RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Bowden! - 12 - Understanding Spengler

Jan. 4, 2018 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

43:21

Bowden! - 12 - Understanding Spengler

Jonathan Bowden joins Richard to discuss the historical philosophy of Oswald Spengler and his relevance for contemporary nationalists. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	Welcome to Vanguard, a podcast of radical traditionalism.
	The Vanguard Here's your host, Richard Spencer.
	Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Vanguard.
	And welcome back as well, Jonathan Bowden.
	How are you, Jonathan?
	Yes, hello.
	I'm very well.
	Thanks for having me on again.
	Quite good.
	Well, today we're going to talk about the philosophy of Oswald Spengler.
	And in these podcasts, we've talked quite a bit about philosophers who are of interest to The new right or the alternative right, white nationalist, whatever you want to call us.
	And we've talked about Nietzsche in particular, and Nietzsche is an interesting case in the sense that despite the fact that he has quite a few unfashionable ideas...
	From the standpoint of our enlightened modern age.
	Nevertheless, he's still quite popular.
	Libraries, bookstores are well-stocked with titles on Nietzsche.
	Spengler, on the other hand, who equaled or surpassed Nietzsche's popularity in Central Europe in his own time, has gone down the memory hole in a way.
	It's hard to find a book by Spengler at your local bookstore, even a large one.
	And though I think a lot of people have heard about him, they have some general notion that he was a pessimistic German or something like this, they don't really know a lot about the man and his philosophy.
	We hope we can increase the level of understanding, certainly with this discussion today.
	Jonathan, the way I wanted to start out this talk about Spangler and the philosophy of history is at a very basic level of understanding.
	And I was thinking before we started this conversation that this idea of linear history is one that is really...
	It's powerful for people.
	And it also has something to do with Christianity in a way, but it's also something that's survived well into the post-Christian West.
	And that is what I mean by linear history is what maybe could be described in just a simple phrase like, it keeps getting better all the time.
	This notion that, you know, we're the next step in history, and this history leads to greater freedom, greater liberation, greater understanding, greater technology, so on and so forth.
	And that, yes, there might be some bad things that happen along the way, but those are kind of speed bumps along this highway towards utopia or something like that.
	And I think if we look at the world from the standpoint of...
	We've had the creation of medicines.
	From, you know, the automobile to the, you know, iPhone or whatever.
	You know, obviously there's a way that things have been getting better.
	They've been slowly perfected.
	But, of course, culture and civilization, these are two very different things than technology.
	And so, Jonathan, maybe we can talk a little bit about that just to get this conversation started and to get our listeners' minds...
	The wheels turning, so to speak, about the philosophy of history is just to think about that powerful assumption that it seems that everyone in the modern West, maybe even the modern world, left and right, both have, and that is of linear history and how Spengler is really challenging that.
	So what do you think about that idea, Jonathan?
	Yes, I think that's a good way in.
	Spengler is a cosmologist of history.
	He's a botanist of history in a way.
	He sees human cultures and their attendant civilizations very much like geological strata or the morphology of plant life.
	They think of a natural cycle, even a diurnal or seasonal one.
	They have a brief flowering, they have a spring, they have a summer, they have an autumnal phase, then they have a winter of the soul.
	And then they die.
	They literally atrophy and die.
	And his belief in the death of great cultures, that cultures can be seen to come to an end, or they can lie fallow for enormously long periods prior to some renaissance or kickstart, is deeply troubling to the modern mind, which is addicted to the idea of progress and progressivism, whatever its standpoint.
	Spain's emotional register was profoundly melancholic and pessimistic.
	And he once famously, in Nun and Technique, said that optimism is cowardice.
	And there is a degree to which his view of history, which is these radial circles that overlap with each other, rather like a Van Dagen in mathematics, a science with which he is familiar, accords very much with his own view that things are cyclic and circular.
	and turn back upon themselves and cultures go through various stages which are inevitable and each stage follows from the other one and has the seeds of death in its own mouth in the sense that the thing will turn to a circle in itself.
	The culture will decline away to merely being of archival and archaeological interest.
	These are forbidding and sort of almost totalitarian insights of pessimism, which don't accord easily with the 20th century.
	If you look at a book like Neil Ferguson, It's an apocalyptic book It's a thought which in some ways is opposed to the idea that things are getting better and better.
	Yet at the same time, it doesn't feel emotionally pessimistic, despite the fact that it's dealing on the whole with pessimistic criteria.
	So Ferguson remains an optimist and a sort of bellatorist of liberal methodology.
	The belief that things can get better, even if they turn out for the worst at a particular time, which he wishes to express.
	Spengler would have no chuck with that.
	Spengler believes that cultures are sort of caged, in a way, and will wither and die on a floresce, just as they sprout up to beauty, in accordance with the rhythm, which is closer to that of biological life.
	Before we get into his organic concept of history, let's talk a little bit about his milieu, you know, where he was coming from.
	And I would like to talk about the milieu in his life in Germany at the first quarter, first half of the century.
	20th century.
	But before that, I think it's worthwhile just looking at going back a little bit to the 19th century and some of the philosophies of history which preceded Spanglers.
	And I'm thinking, of course, of Hegel and Kant, probably the two.
	Biggest figures in that philosophical school.
	So maybe you could just mention, what are some of the ways that Hegel, probably the most well-known, influenced Spengler?
	In particular, obviously Hegel had a dialectical view of history, which is...
	It's certainly more complicated than the kind of it's-getting-better-all-the-time linear view.
	But nevertheless, it was a progressive view of history.
	He actually felt that actually history was kind of coming to an end with the Prussian state and so on and so forth.
	So what do you think about, say, the influence of some of these great German idealist thinkers that came before Spengler and how that...
	Yes, I think that they obviously affected it deeply because they looked for systematic answers.
	Unlike the neo-Kantian school that said there is no plan for history and that all attempts to find a plan in history are artistic and subjective and therefore historically worthless.
	It's important to realize that for a proportion of critics Spengler has not just been an asthma, but it's been fundamentally mysterious.
	Because there are quite a few philosophical schools that believe, whether it's on the left with Cambly or it's on the right with Spengler, that it's utterly pointless to have attempts at historical analysis which are nonlinear and which seek for an answer to the conundrum of history that seeks to elucidate the things.
	and getting to answer questions about the nature of historical reality, they consider that there is no plan, there is nothing other than linear motion in the spasm of time, and that any attempt to find a historical plan which is other than the received wisdom of a work is fruitless, they would consider a work like, Mm-hmm.
	To be perfect in its way, because it takes the Roman Empire as its topic, where you have an enormous unfolding vista of historical time, and you have the idea that you have many triumphs and many disasters, but the end is partly the projection of the beginning.
	So you have a biography of a society.
	That's acceptable.
	What isn't acceptable from this school of thinking, which is the current one in academic orthodoxy at the present time, is to try and find a key philosophical agency to history, to interpret history, that history has a meaning in the way that Thomas Carlyle believed that history had a meaning in the 19th century.
	And Spain is addicted to finding a meaning in history, which pulls them outside of several of the major historical schools to begin with.
	There's also the fact that he is self-taught and was a sort of autodidact and a sort of terribly gifted guillotant, as somebody not completely kindly once said.
	And history is an area par excellence which only academics really believe that they're entitled to write.
	So in two areas, academicism and...
	The search for ontology in history, the search for teleology, the belief that there is a prospective future which can be determined, as Marx believed in a totally different way, and mapped out.
	Those lie outside of Spain's purview and yet make marginal his historical essay, his attempt at finding ultimate meaning in things in the two-volume enormous work of the decline of the West.
	Published in 1918 and 1922.
	So he draws on those primary idealists like Hegel.
	But I don't think there's much comparison, to be frank, when you get to the work, because Hegel believes that history will reach its fulcrum and its determination in the idealistic presentation of the Prussian state in history, and the sort of being in history.
	Whereas for Spengler, the Prussian state, although he wanted Germany and the Germany of his kind to dominate Europe, was just a part of the West and a part of the cycle of the West that would be doomed to decline, as all of the great civilizations, the Arab, the Eastern Chinese, the medieval, were doomed to decline in their way.
	Before we talk a little bit more about Germany and his time, actually, I think it'd be good to lay out some of the basic terms of Spengler's history.
	And he talked about a series of great or high cultures, and these included the Magian culture, which is, I guess, a Semitic culture, and the Apollonian or classical culture, and then Western.
	quintessentially Faustian in nature.
	So Jonathan, maybe you could elucidate some of these big ideas for our listeners so that they could have an idea of his organic historical sense.
	Just in particular with those three massive cults And again, we're not talking about epochs, because he's getting away from a sense of time, and he's more putting it in terms of culture and a people, a civilization.
	So maybe you could explain those basic concepts, and then also just delineate for our listeners what he means by the Magean and the Apollonian, and then finally the Faustian culture, which he felt was coming to a close.
	Yes, he thought cultures were self-enclosed and were organic and were not time-concentric, although they had a period or an expanse of time associated with them.
	He sees the Middle Eastern culture as essentially magical and somewhat sterile and introverted and flat in the culture of the desert.
	He sees Greek culture as proportioned.
	And massive in its sort of architectural and classical relief.
	He sees it as less dynamic than the Western culture, more staid, more with a fixity and a tendency towards a preternatural order and a specificity of sound.
	The Western culture, which he's most keen on, he sees it as a partly diabolical culture.
	He sees it as Faustian.
	He sees it as a mismatch and a matching of things that don't completely go together in other cultures.
	He sees it as a culture of immense restlessness and absence of an inner sense of ease and with an extraordinary desire for self-transcendence, which is a desire to change everything again and again and again, to make it new and make it work.
	And makes the Western culture the most dynamically aggressive culture on Earth.
	So is he talking about a mindset?
	I hesitate to use this term, but a collective consciousness, so to speak.
	What is he amongst the people that is expressed most fully, say, in some of the great people of civilization?
	Is that a good way to describe what he's talking about?
	Yes, it's a sort of a civilizational construct of culture permeated through and by the masses within the particular civics over time.
	It's racially based to an extent, but only partly so, because his positions are sublimated racialisms, whereby Although the Semitic largely goes with the Median and the Eastern Mediterranean largely goes with the Apollonian and the Western is made up of most of Europe and ex-Europe in the New World and
	the far regions of the world associated with Western imperial conquests and settlements and North America in particular.
	The notion that they are purely racial is not one that she accedes to.
	He has a Newton concept of race, which is that race is important because breeding is the basis of everything, but it's too rudimentary for reasons of analysis.
	For analysis, you have to look at the culture and the civics which are created by specific races and intermingled the variants of races over time.
	Pure biology is not enough to describe man's ascent, if indeed it has been an ascent, rather than a withering to death of prior and acknowledged cultures of whatever beauty.
	So Spengler's always an unhappy bedfellow for various people, because he never fits in with people's preconditions and prior suppositions.
	There'll always be a tension.
	Even with the racialist right with Spain though, as there is with the left over his view, pessimistic and non-materialist views of history, his intuitionism, his opening to the subjective element in culture, his belief in the wintering of the soul of a culture and its partial decline over time, his obsession with the conduct of decadence.
	All of these would not have rendered him attractive to a left-wing mind at all.
	But at the same time, the liberal progressive sees little in him, the man of the centre, because he's too morbid, too mordant and pessimistic, too professorial, and too linked to a prior theory which cuts against their ingrained optimism and feeling that, as you said at the beginning of his tour, that things are getting better and better.
	Jonathan, why don't you tell us a little bit about this organic story of Western or Faustian culture and its origins after the collapse of the Roman Empire and then how he felt that it was declining and ending in his own lifetime.
	So maybe you could just give us some outlines of Faustine culture's birth and flowering and then decline.
	What was he talking about?
	And obviously, you know, in order to talk about these things, you have to paint in really broad strokes.
	Well, I think he thinks, after the catch of the Roman Empire, I think he thinks that The classical world comes to an end, and the medieval world, as such, begins.
	But the medieval world is a static and enclosed civilization, which is a magical one, based upon sort of totem and taboo, and based upon a stiff and regulated cosmology that is only unsettled by the return of classical wisdom in what becomes the proto-Renaissance.
	And then the Renaissance.
	And the Renaissance inflames the entire civilization mentally and culturally and sends an enormous coursing sort of torrent of energy through it, which leads to an unnapping and an unfolding of new visions and new vistas,
	whereby we see the Middle Ages replaced by a post-medieval Europe that looks back to the classical period, but based upon the stolidity and the solidity and the transcendental maddianship of the Middle Ages.
	And it's the Renaissance and the scientific methodology that gives rise to it, which is the return to a particular intellectual inheritance of the Greek.
	It's a diabolical pact element.
	In the Western cosmos, this is the idea that Faust will literally sell his soul to Mephistopheles for knowledge.
	He will sell his soul for power over given things, for the power of magic almost, in the interpretation of physical reality, and his ability to hold swell over The physical world with which the sciences are concerned.
	And Western man begins a transmutation of everything in life, of every science, of every art, of all forms of economic dealing, all forms of culture and civilizational intent are recalibrated and cast anew through this prism of Christian fire.
	And this enables the West to set out, as the Athenians had once done, in a restricted Grecian compass, to conquer much of the known world and to subdue it to their own restless tasking and desire for self-overcoming at every possible instant.
	So the West is seen as in some ways the culture of the Superman, in Nietzschean terms, reaching out across the world.
	Reshaping other cultures, interacting with them in often destructive, very creative ways to release more energy, to enhance more transcendence, to enhance more creativity, to lead to more thirsty impacts and bargains, and then to become even more enraptured of its own colossal strength and vigour by importing even more energy.
	through even greater and deeper and more resonantial fast impacts until the thing peters on the brink of absurdity to a degree because the West becomes so unamount of its own model that it can't see that it's beginning like all cultures to engage upon ineffable decline.
	What creates the decline?
	What leads to decadence?
	What turns self-overcoming, continual self-overcoming, into decadence?
	Probably repetition.
	And probably the fact that he believes that everything is pre-programmed like a computer chip to decay over time.
	You can only go to the well so often.
	and probably the spread of democratic, liberal humanist and materialist ideas and the disjunction between the Enlightenment and the Renaissance.
	The Renaissance is seen by most Enlightenment as precursor of the Enlightenment, but who doubtless sees the Enlightenment as the giving way of the Faustian bargain to decadents who untrammeled ideas about the rule of the majority
	Which the people who put them forward, he believes, must know are absurd, because the majority of men can never decide any question of any importance amongst themselves.
	The extension of the women would be given the vote and would be allowed into the function hall of the male, the liberal humanism that would increasingly...
	Refuse to distinguish between patterns of being and hierarchies in nature as they express themselves in society.
	So really, it's the Enlightenment and its definition of the West which is necessary.
	Because in my reading of his Cadence of History is that the decline is necessary and therefore is inborn.
	And the forces which are there, rather like illness and death in the individual, are there to permit change and renewal in the future and the ending of a cycle which is natural, as it is in the biological world.
	So he doesn't see death as a disaster.
	He sees it as a necessity.
	So are we still living in an enlightened age?
	In a way that that was the turning point and we're kind of the last dregs of...
	of the Enlightenment?
	You could interpret it in that way, although, of course, at the end of the Kahn and the West, in the second volume, he preaches a new Caesarism, that there will be a democratic Caesarism.
	Which, of course, came to be true throughout the first half, or the latter third of the first quadrant of the 20th century.
	His view that democratic niceties would be replaced by a much more Machiavellian and realistic politics, a politics of ruthless realpolitik, associated, even though he never advocated it, with fascism, although some of his political sayings are close to that of a fascistic or fascistic conservative.
	That's why, again, he falls between two camps.
	He's not fascistic enough for those people who are enamoured of those governments, movements and regimes at a particular time.
	Nor is he conservative enough not to be associated with them, at least through the glamour of nostalgia.
	So he's too quasi-fascistic for many conservatives, particularly now.
	But he's also too conservative for thoroughgoing, fascistic types.
	And that was his attitude, of course, to one of the most notorious governments in the Western world, which you lived through the early stages of.
	Right.
	Actually, we talked about that, and actually the Nazi regime banned his book, The Hour of Decision, which, again...
	I'm sure in most of the modern mind, they would probably just lump someone like Schwengler on in there with Hitler.
	Evil right-wingers.
	But obviously, that's certainly not the way they saw it at the time.
	So maybe you could put a little more pressure on this, because this is an interesting issue of Spengler's life in an age which could be even described as democratic Caesar.
	Caesarism, that is one based on, say, populism, maybe even popular sovereignty, but then one that is harsh and brutal in many ways, enamored with realpolitik and so on and so forth.
	So I think it's a very interesting topic of Spengler's own life.
	Yes.
	There's always been a liberal qualm here as to why he didn't support the Nazi regime.
	He did vote for Hitler.
	It was against Hindenburg in the presidential election, which, of course, Hitler lost.
	Hindenburg retains presidency until he died in office.
	And then it was after the clash out and it was just rolled up.
	And he became one of Hitler's many officers as he became supreme leader of all elements of the state.
	And the officer, president and chancellor was amalgamated into that of the leader figure.
	He also put a swastika outside his lodging windows once to annoy the neighbours with his sister, saying that he unfilled it that one should always be prepared to pay the price for annoying people.
	But at the same time, he thought of them as irretrievably vulgar.
	And without high culture, very much James Young's snobbish intellectual attitude towards them.
	He wasn't so much worried about the social origins of many of them, which is what convulsed the German old right, in which Spender would have been more comfortable.
	But he was concerned about their cultural ignorance as far as he was concerned, and the greatness and glory of what it was to be German.
	Mm-hmm.
	in some ways he's too spare and too stark and too elitist to figure.
	For him, just to make mouth-watering speeches about Germany and German identity entirely begins it.
	What do you mean by Germany?
	What do you mean by German cultural identity?
	Unless you're highly educated, civilised, and knowledgeable about what it means to be German or to be European in extensa, these political remarks are slightly meaningless.
	He's won intervention into politics when he was attempting to get the power for a German on Lugendorf's job.
	He didn't really go anywhere because he knew practical politics.
	As a man of the study, was rather probably overly conspiratorial and sort of overly verified.
	Like a lot of academic intellectuals, he didn't make a good politician.
	But at the same time, although he despised the "buy my republic" in regard to it as an unnecessary appendage to the glory of the German Empire which had preceded it, he was actually...
	not particularly enamoured of the Germans, partly because he believed they were too hostile to every European peoples when he believed that the coming battles were civilizational and there should be alliances with other European nation states against the hordes of Asia and Africa and the Far East that would be the real enemies in the future.
	So he had an almost Nietzschean, good European sense, or one that was almost similar to maybe even Lothrop Stoddard and some other people in that general time period.
	That's right.
	He sort of, to a leftist mind, he's almost as right as Hitler, but he doesn't agree with his views.
	That's the sort of...
	Just as an enormous number of Latin intellectuals, of course, didn't agree with Stalin.
	So there's a degree to which he also didn't entirely agree with the aggressive sort of technological features in Third Reich, which was romantic and realist and agrarian at one level,
	and yet embraced motorways and rockets and high technology as another, because he believed that technology had become a part of enslavement of the modern man, very much preferring Heidegger's thinking in this regard.
	Yes.
	And also, of course, he didn't share the anti-Semitism either particularly.
	While in no sense being philo-Semitic about Nietzsche, he didn't share the crude, Jew-baiting, beer-hall attitudes that swirled around the German rise, which were not civilizationally of the way he perceived reality because he didn't view the world conspiratorially or metaphysically conspiratorially.
	He viewed the world in terms of these great overarching abstractions of cultural civilizations of which Germany was only a part.
	He also was And rather myopic optimism of that regime, which was very shrill, particularly on its own behalf.
	So, Jonathan, what kind of ideas did Spengler have for the future?
	And did he see the rise of a new civilization?
	You know, I was actually, this past weekend, I attended the American Renaissance Conference.
	Dr. Richard Lin was there, and he gave a very enjoyable and informative talk about eugenics, actually.
	But he ended by talking about the world of the 21st and probably 22nd, maybe 23rd century being that of the East and China in particular.
	Did Spengler talk about any of this, or did he believe that a new civilization would arise, that maybe an Oriental civilization might have a new rebirth?
	Or did he talk about this, or maybe you could even speculate on it yourself?
	Yes, he didn't really think of it.
	The death knell of another present West who was exhausted at the end of the Great War.
	His thesis was misunderstood.
	The tens of thousands of copies that made him from a penniless sort of living in gentile poverty intellectual into a sort of major cultural figure throughout Germany and the West was based on a misnomer.
	The massive cultured people Of course, we're talking yourselves and tens and hundreds of thousands, not the millions.
	He bought his enormous book and some of the others, and he made him moderately wealthy as a consequence and able to live independently.
	They interpreted the book as an explanation for Germany's defeat in the First World War.
	And because it basically put it into world historical and cosmological terms, it exominated Germany from a personal defeat.
	It also seemed so scholarly and sort of well-wrought and was not propagandistic.
	It was not the scub in the back of mythology.
	It was not the fact that we were being let down by forces at home.
	More was it the normative liberal view that they just run out of men, run out of material, run out of resources, and been defeated in that way.
	So people's flock to his port really on a misnomer because what he was saying was that Germany's defeat was part of a pattern of defeats that were going on within the civilization at a particular time.
	He posited the idea that these defeats could be arrested for a time by democratic seizes and various forms of populism for which he had a distaste, actually, for which he believed to be necessary.
	at this time in the cycle.
	And in Manning Technics, for example, there's a quite sort of ruthless extolling of the virtues of some of these sorts of regimes up to a point.
	Hmm.
	And so his belief is that the West would continue to decline throughout the 20th century.
	And one of Spaniel's offshoots, of course, is the doctrine of the clash of civilizations.
	Which is made famous by that book, The Gash of Civilizations.
	Right, by Samuel Huntington, yeah.
	Yeah, it's written about what, 15 years ago now?
	Or so, yeah.
	Now, that's a Spenglerian thesis, even though he may not like to admit to be influenced by Spengler, some people don't choose to.
	You have all sorts of people like the Beats and the left, or metacultural left, let's put it that way, like Barrows and Ginsburg and Kerouac, who openly admit to being strongly influenced by Spengler.
	But other people are very reluctant to even admit the fact that he's come anywhere near...
	Nevertheless, the idea that other civilizations will rise, particularly in the Far East, and will challenge the West's hegemony later in the last century...
	Don't forget he died in 1936, is indisputable from the nature of his work.
	But he doesn't go on to specify it very much.
	He deals with the second volume of the decline of the West.
	It basically closes on the turnaround of the democratic socialism and the fact that the West is nevertheless going into an autumnal and wintery stage and leads it at that.
	But lots of people, of course, take up the mantle.
	Jocky's views are strongly Spenglerian, even though he fills in Jock Spengler's work by essentially giving it a National Socialist Register.
	In some ways, Jocky is a Nazi-fied Spengler, because Spengler was never a whole hogger, as far as they were concerned.
	And actually had a different viewpoint.
	That's why Jocky's book tends to be two books in one.
	80% of it is a Spenglerian exercise.
	And then at the end, the 20%, when he basically adopts a sort of fourth-right, third-right viewpoint, which is he's own grafting onto the Spenglerian architecture of a sort of neo-national socialist.
	One question that was coming to my mind was, we were witnessing, experiencing the winter of Faustian Western culture.
	Do you think that if there were a rebirth amongst European peoples?
	That it would be something different than Faustian culture?
	I mean, would it be a kind of revival of the West as we've known it?
	Or would there actually be a different paradigm that would be adopted by European peoples?
	Well, that's very broad.
	I personally think that if there was to be a revival, it probably has to be more classical than anything else.
	It has to be a sort of a classicism and has to be a return to the verities of the Greco-Roman world as at least a cultural basis and a starting point of thinking because that provides you with a pre-Christian as well as a post-Christian dynamic.
	It's rational.
	All of Western high culture bears the Hellenic stamp upon it, filtered through Rome and Romans hold the empire, Christianized and Germanicized that came after it.
	And in some ways, it's a common appeal to the inner tensions in Western man that can be resolved, classically.
	So that's the inner regions for Greece, of course, the Benoit's outfit, calling itself 'The Drink to Research'.
	...into the origins of Indo-European civilisation and culture.
	They want to go back to Greece with modern technology and with the hallmark of the New West.
	And they want a new right rather than an old right to carry that project forward.
	Even though at least five currents of the new right now are separated out even from the Denmark.
	Right.
	That's certainly true.
	Well, Jonathan, this has been a fascinating discussion, and I'm just going to put a bookmark in it because I think we could return to Spangler later on.
	As with so many of our podcasts, we only scratched the surface on these ideas, and I'm sure I speak for a lot of the listeners.
	Thank you very much.

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