Spengler gives us Big Ideas. They are broad, sweeping, and breath-taking. He’s probably wrong in particulars, and I cringe over his use of Goethe at times, but his overall project is awe-inspiring.
Crucial to his argument is the distinction between Culture and Civilization. Culture is the organic life of a people. Civilization is the outer husk. Moreover, Spengler avoids isolating one moment of Western history and culture and calling that moment “universal man” to which we apply to the rest of humanity. He isn’t saying all cultures and values are relative. Rather, it doesn’t make any sense to evaluate aboriginal man by the standard of Bach.
Spengler explores “world-as-history” and sees history under the category of “becoming.” When we read history, we implicitly think in static terms and universals. There is a place for that, but since history is necessarily unfolding, it makes more sense to see it under the category of “becoming.” To do this, Spengler looks for “morphological relationships” that bind the forms of culture together.
Civilization is not bad, per se. It is the historical destiny of a culture. It manifests what happens to a culture when life is drained from it. In that sense, it is a very important heuristic device. In its final manifestation, a Civilization has a “world-city” as its focal point (32). A world-city is focused on money, rather than on the organic bonds of tradition. It doesn’t have a “folk,” but only a faceless mass of people. Its power is the money-spirit.
The key term for all of this is “megapolitan.”
Spengler mentions it in passing, but there is a connection between Civilization and Empire. “Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated” (36). You have to expand to acquire new markets.
Culture has gymnastics (in the old sense) and tournaments; civilization has professional sports
Cecil Rhodes is the archetype for the New Civilization Man (37).
Chapter 2: The Meaning of Numbers
Before discussing numbers, Spengler advances the claim that the soul is to the possible what the world is to the actual (54). The soul is something we intuit, not rationally analyze. Life in the world, then, is “the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished” (54).
Number
“Number is the symbol of causal necessity” (56). Spengler needs this claim to make his distinction between mechanized views of nature and history, which is “the aggregate of that which has no relation to mathematics” (57).
There is a better way to state his claim. One’s views on number and mathematics are the outward expressions, some of them anyway, of the style of the culture. Spengler sees this in Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples. The latter is Euclidian. The former anticipates concepts of infinity.
Classical mathematics was perceptible to the senses (63). Number is measure. As he notes on the classical statue, “here every essential and important element of Being, its whole rhythm, is exhaustively rendered by surfaces, dimensions and the sensuous relations of the parts.” Extension, then, is a function of space and it makes things “appear.”
Here is the problem: if number is correlative with Being and measurement, then what does one do with irrational numbers? These magnitudes “can never be presented in a straight line” (65).
Cultures that are open to non-Euclidian geometry do not have this problem. Here a word of caution is in order: Spengler is not saying the builders of Gothic cathedrals knew non-Euclidian geometry. Rather, they were no longer bound by older intuitions. For them, “numbers are images of perfectly desensualized understanding, of pure thought, and contain abstract validity within themselves” (67).
Descartes’ geometry replaced lengths with positions, although not doing away with lengths entirely. What it allowed him was a purely spatial, and not material, understanding of position (74).
Number is no longer understood as magnitude, but as relation and function. One can now speak of an infinitesimal calculus, negative numbers, and imaginary numbers–all of which were impossible on the older Classical model. “Numbers are capable of plastic embodiment” and are “cut” along a unidimensional continuum” (77).
Apollonian soul: tied down with limits of physical space (83).
Western, Gothic Man: “an unrestrained, strong, willed far-ranging soul, and its chosen badge is pure, imperceptible, unlimited space” (81).
Function and Limit
The limit, on the new understanding, is an operation and relation, not a state of being (86). Spengler goes so far to say that the limit of an aggregate represents “an aggregate of lower potentiality” (89 n1).
