Culture vs Civilisation - Oswald Spengler

What was the relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ according to

Oswald Spengler, and what was the condition of ‘the West’ during his time, according to him?

Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), a German polymath; learned in multiple disciplines — whom had a grip on the physical, empirical, or objective as well as the metaphysical, theoretical, or subjective — bridges such seemingly differing fields in his explanation of the relationship between culture and civilisation. For he conceptualises such sociological phenomena in a scientific, namely biological manner. According to Spengler, the relationship between culture and civilisation is an antithetical, oppositional, and contradictory one. Culture and civilisation are two sides of the same coin, contrasting one another, though irrefutably connected, for they belong to the same organic cycle. Just like death follows life, so too civilisation follows culture, for culture is alive and civilisation is dead. Such a conceptualisation is unprecedented, for as Spengler puts it, such ‘two words’... ‘hitherto used in an ethical’ manner are now used in a ‘periodic sense’, expressing ‘a strict and necessary organic succession.’ As opposed to being categorised as benevolent or malevolent, culture and civilisation are merely posited to be stages of a sequence. Moreover, according to Spengler, the Abendland, during his time, the early twentieth century, had transformed from a culture into a civilisation. The West had lost its juices of life, its essence, its soul. Such a degeneration had begun by the end of the eighteenth century. This essay will elaborate on the periodic relationship between culture and civilisation, contending with the notion that he employs such terms in an exclusively periodic sense. This essay will also explore a key characteristic of the technological advancement.

According to Spengler the relationship between culture and civilisation is oxymoronic in nature, though not in an ethical sense, but rather in a periodic sense. Whilst culture symbolises the beginning, birth, life, youth, spring, and movement; civilisation symbolises the end, death, old age, winter, and inertia. Spengler writes:

“Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture”. Civilizations 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.”

Civilisation is not a catastrophe, nor a tragedy, rather it is a logical conclusion. Spengler posits to forbear normativity (the categorisation of phenomena as light or dark, permissible, or impermissible, desirable, or undesirable etc.) There is no higher nor lower entity. Both are natural and inescapable parts of a cycle. Spengler further argues that this is not pessimism nor fatalism, but rather the simple and obvious statement of facts. 

Nonetheless this essay contends that humans cannot not be normative. In other words, morality will eternally taint all that which humans do. Thus Spengler, despite asserting to abstain from conceptualising the matter ethically, inevitably does not, for he cannot, as such is perverse to human nature. The words he employs consolidates such a point. For instance, he employs the word ‘petrifying’ to describe an attribute of civilisation. The term petrify possesses two definitions which are of great significance. The first definition is the changing of organic matter into a stony substance. The second definition is to frighten someone to the point of paralysis; thus, it is synonymous with terrify and horrify. The choosing of the specific term ‘petrify’, explicitly elucidates his conceptualisation of civilisation as dark and formidable. Additionally, the baptising of the West’s move from culture to civilisation as ‘Faustian’ further acts to fortify the notion that Spengler abstains from conceptualising the matter ethically. Faustian, refers to the Faustian bargain a deal whereby Faust — the protagonist of a classic German legend, notoriously sells his soul to the devil or Mephistopheles, for material gains such as knowledge, power, and riches. Thus demonic, satanic, and devilish are among its connotations. Ultimately, the significations of the words that Spengler employs to refer to civilisation illustrate that Spengler does not refrain from ethical judgements as he purports to.

This essay argues that phenomenology, a branch of philosophy, substantiates the claim that morality filters man’s perceptions. Founded in the early 20th century in the works of Edmund Husserl, ‘the discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness’ from the subject’s point of view. Phenomenology importantly posits that the central structure of an experience is its intentionality. Individuals are intentional by nature for their experiences are eternally directed toward something — an object, objective, goal, aim, telos, purpose… towards a ‘phenomenon’, hence phenomenology. Logically, anything that prevents the reaching of a goal is perceived as an obstacle and anything that aids the reaching of a goal is seen as a facilitator. Whilst the obstacle is inherently deemed as bad, (archetypally the antagonist, villain, or nemesis, which seeks to prevent the hero from reaching his goal), the facilitator is deemed as good, (archetypally the sidekick, guide, sage etc. who help the hero to attain his goal). Thus, ultimately and vitally phenomenology argues that humans do not perceive the thing, but the rather meaning of the thing. ‘What we perceive are “first and foremost” not impressions of taste, tone, smell, or touch, not even things or objects, but meanings’ writes Binswanger. For example when one sees a cliff, one does not first see the cliff (the object), but rather a falling off place (the meaning) which is bad (the ethical judgement) for survival (the evolutionary aim). Phenomenology therefore repudiates the idea that Spengler merely describes the terms in a periodic manner. 

According to Oswald Spengler ‘the West’ during his time was characterised by ossification, decay, and death. As Georgios Varouxakis notes ‘the Westerners of the centuries between 1800 and 2000… were vis-à-vis their ancestors of the centuries from the 10th to the 18th what the Romans had been vis-à-vis the Greeks’ To elaborate, ‘the Romans were the successors of the Greeks’, they ‘were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development’. As the Romans were ‘unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes…. [standing] between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness’, so too was the Abendland. The Romans clung onto Greek culture, lifelessly emulating, and parroting it, creating nothing of their own. Hence Spengler’s summary — ‘in a word, Greek soul – Roman intellect’, with the term soul signifying life (being etymologically connected to the word animation).

The ubiquitous agreement of the people with Spengler on the condition of ‘the West’ acts as a testament to the validity of his observation. As Northrop Frye argues, Spenglerian visions permeated the Western collective:

‘everybody thinks in terms of a “Western” culture to which Europeans and Americans belong; everybody thinks of that culture as old, not young; At that I am not counting the people who have a sentimental admiration for medieval culture because it represents our own lost youth, or the people who cannot listen with pleasure to any music later than Mozart or Beethoven, or the people who regard the nineteenth century as a degenerate horror, or the Marxists who talk about the decadence of bourgeois culture…or the Hellenists who regard Latin literature as a second-hand imitation of Greek literature.

Hence, Frye posits, ‘we are all Spenglerians’. Frye further contends that the reason that T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, 1922 — which contained the essence of Spengler’s philosophy —  was glorified, praised, and venerated in the way that it was, is attributable to a collective acceptance of Spengler’s theories. The poem related spring, to birth, youth, and the Middle Ages; summer to maturity, fertility, and the Elizabethans; autumn to age and the eighteenth century; and winter to death and the twentieth century. Such references incontestably reflect Spengler’s delineation of the organic cyclical progression of history. 

According to Spengler the dry, barren, and lifeless, condition of ‘the West’ during his time

was notably and undeniably characterised by technological advancement. Spengler argues that the relationship between technology and culture is directly proportional, namely as technology advances so too does culture, eventually crystallising into civilisation. Thus, technology inevitably begets the death of a culture. ‘Just as Faust sold his soul to the devil to gain greater power, the Western man sold his soul to technics.’ This notion is in alignment with Mahatma Gandhi’s claim that ‘machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization’. He deems such technology or machinery as poisonous, noxious, and lethal. Even more so than the venom of a predatory snake, for whilst the biological entities' poison ‘merely destroys the body’, machinery destroys ‘the body, mind and soul.’ Machinery destroys man physiologically — causing the atrophy and withering of his flesh due to disuse; psychologically — makes him idle, complacent, and impatient; spiritually — infecting him with nihilism (meaninglessness), since meaning is derived from responsibility as Holocaust survivor and psychologist Victor Frankl notes. Thus, the West was in a state of soullessness, which it had arrived to by rending technology its God so to speak. 

Such a proposition is supported by religious and mythological literature which fundamentally assert that technological advancements lead to the demise of living structures due to the hubris — excessive pride or arrogance which brings one’s downfall — that follows such developments. In the Abrahamic story of the Tower of Babel, people build a structure ‘with its top in the heavens’, a metaphor for the conceit of people, who having advanced technologically, believe themselves to be level with God. God in turn confounds, bewilders, and perplexes people by introducing different languages. People are consequently forced to disperse and find their way back to the terrestrial realm, and the tower crumbles into oblivion. Moreover, in the ancient Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus, father and son were incarcerated in a tower for reasons of treason. Daedalus pioneered wings, made from feathers and beeswax, which they could use to flee to liberty. Before escaping Daedalus warned his son, first of complacency, — ‘do not fly too low or else the humidity of the ocean will clog your wings,’. And then of arrogance — ‘...and do not fly too high, or else the sun will melt the wax in your wings, and you will fall to your death.’ Icarus tasting the glory and greatness of flight flew too high and fall he did, to his demise. Daedalus being an inventor, (a driver of technological progress) serves to emphasise the role of technology in the end times, reinforcing Spengler’s contention. 

In conclusion, Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilisations are akin to biological entities, each with mortal and deterministic lifespans. ‘Once a culture was born it went from its cultural phase to its civilization phase’, ‘This unfolding of culture was isomorphic with the unfolding of the individual. Morphologically, the immense history of a ... culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the individual man, or of the animal, or of the tree, or the flower’. Akin to the utterances of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the macrocosm reflects the microcosm. Thus, the relationship between culture and civilisation is oxymoronic and periodic, whereby culture symbolises one part of the truth and civilisation the other. If culture was animated and alive, civilisation was inert and spiritless. If culture was the energetic and creative youth, civilisation was the senile and languid elder. However, both were crucially united by virtue of belonging to the same sequence or cyclical process. According to Spengler, ‘The West’ in the early 1900s, had long entered its final stage, commencing its ossification, slowly petrifying into stone. Having traded its soul for technology, the West had rendered technology its God. This especially resonated with Spengler’s post World War I audience, who after having endured the cataclysm, awakened to the nature of the Faustian bargain, ensuring the great popularity of his work. 

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