Longing, Dread and Care: Spengler’s Account of the Existential Structure of Human Experience

1 Spengler was somewhat undecided about the exact status of Russian culture. Spengler, The Decline of the West, from here on referred to in the text as DW, followed by page numbers.

2 It is debatable how literally Spengler wished the existence of his “culture-organisms” to be understood. Are cultures symbolically united and discrete periods of human history that can, for purposes of philosophical utility, be treated as if they were actually organisms, or are they to be taken as actually existing? Frye, on the other hand, thought that the distinction was of no importance for an appreciation of Spengler’s thought. Frye, “The Decline of the West.”

3 Hughes 72–73.

4 Farrenkopf 41.

5 Spengler describes the Faustian Ur-symbol as movement through “pure and limitless space” (Spengler 183). In contrast to the prime symbols of other culture-organisms, the Faustian is singularly dynamic. Whilst other cultures, such as the Egyptian or Chinese, do have prime symbols that contain an idea of motion, they represent movement along a path between two fixed points. The Faustian, in contrast, represents endless movement towards the infinite. The Faustian Ur-symbol, along with its “derivatives”; Will, Force and Deed, give Faustian culture the dynamic trajectory that is inherent in its worldview and progressively expressed through its cultural forms (Spengler 337).

6 See Swer, “Timely Meditations?”

7 For an introduction see Hughes.

8 That Spengler has a philosophical anthropology has been argued before. See Farrenkopf, Kidd. However, this claim has been based upon the analysis of Spengler’s later philosophy, which bears scant resemblance to the theory of cultural cycles put forward in his early work and for which he is best known. I argue here that Spengler puts forward a philosophical anthropology in his early philosophy which has not hitherto been explored and which differs radically from that found in his later works.

9 See Rehberg.

10 On Spengler as a positivist see Gardiner or Collingwood, The Idea of History. On Spengler’s debt to Goethe see Hughes, Oswald Spengler, 59–61.

11 Fischer views this as a typical feature of philosophical anthropology. Fischer 158.

12 Gier states that in Spengler’s philosophy “we have a life-world phenomenology in everything but name” Gier 97.

13 This is a characteristically phenomenological complaint.

14 The term “universal” is meant to indicate that the essence is universal for all members of the particular culture that possesses that essence, rather than to indicate that the essence is universal in the sense of transcending the horizon of a culture-world.

15 Gier 96.

16 Herf 53.

17 Farrenkopf 29–30.

18 For Spengler’s views on science see Swer, “The Decline of Western Science” and “Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics.”

19 Gier 95–96.

20 One might object that Spengler’s philosophy lacks an account of the first-person structure of experience such as one typically finds in transcendental or existential phenomenology. Gier, however, has suggested that one can find in Spengler an anticipation of the body-ego of later phenomenology. Gier 97.

21 Farrenkopf 30.

22 This, I would argue, suggests that Spengler, possibly following Vaihinger, operates with a fictionalist interpretation of Kantian concepts such as the thing-in-itself. See Vaihinger.

23 See for instance Ortega y Gasset.

24 Farrenkopf claims, in contrast, that “central to Spengler’s philosophy is the …  thesis that reality is dualistic.” See Farrenkopf 23. I would argue that Spengler’s statements on subject/object dichotomies explicitly rule out interpretations that attribute a metaphysical dualism to his philosophy.

25 Spengler 136. Atkinson renders “das Urgefühl der Sorge” as “the primitive feeling of Care [italics removed].” I have taken rare issue here with Atkinson’s usually faultless translation as the translation of “Urgefühl” as “primitive feeling” in the context of Spengler’s phenomenological anthropology raises the possibility of it being misattributed to a specific early stage of cultural development, either as a feeling common to primitive mankind or as a not yet developed emotional state. Spengler’s use of the prefix “Ur” here suggests strongly that it should be understood in an ontological sense as fundamental or originary, in much the same way as it operates in his term for the prime phenomenon, the Ur-symbol.

26 My interpretation does appear to run contrary to Spengler’s description of the Egyptian and Chinese cultures as cultures that exhibit care. However, I suggest, it is most unlikely that Spengler can have intended his description of these cultures to be historically or phenomenologically accurate given that they operate as fictional constructs in his world-history. His account of care in Faustian culture, however, is on my account to be understood as a phenomenologically accurate but culture-specific description.

27 Iggers 243, 245.

28 See Swer, “The Revolt Against Reason.”

29 Collingwood, “Oswald Spengler,” 318–19.

30 Spengler’s use of the concept of care as an existential structure that reveals the essential temporality of human existence is rather peculiar. His closest philosophical predecessors to employ the concept were Goethe and Kierkegaard. And yet for Goethe care denotes a solicitous concern with other individuals and political institutions, whilst for Kierkegaard it represents a subjective commitment to responsibility in moral action. There are elements of these positions in Spengler’s use of concept, and yet the understanding of care as the fundamental existential structure and its connotations of finitude and futurity appear his own. Spengler’s concept of care, at a superficial level, does appear to have similarities with that of Heidegger. For both philosophers care indicates that our fundamental way of relating to the world is not cognitive. And for both philosophers care reveals the essential temporality of human existence, and the way in which we disclose other entities and ourselves. Spengler’s related concepts of longing and dread have affinities with certain Heideggerian concepts such as those of futurity and Being-towards-death. However, Spengler’s (1918) Decline of the West precedes Heidegger’s (1927) Being and Time by almost a decade and thus it is unlikely that Spengler could have derived his ideas from Heidegger. See Reich.

31 It should be noted that both Husserl and Heidegger historicise these conditions only in their later works, with Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Heidegger’s post-Kehre writings.