Back Oswald Spengler Afrikaans أوسفالد شبينغلر Arabic اوسفالد شبينجلر ARZ Oswald Spengler AST Osvald Şpenqler Azerbaijani اسوالد اشپنقلر AZB Освальд Шпенглер Byelorussian Освальд Шпэнглер BE-X-OLD Освалд Шпенглер Bulgarian Oswald Spengler Breton
Oswald Spengler | |
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 Spengler in 1929 | |
| Born | Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler 29 May 1880 |
| Died | 8 May 1936 (aged 55) |
| Alma mater | University of Munich University of Berlin University of Halle |
| Notable work |
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| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Continental philosophy Goethean science[1][2] Conservative Revolution[3][4]: 3–30, 63 [5] Lebensphilosophie[6][7][8] Irrationalism[8][4]: 49 [9][10] |
| Thesis | Der metaphysische Grundgedanke der heraklitischen Philosophie (1904) |
| Doctoral advisor | Alois Riehl |
Main interests | Aesthetics Philosophy of history Philosophy of science Political philosophy |
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| This article is part of a series on |
| Conservatism in Germany |
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Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler[a] (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German polymath whose areas of interest included history, philosophy, mathematics, science, and art, as well as their relation to his organic theory of history. He is best known for his two-volume work The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), published in 1918 and 1922, covering human history. Spengler's model of history postulates that human cultures and civilizations are akin to biological entities, each with a limited, predictable, and deterministic lifespan.
Spengler predicted that about the year 2000, Western civilization would enter the period of pre‑death emergency which would lead to 200 years of Caesarism (extra-constitutional omnipotence of the executive branch of government) before Western civilization's final collapse.[11]
Spengler is regarded as a German nationalist and a critic of republicanism, and he was a prominent member of the Weimar-era Conservative Revolution.[4]: 3–30, 63 [5][3] The Nazis had viewed his writings as a means to provide a "respectable pedigree" to their ideology,[12] Spengler later criticized Nazism due to its excessive racialist elements. He saw Benito Mussolini, and entrepreneurial types, like the mining magnate Cecil Rhodes,[13] as examples of the impending Caesars of Western culture—later showcasing his disappointment in Mussolini's colonialist adventures.[14]
- ^ Hughes 1991, p. 59.
- ^ Peter E. Gordon, John P. McCormick (eds.), Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 136.
- ^ a b Sériot, Patrick (2014). Structure and the Whole: East, West and Non-Darwinian Biology in the Origins of Structural Linguistics. De Gruyter. p. 43. ISBN 9781614518273.
Another contemporary current of thought, the so-called German Conservative Revolutionary Movement of the 1920s, exhibited strong similarities to Eurasianism. Its adherents included such important figures as Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler. German Conservative Revolutionaries favored neither liberal capitalism nor communism but a "third way." Eurasianism reinforced the third-way notion by assigning Eurasia the identity of a "third world."
- ^ a b c Herf, Jeffrey (1986). Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521338332.
- ^ a b Wolin, Richard (4 October 2016). The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. Columbia University Press. pp. 9, 29, 72. ISBN 9780231543026.
- ^ Protevi, John (2006). A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy. Yale University Press. p. 355. ISBN 9780300116052.
Lebensphilosophie became a fashionable and quickly worn-out term after the end of the First World War, when it was given a vitalistic and even racist direction. It was employed by thinkers such as Oswald Spengler who developed neo-conservative and culturally pessimistic critiques of the decline of the vitality of the West in its growing modernity, rationality and technology. This popularised and vulgarised Lebensphilosophie is part of the context for the emergence of European fascism.
- ^ Vrahimis, Andreas (2022). Bergsonism and the History of Analytic Philosophy. p. 237. ISBN 9783030807559.
The voice that had most prominently brought elements of Lebensphilosophie to the broader public was not, however, Heidegger's. It came from outside academia, in the work of Oswald Spengler. With the publication of his Untergang des Abendlandes in 1918, Spengler became a kind of minor extra-academic celebrity in the Germanophone world. Spengler's mainly historical work develops an account of the rise and fall of cultures and the phenomena that emerge within them. Its overgeneralisations about the downfall of Western civilisation are based on dubious historical accounts of the emergence and decline of human cultures. Its broad span ranges from the history of art to the history of science and mathematics.
- ^ a b Lukács, György (1981) [1953]. "IV. Vitalism (Lebensphilosophie) in Imperialist Germany, 4. War and Post-War Period (Spengler)". The Destruction of Reason. Humanities Press. ISBN 9780391022478.
- ^ Hentschel, Klaus, ed. (2011). Physics and National Socialism: An Anthology of Primary Sources. Birkhäuser. p. xxv. ISBN 9783034802024.
- ^ Ashman, Keith; Barringer, Phillip (2005). After the Science Wars: Science and the Study of Science. Taylor & Francis. p. 158. ISBN 9781134616176.
The irrational at zenith Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (1918) is unquestionably a classic of modern irrationalism. Few books have been equally popular. [...] Spengler's appeal was so broad that he was equally popular among industrialists and rebel youth." This "powerful and strange man," as Golo Mann called him, was the brightest star of the "conservative revolution" in thought and a trusted ally of right-wing politicians. Overall, Ernest Manheim writes (1948: 365), "Spengler's effect on German postwar nationalism can hardly be overestimated."
- ^ Holton, Gerald James (2000). Einstein, History, and Other Passions: The Rebellion Against Science at the End of the Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00433-7.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
VQRwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ The Decline of the West, Alfred A. Knopf. Volume 1, page 37, Atkinson's Translation.
- ^ Letters of Oswald Spengler page 305, Alfred A. Knopf, 1966, Translation Arthur Helps. Here Spengler is quite critical of Mussolini's involvement in Abyssinia, saying: "Mussolini has lost the calm statesmanlike superiority of his first years...".
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