned for that. But to give an adumbration, Spengler states that this second millennium B.C. was of decisive importance. As the powers of Egypt and Babylon waned, the center of gravity shifts “toward the colder, more intense and highly spiritually refined, harder struggling North”. A new form of human spirit washes across Eurasia. He is referring to the Indo-Europeanization of Eurasia and the establishment of new Cultures: Greco-Roman, Indian and Chinese.

Regarding the 10 essays themselves, only the aforementioned “Tartessos and Alaschia”, and his piece “The War Chariot and its Significance in World-History” were completed. Given the inordinate length of “Tartessos and Alaschia”, I do not have the time to translate it at the moment. But I will continue this series by giving an outline of its major ideas. Regarding the other pieces, we have enough information from Spengler’s notes on prehistory (published in English under the title Early Days of World History) to reconstruct what Spengler might have written had he not died in 1936. So, for next time, be on the lookout for a completed translation of “On World History of the Second Millennium Before Christ”. Following that, I will be going through the 10 planned essays one by one.

Read more

Here, he pleads with German scholars to rethink the use of cartography in their study of prehistory. Though the lecture is charming in its own right, (who wouldn’t want to listen to Spengler sperg out over maps?) I think Spengler is making an important methodological point here. Spengler’s unique approach to the study of history is firmly rooted in Romantic conceptions of Natural Science (namely, Goethe’s botanical and morphological researches). This entails entering a teleological communion of sorts with the object of inquiry. In order for you to truly ascertain a Culture’s morphology, you must allow it to impress itself upon your mind’s eye. This way, you can reconstruct its form and animating principles within your mind—whether this yields a heuristic image or the true “spirit” of the organism is still up for discussion. But regardless, actually seeing the entity and seeing its development over time is paramount to this synthetic activity. Thus, Spengler has a very strong interest in insisting upon better maps to aid his unique style of research.

A quick note on the translation: Spengler makes repeated reference to Kartenbild. This would literally translate to something like, “map-image” or “map-picture”. But I think Spengler is pointing to something deeper (and I have no knowledge of German cartographic scholarship to suggest anything to the contrary). Perhaps he is referring to the way our maps can literally structure the image of World-History within the mind’s eye. Or perhaps he means to convey maps as a type of higher-order visual depiction of historical information. Whatever the case may be, I’ve left the word untranslated where seemingly appropriate.

And lastly, consider becoming a paid subscriber to The Oswald Spengler Project! Paid subscriptions allow me to put more time and effort into these posts. A measly $5 ensures more posts on Spengler, history, and culture.

Plan for a New Atlas of Antiquity

By Oswald Spengler

The following draft is not intended to represent anything definitive or perfect, but rather to be presented for discussion in scholarly circles. Apart from the scholarly feasibility, which I already consider to be assured after the first impressions, the plan also has a very serious technical and economic aspect, which will not be discussed here.

Since historical geography in Germany and elsewhere has all but died out, a state of emergency has developed within historical research, along with its consequences, which we hardly recognize. The result of all historical research is a historical picture which can be presented in cartographic form according to certain ideas for the eye. As a rule, the map refrains from the personal and unique, but it brings out the general form all the more sharply and thus makes it possible to see and feel together at a single glance in a way that no report, however clearly written, can. The extent to which this is the case depends significantly on the cartographic technique, which has its foundations, ideas, and ingenious insights, just like any other technique.

It is now a fact that these maps that accompany our historical research have remained almost unchanged in fact and form for 50 years. In older areas such as Greek or Roman history, the map, as usually attached to a book, is two generations behind the state of research. For the more recent areas (Indian, Chinese, pre-Homeric, Neo-Persian history, etc.) there is no corresponding map at all. For the Aegean world we still have nothing better than the map that treats the borders of Greek dialects as political borders, that is, from a time when ancient history was a secondary task of classical philology. Excavations, tomb explorations, and comparative ceramics have left no trace of this image. The delineation of these maps is outdated, the drawings are outdated, the names are outdated.

We have long been accustomed to reading learned works about the Etruscans, the Hittites, and predynastic Egypt, without knowing how the mentioned places and names relate to each other spatially. It happens that books of this kind become almost incomprehensible to the majority of readers; that they contain old-style maps on which the things mentioned do not appear at all, or hand-drawn sketches in which the eye cannot find its way. It happens daily that the author himself falls into a litany of errors and misconceptions by combining historical facts without being geographically “in the picture”, or that he fails to notice decisive connections. One must calculate how many areas of today’s historical research we lack a technically elaborated map: for India during the Vedic period, for the Homeric period, for Italy at the time of Rome’s founding, for the oldest age of Egypt and Babylon, for the spread of religions and cults of the Roman imperial era. I consider it one of the most urgent tasks of German scholarship to create a new Kartenbild [map image] based on the comprehensive results of scholarly research over the last 50 years, which gives equal expression to the historical.

But this image must be designed according to completely different principles. We need new ideas in cartography because we have gained a new perspective on the course and meaning of history. In the last century, it was enough to draw rivers, cities, political borders, and the names of people on a map. Today we need—within the limits of what is possible—first of all a representation of the terrain, insofar as it promoted or hindered agriculture, settlement, and transportation at that time; in addition to irrigation and the altitude layers, sometimes the stratification of the soil, the occurrence of metals and rare rocks; the sea currents and wind directions, which guided early maritime traffic and thus also the flows of people in certain directions. Furthermore, if possible, an indication of the plant life during the individual historical periods. The vast forest masses are the only decisive obstacle to travel and migration in early times. “Plain” means “clearing” in the Nordic languages. The sea has always connected the early Cultures and populations; the primeval forest separated them. It is also a necessary prerequisite for the historical Kartenbild that the drying up of ever larger areas following the Nordic Ice Age and the subsequent forest and swamp period from the south is also made the basis of the political image. As the rock carvings demonstrate, the Sahara scarcely emerged before the 4th millennium. It was not until Roman times that it broke into Mauritania. In those days, Spain was the land of impenetrable forests. A millennium later, the Moors were only able to halt desertification through artificial irrigation. But the same applies to Arabia, Babylonia, and Inner Asia. The prehistory of the two oldest Cultures did not yet take place under the influence of the isolation of their respective river valleys. But without understanding this, one cannot understand political prehistory. Egypt originally had no natural western boundary in the desert.

The Kartenbild also includes the most important results of zoogeography1: the respective distribution of horses, cattle, and lions. An attempt has recently been made to determine the ancient migrations of the Hamites from the distribution of African cattle breeds. In addition, the proper recording of archaeological finds is essential: the types of graves, the shapes of pottery, the types of settlements, the treatment of bronze. Without this, a map of ancient Italy is worthless today. As long as only the Etruscans are mentioned and one cannot grasp the distribution of so-called Etruscan cities by age and location, as well as their layers of graves at a glance, the Etruscan question will not make sense at all. The map is the only means of presenting to the researcher in a single field the results of all other sciences, as far as they concern him, in a useful and meaningful order.

Then the Rassenfrage [race-question]! It is no longer sufficient to simply print the common ethnic names from very different historical periods over and next to each other. A map, of ancient Italy or Anatolia for example, must contain, in addition to the distribution of languages and dialects, an indication of the of the type of people (height, build, skull shape, facial structures), which never coincides with language boundaries, and only then, and independently of this, the historical ethnic names, indicating their ongoing shifts, substitutions, and superimpositions. This is already possible today in many cases with great accuracy, especially as it is one of the most important findings of the latest racial research that many physical characteristics adhere to a country with great tenacity and have repeatedly asserted themselves despite all migrations since the Stone Age.

It is clear that maps of this style can only be produced by a collaboration of representatives from diverse disciplines. A single person is no longer up to the task. But if the geologist, the animal-geographer, and plant-geographer first create a foundation, in which the anthropologist and prehistorian make their entries, in order to finally make room for the representative of political and economic history, it is conceivable that visual material will lead to discoveries for the eye by its mere presence, which would have remained closed to pure book work. Something like this is only possible in Germany today. No other country in the world possesses such well-rounded scholarship and such a maturity of methods as must be assumed here. If internal or external reasons thwart the plan in Germany, it will never and nowhere be realized. And finally, historical research will falter due to the obstacle placed in its way by the lack of geographical foundation. The only factual objection is that research does not yet allow a conclusive picture to be drawn. But this conclusion will never be reached; the picture changes from one generation to the next; and if the preliminary picture is not sketched because of the necessary gaps, a more mature one will not be at all possible.

The scope of such a work is to be measured quite differently than 50 years ago. The primitive cultures encompass the entire earth, they have used all the seas along the coasts and island chains as go-betweens and form, with their spheres and currents a living whole, without which one is not able to survey the origin and prior history of the High Cultures. Today it is no longer possible to find an eastern boundary for the so-called science of antiquity. Questions of the Homeric era extend as far as the Baltic Sea and the Niger River; the world of forms of migration of peoples cannot be understood without the historical image of Inner Asia and even China; the Stone Age of the northern edges of the Indian Ocean belongs to Egypt and Babylon. On the other hand, the upward historical boundary can easily be identified in the Crusades and the Mongol invasion. From then on, the historical Kartenbild has a different meaning, not internally, but for our practical purposes, and the selection and methodology of what is to be represented have a different tendency. Under this assumption, a natural grouping of the map-material emerges as follows:

1. A group of maps of the primitive world, covering its entire extent across all parts of the world, with an overview of the myriad of archaeological finds, metal sites, and transportation routes of ancient commerce and subsequent migrations, with the distribution of basic religious, social, economic, and political forms. Such a map would simplify and solve a whole series of problems in the study of early history. Individual adventurers, for example, can go wherever they want, but entire tribes always follow a known route that is secured by local inhabitants in terms of food and loot. It, therefore, can also be determined geographically from the local ecology and the type of settlement.

2. A joint group would need to address the destines of Egypt and Babylonia along with their surrounding world, starting from the earliest times of stone workings and the Sahara, still then covered by vegetation, and ending around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. Here, need an overview of the ethnographic divisions, the districts of Egypt, the Sumerian principalities, the geographical distribution of cults and gods, the shift in the political focus over the course of time, and the deep connections from the Indian Ocean deep into the northern landmass.

3. The Near Eastern world between Cyrene and Iran, the Black Sea  and southern Arabia, from 1500 to the Persian period. This is where the great flows of peoples from the vast inland regions of the north came from, which fundamentally altered the landscape both materially and spiritually. Today, we have the results of the excavations of B? And Amarna, Troy and ancient Italy, those of comparative name research, the cuneiform and hieroglyphic literature, but we have nothing that could be called a representation of these results in map form [Kartenbilde]. And it is precisely here that we are groping in the dark for lack of a visual synthesis, passing by obvious discoveries and permitting errors to grow and flourish. Errors that the first best Kartenbilde of this sort would have stamped out from the beginning.

4. The Indian world. Here, decisive discoveries are soon to be expected once the results of purely literary research are combined with our rapidly growing archaeological findings. The distribution and stratification of the graves, weapons, and vessel forms [ceramics] must, as soon as they are available to the Indologist, change the entire structure of Indian history. Thereby giving an idea of the Dravidian culture and illuminating the destiny of the ancient Aryan world. However, I am not aware of the existence of such a map of ancient India.

5. Recently in the study of ancient Chinese culture, several attempts have been made to geographically define the earliest organization of states along the Yellow River based on historical sources. If this had been done earlier, the concept of ancient China would still not be emotionally equated with the country that now bears its name (thus casting this entire history in a false light). The world of states in the early Zhou dynasty was as small and complex as that of the Homeric period. All these statelets could be squeezed into an area the size of southern Germany, and the principalities of the earliest Vedic period were certainly not much larger.

6. A cartographic survey of the two ancient American Cultures [Mesoamerican and Incan], for which the first inadequate attempts already exist.

7. Now, the vorantike [pre-antique2] world of the entire Mediterranean in the 2nd millennium, i.e. down to Homer, with paths of the Sea Peoples who advanced towards Egypt in the 14th and 13th centuries, with the circles and strata of the Iberian, partly originating deep in Africa, the Sardinian, Etruscan, Libyan, Minoan, and Mycenaean form-worlds. The connections extend to the rock paintings of Scandinavia and the findings in the Sudan, Nubia, and southern Arabia. These are the preconditions for the later structure of the antiken Welt [World of Greco-Roman Antiquity], which until now has been reconstructed backwards from the written sources and thus, initially, philologically.

8. Now, the antike Welt itself, until the migration of peoples, and its geographical image must be completely redrawn. We must finally see how not only the physical characteristics, but also its destiny and political significance shift, how certain main areas of Homeric culture—Thessaly, for example—receded, while others—like Latium—rise to prominence, how important towns became villages and how villages became cities. We must finally—and not only here!—make discernible the deep inner difference between castle, settlement, market, town, trading post, provincial, metropolitan, and cosmopolitan city. Between tribe, ethnicity, nation. Between landscape, region, and state. All must be made visually discernible. The Etruscan name, as well as the names Hellene, Roman, Ionian, and Italic designate something different in each century. The age of formation of cities around 800 BC and that of the dissolution of the city-states into great powers around 300 BC must be depicted with an eye toward their development, as well as the racial relations down to the imperial period, where the population of the individual provinces is still simply designated today by their names instead of dialect, adoption or rejection of certain cults, disappearance or increase of the rural population, accumulation or reduction of medium-sized cities. It can be seen to a large extent where the valley regions have a different type of people than the highlands, where the pre-Indo-Germanic population remained in masses. Only this again explains the movement of the Germanic tribes: where they settle en masse and displace the natives, where they sit only as landlords over a class of serfs, where they exercise formal rule. Only when one sees this does one understand the formation of new nations and their languages, the long duration or the rapid collapse of Germanic domains—the Gothic rule in Italy did not take root because there was a lack of wide river valleys south of the Apennines, while the Visigothic Kingdom in Spain sat on the plateau as if on a fortress.

9. The darkest area of history as well as geography is the Near East from Alexander the Great to the Mongol conquests. We possess nothing that gives us a clear picture of Byzantium, such as the linguistic, social, and religious stratification of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt under the rule of Justinian; the Sassanid Empire, a most decisive creation at the crossroads of four High Cultures, is still a formless concept to us today. Apart from the spread of Christianity on the soil of the Roman Empire, we do not even have an attempt to trace the spread of the then new religions from the time after Christ’s birth, the Jewish-Talmudic, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, later the Nestorian, the spread of the so-called cults of Sol and Mithras in late antiquity to as far as Portugal and Inner Asia. We do not see in the map how these religious communities became nations and which disintegrated the older states; how these nations partly had their center of gravity in particular landscapes, where they absorbed their racial traits, until finally the storm of Islam, whose representation in map-form has not yet been attempted, swallows most of these nations—and thus religions. The group of these maps would teach us that it is once again the ancient trade and migration routes, already indicated by Stone Age findings, along which the spread of the great missionary religions then moved.

10. As a conclusion, a group of maps is necessary that summarizes Asia and Europe around 1000 AD as a unified area: This begins with the migration of peoples, which shakes the lands from the Chinese border to Spain and North Africa and scatters a new series of political forms over this vast distance, and concludes in the far west with the age of the Crusades, from which emerges the world of states of a new Culture3. And from there, along the immense ancient southern border of the Neolithic northern sphere, which now forms a border between forest and desert, through the Mongol invasions, which transforms the entirety of Asia, including Russia, into an area in which the ruins of ancient Cultures are overlaid by changing zones of power of various conquerors and tribes with their followers. From here on, the creative history of the world is essentially Western, that is, our own history.

[END OF TRANSLATION]

Thanks for reading! There are some more translations that will be coming out in the next few weeks. It’s shocking to me that it has taken nearly a hundred years for this gem to be translated. It should also be noted that I am no expert in cartography. It seems likely to me that at least some of Spengler’s suggestions have been incorporated in the last century. But it seems unlikely that they’ve been put to the morphological ends that Spengler had envisioned.

The next post will likely attempt to reconstruct some of Spengler’s sketches on prehistory (namely, the 10 articles he outlines in a letter to Hans Erich Stier). So please stay tuned for that.

And again, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the project and to get access to exclusive content! — Spergler

Rather than wallowing in monolingual despair, I got to work on translating one of Spengler’s shorter works on history, titled “Altasien” [Ancient Asia].

John Farrenkopf’s Prophet of Decline gives us some important background information on this fragmentary text. If you want to just read the translation, skip ahead.

“The abrupt shift in Spengler’s interests from politics and intrigue to the study of prehistory and the antecedents of civilizations was highlighted by two events in the fall of 1924. In October of that year, at a conference of the German Oriental Society, the mature scholar who had loved cartography as a school boy eloquently pleaded for a collective, interdisciplinary cartographical effort by German scholars. He recommended that they assemble a comprehensive collection of maps as an essential tool in the study of prehistory and world history. Spengler argued that students of prehistory and early civilizations were doubly hindered, both by the absence of maps for important periods and by the tardiness with which available maps were updated. His appeal for a major cartographical effort highlights his changing views on cultural interaction. Spengler’s daring thesis of the autonomous character of civilizations, their relative insulation from external civilizational influences, continues to receive deservedly much criticism. However, in discussing his ‘Plan eines neuen Atlas Antiquus’ (‘Plan For a New Atlas of Antiquity’), he showed a strong interest in going beyond his thesis of cultural individuality to explore the role of cultural interaction in universal history. Spengler visualizes primitive cultures engaging in dynamic interplay. ‘The primitive cultures encompass the entire earth, they have used all the seas along the coasts and island chains as go-betweens and form, with their spheres and currents a living whole, without which one is not able to survey the origin and prior history of the great cultures.’ He now conceived civilizations to be involved in significant cultural interchange. Thus, the Sassanid Empire is characterized as ‘a most decisive creation at the crossroads of four high cultures.’ One week after this lecture, Spengler completed a five-page sketch entitled ‘Altasien’ (‘Ancient Asia’). The outline attests to his ambition of developing a new vision of universal history. It would encompass prehistory, the historical antecedents of civilizations, and the interactions of these ‘precivilizations’ in recorded history, key topics ignored in The Decline of the West.” (Farrenkopf 189-190)

Personally, I am not entirely convinced that Spengler was planning on a complete revision of his historical overlook. As I’ve said in the past, the main point of the book still stands (the West’s impending doom and the need to muster whatever strength it still has to have a noble and heroic decline). But academics always fail to understand that the book is not addressed to them but, instead, to the young German men Spengler hoped would lead the West into its “Roman” era.

That aside, what is most striking is Farrenkopf’s mentioning of Spengler’s cartographical penchant. The young Spengler would spend much of his free time laboring on imaginary empires complete with pseudo-historical accounts and detailed maps. Spengler, the sensitive young man, makes a reappearance here in Altasien where he ends the sketch with a call for carefully curated selection of images and maps for the forthcoming volume.

It appears that Altasien was really just a sketch of a book he had in mind (and which may have been the impetus behind his collection of notes and musing on prehistory found in Early Days of World History). The publication of Altasien occurred after his death (I believe in 1939, but Farrenkopf is a bit vague) in the journal, Die Welt als Geschichte (The World as History). The journal itself is of some interest to us since its name is a reference to one of Spengler’s major concepts in DOTW Vol. 1 (The World-as-History vs. The World-as-Nature). The journal’s founder, Hans Erich Stier, was a student of Eduard Meyer’s and an accomplished professor of ancient history in his own right. The fate of that journal is another interesting story for another time. Here’s what it looked like:

Interestingly, there exists a few letters between Spengler and Stier in Spenglers Briefe. One of which includes Spengler outlining his plans for a series of 10 articles on various subjects of prehistory. Ostensibly, these would all have been published in Stier’s journal had he not died a bit prematurely in 1936. Alas…

Some of the published ones have already been translated (see ’ translation of ‘The War Chariot and its Importance in World-History). Tartessos and Alaschia also exists in the posthumous volume Reden und Aufsätze but has yet to be translated (no doubt thanks to its monstrous size). For others, we have only the title. But perhaps, thanks to Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte, we might be able to reconstruct the arguments Spengler would have made. A project for the foreseeable future, I suppose…

And without further ado, I present to you the first step forward in translating Spengler’s remaining works. It’s only taken a century to do! And forgive me, dear free subscribers, for this has been paywalled.

ANCIENT ASIA

Tasks and Methods

The plan for this book assumes that it will open a series of works dealing with the historical problems of Asia. Consequently, I consider it right not to summarize here the results obtained so far, which must be reserved for subsequent works, but to develop the whole complex of half-solved or unresolved questions, new methods, surprising outlooks and goals, so that future research can at least have an overview of their field in broad outlines. For this reason, I will refrain from expressing my own opinion in order to emphasize the full significance of the multitude of prevailing opinions.

A. In the first chapter, the primitive culture of ancient Asia would be presented. The concepts of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times disappear completely from the Western horizon. In this era, several major cultural groups slowly begin to emerge.

• 1. The proto-Nordic line from Scandinavia to Korea, which has long since emerged psychologically in the Indo-European and Altaic questions, and whose inner unity will likely turn out to be greater than is believed today. As soon as one penetrates beyond the change of languages, the changes of race, and the geographical shift of the names of peoples [Völkernamen] to inner cultural forms, a lasting and distinct unity emerges from the archaeological findings, graves, ornaments, and customs.

• 2. The Southeast Circle: Extending from central China and Burma to Polynesia and just as firmly linked to the sea as the first circle is to the inland. Here arise the questions of prehistoric sea routes to East Africa (Madagascar, via southern Arabia) and America (Peru, Guanacaste), which are related to ocean currents and trade winds. Here we are also approaching the moment when Indian research, which has so far been limited to philology and literary analysis, can and must compare its results with the layers of archaeological findings from the Stone and Bronze Ages. Only then would the history of India in the 2nd millennium BC be placed on a firm and probably completely new foundation.

• 3. The Western Circle, which encompasses the regions from the Nile to the Indus and, as it seems, shows a great unity in the 4th millennium BC, which begins to shed light on a common southern origin of the Egyptian and Babylonian Cultures.

  

In all three circles, the ancient, eternal traffic routes would need to be examined, partly along the coasts (origin of shipping), partly through the vast clearings of inland forests and mountains (emergence of the wagon). These roads originate as trade routes, especially for metals, amber, and precious weapons; once discovered and put into use, they also guide the migrations of people, who must advance in such a way as to avoid the danger of starvation or getting lost.

B. Towards the end of the 4th millennium BC, the two earliest High Cultures [Hochkulturen] began on the Nile and Euphrates, probably on a common Stone Age foundation [steinzeitlichen Unterbau] with a direction of development that seems to have continued from the south towards the Mediterranean and Black Seas. From the end of the 3rd millennium, a radiation of mature forms (myth, astronomy, technology, economy, weaponry, art?) becomes noticeable along the ancient trade routes, certainly as far as the Sudan and as far as the high north and far east.

C. As these two Cultures grew old, the whole of Asia entered an age of powerful upheavals around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. Everywhere, there is a a great migration takes place from the northern circle to the south:

The horse; the entirely new mobility of small warrior tribes; a lust for adventure, chivalry, the worldview of a ruling caste that simultaneously develops into great forms in the old clans, the Indo-Iranian knighthood, and Homeric heroism.

• 1. In the Western world, the omnipotence of the two oldest Cultures disappears during the Kassite and Hyksos period; Sea Peoples, conquerors with the Indian Mitanni-names; collapse of the Asia Minor state world, the Minoan Empire. New kinds of wars with new aims: an upheaval like that of the migrations in the ruins of the Roman Empire.

• 2. In the South, the same event occurs at the same time: the invasion of the Vedic tribes into the already Bronze Age Dravidian world.

• 3. In the East, the Zhou period begins in a small area of northern China, in a style quite similar to the events of the other two regions. The Zhou also emerge from deep inland; with them begins the feudal era. I consider the entire alleged history of China before 1500 BC to be a later construction. The “imperial dynasties” with real names of rulers have undoubtedly, as in Babylon and Egypt, been transformed from neighboring ruling princely houses into a sequence of dynasties.

D. These similar developments must be traced down to 300 BC. However, between them still exists the bridge of the Central Asian-Scythian population; many obscure questions about the fates [Schicksale] of this vast area from the Danube to the Amur and Brahmaputra. What races? What languages? What kind of shifting groupings of peoples? Scythians, Cimmerians (Tatars?), Tocharians, Huns?

E. Since the 4th century BC, the three great civilizations, radiating far and wide and equally receptive to foreign attractions (image of the Hellenistic, Indian, and Chinese metropolises). Thereby a predominance of the west-to-east direction.

• 1. The world of late antiquity, flooding the ruins of ancient Egypt and Babylon; Alexander; Gandhara art, Hellenistic kingdoms in Bactria; creation of the Buddha-type in the plastic arts. Effects as far as China.

• 2. On Syrian-Arabic soil emerges the new culture of Magian style, with forms of peoples of religious character and a touch of Hellenistic interpretation. Spread of Christian, Jewish, Manichaean, and Mazdean teachings and peoples (both as a unit!) mainly to the east; again and again the old great burial route of the Northern Stone Age, along which the Chinese emperors built their Great Wall, which the Roman emperors continued to a certain extent in Europe. The old northern circle is thus cut off for centuries.

• 3. In line with Hellenism, a wave of forms emanates from India that are less plastic and visual and more soft and rhythmic, under the guidance of Buddhism. The impact of Indian ornamentation, including spiritual ornamentation, on the East and Southeast extends as far as Japan and Java.

• 4. Simultaneously, an emanation of Chinese civilization from the region along the Yellow River extends beyond the Yangtze River to Polynesia, with traces perhaps reaching into the interior of the Americas.

• 5. But now a counter-current: The Chinese Empire proves to be stronger than the Roman one. Along the Stone Age burial route, people of the northern circle try to break into the rich worlds of the south. The Altaic-Germanic migration initiated by the Huns, repelled at the borders of China, moves westwards and breaches the border wall of the Roman world. More primitive forms and beliefs penetrated into the Sassanid Empire (already the Parthians?), to the Byzantines, and finally in a broad wave through the Germanic tribes mixed with Asians as far as Spain and Morocco. The movement was partly prepared by Magian religious propaganda (Manichaeans in southern France, Montanists in North Africa, Arians brought by the Ostrogoths living on the Don River to Italy). The inseparability of Germanic and Central Asian forms in the so-called Völkerwanderungskunst [Migration Period art], as well as the inner relationship of wooden architecture from Scandinavia and Russia to northern China and Korea. These are the ancient forms of the northern circle.

F. Conclusion. In the far west, a new Culture emerges based on the results of the migrations. In the Near East, conclusion of the Magian Culture through the unifying power of Islam in its final form of the 8th and 9th centuries AD. New violent religious storms, which carry Islam to Spain, the Sudan, India, and China, largely absorb the older religions within it. Conclusion in the Caliphate.

As the last great event that created the image of Asia today was the Mongolensturm [Mongol invasion] under Genghis Khan, an event that was probably preceded by similar events thousands of years ago, of which we recognize only the effects, not the causes (Cimmerians, Central Asian tribes that set the Indo-Aryan and Mycenaean peoples in motion?). The Mongol invasion leads to the development of Mongol rule in India, the foreign dynasties of East Asia, the sultanates in the West, and the Khanates in Russia. Asia finally becomes an area littered with cultural ruins under changing rulers, while in the farthest West, a great historical event is being prepared.

This overview only makes sense in the planned condensed form if all the individual questions are included in the following volumes and illuminated from the point of view of our current knowledge. Here, too, the individual problems must be illustrated by a small, careful selection of pictures and maps.

[END OF ALTASIEN]

Some thoughts on Altasien…

Though Altasien is clearly an unfinished sketch of an introduction to a much larger planned work, we can already see some of the main concepts Spengler develops later in his writing. Foremost is the establishment of precultural amoebas which become the basis for the Hochkulturen we are all so familiar with from The Decline of the West.

But perhaps what is most interesting is his view on the spiritual significance of the Asian continent. It is a vast and terrible continent where mankind is exposed to unending strife and competition. It hardens the hearts of men and turns them into the warriors with whom is the very seed of High Culture. Asia is the testing grounds for these nascent Männerbünde. Then, when they notice some choice pickings in faraway metropolitans they move in like a storm, looting and pillaging the intended target. They are moths drawn to a flame. Thus, Asia represents the continual rebarbarization of men. And such turbulence leaves the continent in repeated ruins.

There’s a lot more going on here in Spengler’s essay but I’ll just leave it at that for now! I’ve already got the next few posts planned out so stay tuned for more.

The first step into any scientific inquiry is to define parameters and guiding principles. What am I studying? What sort of thing is it? How do I study this thing? To the natural sciences, this is a fairly intuitive process. A zoologist focuses on animals; a botanist studies plants; a physicist delves into the laws governing matter. Prior to dissecting a specimen, a zoologist, for instance, can anticipate certain characteristics based on its classification. Take a whale, for example. Knowing it belongs to the class Mammalia, the zoologist can expect to find lungs, seven cervical vertebrae, a diaphragm, and other traits. Similarly, a botanist anticipates features like leaves, flowers, fruit, and roots in a tree specimen. Both scientists rely on generic concepts that govern their respective specimens.

Since its inception, philosophy has harbored aspirations of universality. Anything discernible through systematic inquiry is deemed within the realm of philosophy. Aristotle's extensive works, spanning from metaphysics to biology, politics, poetics, logic, and beyond, exemplify this expansive domain. However, a particular discipline has emerged, sparking considerable debate among philosophers—History. While philosophy speaks of the universal and the eternally true, History appears to be the ephemeral study of things past. By its nature, History never refers to the eternally true but only to the multitude of passing events, epochs, and great men. Can History belong to philosophy?

The central problem with History is its lack of a universal. Unlike the natural sciences, which categorize physical specimens under generic concepts (i.e., genera), History presents an ever-expanding collection of specific instances seemingly disconnected from any overarching universal. In a short essay titled On History, Schopenhauer expounds on this issue. He argues that History cannot be treated as a science akin to the natural sciences. In scientific inquiry, repeated examinations of physical specimens enable the formulation of general laws to which particulars must adhere. For instance, a scientist dissecting a whale, a dolphin, a manatee, and a shark can observe common features such as vertebrae, lungs, and mammary glands in the first three specimens. These shared characteristics allow for their grouping under a generic concept, perhaps "aquatic mammals." The shark, however, insofar as it is lacking some of these traits, necessitates a distinct classification.

Schopenhauer states that this subjective nature of History prevents us from studying it systematically. Consequently, it is of less value than something like poetry in ascertaining the essence of man.

History alone cannot properly enter into this series, since it cannot boast of the same advantage as the others, for it lacks the fundamental characteristic of science, the subordination of what is known; instead of this it boasts of the mere coordination of what is known… History would accordingly be a science of individual things, which implies a contradiction.

To make matters worse, our object of inquiry is far more nebulous than those of the natural scientist. We have no problem picking out a whale in the ocean or the tree swaying in the wind. Their immediate appearance to our sense-perception “specimens” content us to the fact of their reality. In fact, the issue would likely never even occur to the scientist. Biological entities exhibit clear borders. Where the whale begins and ends is immediately apparent to our senses. Historical phenomena lack such immediate perceptibility. We rely on mental reconstructions gleaned from biographies, documents, speeches, and other sources to comprehend historical events. “No man can judge history but one who has himself experienced history”, says Goethe. Whatever mediates subject and object is cursed by a historical distance. It's akin to a zoologist having to study a beast solely based on historical descriptions rather than dissecting a tangible specimen on a lab bench. 

The historian has no luxury of species, stable types, or dissection and experimentation. His “specimens” are events, leaders, governments, and so on. Pericles, the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, the Peloponnesian War, etc. These are things which existed only for a short slice of time. Consequently, the notion of a "science of individual things" within history becomes problematic because there is no universal "type" to which these specimens must adhere. Each historical occurrence is unique, defying classification under overarching categories or types. Schopenhauer illustrates his point by writing,

Thus I may know in general about the Thirty Years’ War, namely that it was a religious war waged in the seventeenth century; but this general knowledge does not enable me to state anything more detailed about its course.

To Schopenhauer, knowing the “type” of war which occurred tells you nothing about the war that actually occurred. Wars within the same "type" exhibit such diverse and numerous variations that claiming to possess generic knowledge for judging them appears absurd. Generic knowledge thrives in disciplines characterized by uniformity and regularity, which is not the case in history. The zoologist does not worry about this since every generation of bats, whales, and dogs are roughly the same. Between specimens of the same species, variation is minimal and easily accounted for. Unlike the relative consistency found in species studied by zoologists, history is replete with such idiosyncrasies that to speak of generic knowledge yields the historian a superficial understanding at best. Therefore, History seems to be in crisis. Many of Schopenhauer’s contemporaries (Hegel and his successors especially) were so eager to treat History as a science, that they ignored this issue. History, the realm of the artificial events of man’s own doing, has no universal. There can be no catalogues of types nor can there be any investigations into the “essence” of historical phenomena. It seems impossible.

But let’s not dismiss the possibility of a Philosophy (or Science) of History on Schopenhauer’s sagacious counsel alone. Let’s consider our parameters once more.

What is it? What sort of thing is it?

“History” is a broad classification. Taken literally, it would simply mean everything that has ever happened. Perhaps this classification is too broad. If we are seeking generic knowledge subsumed under universal types, we should articulate these types. No wonder that History, itself a type of universal, cannot be subsumed into meaningful genera without stripping the importance of particulars. Schopenhauer's observation highlights an issue with taxonomy rather than a definitive pronouncement on the limitations of historical inquiry. It follows that we might reconsider our Science of History by focusing on specific types of phenomena rather than attempting to encompass the entirety of past existence.

In his Politics, Aristotle characterizes humans as "political animals," highlighting their inherent inclination towards communal living and the formation of cities, which serve the purpose of fostering a good life. Shortly after, Aristotle contrasts this with the communal life of bees. The main difference between bees and humans is less important for the question at hand. It boils down to human rationality and speech versus the bees who act by instinct alone. What’s important here is the use of the bee colony as a natural social entity. Understanding the behavior of bees necessitates reference to the colony as a whole. We speak of the particular roles of male drones, female workers, forager bees, and the queen bee insofar as they contribute to the activity of the colony. These individuals form a greater whole that lends itself nicely to our inquiry. Drawing parallels to humanity, we can similarly examine the collective wholes that humans form and participate in. In other words, we can study the bee colony as a natural whole through a natural-scientific lens. Why can’t we do the same for human communities?

So are we still “historians”? Perhaps not if we still use Schopenhauer’s understanding of History as the totality of all past events. But if we focus on a single “type” of phenomenon (one that permits generic knowledge), we might still be historians of something. But of what?

To list off a few of these natural wholes: cities, states, nations, and cultures. Thus, our object of inquiry becomes slightly less nebulous. Just as Aristotle described humans as “political animals”, we might take Spengler’s works and say we humans are “cultural animals”. What is Culture? As Nietzsche says, “unity of style”. But what is style? As Spengler perhaps ineloquently explains in his chapter, The Meaning of Numbers, it relates to unique cultural perceptions of time and space. These perceptions are manifest in a Culture’s architecture, art, mathematics, politics, and more. The Western sense (or style) of infinite space can be felt in their Gothic cathedrals, their contrapuntal music, their calculus, and so on. Likewise, Greco-Roman antiquity’s sense of the corporeal and the here-and-now can be felt in Dorian temples, their sculptures, their geometry, and so on. Insofar as we feel these different prime-symbols (again, styles), we can identify different Cultures. Exactly how we “physiognomize” the soul of a Culture to pick up on these prime-symbols will have to be the subject of another article. For now, let us accept that we have these Cultures as objects of inquiry, that they can be manifestly identified, and that, just like the bee colony, they are subject to generic knowledge.

Spengler and Cultural History

Spengler, in the preface to the revised edition of The Decline of the West, mentions two influences: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe, he says, gave him method. Goethe wrote a number of unorthodox treatises on science—primarily on botany, zoology, and color theory. The first two are concerned with the issue of morphology—that is, the study of forms. Goethe’s goal in these researches was to uncover the archetypes which underlie all organisms and explain the development of their bodily shape. In his Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe describes the developmental stages plants undergo as they move from seed to plant to flower to fruit and thus finish their development. Through repeated observation and the use of a peculiar faculty of mind—what Goethe calls “exakte sinnliche Fantasie” [exact sensorial imagination]—the scientist allows the underlying form of the organism to impress itself upon his mind and reveal itself. He is meant to “grow” a plant in his imagination and intuit its developmental principles and ascertain a deeper reason for their “becoming”. Doing so revealed the Urpflanze or the Archetypal Plant to Goethe. Returning to Schopenhauer’s description of the natural sciences, these morphological archetypes constitute generic knowledge to which all manifestations of a species accord. A universal with which to understand the particulars.

Spengler, armed with Goethe’s method, seeks to do something similar in the study of Culture. The book itself is subtitled “An Outline of a Morphology of World-History”. His goal is to demonstrate that, just as Goethe successfully found the archetypal Urpflanze in botany and the vertebrate “typus” in animals, Spengler could uncover the archetype governed the growth and decay of Cultures. Doing so might offer the sort of generic knowledge in a historical discipline which Schopenhauer found impossible.

While laudable in his efforts, such an approach hinges upon a few questions. First, we must understand that Goethe’s Naturphilosophie was meant for the natural world. It is a science of organisms. Whether human Cultures constitute organisms (or perhaps superorganisms) is not a clear cut matter. It requires us to affirm the proposition that “humans are cultural animals” and together they can create a natural whole which avails itself to this science of organism. To his credit, Spengler doesn’t shy away from this issue by stating “Cultures are organisms, and world-history is their collective biography” (DOTW, 104). Spengler, however, presents this more as an article of faith rather than a carefully argued proposition. But to strengthen his point, he refers back to Goethe:

In the works of the old-German architecture one sees the blossoming of an extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a blossoming can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the secret inner life of the plant and its rain of forces, who can observe how the bud expands, little by little, sees the thing with quite other eyes and knows what he is seeing.

Elsewhere, Spengler cites Goethes’ essay Geistesepochen as further justification that Goethean Science might fruitfully be applied to the study of Culture. For a breakdown of that essay, read my last piece.

Now that we have established that Culture is an appropriate object of inquiry, there still remains a question about the methodological “hook-up” between mind and world. How do we best study this thing? How do we mediate subject and object? In other words, what is our version of a “dissection on the lab bench”?

Spengler creates an opposition between two world-pictures. The World-as-Nature and the World-as-History. He opts for the latter as a better means of piercing the phenomenal veil and uncovering the essence of Culture. He writes:

All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be described as Morphology. The Morphology of the mechanical and the extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny, is called Physiognomic.

Spengler is telling us that his physiognomic approach to morphology will look rather different from what is commonly practiced in the natural sciences. He has little interest in causality, laws, and systems. His approach is concerned with life, symbolism, and the ever-mysterious becoming peculiar to the organic world. But how to intuit these essences? Spengler clues us in by writing:

I distinguish the idea of a Culture, which is the sum total of its inner possibilities, from its sensible phenomenon or appearance upon the canvas of history as a fulfilled actuality. It is the relation of the soul to the living body, to its expression in the light-world perceptible to our eyes. This history of a Culture is the progressive actualizing of its possible, and the fulfillment is equivalent to the end.

The works of a Culture—its art, mathematics, etc.—exist as actualities which emerge from a latent potentiality. From the actualities, which are outward appearances, he is able to intuit the idea of a Culture. These are confessions of the soul. Elsewhere, Spengler writes:

In every science, and in the aims no less than in the content of it, man tells the story of himself. Scientific experience is spiritual self-knowledge. It is from this standpoint, as a chapter of the Physiognomic, that we have just treated 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.

This is what it means to uncover the morphology of Culture. It is to physiognomize these mouthpieces of Culture and uncover the idea working itself through them. From there, we trace the development of these ideas. The moment they are born, how they appear in Cultural productions, how they rhythmically work toward perfection and once apotheosized begin a process of decline until the idea itself is dead. This presents a morphology of the Cultural “typus”. Every living organism is bound by birth and death. It has a predictable lifespan and moves through immediately recognizable developmental stages. Spengler likens it to the seasons, with each Culture having a spring, summer, autumn, and finally a winter signifying death.

The history of Cultures viewed morphologically allows for some fascinating insights. Spengler employs the terms “homology” and “contemporary” to signal the equivalent importance of historical facts across Cultures. Homologous figures appear contemporaneously in regard to their position with their respective Cultures. Suddenly, Descartes and Pythagoras appear side by side. The Trojan War and the Crusades become contemporary. Polycleitus pairs in time with Bach. Now armed with generic knowledge—created as a result of an in-depth study of the world’s eight high and mighty Kulturen—we can better understand the particular facts of this or that Culture. They are all positioned as part of a greater historical becoming.

Lastly, this offers us some insight into the most enticing aspect of Spengler’s study of Culture. From the outset, Spengler makes clear the importance of such a work:

In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermined history, of following the still untraveled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfillment—the West-European-American.

Later on in Chapter 3 we see a similar sentiment:

Overpassing the present as a research-limit, and predetermining the spiritual form, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the still unaccomplished stages of our western history; and reconstruction long-vanished and unknown epochs, even whole Cultures of the past, by means of morphological connexions, in much the same was as modern palæontology deduces far-reaching and trustworthy conclusions as to skeletal structure and species from a single unearthed skull-fragment.

Spengler is convinced he has uncovered the logic of History—at least as it applies to the reign of High Cultures which has been the last 6000 years or so with the end of the Neolithic. These morphological connections are built on a sort of generic knowledge of how Culture must be. These are the inward principles which regulate the development of Cultures. Knowing this tells us how our western history must necessarily develop moving into the future. Just as every preceding Culture underwent periods of Caesarism, Cultural decay, chaos, and finally death, so must ours.

This was Spengler’s dream. To revolutionize the study of History and to arm the historian with new methodological tools to help recreate the many great forms whose day has long since passed. Spengler writes:

This is a truly Goethean method—rooted in fact in Goethe’s conception of the Urphänomen—which is already to a limited extent current in comparative zoology, but can be extended, to a degree hitherto undreamed of, over the whole field of history.

Whether Spengler was successful in realizing this dream is a bit more difficult to state. Others took up the mantle of broad and sweeping views of history and civilizations. Toynbee comes to mind as does Braudel. But none had that physiognomic tact which makes Spengler feel so special. One gets the impression that he really did pierce the veil, peek his bald head into the clouds, and bear witness to History’s shimmering forms and archetypes. He speaks not only to the vital pulse that exists within a Culture but also the vital pulse inherent in his readers (young men of the Faustian West). It serves as a poem that synchronizes our own sense of fate with that of an entire Culture. We are wrapped up in this greater Destiny. We can participate willingly and heroically or find ourselves dragged by the Fates. And of course, Spengler hoped his work would encourage these young men “to devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology”. This plea has seemingly fallen on deaf ears. Maybe that was inevitable. When you write a colossal two volume tome on the history of Culture, you naturally attract a bookish type of reader. But what of those of us who feel more attracted to epistemology instead of politics? Spengler has given us this new method, inherited by way of Goethe, to excavate a great wealth of lost Cultures, nations, and historical phenomena. And like that paleontologist, we might be guided by a sense of inward necessity and organic logic to help reconstruct what’s been lost to history. As Spengler says, “does history only exist when it is written in books?”

Epochs of Human Spirit

In the oft-cited preface to The Decline of the West, Spengler names two individuals, Goethe and Nietzsche, to whom he remains firmly indebted. There, Spengler gives thanks to Goethe’s ‘method’ as found within his works on the natural sciences. But tucked away in a seemingly insignificant footnote in Volume II, Spengler demonstrates his admiration for Goethe again by referencing a rather obscure essay.

Goethe, in his little essay “Geistesepochen,” has characterized the four parts of a Culture—its preliminary, early, late, and civilized stages—with such a depth of insight that even today there is nothing to add. See the tables at the end of Vol. I, which agree with this exactly.1

This remarkable essay, coming in at just under 500 words, is packed with profound insight and captures the conditions under which Spengler’s ‘Hochkulturen’ [High Cultures] develop. The essay itself was published in 1817 as an elaboration on Johann Gottfried Hermann’s dissertation on ancient mythology. But what sticks out is its remarkable anticipation of Spengler’s ideas. Here, Goethe traces the archetypal development of Culture as it moves across four stages: the Poetic, the Theological, the Philosophical, and the Prosaic. Man’s mind originates in a primitive mysticism, rises to an intellectual maturity, and crashes back into a dark age from which it began. Each stage along this development is characterized by a different theme and whose major productions reflect as much. Poetic cosmogonies are wedded to theologies by scholastics, scholastics pave the way for philosophers, and the intellectual doubting of a Socrates-like figure leads to the intellectual sterilization of a vulgar and now ‘civilized’ Culture.

Though there may be “nothing to add”, I hope that drawing attention to the historical particulars of Goethe’s somewhat abstract essay will still be illuminating. What follows is a brief history of two Cultures (The Greco-Roman Classical, and the more recent Western European) and their respective ‘Spiritual’ developments.

The Poetic

As described by Goethe:

The primeval phase of the world, of nations, of individual human beings is the same. At first everything is enveloped by a desolate void, but the spirit already contemplates the creation of the animate and inanimate world. While the primitive masses look about with fear and amazement in search of the barest necessities, a more advanced spirit gazes at the great phenomena of the world, perceives what occurs there, and gives utterance to what exists with profound awareness as if it came into being before his very eyes. Therefore, in the earliest stage we have the contemplation and the philosophy of nature, the defining and the poetry of nature—all in one.

The world gets brighter, and the obscure elements become clearer and take on outline. Man reaches out in order to gain mastery of them in a different way. This new man surveys the world with a simple, healthy sensuousness which sees nothing but itself reflected in things past and present. He gives new shape to old names, anthropomorphizes and personifies things, and beings living and dead, and imparts his own character to all creatures. Thus primitive faith lives and thrives, and, often recklessly, rids itself of all abstruse remnants from the primeval epoch. Poetry flourishes, and only he who has innate primitive faith or can acquire it, is a poet. This epoch is characterized by a free, robust, serious, noble sensuousness, which is elevated through the power of the imagination.

Just as a man who awakes in the morning is still half-asleep, a freshly awoken Culture is still steeped in a dream-like haze. His imagination is populated with images of gods, spirits, and heroes. Legends and fairytales are treated with sincerity and become the basis for great works of poetry.

For the Greeks, this poetic period is best represented by the works of Homer. One finds descriptions of legendary events, battles, gods, and creatures. Diomedes confronts Ares, Achilles is the son of a sea nymph, Aeneas is whisked away from battle by his mother, Aphrodite. The Greek gods are not yet theological abstractions but are instead bursting with personality and idiosyncrasy. At this stage of man’s mind, these are plainly accepted. Magic, mythical creatures, gods, enchanted armaments, and fate were once the norm.

The same goes for the West, which Spengler separates from Greco-Roman Culture and argues began around the year 900 AD. The cultural cycle begins anew and homologous poetic works emerge. The Norse Poetic Edda and German Nibelungenlied operate on the same mythical consciousness structure that Homer’s works once had. Conspiring gods, fates, curses, and enchanted objects make their mark on the affairs of men. Perhaps the most culturally enduring works of the West’s poetic stage were the Arthurian legends and the quest for the Holy Grail. In the story of Percival’s quest for the Grail, we see a divine mission, chivalric warriors, and enchanted objects presented just as they were in Homer. A naïve and robust imagination that embraces legend without attempts at rationalization.

The Theological

As described by Goethe:

But since man knows no limit in his pursuit of self-improvement and because the enlightened aspect of existence is not always to his liking, he longs to return to mystical experience and searches for a higher power behind the world of appearances. And just as poetry creates dryads and hamadryads and makes them subjects of higher gods, so theology creates a hierarchy of demons that are envisioned to be ultimately dependent on one god. We may call this time the sacred epoch. Although it is essentially a product of reason, the rational spirit gradually loses its influence. Primitive faith is reclaimed, modified to suit the time, and the miraculous is proclaimed to have objective rather than poetic validity. To this the intelligent mind must object, although in its ideal state and form it worships the primitive beginnings, takes pleasure in the poetic primitive faith, and values the noble human need to accept a supreme being.

Theology, the queen of the sciences, is humanity’s earliest attempts at cognizing their world as a rational ordering of the cosmos. We see it at work first in cosmogonic poetries of a Dante or a Hesiod. It brings order to the cosmological soup that Poetic mankind first concocted. Mythological beings are given genealogies to assert some logical connection between symbols. Though convoluted at times, we can see how the Greeks made associations between Gods which represented different aspects of existence—how Nyx, the goddess of night gave birth to Thanatos [Death] and Nemesis [Retribution] and so on.

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What I publish here will serve as a first attempt at writing this book. Naturally, the final product will look a bit different. But in the mean time, I thought you would all enjoy. There is a caveat however. Moving forward, these posts will be paywalled as a way of thanking those of you who have been generous in your patronage thus far. If you are interested in this project or just in supporting my work, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber. These paywalled posts will come out weekly until the manuscript is done.

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INTRODUCTION

OSWALD SPENGLER is one of the most important intellectuals of the Twentieth Century and his major work, The Decline of the West, a massive effort which ran to over 1,000 pages and two volumes, had sold 100,000 copies by 1927.

Oswald Spengler was born in 1880 and he was an isolated and somewhat incorrigible figure; a retired schoolteacher who endured penury in order to complete his massive work; the magnum opus to which he devoted his life. He once described himself as a lone scribbler, a man who peered into cultures from the outside—an analyst of meta-cultural phenomena—a man who dissected the rise, decline and fall of various civilizations—all of which he anatomised in the manner of plants, whose botanical propensities he classified à la Goethe. In a sense, therefore, he was a taxonomist of culture; a man who ‘worked over’ cultures, who tagged, docketed and examined them like specimens on the laboratory bench.

Oswald Spengler always believed that the inner reasons for Western collapse could be brought to the surface and this was something which struck a particular chord at the end of the Great War. When European civilization was prostrate and exhausted wracked with pain and dissolution, as the abortive German revolution began which led to the collapse of the Prussian monarchy and its replacement with Weimar, a nominally democratic republic which rested on the guns of the Freikorps who had put down the Communists.

Most of Spengler's complicated schema involved a diurnal pattern, a travelogue of regression and withdrawal, whereby a culture developed whether European, Byzantine, Asiatic or what not—and declined in a defined manner, almost in the manner of a living organism, which undulated towards death, towards its inevitable decline and fall. Spengler believed that any attempt to arrest this process was worse than useless, but that an antidote to Western decline could be affected through the advance towards, possibly the regression to, a new Caesarism.

All of which has led Spengler's thought to be treated as a mere coda to Nazi rule, an invitation to the prospect of an authoritarian régime, an apologia before rather than after the fact, but this is far from the case because Oswald Spengler was anti-Nazi, conservative, crabby and élitist. He regarded the Nazi's as “prolet-‘Aryans’ ”—men who were unfit to lead Germany into the new uplands which he wished to see, and like Moeller van den Bruck, a thinker he much resembles, he despised Hitler personally seeing in him the “mass man”—the mass man thrown up by the people rather than the leader of the people. An opinion which he shared with a wide number of Weimar intellectuals, all of whom were men of the Right, such as Moeller van den Bruck (already mentioned), Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, Stefan Georg, Arno Bronnen, Hauptmann and Carl Schmidtt. All of whom were regarded as Conservative Revolutionaries, neo-classicists, reactionaries, romantics and revolutionaries of the Right; men who believed in Prussianism and Socialism (to quote the title of one of Spengler's books).

Man & Technics, for its part, is a précis of The Decline of the West. More accurately, it is a compression, a condensed version of the larger work. It is an intellectual pamphlet, an essay or précis on the theme of “Decline”. Where that theme is the development and decline, the growth and adaptation—above all the morphology of human societies.

How we have arrived at where we are and how this can be traced back to where we came from!

The work contains a few infelicities, a number of anthropological errors which have been disproved by academic advance, such as the idea that human beings did not begin to speak before the advent of agricultural societies, but it is still worth reading.

The European Books Society offers Man & Technics as a classic reprint, a contribution to present debate and a useful addendum to The Decline of the West (published by George, Allen & Unwin).

We intend to publish a large range of material by such authors as Berdyaev, Jabotinsky, de Benoist and others, in order to begin an intellectual renaissance of the Right in this country.

Jonathan Bowden,

Chief Editor,

The European Books Society.

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FENNELLY

The Spenglerian Theory of cultural growth and decay is not difficult to understand provided two conditions are met. First, it is necessary to grasp the unusual meanings which the author attaches to certain key words. Second, one must brush aside the smoke screen of metaphysics with which he surrounds and beclouds his approach to the subject.

Spengler describes his work as a Morphology of History. By this he means the treatment of each separate culture as a living organism which is born, grows, decays and dies within the framework of a fixed and predictable life-cycle, just like any other living organism. He employs the word Culture to describe the living and creative phase of this organism, and Civilization as the end term of every culture, a period when all genuine creativity has disappeared, and the culture approaches its final demise under the bright glare of cold, abstract reason.

The next key-word encountered is physiognomic, the literal meaning of which is "pertaining to the face." Spengler uses it, however, to describe his intuitive approach to the problems of history;—looking directly into the face or the heart of historical events, rather than attempting to understand them by means of scientific analysis. Spengler also makes a rigorous distinction between two kinds of time. The first is the time of history, time as duration, which is irreversible, and which gnaws inexorably into the future. The second is the time of mathematical law, represented by the symbol t, which is reversible, and which is an abstraction from reality. The first relates to destiny and the second to the principle of causality.

These two concepts could lead us directly into the heart of Spengler's metaphysics, but discussion of this subject must be postponed until later in the study. At this point it will suffice to state that Spengler was convinced that the real essence of history could only be grasped by means of the physiognomic or intuitive approach.

In order to clear the ground for his theory of comparative cultures Spengler first launches a vigorous attack on the conventional classification of "Ancient," "Medieval" and "Modern" histories. He describes this classification as "an incredibly jejeune and meaningless scheme," an egocentric conception of our western Culture which treats all past history merely as a backdrop to present day life in Europe. This conventional treatment of history is designated as the Ptolemaic system, in which all the other cultures are made to follow orbits around western Europe as the presumed center of all world events. Spengler describes his own method as the Copernican system which admits no priority in the treatment of anyone culture in relation to all of the others.

Thus, in place of a linear concept of history leading up to and culminating in a picture of our own times, Spengler presents the story of eight separate High Cultures of the human race, no one of which is considered more important than any of the others. These eight are: the Babylonian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Classical (the Culture of Greece and Rome), the Arabian (also called the Magian by Spengler), the West European (or Faustian) Culture, and finally the Mayan-Aztec Culture of Mexico.

Each of these cultures is treated as a separate living entity with a definite limited life-cycle of approximately one thousand years, during which it actualizes all of the possibilities inherent in its own particular Weltanschauung (world-outlook). The civilization phase of a culture, however, may last for hundreds or even thousands of years more, while life continues in a kind of petrified state.

With this background one can grasp Spengler's idea of the birth and development of a culture, and of the contrast between culture men and mankind as a whole. In one magnificent paragraph he sums up this philosophy:

"Mankind, however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the family of butterflies or orchids. 'Mankind' is a zoological expression, or an empty word . . . I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one's eyes to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle, each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. . . . Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline. . . . 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."

One may search the pages of the Decline in vain for a precise explanation of the birth of a culture; why it appeared, when and where it did, and why it emerged with its own particular world-outlook. It seems clear that Spengler regarded these phenomena as part of the eternal mysteries of life: "A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing, from the boundless and enduring."

The author does throw some light, however, on the type of world-outlook that emerges in a particular culture by intimating that the surrounding landscape is a determining influence in shaping the soul of a culture. Thus, he sees in the hard, bright light of the Mediterranean a basic cause in shaping the Classical Culture, and the dark forests of northern Europe as a prime influence in shaping the brooding soul of Faustian man.

In the simplified and condensed explanation of Spengler's culture theories presented below, attention is concentrated very largely on only three of the eight cultures; the Classical, the Arabian or Magian, and the West European or Faustian, with occasional side glances at the others. Actually this was the course followed by Spengler himself. No one man could possibly have the breadth of knowledge sufficient to cover with equal facility and understanding all parts of the enormous area staked out in the Decline. The author was an accomplished Classical and West European scholar, with an adequate but more limited knowledge of the Magian and Egyptian Cultures. His understanding of the Babylonian, Indian and Chinese Cultures, however, was more superficial, and was practically non-existent in the case of the Mayan-Aztec Culture. As a result, a more understandable account can be presented by sticking closely to the areas in which Spengler was most proficient. Moreover, the exposition in this chapter attempts only to cover the broad phases and turning points of the growth and decline of the several cultures

The prime symbol of the Classical Culture was a concentrated concern with the point-present, the nearby and the small. The gods of Classical man were little more than human beings drawn in the large. His mathematics was the visible space geometry of Euclid. The architecture, as expressed in the Doric Temple, was wholly oriented to the external view, with its rows of columns and sculptured reliefs. The only interior was the simple cella, which was just large enough to house an heroic statue of a god or goddess, and which also faced to the exterior.

The primary art form of the Classical Culture was the free-standing nude statue of the human body. The typical nude statue was devoid of facial expression, designed deliberately to avoid revealing the personality of the original. Spengler points out that it was not until the late Roman period that human statues became at all biographical.

Classical painting, as revealed by the painted surfaces of the famous Greek amphorae or vases, was two-dimensional to a high degree, with almost no feeling of depth perception. "The Classical vase-painting and fresco—though the fact has never been remarked—has no time-of-day. No shadow indicates the state of the sun, no heaven shows the stars. There is neither morning nor evening, neither spring nor autumn, but pure timeless brightness." The human figures are highly stylized representations of warriors, maidens and satyrs. After studying a group of these vases, it is startling suddenly to come upon a Hellenistic portrait painting of the 1st Century A.D. and to realize that one is in a new world of art. Here one sees a portrait that is truly biographical, revealing clearly the personality and character of the original.

According to Spengler, Classical man was ahistorical, or lacking in any sense of or feeling for history. He could write brilliant accounts of contemporary events, such as Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, or Xenophon's Anabasis, but anything of the remote past became transformed into myths, such as the Homeric legends. He had little appreciation of the reckoning of time and did not create an adequate calendar until the time of Julius Caesar. Classical man would have had no understanding whatsoever of our present day interest in archaeology. Thus, when the Acropolis was rebuilt after the Persian invasion of Xerxes, the Athenian citizens merely threw the remains of the former structures over the side of the hill into a massive dump heap.

The outstanding literary form of the Classical Culture was the drama, as exemplified in the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. These dramas were all, according to Spengler, "situation" tragedies, in which the protagonists were led to their destruction, not by their own deeds, but by the action of blind fate. Typical is the familiar story of Oedipus, which is not the tale of a hero struggling against alien forces and his own internal demons but one of a man who is led to his destruction by blind forces which he cannot attempt to combat.

An important feature of the Attic drama was its extreme formalism. Spengler points out that this effect was achieved deliberately in many different ways. In addition to the emphasis upon the so-called dramatic unities, the Greeks introduced the device of the chorus which largely dominated every scene. Masks, stilt-like shoes and padded clothing all combined to eliminate any possibility of individual characterization. This effect was further enhanced by monotonous sing-song speech delivered through a mouthpiece fixed in the mask. The result, according to Spengler, was exactly in keeping with the Attic spirit which prohibited all likeness-statuary.

The characteristic form of political organization of the Classical Culture was the Polis, or city-state-again an exemplification of the small and near. Instead of extending their frontiers by means of lateral expansion, Classical men established overseas colonies through maritime excursions. These colonies in turn became separate city-states, only loosely affiliated with the mother-city. This form of political organization was maintained rigorously throughout the Classical world and was only broken down by the emergence of the Roman Empire. Undoubtedly this spirit of separatism and exclusiveness was an important factor in causing the never-ending warfare amongst these small states.

We turn now to a consideration of our West European, or Faustian Culture. Here we find a soul which is diametrically different from that of the Classical. Spengler calls it one of the great paradoxes of history that Faustian man should have developed such a cult of worship of the Classical Culture, which is so alien to him and which he has never really understood.

The prime symbol of the Faustian Culture is a limitless will-to-power and a reaching out into infinite space. Faustian man is as dynamic as Classical man was static, and every aspect of our Culture is an expression of this dynamism. Out of the forms and symbols of Christianity, Faustian man created a new religion of his own, with Mary, the Mother of God, superseding Jesus as his principal deity. Spengler sees in Mary a symbol of care and of the Faustian feeling for time and history. As the Culture developed, the image of God, the Father, became more and more ethereal until it was almost identical with that of infinite space itself.

A counterpart to the adoration of Mary as the Queen of Heaven was an equally fervent belief in the constant nearby presence of the Devil and his cohorts. Spengler describes this duality as one of the most essential elements of the Gothic spirit and one which modern man is no longer capable of understanding. On the one hand, Gothic man saw Mary as a figure of utter beauty and tenderness, while, on the other, he felt himself surrounded by the realm of the Devil with his army of goblins, night-spirits, witches, werewolves, all in human shape. Spengler maintains that these two concepts were believed with a depth of sincerity that it is not possible to exaggerate, and that disbelief in either was deadly sin. “Man walked continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit. Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate contest with the Devil, into which every individual plunges as a member of the church militant, to do battle for himself and to win his knight’s spurs.”

In contrast to the static geometry of Euclid, the Faustian Culture produced the calculus, which is essentially the mathematics of motion. Spengler describes Faustian mathematics as dealing with functions and functional analysis rather than with concrete numbers. The creation of non-Euclidean geometries represented another step away from the Classical feeling for numbers. The culminating development, however, was the idea of multi-dimensional space which in turn led to the theory of Relativity.

The scientific interest of Classical man was almost wholly speculative, with little interest in experimentation and none whatsoever in technology. Faustian man, on the other hand, tested his scientific theories with experiments, and through these methods, developed a technology that was destined to overwhelm the whole world.

In architecture, the perfect expression of the Faustian spirit is the Gothic cathedral. As the Greek temple is wholly exterior, the Gothic cathedral can be appreciated only when viewed from within. The straining upward thrust of the mighty columns and pointed arches, the huge windows of coloured glass which impart to the outside light an ethereal quality, all combine to give one a feeling of reaching out into infinite space.

Although there have been many outstanding sculptors in our Culture, the material (with which the sculptor is forced to work) is too intractable to serve as an adequate vehicle to express the far ranging Faustian soul. Much better suited is portrait painting which is not only biographical but also in its emphasis on depth perspective gives the impression of infinite space. But greatest of all the arts as an expression of the Faustian spirit is music, which transcends all temporal and spatial barriers and lifts man out of himself into the infinite.

The typical literary form of the Faustian Culture is the biography, either as the story of the life of an actual individual, or in the more popular form of the novel which developed later out of the biography. In either case we find a story, dynamic in character, of the development of individual human beings and of their struggles with forces outside of themselves as well as with demons within their own natures.

In drama Faustian man created a form of grand tragedy which was very different in character from the "situation" tragedies of the Classical world. In Shakespeare's Macbeth and Goethe's Faust we are dealing with individuals who display a limitless will-to-power, and who are led to their destruction, not by blind fate, but by their own deeds. "It is Time that is the tragic, and it is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to Time that one culture is differentiated from another; and consequently "tragedy" of the grand order has only developed in the Culture that has most passionately affirmed (the Faustian), and that which has most passionately denied (the Classical), Time."

Faustian man is historically minded to an extreme degree. His precise reckoning of time for centuries and millennia of the past, his invention of the clock in the 11th Century, his passion for archeology, are all facets of the same spirit. Spengler saw a close relationship between the dynamic quality of the Faustian Culture and the historical spirit and asserted that to describe it as a dynamic culture is only another way of emphasizing the eminently historical character of its soul.

The characteristic form of political organization of the Faustian Culture is the nation state extending over a wide geographical area. Also, according to Spengler, the characteristic form of government is the dynastic monarchy. The Faustian feeling for time and care leads naturally to a strong desire for continuity and even perpetuation insofar as possible of the ruling family. The passionate devotion, almost a religion in itself, which Faustian man feels for his Fatherland, is a characteristic symbol of our Culture.

Spengler sees in parliamentarism and democracy merely a transitional stage between the dynastic monarchy and the coming of the Caesars. Where democracy becomes complete it lapses quickly into tyranny, as in the case of France in the last decades of the 18th Century. Parliamentarism works as an effective system of government only in those rare cases such as in Great Britain in 18th and 19th Centuries, where a powerful aristocracy manages, under the forms of democracy, to retain the control of government within its firm grasp. Even in the British example, however, Spengler sees clear signs of decay of parliamentarism by the end of the 19th Century.

When we turn to the Arabian or Magian Culture we find ourselves confronted by a culture that is not only different in form but also radically different in concept from all the others. The idea of a Magian Culture is the unique creation of Spengler himself. It is the outgrowth of the fact that there flowered in Asia Minor around the beginning of our Christian era a group of monotheistic religions which, though differing in dogma, had a common religiosity and a common world outlook. They are all the end results of several centuries of the teaching of prophets such as Amos, Isiah, Jeremiah and Zarathurstra.

Spengler saw in these prophetic teachings the birth of the Magian soul. Each of the prophets taught a belief in one god—Yahweh, Ahuremazda or Murduk-Baa—who represented the principle of good and all other deities being either impotent or evil. Along with this doctrine there arose the hope of a Messiah, first in the teaching of Isaiah, and then appearing everywhere during the next few centuries. This is the essence of the Magian religion, containing the idea of the historical struggle between good and evil in which the power of the good finally triumphs on the Day of Judgment. This moralization of history was basic in the religions of the Persians, the Chaldees and the Jews.

In its prime symbol, the Magian Culture emphasizes the cavern-like character of its world. “The world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling. Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him. There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings, and beings, secret letters, Solomon’s seal, the Philosophers’ stone, and over all this poured the quivering cavern-light that the spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up.”

 This unceasing struggle between the forces of good and evil, with man as the center of the drama, permeates all aspects of the Magian Culture. There is something magical in algebra, a prime creation of Magian man, with its indefinite numbers and unknown quantities. Also essentially Magian is the Ptolemaic picture of the universe, with the earth at its center and surrounded by the cavern-like dome of the heavens.

Not only is Magian man's feeling for space radically different from that of the Classical or Faustian, but equally different is his feeling for time. Thus, Magian man was convinced that everything has a definite "time" from the origins of the Messiah, the hour of whose coming was set down in the ancient texts to the minor events of everyday life. Out of this belief emerged the early Magian astrology which assumes that all things are written down in the stars and that it is possible to foretell the course of human events by scientific calculations of the course of the planets.

In architecture, the closed-in space of the basilica and mosque is the perfect expression of the cavern-feeling: "Where the Egyptian puts reliefs that with their flat planes studiously avoid any foreshortening suggestive of lateral depth, where the Gothic architects put their pictures of glass to draw in the world of space without, the Magian clothes his walls with sparkling, predominantly golden, mosaics and arabesques and drowns his cavern in that unreal, fairy-tale light which for northerners is always so seductive in Moorish art."

Most fundamental of all to the Magian world outlook is the conception of the state. In contrast to the Faustian idea of a fatherland, Magian man had no earthly home with a definite geographical location and clear-cut frontiers. Instead, he created the idea of the consensus, a nation of true believers in a particular religious faith no matter where they might be located geographically. This idea, so alien to western man, is expressed in the words of Jesus; “Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there will I be also.”

The government of this Magian nation was also unique. In it the notion of a separation of the church and the state was unthinkable. The law of Magian nations is a law of creed-communities. In contrast to the laws of Classical and Faustian man which arose from practical experience, Magian man believed that all laws came directly from God who revealed them first to certain enlightened individuals. Such individuals in turn find the truth, not by personal pondering, but by ascertaining the general conviction of their associates which cannot err because the mind of God and the mind of the community are the same. If a consensus is found, truth is established.

According to Spengler, this idea of the consensus, unbounded by national frontiers, still permeates the Jewish race of today and accounts for the characteristic internationalism of this people. To Faustian man, with his deep-seated feeling for a fatherland, for which he is willing to fight and die, the idea of the consensus is utterly alien and incomprehensible.

Having covered in an abbreviated form the world outlook of three leading cultures, we turn now to a consideration of the life-cycles of these same cultures. Spengler dates the cultural, or living phase, of the Classical organism from about 1100 B.C. to about 100 B.C. The Magian Culture extends from the birth of Christ to about 1000 A.D. and the Faustian from about 900 A.D. to about 1900 A.D.

Spengler asserts that the pre-cultural man had no history in any proper meaning of that word. Such primitive people led a tribal and plant-like existence with an endless and meaningless repetition of births, struggles and death. The only important contribution of pre-cultural men, in Spengler’s view, was the creation of a group of mighty legends and sagas which were the harbingers of the later births of several cultures. Thus, the Classical Culture had its Homeric legends, the Faustian its Nibelungenlied and Viking sagas, and the Magian the utterances of its line of great prophets.

In studying the history of several high cultures it is essential to keep in mind three basic Spenglerian concepts. First, it is necessary to realize the unity of all developments that unfold themselves in the life of each separate culture. At the core of the Spenglerian philosophy of history is the belief that the expression-forms of all branches of a culture are bound together in a tight morphological relationship. Thus, the religion, the mathematics, the architecture, the art forms, the philosophies, dramas and poetry, even the craftsmanship and choice of materials, are all expression-forms of the prime symbol of each separate culture. To understand fully the form-problems of history one must be aware of the unique character of such developments in each culture and of their close mutual relationships.

The second concept is that each important stage in the youth, maturity and decay of each culture lasts for the same period of time as the similar stages in all of the other high cultures.

The third and final concept follows from the second. It is the idea that every important stage in the life of a culture is contemporaneous with a comparable period in all the other cultures. Thus, Spengler uses the word "contemporaneous" to mean, not the same date in a chronological calendar, but as referring to an event or stage in the development or decay of a culture which has its counterparts in similar periods in the life-cycles of all the other cultures.

Although the birth of a culture occurs in the pre-urban country-side, its history is largely one of the gradual urbanization of society. Thus, the developments of art and intellect are for the most part products of the cities. In the early stages of a culture this trend represents a normal and healthy growth. It is only in the late stages, when a culture has exhausted its potential for creativity, that one can see the sickness of society produced by the materialism of the giant cities of a dawning civilization which progressively drains all vitality from the surrounding country-side.

During the youth of a culture, two principal estates emerge—that of the nobility and that of the priesthood. The former are the fact men, the doers and the warriors, who act largely from a sure instinct. The priests, on the other hand, are the rationalizers and systematizers of life. In the Faustian Culture these two estates have engaged in a constant struggle with one another. It is, in Spengler's view, the fundamental conflict between the world-as-history represented by the nobility, and the world-as-nature represented by the priesthood. Initially, this conflict is presented as a broad generalization as though it applied to all the cultures. Later Spengler makes clear that the situation he describes is applicable only to the Faustian Culture and that similar conflicts between the two estates did not appear in either the Classical or the Magian Culture.

The first great intellectual creations of a culture are the work of the priesthood. Such creations are known to us today as works of scholasticism and represent an attempt to rationalize the early religious beliefs. In the Faustian world this development culminated in the Summa Theologia of Thomas Aquinas, in which the author undertook to reduce the conduct of life to an exact science. His objective was the salvation of souls, and to this end he laid down rules of conduct based upon the Laws of God exactly as a modern scientist bases his conclusions upon the Laws of Nature. This intellectual structure dominated the thinking of the early Faustian Culture, and was only broken down by the emerging skepticism of the early lay scientists of the 16th and 17th Centuries.

In the Magian Culture, a comparable development is seen in the writings of the early church Fathers. This movement culminated in the Civitas Dei of St. Augustine, whom Spengler describes as "the last great thinker of Arabian Scholasticism, anything but a western intellect." Because Augustine was purely Magian in his world outlook, his writings have always been a thorn in the flesh of western theologians who have struggled to reconcile his thinking with their own.

In the old age of a culture, as the importance of the lay philosopher and scientist increases, and that of the priest diminishes, the latter is absorbed into a larger group of intellectuals in which the philosopher and the scientist play the leading roles. The importance of the nobility is similarly reduced and the nobles, as the fact men, are largely replaced by the entrepreneurs of business, and, to a lesser extent, by professional military leaders.

Spengler considers the peasantry as a non-estate. The plant-like existence of the peasants, with their close ties to the soil and the recurring cycles of weather, births and deaths, prevent them from taking any active part in the life of a culture. In the later stages of a culture, however, there emerges, in the city-dwellers or burghers, a third estate which grows steadily in importance as the culture matures and finally dominates the life of society. It is this class that carries through to fulfillment the various expression forms of a culture and leads in the transition from the cultural to the civilization stage of life.

A vital turning point in the life of a culture is the religious reformation which occurs contemporaneously in a fairly late phase of the life of every culture. In each case it is an effort to restore the religion to the purity of its original idea. For the Faustian world the reformation was largely the intellectual work of Luther and Calvin, and its most important outcome was the Puritanical Movement of Cromwell and his followers in England and Scotland. In the Classical Culture the reformation was led by Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. The Pythagorean revolt was fundamentally an effort to break away from the Olympian Pantheon of gods and to restore the early and simple worship of Demeter, the Earth Goddess. It was also a Puritanical Movement and led amongst other things, to the destruction of Sybaris, the city of "all evil" in Italy.

In the case of Magian man, however, the reformation was nothing less than the emergence of Mohammed and the rise of Islam in the seventh century A.D. Spengler refuses to admit that Mohammedanism was a separate and distinct religion. “At most Islam was a new religion only to the same extent as Lutheranism was one. Actually, it was the prolongation of the great early religions. Equally, its expansion was not (as is even now imagined) a migration of peoples: proceeding from the Arabian Peninsula, but an onslaught of enthusiastic believers, which like an avalanche bore along with it Christians, Jews, and Mazdaists and set them at once in its front rank as fanatical Moslems. It was Berbers from the homeland of St. Augustine who conquered Spain, and Persians from Irak who drove on to the Oxus. The enemy of yesterday became the front-rank comrade of tomorrow. . . . The soul of the Magian Culture found at last its true expression in Islam.”

In all cases, Puritanism displayed a sober, pedantic kind of fanaticism, from which all the joy and humor of the early springtime religions had disappeared. In the Faustian world every Puritan, having become his own priest, carried within him his own personal Hell, as was vividly shown in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Similar sobriety and earnestness were shown in the ranks of the Pythagoreans and in the armies of the early Caliphs.

Puritanism was chiefly a movement of the urban middle class and was generally opposed by the nobility. With its urban background of the Puritan movement contained the seeds of rationalism which, after the passage of a few generations, burst forth everywhere. Puritanism was thus the prelude to the Age of Enlightenment. Locke in England, Voltaire in France, and Kant in Germany were the philosphic leaders of this development. In the Classical world, a similar movement unfolded under the aegis of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

The 18th Century in Europe also witnessed a softening of the harsh fanaticism of the Puritan as a result of the emergence of the so-called Pietistic faiths, such as those of the Methodists and the Quakers. Under the growing influence of scientific materialism, there appeared concurrently the idea of god, the great watchmaker, who was believed to have started the machinery running and then to have left it to its own devices. In the Magian world the comparable and contemporaneous development of Pietism was known as Sufism.

In Spengler's view the principal art forms of the Faustian world reached their culmination in the 18th Century—the rococo in architecture, and the great contrapuntal creations of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven in music. He believed, however, that portrait painting had reached its apogee in the 17th Century with the work of Rembrandt. Western science, on the other hand, continued its free-wheeling advance throughout the 19th Century and, according to Spengler, only completed its basic thought structure in the early 20th Century.

In the Classical world, the work of Phidias and Praxiteles in Athens during the 5th Century B.C. marked the culmination of the art forms of this Culture. Classical science was largely speculative and the end term of this development is found in Archimedes.

A basic aspect of the transition of a culture to a civilization is the growing dominance of money and the rise of a class of capitalists and business entrepreneurs. In the Faustian world the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the later 18th Century, accompanied by the philosophy of David Hume and Adam Smith, marked the emergence of the power of money.

When we turn to the Classical world, our scene shifts from Greece to Rome. Spengler asserts that a study of economics had no place in the small-scale life of the Greek cities. The history of Rome, however, is incomprehensible unless viewed from an economic standpoint. After the end of the second Punic War in the 3rd Century, B.C., there emerged in Rome a new class of capitalists that became more and more dominant during the following two centuries and culminated in such figures as SuIla, Pompey and Crassus. These men were the leaders in the unceasing warfare, chiefly civil conflicts, that took place during this period.

In a later chapter the difference in the concepts of Classical money and Faustian money is discussed in some detail. At this point it must suffice to point out that the Roman idea of wealth was a mass of concrete objects, such as gold and slaves. For late Faustian man, on the other hand, wealth arose out of credit or functional money created by the dynamism of business entrepreneurs.

According to Spengler, the power of money remains dominant during the early stages of a civilization but finally succumbs to what he terms the power of blood with the coming of the Age of the Caesars. Thus, with the arrival of Julius Caesar and Augustus, the power of money was reduced to a subordinate role. It was the great capitalists of Rome who were responsible for the murder of Julius Caesar because they saw in him the beginning of the end of their power. In the Faustian world, however, we are still completely in the grip of a money economy.

Another important aspect of every late culture is the geographical expansion of its power and influence. For the Magian world, as we have already seen, this phenomenon appeared in the tidal waves of Islam which swept across north Africa into Spain and was finally checked by Charles Martel in southern France. Eastward the followers of Mohammed drove as far as the western borders of India.

The expansion of the more static Classical Culture was represented by a gradual extension of its power beyond the borders of the Mediterranean. This movement reached its limits in Spain in the west, England in the north, and Asia Minor in the east.

Most dramatic of all, however, has been the imperialistic expansion of the Faustian Culture. The early voyages of the Vikings were perhaps an early manifestation of this development. The real movement began, however, with the explorations of the Portuguese and Spanish navigators in the 15th Century and continued during the succeeding centuries with an ever rising tempo. Aided by improved navigational instruments and a vast superiority in military technology, Faustian man not only circumnavigated the globe, but also extended his power to its most remote corners.

The first stage of a civilization is the period of “contending states.” This phrase is marked by a succession of frightful wars and usually lasts for a century or more. At the end of the period an agonized and exhausted world accepts gratefully the coming of the Caesars who unite the warring factions and bring about an era of peace and stability.

The period of contending states for the Classical world was mentioned above. Spengler sees the 19th Century as a period of transition from the Faustian Culture phase to that of civilization. The true civilization starts in the 20th Century with the holocausts of World Wars I and II. If Spengler's view is correct, we are now right in the middle of our period of contending states and still fairly far removed from our Age of the Caesars with its prospective haven of security.

Spengler considers Alexander of Macedon and Napoleon as contemporary figures. He asserts, however, that both were romantic adventurers whose conquests left no permanent mark. They appeared just prior to the emergence of the civilization stage and their empires vanished within short periods of time leaving scarcely a ripple on the surfaces of their respective worlds.

The megalopolis is a prime symbol of every civilization. These giant cities dominate the life of their worlds and drain the vitality of the surrounding country-side. In the Classical world Rome was the one true megalopolis. In the Magian, Alexandria and Constantinople were comparable centers of population. Spengler sees in London, Paris, Berlin and New York the giant cities of our own civilization.

The inhabitants of the megalopolis are rootless, atheistic, and thoroughly materialistic. They erect giant structures, such as the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the mighty Aqueducts of Rome, and the American skyscrapers of the Faustian world. All genuine creativity, however, has disappeared. In its place, a sucesion of schools and fads arise, flourish and quickly vanish.

An important characteristic of every megalopolis is the emergence of a new urban proletariat. In Rome this class consisted mainly of freed slaves as well as other immigrants from the outlying provinces. These people form a restless seething mass who are constantly threatening rebellion against the existing establishment. They are kept in check chiefly by liberal doses of Bread and Circuses, and by the modern equivalent in the form of welfare payments.

Another phenomenon of the late megalopolitan world is a gradual decline in population, despite a steady influx of fresh blood from outside. First, the nearby country-side is denuded of inhabitants by the magnetic attraction of the giant city. In these areas, agriculture practically disappears and food supplies are drawn from more and more remote sources. In the cities life continues to die out at the top. No longer is there pride in large families and in the succession of sons and heirs. This phenomenon is basically the result of a declining vitality of the urban population.

In the Classical civilization Stoicism was the dominant philosophy, a calm and static acceptance of the vicissitudes of life. Spengler sees in socialism the dominant and more dynamic philosophy of the Faustian civilization. He defines socialism more broadly than a mere belief in any particular political faith, or as a philosophy of human welfare. Instead, he sees it as an expression of the modern idea of “Progress,” and the Faustian will-to-power. He states that the stoic takes the world as he finds it, but that the socialist wants to recast it in form and substance, to fill it with his own spirit.

In every late civilization there appears what Spengler calls "a second religiousness." This is a pallid revival of a belief in the religious symbols of the early culture. He makes clear, however, that there is no connection between this development and such modern cults as Christian Science and Theosophy, for which he expresses nothing but scorn.

As pointed out earlier, a civilization may last on for a millennium or more as a result of sheer size or relative isolation; for example, China and India. On the other hand, a civilization may be destroyed almost overnight by a brutal invasion. Such was the case when the tiny army of Cortez struck down the Aztec-Mayan Civilization in Mexico. The Magian Civilization was overwhelmed by a series of invasions by barbarians from the steppes of Asia. This movement reached its culmination when all of Asia Minor was occupied by the Ottoman Turks, and Constantinople fell at last to the invader in 1453 A.D.

The collapse of the Roman Empire resulted from a combination of the barbarian within and the barbarian without. The decline in the population of Italy forced Rome to replenish the depleted ranks of her far-flung legions with recruits from the nomadic tribes which were pressing against her frontiers. Thus, the defense of the Classical world passed gradually into the hands of its enemies. From this point it was an inevitable step to the takeover of the almost empty shell of the Empire by the Goths, the Ostrogoths and the Germans.

According to Spengler, the peoples of a late or destroyed civilization revert to a historyless existence. Their struggles and the rise and fall of various groups have become meaningless for the great panorama of world history. During the period of contending states, they fought, bled and died for ideals and rights without which life seemed not worth living. After the coming of the Caesars, however, these goals ceased to have any meaning. “A hundred years more, and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies.”

Spengler uses the word “Fellaheen” to designate the people of a late or collapsed civilization. It is a term of contempt which was first employed to describe the Egyptians of the post-Roman period. It means a people without vitality, direction or destiny.

This summary exposition of Spengler’s philosophy of history would not be complete without some comments on the literary organization of the work. A reader, on first approaching the Decline, is certain to be confused by the lack of any orderly presentation of the material. Thus, the author jumps abruptly from an opening chapter on mathematics to several chapters on his metaphysical assumptions, then back again to a discussion of the differences between cultures. Volume II opens with another lengthy metaphysical section, then moves into sections dealing with such diverse subjects as the megalopolis, the psuedomorphosis, the law, the religious reformations, the state, money and the machine, all presented without any apparently logical sequence. Throughout the whole work there is a constant turning back to the previously discussed subjects, with the author repeating and amplifying his earlier statements.

It is only after a reader has lived with the Decline for some time that he begins to realize that the work has an order and logic of its own and that the repetitions and back-trackings fit into a unique literary pattern that is more the nature of a musical composition than it is that of a straight exposition. H. Stuart Hughes, in his book on Spengler, expresses this point of view eloquently: “Hence even the back-trackings and repetitions play their part, indeed are nearly indispensable, in the tightly woven, all interrelated efect that the author seeks to convey. Actually the Decline can hardly be said to start and end at any particular point. It is not to be read as a logical sequence. It is rather—to use the language of music to which Spengler was so deeply attracted—a theme and variations, a complex, contrapuntal arrangement, in which no one idea necessarily follows another, but in which a group of ideas, whose mutual relationship is symbolically experienced rather than specifically understood, summon, answer, and balance one another in the sort of lofty, cosmic harmony that Goethe’s angels had proclaimed in the prologue and concluding stages of ‘Faust.’”

Here, Evola discusses Caesarism, 20th-century fascism and Nazism, and some of the technical vocabulary of Spengler’s work. A very special thank you to Pleth who translated this work.

EVOLA

It's worth again mentioning the phenomenon of Caesarism as conceived by Spengler. The situation would be such that during the phase of 'civilization' in each cycle (but here the reference becomes specific, it's the West that Spengler clearly has in view), after technological civilization, the reign of machinery and technicians has triumphed over everything else, it will be the powers of finance and capital that dominate (essentially under the guise of democracy), and ultimately a fight to the death will ensue between the lords of money and 'Caesar-like individuals,' identical to the struggle between economy and pure politics. The Caesar-like individuals will break the tyranny of gold and establish the era of absolute politics. Here, a curious and contradictory interference of motives arises: because at this point, according to Spengler, ethical values, race, and tradition would also miraculously revive—although is unclear how such values could have survived the destructions that characterize the entire exhausted phase of 'civilization.' It is not apparent how one can expect these 'great individuals' to develop a sense of responsibility, honor, and care for everything they, with their absolute power, will have wrested from the dominion of gold and brought back under the sovereignty of the pure political principle.

Spenglerian Caesarism is essentially defined as the formless power of single individuals, against the backdrop of Spengler's philosophy that emphasizes the primacy of reality and facts over truth, power over principles, and "life" over any form of higher existence. This sets the stage for unabashed Machiavellianism, and the prophetic prognosis, when stripped of embellishments, simply presents us with totalitarianism, reasonably seen as an inevitable phenomenon in times of "civilization." Adding traditional and aristocratic values becomes nonsensical: in that case, it would no longer concern the Caesar-like individual (assuming one follows Spengler in an abusive and unilateral interpretation of Caesar) or even a Napoleonic figure, but rather the archetype of a legitimate leader or sovereign, whose historical context isn't "civilization" but rather "culture.”

Could this ambiguity perhaps be related to the effect that Spengler's theory of the belated Caesarist era had on Mussolini? This is why he wanted Spengler's work "The Decline of the West," where this theory is emphasized, to be translated into Italian. Probably because he saw himself as one of the new rulers functioning under the absolute political principle. However, he paid little attention to the historical role, which, despite everything, Caesarism fills in Spengler's theory. It's intrinsic to the atmosphere of a dying and thoroughly degraded and desacralized civilization.

It's true, however, that following Spengler, there would be only one ethic, one imperative: the biological, to realize what corresponds to the cyclic phase in which one finds oneself living. In fact, the alternative could be stated thusly: either to be nothing, or to be what a given historical period demands, in every domain, under the guise of Destiny. And in the climate of a civilization, only the above-mentioned political forms would be up to date.

In National Socialist Germany, Spengler represented quite an exceptional case. Faced with the more intense "Caesarism" of Hitler, which was more populist in nature than Mussolini's, Spengler saw his theory almost put to the test. The man Spengler, if not the philosopher who had previously praised Cecil Rhodes, didn't feel inclined to follow it. Like Jünger, von Salomon, Blüher, and various other figures of the so-called "conservative revolution," who in many ways had laid the groundwork for National Socialism, Spengler kept himself somewhat apart. This sentiment was reciprocated: the more radical Nazi circles viewed Spengler with suspicion, not so much for his theory of Caesarism, biological irrationalism, and the will to power, but more due to the inconsistency already mentioned. This inconsistency made him appear as an advocate of conservative and aristocratic Prussian values, which were considered reactionary and suspect in those circles' eyes.

This is certainly not the appropriate place for a detailed examination of the value of Spengler's views on various civilizations and their different phases. There would be too many elements to correct, due to their one-sided or even their inaccurate presentations. Spengler is credited with the discovery of the so-called "Magian civilization" as a distinct unit. His term "Faustian civilization" and "Faustian man" has, in the meantime, become somewhat common among various writers. However, much could be said about the meaning of Faustian civilization, which Spengler identifies with the Western one, starting with Gothic culture. It's worth noting that he considers the entirety of Indo-European pre-history, to say nothing of Hyperborea, to be nonexistent, disregarding the foundational influences by that were propagated by the Gothic and Germanic cultures. He also fails to realize that some presumed specific traits of the Faustian civilization (the cult of the self, psychological analysis, the romantic drive towards the limitless, etc.) are nothing more than precursors to the crisis that would characterize Western civilization. The discussion about the opposition between Western (Faustian) civilization and classical (ancient) civilization keeps resurfacing to excess. Unfortunately, the tired arguments about Greco-Roman civilization as one of the corporeal, finite, and closed, along with the notion of "Apollonialism" being almost synonymous with all this, still prevail. Greek and Roman civilizations are considered parts of the same organism or historical cycle, almost in terms of corresponding phases of civilization and culture. However, it's well-known that they represented distinct cultural entities due to deep-seated factors. Finally, readers might be surprised to hear what Spengler has to say about Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism, and Pythagoreanism. But as it's not our intention to delve into a critique here, readers can decide for themselves, based on their own principles, how to orient themselves and separate what, despite the confusion in Spengler's work, still holds positive value and can be appropriately utilized in morphological historiography, from what should be discarded without hesitation.

The style used by Spengler in this work is anything but plain, both in terms of language and articulation of thought. Therefore, if the reader feels some discomfort, they shouldn't blame the translator, whose liberties could not go so far as to rewrite almost everything in different words, taking on the responsibility of purely probable interpretations at more than one point.

Apart from the general style, there's also a special terminology or a quite particular use of common terms. The reader will gradually get used to this. Let's limit ourselves to a few observations for initial orientation.

The German term "die Antike" means "antiquity" in the specific sense of Greco-Roman civilization (so "der antike Mensch," "die antike Kunst," etc., mean the man, art, etc. of classical civilization). Spengler uses the term precisely in this sense and opposes the use of the expression "classical antiquity." Nevertheless, in certain cases, the use of this expression has been essential; otherwise, the only available Italian term is "antico" (ancient). However, it's important to reiterate that for Spengler, "ancient civilization” doesn't refer to every civilization of the past, but only to that of Greco-Roman antiquity.

When Spengler speaks of "Western civilization," he refers to the cycle of the Faustian or Euro-Western civilization (and later, also American), which he believes began around AD 1000. It doesn't encompass every Western civilization throughout different historical periods.

The German term "Landschaft" means "landscape." However, Spengler uses it in a complex sense, not merely in a picturesque or panoramic manner. He refers to the particular "nature," understood as a combination not only of geographical and climatic factors but also psychological and spiritual ones, that constitutes the mother soil of a given civilization. Translators into other languages have used corresponding terms, such as "paysage" in French and "paesaggio" in Italian.

The terms "Erleben" and "erlebnis" refer to "lived experience" and often pose challenges in translations from German. Given Spengler's irrationalistic philosophy, these terms frequently appear throughout his work. They contrast with a curious use of "Geist" and "geistig," meaning "spirit" and "spiritual," which are often employed to denote the opposite of "Erleben," encompassing intellectual, rational, abstract, and cerebral aspects. To avoid confusion, translators have sometimes taken the liberty to use these more appropriate expressions.

Readers will often have to navigate on their own, as it's not uncommon for Spengler to paradoxically associate disparate concepts under the same term "Geist," such as Enlightenment, urban rationalism, religious spirit, wisdom or gnosis, and scientific-philosophical speculation, all counterposed equally against "life" and "lived experience.”

Regarding the term "image" ("Bild"), readers must gradually get accustomed to the complex and varied ways Spengler uses it. For the challenging term "Stand" or "Stände" (caste, social class, corporation: see "Ständestaat"), and other specific terms, explanations will be provided in notes as they come up. The term "Gleichzeitig," meaning "simultaneous" or "contemporary," has been translated as "synchronous," used by Spengler for phenomena or figures that occupy the same "place" in the cycle of different civilizations (someone has instead translated it as "coeval"). Overall, it's only by gradually becoming accustomed to Spengler's style and mindset that the reader can overcome the difficulties presented by the study of this book.

[END PART 2]

To read the first half of the translation, view it here:

A special thank you to Pleth (@plethonist on X.com) for leading the way on this translation.

EVOLA

While minor works by Spengler have been available in Italy for some time now, his main book, to which the author owes his worldwide fame, is only being made accessible to a general readership for the first time through this translation, despite the frequent references to it found in current literature.

One might think that this publication holds a certain relevance today, due to the fact that the same state of mind it represents has reappeared in the aftermath of the Second World War. The same collapse of values has become evident, and the same sense of a general crisis of civilization has intensified. These were the characteristics that marked the post-World War I period, laying the groundwork for the success of Spengler's work and lending a symbolic value to its title, "The Decline of the West.”

Partly, this is true. However, it is also true that themes which initially held a sense of originality in the early reception of the book have now become almost clichéd, representing the first barometric indicators of a shift in historical sensibility away from previously dominant historical and progressive optimism. In the meantime, these themes have been repeated and developed in various ways through a wide range of literature, more or less extemporaneously. Thus, a balanced and objectively critical assessment of such concepts is now imperative.

In the second place, the title of the book, as the reader will see, only partially corresponds to its content. It is not merely an endeavor to systematically highlight the twilight nature of the Western civilization at its end. Instead, it represents the exposition of a personal philosophy in general, where the philosophy and morphology of world history are merely a consequence, and Spenglerian views on the decline of the West and the forms in which our civilization might come to an end are also second-order consequences, so to speak. And within this personal philosophical system, there are far too many things of a highly debatable value.

In a general sense, it can be said that Spengler's most evident merit lies in his attack against the linear and progressive (and also post-Hegelian dialectical) conception of history. He challenges the idea that there exists a singular history that encompasses all of humanity and unfolds from a lesser to a greater state of civilization in indefinite evolution. Another merit of Spengler is his pointing out the intellectual provincialism of certain historiographies, where anything outside Western history, confined to the conventional schema of ancient-medieval-modern, would be more or less irrelevant and marginal, if not outright nonexistent. In contrast, for Spengler, history fractures into closed, discontinuous cyclical courses, each corresponding to a specific irreproducible civilization. The cycle pertaining to Western or Euro-Western civilization is just a particular cycle, lacking any privileged position. Like all other cycles, the cycle of our civilization also had a specific beginning and will have an inevitable end. Differentiated from ahistorical forms of existence, civilizations, having fulfilled their time, dissolve back into them.

The Spenglerian conception is entirely based on an organic analogy. According to Spengler, the primary phenomenon in history, the Goethean "Urphänomen," is constituted by civilizations. These are conceived as organisms that, despite being of a higher order and having a superindividual character, like all organisms, have a finite duration and present well-defined phases of development. Just like visible organisms, civilizations have youth, a period of maturity and flourishing, followed by old age, leading to decline and ultimately, an end. The "morphology of world history" aims to identify the recurrence of these phases in various cycles of civilizations within a system of correspondences and "synchronisms" that extend beyond the domains of art, thought, science, religion, ethics, law, and so forth.

Once one of these organisms dissolves, another emerges in a different "landscape," repeating the same cycle without continuity with the previous, based on a new original and irreproducible idea. Each cycle of civilization expresses a specific idea or "soul" in its arts, wars, thought, architecture, economy, sciences, and so forth, imparting a symbolic character to all these manifestations. Nothing truly passes from one civilization to another. What one civilization might borrow from another is assimilated in a different function, according to a different idea, the specific idea of that civilization, imbuing it with a different meaning, a different quality. For instance, Christianity as it was adopted in Euro-Western civilization ("Catholic-Germanic" Christianity) is fundamentally different from original Christianity, which emerged and developed within the framework of what Spengler calls the "Magian" civilization.

According to Spengler, each civilization not only has a distinct worldview and life conception stemming from its “prime-symbol," but also a different science, mathematics, physics, and so on. There are no singular or universal mathematics, paintings, laws, economies, etc. Instead, there are diverse mathematics, diverse painting styles, diverse economies, diverse legal systems, each with a different spirit, sense, and symbolic value.

Therefore, we are confronted with a pluralistic and thus relativistic conception, where the positive blends with the negative. While it is valid to break the magic circle that leads one to interpret every civilization according to one's own, thereby disregarding its originality, it becomes evident that excessive emphasis on discontinuity and particularly Spengler’s assertion that every truth and understanding are historically conditioned and subject to the irrevocable law of the civilization to which they belong, leads to a methodological impossibility. Rigorously speaking, one would be condemned to truly understanding only their own civilization. Right from the outset, Spengler's assumption of grasping the soul and guiding idea of civilizations different from our own appears absurd. Furthermore, following Spengler's logic, we Westerners would find ourselves in a particularly unfavorable situation in this regard, as the historical character that conceives everything in terms of perspectivist relativity would be specific to our civilization. In such a case, the premises would need to be reversed.

To fulfill the task that Spengler has outlined, the individual from the civilizations he labels ahistorical or atemporal would be far more qualified. Such an individual could also be described as the "traditional man." Freed to a greater extent from the demon of history, such an individual would possess the capacity for a free, objective gaze capable of apprehending differences without distorting them. Moreover, it is the traditional man who is responsible for historical visions and "myths" of a vastness that finds no parallel in any of the modern philosophies of history (with the exception of Guénon, who revived those traditions). Examples include the doctrine of the "four ages," which holds a universal character as it has been formulated by various civilizations, the doctrine of the "great year," the doctrine of kalpas, and so on.

On the other hand, the fate of modern individuals, to undergo historical conditionality in their conceptions, is real and is illustrated by the case of Spengler himself: his entire exposition is rooted in an irrationalistic philosophy of life, an evident product or byproduct of the last European civilization. This philosophy is the last among those that can help us understand the spirit of other civilizations or other phases of a civilization, for instance, starting from our Middle Ages.

Regarding the cyclical development of individual civilizations, Spengler introduced a distinction and a corresponding terminology of debatable value: "culture" (Kultur) versus "civilization" (Zivilisation). In any case, the "culture" phase is the qualitative and differentiated one, tied to the prime-symbols of castle and temple, centered around the two "primeval castes" of nobility and priesthood, emphasizing the values of race, tradition, living custom, a sense of destiny, and artistic intuition. Once the apex of each cycle is surpassed, primarily with the rise of cities, the advent of the Third Estate, and ending with the rule of the masses, all these values wane, and the transition from "culture" to "civilization" occurs. Civilization is an inevitable terminal and twilight phase of each cycle. In civilization, abstract intellect predominates, pure "wakefulness" detached from instinct, race, and cosmic substratum. Here, the inorganic supplants the organic, mechanical randomness supplants lived experience, the world as history gives way to the world as nature, and form yields to formlessness. The advent of machinery, the omnipotence of money and finance, the rule of the masses and the anti-caste, all mark civilization. Its ultimate symbol is the sprawling cosmopolitan metropolis, which absorbs and devours the countryside and its energies. Socially and politically, civilization culminates in Bonapartism and Caesarism: it is formless power in the hands of individuals who despotically control the forces and people of this internally dissolved and twilight world. Beyond this point, there is no more history in the higher sense, nothing holds significance or symbolic power; primitive, ahistorical, "eternal," purely biological forms of the primordial return.

According to Spengler, we are living in the civilization phase of the Euro-Western (or "Faustian") cycle, which began around the year 1000 AD. The concept of the "decline of the West" simply expresses this fact, our destiny. Even the West will experience the end of its cycle, in forms that other civilizations have already experienced, and the form of which can thus be prognosticated going forward.

Spengler can reject the accusation of pessimism here, as he sees this as a simple observation of an inevitable natural phenomenon. To predict the ways in which a civilization will be extinguished is no more pessimistic than describing the phases of decline, old age, and inevitable death in any organism. However, the question would then shift: Spengler can be accused of pessimism not in the specific regard of the phenomenon of "civilization," but rather in the broader context of his doctrine, which is informed by a biological fatalism inappropriately extended to the realm of the philosophy of history.

Since this is the most interesting and worthy point of consideration within our author's theories, it would be wise to add a few more brief remarks.

Just as individual lives, succeeding one another in time, while being closed cycles with more or less the same biological phases, can collectively give expression to a continuity on a higher plane (for example, as history), similarly the theory of civilizations as more or less parallel cycles does not necessarily exclude a broader perspective. Someone who would take the secure guidance of the ancient traditional views already mentioned, notably the doctrine of the four ages, could easily see that while each particular civilization may have had its own distinctive character and may have followed the mentioned course that culminates in a phase of civilization, nevertheless, for the entirety of them, the same rhythm has unfolded since ancient times. Thus, "civilization" seems to be the final term, the terminus ad quem, to which the complex of preceding civilizations appears to have been ordered, and in which an overall process of an involutionary nature is concluding. So much so that within the individual forms of preceding "civilizations," one can almost see partial forms, almost trials or prefigurations, which were to have their most complete, radical, and universal realization only in the Euro-Western civilization, identical to the "modern world." Universal realization, we may say, since the civilization of the recent West is no longer the episode of a specific civilization limited to a particular "landscape." Instead, it is a phenomenon that is gradually encompassing the entire globe, leaving no space where something new can be conceived and a new cycle initiated. Moreover, Spengler acknowledges this by speaking of the "planetary" character that, unlike others, the Faustian civilization presents.

The value of distinguishing between civilization and culture has been recognized for a morphology of history. However, such a distinction should have been further elucidated in the form of two "categories" in the Kantian sense, and two general types of possible organization of human life. This would have given rise to a valuable duality as a guiding thread for discovering, beyond apparent pluralism, the different, antithetical spirit presented by art, science, worship, custom, and so forth, depending on whether they refer to a "culture" or a "civilization.”

In relation to this, if Spengler highlights the characteristics of each civilization quite well, there is much to be said about what would correspond to its opposite for him, namely what is truly and properly culture. One might even question whether Spengler was capable of comprehending the spirit of superior traditional forms of culture, as it appears that he mostly appreciates expressions of a somewhat primitive existence, tied to the countryside and small centers, with qualitative forms, including warlike, priestly, and symbolic elements, and with emphasis placed on the domain of the arts, albeit on a small scale and of short duration. These expressions, however, lack a connection to something transcendent and spiritual in a higher sense. Spengler's philosophy of life leads him to only sense the value of what is vitally confused, what is irrationally and almost unconsciously lived. The forms of a higher consciousness and a transcendence detached from life, which ordains and dominates life and existed at the heart of all major traditional civilizations, are already included by him in the phases of urban degeneration, detachment from origins, and the tyranny that intellectualized "waking-being" exerts on the maternal substrate of life and "being.”

In passing, it can be mentioned that this is the reason why, even though Spengler attaches great importance to the world of symbols and myths, he does not align with the traditionalist tendency that attributes metaphysical content to that world. For Spengler, symbols and myths have more or less the same "vital" and confused meaning attributed to them by irrationalists and psychoanalysts. They are manifestations of the unconscious substrate of life, something that exists not beyond but within the realm of each normal and awakened individual.

It is noteworthy that there is no reference to Vico in Spengler's work. He either completely ignored Vico's ideas or chose to remain silent about this thinker, whose theory of historical recurrences bears analogies to Spengler's, but with the advantage of better-defined historical categories despite various imperfections and digressions. This superiority arises from the fact that Vico drew his inspiration from one of the formulations of the ancient doctrine about the cyclical succession of individual phases of civilization in an involutionary sense. As is known, Vico distinguishes in cyclical development between the sacred period and the heroic one, which then transitions into the merely human and rationalistic period (the "barbarism of reflection"), roughly equivalent to Spengler's phase of "civilization." In Vico's framework, this period represents the same final phenomenon of a "monarchy," understood more or less as a form of "Caesarism." The Spenglerian schema is more incomplete than Vico's because Spengler's confused, irrationalistic interpretation of the spirituality of origins, his commingling of priesthood and nobility in an existential opposition from the outset, hinders the ability to adequately distinguish the sacred phase from the heroic and warrior phase. Furthermore, this would have required an exploration of the "metaphysical dimension" of civilizations, which is lacking in Spengler's historiography (it is significant that he consistently refers to the "soul" of a civilization, but never to its "spirit"). Instead, his work places excessive emphasis on considerations related to the domain of the arts, particularly arts construed in a humanistic sense. Overall, one gets the impression that his morphology almost reduces to a "psychology" of civilizations (hence the use of the term "physiognomy"), rather than serving as a true philosophy or metaphysics of history.

[END PART 1]

Continue here to read the second half:

Click here to see Early Days of World History on Amazon

Click here to see Prussianism and Socialism on Amazon

Spergler Acolyte: Constantin, thank you for joining me on The Oswald Spengler Project.

Constantin von Hoffmeister: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

SA: Can you tell the readers a bit about yourself and how you became interested in the works of Oswald Spengler?

CVH: My formative years were spent in Germany, but I moved to the United States as a teenager and attended high school in Arizona. I majored in English and political science at the University of New Orleans. I have lived and worked in various countries, including India, where I wrote articles for English-language Indian newspapers, Uzbekistan, where I taught at a private British elementary school, and Russia, where I provided Business English training to directors and managers of various companies.

My exposure to different cultures and languages has given me a unique perspective and an ability to navigate complex cross-cultural situations with ease. My fascination with the works of Oswald Spengler began when a high school friend gave me an abridged version of The Decline of the West. This experience proved to be a transformative one, sparking a passion for Spengler's ideas that drove me to seek out and devour all of the original German editions. My interest in Spengler’s works has continued to inspire and inform my thinking, especially when it comes to matters concerning the fate of Western civilization.

SA: What motivated you to start producing translations?

CVH: As a true perfectionist at heart, I found myself sometimes dissatisfied with existing translations of various works, including those by Oswald Spengler and other notable authors. Driven by my love of language and my desire to share these important texts with English-speaking readers, I decided to embark on a journey of translation.

With a keen eye for detail, I poured myself into the work, determined to produce translations that would do justice to the original texts. My efforts have not only allowed me to satisfy my own exacting standards, but have also helped to bring previously untranslated works to a wider audience.

I take great pride in the quality of my translations, and it is immensely gratifying to know that my work has played a part in making these important works accessible to a new generation of readers. For me, the art of translation is not just a job, but a passion that drives me to continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the field of literary translation.

SA: Charles Francis Atkinson (CFA) has long been held as the “gold standard” of Spengler translations. Through your work with Arktos, you produced a revised translation of The Decline of the West. What sort of changes did you make to the CFA translation?

CVH: I didn’t make any changes. I merely corrected obvious typos and other mistakes, which apparently had never been fixed since it was first published almost one hundred years ago.

SA: I noticed that, in the translator’s preface, CFA mentions how difficult translating certain passages can be. What are some of the difficulties of capturing Spengler’s style in English?

CVH: Capturing Spengler’s style in English can be challenging for several reasons.

Firstly, Spengler was known for his dense and complex writing style, which incorporates many technical terms, neologisms, and metaphors that are difficult to translate directly into English. His use of German philosophical and scientific vocabulary also adds an additional layer of complexity to the task of translating his works. Finding equivalent terms and phrases that convey the same meaning in English can be a difficult task.

Secondly, Spengler’s writing often employed a highly metaphorical and poetic style that was deeply embedded in German culture and literature. This makes it difficult to capture the full meaning and connotations of his language in translation, as many of his metaphors and cultural references are unique to the German language and culture.

Thirdly, Spengler's works often incorporate a highly idiosyncratic and personal style, which makes it difficult for translators to separate the author’s voice from the content of his ideas. This requires a deep understanding of Spengler’s philosophical and historical ideas and an ability to convey those ideas in a way that preserves the author’s intended meaning and tone.

Overall, translating Spengler’s works requires not only a deep knowledge of both German and English but also a deep understanding of Spengler’s unique style, philosophy, and cultural background.

SA: In the introduction, Spengler employs Goethe’s phrase “exakte sinnliche Phantasie” to describe his approach to ascertaining historical forms. The CFA translation renders this as “intellectual flair”. It wasn’t until I reviewed the German that I realized that Spengler was directly quoting Goethe’s scientific writings by using that phrase. A more literal translation might be “exact sensorial imagination”. In the translator’s preface, Atkinson mentions this particular phrase as being difficult to translate. I excused it since I figured he wasn’t too familiar with Goethe’s philosophical writings and therefore Goethe’s literal intent behind the phrase was a bit lost on Atkinson. But this made me wonder: does the CFA translation have any other unusual or even inaccurate English renderings?

CVH: It is possible that the CFA translation of Spengler contains other unusual or even inaccurate English renderings, as translation is a complex and often subjective process. In any translation, there is always the risk of losing some of the original meaning or nuance, particularly when dealing with complex ideas and cultural references.

In the case of the phrase “exakte sinnliche Phantasie,” it is clear that the CFA translation chose to use “intellectual flair” as an approximation of the idea, while acknowledging in the translator’s preface that a more literal translation might be difficult to achieve. While this translation may not fully capture the intended meaning of the original German phrase, it is ultimately up to the reader to decide whether the English rendering is adequate.

As with any translation, it is important to approach the CFA translation of Spengler’s works with a critical eye, and to consult other translations or the original German text when in doubt about the accuracy or appropriateness of a particular rendering.

SA: Now, I want to shift the conversation toward your more recent endeavors. You recently produced two translations of Spengler: Prussianism and Socialism and Early Days of World History. The publication of Early Days of World History has sparked much excitement on twitter over the past few months. For those who are unaware, Early Days of World History had previously never been translated into English. Your translation marks the first time that the Anglophone world has been able to sink their teeth into Spengler’s investigations into prehistory. Can you give us some of the background behind this work? What sort of state was it in at the time of Spengler’s death and how was it originally published?

CVH: Early Days of World History was one of the major works that Oswald Spengler was working on at the time of his death in 1936. It is a fragmentary work, and many sections consist of notes or incomplete sentences. Spengler left behind extensive notes and fragments for the book, but he did not have a chance to organize and complete them before his death. As a result, the text is often difficult to read and lacks the coherence and structure of Spengler’s other works. However, despite its fragmentary nature, Early Days of World History remains an important source of Spengler’s ideas about the early period of world history and his philosophy of history in general.

SA: Given that the work was left as an unfinished series of notes, I imagine there must have been many challenges associated with translating it. Can you describe some of these?

CVH: Translating a fragmentary and unfinished work like Early Days of World History is challenging in several ways. Firstly, there is missing or incomplete text, which can make it difficult to grasp the intended meaning. Secondly, the lack of context in some parts of the work makes it challenging to accurately translate certain phrases or passages. Additionally, the unfinished nature of the work may result in a lack of clarity or coherence in certain sections, which can be difficult to convey in the translation. Furthermore, the style and tone of the writing may be unconventional, making it harder to capture the author’s intended voice and meaning in another language. Finally, as the translator, I also had to do extensive research on the historical and cultural contexts of the work in order to accurately express its intended meaning to the target audience.

SA: As a translator, how do you decide when and where to make changes that might improve the work’s legibility while still remaining faithful to the state of the source material?

CVH: Translators often face a difficult balance between remaining faithful to the source material and making changes that improve the work’s legibility. While it is important to accurately convey the author's intended meaning and style, sometimes the source material may be difficult to understand or read in the target language due to differences in grammar, syntax, or cultural context. In such cases, making changes to improve the work’s legibility may be necessary, provided that the translator does not alter the meaning or intent of the original text. Ultimately, the goal of any translation should be to make the work accessible to a wider audience without sacrificing the integrity of the source material. If Spengler was unclear or vague in the original, I replicated this ambiguity in the translation. If his wording is awkward in the original, I also wanted to show this awkwardness in the translation.

SA: What are some of the main ideas that Spengler presents in Early Days of World History?

CVH: In Early Days of World History, Spengler presents a number of ideas about the early history of human civilization. Some of the main ideas include:

1.) The concept of “culture-amoebas”: Spengler suggests that civilizations are like amoebas: they are mobile and not anchored to a specific place. He identifies three main culture-amoebas: Atlantis (the West), Kash (the Southeast), and Turan (the North). Atlantis, Kash, and Turan are morphologically distinct cultures in religion and the arts. Atlantis worships the dead and emphasizes the ultra-telluric realm with an obsessional relationship to ancestors. Its art centers on stone constructions with a feeling of inert complacency. Kash has a tropical and content religion, where the mathematics of the cosmos dominates and life after death is a matter of indifference. The central symbol of Kash is the temple, where priests scrutinize celestial mathematics. Turan values the power of royal bloodlines and individual heroism and has a love for beauty and ornamentation.1

2.) The notion of “primitive” cultures: Spengler suggests that there is a certain stage in the development of human cultures that is characterized by primitive, magical thinking, which is distinct from the more rational, scientific thinking of later civilizations.

3.) The role of myth and religion in early civilizations: Spengler argues that myth and religion played a crucial role in shaping early civilizations and that they are intimately linked to the cultural and spiritual identity of a people.

SA: In the Anglophone world, John Farrenkopf has argued that the ideas presented here along with those in Man and Technics represent a “metamorphosis” of Spengler’s philosophy of history. While The Decline of the West showcases a nonlinear view of history, the latter Spengler seems to amend this perspective somewhat. How did the later Spengler’s view of history evolve? And in what ways did it remain the same?

CVH: In The Decline of the West, Spengler presented a cyclical view of history in which cultures go through a predictable life cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and decline. However, in his later works such as Man and Technics and The Hour of Decision, Spengler appeared to depart from this cyclical view of history and adopt a more linear perspective.

Also, Spengler’s later works, including Man and Technics and Prussianism and Socialism, focused more on the impact of technology and the rise of the machine on human civilization. In these works, Spengler argued that the machine was not simply a tool, but a new form of life that was transforming the world in ways that were unprecedented in human history. He believed that technology was not just changing the material conditions of life, but was also transforming human nature itself.

However, while Spengler’s later works focused more on the impact of technology, they did not completely abandon his earlier cyclical view of history. Instead, they presented a kind of synthesis between the cyclical and linear views of history, in which cultures continued to go through a life cycle of birth, growth, and decline, but were also subject to external forces such as technological change that could accelerate or decelerate this life cycle.

Overall, while Spengler's view of history did evolve somewhat in his later works, he remained committed to the idea that cultures go through predictable life cycles of birth, growth, and decline. However, he also recognized the importance of external factors such as technological change in shaping the course of human history.

SA: Did the ideas expressed in Early Days of World History have any direct impact on the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and/or history? Or did Spengler’s premature death leave them relatively unknown and unstudied?

CVH: It is unclear to what extent Spengler's ideas in Early Days of World History directly impacted the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and history. Spengler’s premature death in 1936, before the book was completed, may have contributed to its relative obscurity compared to The Decline of the West. However, some scholars have noted the influence of Spengler’s ideas on subsequent thinkers in these fields. For example, some have suggested that Spengler’s focus on the unity of culture and the need to understand cultures on their own terms anticipated later trends in anthropology and cultural studies. Spengler was basically a forerunner of cultural relativism. Additionally, Spengler's emphasis on the importance of historical cycles and the need to understand historical phenomena in their broader cultural and civilizational context has been seen as influential in historical and comparative studies. Overall, while the impact of Spengler's ideas in Early Days of World History may be difficult to measure, they remain a subject of interest and debate among scholars of history, anthropology, and cultural studies.

SA: In addition to Early Days of World History, there is another posthumous volume of Spengler’s unfinished work called Urfragen (Primordial Questions). This has yet to be translated into English. Do you plan on translating this work? Is there anything you can tell us about Urfragen?

CVH: Yes, it’s on my list of future translations. The book consists of notes and essays that Spengler wrote over the course of his life, but did not organize into a coherent work. The title of the book refers to the fundamental questions that Spengler believed were at the root of all human cultures, such as the meaning of life and death, the nature of existence, and the purpose of history.

Urfragen is considered by some to be the culmination of Spengler’s thought, as it reflects his most mature and developed ideas on these fundamental questions. However, because the book was left unfinished at the time of Spengler’s death, it remains unclear how he intended to develop these ideas further, or how he would have ultimately synthesized them into a coherent philosophical system.

SA: You’ve also recently translated Spengler’s political tract Prussianism and Socialism. Can you give a rundown of some of the ideas in the text?

CVH: Prussianism is a cultural and political phenomenon that emerged in Prussia during the 18th century, characterized by a strong sense of duty, discipline, and order. It emphasizes the importance of the state and the superiority of Germanic culture. Socialism, as it developed in Germany, was also influenced by Prussian values. Spengler argues that German socialism was not a proletarian movement, but rather a movement of the middle and upper classes disillusioned with the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic.

According to Spengler, both Prussianism and socialism are part of a larger historical phenomenon he calls “Prussian socialism.” This socialism is rooted in the unique cultural and historical experience of Prussia and Germany. Spengler contends that Germany’s future depends on successfully merging Prussianism and socialism. He advocates for a strong, authoritarian government capable of implementing socialist policies to achieve national goals. In Spengler’s view, this requires a rejection of liberal democracy and the prioritization of the state over individual rights. He argues that this synthesis will lead to a powerful, unified Germany that can compete on the global stage.

SA: What sort of impact did this text have in intellectual and political circles of Weimar Germany?

CVH: Prussianism and Socialism had a significant impact on intellectual and political circles in Weimar Germany. It was widely read and discussed among intellectuals and politicians, and its ideas influenced the development of conservative and nationalist thought in the country.

The text was particularly influential among conservative and nationalist groups who were disillusioned with the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic and sought an alternative vision for Germany’s future. Spengler’s call for a strong, authoritarian government that could implement socialist policies resonated with many of these groups, and his ideas helped to shape the development of conservative and nationalist political movements in the country.

At the same time, Spengler’s ideas were also controversial and contested. Some intellectuals and politicians criticized his vision of Prussian socialism as authoritarian and anti-democratic and argued that it represented a threat to the principles of liberal democracy and individual freedom.

SA: It seems like this text was one of the many products of the Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic. How do the ideas expressed in Prussianism and Socialism differ from those that arose later with National Socialism? I recall that Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister wrote a letter to Spengler not understanding Spengler’s disagreement with National Socialism. She writes “Does not our sincerely honored Fuhrer have the same ideals and values for the Third Reich, as you [Spengler] have expressed in Prussianism and Socialism?”. How would you answer her?

CVH: The ideas expressed in Spengler's Prussianism and Socialism are often associated with the broader intellectual movement of the Conservative Revolution. This movement was characterized by a rejection of liberal democracy and the values of the Enlightenment, and an embrace of authoritarianism, traditionalism, and a strong sense of national identity.

While there are certainly some similarities between the ideas expressed in Prussianism and Socialism and those that arose later with National Socialism, there are also important differences. Spengler’s vision of a strong, authoritarian government implementing socialist policies was not necessarily tied to racial ideology or the kind of aggressive militarism associated with National Socialism.

Spengler’s ideas were rooted in a broader cultural and historical understanding of Germany’s place in the world, whereas National Socialism drew heavily on racial theories and a mythologized view of Germany’s past. Additionally, Spengler was critical of the kind of mass politics that characterized National Socialism and believed in the importance of strong, authoritarian leadership rather than the kind of populist movement that was central to the rise of the Nazis.

In response to Nietzsche’s sister's letter, it’s important to note that while there may have been some overlap in terms of certain values and goals, Spengler was not a supporter of National Socialism and did not see it as a viable solution to Germany’s problems. Instead, his ideas were more closely aligned with the broader intellectual and political movement of the Conservative Revolution, many of whose proponents were opposed to National Socialism as well.

SA: It seems like the worldview of English liberalism has dominated the globe in the years since Spengler’s death. Do you think there’s any future in which a “Prussian spirit” might return?

CVH: The ideas and values of different historical periods and cultures are often in constant flux, and their relevance and appeal can change over time. While the ideas of Prussianism and socialism had a significant impact on Weimar Germany, they also faced criticism and opposition from other intellectual and political movements. It is possible that these ideas may resurface and gain popularity in the future, but it is also possible that they may not. Ultimately, the future is shaped by a complex interplay of social, political, and cultural factors that are difficult to predict with certainty.

SA: Your edition of Prussianism and Socialism also includes Spengler’s essay “Russia’s Double Face and the German Problems in the East.” Can you tell us a bit about this essay and why it was included in this edition?

CVH: “Russia's Double Face and the German Problems in the East” is an essay written by Spengler in 1922. In the essay, Spengler examines the relationship between Russia and Germany, as well as the complex political and cultural issues that exist between the two countries.

Spengler argues that Russia has a “double face.” On the one hand, it is a nation with a rich and unique cultural heritage, deeply connected to the land and the rhythms of nature. On the other hand, it is also a nation with a strong authoritarian streak, and a tendency towards bureaucratic centralization and social engineering.

Spengler also explores the historical and geopolitical issues that have led to conflict between Germany and Russia, including the competition for dominance in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the clash between the cultures of the two nations. He argues that Germany has historically been caught between the two poles of Western and Eastern culture, and that this has made it difficult for Germany to find a stable political and cultural identity.

Overall, “Russia's Double Face and the German Problems in the East” is an important document for understanding Spengler’s view of geopolitics and cultural history, and his ideas about the challenges faced by modern nations in the wake of the collapse of traditional cultural structures.

I included the essay due to its relevance in the current geopolitical climate of tensions between the West and Russia.

SA: What do you think has been the long-term legacy of Spengler’s political works?

CVH: The long-term legacy of Spengler’s political works is complex and controversial. On the one hand, his ideas were embraced by some political movements in the early 20th century, particularly those associated with the Conservative Revolution. These movements sought to redefine the meaning of conservatism, rejecting the liberal values of the Enlightenment and advocating for a return to traditional values and a strong, authoritarian state.

However, Spengler’s work was also criticized for its pessimism, cultural determinism, and rejection of democracy. Many of his ideas were later appropriated by the Nazis, who claimed that they were fulfilling Spengler’s prophecy of the “decline of the West” and the rise of a new, authoritarian order.

Despite these criticisms, Spengler's work continues to be studied and debated by scholars in a variety of fields, including philosophy, history, and political science. Some scholars have argued that his ideas about cultural cycles, the importance of tradition, and the limitations of reason are still relevant today, particularly in the face of globalization and the erosion of traditional values. Others have argued that his work is too deeply rooted in the specific historical context of his time, and that his theories are overly deterministic and essentialist.

SA: Wrapping up, I want to ask you a few questions about the influence of Spengler today. It seems that there is a new generation of those interested in Spengler’s works. Within the last few years, we’ve seen the birth of organizations like The Oswald Spengler Society. They’re beginning to host conferences that showcase Spenglerian analyses of history, culture, and politics. Additionally, I’ve noticed that the internet has a growing interest in Spengler’s ideas. There seems to be a lot of excitement over Spengler. Why is there so much renewed interest in Spengler?

CVH: There are several reasons why there has been renewed interest in Spengler in recent years. One reason is the perceived crisis of Western civilization, particularly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing political, economic, and social changes of the 21st century. Spengler’s pessimistic views on the decline of Western civilization and the cyclical nature of history have resonated with some who see parallels between the current situation and the decline of past civilizations.

Another reason for renewed interest in Spengler is his analysis of the rise of authoritarianism and the role of technology in modern society. Spengler’s works anticipate many of the developments that have taken place in the 20th and 21st centuries, including the rise of totalitarian regimes, the impact of mass media and communication technologies, and the decline of traditional values and institutions.

Finally, there is also a renewed interest in Spengler’s literary style and the way in which he blends historical analysis with cultural criticism and philosophical reflection. Some scholars see Spengler as an important figure in the development of literary modernism and the use of literary techniques in non-fiction writing. Spengler’s emphasis on the relativity of cultural values and his rejection of universal truths and absolutes anticipate postmodernism to some degree.

SA: What is the importance of reading Spengler today?

CVH: His work provides a unique perspective on history and culture that challenges traditional Western views. Spengler’s cyclical view of history, for example, challenges the idea of progress and the inevitability of Western dominance. This can help readers to think more critically about their own assumptions and to develop a more nuanced understanding of the world.

SA: After spending so much time reading and translating Spengler, has your perspective on his thought changed in any way?

CVH: Not at all. It has merely cemented my views on his philosophy. After all these years, he still remains the man of the hour!

SA: Constantin, I want to thank you for joining me on The Oswald Spengler Project.

CVH: Thank you for letting me participate. I greatly appreciate it.

If you’d like to read these translations for yourself, consider purchasing them from Legend Books via Amazon. Having purchased and read them myself, I can personally attest to their quality and am happy to give them my stamp of approval. Both are sturdy, handsomely designed, and the best editions available for purchase.

Legend Books’ website: https://legendbooks.org/

Click here to see Early Days of World History

Click here to see Prussianism and Socialism

Constantin can be found on Twitter, Telegram, and Substack. Consider following and subscribing.

Twitter: @constantinvonh

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Eurosiberia

Pan-European geopolitics and culture

By Constantin von Hoffmeister

Some housekeeping…

In the coming weeks I will be working on an analysis of the introduction to The Decline of the West Volume I. So please subscribe to my Substack and follow me on Twitter to be notified when I publish this. I can assure you that this will be the most in-depth analysis of the introduction that exists on the internet. You won’t want to miss it.

Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt.

@SperglerAcolyte

I am happy to announce the resumption of The Oswald Spengler Project. This post will serve as a biographical sketch of Oswald Spengler’s life from birth to the publication of the first volume of The Decline of the West in 1918. I plan on publishing these biographical interludes in between my posts explicating Spengler’s works. I hope this will grant the reader some deeper insight into Spengler’s mind and the background from which his work emerges. Please check the notes at the bottom of the post if you are interested in sources or reading more on Spengler’s biography.

The Early Days of Oswald Spengler

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was born on May 29, 1880 in Blankenburg, Germany to Bernhard and Pauline Spengler. Blankenburg had historically been a mining town and was located on the north foot of the Harz Mountains. Spengler’s paternal grandfather had worked as a metallurgical inspector within the region. Blankenburg’s mining industry, however, began to decline and forced Oswald’s father, Bernhard Spengler, to abandon the family profession. Bernhard joined the German Empire’s civil service and worked as a postal official. This station afforded the Spengler family the comforts and advantages of a middle-class existence typical of Germany at the time. In 1886, Bernhard was promoted to a position in Soest and so the family moved.

While his father represented an austere and duty-minded influence upon the young Spengler, his mother’s side of the family represented a more artistic nature. Spengler’s maternal grandfather, Gustav Adolf Grantzow, was a ballet master married to a ballerina. Of their five children, two became actresses and one, Spengler’s aunt Adele, became an internationally acclaimed ballerina. Tragically, she would die before Oswald’s birth due to complications following the amputation of her right leg. Her fortune was left to her sister (Spengler’s mother), Pauline. Following the death of his mother in 1910, Spengler would inherit this money and used it to sustain himself as an independent scholar. Despite the Grantzows’ Bohemian proclivity toward the arts, Spengler’s mother was unloving and tyrannized the household. His duty-bound, humorless, and anti-intellectual father offered no comfort either. Later in life, Spengler remarked to his sister, Hildegard, that his hard and joyless childhood primed him for success later in life.

Growing up in such a household, the young Spengler was incredibly anxious as a child. Indeed, anxiety became a defining feature of the adult Spengler and his work. Spengler writes, “when I contemplate my life, it is one feeling which dominated everything, everything–anxiety”. In addition to anxiety, Spengler was frequently assailed by agonizing headaches. These migraines resulted in temporary losses of memory. In his autobiographical notes, a deeply unsettled Spengler confesses to suicidal thoughts. “I never had a month without thoughts of suicide”.

Despite the turbulence of his psyche, the young Spengler had an incredible imagination. Spengler would regale his three sisters with fabulous stories of an Arabian palace. He would fill booklets with drawings of maps and historical accounts of fictitious empires (one of which ended in revolution and military dictatorship—a theme continued in The Decline of the West). He would even include granular details like administrative procedures and economic statistics of his fictitious empires. 

Though Oswald was clearly a bright and smart child, the Spengler family did not read much. His father reproached Oswald’s voracious appetite for reading. In his eyes, Oswald was meant to follow in his footsteps and become a dutiful government official. Intellectualism was to be despised. This tension between a life of duty and a life of the mind became central to Spengler’s later political and philosophical work. No doubt that Spengler’s intellectual proclivities were complicated by a desire to placate his father.

In the autumn of 1891, the Spengler family moved from Soest to Haale an der Salle. Spengler attended the local Latina (a secondary education institution that emphasizes the study of the classics and classical languages) where his favorite subjects were history and geography. Spengler would venerate his history teacher, Friedrich Neubauer, for the rest of his life. As part of the gymnasium’s curriculum, Spengler studied Greek and Latin for nine years. This study of the classics would become indispensable to the writing of The Decline of the West and its treatment of classical antiquity. Later, he would pick up some French and English (though only enough to read some specialized literature on archaeology and anthropology). He also learned Italian and eventually spoke it with reportedly acceptable fluency. While at university, he would become interested in his university’s Russian student population and taught himself to read his beloved Dostoyevsky with the aid of a dictionary.

As Spengler began to age into his late teens and early twenties, he began a number of literary pursuits. He was particularly interested in drama and drafted several historically-minded plays. These include a drama of the Roman emperor entitled, Tiberius; a series of Prussian dramas entitled Friedrich Wilhelm I, Friedrich II, Bismarck; an untitled cycle of North German tragedies; a dramatic composition of Jesus; a play on the Aztec emperor Moctezuma; a short story set during the Russo-Japanese war called Der Sieger (The Victor); and finally a libretto to Paul Strüver’s Dianas Hochzeit (Diana’s Wedding). Spengler only ever finished Moctezuma, Der Sieger, and the libretto. His other works were largely abandoned and Spengler’s sister, Hildegard, claims that Oswald burnt many of these early literary efforts in 1911.

At age 17, Spengler began to sneak into the University Library at Halle to supplement his omnivorous intellectual appetite. He began to steep himself in the works of Goethe, reading his entire oeuvre with the exception of those works pertaining to the natural sciences. Spengler knew the entirety of Goethe’s Faust part one by heart. He zealously studied the works of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and worshiped Wagner’s music. He was so enchanted by a performance of Tristan in Bayreuth that he took up the piano just to play selections from Wagner. John Farrenkopf lists the following authors as also among the young Spengler’s favorites:

• William Shakespeare

• Gerhart Hauptmann

• Henrik Ibsen

• Maksim Gorky

• Honoré de Balzac

• Theodor Fontane

• E. T. A. Hoffman

• Heinrich von Kleist

• Friedrich Hebbel

• Heinrich Heine

• Friedrich Hölderlin

• Leo Tolstoy

• Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• August Strindberg

• Émile Zola

• Stendhal

• Gustave Flaubert

The Disappointing Career of an Ambitious Mind

In 1899, Spengler was awarded his gymnasial diploma. Biographer Anton Mirko Koktanek reports that this feat was capped by a Kanonenrausch–apparently a celebratory episode of excessive drinking common after graduation. His graduation signified entry into Imperial Germany’s educational elite. But the young adult Spengler was still forced to wrestle with choosing a career. On the one hand, his father expected him to be done with his studies and assume his civic duty through government service. On the other hand, Spengler’s deep intellectual passions were far from quenched. Spengler opted for the latter and enrolled at the University of Halle with the purpose of becoming a gymnasial teacher. His studies focused on mathematics and the natural sciences with a particular interest in Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. In all likelihood, it was around this time that Spengler became familiar with Goethe’s scientific works (though his biographers mention nothing of it). Though Ernst Haeckel is better known now as a German popularizer of Darwin’s works, Haeckel was more than familiar with Goethe’s works on anatomy, botany, and morphology. We must imagine that it was at this time when Spengler discovered “Goethean Science” (which would go on to have a profound influence on the construction of The Decline of the West and Spengler’s unique historical method).

In 1901, Spengler’s father passed away. The Spengler family moves out of Halle and back to Blankenburg (where Spengler’s mother, Pauline, had never wanted to leave in the first place). Rather than continuing his studies in nearby Halle, Spengler decided to transfer to the University of Munich. He wished to escape the joylessness of home life and loved Munich’s cultural vibrance and warmer climate. He also transferred to Berlin for one semester in 1902 (a relatively common practice in Imperial Germany) but found the city too soulless and megapolitan. Eventually, Spengler transferred back to the University of Halle and began to research his dissertation on the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus. Spengler, unfortunately, failed his first oral exam in the fall of 1903. Several errors precipitated this failure. For starters, he did not know any of his examiners. Spengler forewent seeking the approval of his advisor on his dissertation topic and failed to consult him altogether. Additionally, his examiners determined that Spengler had failed to adequately cite specialized literature on the topic. In April 1904, Spengler was afforded a second opportunity in which he passed his oral exam and was awarded his Ph.D. Again, I must speculate that Bernhard Spengler’s anti-intellectual influence was manifesting in Spengler’s rogue studies. Later in life, Spengler was offered many prestigious university jobs as department chairs–all of which he turned down. Despite Spengler’s intellect, the man had a serious distaste of academia and its–even then–drone army of “academicians”.

In the same year of being awarded his Ph.D., Spengler took the Staatsexamen, which was a series of exams required to enter the teaching profession. Spengler passed them in the fields of zoology, botany, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, and mathematics. In addition, he was required to write a specialized study to be admitted into the profession. He wrote a tract titled Die Entwicklung des Sehorgans bei den Hauptstufen des Tierreiches (The Development of the Organ of Sight by the Main Levels of the Animal Kingdom). Unfortunately, this work has been lost throughout the years. Spengler’s biographers refrain from further detail, but I have to wonder whether it has not survived (albeit, in a modified form) in Spengler’s Man and Technics. Part 2 (“Herbivores and Beasts of Prey”) discusses the importance of the evolution of binocular vision in predators and the impact of this physiological factor on the predator’s mind and behavior. However, since we do not have access to the original study and cannot compare the two, this connection is purely my own speculation.

Spengler was then offered a trainee position as a teacher in Lüneburg. Upon arrival, Spengler had a quick tour of the school and suffered a nervous breakdown on the spot. Biographer John Farrenkopf claims that the realization of being a “mere” teacher agonized the intellectually ambitious Spengler. But Spengler’s mother, Pauline, pressured Spengler into employment. He soon took up another position as a substitute teacher in Saarbrücken. Spengler took advantage of being on the border and traveled to France several times. He would look back on his time in Paris quite fondly for the rest of his life. It was also while in Paris he began to conceptualize the importance of city-life for culture and civilization. Versailles embodied a declining mature culture while Berlin was a megapolitan city of cultural philistines. Visits to French Gothic churches also planted in Spengler that the Gothic era (and not classical antiquity) served as the origin of Western Civilization. This idea would eventually grow into the cornerstone of Spengler’s argument in The Decline of the West.

Following this period on the Franco-German border, Spengler would spend a year teaching in Düsseldorf before shifting locations yet again. In June 1907, Spengler passed a technical exam for upper-level instruction in mathematics. Having some time between jobs, Spengler spent the summer traveling through Italy (perhaps mimicking Goethe who had done the same in his Italian Journey). Biographer John Farrenkopf mentions that, despite having a heart defect, this condition did not prevent Spengler from enjoying some hiking during his trip. His condition was, however, sufficient to have him declared medically unfit for military service in December 1907. Spengler was then offered employment at a Hamburg gymnasium at around the same time. So there he traveled. He received a promotion in the spring of 1908 and transferred to a different gymnasium within Hamburg. Spengler’s teaching offered an unusually broad assortment of courses including the natural sciences, mathematics, German, and history. By all accounts, Spengler was a good teacher. According to former students, his style was lively, and intuitive, with all the hallmarks of a good and passionate teacher. But the approval of his students did little to ease the disquiet in Spengler’s heart. The ambitious school teacher felt that his profession was beneath him. However, the job offered significant perks. A reasonably good income, ample free time for private study and travel, and the opportunity to teach the youth (which Spengler enjoyed throughout his life). He planned to stick it out for the time being.

Move to Munich as a Rogue Scholar

In 1910, Spengler set on making new opportunities for himself following the illness and death of his mother, Pauline. This marked a turning point in the otherwise unremarkable life of a Hamburg school teacher. Before she had even passed, Spengler requested a leave of absence and traveled straight to Italy. There, he felt the freedom of the southern air and the waning influence of an unloving and tyrannical matron. Free from her pressure, Spengler decided he would quit his job and seek a more daring life as a writer. In March 1911, he began an unpaid vacation in Munich and set out to become a writer in this south-German metropolis. The passing of his mother also meant Spengler’s inheriting of his aunt Adele’s wealth. Though it was sufficient for Spengler to quit his job, it forced Spengler to accept a markedly lower standard of living. Upon arriving in Munich, Spengler’s attention had not yet turned to a work on the philosophy of history. Instead, Spengler’s literary pretensions were inflamed by his bold personal moves. He aspired to write a major novel based on the sketches he created while at university. Many of Spengler’s surviving letters from this period detail his thoughts on the Munich art scene along with his own literary efforts. According to his sister, Spengler was also engaged as an art critic by two Munich newspapers. Munich served as a symbolic ground for the now-free Spengler to metamorphose his life into something far greater. He deeply loved the city, its temperate weather, and being at the gateway to southern Europe. Munich was to be Spengler’s home for the rest of his life.

But this honeymoon period with an artist’s life soon turned sour. He concluded that poetry and drama had terminated as meaningful modes of artistic expression. They had simply run their course. The only medium yet to be exhausted was the novel. And that someone from his generation would be the one that would “exhaust the sum total of the life of [his] epoch,” as Goethe had done in Wilhelm Meister and Stendhal in The Red and the Black. He found Thomas Mann to be an unwitting romantic and therefore inappropriate to emulate in a post-romantic era. Spengler yearned to see a “new German master prose” with a “Hindenburg style” that would command center stage in German letters. It’d be “concise, lucid, Roman, above all natural”.

The decline of the arts was not Spengler’s only concern. German politics weighed heavily on Spengler’s mind ever since the resignation of Otto von Bismarck in 1890. Germany was seemingly on the decline and crises were mounting in Europe and across the world. Spengler estimated that Germany lacked a cunning-enough leader to guide the nation through the coming turbulence of world politics. This would spell Germany’s doom. Further, the Agadir Crisis of 1911 brought the possibility of a general European war to the forefront of everyone’s minds. In the introduction to The Decline of the West, Spengler comments on the impact of the Agadir Crisis on his decision to write the book.

His literary pretensions evaporated and Spengler became determined to write a slim volume dealing with the contemporary position of Germany in world politics under the provisional title of Liberal and Conservative. The book would have focused on the coming war between England and Germany and the differing political ethos between the two (England being liberal and Germany being conservative). However, the scope of the book grew and mutated over time. In 1912, he passed a Munich bookshop and saw a window display of Otto Seeck’s work Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (The History of the Decline of the Ancient World). He thereupon conceived the title of his own budding work as a conscious parallel. Equipped with a new title–Der Untergang des Abendlandes–Spengler decided to place Liberal and Conservative on the back burner. By the time Spengler returned to it, it transformed into Prussianism and Socialism and was published in 1919 (after releasing the first volume of The Decline of the West).

As Spengler began to write the book, the first World War began. He buried himself in his work and became increasingly isolated. Correspondences with old friends became increasingly sporadic and the privations of the wartime economy began to exert hardship on the independent writer. Spengler, who was something of an epicurean in his tastes, relished excellent food, wine, and cigars. The English blockade of Germany imposed nationwide shortages of food and fuel. Consequently, what little Spengler did eat was bland and contributed to his malnutrition. A shortage of gas forced him to write by way of candlelight at night. And the lack of heating fuel forced Spengler to place a chair on top of his desk. Spengler would precariously climb up his desk and sit on the elevated chair so as to be closer to the warmer air that was near the ceiling. But despite these austere measures, Spengler anticipated his work to become a tremendous success. He wrote, “[it] will, to be sure, arrive upon the scene of contemporary literature like an avalanche in a shallow pond”.

But these personal privations paled in comparison to the tragedies which afflicted the Spengler family during the war. His sister, Adele, committed suicide in 1917 at the age of thirty-five. The following year, Spengler’s brother-in-law, Fritz Kornhardt, fell on the field of battle. Despite the tragedies and hardships of the wartime years, Spengler pushed on and eventually had a manuscript in early 1917. Spengler began the search for a willing publisher but a paper shortage delayed the work’s publication. Eventually, Braumüller in Vienna accepted it and published it in April 1918.

Shockingly, the book was immediately successful and even something of a bestseller. In the translator’s preface to The Decline of the West, Charles Francis Atkinson remarks the following: “the public impulse to read it arose in and from post-war conditions, and thus it happened that this severe and difficult philosophy of history found a market that has justified the printing of 90,000 copies. Its very title was so apposite to the moment as to predispose the higher intellectuals to regard it as a work of the moment–the more so as the author was a simple Oberlehrer and unknown to the world of authoritative learning”.

The quick success of the book helped the rather dire financial situation of its author. The Nietzsche Foundation awarded Spengler the Lassen Prize in November 1919. Spengler catapulted into the many aristocratic, scholarly, and political circles of contemporary German society. Despite his entry into this intellectual elite, Spengler’s work drew the ire of many “experts” in theology, history, science, and art criticism. In 1922, Manfred Schroeter published Der Streit um Spengler–an attempt to catalog and refute Spengler’s many critics. Many of these criticisms tended to nitpick details in an effort to “disprove” Spengler’s radical theory of historical determinism. They largely failed to see the forest for the trees and could not grasp the true depth of Spengler’s argument and methodology. Schroeter’s index of critics’ names reaches an astonishing 400 entries. Suffice it to say that, though it was popular, Spengler’s work was highly controversial. The criticisms of the first edition spurred Spengler to rework the volume and release a revised edition in 1922. This revised edition has become the standard edition and the one upon which the English translation is based.

This concludes Spengler’s biography up to the point of the work’s publication and popularization. From here, I will be pausing Spengler’s biography and transitioning into a chapter-by-chapter review and exegesis of The Decline of the West. The biographical interludes will continue as bridges between Spengler’s major works. Expect the next post to arrive sometime later in February. I will be discussing the introduction to The Decline of the West and the philosophical influences of Nietzsche and Goethe upon Spengler.

If you are interested in reading more about Spengler’s life and works, I would recommend John Farrenkopf’s book The Prophet of Decline (published by LSU Press in 2001). It is by far the best English source on Spengler’s life and works. Farrenkopf wrote the book after extensive research on Spengler’s estate at the Bavarian State Library. H. Stuart Hughes also has a book on Spengler’s life and works but it gets a few things wrong so I am hesitant to recommend it. If you can read German, Anton Mirko’s book Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit is highly recommended and is considered the “definitive” biography of the man. Additionally, Spengler’s autobiographical notes, Eis heauton, are worth reading.

A special thanks to @AMonophtalmos for sending me the photos of Spengler.

Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt.

@SperglerAcolyte

I am inaugurating a long series of posts that will follow the collected works of Oswald Spengler.

My plan is threefold.

1. Notes on the entirety of Spengler’s published work

2. Essays on historical, cultural, and philosophical matters (in the vein of Spengler of course)

3. Translations of Spengler’s untranslated works

For now, I am mostly going to focus on parts 1 and 2.

Regarding the notes, I am planning to go in the following order:

1. Decline of the West

2. Man and Technics

3. Prussianism and Socialism

4. Other Political Writings

5. Other Writings

6. Years of Decision

Intermittently, I will be publishing essays here. Topics will include comparing Spengler and Hegel, Spengler’s choice of method, Spengler’s political ideology vis-à-vis 1930s German politics… and many more topics. But the bulk of the work should be these notes. I hope that these notes and essays will help those of you working your way through the corpus who are in need of some guidance and explanation.

Once I have exhausted Spengler’s translated corpus, I will begin publishing my translations of his untranslated works (mostly his work on metaphysics and his inquiries into prehistory).

Stay tuned for more and plz sub.

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