By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
In P.4 and P.5 we
argued that the debates out of which the West became an ideal-type construct,
involving the theorization of civilizational difference- occurred first in
Russia. But this discourse was conducted in the Russian language, often in
journals that were soon censored and their authors silenced. It seems
counter-intuitive to claim that this discourse had much effect on generating
what became a globalized term after Spengler. Yet Russian ideas and art had a
surprisingly profound effect from the last decades of the nineteenth century up
to the Russian Revolution, not only in the intellectual life of the
"West" of Europe and America, but also in the "East" of
India, China. Japan. and Turkey. Within the German discourse, of which Spengler
was part, certain elements encouraged the emergence of the West as an analytic
category, but they co-existed with others that did not, and it was the
influence of Russian works that seems to have provided the catalyst for the
conceptual turn to the West.
Little in
nineteenth-century German thought unambiguously lent itself to an
identification with European civilization, let alone Western civilization.
Germany, although part of Europe, was conscious of backwardness in its lack of
political unity and political freedom, especially in contrast to France. The
famous project of German thinkers was to form a particular cultural identity
against the French universalizing missions of the Enlightenment, the Revolution
and Napoleon. As a "late modernizer," Germany as a nation then
advanced through a deliberate program of educational and economic
development, until it became the ultimate modernizer in a range of endeavors at
the turn of the twentieth century, from scientific research to militant
nationalism. Despite its achievements, Germany resented the pre-eminence of the
Atlantic powers, especially Great Britain, in colonizing the world. This
resulted in the military competition called "the race for empire,"
culminating in World War One, in which Germany's enemies were called "the
Western powers." In some ways the Germans were quintessential Europeans,
as the heirs of the Roman Empire, the restorers of the Greek heritage, and the
leaders in industrial and scientific advance. But the imaginary involved in
being "Western" was not assumed, given Germany's location in the
heart of Europe, between the Atlantic powers to its west and the Slavic peoples
to its east.
On the other hand,
neither did Germany develop an identity so opposed to other European nations
that they became its "West" unambiguously, as had happened in Russia.
Martin Malia and Hans Kohn both characterize nineteenth-century German thought
as consumed by the relation between German and the West. But this is an
anachronism, although a telling one, for both authors are historians of Russian
thought and they have unwittingly transferred Russian categories to a different
context. It might be more accurate to say that German thought was consumed by
the dilemmas of modernity, given its position both outside the liberal
narrative of European progress as defined by the English and French, and inside
the mainstream of European culture and scholarship. John Cuddihy, in his The
Ordeal of Civility, argues that only in Western nations was modernization an
indigenous process (12), but it seems that this was only felt in France and
England. Although Hegel and others believed that the modern world began with
Luther, it has often been observed that the Germans did not feel at home in
modernity.31 A general sense of alienation and malaise on the part of
intellectuals became particularly acute in the last years of the nineteenth
century. As Heather Wolfram writes: "During the 1890s unease with some of
the more bewildering aspects of modernity, including rapid industrialization,
urbanization, and economic instability, saw significant numbers of Germans
experience was has been termed a crisis of modernity" (151). In reaction
to the positivism and mechanism they saw dominating science and society, German
culture critics turned to forms of thought that privileged spirit, wholeness
and organic development.
Out of this division
came the famous distinction in Germany between civilization and culture. Arthur
Herman, in his The Idea of Decline in Western History, claims that this
distinction indicates "a basic conceptual conflict" in the whole
German scholarly tradition (196); Zivilisation named
the superficiality and materialism of the French outlook, while Kultur named
the spiritual, historical, and organic outlook of the Germans (197). Raymond Geuss, in his carefu11996 study of the concepts
"Ku/tur, Bildung, Geist, " argues
convincingly, however, that these meanings should not be read back into German
thought as somehow intrinsic. They did not appear until the turn of the
twentieth century, when German nationalist ideology required terms to assert
its national superiority over its competitors, ''the French in the west and the
Slavic peoples in the east" (162). Even so, the meanings resonated with
older themes in German thought, such as the traditional opposition between the
Latins and the Germans, the South and North, the Roman Church and the Lutheran.
Fichte, for example, argued that labeling the Germanic tribes
"barbaric" had resulted in German self-hatred and an admiration for
Latin civilization. Now the time has come to take back the German spirit (perkins 249).
Outside its national
connotations, the distinction also informed the important opposition between
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that developed in late nineteenth-century German
sociology, that is, between organic traditional community and utilitarian
modern society. During the First World War, Thomas Mann would contrast the
organic and communal nature of the Germans as a people of Kultur with the
mechanical and superficial Zivilisation of the
French. A similar distinction surfaces later in Heidegger's two Wests: the
superficial Westen of the AnglolFrench
and American worlds, as the heirs of Roman civilization, and the authentic true
Abendland of Germany, as the heir of Greek culture.32
In this sense, the geography of war would encourage Germans not to place
themselves within the larger category of the West, while the geography, of the
Russian Revolution would work in the opposite manner.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud's
"Thought for the Times on War and Death," first published in early
1915, is one example demonstrating that "Western civilization'" was
not yet a category in general use even during the war. Here Freud analyzes
''the significance of the thronging impressions" which have overwhelmed
people in the ''vortex of this war-time" (288). He argues that there are
two main sources for the strong feelings of mental distress and disorientation
experienced by noncombatants - namely, disillusionment and a new relation to
death. Disillusionment concerns the aims and behavior of the civilization in
which the war takes place. Given the attention he is paying to the condition of
his civilization, one expects Freud here to concern himself with the condition
of "the West," and yet he does not. Freud speaks of the aspirations
his contemporaries have for their civilization in this way:
We had expected the
great ruling powers among the white nations upon whom the leadership of the
human species has fallen, who were known to have cultivated world-wide
interests, to whose creative powers were due our technical advances in the
direction of dominating nature, as well as the artistic and scientific
acquisitions of the mind - peoples such as these we had expected to succeed in
discovering another way of settling misunderstandings and conflicts of interest
(293).
War, he observes,
might still be expected to occur between "the primitive and civilized
peoples," between "races whom a colour-line
divides," and even "with or among the undeveloped nationalities of
Europe or those whose culture has perished," but not among the civilized
races who had developed stringent standards of morality, high levels of
understanding and tolerance, cosmopolitan tastes, love of beauty and law, inner
cultivation through the classics, all of which had overcome more primitive
allegiances to the group. Even if such were to find themselves engaged in war,
one would expect that they demonstrate exemplary morality as a "chivalrous
crusade" waged in adherence to International Law (292). But all these
expectations have now been overthrown - the war is, in some ways, as terrible
as any war in the past, and more so. The fellowship of a common civilization
has given way to extreme nationalist passions, and the state supposed to
encourage morality has shown morality to be mere convention and sham.
"Well may that
civilized cosmopolitan. . . stand helpless in a world grown strange to him -
his all-embracing patrimony disintegrated, the common estates in it laid waste,
the fellow-citizens embroiled and debased!" (294).
Freud claims that the
feelings of disillusionment he describes are indeed based on an illusion, one
that believes that civilization can succeed in making people more moral. While
civilization certainly transfers egotistical instincts into social channels, it
is powerless to eliminate them. It can enforce obedience to social norms but it
cannot change human dispositions. "In reality .our fellow-citizens have
not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we
believed" (300), Freud argues. The expectation that the operations of
mutual self-interest in a shared economic life promotes peace does not
recognize how little the common interests of the "higher unities"
have any sway over the passions of nationality. For reasons that cannot be
discerned, nations arouse ''the most primitive, the oldest, the crudest mental
attitudes" (304).
In Freud's article,
then, the salient distinctions include civilized and primitive humanity, the
white nations, races divided by the color-line, undeveloped nationalities
(presumably those of Eastern Europe) and those "whose culture has
perished" (presumably the Jews).
We see in these both
the eighteenth-century meaning of civilization as a universal condition arrived
at through stages, and the nineteenth-century emphasis on racial distinctions,
but we do not find Western civilization. It is not that Freud would have no use
for the concept of the West in his theory, but that it does not appear to be
one belonging to his milieu in 1915. One could speculate that defining itself
as Western or in possession of a civilizational essence might have little
resonance in Vienna, the capital of the pluralistic Austro-Hungarian Empire
lying in the "heart" of Europe.
Max Weber on Capitalism
A decade before
Freud's "Thought for the Times on War and Death," Max Weber, the
theorist of the ideal-type concept, published a seminal work in which the
specific nature of the West seems to have been of central concern. Weber's
introduction to the first English translation of his 1905 Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit a/Capitalism frames the purpose of his analysis, namely to
understand the uniqueness of the West. It begins: A product of modern European
civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask
himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that
in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena
have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having
universal significance and value. (13)
Weber goes on to say
that "only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which
we recognize to-day as valid." Other civilizations made extensive
scientific observations in the past, but lacked theory and "rational
proof," these being a ''product of the Greek intellect." Others
had history, political thought, and law, but none has the system and structure
of the Greeks, Romans and their Western successors (14). Others had
sophisticated music, but lacked rationality in composition. Still others
developed styles of architecture, but none but the West employed "the
rational use of the Gothic vault" (15). Many techniques were invented in
the Orient, but only in the Occident were they used systematically and
rationally. Other civilizations have known governments, but only the Occident
has developed the State, with its rational organization. Finally, others have
known developed economic life and the pursuit of gain (20), but only the
Occident has developed modern capitalism, which imposes rational restraint to
further the systematic acquisition of capital: "But in modern times the
Occident has developed ... a very different fonn of
capitalism which has appeared nowhere else: the rational capitalistic
organization of (fonnally) free labour"
(21). Only in the West has the citizen existed, and only in the modern West
have the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. "For in all the above cases it
is a question of the specific and peculiar rationalism of Western culture"
(26).
In his introduction
to The Protestant Ethic, then, Weber sets himself the task ''to work out and
explain genetically the special peculiarity of Occidental rationalism."
Why have Westerners been disposed to adopt "practical rational
conduct?" (27). He answers that one must look to inner spiritual
dispositions and the ideas of moral behavior arising from them, which aid or
impede economic behavior. The Protestant Ethic, accordingly,examines
the influence of the religious ideas of ascetic Protestantism on the
development of a certain economic spirit (27). It seems clear that one of the
most famous works of sociology is concerned fundamentally with the question of
the West. Gerhard Masur thus describes its purpose: "What, asked Weber,
distinguishes Western capitalism from other forms of economic activity? . . . .
The idea that economic activities must be considered a moral duty is something
new and typically occidental" (192-93).
And yet Weber's
introduction gives a misleading summary of the content of his book. He did not
write it, in fact, at the time that he wrote The Protestant Ethic, (in 1905),
but in 1920; and it was not the introduction to The Protestant Ethic, but to
his Collected Essays
In the Sociology of
Religion, as Talcott Parsons notes in the Preface to his 1930 translation (x).
Parsons decided to include Weber's piece as an introduction to the first
English edition of The Protestant Ethic in order to give "the general
background of ideas and problems into which Weber himself meant this particular
study to fit" - but this misrepresents the problem Weber was addressing in
the first years of the century. A few years later, his larger project concerned
the systematic comparison of economic ideas in different religions, in order to
understand the causes of the distinctiveness of each civilization, and
especially of the uniqueness of Western civilization, although Weber would
insist that this did not imply a judgment concerning their relative value (29).
But the Protestant Ethic does not offer an analysis within this particular
framework.
It begins, in fact,
with a statement of the important differences between Protestants and Catholics
(35). This distinction, as well as the one between Lutheranism and the ascetic
Protestantism of English Puritanism, are the governing ones in the book. The Protestant
Ethic employs the terms Occidental and Oriental only in a few instances. These
include: "The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit
of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic
of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured
according to Occidental standards, has remained backward" (14); Jesus'
lack of interest in a worldly calling was "antique Oriental" (83) and
thus not the basis of the "modem idea" (84); and, Christian ascetism
"had a defInitely rational character in its
highest Occidental forms as early as the Middle Ages, and in several forms even
in antiquity." This forms the "historical significance" of
"Western monasticism," as opposed to the Eastern (118). Yet none of
these references show developed concern with what is Western. In their new
translation of The Protestant Ethic, Peter Baehr and
Gordon C. Wells confirm this observation: "the uniqueness of the West, or
a comparative, cross-cultural theory of rationalism, are not part of the Problemstellung or Fragestellung
(''problematic'') of the text of 1905, the focus of which is much more
circumscribed: an inquiry into the impact of Protestant rational asceticism on
the rise of modern capitalism" (xxxv).
In The Protestant
Ethic, Weber traces a development within the culture of Europe involving
"a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man," or a giving up
of the possibility of a full and many-sided humanity, in favor of the ascetic
character of specialized modern labor (180). Now asceticism has left the
monastery and entered the entire "cosmos of the modern economic
order" which determines "the lives of all the individuals who are
born into this mechanism" (181). Thus a certain form of Protestantism has
impacted modem culture and modem economic life (183). One of the causes of
modernity is the specific Western form of Christian monasticism, with its sense
of vocation and rational discipline, not Western civilization as such. Weber's
primary task is to explain why capitalism arose out of how a certain kind of
Calvinism, rather than from Catholicism or even other kinds of Protestantism.
His study is essentially about the differences within Europe, on the one hand,
and the difference between modernity and all other types of existence
(including those of European pre-modernity), on the other. It is the
introduction, written fifteen years later, that interprets its significance as
analyzing the uniqueness of the West in comparison with all other cultures in
retrospect. Thus, the difference between Weber's initial framework in the
1904-05 Protestant Ethic and the one articulated in the 1920 introduction,
manifests a fundamental conceptual shift. Why has modernity's important feature
now become its Occidentalism? We would suggest two reasons: the influence
of Russians in early twentieth-century Germany, and the impact of the work of
Spengler. These acted together to construct the new conceptual framework of the
West.
Spengler's Decline of the West
Oswald Spengler's
Decline of the West, as a book, but even more as a title, is arguably the most
responsible for bringing the term "the West" and the idea of its
ending into common discourse in the twentieth century. His English translator,
Charles Francis Atkinson, writes in 1926 that, besides acquiring "a large
following amongst thoughtful laymen," Spengler's theory "has forced
the attention and taxed the scholarship of every branch of the learned
world" (ix). Michael Allen Gillespie observes that, "as a term describing
the totality of European culture," Abendland
''was not widely used in this sense until after the 1918 publication of
Spengler's Decline of the West" (8), and claims that Spengler's ''magnum
opus was the principal event in the formation and propagation of the concept of
the West not merely in Germany but in other Western countries as well. Spengler
sees the idea of the West as an important innovation in historical
studies" (9).
Nevertheless,
Gillespie suggests that the "detenninative
meaning" of the West for modem philosophy is not so much that of Spengler
as of Heidegger, for Heidegger locates the West's essential origins in ancient
Greece. Spengler- on the other hand, argues that the West began as a distinct
civilization only at the end of the first millennium in medieval Europe. He
believes that ancient Greece was its own cultural whole, and that the Hellenic
is "immeasurably alien and distant," and "from our inner selves
– more alien, maybe, than Mexican gods and Indian architecture" (1: 27).
Spengler uses his
idea of the West to perform a cultural critique, that is, to critique
modernity. His analysis is based on his view that cultures are organic entities
with given life-cycles of about one thousand years. Each culture is informed by
its own unique principle, and when this principle holds unquestioned sway, the
culture is full of youthful vitality. Near the end of its life-cycle, a culture
ceases to be true to itself and turns into a "civilization."
Civilization is the "end" of culture, both its destiny and its
finality:
The Civilization is
the inevitable destiny of the Culture ... Civilizations are the most external
and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They
are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death
following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone
built, petrifying
world-city following mother earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and
Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and
again. (1: 31)
Civilization, for
Spengler, is not the opposite of barbarism, but is in itself barbaric.
The Romans, for example, were barbarians in that they finished Greek culture:
"In a work, Greek soul - and Roman intellect; and this antithesis is the
differentia between Culture and Civilization" (1: 32).
The West once had
been a culture, but after it culminated in Kantian philosophy it became merely
a "civilization"; the symptom of its degradation is the subordination
of the higher life of metaphysics to practicality, economic gain, ethics,
social critique, and immediacy (I: 367). During this, its last phase of
existence, the West has created industrialization which will enslave humanity
and the earth, whereby "forces and efficiencies will take the place of the
Person and the Thing" (2: 505). Yet the domination of money will not be
the final stage of the West. Another power will arise in turn to overthrow it:
"blood." Force will rule and all will be sacrificed to "the
blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow (2:
507)."
David Gress describes the enormous impact that the publication of
The Decline of the West had in a Germany tom apart by years of war:
"Oswald Spengler's book erupted into the fear and bitterness of 1918 with
what seemed to many the force of revelation" (343).
And "most who
heard of Spengler took him to be saying that the war was the beginning of the
end of the West, a fall from a prewar condition of cultural health and
vigor" (344). In his translator's preface, Atkinson agrees that
"inevitably the public impulse to read it arose in and from post-war
conditions. . . Its very title was so apposite to the moment as to predispose
the higher intellectuals to regard it as a work of the moment" (l: ix).
But, as Gress points out, Spengler had already coined
the title in 1912 and wrote most of the book before 1914, completing it in
1917; the end of the West he was describing was not caused by the war, but was
the expression of an inevitable stage in every culture (344).
Nevertheless, due to
the timing of publication of The Decline of the West, that the postwar malaise
was figured in the terms of Western civilization.
Spengler's title,
inspired by chance notice of a book called "The Decline of Antiquity,"
is called in German Der Untergang Des Abendlands, which means the setting or sinking of the
evening lands. Arthur Herman in his The Idea of Decline suggests that a better
translation than decline is "twilight" or "sinking away"
(234), and John Fennelly entitles his 1972 book on Spengler The Twilight of the
Evening Lands. Gress suggests that Untergang is better translated as
"disappearance," to emphasize that it is not meant to express a value
judgment but an observation (344). (That is, Untergang
is meant to indicate that the West is not declining because it has swerved from
the correct path into corruption, but only because it is going through the
inevitable old age of culture.) Like "Occident," the term Abend is
connected to the setting of the sun, so refers both to the evening and to going
down. Thus one could translate the title as anything from "the evening of
the evening lands" to "the falling of the Western countries." In
any case, it is interesting but little noted that Spengler uses a plural noun
for the West; when he characterizes the West as a singular entity it is as
"Faustian culture." Goethe's portrayal of Faust aptly symbolizes
Spengler's view of the West as a culture marked by restless striving upwards
and continual instability. For Weber, on the other hand, Faust is what the
modem capitalist has had to give up, sacrificing the Faustian many-sidedness in
favor of an ascetic and disciplined rationality.
Spengler believes
that his work is profoundly innovative, presenting "a new outlook on
history and the philosophy of destiny - the first indeed of its kind" (1:
xiv), and indeed articulating "the philosophy of our time" (1: xv).
He begins his first chapter by stating: "In this book is attempted for the
first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and
specifically the onCulture of our time and on our
planet which is actually in the phase of fulfillment – the
West-European-American" (1: 3). His accomplishment has been to discover a
pattern to human history based upon "general biographic archetypes,"
which solves "a problem so far-reaching" that it "has evidently
never been envisaged." The decline of the West is now perceived to be
"a philosophical problem" that "includes within itself every
great question of Being." It is "the philosophy of the future,"
insofar as "the West-European mind" can conceive of something new at
this late stage, a philosophy based upon "a morphology of world history"
(1: 5).
Spengler claims that
he is the first to consider what is essential to historical meaning, namely, a
culture's distinctive soul "that inwardly binds together the expression-fonns of all branches of a Culture" from mathematics
to art to economic organization (1: 6-7).
Given this
understanding of culture, it is clear that the classical world was based on
utterly different principles than the Western European, and thus that the usual
historical periodization of Ancient, Medieval, Modem is but "an incredibly
jejune and meaningless scheme" (I: 16), one indifferent to world-history
and reflecting the limited standpoint of "the little part-world which has
developed on West-European soil from the time of the German-Roman Empire."
It is also clear that "Europe" is a meaningless term,based
on a perception of geography, rather than an understanding of what informs
culture, and leading to the link of Russian and the West [Ahendlande,
or "Western countries"] in "an utterly baseless unity":
'''East' and "West" [Orient und Okzident]
are notions that contain real history, whereas 'Europe' is an empty sound'; (I:
16nl).
Spengler and the Russians
As Spengler makes
clear, then, the West is used to distinguish one cultural totality from
another, the West-European-American from the Russian. It is also used to
counter what we now call the Eurocentrism of traditional historical writing,
which falsely elevates everything connected with Europe and diminishes
everything that is not. "The West" is a term that allows a proper
understanding of world-history as a whole, comprised as it is ofthe life-courses of a number of distinct cultures.
Eurocentrism is represented as the Ptolemaic system of historical knowledge;
Spengler claims his system represents the Copernican revolution in historical
knowledge, for by it, Europeans will come to acknowledge that world history has
not revolved around them (1: 18). At the same time, Western culture is the only
culture undergoing its life-course in the present age.
Farrenkopf notes
that: It is ironic that the historical thinker who before Toynbee did the most
to raise our consciousness of civilizational pluralism justifiably emphasized
its reality in the past and correctly de-emphasized its purported existence so
long as Western civilization held sway. Spengler would view it as a mistake to
see the 20th and next couple of centuries as an era in which different
civilizations coexist and interact. (31)
In his discussion of
Spengler in The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman traces the
roots of Spengler's philosophy of history only to European sources, treating it
as the expression of "a half-century of historical pessimism and cultural
discontent" in German thought (236). To be fair, Spengler himself in his
1922 "Preface to the Revised Edition" claims that he owes
''practically everything" to Goethe and Nietzsche, and that his work
constitutes that which, "despite the misery and disgust of these
years," he is ''proud to call a German philosophy" (1: xiv). But one
should consider the context in which he makes such a patriotic statement;
namely. the aftermath of German defeat and the threat of the Bolshevik
revolution. In fact, Spengler's assertion of the existence of an immense differenpe between the Western or Faustian soul and the
Russian, his critique of the westernizing program of Peter the Great, his
characterization of Western civilization as dying, and his intimations that
Russian culture will become the culture of the future, all employ the familiar
terms of the Russian discourse on the West, particularly those of the
Slavophiles and of Dostoyevsky. Spengler says very little about Russia in the
two volumes of the Decline, and'much of this is
presented in footnotes. Yet what he does say has tremendous significance for
the entire meaning his philosophy.
The first reference
to Russia is in the footnote previously cited, in which Spengler argues that
"Europe" should be discarded: "In the shape of Peter the Great,
this word has falsified the historical tendencies of a primitive human mass for
two centuries, whereas
the Russian instinct
has very truly and fundamentally divided 'Europe' from 'Mother Russia' with the
hostility that we can see embodied in Tolstoi, Aksakov or Dostoyevski" (1:
16nl). In the second example, Spengler describes the essential distinction
between the
Faustian and Russian cultures: "The historic future is
distance-becoming. the boundless world-horizon distance-become - this is the
meaning of the Faustian depth-experience"; "To call the Faustian
Culture a Will-Culture is only another way of expressing the eminently
historical disposition of its soul"; "Now this, precisely this, the
genuine Russian regards as contemptible vain-glory. The Russian soul,
will-less, having the limitless plane as its prime-symbol, seeks to grow up - serving,
anonymous, self oblivious - in the brother-world of
the plane" (1: 308-9). Spengler elaborates upon this difference in the
second volume: Western man looks up, the Russian looks horizontally into the
broad plain...The idea of a Russian's being an astronomer! He does not see the
stars at all, he only sees the horlzon...For him the
Copernican system, be it never so mathematical, is spiritually contemptible ...
the boundlessly extended plain - is the metaphysical fundament of all Dostoyevski's creation. . . it is the utter negation of
Faustian personal responsibility. Russian mysticism has nothing of that upstriving inwardness of the Gothic, of Rembrandt, of
Beethoven. (2: 295n1)
In the third example,
which comprises the most extended discussion of Russia, Spengler analyzes its
contemporary cultural condition as an instance of "pseudomorphosis,"
a term he borrows from geology and defines as follows: By the term
"historical pseudomorphosis" I propose to
designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over
the land that a young Culture,born in this land,
cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific
expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness.
All that wells up
from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds,
young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its
own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows
to be monstrous. (2: 189)
The source of the
Russian pseudomorphosis was the reign of Peter the
Great (2: 192).
The type of rule that
fundamentally is suited to the essence of Russia is that of the tsar in Moscow,
but Peter made himself a European-style emperor in his new city of Petersburg,
with the result that Russian spirituality was "distorted" and
''twisted'' by worldliness (2:193). In turning Russia into a European power,
Peter forced it into alien Western paths,including
the path ofhlstorical consciousness: "And thus a
nationality whose destiny should have been to live without a history for some
generations still was forced into a false and artificial history that the soul
of Old Russia was simply incapable of understanding." The Russians were
essentially peasants on the land, not city-dwellers, but after Peter "cities
of alien type fixed themselves like ulcers - false, unnatural,
unconvincing." Spengler cites in evidence Dostoyevsky's characterization
in Notesfrom the Underground of Petersburg as being
"'the most abstract and artificial city in the world.'" Following the
logic of pseudomorphosis outlined above, in
consequence of this, among the Russian people "a truly apocalyptic hatred
was directed on Europe," on Petersburg, and on everywhere that was not
Russian on the part of true Russians.
Spengler explains
Russia's internal cultural division more closely by comparing Dostoyevsky and
Tolstoy. He claims that Dostoyevsky is the representative of the Russian
peasant, always yeaming to return to the soil and
''bitterly hating the stony grey world" (2: 194). Tolstoy, on the other
hand, is the representative of the Westernized intellectual who cannot overcome
his estrangement from the land, despite all his attempts. He belongs to the
West and hates it at the same time, and so hates himself. Thus he becomes
"the father of Bolshevism," which Spengler identifies as extreme
Westernism and thus essentially as a force of negation. Tolstoy is "an
event within and of Western Civilization" (2: 195). But Dostoyevsky is a
different kind of being. He does not hate, does not analyze, does not propose
solutions, and does not reject: "His passionate power of living is
comprehensive enough to embrace all things Western as well" (2: 194).
Dostoyevsky is
outside all political designations: "Such a soul as his can look beyond
everything that we call social, for the things of this world seem to it so
unimportant as not to be worth improving. Dostoyevski,
like every primitive Russian, is fundamentally unaware of that world and lives
in a second, metaphysical world beyond"; "But the reality in which Dostoyevski lives, even during this life, is a religious
creation directly present to him" (2: 95). "Dostoyevski
is a saint, Tolstoi only a revolutionary."
"Tolstoi is the former Russia, Dostoyevski the coming Russia" (2: 194).
The success of the Russian
Revolution seems to indicate, however, that the future of Russia lies in
Marxist communism. But this is an illusion. The Bolsheviks have nothing to do
with any real Russian, for they belong merely to the alien Westernized society
created by Peter, although at the lowest level and hating the higher ones.
"The real Russian is a disciple ofDostoyevski"
(2: 196). Even so, the real Russian has lent for a time his energy to the
Revolution. The Russian people, without hatred, urged only by the need of
throwing off a disease, destroyed the old Westenrlsm
in one eff'ort{)f upheaval, and will send the new
after it in another. For what this townless people yearns for is its own
life-form, its own religion, its own history. Tolstoi's
Christianity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx. But
to Dostoyevski's Christianity the next thousand years
will belong. (2: 196)
In the fourth
example, which occurs later in the volume, Spengler elucidates his meaning here
(2: 495n1). Western society is based upon commerce, but the ''profoundly
mystical inner life" of Russia believes that this is sinful. The
money-economy essentially has been imposed upon Russia and will always remain
alien to it, for the essential Russia is "a townless barter-life that goes
on deep below, uncalculating and exchanging only for immediate needs."
Russians have submitted themselves passively to Western economic forms, just as
they submit to any external power while inwardly concerning themselves with the
state of their souls: "The Russian does not fight Capital, but he does not
comprehend it." Again, Dostoyevsky provides the key to the Russian soul:
"Anyone who understands Dostoyevski will sense
in these people a young humanity for which as yet no money exists, but only
goods in relation to a life whose centre of gravity
does not lie on the economical side." Underneath, Russians hate capitalism
in the way that thJews in the time of Christ hated
the civilization of Rome. Romans might now participate in the revolutionary
overthrow of the system, but their hidden goal is a new Christianity not a new
communist society: "The Russian of the deeps today is bringing into being
a third kind of Christianity, still priestless, and
built on the John Gospel- a Christianity that stands much nearer to the Magian
than to the Faustian and, consequently rests upon a new symbolism of baptism,
and looks neither at Rome nor at Wittenberg, but past Byzantium towards
Jerusalem, with premonitions of coming crusades."
In Spengler's final reference
to Russia, in a footnote near the end of his work, Spengler again suggests that
the coming age will not be informed by Western principles, but rather the
spirituality of Russia (2: S04nl). He criticizes Marx for believing that the
technological revolution represents a universal process of world history,
rather than being merely the expression of a unique Faustian culture~ Marx has
failed to note that it is only the bourgeoisie of this one single Culture that
is master of the destiny of the Machine. So long as it dominates the earth,
every non-European tries and will try to fathom the secret of this terrible
weapon. Nevertheless, inwardly he abhors it, be he
Indian or Japanese, Russian or Arab . . . But so also the Russian looks with
fear and hatred at this tyranny of wheels, cables, and rails, and if he adapts
himself for to-day and to-morrow to the inevitable, yet there will come a time
when he will blot out the whole thingfrom his memory
and his environment, and create about himself a wholly new world, in which
nothing of the Devil' s technique is left.
Despite the little
space Spengler gives it in his two-volume Decline of the West, then, Russia
turns out to be of fundamental importance for his overall vision of history.
The Russian soul is the foil for the Faustian soul and will succeed it once
Western civilization has run its course and Russia is tree to follow its own
unique path. Spengler's characterization of the West as rationalist,
egoistical, and enslaved by money and the machine, on the one side, and his
characterization of Russia as spiritual, organic, communal, and agrarian, on
the other, all reflect Slavophile categories. Idiosyncratic as his work is. its
indebtedness to Russian themes is no accident. Rather it reflects the extensive
influence of the Russians in Germany in the pre-war period generally, and a
certain way of reading Dostoyevsky in particular, one promoted by neo-Orthodox
Russian emigres such as Nicholas Berdyaev, as Robert C. Williams argues in his
1997 Russia Imagined: Art, Culture and National Identity, 1840-1995. To account
for how, and why, Russia made such a mark upon German culture, I will draw upon
Williams' book, and upon Steven G. Marks's 2003 Ho... tl
Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to
Bolshevism. Both consider this subject in some detail. While the two authors
independently demonstrate that Russian thought and culture had a tremendous
impact upon the European, neither considers the possibility that one of the
forms that impact took was in introducing the concept of the West, and thus
introducing a new framework for European cultural self-analysis.
The importance of the
Russian development of the West is noticed, although in an overly-simplified
way, in some of the literature of critical accidentalism. Christopher GoGwilt in particular argues that the Russian influence
explains the "radical shift in the writing of world history"
("True West" 43) between Herder, in the eighteenth century, and
Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, in the twentieth; the West was absent in the first
case, but had became the "organizing
principle" in the second ("True West" 44). GoGwilt
explains that various upheavals in Russia led European commentators to the fear
that Russian nihilism would spread into Europe. To guard against this
possibility, "'Western civilization' could be constructed as the
historical heritage to be defended" against nihilism. While the nihilist
was seen as an extreme Westerner within Russia, Europeans believed that Russian
nihilism was the expression of the Asiatic soul, or the "Slavonic
mind," threatening the civilized order of Europe with chaos ("True
West" 47).33 Thus, according to GoGwilt, '''the
West' merged as the cultural, political, and historical entity threatened by
Russian nihilism" ("True West" 48). The West, as a civilization,
was understood using the terms of its Russian critics, due to the
"reactive borrowing of the Russian stereotype by European intellectuals,
filtered through successive versions of the Slavophile- Westerner controversy
and informed by contemporary political events" ("True West" 49).
As the Russians had sought to define their country in contrast to Europe, now
Europe sought to define itself in contrast to Russia, as understood through the
traits claimed for it by the Slavophiles. The West as a category became
suddenly popular, GoGwilt argues, because the Russian
Revolution "crystallized an idea of the West" that was already
developing through exposure to Russian ideas (Invention 227).
Spengler made it
clear that the West and Russia in the East were absolutely different, so the
Russian revolution was in no way Western ("True West" 50).
While GoGwilt is right in his general argument that the West
developed out of an exposure to Russian ideas, his example of Spengler actually
shows how the crystallization preceded the Russian Revolution. And while he
correctly notes that, for Dostoyevsky, the West was not just something
external, but something that the Russian now found within himself, he fails to
apply this logic to the reverse operation. As Marks and Williams argue, Russian
culture had influence precisely because its aspects to the fact that aspects
were internalized by Europeans, who found that the Russian novel, in
particular, spoke to a part of themselves that had hitherto been submerged. By
no means was the West simply an expression of an ideology of positive
Occidentalism, as GoGwilt seems to suggest, within
"the West" itself.
How came early
twentieth-century Germany to be so receptive to, and familiar with, Russian
thought? According to Williams. one major conduit of exposure was the presence
of Russian emigres. After 1881, Germany became the "center of Russian
exile political activity" (19), replacing England and Switzerland.
Russians went to Germany as students to acquire professional and technical
educations at the world's foremost universities. There were also refugees from
Russia; the Baltic Germans and Russian Jews were the two most important groups,
and both had vital, and distinct roles to play in the formation of the German
perception of Russia (20). Both had ties to German culture and were critical of
Russian autocracy. The interpreters of Russia to Germany typically came out of
one of these communities. In different ways, however, they also presented a
Russia that was to be feared. In the late nineteenth century, a heightening of
nationalist sentiment developed in Russia after the assassination of the tsar.
Both the Baltic Germans, an aristocratic class which served the Russian state
through their European skills, and the Jews, an ethnically and religiously
distinct people, became considered outsiders. The BaIts
were pushed aside by an emerging Russian professional class, and the Jews, in
the last two decades of the century, suffered from pogroms. Members of both
groups emigrated in substantial numbers to Gern1any and to the United States.
Russian Jews turned to radical politics and formed socialist and Zionist groups
(28), and many Germans felt "swamped" by them, and felt that the
stability of German society was threatened by their radical views (29). The
Russian Revolution of 1905 had an tremendous effect on German public opinion,
Williams argues, because it showed the potential for revolutionary - and
potentially infectious - upheaval very close to home.
For the first time,
Germans became aware of the number and types of Russians in their midst, and
especially of the Jewish students, many of whom were revolutionaries (36).
The Baltic Germans
were likewise disaffected with Russia but were more easily able to assimilate
in Germany than ethnic Russian, even though they were considered Russian by the
Germans. They were already a people in-between, neither wholly of one
nationality or the other. Now displaced in Russia, and with their Baltic homes
threatened by Russian political expansion, they turned against the country they
had served, portraying it as an "oriental despotism," filled with
"dirty Slavs," and animated by hostile intentions towards Europe. The
conservative Balts urged Germany to adopt an ideology of Pan-Germanism and
expand eastwards. Baltic German academics played a central role in the
development of an aggressive German foreign policy, especially towards Russia
(32). For example, Theodor Schiemann, whose name
"became synonymous with German aggrandizement in the East" was close
to the Kaiser (33). Schiemann characterized Russians
as a primitive, barbaric, nomadic, and religious people who had been affected
only superficially by Peter's Westernization. And he presented Russia as an
unstable state being undermined by "writers, intellectuals, socialists,
nihilists, Jews" (33). Schiemann contributed to
a growing and "widespread Russophobia" in Germany, which played an
important role in mobilizing Germans to fight in World War One. Williams claims
that the war on the Eastern front was typically presented as involving
"Western civilization against Eastern barbarism" (19), although Geuss argues that the "canonical" contrast was
actually between three terms: "Zivilisation
(France), Kultur (Germany), and Barbarei
(Russia)" (163).
Not all Baltic
Germans took this view, however. Some intellectuals - not in a group
influential in foreign policy - were attracted by "primitive" Russia.
Lou Andreas-Salome came of a Baltic German family, as did the wife of Rudolph
Steiner, who introduced him to Russian religious writings. The writings of
Count Hermann Keyserling, a "Russophile Balt," were read extensively.
Keyserling connected science to mysticism, studied yoga, and traveled to the
Far East. The published diary of his travels praised the '''partially developed
peoples' of the world," including the Russians, as superior to the
Europeans (34-5). KeyserIing founded the School of
Wisdom, which intended to restore the Buddhist schools that had existed in
India two thousand years before and establish a new planetary religion. It
would attract the attention of Hermann Hesse and Carl Jung.
At the same time,
German intellectuals became fascinated with Russia out of a mood of despair
with their own mechanistic and bureaucratic society, a mood described earlier
as the "crisis of modernity." Searching for alternatives, they became
attracted to what they believed was a more natural, spontaneous, and spiritual
life in the East. For them, this included Russia. Because most Germans knew
little of Russia, they turned to local Russian emigres. They turned especially,
Williams argues, to those who gave them the kind of simplified version of
Russia they craved. One notable figure in this regard was Dmitry Merezhkovsky. He developed a theory of the "third
kingdom"; this would be the next stage in world history after Western
civilization, and would reconcile East and West.
The idea of the
Russian soul thus was attractive during a period in which Germans, and other
Europeans. sought to escape the confines of their own society and saw in Russia
and Asia the opening to new possibilities (17). Williams argues that the
Russian soul was an idea derived not so much from Slavophilism as from
literature, especially that of Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky was a ''visionary
prophet" (24) for those who wished to find a way out of the dehumanized
and overly organized West. He was especially popular among the Germans, who
understood him to foretell the West's decline, and to portray a way of life animated
by holiness and the ability to find meaning in suffering, which qualities were
missing in Western civilization (16).34 Steven Marks writes that
Dostoyevsky was taken
up with enthusiasm in a number of European countries, but in Germany "the
Dostoyevsky fever reached epidemic proportions" (76). "He was more
widely read in Germany than any other foreign author," and by the
mid-1930s the number of secondary works concerning him was exceeded only by
those on Goethe (77).
Marks cites Fritz
Stem's opinion that Dostoyevsky's influence on pre-war Germany was second only
to Nietzsche's, and that it extended through the entire range of political
opinion.
Dostoyevsky was able
to command such reach because Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a foIlower ofMerezhkovsky's, published
all of his works in German from 1907 to 1919, and wrote the introduction to
each volume under Merezhkovsky's guidance (78).35
Moeller presented
Dostoyevsky as an exemplar of the mystical and authentic Russian soul, a
conduit for the original wisdom of the East. He prophesied, in anticipation of
Spengler's views, that "'If some day evening comes to Western humanity and
the German is at rest, only a Slavic mother could again bear Buddha or Jesus
out of the Eastern world'" (qtd. in Marks 79). As innovative as Spengler
was and considered himself to be, then, his conceptualizations of the West and
the Russian soul, and his evocations ofDostoyevsky
as evidence, are a testament to the preoccupations of his generation, which
expressed its dissatisfaction with the times in ways mediated by the Russian
novel.
The impact of
Dostoyevsky on Germany is but one example of the Russian impact on the rest of
the world, as detailed by Steven Marks's How Russia Shaped the Modern World.
The book's thesis is
that Russian intellectuals belonged to the first non-Western nation to undergo
modernization, and their responses to this process in their literaturet
artt and political ideas played a pivotal role in
shaping the later responses of others all over the globe:
Anxiously searching
for alternatives to the. rationalismt materialism, or
hegemony of the Westt a portion of humanity turned to
Russia for inspiration. Through its charismatic calls to justicet
the creative genius of its artists and writerst and
its extremist and utopian rejection of the West, Russia helped to configure
some of the pivotal features of the modem era. Its thinkers bred a bewildering
array of political arrangements and cultural expressions, constructive and
destructive, entertaining and vile, positive and negative. All were
manifestations of the antimodern rebellious mood that was prevalent among large
segments of the world's intelligentsias. What Russian ideas offered them was a
way of either rejecting the contemporary world altogether or following a non-Western
path to modernity. (334)
Although Marks does
not make this explicit, the evidence of his book demonstrates that anti-modem
ideologies became figured as anti-Western even within Europe and America tbrough the influence of the Russian configurations.
Spengler's philosophy of history, concerning itself with the fate of what would
now be called the West, essentially served to popularize a Russian conceptual
scheme. The Russian problematic concerned the dominance of Western Europe, and
hypothesized the existence of two unique cultural wholes, of the West and of
Russia (or the Slavs), unfolding tbrough history, to
explain present differences and to prognosticate the future possibilities.
Spengler took this up, and his treatment of cultures as organic entities moved
past analogy to propose an actuality of cultures as separate species with
determinate life-courses.
Spengler's extreme
organicism inspired few followers and attracted the scorn of professional
historians. R.G. Collingwood, for example, in his famous book The Idea of
History of 1946, wrote that "Der Untergang des Ablendlandes has had such a vogue in this country and in
America, as well as in Germany, that it may be worth while
to indicate here again my reasons. for regarding it as radically unsound"
(181). And Spengler's argument that Western culture begins in the Middle Ages
rather than with Classical cultures has not prevailed, but was overtaken by
what Gress terms the Grand Narrative. Although it hit
a nerve in post-war Germany, the message of The Decline of the West was not
well received by all, even by fellow opponents of liberalism. For example,
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an influential exponent of the theory of Aryan
racial superiority, complained in 1922 that the very title of Spengler's work
was inappropriate: "There cannot be a more unfortunate solution than that,
which the enemy within us has come up with, right at the moment when we need
all strength of faith: the slogan of the 'Untergang
des Abendlandes.'. The word 'Abend/and' is used to
undermine the idea of race, and with the word 'Untergang'
all hope is cut off." Likewise, Hitler disputed Spengler's message in
1935: "'We live in the fIrm conviction that in
our time will be fulfilled not the decline but the renaissance of the West.
That Germany may make an imperishable contribution to this work is our proud
hope and our unshakeable belief" (qtd. in Gress,
171nS).
Despite its many
detractors, The Decline of the West largely initiated the twentieth century
discourse on the West. Such discourse addresses the modem world by considering
the meaning of the history of the West and of its future. While some later
historians and writers of philosophies of history have found it necessary to
respond to Spengler, in many other cases they have borrowed from him without
acknowledgement, or perhaps without realization. Patrick Parrinder,
in his 1997 "Ancients and Modems: Literature and the 'Western
Canon,'" argues that Spenglerian pessimism has been influential but
unacknowledged in the various laments over the West's decline by literary
critics from Leavis to Harold Bloom. The latter laments that '''the shadows
lengthen in our evening land'" (qtd. in Parrinder
271). Works bemoaning the West's decline or the decline of Western culture are
still being published: Morris Berman's 2002 The Twilight of American Culture,
Patrick 1. Buchanan's 2002 The Death of the West, and Richard Koch and Chris
Smith's 2006 Suicide of the West are recent examples. Tomislav Sunic, in his 1989 "History and Decadence: Spengler's
Cultural Pessimism Today" claims that Spengler is again becoming
influential in renewed critiques of contemporary decadence, rootlessness,
alienation, materialism, and the loss of a sense of civic responsibility (2).
Samuel P.
Huntington's Clash of Civilizations can be seen to reflect Spengler's view
that civilizations are separate entities, informed by irreconcilable
principles. Both Huntington and Spengler dispute the Eurocentrism implied in
the assertion that the West has discovered universal principles of justice and
reason (lfversen 1997). Yet, as John Farrenkopfpoints out, in his 2000 article "Spengler's
Theory of Civilization," Spengler, unlike Huntington, could not be
mistaken for a cultural pluralist, for he did not believe that different world
cultures could co-exist, and he characterized the modern world as having
essentially become Western (24-6).
Conclusion
As seen above, ''the
rise" of the West, either as a organizing
principle of culture in Spengler's speculative history, or as a central
problematic of sociology beginning with Max Weber, occurred in the context of
the German "crisis of modernity."
This mood of cultural
estrangement caused many to look to Russia for an alternative mode of being,
and as a consequence took on the categories of the Russian discourse concerning
the West. While Russian thought was not the sole "cause" of the West,
its tremendous impact on German intellectuals in the first decade of the
twentieth century, as described by Robert Williams and Steven Marks, helps
explain why a multitude of different modes of categorization suddenly
crystallized into the single concept of the West. It also helps to explain why
the concept of the West, no matter what its content, always involves the
question of its end, and why, from the beginning, it has been the source of
negative Occidentalism. As a result, intellectuals in the West have engaged in
a culture critique of the West as if it names something alien to them, and as
if, in relation to it, they are merely passive observers. The original Russian
use of the concept to make a sharp distinction between the Slavonic world
and the European, and to evaluate that distinction, also accounts for the
general use of the West to delineate and rank cultures.
The concept‘s
insistence upon the separation of civilizations as defined through their unique
historical developments, and its role in bolstering national identity, have
served to resist any accounting for the history of their interrelations.
Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, Multiculturalism
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