My translation of Mohler’s “Hommage à Oswald Spengler,”
Orientations 1 (1982). Mohler presents Spengler as aligned with the Conservative
Revolution, emphasising his Nietzschean aspects, and placing him in a tradition
of implicitly anti-Platonist and “nominalist”
thought (in Mohler’s special sense of the term).
French original:
PDF of this translation:
There are many ways to ignore the thoughts of great
men, and to live as if those thoughts had never been expressed. In 1980, any
onlooker in Federal Germany would have seen just that. We celebrated the
centenary of the birth of Oswald Spengler. Even in the homages offered to the
philosopher, one would, objectively, have found lacunae. Some underlined the
importance of the Spenglerian philosophy of History, whose prophecies would be
confirmed by events; but thereby they avoided addressing the political
affirmations of the author of The Decline
of the West. Others wanted to “rescue”
Spengler the politician by making him into an anti-fascist, and by studying
only very superficially the links that did exist between Spengler, Hitler, and
National Socialism. I’ll say nothing of the “brilliant” essayists laboured
prodigiously over their study of Spengler to take so little from it.
The Total Spengler
It was another great man, Herbert Cysarz (born sixteen
years after Spengler), who was able truly to understand Spengler in his
totality. The homage that he offered, in the January issue of the revue Aula, edited in Graz in Austria, began
with these words:
No contemporary historian has known so great a glory as Oswald Spengler. None has been, in his lifetime, so incontestably original. This man, hostile to all literature and all idealism, totally distant from the abstract world of letters, has looked into the grand themes and multiple layers of History, and underlined, as no man has done heretofore, the intensity that resides in will and action. He has given to the world a new way of conceiving the political, with a particular way of seeing, thinking and presenting History.
There’s no doubt that Cysarz understands that Spengler
is more than an historian: as regards his work, he writes that he remains a
sign of the destiny which manifested at the turn of our era.
A man of the same generation as Cysarz, Ernst Jünger,
wrote things of this kind in the twenties—even if his tone was more measured,
not so full of pathos. In a very important political article of that era (whose
republication in Jünger’s complete works we shouldn’t expect, mind you), he
expresses an opinion shared by many of his contemporaries: for a brain of the
calibre of Spengler’s, they’d gladly give a Parliament.
The Weaknesses of Spengler’s Work
So enthusiastic a reception of the totality of
Spengler’s work does not mean that we endorse all its details, however, without
formulating any critique. Spengler is not a superman: he, too, had his
weaknesses. Beside the prophecies that were realised in fact are those that
have not eventuated. Spengler’s deep studies of the diverse cultures of History
oblige us to note that not all domains of creative human activity are equally familiar
to him. For example, Spengler’s literary style cannot always match the height
of his subjects; this oughtn’t to stun us, for these texts arouse the strongest
emotions. Spengler’s enemies also delight in citing phrases that display a
certain “kitsch.” Moreover, Spengler suffers one weakness like a great many
visionaries: what is most immediate escapes him. Therefore, according to him,
the great poet of his generation is neither Stefan George nor Rainer Maria Rilke,
but Ernst Droem, who has, quite rightly, languished in obscurity.
Very revealing is the reaction of the author of the Decline of the West to the dispatch,
by a young writer, of one of the foremost books of our century. In 1932,
indeed, Ernst Jünger sent Spengler—with his warmest regards—his book entitled Der Arbeiter (The Worker). Spengler was content to leaf through the book and
respond:
In Germany, the peasantry is still a political force. And when one opposes to the peasantry—purportedly moribund—the “Worker”—that is, the manufactural labourer—one distances oneself from reality, and bars oneself from all influence on the future…
As Spengler didn’t read the book, he cannot have known
that Jünger didn’t speak of the manufactural labourer. But it’s quite stunning
that he overvalues the political potentialities of a peasantry that, a few years
later, would be completely annihilated.
Inner Obstruction
Neither these few blind-spots, nor the bizarre aspects
of Spengler’s life, should turn our attention away from the mass of his work. This
sensitive man wore a mask, adopted a style that should not be taken on its
face. Therefore, Spengler’s admirers will avoid confounding his true
personality with that “Caesarean mask” that he wore for his numerous public
appearances.*
[* Author’s note. We might, of course, discuss the
good taste of publishing the photo of Spengler on his deathbed. This photo
proves, however, that this mask did not, in a lasting fashion, permeate
Spengler’s physiognomy.]
Spengler’s detractors, for their part, will try not to
describe him, in the light of his private life, as a sort of bizarre totem of
the decadent bourgeoisie.
Of course, Spengler’s reclusive life permits certain
assumptions. He was born on 29 May 1880, the son of a high-ranking postal
official, in Blankenburg in Harz.* It wasn’t his father, a peaceable man, who
dominated the family home, but his mother, a half-way mad creature, devoured by
pseudo-artistic ambitions. She decked out their large apartment with such a
quantity of furniture that the young Oswald and his three sisters had to bunk
in store-rooms under the rafters!
[* Author’s note. Another protagonist of the Konservative Revolution who came from
this town is August Winnig. He was born two years before Spengler in 1878, and
was the son of a gravedigger.]
After defending a dissertation on Heraclitus, Spengler
became professor of mathematics and natural sciences in a high-school (Gymnasium). The subsequent death of his
mother didn’t leave him a large inheritance, but did permit him all the same to
live without working: from 1911 to his death from a heart-attack on 7 May 1936,
he lived withdrawn as an independent researcher in Munich, in an immense apartment
in the Gründerzeit style (the style
of the 1870s–80s), heaving with enormous furniture and situated on the Widenmayerstraße.
One of his sisters tended to him.
He travelled little, and maintained only a restricted
circle of acquaintance. He refused the professorial position that was offered
him. He was transformed by the First World War. This life appears dominated by
the fierce repudiation of all human contact. We know nothing of any erotic
relations. From the beginning, there was a withdrawal into interiority. And in
Spengler, the only results that interest us are the products of that isolation
after 1917. The chastity of this existence is not at all an argument against
Spengler’s work. Just as, for that matter, the isolation in a monastic cell
wouldn’t be an argument against Augustine.
Beyond Optimism and Pessimism
In the history of ideas, the meaning of Spengler’s
work resides in that, in a state of crisis, he restores to conscience the “subterranean”
foundations of thought, with a vigour which recalls that of a Georges Sorel. And
what are these “subterranean” foundations? It’s the resolutely realistic
thought initiated by Heraclitus and the school of the Portico (Stoa). It’s a thought that has always
renounced the false consolations and fatemorgane
of systems founded on cosmic pseudo-orders. In a masterly way, Spengler
confronts the war generation with this thought. His style was a curious mélange of classical “monumentality” and
expressionism, done in loud colours. And it was precisely those who had most
deeply experienced the collapse of the bourgeois world (that of the “puppet-show”
[Puppenspiel]) who heard his call.
This thought situates itself beyond optimism and
pessimism. The title that the publisher chose for Spengler’s masterwork (The Decline of the West) deceives. It’s
possible that Spengler, in private, deplored the collapse of a worlds that was
dear to him. But his work deplores nothing: it rather apprises us that History
is a unique movement of emergence and decline, and that there is nothing for
man to do but to face this reality with composure, in the place that destiny
has appointed him. It’s this that keeps Spengler from identifying with the
Third Reich, and which prompted him in 1933, in his last work, Jahre der Entscheidung (The Hour of Decision), to confront the
NSDAP with its blindness in foreign policy. For Spengler, foreign policy,
because it’s combat, it primary with
respect to domestic policy, which itself insists on the importance of wellbeing. Therefore, the hybrid
character of National Socialism appears clearly: as socialism, it nurtures a
strong tendency towards utopia, even while it also knows the fascination of the
Heraclitean melody.
Without a doubt, no political praxis is possible
without a certain dose of hopefulness, and without allusions to an order
(cosmic) endowed with meaning (teleological).
Only a minority of individuals can sustain the Gorgon’s gaze. Within this
minority, the percentage of men of action is greater than that of intellectuals,
or priests, or of other manufacturers of opinion. In any event, the disciples
of Heraclitus possess a consolation of their own, which they draw from
precisely that which constitutes, for others, a source of terror. Reading Spengler
demonstrates for us the double aspect of Heraclitean thought.
Inflexibility
It’s with pertinence that Herbert Gysarz cites two
phrases that show most insurmountably what separates Oswald Spengler from
liberal society, as from any kind of dictatorship of wellbeing (either red or
brown). The first of these phrases says: “Facts are of more importance than
truths.” The second: “Life is not sacred.” This is the harsh side of Spengler’s
philosophy; and it’s in Man and Technics (1931),
a book purged of all ambiguity, that Spengler underlines it most particularly,
in order to defy all the chatter of our century.
Heinz Friedrich, in his article in Die Welt, penned for the philosopher’s centenary,
offers still more precise formulae. He begins with the fact that Spengler
himself is a declared disciple of Goethe and Nietzsche. Cysarz himself says
that the Spenglerian notion of destiny displays more of an elective affinity
with the Germanic sagas and the tragic heroism of Shakespeare than with
classical humanism. Friedrich writes, in a language not at all Spenglerian (he
speaks of “truths”!):
At the end of the age of chaos, citizens must habituate themselves not only to coming to a consciousness of truths, but also to living them and living with them. As Goethe said, it’s not only nature that is insensitive, but also history; for, to paraphrase Spengler, one might say that it retains more natural characteristics that we’d like to admit. Consequently, it’s with indifference that it ignores our hopes and fears.
For Friedrich, what is Nietzschean in this is the
diagnosis that represents decadence as a vital weakness: “The agent of life,
the favoured factor of eternal becoming is, for Nietzsche, will-to-power.”
Friedrich appends a warning: “Will-to-power, recognised by Nietzsche as vital
principle, is anything but the biological and muscular pridefulness that we
still want it to mean today.” This vulgar conception of things is shared by
Nietzsche’s adepts as by his adversaries. It simply means that all life feels
the urge to affirm itself. Spengler is more than a disciple of Nietzsche: he
completes him and transforms him. Spengler’s personal contribution to this
school of thought is to fulfil something that he found in Nietzsche in the form
of a call.
The Colours of Life
Who resists the Gorgon’s gaze turns not from the
world. On the contrary: he sees the world in a more intense, more plastic, more
coloured way. This is the paradoxical truth of the matter. The look of
hopefulness, on the other hand, can see only coherences, laws, and, for this
reason, turns its attention from the particular to lose itself in the general:
it disenchants the world.
One must take into account how the dominant Weltanschauungen, which are a dismal gumbo
of vapid Enlightenment ideology and secularised Christianity, have, for the mediocre
man, transformed the world into an ensemble of sad schemata. It is the result
of a well-defined vision
of History (in History, man decrypts the world in order to understand it). From
where, in this vision, does life take its value? From something to be attained
in a distant future, after a long evolution, and after our own death. Nothing is
itself; everything exists only inasmuch as it signifies some other thing, which
lies “behind” it.
Life then sees itself reduced to a mediocre
rationality, which precludes all those great effervescences that lead either to
the heights or to the depths; man then moves within a narrow stricture, which
offers him nothing more than the satisfaction of his physical needs. Above this
stricture blows a tepid breath of behaviourist ethics. Arnold Gehlen called
this “mass eudaemonism.” The masses are constituted as isolated individuals,
who are not rooted in anything solid, who are not enmeshed in a concrete
structure, who wander aimlessly in the “general.”
It’s against such a background that the Spenglerian
cyclone must be understood: it breaks the monotony of what calls itself “modern,”
and reinvests the world with vibrant tonalities. In the Spenglerian vision, man
no longer manifests as a “generality,” which he shares with all his fellows. Quite
to the contrary, he belongs to a specific culture, which cannot be reduced to
any other thing, but which has its own
meaning. Every culture is of a totally cultic nature, because, from everything
it produces, springs the symbol with which it identifies, and by which it
distinguishes itself. Spengler saw these cultures living as plants live: with
their phases of growth and decline. Each of these phases of growth occupies its
own rank. How strong a melody sounds in his evocation of the end of a culture
or Caesarism! We could cite with pleasure whole pages from the first volume of
the Decline:
A real life leads itself. It’s not determined by the intellect. Truths are situated beyond History and life. […] Peoples of culture are gushing forms of the river of existence. […] For me, the people (Volk) is a unity of soul (Seele). […] The gaze breaks free of the limits of wakefulness. […] What confers value on a single fact is quite simply the greater or lesser power of its formal language, the strength of its symbols. Beyond good and evil, superior and inferior, the necessary and the ideal.
We must still add one last word regarding the German
that was Oswald Spengler. He didn’t evoke the plurality of cultures in order to
sublimate himself through exoticism. He wrote his books for the Germans who
lived through the collapse of the Reich. Spengler doesn’t haul the Germans
before some tribunal of “generality,” but confronts them with their
specificity, in the mirror of their history. In all Spengler’s writing, one
feels his conviction that the Germans had played in the past a particular role,
and that the Prussians would play one in the future. These convictions of
Spengler’s obviously discombobulate those wish to maintain the frustrated
mentality that reigns today.
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