Rationalist Progress-Philistines Are Blind to the Forces of History. Are You?
Oswald Spengler's 'The Hour of Decision' Series - Part 1
This article is the first in a series analyzing Oswald Spengler’s The Hour of Decision (HoD), originally published in 1934. Spengler is described as a German polymath, but he is best known for his work regarding the philosophy of history. His best-known work is The Decline of the West (DoW), which is a remarkable and interesting 2-volume book detailing a cyclical, rather than progressive, view of human history.
This series is about HoD because much of Spengler’s analysis seems eminently applicable to today’s political situation. DoW contains many interesting and useful concepts for understanding life and history, yet the extensive scope of the work makes it difficult to cover the work entirely in a series of articles. In the future, however, I plan to cover some of my favorite chapters. HoD does some of the heavy lifting when it comes to bringing the most important concepts from DoW into the ongoing plays of political and social affairs. This series will go through HoD front to back, with each article picking up where the previous one left off and covering a certain topic or concept.
This requires, however, a brief overview of some of the concepts contained in DoW so that there will be sufficient context for understanding HoD. The first and most important is Spengler’s cyclical view of history. Spengler identifies High Cultures as the primary entities of history. These cultures are the Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Greco-Roman, Magian/Arabic, Mexican, Western, and Russian cultures. These cultures are not merely collections of similar human actions across time. Spengler describes them as organisms that have predictable and identifiable life cycles: birth, maturity, senescence, and death.
It should be noted that Spengler distinguishes between Western Culture and Greco-Roman Culture. This may come as a surprise to many enjoyers of the Western Heritage, who identify its beginnings with ancient Athenian democracy and philosophy which eventually culminates in something like the United States. Spengler does not see a continuity from then to now, however, it is undeniable that Western culture owes a great debt to Greco-Roman Culture.
Once a High Culture has grown substantially, it transforms into a Civilization. The transformation into a Civilization is where the decline begins. This is why Spengler said that the West is in decline: it is at its highest point and has reached a civilizational status. It is argued by some that some of the details of Spengler’s cyclical theory of history change in his later works, particularly in Man and Technics. Both in that work and in HoD there is evident an urgency that implies that the future of humanity may not include another High Culture after the West.
The main character of Western culture is Faustian Man. Faustian Man’s chief characteristic is his desire to reach the heights no matter the cost. Despite Spengler having written his works nearly a century ago, the conceptual application of Faustian Man to the modern world is hard to question. We live at the height of all technology and wealth, yet somehow also at the height of malcontent by everyone, regardless of their political leanings.
The purpose of this series will be to explore and understand Spengler’s HoD. I will faithfully represent Spengler’s positions, occasionally interjecting my analysis, reinforcement, or skepticism. Explaining Spengler’s position should not be equated to an endorsement, but rather to a sincere desire to get to the bottom of what he is saying.
Before we begin, the stakes of this investigation should be established. Spengler believed that as the High Culture turns into Civilization and then declines, this necessarily births a Caesar figure that can take hold of the chaos and re-orient society, breathing fresh life into it. Spengler also believed that the interwar period was the hour of decision itself where this Caesar figure must come about, lest the West fall into ruin. If Spengler’s assessment that the interwar period was indeed the final hour is correct, it’s over. The West had a good run, but the decline is too far gone and it is time for another High Culture to take its place. However, if Spengler’s belief that decline necessitates the arrival of Caesar is correct, it is then the case that the West has not yet reached a sufficient point of decline for Caesar to emerge. In this second case, Spengler was correct but early with his historical prediction. Suppose the assumptions of Spengler’s historical understanding are correct. In that case, the second case is preferable because Faustian Man’s project of Western Culture is not dead, but is about to receive its second wind. Donald Trump was an expression of the Western desire for a new Caesarism, but he was not able to transcend the political struggle and make major world-historical decisions.
Now that the stakes of this investigation into Spengler have been established, it is time to begin. The first chapter emphasizes the importance of thinking about history outside the boundaries established by the age of rationalism. It is important to do so because Europe was at a critical historical moment in Spengler’s view, and even the members of the ruling classes in Europe did not understand their historical circumstances. "But how superficial, how narrow, how small-minded are the judgments and measures of Western Europe and America!" Spengler states. Everyone in the West is caught up in the moment, in the issues of the day, and does not recognize the momentous moment in history and that they are at what could be the greatest time in Faustian civilization. Two of the primary culprits clouding the eyes of European leaders at this time were Rationalism and Romanticism.
Spengler emphasizes the importance of Germany at this point in world history. Spengler was writing in Weimar Germany, where economic disaster and scarcity were widespread. This state of affairs puts collapse at the forefront of any thinking man’s mind. In addition, Germany’s position in the center Europe meant that whatever would happen in Germany would have tremendous impacts on the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. He also highlighted German Idealism as the foundation for all of the important ideologies that ruled the world at that time.
Spengler thought that European man was over-burdened by rationality. “He has become too wide awake, too accustomed to ponder perpetually over yesterday and tomorrow, and cannot bear that which he sees and is forced to see: the relentless course of things, senseless chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries into which the individual with his tiny scrap of private life is irrevocably born at the appointed place.” (Page 8)
European man, now confined to the cities, is far disconnected from reality and spends excessive time in thought and fantasy. Spengler described him as engaging in "cowardly optimism," meaning that European man rests on the idea that things ought to be different and better, and thus they simply will be, but they are not willing to take any sort of action to bring about new circumstances. If new circumstances are going to come about, Spengler emphasizes the importance that change be made with a historical perspective in the front of mind. Rational impulses to change the world through arguments and merely thinking up new possibilities will not work. Rather, the course of history moving into the future will rely on the same forces that swayed the course of history in the past. Spengler lists four forces: the will of the strong, healthy instincts, race/nationality, and the will to possession and power.
But the men of Spengler’s day (and our own) do not look to the future with consideration of these forces. Rather, they move towards the future with their fantasies. Justice, happiness, and peace are only dreams and are not the movers of history. This has led to a crisis. It is increasingly difficult to gain a full view of the situation faced by civilization, and true statesmen who can do so are increasingly lacking. Once again, this is true both in our time and in Spengler’s.
This is where Spengler moves into the meat of his critique of the ‘Age of Rationalism,’ particularly targeting the notion of progress. Progressivism is the dominant ideology for the current regime in the Western world, promoting the denigration of family and undermining any kind of traditional values. Therefore, it is important to illuminate that progressivism is based on a false notion of rationalist supremacy. The importance here is not because writing an essay can break down the regime or anything like that. It is not as if those with the levels of power will read this or Spengler and realize “Oh, shoot, I never thought about it that way!” This is important to highlight because it governs what the political strategy of conservative and traditionalist forces will be going into the future.
Spengler states that the Age of Rationalism "is the period in which everyone can read and write and therefore must have his say and always ‘knows better.’ This type of mind is obsessed by concepts - the new gods of the Age - and it exercises its wits on the world as it sees it." (Page 9) This is the essence of progressivism in Spengler's estimation: that because of our widespread literacy, we must somehow be more intelligent, we must automatically know better than everything that came before. We think we can wave some proverbial magic wand and change reality through facts and logic, Ben Shapiro style. But our understanding is stuck within the current rationalist frame. It cannot transcend rationalism without a rejection of rationalism, so engagement in further rationalism, even if the conclusions are conservative in some sense, will still lead to the same consequences: the privileging of concepts and endless deconstruction.
The forces of history cannot be avoided. They are the fundamental constraints on human history. So, what happens when one thinking with the rationalist mindset (the cultural philistine, or progress philistine as Spengler calls them in Man and Technics) is faced with these historical constraints? Spengler says "The shallow optimism of the cultural philistine is ceasing to fear the elemental historical facts and beginning to despise them. Every ‘know-better’ seeks to absorb them in his scheme (in which experience has no part), to make them conceptually more complete than actually they are, [sic] and to subordinate them to himself in his mind because he has not livingly experienced them, but only perceived them." (Page 9) The progressive rationalist mindset seeks to incorporate any information about prior ages into the pre-existing mental schema so that they can be accepted within (and disfigured by) the progressive worldview, or so that they can be disfigured by and then rejected by the progressive worldview. The idea of making them "conceptually more complete than they actually are" is very interesting; things that are outside of rationality, born of instinct or tradition, are used and passed down due to experience with those things or actions being useful in the past, and possibly towards a spiritual or metaphysical end. The rationalist or Socratic mind must reframe them because there is no space within rationality to understand that some things may be oriented towards a spiritual or metaphysical end. If it is based on instinct, passion, action, etc., and not based purely upon rationality, it is outside of the bounds of rational inquiry and cannot be incorporated without being disfigured by the progressive rationalist outlook.
The intellectual production of the rationalist intellectual “is artificial and lifeless, and when brought into contact with real life, it kills. All these systems and organizations are paper productions; they are methodical and absurd and live only on the paper they are written on.” (Page 10) The concepts born of the age of rationality are not life-affirming. They are sterile and confined to the page. Building intellectual systems for their own sake is not particularly productive. It does not
Spengler emphasizes three primary products of rationalism: idealism, materialism, and romanticism. Materialism and idealism are ways of looking at the world that prioritize progress, technics, liberty, utilitarianism, art, etc. But the march of history does not rely on these things, but rather on "robuster forces," as previously discussed. He then puts special emphasis on Romanticism:
Romanticism is no sign of powerful instincts, but, on the contrary, of a weak, self-detesting intellect. They are all infantile, these Romantics; men who remain children too long (or for ever), without the strength to criticize themselves, but with perpetual inhibitions arising from the obscure awareness of their own personal weakness; who are impelled by the morbid idea of reforming society, which is to them too masculine, too healthy, too sober. And to reform it, not with knives and revolvers in the Russian fashion - heaven forbid! - but by noble talk and poetic theories. (Page 10)
According to Spengler, romantics are spineless and pointless, sit around imagining things, and cannot produce true art. They are also too cowardly to take any action beyond the mundaneness of the everyday. They think that through weakness they will somehow triumph, but they do not even acknowledge their weakness. They instead simply critique the strong. Spengler describes a few different kinds of Romantics:
Romanticism of sentimental Communists
Romanticism that sees election numbers and political committee meetings as legitimate deeds or some kind of political victory
The romanticism that "trickles out from behind the gold theories of sick minds that know nothing of the inner forms of modern economics"
Rationalists and romantics appeal to universalism and seldom-defined human rights, rather than recognizing the historically contingent yet traditionally rooted state and nation as the guarantor of rights. They speak of the folk and the people, because they look at things from down below, at the streets and the grovelers, and have no sense of high culture, civilizational excellence, or greatness. When they get a whiff of these things, they tear them down because they stand in the way of humanity being morphed into a "dull formless mass which everyone sense [sic] as his equal, from the 'proletariat' to 'humanity.'"
The spirit of these Romantic rationalists points towards what I believe is one of the most important aspects of HoD: the politics of resentment. This will be explored at a greater length in further pieces. Chipping away at the chokehold that rationalism has Western Civilization in is important groundwork for understanding the destiny of Western Culture and is necessary if there is going to be a recovery.