“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.”
Before any analysis and explorations of different problems in world-history using a framework derived mostly from Spengler (though not faithfully), it is important to establish the definitions and terms that are fundamental to not only understanding my worldview, but also Spengler’s.1 As much as I would like to dig through the entirety of Decline of the West, the possible results would be not desirable. It would most likely result in uninspiring summations of the text, weaker delivery of the ideas, and overall an inferior version of the text. Eventually, certain concepts of the text will be tackled and criticized, but that is for a much later date.2
Central to the views of Spengler are his concepts of Culture and Civilization, typically contrasted as diametric opposites and as succeeding stages of a human society.
Culture
Waking being of a single huge societal organism. Self-expression manifested in all spheres of life; religious, political, intellectual, spiritual, economic, etc. Making “not only custom, myths, technique, and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in itself the vessels of one single form language and one single history.” Despite this multiplicity, every great Culture is “nothing but the actualizing and form of a single, singularly constituted soul”, the “soul’s total expression ‘become’.” Each culture is a new expression of a specific world feeling, a new symbol, a new destiny idea, a new waxing and waning of organic forms, a new principle of ordering the Become reflecting the central essence of the soul of a particular Culture. Organically creating States, myths, traditions, and great works of art, “every Culture stands in a deeply symbolical, almost in a mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it strives to actualize itself.“
Prime Symbol
“Every Culture, every adolescence and maturing and decay of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically necessary stages and periods, has a definite duration, always the same, always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol.” The culminated works of every great Culture are “linked as a unit by the unity of the prime symbol underlying them all.” Culture is the symbol’s mortal transient body.
Civilization
The organic logical sequel, fulfillment and finale of a culture, in “organic succession” where “the most external and artificial of which a species of developed humans in possible.” When values are transvalued, remolding all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, and practices them in a different way. Culture is the becoming, Civilization the become. Culture is the organism born of Mother Earth, Civilization the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture is the living body, Civilization the mummy. The essence of Culture is religion, the essence of Civilization irreligion. With the grey dawn of civilization, the fire in the Soul dies down.
Spring3
The birth of culture from which everything follows. Creative, intuitive, deeply religious, traditional, personal, inward, united, full, chivalric. Longing, becoming, the birth of myth, a new God-feeling, a new world-fear, and, eventually, mystical-metaphysical scholasticism. Filled with childish yearning and fears, the culture seeks to express its spirituality in great creations of the newly awakened soul and in a new ornamentation, in religious architecture as the sublime form of that ornamentation. When the city is only a market or a stronghold. The political expression of this season is the organic articulation of political existence, feudal mystical dream polities ruled by the two prime classes, nobles and priests. The vassals struggle under their patriarch until the transition into an aristocratic state.
Examples:
Early Dynasty of Sumer
Old Kingdom of Egypt
Kuru Period of India
Western Zhou of China
Dark Age of Greece
Anti-Nicene Period of the Near East
Classic Maya of America
High Middle Ages of Europe
Present Times in Russia
Summer
Full consciousness of ripened creative power. Individual traits of expression become deliberate, strict, measured, marvelous in their ease and self-confidence. Born as internal popular opposition to the Springtime forms (reformation), stirs as beginnings of a purely philosophical world-form, forms a new mathematical concept of number, and finally, when critical opposition to Springtime forms crosses into religion, develops Puritanism. Politically, it fashions a “world of states weltering in anarchy”.
Examples:
Akkadian Period of Sumer
Middle Kingdom of Egypt
Late Vedic Period of India
Eastern Zhou of China
Archaic Period of Greece
Late Classical of the Middle East
Lata Classical Maya of Americas
1400-1600 in Europe
Autumn
Brilliant completion of the expression of a culture’s high style, linked with the city. Ripest conditions of a Culture. The height of the city and intellectual creativeness. Unworldliness and deed shyness first appear. Enlightenment “the return to nature”, zenith of mathematical thought, followed by great systematic thinkers. Politically, the absolute State assumes dominance over the aristocratic State, but is followed by the breakdown of state-form ushering the birth of Civilization. Victory of the city over the countryside.
Examples of the political:
Themistocles and Pericles construct the pure polis, Philip of Macedon breaks it down and Alexander ushers in Civilization.
Louis XIV constructs the absolute French state, Robespierre breaks it down and Napoleon ushers in Civilization.
Winter
The gray dawn of Civilization. Victory of the inorganic megalopolis (the masses, the fourth estate) over the organic countryside (becoming “provinces”). Culture cites fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-city, cosmopolitanism in place of home, cold fact in place of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as the representative of the older religion of the heart, society in place of the state, natural instead of hard earned rights. The very depths of civilization. Stiffening of philosophy into the final sentiment. Politically, the domination of money (democracy), followed by Caesarism, and then maturing of the final form, a historyless stiffening and enfeeblement.
Examples:
Egypticism
Mandarinism
Byzantinism
Pre-Culture
Also known as Primitive Culture. A sum of the expression forms of primitive groupings. Strong, integral, vital, effectual. All microcosmic utterances (myth, custom, technique, ornament) obey only the pressures of the very instant. Ornamental form language, not yet style. Essentially chaotic, neither an organism nor a sum of organisms. The primitive man experiences, in a dreamlike continuum of sensation, “soul” first in other men and then in himself.
Morphology
All modes of comprehending the world. A doctrine for the creation of form. Specifically, a dissection of something’s becoming and form.
Physiognomic
“The Morphology of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny”
Systematic
“The Morphology of the mechanical and the extended, a science which discovers and orders nature laws and causal relations.”
World-as-history
The world-consciousness by which a culture and its individuals are under the constant impression that they are an element in a far wider life course spanning hundreds and thousands of year, or conceives of himself as something rounded off and self-contained. “He who looks at the becoming and fulfilling in them, experiences History.” To be rendered poetically. Rhythm, form. Physiognomic. Facts.
World-as-nature
The world-consciousness by which a culture and its individuals perceives the world as a collected image of what is understood through “the accumulation of daily detail technical and empirical experience” becoming “a stock of permanent data.” “He who dissects them as become and fulfilled cognizes Nature.” To be rendered scientifically. Timeless, immobile. Tension, law. Systematic. Truths.
Caesarism
“That kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness.” “Real importance centered in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar, or by anybody else capable of exercising it in his place. It is the récidive of a form fulfilled world into primitivism, into the cosmic historyless. Biological stretches of time once more take the place vacated by historical periods.”
Second Religiousness
In the midst of Civilization, "the soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the mother, in the grave.”
“All art is expression-language. This expression is either ornament or imitation.”
Imitation
”Born of the secret rhythm of all things cosmic,” and following the stream of life. Physiognomic traits overheard in the alien being, expressing this by accomplishing itself. Earlier and more characteristic of race. Possesses beginning and end. Only the destiny of an individual can be imitated. Religious, dramatic. Belonging to Time and Direction.
Example: Antigone
Ornamentation
“Pure extension, settled and stable.” Established motives and symbols impress themselves, presenting itself as a finished thing. Possesses only duration. Only generalized destiny idea itself can be represented. “ Being as such, wholly independent of origin.” Taken away from time.
Example: Doric column
Pseudomorphosis
“Those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that 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 molds, 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.”
Now that I have, hopefully, defined all of the most pivotal Spenglerian concepts4, I can now set on the task of exploring different facets of world-history. My next post will either be an analysis on the Pyramid Texts, the Sumerian Springtime, more notes on universals, or a post on the philosophy of Rozanov (through his own translated words).
If you are interested in Spengler’s ideas themselves, this blog will be a place to explore them, but will be written with the expectation the reader has already read Spengler’s seminal work.
One I am very excited to write is on the exploration of a so-called (by me) Spenglerian dynamism, focusing on a more dynamic approach to viewing the forces of Culture and Civilization.
In the future, each season will get its own series of posts exploring different aspects and different appearances across all the cultures.
I will be adding to this post if there is anything else I find the need to define. Please contact me by any means if there is a Spenglerian concept you want added. I will add it.