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Monday, 8 September 2014

Oswald Spengler and the Faustian Soul of the West (part 1)

If I had to choose one word to identify the uniqueness of the West it would be “Faustian”. This is the word Oswald Spengler used to designate the "soul" of the West. He believed that Western civilization was driven by an unusually dynamic and expansive psyche. The “prime-symbol” of this Faustian soul was “pure and limitless space.” This soul had a "tendency towards the infinite," a tendency most acutely expressed in modern mathematics. The “infinite continuum,” the exponential logarithm and “its dissociation from all connexion with magnitude” and transference to a “transcendent relational world” were some of the words Spengler used to describe Western mathematics. But he also wrote of the “bodiless music” of the Western composer, “in which harmony and polyphony bring him to images of utter ‘beyondness’ that transcend all possibilities of visual definition”, and, before the modern era, of the Gothic “form-feeling” of “pure, imperceptible, unlimited space” (Decline of the WestVol.1, Form and Actuality [Alfred Knopf, 1923] 1988: 53-90).


A variety of words have been used to described or identify the peculiar history of the West: "individualist," "rationalist," "imperialist," "secularist", "restless," and "racist." Spengler's term "Faustian," it seems to me, best captures the persistent, and far greater, originality of the West since ancient times in all the intellectual, artistic, and heroic spheres of life. But many today don't read Spengler; there are no indications, in fact, that the foremost experts on the so-called "rise of the West" have even read any of his works.

The current ac
ademic consensus has reduced the uniqueness of the West to when this civilization "first" became industrial. This consensus believes that the West "diverged" from other agrarian civilizations only when it developed steam engines capable of using inorganic sources of energy. Prior to the industrial revolution, we are made to believe, there were "surprising similarities" between Europe and Asia. Both multiculturalist and Eurocentric historians tend to frame the "the rise of the West" or the "great divergence" in these economic/technological terms. David Landes, Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, Joel Mokyr, Jack Goldstone, E.L. Jones, and Peer Vries all single out the Industrial Revolution of 1750/1830 as the transformation which signaled a whole new pattern of evolution for the West (or England in the first instance). It matters little how far back in time these academics trace this Revolution, or how much weight they assign to preceding developments such as the Scientific Revolution or the slave trade, their emphasis is on the “divergence” generated by the arrival of mechanized industry and self-sustained increases in productivity sometime after 1750.


Limitations in Charles Murray’s Measurement of the Accomplishments of Western civilization





Missing is an understanding of the unparalleled degree to which the entire history of the West was filled with individuals persistently seeking "to transcend every optical limitation" (Decline of the West: 198). In comparative contrast to the history of India, China, Japan, Egypt, and the Americas, where artistic styles, political institutions and philosophical outlooks lasted for centuries, stands the "dynamic fertility of the Faustian with its ceaseless creation of new types and domains of form" (Decline of the West: 205).  I can think of only three individuals, two philosophers of history and one historical sociologist, who have written in a wide-ranging way of: i) the “infinite drive,” “the irresistible trust” of the Occident, ii) the “energetic, imperativistic, and dynamic” soul of the West, and iii) the “rational restlessness” of the West – Hegel, Spengler, and Weber.

Spengler is the one who overcomes in a keener way another flaw in Murray: his account of European distinctiveness is limited to the intellectual and artistic spheres. He pays no attention to accomplishments in warfare, exploration, and heroic leadership. His definition of accomplishment includes only peaceful individuals carrying scientific experiments and creating artistic works. Achievements come only in the form of “great books” and “great ideas”. In this respect, Human Accomplishments is akin to certain older-style Western Civ textbooks where the production of "Great Works" by "Great Men" in conditions of "Liberty" were the central themes. David Gress dubbed this type of historiography the “Grand Narrative” (1998). By teaching Western history in terms of the realization of great ideas and works in the arts and sciences these texts “placed a burden of justification on the West" to explain how the reality of Western colonialism across the world, the higher degree of warfare among Europeans, the invention of far more destructive military weapons, the slave trade, and the unprecedented destruction of the civilizations of the Americas, should  be left out of the account of Western accomplishments. Gress called upon historians to move away from an idealized image of Western uniqueness. Norman Davies, too, has criticized the way early Western civilization courses tended to “filter out anything that might appear mundane or repulsive” (A History of Europe, 1997: 28).

The Faustian Personality



In contrast to Weber, for whom the West “exhibited an unrivaled aptitude for rationalization,” Spengler saw in this Faustian soul a primeval-irrational will to power. It was not a calmed, disinterested, rationalistic ethos that was at the heart of Western particularity; it was a highly energetic, goal-oriented desire to break through the unknown, supersede the norm, and achieve mastery. The West was governed by an intense urge to transcend the limits of existence, by a highly energetic, restless, fateful being, an "adamantine will to overcome and break all resistances of the visible" (Decline: p. 185-86).

  • The Faustian soul – whose being consists in the overcoming of presence, whose feeling is loneliness and whose yearning is infinity – puts its need of solitude, distance, and abstraction into all its actualities, into its public life, its spiritual and its artistic form-worlds alike. (Decline: 386).
For Spengler, Christianity, too, became a thoroughly Faustian moral ethic. “It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity -- and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction”: will-to-power in ethics (344). This “Faustian-Christian morale” produced
But what exactly is a Faustian soul? How do we connect it in a concrete way to Europe’s creativity? To what original source or starting place did Spengler attribute this yearning for infinity? To start answering this question we should first remind ourselves of Spengler's other central idea, his cyclical view of history, according to which i) each culture contains a unique spirit of its own, and ii) all cultures undergo an organic process of birth, growth, and decay. In other words, for Spengler, all cultures exhibit a period of dynamic, youthful creativity; each culture experiences “its childhood, youth, manhood, and old age.” “Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression, which arise, ripen, decay and never return” (18-24, 106-07). Spengler thus drew a distinction between the earlier vital stages of a culture (Kultur) and the later stages when the life forces were on their last legs until all that remained was a superficial Zivilisation populated by individuals preoccupied with preserving the memories of past glories while drudging through the unexciting affairs of their everyday lives.

However, notwithstanding this emphasis on the youthful energies of all cultures, Spengler viewed the West as the most strikingly dynamic culture driven by a soul overflowing with expansive energies and “intellectual will to power.” By "youthful" he meant the actualization of the specific soul of each culture,"the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences." Only in Europe he saw  "directional energy," march music, painters relishing in the use of blue and green, "transcendent, spiritual, non-sensuous colors," "colours of the heavens, the seas, the fruitful plain, the shadow of the Southern noon, the evening, the remote mountains" (245-46). I think John Farrenkopf has it right when he argues that Spengler’s appreciation for non-Western cultures as worthy subjects of comparative inquiry came together with an “exaltation” of the greater creative energy of the West (2001: 35).





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