Evola and Italian Philosophy, 1925–49: Three Biographical and Bibliographical Essays

Evola and Italian Philosophy, 1925–49: Three Biographical and Bibliographical Essays

by Gianfranco de Turris, Stefano Arcella & Alessandro Barbera

Translation by Fergus Cullen

The following essays all appeared in Vouloir 119–121 (1996), the supplement to the revue Orientations, edited by Robert Steuckers. They centre on Julius Evola’s relations with the two major figures of Italian philosophy in the interwar period.

In “Evola, ultime tabou?” (pp. 1–3), Gianfranco de Turris asks if the rehabilitation enjoyed by such philosophers as Giovanni Gentile, previously denounced as Fascist, might be afforded to Evola. He briefly sketches the case in his favour: unlike the marginal crank of post-War imagination, Evola seems to have maintained relations with such figures of the first rank as Gentile and Benedetto Croce. In “Gentile/Evola: une liaison ami/ennemi…” (pp. 3–5) Stefano Arcella examines Evola’s fertile collaboration with Gentile and Ugo Spirito on the Enciclopedia Italiana. And in “Quand Benedetto Croce ‘sponsorisait’ Evola” (pp. 5–7) Alessandro Barbera investigates the Croce connection, looking in some detail at the correspondence between Evola, Croce, and the publisher Laterza.

French originals:

1—http://www.archiveseroe.eu/evola-a48672110

2—http://www.archiveseroe.eu/gentile-a126198308

3—http://www.archiveseroe.eu/croce-a126196870

PDF of this translation:

https://www.academia.edu/42191919/Evola_and_Italian_Philo...

Gianfranco de Turris

Evola: the Last taboo?

by Gianfranco de Turris

We will surely remember 1994 better than 1984, which Orwell immortalised by writing his celebrated apocalyptic book predicting an ultra-totalitarian world in which we all would have been irredeemably crushed. We will not remember it solely for the political event of 27 March in Italy, but above all for the consequences that this “reversal” might (I insist on the conditional!) have in the cultural sphere. Whatever one may thing of the victory of Berlusconi and his allies, it has already had a first result: the organisation of a colloquium dedicated to the personality of Giovanni Gentile; it was held in Rome on 20 and 21 May 1994 on the initiative of the leftist municipal council (which does honour to the Italian left, as does the other colloquium it dedicated to Nietzsche). We remember he whom we always defined as the “philosopher of Fascism,” fifty years after his death, when he was assassinated by a commando of communist partisans in Florence on 15 April 1944. After having beaten a long and sinuous intellectual course, many post-Marxist philosophers, such as Colletti, Marramao and Cacciari, claimed him for an authentic figure of the left, at least in a decent part of his work.

So Gentile recovers all his dignity for the “official” culture in Italy: of course, this concerns first of all Gentile the philosopher, and not the man and political militant. All the same, his rehabilitation as a philosopher marks a step forward in the liberation of spirits. So the last taboo for Italian intellectuals remains Julius Evola, as Pierluigi Battista nicely put it in the columns of Tuttolibri. Now, this year we also commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Evola’s death (11 June 1974). For Gentile, Italian official culture has at last come to accept, after a half-century and only some years before the year 2000, the position and importance of the “actualist” and Fascist philosopher. For Evola, on the contrary, a silence is always held, even is, imperceptibly, one feels that something is in the process of changing.

Luciferian Dilettante

Evola, in official culture, is thrown from one extreme to the other: on the one hand, he’s a demon, the Devil, an almost Luciferian personage, an ultra-racist to whom salvation is never to be granted; on the other, he’s culture’s sock-puppet, the inexact dilettante, unscientific and superficial, a clown of esotericism, “il Divino Otelma.” In interesting ourselves in him, we then risk toppling into the laughable, unless a more authorised voice begins to speak of him.

So there is still much work to be done on Evola, whether it be as a thinker of multiple interests, as an organiser of colloquia and promoter of intellectual initiatives between the Wars, as a man of culture and innumerable contacts, who received many suggestions from his contemporaries and gave in his turn.

During the twenty years that have passed since his death, few things have been done on his work and person in Italy; and these were the work of a small number of those who had always referred to Evola. We’ve found neither the time nor the manpower. It’s a bitter truth; but it’s so. It suffices to consider archival research: to reconstitute the facts and ideas, to fill in the “voids” in the life and in the evolution of Evolian thought, we need the documents; and these are still not all archived. The documents exist: it suffices to go and search where one thinks they might be found…

For example, we don’t have access to the complete documentation on the relations between Evola and the Italian philosophical world of the ’20s and ’30s: Croce, Gentile, Spirito, Tilgher… We only finally know what Evola recounts of himself in his “spiritual autobiography,” The Path of Cinnabar. Ultimately, we know what we can deduce of his positions on diverse philosophical systems and on what we surmise intuitively. In general, we only know the views and opinions on Evola of the historians and academics who have especially studied that period of Italian culture: and they say that Evola was an isolated, marginal figure; that his ideas were not taken into consideration; that he was a singular, if not folkloric, figure. But do these opinions really correspond to reality?

We believe that we can today affirm that things were not so simple: that Evola was more relevant in his epoch than we’ve believed him to be. And we affirm this on the basis of a series of indications, hidden until today. The Roman weekly L’Italia settimanale is cataloguing these indications for the first time in a special supplement, in the hope of provoking debate and research.

Sponsored by Croce?

Evola maintained far more complex relations with Croce and Gentile that we’ve believed for many decades. Can we imagine an Evola “sponsored” by Croce? An Evola, collaborator with the Enciclopedia Italiana, patronised by the Mussolinian regime and directed by Gentile? An Evola close to Adriano Tilgher? An Evola in direct contact with Ugo Spirito? We can now divine that these relations were pursued more than we imagined them; but we have neither formal proofs nor the documents that definitively attest to them. The “isolated figure” was not, ultimately, isolated; the marginalised personage, as well, was not marginalised as we wished to say; the intellectual who, under Fascism, had amounted to not much, or missed out on everything, had been, ultimately, of more impact that we’d thought him. I think that we must seek out and recognise our fault: that of not having contemplated this sooner, and having given a truncated picture of Evola; with a complete vision of Evolian words and deeds, we may be able to refute many commonplaces. This won’t be possible unless the Croce Archives at Naples and the Gentile Foundation at Rome agree to let us consult the documents they hold and that concern the relations of Croce and Gentile with Evola.

Better late than never. The future will tell, after our work is done, whether Evola will always be, for progressivist culture, a taboo, will be the Devil, a clown…

Stefano Arcella

Gentile and Evola: Friends and Enemies

by Stefano Arcella

The relations between Evola and Gentile have always been seen from the perspective of conflict, from the perspective of profound differences between the respective philosophical orientations of the two men. Evola, in his speculative period (1923–7), elaborated a conception of the absolute individual, representing a decisive overcoming of idealist philosophy in all its multiple formulations—notably those of Croce’s idealism and Gentile’s actualism. Evola, in reaching the end of his speculations, already approached the threshold of tradition, understood and perceived as openness to transcendence, and towards esotericism (as an experimental method for the knowledge and realisation of the self). His speculative period had thus been a necessary step on his path towards Tradition.

For all that, in the history of the relations between these two thinkers, there is an element that has remained utterly unknown before now: if we make ourselves aware of it, we acquire a clearer, more direct and more complete vision of the bond that united these two men—enemies to all appearances. This element is the correspondence between Evola and Gentile, which we can now consule, thanks to the courtesy the Fondazione Gentile has shown. This correspondence dates to the years 1927–9, to the time during which Evola directed the revue Ur, a publication aimed at working out a science of the Self, and which was subsequently titled a “revue of esoteric science.”

It was at this time that Gentile, with his collaborators, prepared a work of great scientific importance: the Enciclopedia Italiana, of which he was the first director. The first volume of this gargantuan work, commissioned by the Mussolinian regime, was produced in 1929. The following tomes appeared quarterly.

The most significant letter, at least from an historico-cultural perspective, is that sent by Evola to Gentile on 2 May 1928 (the year in which Imperialismo pagano was published). This letter is on paper with the letterhead of the revue Ur; it thanks Gentile heartily for having acted upon his wish to collaborate on the Enciclopedia Italiana; and Evola, in what follows, makes reference to his friend Ugo Spirito regarding the areas that might fall within his expertise.

This collaboration is confirmed in a letter of 17 May 1929, in which Evola reminds Gentile that the latter entrusted the writing of certain entries to Ugo Spirito, who in turn entrusted them to him. In this letter, Evola doesn’t specify precisely which entries are concerned, which makes our researches more difficult. Currently, we have identified with only one entry with certitude, relating to the term “Atanor,” signed with the initials “G.E.” (Giulio Evola).

These points can be verified in the volume Enciclopedia Italiana: Come e da chi è stata fatta, published under the auspices of the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana in Milan in 1947. Evola is mentioned in the list of collaborators (Evola, Giulio, p. 182); and also mentioned are the initials which he used to sign the entries of his expertise (G. Ev.), as well as the specialism in which his expertise was incorporated: “occultism.” This term designates the specialisation of the Traditionalist thinker, and not an entry in the Encyclopaedia. Furthermore, the citations, which this little introductory volume indicates beside the matter treated, suggest the volume on which Evola collaborated especially: it was vol. V, published in 1930, whose first entry was “Assi,” and last “Balso.”

Currently, we seek to identify precisely the notes prepared by Evola himself for this volume. We account for the fact that a good number of entries weren’t signed, and that the preparatory material for the Encyclopaedia must constantly be recategorised and put in order under the auspices of the Archivio Storico dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, because these masses of documents were dispersed in the course of the Second World War. Indeed, one part of the documentation had been transferred to Bergamo under the Social Republic.

Another element lets us verify Evola’s participation in this work of broad scope: Ugo Spirito mentions the name Evola in a text of 1947 among the writers of the Encyclopaedia in the domains of philosophy, economy and law. Identical indications are found in vol. V of 1930.

On the basis of his data, further considerations are in order. The fact that Evola wrote to Gentile on paper with the Ur letterhead, on 2 May 1928, is not random.

Evola was not a man who acted at random, above all when he might be put in contact with a philosopher of Gentile’s standing, a figure of the first rank in the Italian cultural landscape of the era. Evola then didn’t present himself to the theoretician of actualism in a personal capacity, but as the representative of a cultural thread which found its expression in Ur, the revue of which he was the director. Evola hereby attempted to formalise esoteric studies and sciences within the bounds of the dominant culture, at the historical moment at which Mussolinian Fascism triumphed. This purpose is divined immediately when one knows that the discipline attributed especially to Evola in the Encyclopaedia was “occultism.”

Giovanni Gentile

Gentile then accepts Evola’s collaboration, which represents, in fact, an avowed recognition of the qualifications of the theoretician of the absolute individual, as well as an indication of the attention given by Gentile to the themes treated in Ur, beyond the convictions that oppose one man to the other, and the irreducible differences of a philosophical order that separate them. Evola’s collaboration on the Encyclopaedia directed by Gentile proves that the latter counted him among the first rank of scientific minds, the cultural prestige of which was incontestable in the Italy of that epoch. From these epistolary exchanges between Evola and Gentile, we can deduce, today, a lesson which the two philosophers bequeath us in concert: they both show themselves capable of harmoniously integrating coherences to which they are strangers—coherences which contradict their own principles—which attests to an openness of spirit and a propensity for dialogue; to fertile confrontation and to collaboration, even and above all with those who express a marked otherness in character and ideas. Coherence is a positive force: it is not the rigidity of him who shuts himself up in sterile isolation. A fair play upon which it suits to meditate at this moment, at which some shout their heads off for a new inquisition.

For fifty years, we have witnessed an uncritical, misguided and unfounded demonization of our two thinkers; we’ve observed a gulf of incomprehension, of barriers which, happily, we might begin to break today, in view of the processes of transformation at work in the world of culture. All the same, the degradation of cultural debate in the aftermath of anti-fascism or party spirit is an unhappy reality of our era. To reverse the trend, it suits to return the spotlight on these bonds between Evola and Gentile—between two philosophers belonging to entirely different and opposite schools—in order to launch a debate at the Italian national level; to re-examine the roots of our recent history; to recuperate what has been unjustly stifled since 1945 and scrubbed from our consciousness in a burning fever of damnatio memoriae.

In conclusion, besides the path that the consultation of the Laterza archives offers us to explore the relations between Croce and Evola, we would also like to consult the letters of Croce; but alas, the Croce Archives have told us in so many words that “those letters are not consultable.” These are politics diametrically opposed to those practiced by the Fondazione Gentile, which itself permits one to consult, without difficulty, the letters of which I’ve informed you.

Alessandro Barbero

When Benedetto Croce “Sponsored” Evola

by Alessandro Barbero

Julius Evola and Benedetto Croce. In appearance, these two thinkers are very distant from one another. That said, for a certain period of their coexistence, they were in contact. And it wasn’t an ephemeral episode, but a link of long standing, lasting for almost a decade, from 1925 to 1933. To be more precise, we should say that Croce, in this relation, played the part of “protector,” and Evola the role of “protégé.” This relation began when Evola entered the prestigious Areopagus of authors at the publisher Laterza of Bari.

In the ’30s, Evola published many works with Laterza, which have been reissued post-War. Now, today, we still don’t know the details of these links within the publisher. In fact, two researchers, Daniela Coli and Marco Rossi, have already furnished us in the past with intelligence on the triangular relation between Evola, Croce and the publisher Laterza. Daniela Coli approached the question in a work published ten years ago with Il Mulino (Croce, Laterza e la cultura europea, 1983). Marco Rossi, for his part, raised the question in a series of articles dedicated to the cultural itinerary of Julius Evola in the ’30s, and published in Renzo de Felice’s review Storia contemporanea (6, December 1991). In his autobiography, The Cinnabar Path (Scheiwiller, 1963), Evola evokes the relations he maintained with Croce, but tells us very little, ultimately: far less, in any case, than we can divine today. Evola wrote that Croce, in a letter, did him the honour of appraising one of his books: “Well ordered, and underpinned by reasoning quite exact.” And Evola adds that he knew Croce well, personally. The inquest leads us straight to the archives of the publishers at Bari, currently deposited at the State archives of that town, which might consent to furnish us with far more detailed indications as to the relations having united these two men.

The first of Evola’s letters that we find in Laterza’s house archives isn’t dated, but must trace to the end of June 1925. In this missive, the Traditionalist thinker replies to a preceding negative response, and pleads for the publication of his Teoria dell’individuo assoluto. He writes:

It is assuredly not a happy situation in which I find myself, I, the author, obliged to insist and to struggle for your attention on the serious character and interest of this work: I believe that the recommendation of Mr. Croce is a sufficient guarantee to prove it.

Theory of the Absolute Individual

The liberal philosopher’s interest is also confirmed in a letter addressed by Laterza to Giovanni Preziosi, send on 4 June of the same year. The publisher writes: “I have had on my desk for more than twenty hours the notes that Mr. Croce sent me concerning J. Evola’s book, Teoria dell’individuo assoluto; and he recommends its publication.” In fact, Croce visited Bari around 15 May; and it was on this occasion that he transmitted his notes to Giovanni Laterza. But the book was published by Bocca in 1927. That was the first intervention, of a long series, by the philosopher in Evola’s favour.

Some years later, Evola returned to knock at the door of the Bari publisher, in order to promote another of his works. In a letter sent on 23 July 1928, the Traditionalist proposed to Laterza the publication of a work on alchemical Hermeticism. On this occasion, he reminded Laterza of the Croce’s intercession on behalf of his work of a philosophical nature. This time once more, Laterza responded in the negative. Two years passed before Evola reoffered the book, having on this occasion obtained, for the second time, Croce’s support. On 13 May 1930, Evola wrote: “Senator Benedetto Croce communicated to me that you do not envisage, in principle, the possibility of publishing one of my works on the Hermetic tradition in your collection of esoteric works.” But this time, Laterza accepted Evola’s request without opposition. In the correspondence of that era between Croce and Laterza that one finds in the archives, there are no references to this book of Evola’s. This is why we may suppose that they had spoken of it in person at Croce’s house in Naples, where Giovanni Laterza has in fact stayed some days previous. In conclusion, five years after his first intervention, Croce succeeded finally in getting Evola into Laterza’s catalogue.

The third expression of interest on the part of Croce probably originated in Naples, and concerns the reedition of Cesare della Riviera’s book, Il mondo magico degli Heroi. Of the dialogues relative to this reedition, we find a first letter of 20 January 1932, in which Laterza complains to Evola of having failed to find notes on this book. A day later, Evola responds and asks that he be procured a copy of the original second edition, that he might cast an eye over it. Meanwhile, on 23 January, Croce wrote to Laterza:

I have seen in the shelves of the Biblioteca Nazionale that book of Riviera’s on magic; it’s a lovely example of what I believe to be the first edition of Mantova, 1603. It must be reissued, with dedication and preface.

The book ended up being published with a preface by Evola and his modernised transcription. A reading of the correspondence permits us to admit the following hypothesis: Croce had suggested to Laterza to entrust this work to Evola. The latter, in a letter to Laterza dated 11 February, gave his view and judged that “the thing was more boring that I’d thought it would be.”

The Anthology of Bachofen’s Writings

The fourth attempt, which was not welcomed, concerned a translation of selected writings by Bachofen. In a letter of 7 April 1933, to Laterza, Evola wrote:

With Senator Croce, we once mentioned the interest which might receive a translation of passages selected from Bachofen, a philosopher of myth much in vogue today in Germany. If this thing interests you (it might eventually join the “Modern Culture” series), I can tell you what it concerns, taking into account the opinion of Senator Croce.

In fact, Croce was preoccupied by Bachofen’s theses, as a series of articles from 1923 demonstrates. On 12 April, Laterza consults the philosopher: “Evola wrote me that you had spoken of a volume that would compile passages selected from Bachofen. Is it a project that we ought to take into consideration?” In Croce’s response, dated the following day, there is no reference to this project; but we ought to account for one fact: the letter has not been conserved in its original form.

Benedetto Croce

Evola, in any case, had not rejected the idea of producing this anthology of Bachofen’s writings. In a letter of 2 May, he announces that he proposes “to write to Senator Croce, that he might remind him of to what he had alluded” in a conversation between the two. In a second letter, dated to 23, Evola asked of Laterza if he in turn had asked the opinion of Croce, while confirming that he’d written to the philosopher. Two days later, Laterza declares not “to have asked Croce for his opinion” regarding the translation, because, he adds, “he fears lest he approve of it.” This is clearly a deceit. In fact, Laterza had asked the opinion of Croce; but we still don’t know what this opinion was, nor what had been decided. The anthology of selected writings of Bachofen was finally produced, many years later, in 1949, by Bocca. From 1933, the links between Evola and Croce seem to come to an end, at least from what the Laterza house archives permit us to include.

To find the trace of a reconciliation, we must refer ourselves to the post-War period, when Croce and Evola almost met once more in the world of publishing, but without the Traditionalist thinker noticing. In 1948, on 10 December, Evola proposed to Franco Laterza, who had just succeeded his father, to publish a translation of a book by Robert Reininger, Nietzsche e il senso de la vita. After having received the text, on 17 February, Laterza wrote to Alda Croce, the daughter of the philosopher: “I enclose to you a manuscript on Nietzsche, translated by Evola. It seems to me a good work; might you see if we can include it in the ‘Library of Modern Culture’?” On 27 of the same month, the philosopher responds. Croce considers that the operation might be possible; but he provides a few reservations all the same. He postpones his decision till Alda’s return, who was a few days in Palermo. The final decision was taken in Naples, around the 23 March 1949, in the presence of Franco Laterza. The opinion of Croce is negative, seemingly under the influence of his daughter Alda. On 1 April, Laterza confirms to Evola that “the book was much appreciated [without specifying by whom] on account of its quality,” but that, for reasons of “expediency,” it had been decided not to publish it. The translation appeared much later, in 1971, with Volpe.

This refusal to publish puzzled Evola, who didn’t know the real whys and wherefores. A year later, in some letters, returning the issue to the table, Evola raised the hypothesis of a “purge.” This insinuation irritated Laterza. Following this controversy, relations between the writer and the publisher cooled. In the final analysis, we can conclude that Evola was introduced to Laterza thanks to Croce’s interest in him. He left on account of a negative opinion offered by Alda, Croce’s daughter, on one of his proposals.

Ernst Jünger entre panique, système et rebelle

Ernst Jünger entre panique, système et rebelle

par Nicolas Bonnal

Le système occidental use de la peur pour se maintenir. Virus, terrorisme, chiites, climat nationalisme, fascisme, Chine, sexisme, Poutine, ce qu’on voudra, tout justifie l’agenda.

Nous autres antisystèmes sommes aussi soumis à un feu croisé d’affolements divers : troisième GM, faillite du système, acheter de l’or, fin des religions, culture Illuminati, disparition des libertés, de l’eau, de l’air, du reste… On en deviendrait drôle ! Cela n’empêche pas de continuer de cliquer et de laisser Assange à ses bourreaux.

Un qui en a bien parlé de cette conjonction du monde automatique moderne et de la croissance corrélée de la panique est Ernst Jünger. Traité du rebelle, XIII…

« La peur est l’un des symptômes de notre temps. Elle nous désarme d’autant plus qu’elle succède à une époque de grande liberté individuelle, où la misère même, telle que la décrit Dickens, par exemple, était presque oubliée. »

Jünger évoque justement le Titanic ; on se souvient du succès effarant de ce film répugnant. Il écrit donc :

« Comment ce passage s’est-il produit ? Si l’on voulait nommer l’instant fatal, aucun, sans doute, ne conviendrait mieux que celui où sombra le Titanic. La lumière et l’ombre s’y heurtent brutalement : l’hybris du progrès y rencontre la panique, le suprême confort se brise contre le néant, l’automatisme contre la catastrophe, qui prend l’aspect d’un accident de circulation. »

Jules Verne a bien montré que l’automatisme (la civilisation mécanique) croissait avec la peur. Voyez les 500 millions de la Bégum qui montre la montée du péril parano allemand sur fond de grosse industrialisation. Il y a une grosse promesse, raconte Jünger, mais elle croît avec un grand risque et une grosse trouille :

« Il est de fait que les progrès de l’automatisme et ceux de la peur sont très étroitement liés, en ce que l’homme, pour prix d’allégements techniques, limite sa capacité de décision. Il y gagne toute sorte de commodités. Mais, en contrepartie, la perte de sa liberté ne peut que s’aggraver. La personne n’est plus dans la société comme un arbre dans la forêt ; elle ressemble au passager d’un navire rapide, qui porte le nom de Titanic, ou encore de Léviathan. Tant que le ciel demeure serein et le coup d’œil agréable, il ne remarque guère l’état de moindre liberté dans lequel il est tombé. Au contraire : l’optimisme éclate, la conscience d’une toute-puissance que procure la vitesse. Tout change lorsqu’on signale des îles qui crachent des flammes, ou des icebergs. Alors, ce n’est pas seulement la technique qui passe du confort à d’autres domaines : le manque de liberté se fait sentir, soit que triomphent les pouvoirs élémentaires, soit que des solitaires, ayant gardé leur force, exercent une autorité absolue. »

Jünger a vu le lien entre les mythes grecs et le progrès technique, comme Anouilh, Giraudoux, Domenach, Cocteau et quelques autres. Le Titanic n’est pas seul en cause. C’est aussi le syndrome du radeau de la méduse, épisode affreux de notre histoire et qui rappelle que la méduse nous transforme en pierres (en cœurs de pierre).

Et nous finissons comme des bougies dans un tableau de Bosch :

« On pourrait élever une objection : d’autres ères de crainte, de panique, d’Apocalypse ont suivi leur cours, sans que ce caractère d’automatisme vînt les renforcer, leur servir d’accompagnement.

Laissons ce point : car l’automatisme ne prend ce caractère terrifiant que s’il s’avère être l’une des formes, le style même de la fatalité, dont Jérôme Bosch donnait déjà une représentation incomparable. »

Mais Jünger souligne l’essentiel. Nous crevons de trouille et c’est la marque du monde moderne (la vie aurait dû rester un « risque à courir, pas un problème à résoudre », comme dit un Bernanos écœuré) :

« On constatera que presque tous, hommes ou femmes, sont en proie à une panique telle qu’on n’en avait plus vu dans nos contrées depuis le début du Moyen Age. On les verra se jeter avec une sorte de rage dans leur terreur, en exhiber sans pudeur ni retenue les symptômes. »

On veut se cacher (collapsologues, catastrophistes, apocalyptiques, à vos bateaux, à votre or, à vos cavernes !) :

« On assiste à des enchères où l’on dispute s’il vaut mieux fuir, se cacher ou recourir au suicide, et l’on voit des esprits qui, gardant encore toute leur liberté, cherchent déjà par quelles méthodes et quelles ruses ils achèteront la faveur de la crapule, quand elle aura pris le pouvoir. »

L’automatisme progresse évidemment avec la panique, et dans le pays qui reste le plus avancé, l’Amérique :

« La panique va s’appesantir, là où l’automatisme gagne sans cesse du terrain et touche à ses formes parfaites, comme en Amérique. Elle y trouve son terrain d’élection ; elle se répand à travers des réseaux dont la promptitude rivalise avec celle de l’éclair. Le seul besoin de prendre les nouvelles plusieurs fois par jour est un signe d’angoisse ; l’imagination s’échauffe, et se paralyse de son accélération même. » 

Jünger va même plus loin ici :

« Toutes ces antennes des villes géantes ressemblent à des cheveux qui se dressent sur une tête. Elles appellent des contacts démoniaques. »

Nous avons parlé du rôle narcotique de l’info dans un texte ici-même, en citant Platon, Théophraste, Fichte et Thoreau. Reprenons Thoreau :

« À peine un homme fait-il un somme d’une demi-heure après dîner, qu’en s’éveillant il dresse la tête et demande : « Quelles nouvelles ? » comme si le reste de l’humanité s’était tenu en faction près de lui. Il en est qui donnent l’ordre de les réveiller toutes les demi-heures, certes sans autre but ; sur quoi en guise de paiement ils racontent ce qu’ils ont rêvé. Après une nuit de sommeil les nouvelles sont aussi indispensables que le premier déjeuner. »

« Dites-moi, je vous prie, n’importe ce qui a pu arriver de nouveau à quelqu’un, n’importe où sur ce globe ? »

Nous risquons toujours la guerre avec la Chine et la Russie, comme durant la Guerre Froide. Jünger remarque :

« Il est certain que l’Est n’échappe pas à la règle. L’Occident vit dans la peur de l’Est, et l’Est dans la peur de l’Occident. En tous les points du globe, on passe son existence dans l’attente d’horribles agressions. Nombreux sont ceux où la crainte de la guerre civile l’aggrave encore.

La machine politique, dans ses rouages élémentaires, n’est pas le seul objet de cette crainte. Il s’y joint d’innombrables angoisses. Elles provoquent cette incertitude qui met toute son espérance en la personne des médecins, des sauveurs, thaumaturges. Signe avant-coureur du naufrage, plus lisible que tout danger matériel. »

Ce naufrage n’est pas très prometteur d’autant que la solution semble impossible. Jünger envoie promener le yoga, pourtant recommandé avec la Kabbale dans Sex in the City :

« Reste à signaler une source d’erreurs – nous songeons à la confiance en l’imagination pure. Nous admettrons qu’elle mène aux victoires spirituelles.

Mais notre temps exige autre chose que la fondation d’écoles de yoga. Tel est pourtant le but, non seulement de nombreuses sectes, mais d’un certain style de nihilisme chrétien, qui se rend la tâche trop facile. On ne peut se contenter de connaître à l’étage supérieur le vrai et le bon, tandis que dans les caves on écorche vifs vos frères humains. »

Reconnaissons que nous avons progressé. On les écorche moins vifs, on les bourre vifs et on les surinforme vifs. Mais passons. Jünger encore pour conclure (si c’est encore possible) :

« Car nous ne sommes pas impliqués dans notre seule débâcle nationale ; nous sommes entraînés dans une catastrophe universelle, où l’on ne peut guère dire, et moins encore prophétiser, quels sont les vrais vainqueurs, et quels sont les vaincus. »

Comme on sait Jünger défend le recours aux forêts. Comme on sait aussi les montagnes sont bourrées de parkings payants et nous venons d’apprendre que dans les Pyrénées la ballade sera payante. On paie un automate…

Jünger définit son rebelle :

« Quant au Rebelle, nous appelons ainsi celui qui, isolé et privé de sa patrie par la marche de l’univers, se voit enfin livré au néant. Tel pourrait être le destin d’un grand nombre d’hommes, et même de tous – il faut donc qu’un autre caractère s’y ajoute. C’est que le Rebelle est résolu à la résistance et forme le dessein d’engager la lutte, fût-elle sans espoir. Est rebelle, par conséquent, quiconque est mis par la loi de sa nature en rapport avec la liberté, relation qui l’entraîne dans le temps à une révolte contre l’automatisme et à un refus d’en admettre la conséquence éthique, le fatalisme. »

Sources:

Jünger – Traité du rebelle, le recours aux forêts –archive.org

 

Giorgio Agamben: coronavirus et état d'exception

Coronavirus et état d'exception

Giorgio Agamben

Ex: https://acta.zone

Face aux mesures d’urgence frénétiques, irrationnelles et totalement injustifiées pour une supposée épidémie due au coronavirus, il faut partir des déclarations du CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), selon lesquelles «  il n’y a pas d’épidémie de Sars-CoV2 en Italie » .

Et ce n’est pas tout : «  l’infection, d’après les données épidémiologiques disponibles aujourd’hui sur des dizaines de milliers de cas, provoque des symptômes légers/modérés (une sorte de grippe) dans 80 à 90 % des cas. Dans 10 à 15% des cas, une pneumonie peut se développer, mais l’évolution est bénigne dans la majorité absolue. On estime que seulement 4 % des patients doivent être hospitalisés en soins intensifs » .

Si telle est la situation réelle, pourquoi les médias et les autorités s’efforcent-ils de répandre un climat de panique, provoquant un véritable état d’exception, avec de graves limitations des mouvements et une suspension du fonctionnement normal des conditions de vie et de travail dans des régions entières ?

Deux facteurs peuvent contribuer à expliquer un tel comportement disproportionné.
Tout d’abord, on constate une fois de plus une tendance croissante à utiliser l’état d’exception comme paradigme normal de gouvernement. Le décret-loi immédiatement approuvé par le gouvernement «  pour des raisons de santé et de sécurité publiques » entraîne une véritable militarisation «  des municipalités et des zones où a été contrôlée positive au moins une personne dont la source de transmission est inconnue ou dont le cas n’est pas imputable à une personne provenant d’une zone déjà infectée par le virus » . Une formule aussi vague et indéterminée permettra d’étendre rapidement l’état d’exception dans toutes les régions, car il est presque impossible que d’autres cas ne se produisent pas ailleurs.

Considérez les graves restrictions à la liberté prévues par le décret : interdiction de sortir de la municipalité ou de la zone concernée pour toute personne présente dans la municipalité ou la zone ; interdiction d’accès à la municipalité ou à la zone concernée ; suspension des manifestations ou initiatives de toute nature, des événements et de toute forme de réunion dans un lieu public ou privé, y compris culturel, récréatif, sportif et religieux, même s’ils ont lieu dans des lieux fermés ouverts au public ; suspension des services éducatifs pour les enfants et des écoles de tous les niveaux, ainsi que de la fréquentation des activités scolaires et d’enseignement supérieur, à l’exception des activités d’enseignement à distance ; suspension des services pour l’ouverture au public des musées et autres institutions culturelles et des lieux visés à l’article 101 du code du patrimoine culturel et du paysage, conformément au décret législatif du 22 janvier 2004, n. 42, ainsi que l’efficience des dispositions réglementaires sur l’accès libre et gratuit à ces institutions et lieux ; suspension de tous les voyages éducatifs, tant dans le pays qu’à l’étranger ; suspension des procédures collectives et des activités des bureaux publics, sans préjudice de la prestation des services essentiels et d’utilité publique ; application de la mesure de quarantaine avec surveillance active des personnes ayant été en contact étroit avec des cas confirmés de maladie infectieuse généralisée.

La disproportion face à ce qui, selon le CNR, est une grippe normale, peu différente de celles qui se répètent chaque année, est évidente.
Il semblerait que, le terrorisme étant épuisé comme cause de mesures d’exception, l’invention d’une épidémie puisse offrir le prétexte idéal pour les étendre au-delà de toutes les limites.

L’autre facteur, non moins inquiétant, est l’état de peur qui s’est manifestement répandu ces dernières années dans les consciences des individus et qui se traduit par un réel besoin d’états de panique collective, auquel l’épidémie offre une fois de plus le prétexte idéal.
Ainsi, dans un cercle vicieux et pervers, la limitation de la liberté imposée par les gouvernements est acceptée au nom d’un désir de sécurité qui a été induit par ces mêmes gouvernements qui interviennent maintenant pour le satisfaire.

Giorgio Agamben

Cet article a initialement paru en italien sur le site du journal Il Manifesto.

Nietzsche : l’hypermoralisme du système face au Grand Remplacement

Nietzsche : l’hypermoralisme

 

du système face au

 

Grand Remplacement

 

par Tomislav Sunic

Ex: https://www.noussommespartout.fr/

 

À chacun son Nietzsche. Par cette phrase nous pouvons entamer un énième discours sur Nietzsche. Vu le nombre inouï d’ouvrages consacrés à  Nietzsche, il est de rigueur de poser la question : quel Nietzsche faut-il lire d’abord ? Faut-il lire en premier lieu Nietzsche lui-même ou faut-il d’abord lire les ouvrages que d’autres auteurs lui ont consacrés ? Et quel ouvrage et par quel autre auteur ? Le problème est d’autant plus grave qu’on ne trouve pas deux ouvrages parmi des dizaines de milliers sur Nietzsche qui s’accordent sur la même interprétation de ses idées. Certes, on pourrait formuler la même remarque quant à mon interprétation de Nietzsche. De plus, il se peut que ma compréhension, mon interprétation et mon choix des armes au regard de ses pensées soient différents de ceux de nombreux auteurs qui prétendent être ses meilleurs interprètes. Par conséquent,  on peut m’accuser d’utiliser des démarches explicatives qui ne seraient partagées ni par Nietzsche ni par ses innombrables interprètes.            

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Ce qu’il faut mettre en évidence, c’est le lien fondamental établi par Nietzsche entre les valeurs chrétiennes et leurs avatars séculiers  qui servent aujourd’hui  de base légale et psychologique aux classes dirigeantes  en Occident pour faire entrer des masses non-européennes en Europe. En utilisant les valeurs moralisatrices, dont les origines lointaines remontent au christianisme primitif, le Système est en train de procéder à la destruction des peuples européens. 

Nietzsche fut non seulement un bon philosophe mais également un bon philologue qui connaissait  fort bien les subtilités du langage de son temps. Par conséquent et en premier lieu, il nous faut isoler quelques-uns des termes utilisés par lui et tenter de trouver  les équivalents conceptuels, en français et en anglais, utilisés dans le langage académique et médiatique d’aujourd’hui. Ce qu’il faut retenir chez Nietzsche, c’est sa dénonciation incessante de la fausse morale chrétienne propagée par ses contemporains et à la place de laquelle il propose des vertus combatives, c’est-à-dire la « virtù » antique  dépouillée  de la « vertu moraline » (moralinfreie Tugend) 1.

Dans notre langage à nous, Nietzsche nous enseigne comment  reconnaître, derrière des phrases moralisatrices  sur l’humanité, sur la paix et la tolérance, la nouvelle  forme de terrorisme intellectuel qui se dessine et qui force les gens à devenir la proie de sentiments de culpabilité politique : « Il y a aujourd’hui, presque partout en Europe, une sensibilité et une irritabilité maladives vis-à-vis de la douleur et aussi unetendance fâcheuse à se plaindre, une efféminisation qui voudrait se parer de religion et de fatras philosophique, pour se donner plus d’éclat » 2.  De surcroît, il faut ajouter à cette fausse morale décrite par Nietzsche  sa critique acerbe du providentialisme chrétien qui se manifeste aujourd’hui dans l’esprit grégaire de la démocratie moderne.  Les effets laïcisés de cette moraline chrétienne apparaissent aujourd’hui, en Europe et en Amérique, dans la mystique des droits de l’ homme, le mythe du multi culturalisme, le devoir de métissage, et dans la bien-pensance de l’enseignement supérieur. L’amour pour tous les ratés du monde, en l’occurrence pour les immigrés du Tiers monde à la recherche d’une vie plus facile en Europe,  est devenue une vraie manie dans des cercles politiques et médiatiques. Pierre Chassard, un bon connaisseur français de Nietzsche, résume les pensées du philosophe  par les phrases suivantes :  « Les damnés de la terre, pendus à la croix, sont seuls devins. Les ratés de la vie sont les élus du ciel.  Il sont les bons et les autres sont les méchants » 3. La liste serait plus longue si l’on y ajoutait les petits Blancs avec leur haine de soi, ainsi que le dogme de l’interchangeabilité des peuples et des races véhiculé par le Système et les grands médias. Ces composants dont Nietzsche fut le premier détracteur, sont  aujourd’hui la marque déposée du Système.

Commençons d’abord par l’expression « le grand remplacement ». Cette expression, due à l’écrivain  Renaud Camus, est mal vue par le Système 4.  Or bien que le livre de cet auteur soit fort utile, son titre se prête aux malentendus. Au lieu de l’expression « le grand remplacement », on est tenté d’utiliser la formule plus exacte de « grande invasion ». De plus, le terme « invasion » nous renvoie à la notion du politique des siècles précédents lorsque son emploi s’accompagnait généralement d’un vrai conflit  armé – ce qui n’est pas le cas pour l’heure avec les flux de migrants extra-européens auxquels les médias occidentaux attribuent le titre sentimental de « réfugiés ». Le Système et ses scribes évitent le terme « invasion » ou « remplacement », leur préférant des expressions romantiques tels que « enrichissement culturel » ou « diversité » – termes qui furent d’ailleurs promus par la langue américaine dans les années 80 du siècle précèdent.  D’autre part, même si l’on se met d’accord  sur l’usage du terme « invasion » pour décrire la ruée des migrants afro-asiatiques vers l’Europe, le choix de ce mot nous conduit sur le plan de la polémologie, sujet que l’on peut aborder au passage.
Selon Nietzsche, la moralisation du politique engendre le chaos politique dans les démocraties parlementaires. Dans le cadre de ses analyses, il nous incombe de transposer la fausse morale décrite par lui dans le Système ou nous vivons. En effet, il suffit d’écouter le langage hyper moraliste de nos classes dirigeantes pour s’aviser que leur bric-à-brac politique – qu’ils baptisent « démocratie » et « vivre ensemble » – est une gigantesque imposture. On est chaque jour témoin de l’effusion du langage hyper moraliste dans les discours des dirigeants euro-américains : cela leur sert de paravent juridique pour leurs démarches humanitaristes au profit des immigrés non-européens, mais aussi de belle couverture pour leur répression de toute forme de pensée libre.

Dans l’Allemagne bismarckienne de la fin du XIXe siècle, Nietzsche ne connut pas de flux migratoire extra-européen. En revanche, il avait bien saisi la dynamique de la pensée hyper moraliste qui était en train de s’implanter en Occident dans les discours  de nombreux politiciens et intellectuels de son époque – soit sous une forme libérale, soit sous une forme cryptocommuniste. Cette démarche hyper moraliste, ayant pour but la création du meilleur des mondes ou la promotion des lendemains communistes qui chantent, devait fatalement aboutir, cent ans après sa mort, au monde multiculturel que nous connaissons et contre lequel Nietzsche nous avait mis en garde.

Il serait donc vain de s’en prendre aux migrants, dont la majorité est certes musulmane et extra-européenne, sans décrypter au préalable les idées moralisatrices, globalistes, altruistes et œcuméniques dont se pare l’Eglise depuis deux mille ans. Ce fut le grand mérite de Nietzsche d’avoir été le premier à saisir que tous nos concepts politiques actuels, tous les dérapages du système libéral auxquels nous faisons face aujourd’hui, proviennent du fanatisme chrétien et que  « le mouvement démocratique continue l’héritage du mouvement chrétien ». 5

Certes, dans le Système d’aujourd’hui, qui se veut d’ailleurs le meilleur du monde, toute critique de la démocratie parlementaire, du multi culturalisme et du métissage, entre dans le cadre pénal, de la démonologie et de ses sbires. D’une part, le Système se targue d’être tolérant, prétend donner sans restriction la parole même à ses détracteurs, et d’autre part, il réussit, tout en se cachant derrière les mots de tolérance, de diversité et d’humanisme, à exercer un contrôle total de sa population – phénomène jamais vu auparavant dans l’histoire de l’Occident.  Du point de vue du langage moderne, du point de vue de la notion  du politique, le Système a parfaitement réussi à renverser les traditionnelles valeurs européennes d’honneur et de sacrifice pour le bien commun. Dans le cadre actuel de la transposition de ces valeurs moralisatrices et œcuméniques, décriées par Nietzsche autrefois, il devient logique que les masses non-européennes qui entrent pêle-mêle en Europe se perçoivent comme de « pauvres réfugiés ». En effet, le vocable « réfugié » n’a pas été choisi par les migrants non-européens :  il leur a été accordé par la classe dirigeante et ses acolytes bien-pensants des grands médias.

L’un de meilleurs connaisseurs de Nietzsche, l’Allemand Alfred  Baeumler, dans l’Allemagne de Weimar, a bien  saisi le dérapage nihiliste inhérent au langage de la démocratie  libérale et l’aberration politique qui en a découlé en Europe entre les deux guerres.

“Le nihilisme, à savoir le chaos, est la conséquence inévitable de la croyance en l’harmonie sans lutte, en un ordre sans contraste. Le véritable ordre naît des relations de pouvoir créées par la volonté de puissance.  Inhumain veut dire chaos. La règne de la tolérance et des idées morales, de la raison et de la compassion, bref “l’humanité” conduit à l’inhumanité”. 6

Le Moi et mon Double

En conséquence de cet hyper moralisme qui sévit  aujourd’hui  en Occident, on aperçoit chez nos gouvernants une tendance accrue au dédoublement de leur propre soi qu’ils projettent ensuite  sur les migrants extra-européens destinés à constituer dorénavant le nouveau phare de l’humanité.  Ce déni de soi est surtout visible en Allemagne, pays qui fut, à partir de 1945, obligé de se rechercher une nouvelle identité.

A titre d’exemple de ce mental allemand du « dopplengaegertum », on peut citer  plusieurs auteurs de contes fantastiques du début du XIXe  siècle qui, par détour, reflètent parfaitement l’esprit fracturé de l’Allemagne d’aujourd’hui.  Citons ainsi l’écrivain de contes horrifiques  E. T. A. Hoffmann et sa nouvelle L’homme au sable 7.  Le personnage principal de ce conte tombe amoureux de l’image d’un automate qui ressemble étrangement à une belle femme conçue au préalable dans ses rêves d’antan. Au tout dernier moment, cette femme-automate imaginaire pousse le malheureux au suicide. Aujourd’hui, nous assistons à une semblable fixation mécanique et suicidaire  par des gouvernants européens épris de projets quasi autistiques et tiers-mondistes, à savoir à leur jouissance de la démolition délibérée de leur propre identité et son remplacement par le simulacre de l’identité afro-asiatique. Or cette fois-ci, les gouvernants européens, faute d’être physiquement remplacés par de réels migrants afro-asiatiques, sont en train de se remplacer eux-mêmes par l’imaginaire sur réel emprunté aux migrants afro-asiatiques.
On peut en fournir un exemple avec les pèlerinages pénitentiels des politiciens européens sur les lieux saints de la haute politique mondiale, à savoir Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv. Les Allemands doivent faire un chemin de croix supplémentaire en rendant une visite de pénitence à Israël pour y faire un mea culpaidentitaire. Lorsque la chancelière Merkel s’est rendue en Israël il y a deux ans, elle y déclara: « Être conscient de cette responsabilité( les crimes nazis contre les Juifs, N.A) est une part de notre identité nationale » 8. Sans son Double, c’est-à-dire sans l’acceptation de l’Autre qui fut autrefois nié ou colonisé, le Système et ses bien-pensants ne pourraient pas survivre.
Dans cette même veine, les politiciens et les intellectuels européens se voient obligés de renchérir sur leurs dédoublements  moralisateurs à l’encontre des migrants extra-européens et cela dans le but d’écarter tout soupçon de regain du fascisme ou de crypto-nostalgie coloniale.  On pourrait parler longtemps de ces nouveaux dédoublements chez les politiciens européens qui surenchérissent dans la haine de soi, l’autocensure et l’hypertrophie de la fausse morale envers les inconnus exotiques. Nietzsche a bien décrit cette pensée castratrice,  qui est devenue aujourd’hui l’idée directrice du Système libéral.
Veut-on dire par là qu’un tel système de traitement a rendu l’homme meilleur, je n’y contredirai pas : mais j’ajouterai que, pour moi, rendre « meilleur » signifie « domestiquer », « affaiblir », « décourager », « raffiner », « amollir », « efféminer » (rendre meilleur serait donc presque synonyme de dégrader…) 9.

La recherche du double politique dont nous sommes témoins a atteint aujourd’hui en Europe une limite pathologique : les politiciens de l’EU n’ont de cesse d’amplifier leur bienveillance envers les migrants afro-asiatiques afin de mieux se débarrasser de leur péché historique antisémite, colonialiste et raciste. Dans la majorité des cas, un tel comportement mimétique est le résultat de la rééducation alliée de l’Europe depuis 1945, dont le but était de créer une nouvelle espèce humaine.

Dans ce court essai sur Nietzsche il ne nous faut pas oublier le nom de l’anthropologue allemand Arnold Gehlen, peut être le meilleur connaisseur de Nietzsche, dont l’analyse sur la  moraline du Système porte le nom « d’hyper morale » .

L’hypertrophie morale survient quand on accepte tout simplement chaque être humain dans sa simple humanité et qu’on lui octroie dans cette qualité d’existencele rang le plus élevé 10. 

Cette hypertrophie morale, ou moraline post-nietzschéenne, est utilisée  par nos gouvernants et leurs services de  « fake news » pour imposer une culpabilité éternelle aux Blancs et leur faire oublier ainsi leur identité culturelle et raciale.

Ni l’Eglise catholique ni les papistes du monde entier ne sont à la traîne. Le dernier en date est le pape François avec ses prêches sur les droits des immigrés ou ses homélies affirmant que « les migrants sont le symbole de tous les exclus de la société globalisée » 11. À l’écoute de ses paroles urbi et orbi, cela vaut la peine d’examiner le psychisme des migrants afro-asiatiques. Malgré leur modeste quotient intellectuel, ils ne sont pas bêtes. Ils savent qu’ils ont de puissants alliés, non seulement dans les cercles antifas  mais également au sein du haut clergé catholique, aux Etats-Unis et en Europe.
On peut assurément fustiger George Soros et une foule d’ONG pour avoir facilité l’inondation de l’Occident par des migrants africains et asiatiques. Pourtant, le fait demeure que les migrants afro-asiatiques suivent d’abord et avant tout les appels de bienvenue unilatéraux des politiciens européens dont les propos sont approuvés  par le pape et le haut clergé catholique. Ces derniers sont toujours prompts à se mobiliser pour l’établissement de quartiers et de villes sanctuaires, ce qui a pour effet de redoubler leurs arrivées 12.  En effet, l’Eglise fonctionne aujourd’hui comme une sorte de contre-pouvoir vis-à-vis du pouvoir légal en place, lequel est de toute façon déjà très laxiste par rapport à l’arrivée des migrants.

Au-delà des phrases moralisatrices sur les bienfaits du multi culturalisme et du métissage propagées par le Système et l’Eglise auprès des peuples blancs, les lois impitoyables de la biologie et de l’hérédité ne peuvent être ignorées. Dans les années à venir, les pays de l’Union européenne seront exposés à des conflits multireligieux et multiraciaux parmi les nouveaux migrants non-européens, conflits de grande ampleur et de longue durée. Avec leur déni de soi, les pays européens, Allemagne en tête, auront du mal à faire face non seulement au grand remplacement des peuples, mais également aux conflits sauvages au sein même des divers groupes de migrants non-européens. Contrairement aux opinions erronées  énoncées par les dirigeants de l’UE et leurs mauvais disciples universitaires, l’intolérance raciale et la xénophobie en Europe ne sont  aucunement le privilège des nationalistes blancs. La fierté raciale et l’exclusivisme racial ne sont en aucun cas le monopole des Européens de souche. Les petites guerres larvées entre ressortissants d’origine asiatique et ressortissants de provenance subsaharienne ont un bel avenir.  Pire, de concert avec divers groupes moralisateurs et antifascistes, les gouvernants du Système auront du mal à faire admettre aux migrants les mêmes oukases, les mêmes normes juridiques, les mêmes tests scolaires et les mêmes concepts politiques qu’aux Occidentaux. Imposées aux migrants, ces règles occidentales resteront toujours étrangères et inacceptables pour eux. Au nom de la « diversité »  et « vivre  ensemble » le Système est en train de détruire non seulement l’identité des peuples européens, mais ruine aussi l’identité des nouveaux arrivants non-européens.

Les états multiculturels et multiraciaux conduisent tôt ou tard à des guerres civiles. Dans le grand remplacement qui est en cours, les guerres interraciales parmi les migrants non-européens seront aggravées par les grands changements démographiques. De plus, ces guerres hybrides et larvées s’accompagneront d’une surenchère des discours  victimaires de chaque membre de ces différentes peuplades  et tribus résidant en Europe, chacun revendiquant bien sûr la première place sur la liste des victimes.  La méfiance mutuelle, suivie par le déclin de la solidarité civique et la dissolution de l’ordre seront à l’ordre du jour. Les bouffonneries moralisatrices et masochistes des politiciens blancs, dont l’Allemagne fait la surenchère, ne sont que le reflet logique d’un vieux complexe d’infériorité dû au passé fasciste, colonial, oustacha ou national-socialiste. Suite aux incessantes incantations des gens du Système – «mea culpa, mea maxima culpa » – qu’aurait dit  Nietzsche au sujet de notre destin ? Sa réponse est claire :  « une crise comme il n’y en eut jamais sur terre » 13.

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Notes : 

1. 1) Friedrich Nietzsche, L’Antéchrist (Œuvres complètes) (Paris : Arvensa éditions ; 2014), p. 3945. 
2. 
   2) F. Nietzsche,  Par-delà le Bien et le Mal (Paris : Editions Ligaran, 2015), p. 293.
3. 3) Pierre Chassard, La philosophie de l’histoire dans la philosophie de Nietzsche (Paris : éd. GRECE, 1975),  p.78.
4. 4) Renaud Camus, Le Grand Remplacement  (Paris ; éditions David Reinharc, 2011).
5. 5) F. Nietzsche, Par delà le bien et le mal (Ouvres complètes), (Arvensa éd). p. 3327.
6. 6) Alfred Baeumler, Nietzsche; der Philosoph und Politiker(Leipzig : Reclam, 1931), p. 72-73. 
7. 7) E.T.A. Hoffmann, L’homme au sable (Paris : Gallimard, 2003).
8. 8) The Times of Israel, « Merkel : la mémoire des crimes nazis « inséparable » de l’identité allemande », le 6 décembre, 2019.
9. 9) Friedrich Nietzsche, La Généalogie de la morale (Œuvres complètes de Frédéric Nietzsche, vol 11). Traduction par Henri Albert (Paris : Mercure de France, 1900), p. 249.
10. 10) Arnold Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral  (Frankfurt : Athenäum 1969), p. 143. 
11. 11) Le Monde, « Le pape François : « Les migrants sont le symbole de tous les exclus de la société globalisée »», le 8 juillet, 2019. 
12. 12) Voir T. Sunic, « Non-White Migrants and the Catholic Church: The Politics of Penitence », The Occidental Observer, Avril, 2017. 
13. 13) Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (Traduction par Henri Albert), (Paris : Mercure de France 1909), p. 255. 

Freyer, Hans (Johannes)

Freyer, Hans (Johannes)

Elfriede Üner

Ex: http://www.uener.com

(Lexikon Artikel im "Lexikon des Konservatismus", Leopold-Stocker-Verlag, Graz/Stuttgart 1996)

geb. 31.7.1887 Leipzig; gest. 18.1.1969 Ebersteinburg/Baden-Baden.

Deutscher Philosoph und Soziologe; Schwerpunkte historische politische Soziologie und Kulturtheorie der Industriegesellschaft.

Der Sohn eines sächsischen Postdirektors erhielt seine Gymnasialausbildung am königlichen Elitegymnasium zu Dresden-Neustadt, studierte von 1907 bis 1911 in Leipzig Philosophie, Psychologie, Nationalökonomie und Geschichte, u.a. bei Wilhelm Wundt und Karl Lamprecht, in deren universalhistorischer Tradition er seine ersten Arbeiten zur Geschichtsauffassung der Aufklärung (Diss. 1911) und zur Bewertung der Wirtschaft in der deutschen Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Habilitation 1921) verfaßte. Nach zusätzlichen Studien in Berlin mit engen Kontakten zu Georg Simmel und Lehrtätigkeit an der Reformschule der Freien Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf kämpfte F. mit dem Militär-St.-Heinrichs-Orden ausgezeichnet im Ersten Weltkrieg. Als Mitglied des von Eugen Diederichs initiierten Serakreises der Jugendbewegungverfaßte F. an die Aufbruchsgeneration gerichtete philosophischen Schriften: Antäus (1918), Prometheus (1923), Pallas Athene (1935). Von 1922 bis 1925 lehrte er als Ordinarius hauptsächlich Kulturphilosophie an der Universität Kiel, erhielt 1925 den ersten deutschen Lehrstuhl für Soziologie ohne Beiordnung eines anderen Faches in Leipzig und widmete sich von nun an der logischen und historisch-philosophischen Grundlegung dieser neuen Disziplin. In Auseinandersetzung mit dem Positivismus seiner Lehrer und mit der Philosophie Hegels sollten typische gesellschaftliche Grundstrukturen herausgearbeitet und ihre historischen Entwicklungsgesetze gefunden werden. Darüber hinaus ist für F. die Soziologie als konkrete historische Erscheinung, erst durch die abendländische Aufklärung möglich geworden, Äußerung einer vorher nie dagewesenen gesellschaftlichen Emanzipation zur wissenschaftlichen Selbstreflexion, drückt deshalb als "Wirklichkeitswissenschaft" in der Erfassung des gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Wandels auch den kollektiven Willen aus, ist also als Wissenschaft zugleich politische Ethik, die die Richtung des gesellschaftlichen Wandels zu bestimmen hat.

F. war ab 1933 Direktor des Instituts für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte an der Leipziger Universität. Als neu gewählter Präsident der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie legte er diese 1933 still, um eine politische "Gleichschaltung" zu verhindern. Den damaligen europäischen politischen Umbrüchen brachte F. als Theoretiker des Wandels zunächst offenes Interesse entgegen, fühlte sich der theoretischen Erfassung dieser Entwicklungen verpflichtet und war deshalb nie aktives Mitglied einer politischen Partei oder Bewegung; er wurde später der "konservativen Revolution" der zwanziger Jahre als "jungkonservativer Einzelgänger" (Mohler) zugeordnet. Die vor 1933 noch idealistisch formulierte Konzeption des Staates als höchste Form der Kultur (1925) hat F. im Lauf der bedrohlichen politischen Entwicklung revidiert in seinen Studien über Machiavelli (1936) und Friedrich den Großen (Preußentum und Aufklärung 1944) durch einen realistischen Staatsbegriff, der ausschließlich durch Gemeinwohl, langfristige gesellschaftliche Entwicklungsperspektiven und durch prozessuale Kriterien der Legitimität gerechtfertigt ist: durch den Dienst am Staat, der aber den Menschen keinesfalls total vereinnahmen darf, sowie die Prägekraft des Staates, der dem Kollektiv ein gemeinsames Ziel gibt, aber dennoch die Freiheit und Menschenwürde seiner Bürger bewahrt. Insbesondere gelang F. in der Darstellung der Legitimität als generellem Gesetz jeder Politik eine dialektische Verknüpfung des naturrechtlichen Herrschaftsgedankens mit der klassischen bürgerlich-humanitären Aufklärung: Nur die Herrschaft ist legitim, die dem Sinn ihres Ursprungs entspricht - es muß das erfüllt werden, was das Volk mit der Einsetzung der Herrschaft gewollt hat.

Als Gastprofessor für deutsche Kulturgeschichte und -philosophie an der Universität Budapest (1938-45) verfaßte F. sein größtes historisches Werk, die "Weltgeschichte Europas", eine Epochengeschichte der abendländischen Kultur. Von den politischen Bestimmungen der Amtsenthebung nicht betroffen lehrte F. ab 1946 wieder in Leipzig, wurde 1947 nach einer durch G. Lukács ausgelösten ideologischen Debatte entlassen, war danach Redakteur des Neuen Brockhaus in Wiesbaden, lehrte 1955 bis 1963 Soziologie an der Universität Münster und nahm mehrere Gastprofessuren in Ankara und Argentinien wahr. 1958 leitete er als Präsident den Weltkongreß des Institut International de Sociologie in Nürnberg und wurde mit dem Ehrendoktor der Wirtschaftswissenschaften in Münster (1957) und der Ingenieurswissenschaften an der Technischen Hochschule in München (1961) ausgezeichnet.

Zentraler Gesichtspunkt seiner Nachkriegsschriften war die gegenwärtige Epochenschwelle, der Übergang der modernen Industriegesellschaft zur weltweit ausgreifenden wissenschaftlich-technischen Rationalität, deren "sekundäre Systeme" alle naturhaft gewachsenen Lebensformen erfassen. F. weist nach, wie diese Fortschrittsordnung zum tragenden Kulturfaktor wird in allen Teilentwicklungen: der Technik, Siedlungsformen, Arbeit und Wertungen. Seine frühere integrative Perspektive einer Kultursynthese wird ersetzt durch den Konflikt von eigengesetzlichen, künstlichen Sachwelten einerseits und den "haltenden Mächte" des sozialen Lebens andererseits, die im "Katarakt des Fortschritts" auf wenige, die private Lebenswelt beherrschende Gemeinschaftsformen beschränkt sind. Jedoch bleibt die Synthese von "Leben" und "Form", von Menschlichkeit und technischer Zivilisation für F. weiterhin unerläßlich für den Fortbestand jeder Kultur, im krisenhaften Übergang noch nicht erreicht, aber durchaus denkbar jenseits der Schwelle, wenn sich die neue geschichtliche Epoche der weltumspannenden Industriekultur konsolidieren wird. F.s Theorie der Industriekultur, kurz vor seinem Tode begonnen, ist unvollendet geblieben. Sein strukturhistorisches Konzept der Epochenschwelle hat in der deutschen Nachkriegssoziologie weniger Aufnahme gefunden, während es in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft wesentlich zur Überwindung einer evolutionären Entwicklungsgeschichte beigetragen hat und eine sozialwissenschaftlich orientierte Strukturgeschichtsschreibung einleitete, wofür F.s Konzept der Eigendynamik der sekundären Systeme ebenso ausschlaggebend war.

F. hielt andererseits an einem gegen die Sachgesetzlichkeiten gerichteten Begriff der Geschichte als souveräne geistige Verfügung über Vergangenheit fest. Die Annahme einer selbstläufigen Entwicklung ist nach F. dem Geschichtsdenken des 19. Jahrhunderts verhaftet, ein modernes historisches Bewußtsein hat solchen Chiliasmus abgetan. Geschichte als Reservoir von Möglichkeiten für konkrete Zielformulierungen kann Wege öffnen zur Bewältigung der Entfremdung durch sekundäre Systeme. Zugleich weist F. auf die Paradoxie eines rein konservativen Handelns hin: Ein Erbe nur zu hüten ist gefährlich, denn es wird dadurch zu nutzbarem Besitz, zum Kulturbetrieb entwertet; ebenso wird die Utopie, durchaus förderlich als idealtypische oder experimentelle Modellkonstruktion, als konkrete Zukunftsplanung zum Terror einer unmenschlichen wissenschaftlichen Rationalität. Diese Paradoxien beweisen für F. die Wirklichkeitsmacht der Geschichte, die weder bewahrt, geformt noch geplant, sondern nur spontan gelebt werden kann. F.s bleibender Beitrag besteht in der dialektischen Verschränkung und Nichtreduzierbarkeit der Dimensionen von politischer Herrschaft, wissenschaftlicher Rationalität und der sozialen Willens- und Entscheidungsgemeinschaft und in der Charakterisierung dieses dialektischen Verhältnisses als die eigentliche Dimension des "Politischen", die auch im gegenwärtigen "technisch-wissenschaftlichen Zeitalter" nicht an Bedeutung verloren hat.

Literaturverzeichnis Hans Freyer bis etwa 1994

Bibliographie:

E. Üner: H. F.-Bibliographie, in: H. F.: Herrschaft, Planung und Technik. Hg. E. Üner, Weinheim 1987, S. 175-197.

Schriften:

Die Geschichte der Geschichte der Philosophie im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Phil. Diss.), Leipzig 1911; Antäus. Grunlegung einer Ethik des bewußten Lebens, Jena 1918; Die Bewertung der Wirtschaft im philosophischen Denken des 19. Jahrhunderts (Habil.), Leipzig 1921; Theorie des objektiven Geistes, Leipzig-Berlin 1923; Prometheus. Ideen zur Philosophie der Kultur, Jena 1923; Der Staat, Leipzig 1925; Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, Leipzig-Berlin 1930; Revolution von rechts, Jena 1931; Pallas Athene. Ethik des politischen Volkes, Jena 1935; Das geschichtliche Selbstbewußtsein des 20. Jahrhunderts, Leipzig 1937; Machiavelli, Leipzig 1938; Weltgeschichte Europas, Wiesbaden 1948; Die weltgeschichtliche Bedeutung des 19. Jahrhunderts, Kiel 1951; Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, Stuttgart 1955; Schwelle der Zeiten, Stuttgart 1965.

Editionen:

Gedanken zur Industriegesellschaft, Hg. A. Gehlen, Mainz 1970; Preußentum und Aufklärung und andere Studien zu Ethik und Politik, Hg. E. Üner, Weinheim 1986; Herrschaft, Planung und Technik. Aufsätze zur politischen Soziologie, Hg. E. Üner, Weinheim 1987.

Literatur:

J. Pieper: Wirklichkeitswissenschaftliche Soziologie, in: Arch. f. Soz.wiss. u. Soz.pol. 66 (1931), S. 394-407; H. Marcuse: Zur Auseinandersetzung mit H. F.s Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, in: Philos. Hefte 3 (1931/32), S. 83-91; E. Manheim: The Sociological Theories of H. F.: Sociology as a Nationalistic Paradigm of Social Action, in: H. E. Barnes, ed., An Introduction to the History of Sociology, Chicago 1948, S. 362-373; L. Stern: Die bürgerliche Soziologie und das Problem der Freiheit, in: Zs. f. Geschichtswiss. 5 (1957), S. 677-712; H. Lübbe: Die resignierte konservative Revolution, in: Zs. f. die ges. Staatswissensch. 115 (1959), S. 131-138; G. Lukacs: Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Neuwied-Berlin 1962; H. Lübbe: Herrschaft und Planung. Die veränderte Rolle der Zukunft in der Gegenwart, in: Evang. Forum H. 6, Modelle der Gesellschaft von morgen, Göttingen 1966; W. Giere: Das politische Denken H. F.s in den Jahren der Zwischenkriegszeit, Freiburg i. B. 1967; F. Ronneberger: Technischer Optimismus und sozialer Pessimismus, Münster/Westf. 1969; E. Pankoke: Technischer Fortschritt und kulturelles Erbe, in: Geschichte i. Wiss. u. Unterr. 21 (1970), S. 143-151; E. M. Lange: Rezeption und Revision von Themen Hegelschen Denkens im frühen Werk H. F.s, Berlin 1971; P. Demo: Herrschaft und Geschichte. Zur politischen Gesellschaftstheorie H. F.s und Marcuses, Meisenheim a. Glan 1973; W. Trautmann: Utopie und Technik, Berlin 1974; R. König: Kritik der historisch-existentialistischen Soziologie, München 1975; W. Trautmann: Gegenwart und Zukunft der Industriegesellschaft: Ein Vergleich der soziologischen Theorien H. F.s und H. Marcuses. Bochum 1976; H. Linde: Soziologie in Leipzig 1925-1945, in: M. R. Lepsius, Hg., Soziologie in Deutschland und Österreich 1918-1945, Kölner Zs. f. Soziol. u. Sozialpsychol., Sonderh. 23, 1981, S. 102-130; E. Üner: Jugendbewegung und Soziologie. H. F.s Werk und Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft, ebd. S. 131-159; M. Greven: Konservative Kultur- und Zivilisationskritik in "Dialektik der Aufklärung" und "Schwelle der Zeiten", in: E. Hennig, R. Saage, Hg., Konservatismus - eine Gefahr für die Freiheit?, München 1983, S. 144-159;E. Üner: Die Entzauberung der Soziologie, in: H. Baier, Hg., H. Schelsky - ein Soziologe in der Bundesrepublik, Stuttgart 1986, S. 5-19; J. Z. Muller: The Other God That Failed. H. F. and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism. Princeton, N. J. 1987; E. Üner: H. F.s Konzeption der Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, in: Annali die Sociologia 5, Bd. II, 1989, S. 331-369; K. Barheier: "Haltende Mächte" und "sekundäre Systeme", in: E. Pankoke, Hg., Institution und technische Zivilisation, Berlin 1990, S. 215-230; E. Nolte: Geschichtsdenken im 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin-Frankfurt/M. 1991, S. 459-470; E. Üner, Soziologie als "geistige Bewegung", Weinheim 1992; H. Remmers: H. F.: Heros und Industriegesellschaft, Opladen 1994; E. Üner: H. F und A. Gehlen: Zwei Wege auf der Suche nach Wirklichkeit, in: H. Klages, H. Quaritsch, Hg., Zur geisteswissenschaftlichen Bedeutung A. Gehlens, Berlin 1994, S. 123-162.

Fuir le monde, Lipovetsky et le néant

Fuir le monde, Lipovetsky et le néant

par Olivier Pascault

Ex: https://latelierduserpentvert.blogspot.com

            Gilles Lipovetsky, sociologue français à la mode à la fin des années 1980, a associé son nom à l'exploration de la notion d'Individu comme « atome irréductible » de l'âge démocratique. Après avoir pointé l'individualisme de la société « postmoderne », Lipovetsky voit venir le temps de « l'hyperliberté » et de «  l'hyperanxiété » ; il demeure pour autant optimiste.

            La parution de L'Ere du vide, en 1983, fit grand bruit. Gilles Lipovetsky apparaissait comme un observateur de la société postmoderne, celle qui voyait simultanément l'écroulement des grandes idéologies et le développement de l'individualisme. Ce livre marquait l'entrée en scène tonitruante d'un « Narcisse cool et affranchi ».

            S’il y eut le « moderne » et le « postmoderne », les temps sont aujourd'hui hypermodernes. Tel est le diagnostic de Gilles Lipovetsky, capable d'analyser le luxe et le féminin et d'en tirer une radiographie sociologique de toute une époque. L'idéologie du progrès propre à la modernité n’est plus d'actualité ; or, la revendication hédoniste de la postmodernité, (années 60-80) est, elle aussi, caduque. Survient donc l'hypermodernité.

            Dans Les Temps hypermodernes, tout semble aspiré par l'urgence et la profusion : libéralisme économique, fluidité médiatique, hyperconsommation… mais aussi les paradoxes. Nous vivons l'instant, mais on s'inquiète du futur. Nous subissons les médias, mais on filtre leurs messages. Nous désertons la politique, mais on s'investit dans le bénévolat. Pour Lipovetsky, la vitalité démocratique est toujours à l’œuvre. Les grands systèmes agonisent, dès lors, quand l'individu est toujours empli de ressources. Malheureusement, le constat ne débouche sur aucune proposition concrète. Une sociologie hypermoderne ? Un pet de vent intellectuel ?

            L’existence dans l’hypermodernité expose un versant refoulé dans excès et une dualité, où la frivolité masque une profonde anxiété existentielle collective. De là naît un rapport crispé sur le présent, lequel triomphe dans le règne de l'émotivité angoissée. L'effondrement des traditions est alors vécu sur le mode de l'inquiétude et non sur la conquête de libertés individuelles et collectives. L'hypermodernité, pour Lipovetsky, tient également lieu de chance à saisir, celle d'une responsabilisation renouvelée du sujet.

            Cet essai est composé de trois parties. Le texte de Gilles Lipovetsky est précédé par une introduction signée du philosophe Sébastien Charles, suivi par des entretiens sur son parcours intellectuel. Cet ensemble de textes reste bref mais dense et donne à la fois un résumé et une analyse de nos temps confus du marais intellectuel.

            Père de deux filles et toujours marié avec leur mère, il se réjouit des familles recomposées et des sexualités libérées. Il se vante de son goût favorable à la légalisation du cannabis mais se montre très hésitant sur une éventuelle loi sur le voile. « La conso (comprendre consommation ; Lipovetsky se veut moderne jusqu’au bout du clavier) des autres m'intéresse mais je vis facilement avec rien » … et il se dit philosophe et sociologue ! De la philosophie de comptoir ou plus sûrement de la sociologie de lounge !

            Lipovetsky se réjouissait de voir la nation, l'armée, l'Eglise jetées par-dessus bord pour faire sortir des flots capitalistes le démocrate radieux, droit-de-l'hommiste et consumériste. A regret, le « philosophe » doit bien admettre que l'affranchissement de l'individu génère autant d'angoisse que de créativité, même s'il peine toujours à reconnaître que l'homme libre est de plus en plus inégal et de moins en moins fraternel. En résumé, un auteur biberonné à la valve d'un oubli nécessaire pour qui veut progresser dans sa vie intellectuelle et personnelle…

Olivier Pascault

le 22 novembre 2010.

• Gilles Lipovetsky [avec Sébastien Charles], Les Temps hypermodernes, Ed. Grasset, 2004, Paris, 186 pages (12 euros).

La malédiction de la pureté morale

Par Chris Hedges

Source : Truthdig, Chris Hedges

Ex: https://www.les-crises.fr

L’incapacité chronique de l’establishment de la gauche américaine à s’attaquer aux maux qui assaillent le pays – changement climatique, capitalisme mondialisé non réglementé, inégalités sociales croissantes, armée surdimensionnée, guerres sans fin à l’étranger, déficits incontrôlables et violence par armes à feu – signifie inéluctablement la mort par asphyxie pour notre démocratie anémiée. Submergées par de multiples crises, les élites libérales ont renoncé à la véritable vie politique et se sont repliées dans des croisades morales contre-productives, tentant ainsi vainement et de manière puérile de détourner l’attention des catastrophes sociales, politiques, économiques et environnementales qui se profilent.

Ces prétendues « croisades morales » – terme employé tant par la gauche que par la droite – ont divisé le pays en factions en guerre. Les opposants sont diabolisés. Les partisans de la cause sont du côté des anges du Ciel. Il n’y a pas place pour la nuance et l’ambiguïté. Les faits sont manipulés ou ignorés. La vérité est remplacée par des slogans. Les théories du complot les plus bizarres sont adoptées sans être crues, pour exposer la perfidie de l’ennemi. La politique se définit au travers de personnalités politiques antagonistes qui crachent du vitriol. La stérilité intellectuelle et morale, ainsi que l’incapacité d’arrêter les forces de destruction de la société, fournissent un terreau fertile pour les extrémistes, les néofascistes et les démagogues qui prospèrent dans les périodes de paralysie et de dégénérescence culturelle.

Les libéraux et la gauche ont perdu les deux années passées à attaquer Donald Trump – supposé être un agent russe – et semblent prêts à perdre les deux années à venir à l’attaquer pour son racisme. Ils cherchent désespérément des boucs émissaires pour expliquer l’élection de Trump à la présidence. La droite n’est pas si différente, accusant ses ennemis démocrates d’être des socialistes détestant l’Amérique et rendant responsables de notre débâcle nationale les musulmans, les immigrés et les pauvres de couleur. Ce sont des visions concurrentes d’un monde de dessin animé. Elles favorisent un univers de méchants et de super-héros qui exacerbe les clivages et les haines.

« Partout la société bourgeoise semble être à court d’idées constructives », écrivait Christopher Lasch en 1979 dans « La culture du narcissisme ». « Elle a perdu à la fois la capacité et la volonté d’affronter les difficultés qui menacent de la submerger. La crise politique du capitalisme reflète une crise profonde de la culture occidentale, qui se révèle par une impuissance à comprendre le cours de l’histoire moderne ou à l’analyser de manière rationnelle. Le libéralisme – la théorie politique de la bourgeoisie ascendante – a perdu depuis longtemps toute capacité à expliquer le cours des événements dans le monde de l’État providence et des multinationales. Et il n’y a rien pour le remplacer. Le libéralisme est en faillite politique, mais aussi intellectuelle. »

Le magazine en ligne Slate a récemment publié les verbatim d’une réunion publique entre Dean Baquet, rédacteur en chef du New York Times, et le personnel du Times. Il est fascinant de voir l’arrogance et l’ignorance du journal – principal organe d’information de l’élite dirigeante – qui s’est employé depuis deux ans à détruire sa propre crédibilité en mettant en avant l’enquête de Robert Mueller et la théorie du complot selon laquelle Trump était un agent russe. Voici ce dit Baquet dans le reportage du journal sur Trump :

« Le chapitre 1 de l’histoire de Donald Trump, non seulement pour notre rédaction mais, je pense, pour tous nos lecteurs, était la suivante : Donald Trump avait-il entretenu des relations fâcheuses avec les Russes et y avait-t-il eu obstruction à la justice ? C’était la question centrale, ne l’oublions pas. On a mis les moyens pour couvrir cette affaire. Et pour sa couverture, nous avons remporté deux prix Pulitzer. Je pense que nous l’avons couverte mieux que quiconque.

Le jour où Bob Mueller a quitté la barre des témoins, deux choses se sont produites. Nos lecteurs qui veulent que Donald Trump s’en aille se sont dit : “Putain, Bob Mueller ne va pas le faire.” Et Donald Trump s’est un peu enhardi politiquement pour des raisons évidentes. Cela a changé la donne. La plupart des choses dont nous parlons aujourd’hui ont commencé à émerger il y a seulement six ou sept semaines. Nous avons été pris au dépourvu de ce nouveau tour qu’a pris l’affaire au bout de deux ans. N’est-ce pas ?

Je pense – comme je l’ai déjà dit – que nous devons changer la vision de notre couverture médiatique pour les deux années à venir : Comment peut-on parler d’un type qui tient de tels propos ? Comment parlons-nous des réactions qu’il suscite ? Comment pouvons-nous le faire tout en continuant à rendre compte de sa politique ? Comment traitons-nous de l’Amérique, si divisée par Donald Trump ? Comment pouvons-nous nous emparer de tous les sujets dont vous parlez tous ? Comment écrire sur les questions raciales de manière intelligente – sujet que nous négligeons depuis longtemps ? A mon avis, c’est de ça qu’il s’agit quant à la vision de notre politique éditoriale. Vous allez tous devoir nous aider à élaborer cette vision. Je pense que c’est à ça que nous devons nous atteler pour le reste des deux années à venir. »

Baquet affirme que la campagne journalistique visant à incriminer Trump en tant qu’agent russe a fait « Pschitt » et qu’une nouvelle croisade – lire une campagne morale – s’est fait jour depuis six ou sept semaines, focalisée sur le racisme de Trump. Le racisme de Trump, bien sûr, ne date pas de six ou sept semaines. C’est le journal qui, il y a six ou sept semaines, a changé son histoire, passant d’une croisade morale à une autre.

Ce n’est pas du journalisme. C’est du puritanisme moral déguisée en journalisme. Et il sera, comme la conspiration « Russe », inutile pour affaiblir la popularité de Trump, pour expliquer et faire face à nos innombrables crises ou pour guérir les clivages grandissants.

Le problème auquel le journal est confronté, ainsi que le sont le parti Démocrate et ses alliés libéraux, est qu’il est tenu par les grandes entreprises qui le soutiennent, celles-là même qui ont orchestré l’inégalité grotesque des revenus, la désindustrialisation, la machine militaire incontrôlable, qui ont neutralisé les médias stérilisés et bâillonne le monde académique. Par conséquent, plutôt que de tenir pour responsables ses annonceurs et son lectorat élitiste, le journal a commencé par blâmer la Russie, et blâme aujourd’hui les suprémacistes blancs. Plus cette démagogie durera longtemps tant à gauche qu’à droite, plus le pays sera déchiré.

Hannah Arendt dans « Les origines du totalitarisme » souligne que les idéologies sont attrayantes en temps de crise parce qu’elles réduisent et simplifient la réalité à une seule idée. Tandis que la droite met le déclin sur le dos des personnes de couleur, les élites libérales en font porter la responsabilité à la Russie ou aux racistes. C’est l’idéologie, et non l’expérience ou les faits, qui sert à « fournir une explication à chacun des événements historiques, une clé de lecture de l’histoire, une connaissance exhaustive du présent et une prévision fiable de l’avenir », écrit-elle.

Toutes les idéologies exigent une cohérence impossible. Celle-ci est obtenue en tordant constamment la réalité jusqu’à obtenir, comme dans le cas de l’enquête Mueller, une mise en scène absurde. Au final, les croyants, écrit Arendt, sont désorientés et en proie à la peur exacerbée et la paranoïa.

Ce type de délire collectif a toujours existé dans la société américaine, comme l’historien Richard Hofstadter l’a souligné. Il résulte, écrivait-il, « de certaines préoccupations et aussi de fantasmes : le mégalomane qui se considère comme l’Élu, totalement bon, abominablement persécuté, mais sûr de triompher à la fin ; l’attribution de pouvoirs gigantesques et démoniaques à son adversaire ».

Mais ces délires ont généralement été confinés aux marges de la société, comme, par exemple, une gauche qui qui partait en pèlerinages politiques en Union soviétique, ignorant béatement le massacre par son gouvernement de millions de ses propres citoyens, les goulags et les famines, et une droite qui célébrait les dictatures fascistes en Espagne puis en Amérique latine, oubliant les exécutions de masse, le terrorisme et les escadrons de la mort.

Cependant, désormais, ces délires collectifs sont généralisés. Ils sont claironnés par les relais médiatiques de l’ensemble du spectre politique ainsi que par l’establishment politique. Ils font vivre aussi bien Fox News et Breitbart que MSNBC et CNN. Jake Tapper [présentateur télé sur CNN qui ne se présente pas comme démocrate mais qui a travaillé pour une candidate démocrate au Congrès, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, en 1992, NdT] et Rachel Maddow [présentatrice télé sur MSNBC, libérale adhérant aux idées du parti républicain de l’époque Eisenhower, NdT], comme l’a souligné Matt Taibbi, sont des versions « libérales » de Sean Hannity [présentateur conservateur sur la chaîne Fox news défenseur de Trump, NdT].

Richard Rorty, avec une prescience étrange, a écrit dans son livre « Achieving Our Country » de 1998 :

« Nombre d’auteurs ayant écrit sur la politique socio-économique ont alerté : les vieilles démocraties industrialisées se dirigent vers une période semblable à celle de Weimar, au cours de laquelle les mouvements populistes sont susceptibles de renverser les gouvernements constitutionnels. Edward Luttwak, par exemple, a suggéré que le fascisme pourrait être l’avenir américain. Son livre “The Endangered American Dream” souligne que les syndicalistes ainsi que les travailleurs non qualifiés et non syndiqués comprendront tôt ou tard que leur gouvernement n’essaie même pas d’empêcher les salaires de baisser ou d’empêcher les emplois d’être délocalisés. À peu près au même moment, ils se rendront compte que les cols blancs des banlieues, qui craignent désespérément d’être déclassés, ne se laisseront pas imposer pour verser des prestations sociales à qui que ce soit d’autre.

À ce moment-là, quelque chose va craquer. L’électorat non suburbain décidera que le système a échoué et commencera à chercher un homme fort pour qui voter – quelqu’un prêt à leur assurer qu’une fois élu, les bureaucrates suffisants, les avocats rusés, les vendeurs d’obligations surpayés et les professeurs postmodernes ne seront plus aux commandes. Un scénario comme celui du roman de Sinclair Lewis “It Can’t Happen Here” peut alors se jouer. Quand un tel homme fort prend ses fonctions, personne ne peut prédire ce qui va se passer. En 1932, la plupart des pronostics sur ce qui se passerait si Hindenburg nommait Hitler chancelier étaient d’un optimisme aveugle.

Il est bien possible que les avancées obtenues ces quarante dernières années par les américains noirs et basanés et par les homosexuels soient réduits à néant. Le mépris badin pour les femmes va revenir à la mode. Ça sera le retour des mots “nègre” et “youpin” sur les lieux de travail. Tout le sadisme que la gauche académique a tenté de rendre inacceptable pour ses étudiants reviendra en masse. Tout le ressentiment des Américains mal éduqués à l’idée que leurs manières leur soient dictées par des diplômés universitaires trouvera un exutoire. »

La rupture des liens sociaux, provoquée par l’effondrement de la société, l’inégalité des revenus, la stagnation sociale et la marginalisation de la classe ouvrière s’exprime dans d’innombrables pathologies sinistres. Une société clivée adopte des comportements autodestructeurs – violence armée incontrôlée, dépendance aux opiacés et sadisme sexuel – pour tenter de composer avec la dislocation, l’impuissance et la douleur. Les croisades morales sont l’expression de cette maladie culturelle. Elles sont emblématiques d’une société en profonde détresse, incapable de faire face rationnellement aux problèmes qu’elle rencontre. Ces croisades ne font qu’empirer les choses, dès lors qu’il apparaît qu’elles sont inefficaces, elles engendrent invariablement un fanatisme effrayant.

Source : Truthdig, Chris Hedges, 26-08-2019

Traduit par les lecteurs du site www.les-crises.fr. Traduction librement reproductible en intégralité, en citant la source.

Historian of the Future: An Introduction to Oswald Spengler’s Life and Works for the Curious Passer-by and the Interested Student

Historian of the Future:
An Introduction to Oswald Spengler’s Life and Works
for the Curious Passer-by and the Interested Student

By Stephen M. Borthwick

Ex: https://europeanheathenfront.wordpress.com

There have been two resurgences in the popularity of Oswald Spengler since the initial blooming of his popularity in the 1920s; the first in the 1980s and the second most recently, with almost ten major books dealing directly with him or his thought published in the last ten years, and more articles in various academic journals. It is a resurgence in the popular mind that may yet be matched in the academy, where Spengler has hardly been obscure but nevertheless an unknown—a forbidden intellectual fruit for what was, in the words of Henry Stuart Hughes, his first English-language biographer, “obviously not a respectable performance from the standpoint of scholarship” calling Decline of the West, in form typical to Hughes’ species “a massive stumbling block in the path to true knowledge”.^[1] This is a pervasive attitude amongst academics, whose fields, especially history, are dominated by a specialisation that Spengler’s history defies with its broad perspective and positivist influences. As such when Spengler’s magnum opus first appeared, it was immediately subject to what in popular parlance can only qualify as nit-picking, which did not cease when the author corrected what factual errors could be found in his initial text. Nevertheless, in the popular mind Spengler has remained an influential if obscure author. Most recently, his unique, isolated civilisations encapsulated in their own history has been observed in Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, though the development of civilisations from Mediterranean to Western that he paints resembles the dominant theory posited by William McNeill in his Rise of the West rather than Spengler’s Decline of the West. Nevertheless, Spengler’s theory of encapsulated cultural organisms growing up next to one another, advanced by subsequent authors like Toynbee, remains a stirring line of thought, growing more relevant in the rising conflict between Western countries and the resurging Islamic world.

To understand this adversity that Spengler’s ideas struggle against in the academic establishment, and therefore to know why his ideas have filtered through the decades but left his name and book behind, it is necessary to do what very few academics dare to do: to explore and openly discuss the significance of Spengler’s thought. This is the project of this essay; to explain to any who have recently discovered Spengler, especially if they are a college student or college graduate, why they have never heard the name “Spengler” before, and what his thought entails at its most basic level. This discussion will deal not just with Spengler’s most famous work, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (“The Downfall of the Occident”, popularly known as Decline of the West, after C.F. Atkinson’s translation) but also with his numerous political pamphlets and subsequent works of philosophy and history. His philosophical texts include, chiefly: Man and Technics, a specialised focus expanding on the relationship of the human being and the age of technology in which we live already mentioned in Decline, The Hour of Decision, which foresees the overthrow of the Western world by what today would be called the “Third World”, or what Spengler refers to as the “Coloured World”, and Prussianism and Socialism, his first major political text, prescribing the exact form of political structure needed, in his view, to save Germany immediately after the First World War. Numerous other texts, published by C.H. Beck in Munich, also exist, compiled in two primary collections, Politischen Schriften (“Political Writings”) of 1934 and posthumous Reden und Aufsätze (“Speeches and Essays”) of 1936; these are joined by Gedanken (“Reflections”), also of 1936. His unfinished works, posthumously collected and titled by chief Spengler scholar Anton Koktanek in the 1960s, Urfragen and Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte, will not be touched upon in this brief introduction, since they are not available in the English language, but readers fluent in German are encouraged to explore them as well as Koktanek’s other works.

On the assumption that without understanding a man, one cannot grasp his thought, it seems most appropriate to begin any exploration of Spengler the philosopher with Spengler the man. Spengler was a conservative first, then a German nationalist, then a pessimist (though he regarded himself as a consummate realist). Further, he was one of the few men (if not the only man) to meet Adolf Hitler and come away completely unmoved by the demagogue and future dictator of Germany. He openly attacked National Socialism as “the tendency not to want to see and master sober reality, but instead to conceal it with... a party-theatre of flags, parades, and uniforms and to fake hard facts with theories and programmes” and declared that what Germany needed was “a hero, not merely a heroic tenor.”^[2] Nevertheless, when voting in the 1932 elections, Spengler, along with some 13.5 million other Germans, cast his ballot for the National Socialist ticket; he explained his choice to friends by saying enigmatically “Hitler is an idiot—but one must support the movement.”^[3] At the time people speculated what he meant, and have subsequently continued to speculate to what he was referring when he said “the movement”, especially after his sustained criticisms of National Socialism well into what other Germans were experiencing as “the German Rebirth” in the years between 1933 and his death in 1936.

Spengler’s sustained pessimism about the National Socialist future (he remarked sarcastically shortly before his death that “in ten years the German Reich will probably no longer exist”) is reflective of a realism he had well before the beginning of the First World War, when the idea that would become Decline of the West were first conceived shortly after the Agadir crisis in 1911. Spengler lived and wrote largely in unhappy times; his chief contributions were made in Germany’s darkest hours of the interwar period, dominated by an unstable, incompetent government, extraordinary tributes exacted by the victorious allies, and as a result unrivalled poverty, inflation, and unemployment while the former Allied Powers (save for Italy) were experiencing the so-called “Roaring ‘20s”. He was born and he died, however, in times when things were looking bright. Few regular Germans in 1936 could or did foresee the barbarity of Hitler’s reign, five gruelling years of World War and the planned extermination of non-“Aryans” in conquered territories as well as at home, just as Wilhelmine Germany was oblivious to the consequences of the First World War almost right through it. All that the Germans saw was Germany, their Germany, was on the rise! In 1880, when the young Oswald was born to Bernhard Spengler and his wife Pauline, the German Empire was led by Kaiser Wilhelm I and his Iron Chancellor Bismarck, and the German Reich was still celebrating its formation and the unification of the German nation. Aside from the tribulation of the “year of three emperors” when the young Oswald was eight, there was no reason for the average German to worry about catastrophe: the kindly old Kaiser Wilhelm was replaced by his young, virulent grandson, Wilhelm II, who promised his people “a place in the Sun”. Later, in 1936, when the now established scholar died in his sleep of a heart-attack, the German people were again in good spirits; from the popular perspective, all they could see was that they at last had jobs again, inflation no longer loomed as so painful a memory, their shattered Reich was being rebuilt, and someone had finally reasserted German control over the Rhineland and the Saar—where the memory of the insulting use of colonial occupation forces by the French, and the various abuses civilians suffered during the occupation, still lingered in the German mind.

Early Life (From Youth to Decline, 1880-1917)

All of this blithe cheerfulness and celebration, though, did not affect either the young or the old Oswald Spengler. The opening chapter of Koktanek’s biography of him is titled “Ursprung und Urangst” – “Origin and Original Anxiety”, and not without good reason. Throughout his life, Spengler suffered a nervous affliction and anxiety, leading to chronic headaches in later years so bad that they caused minor short-term memory loss. He would later reflect in his planned autobiography that in his youth he had “no friends, with one exception, [and] no love: a few sudden, stupid [infatuations], fearful of the bond [of relationship]. [I had] only yearning and melancholy.”^[4] His home life was similarly dismal. John Farrenkopf characterises it as the typical bourgeois home of the period; his father, a former copper miner turned civil servant, was proud of the Fatherland, conservative in social attitudes, and generally took for granted his loyalty to the Prussian State. It was, in Spengler’s own eyes, a cold place, and an unhappy one. Spengler remarked that his parents were “unliterarisch”—“unlettered, unliterary”—and they “never opened our bookcase nor bought a book”; he himself developed an early love for reading, which earned him ire from his father, of whom he wrote was characterised by a “hatred for all recreation, most of all books”.^[5] Despite his newspaper reading and bourgeois sensibilities, though, Bernhard Spengler rarely raised the topic of politics in the household, and young Oswald was only exposed to the workings of the State by outside influences. He would break from this aloofness of politics only once in his life, shrinking after his failure back into scholastic and theoretical efforts to influence the political climate.

Spengler’s mother led an unhappy life; she married Bernhard, it would seem, out of convenience rather than deep feeling, and bitter about her lot. Originally from the famous Grantzow clan of ballerinas and ballet masters, Pauline Spengler was prevented from ballet and the stage because of her figure, and then forced to leave her beloved home town, the quiet hamlet of Blanckenburg in the Harz mountains, for the bustling Hessian city of Halle-an-der-Saale when young Oswald was ten and her husband changed his trade from mining to postal work (a change he was not especially excited about, either). She displayed her dissatisfaction by brooding over her painting (an effort to cling to what artistry she could maintain in competition with her sisters) and playing petty tyrant over her children.

The young Spengler escaped this life through fantasy and fiction, inventing imaginary kingdoms and world-empires and writing childish theatre-plays with echoes of Wagner. He found further escape after he began his schooling at the Latina, administered by the Franckean Foundation in Halle, where he formally studied Greek and Latin, but in his free time devoured Goethe and Schiller, the first of literary influences that would later be joined by such eclectic writers as William Shakespeare, Gerhart Hauptmann, Henrik Ibsen, Maksim Gorky, Honoré de Balzac, Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Hebbel, Heinrich Heine, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Émile Zola, Gutave Flaubert, and others.^[6] Spengler complained of the Franckean focus on Greek and Latin that prevented him from learning “practical languages”, and he was forced as a result to teach himself French, English, Italian, and, later, during his university days, Russian, through reading authors in those languages. His fluency in the languages was astounding to many, but he himself never felt comfortable enough with them to correspond with many of the authors he would later read and who would bring to bear influence on his own magnum opus in their own languages. Anton Koktanek blames this anxiety and lack of formal training in modern foreign languages for Spengler remaining “a German phenomenon”.^[7]

Spengler’s interest in world history and contemporary history also began here, and added to the fiction he wrote, including a short story set in the Russo-Japanese War titled Der Sieger as well as poetry, librettos, dramatic sketches, and other notes and such, most of which he would commit to the flames in 1911.^[8] At University, he read the entirety of Goethe’s corpus and discovered two men who would bear tremendous influence on his later writing: Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. He would also become a devotee of Richard Wagner during this time, declaring his favourite work to be Tristan and Isolde.^[9] His interest in Nietzsche especially would have great bearing on his choice of thesis topic, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.

Spengler’s father died in 1901, just as Oswald was beginning University studies. He was by and large emotionally unaffected by the loss, and began all the more focusing on his studies. Like most students at University in those days, Spengler matriculated at several Universities while formally enrolled at the University of Halle. First, he travelled to Munich, a city with which he would fall in love and later make his home. Subsequently he would also study at the University of Berlin and then returned to Halle to complete his dissertation topic, entitled “Heraklit: eine Studie über den energetischen Grundgedanken seiner Philosophie” (“Heraclitus: A Study of the Energetic Fundamental Thought of his Philosophy”). It was, as Klaus Fischer observes, “a daring subject for a young scholar because Heraclitus had only left a few and highly cryptic fragments of his thought.”^[10] Spengler, however, dared, and presented the first form of his thesis in 1903, but failed the oral defence. Despite his own typically depressed personality, however, he was not downtrodden at the failure; rather, he agreed with almost every criticism that was offered against his work—in his autobiography he called himself “naïve”. He had not, as most biographers observe, consulted any professors on his thesis before submitting it, and therefore had made errors and omissions that one only really avoids from consultation and discussion of one’s work.^[11] The primary complaint was his lack of citations. He would repeat this mistake with the first edition of Decline of the West in 1917, writing the book entirely alone and isolated from the outside world—after initial criticism of the book he would revisit and largely revise the text, such that when it arrived in second edition in 1922 he had fixed most of his errors, but did not, as the academics insisted he should, increase the number of citations.

Spengler received his Ph.D. in 1904 and immediately went on to pass State examinations in a number of subjects that allowed him to become a Gymnasium teacher. His first assignment was a major turning point in his life, when he resolved not to be a teacher after stepping off the train in the little town of Lüneburg, taking a glance about at the town and the school and realising how terribly provincial his life would be. Spengler promptly boarded a train for his home town of Blankenburg and had a nervous breakdown. From this point forward he resolved to use teaching as a support for his true passions of study and writing. He recovered from his breakdown and took a different assignment, this time in Saarbrücken, happy to be so close to the French border that would allow him to take several holidays in France.^[12] After a year there, he moved on to Düsseldorf, where he taught for another year before taking on a permanent (or so it appeared at the time) position in Hamburg.

Spengler flourished in these cities of big industry and metropolitan life—despite his writings criticising money power and the soul-stealing metropolis, Spengler remained a cosmopolitan urbanite throughout his life. An attestation to this aspect of his personality is his behaviour while teaching. Spengler remembered his days in the Franckean Latina with mixed disdain for the parochial moralists he had as teachers and gratitude for the training he received. He resolved, in the words of Klaus Fischer, “to avoid the foibles commonly attributed to schoolteachers: pedantry, narrow provincialism, and incivility” and made an effort to keep himself fully attuned to the petty culture of fashion and the latest advances in his scholarly fields (he taught German, mathematics, and geography). He would also frequent the theatre (where he would weep easily at especially moving plots and concertos) and local museums—in Düsseldorf he was even spotted frequently in the casino, a place quite foreign to most schoolteachers!^[13] His time in teaching, however, was short-lived. By almost all accounts Spengler hated Hamburg, not for itself, nor because he disliked the people, his colleagues or his students—indeed in all these respects he was well-respected and well-loved and returned these feelings of affection—but because of the weather. The cold, wet north German city terrorised him, increasing the acuteness and the frequency of his chronic headaches to such a degree that he took a year sabbatical in 1911 from which he would never return. His immediate plans were a holiday in Italy, where he would sojourn frequently in imitation of Goethe.^[14]

His complete departure from teaching, much to the disappointment of both colleagues and students, who regarded him as a superlative teacher and amicable fellow, was by and large decided by his mother’s death in 1910. He had little regard for his mother, who psychologically tortured his sister Gertrude, disdained his other sister Hildegard, and was no kinder to his beloved sister Adele.^[15] While he marked his father’s passing in 1901 with reflections of the latter’s loyalty to Prussia, his mother’s death was marked only with his inheritance and departure from his childhood home, leaving his sister Adele to dissolve the household.^[16] Adele, a frustrated bohemian and largely talentless aspiring virtuoso, quickly spent the 30,000DM she inherited and committed suicide in 1917. Oswald’s inheritance, on the other hand, was wisely invested and used with some measure of thrift, giving him a comfortable lifestyle in Munich and allowing him to pursue his desire to be a writer.

At first, Spengler hadn’t the slightest idea what to write about. In Heraklit he displayed some of the budding thought which came to fruition as his magnum opus, to be sure. In one of the thicker sections of notes for Eis Heauton, the author proclaims that “my great book, Untergang des Abendlandes, was already emotionally conceived in my twentieth year” (four years before he would submit his doctoral thesis).^[17] Farrenkopf observes that Spengler’s dissertation bears the marks of Decline as well, declaring that “what Spengler later attempted as a philosopher of history is analogous to what he claimed Heraclitus had accomplished in Greek philosophy”.^[18] The true inspiration for Decline, however, came not from Heraclitus nor from Goethe or Nietzsche; nor did it come to him, as it did with Gibbon and Toynbee, from a physical visit to any landmarks. Rather, the genesis of Decline of the West was in a much different, political work titled Liberal and Conservative, which Spengler began writing in response to the Agadir Crisis of 1911.

Agadir, briefly put, was an attempt on the part of Kaiser Wilhelm II to imitate the American support of the Panamanian rebellion against Columbia, which was accomplished by placing the American fleet off the coast of Panama to prevent Columbian intervention. When Moroccans rebelled against the puppet Sultan Abdelhafid after years of allowing his country to be exploited by European powers, the French offered to support Fez by sending in troops. Wilhelm attempted to assert German interests in the region by sending the gunboat Panther to the harbour of Agadir, much to the chagrin of the French, who would later take over Morocco as part of their colonial Empire, and the British, who viewed the act as a challenge to their own power and a threat to peace in Europe. The end result of the whole event was a strengthened Entente cordiale that would eventually become the Allied Powers in the First World War.

Spengler was keenly aware of the situation at the time, and took on the task of writing a book on the subject that would contrast German and British world-aims and national spirits. The general thrust of this work would become his later work Prussianism and Socialism of 1919, but as he worked on Liberal and Conservative, he found his topic broadening more and more, to the point where he was taking into account not the national rivalries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the great trials and tribulations of entire civilisations over the course of millennia. Thus the work transformed into the first volume of his Decline of the West, the title of which he probably derived from discovering Otto Seeck’s Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (“History of the Downfall of the Ancient World” or The History of the Decline of Antiquity) in a store-front window.^[19] He would complete the work over the next few years, well into the World War, about which he maintained a positive outlook, to the extent that his introduction to the first volume of Decline, appearing in 1917, bore the hope of the author (omitted in Atkinson’s translation) that “this book might not stand entirely unworthy next to the military achievements of Germany.”^[20]

The book that took shape was sweeping in scale, painting the picture of a broad history of mankind as the life cycle(s) of massive organisms to which Spengler gave two names: Kultur and Zivilisation, each representing the youth and the adulthood of the organism. These organisms passed through four seasons of life—(as Kultur) Spring, Summer, (as Zivilisation) Autumn, and Winter—before passing from existence and leaving the soil to which it is tied to give rise to a new organism. A more detailed discussion of the theory may be required before departing into Spengler’s life after the War and the publication of Decline.

Decline of the West and its Influences

Der Untergang des Abendlandes occurs as a part of a long tradition of German historical writing, dating from the early nineteenth century and in which the giants of the field, both famous and infamous, stand: G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Heinrich von Treitschke, Leopold von Ranke, Heinrich Friedjung, among others. It also occurs as a part of a long tradition of German philosophy and social thought, dating even further into history and starting, not with the rational Kant, but with the intuitive and romantic, sometimes quasi-mystical writings of Goethe, following to Nietzsche, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and still more. More can be said of Spengler’s influences, and has been said in the works of Farrenkopf and Fischer on the subject, but a brief discussion of chief influences will be sufficient for our purposes.

If Spengler was the first to propose a World-Historical view, as he claims in the early pages of Decline, Leopold von Ranke preceded him by for the first time proposing a European-Historical view in his two-volume Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (“German History in the Age of Reformation”) of 1845/47.^[21] Ranke wrote a history which belongs to a very specific school of historical inquiry, dependent on objectivity and a slice of historical fact drawn from primary source work with bearing only on that exact moment in history, showing things wie es eigentlich gewesen, as he proclaims in his 1824 work Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (“History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples, 1494-1514”). For all his efforts at objectivity in history, he was a firm believer in the balance of power of nation-states, and his loyalty to this state philosophy bleeds through in his writing. He is significant to Spengler in that both men sought to broaden historical inquiry into an objective rather than national project, and that Spengler was certainly beholden to the school of narrative historicism that Ranke would found, inasmuch as his project was heavily criticised by more loyal Rankeans than himself.

Spengler’s other major historical inheritance was G.W.F. Hegel, who stood with Ranke in his typical nineteenth century fascination with the nation-state but was completely opposed to Ranke’s objective, slice-of-history approach, demanding a broader view, and the ability to see the future in the past. Hegel was also a dedicated Prussian, much like Spengler’s father and Spengler himself—so much so, in fact, that he is among several German historians of preceding centuries who are mentioned by Shirer in his fumbling, attempt to link National Socialism and the Prussian state in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. His declaration in Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (“Elements of the Philosophy of Right”) that “the course of God in the world—that is the State—and its foundation is the mighty force of Reason actualising itself as Will” is reflected in Spengler’s own firm belief in the role of fate in the lifespan of Kultur-Zivilisation organisms.^[22] Furthermore, like Hegel, Spengler’s history is a designated march to a designated end: for Hegel, the “end of history” is a progressive, linear movement from antiquity to modernity and the pinnacle of mankind’s development—a belief that has earned Hegel accusations of arrogance and stubbornness, among other things, from detractors. He would pass this view onto his student Karl Marx, who proclaimed the same progression, but from a strictly economic view, of modes of production through history, culminating in the elimination of alienation and the realisation of Species-being in Communism. The difference between the Hegelian and Marxian view of history and Spengler, however, is two-fold: while the given lifespan of a Kultur-Zivilisation organism can be viewed as linear, it is a downward motion rather than the upward motion Hegel and Marx see; further, there is no single linear history of all mankind, the way Hegel and Marx see it. Quite the contrary, Spengler echoes Goethe, declaring that “‘Mankind’ is a zoological concept or merely an empty word.”^[23]

It seems contradictory, of course, that Spengler would reject that “mankind” exists while attempting very earnestly to write a “world-history.” As much as Spengler reflects Hegel and Ranke as historical predecessors, his views of the organism of society bear the marks of Ferdinand Tönnies, whose famous work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft would practically found the discipline of sociology, influencing both Max Weber’s seminal The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as well as Emile Durkheim’s functional theories of society.^[24] Tönnies summarises his project in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft in the very first page, saying “The connexion will be understood either as real and organic – this being the nature of the Gemeinschaft – or in an ideological and mechanistic form – this being the notion of Gesellschaft” and further summarising the difference between the two by saying that, “all that is familiar, private, living together exclusively (we find) is understood as life in a Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft is the public sphere, it is the World”.^[25]

Spengler’s structure of the communal, agrarian Kultur passing into individualised, urban Zivilisation has much in common with Tönnies’ conception of the organic Gemeinschaft and its artificial counterpart Gesellschaft. It is also important to bear in mind that the key to the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft schema is two-fold—both the contrast of the private with the public spheres as well as the organic with the artificial—when considering Spengler’s own contrast of the representative of Kultur, which is the “country-town” with the representative of Zivilisation, which is the megalopolis. As Spengler says himself, “long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.”^[26]

The contrast of the organic with the artificial, the personal with the impersonal, and the village with the city runs throughout Spengler’s whole structure. Spengler’s vision is two-fold: both the binary progression of Kultur crystallising and stagnating into Zivilisation as well the four-phase life cycle that all Kultur-Zivilisation structures (or, more properly, organisms) follow. Describing this, Spengler uses two sets of terms: organic terms, describing the actual birth, growth, decline, and death of the Kulture-Zivilization organism as a life form, and the fatalistic language for which he has been so criticised: he declares “the Civilisation is the inevitable destiny of a Culture… Civilisations are… a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life”.^[27] The central concept there—Werden and Gewordene, “becoming” and “become”—are ideas for which Spengler is deeply indebted (as he admits) to Goethe, and play strong role in the contrast he makes between the vivacious, developing Kultur and the stagnant, crystallised Zivilisation.^[28]

These Kultur-Zivilisation organisms are detailed in three tables he includes in his work: the first details the passage of Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter, which for the Occident begins in 900, after the Carolingian period and the final death of Antiquity, and ends (or begins to end) with modernity, completely the roughly thousand-year lifespan which Spengler assigns to his Kultur-Zivilisation organisms (except those of the far east). Each Kultur-Zivilisation organism has a symbol which accompanies it in the Kultur phase; for the West it is infinite space; for the Egyptian, the long corridor; the Semitic, the cavern; the Greeks, the idealised statue, etc. Spengler also specifically names three of the “souls” of these organisms with especial bearing on the Occident. The West itself is “Faustian” defined by Goethe’s own character and his constant outward-reaching for knowledge and more; Antiquity, which the West has replaced, is “Apollonian”, a term readily borrowed from Nietzsche, defined by the Nietzschean Apollonian rationality and thirst for worldly perfection; finally, the Semitic, being Jewish, Arabic, etc. is a sort of mixed Kultur-Zivilisation organism called “Magian”, after the mystics who visited the birth of the Christ-child, and is defined by the preoccupation with essence rather than space.

The Magian requires some further discussion, since it represents for Spengler a different “mutation” (to keep with the biological sense of an organism) of the main species of Kultur-Zivilizationen. This is because of a process Spengler describes in the second volume of Decline called “pseudomorphosis”. He asserts in the first volume that the “Arabian soul was cheated of its maturity—like a young tree that is hindered and stunted in its growth by a fallen old giant of the forest,” but after critiques of the work began to circulate back to him, realised that this was inadequate to explain the unique situation that the Magian Kultur-Zivilisation finds itself.^[29] He therefore suggests a parallel with mineralogy, pointing the phenomenon of “pseudomorphosis”, by which volcanic molten rock flows into spaces left by washed away minerals in the hollows of rocks; likewise, since the Arabian culture’s pre-historical period is encompassed by Babylonian Civilization, and later as it develops it is stunted by Antiquity with the Roman conquest of Egypt.^[30] Spengler sees a similar occurrence with the Russian Kultur-Zivilisation, which is pressed between the Faustian Kultur-Zivilisation and the Asiatic hordes which repeatedly conquer it. He maintains even in his last work, Jahre der Entscheidung, that the Bolshevist revolution represented a part of this pseudomorphosis that Russia is experiencing: “Asia has conquered Russia back from “Europe” to which it had been annexed by Peter the Great”.^[31]

This is the structure within which the subject of Spengler’s title exists. Spengler remarked on his title at length in an essay titled “Pessimismus?” (“Pessimism?”) appearing in the Preußischer Jahrbücher in 1921:

But there are men who confuse the downfall [literally “going under”] of Antiquity with the sinking of an ocean liner. The notion of a catastrophe is not contained in the word. If one said—instead of downfall—completion, an expression that is linked in a special way with Goethe’s thought, the “pessimistic” side is removed without the real sense of the term having been altered.^[32]

He is not, therefore, discussing a cataclysmic event that would bring about the end of Western civilisation, though no doubt much of the appeal of his work was the recent catastrophe of the Great War. What he sees instead is a general inadequacy in the trends coming out of his contemporary West, which the Great War only compounded. Faustian civilisation had come to stagnate with the rise of bourgeois economists; as he says, “through the economic history of every Culture there runs a desperate conflict waged by the soil-rooted tradition of a race, by its soul, against the spirit of money”.^[33] The capitalism and industrialisation of liberal Europe represents the bleeding dry of the soul of Faustian Kultur; it, too, however, shall pass in the coming Ceasarism of the Faustian Winter that Spengler predicts. He speaks of “the sword” being triumphant over money-power and finance capital, bringing about the final period of where violence of spirit triumphs and is marked by the rise of the “Caesars”, demagogues who will bring about a Western World Imperium that Spengler envisioned being headed by Germany. It is worth noting that John Farrenkopf believes this to remain an accurate prediction for America, which Spengler himself discounted, as most Europeans at the time, as an adolescent child of Europe, hardly capable of contributing to Faustian Zivilisation in any great way.

It is, at last, important to note that while Spengler offers this structure that explains history, it is not his intent to “save” the Occident. He participated in politics that would, in his view, further the progression of Faustian Zivilization out of its Autumn and into Winter, but, in true Nietzschean fashion, he encourages his readers to adopt an amor fati toward the decline of their Kultur-Zivilisation. Indeed, the hope one retains after reading Spengler is of a peculiar kind—since all Kultur-Zivilisationen are destined to wither and die, the Faustian man should embrace the destruction of the Occident with an eye to the subsequent Kultur-Zivilisation organism that will take its place, which Spengler predicts will be Russian, a society which due to close contact to both the Occidental and Asian Kultur-Zivilisation organisms has not been able to come into itself—in short, it is not yet Werden, existing in the historyless period that marks the beginning and end of every Kultur-Zivilisation organism.

The Conservative Revolutionary (Political Writings and Speeches, 1919-1924)

The Decline of the West marks a high-point in Spengler’s life, and also a turning point for both his own life and the life of Germany as a whole. Decline appeared complete in two volumes in 1922, four years after Germany’s defeat in the First World War and in the midst of the Weimar Republic struggling to get on its feet. As mentioned above, this contributed greatly to the book’s circulation, though it is unclear how many enthusiasts made an effort to read the entire text. Spengler found himself now ushered into higher intellectual circles, battling with intellectual greats over the value of his work, and once again able to enjoy the delicacies he had to go without for the duration of the War (he wrote that much of the work he did on Decline was done by candlelight). In 1919 he joined such famous names as Hermann Alexander Graf Keyserling (for his seminal work Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen, “Travel-Diary of a Philosopher”) and distinguished Kant scholar Dr. Hans Vaihinger (for his work Philosophie des Als Ob, “The Philosophy of As-If”) in being awarded the Nietzsche Archives’ “Distinguished Scholar Award” with an academic diploma and the sum of 1,500.00DM (roughly $45.00 in 1919).^[34]

Despite his acute sense of the depressing reality of his work, Spengler was materially well-off and led a generally comfortable life because of its popularity. He moved from the small flat where he had written Decline during the war to a spacious apartment that overlooked the Isar River. He decorated it with a variety of fine paintings, Chinese and Greek-styled vases, and other pieces obtained at auctions or gifted to him by admirers, and shocked visitors with his vast library, which literally lined the walls of his new home. He covered the fine hard-wood floors with even finer rugs, most markedly a strikingly red carpet in his office upon which he was known to pace endlessly in the night while he worked.^[35] He was, though, of relatively modest tastes, and was frugal with his money. He took holidays to Italy frequently, but otherwise only left Germany when another party could pay for his travel; his tastes at home included trips to the theatre, fine wines, and a regular supply of dark cigars. He never hired a housekeeper or married, and his sister Hildegard, widowed by the World War, would keep house for him. He rarely entertained and continued to devote himself to work. His work now, though, was not strictly scholarly.

A well-known name now, Spengler began to take a greater interest in politics than he had hitherto. He wrote to Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz in 1920 regarding the recovery of the flag from the SMS Scharnhorst, which was sunk in the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914, taking Admiral Maximillian Graf von Spee to the bottom with it; the flag, Spengler wrote, had fallen into the hands of an anti-German party who wished to send it to Britain to be a trophy of war, something offensive to Spengler as a German nationalist.^[36] Admiral von Tirpitz replied that he would refer the matter to the admiralty, but the flag was undoubtedly not that from the Scharnhorst’s main post, which went down flying, and therefore the value of the demands of the original owners for the flag (50,000-60,000DM) was probably not equal even to its sentimental value. The admiral added, probably much to Spengler’s satisfaction, that he had thoroughly enjoyed reading Prussianism and Socialism, and wrote “I only wish that your ideas could find response in the Marxist-infected working classes.”^[37]

The work Admiral Tirpitz praised so highly was Spengler’s second attempt to reflect on the Agadir crisis and the significance of German and British relations. Prussianism and Socialism appears in English translation by Donald O. White with a number of other shorter articles that Spengler penned in the early 1920s. The work appears in White’s 1967 collection Selected Essays, which is roughly a translation of Politischen Schriften, but making some omissions and drawing also from Rede und Aufsätze. The overall collection gives a decent introductory glance at Spengler’s social and political thought, which merits it some exposition here. Other works included in it are “Pessimism?”, which was written as a response to the charge levelled against Decline, his two speeches “The Two Faces of Russia and Germany’s Eastern Problems” (delivered to a conference of influential Ruhr industrialists in 1922) and “Nietzsche and his Century” (delivered at a conference hosted by the Nietzsche Archive in 1924 before Spengler severed ties with Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche because of her alignment with Hitler ten years later), another short essay titled “On the German National Character”, published in 1927, and finally a brief response given by Spengler to a query posited internationally by Hearst International’s The Cosmopolitan, titled “Is World Peace Possible?”, which was published in what White calls “barely adequate translation” in 1936 alongside answers from Mohandas K. Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, General Billy Mitchell, and Lin Yu-tang.^[38]

Prussianism and Socialism abandons Spengler’s earlier, less informed political alignment with the Kaiser, but beyond this minor change it expresses and sets the tone for almost all of Spengler’s other political writings before and after, including his final major work, Hour of Decision. It is also the work that initiated Spengler’s name into the collection of intellectuals and aristocrats that formed the “Conservative Revolution” movement in Weimar Germany. The names he is included with range from the completely obscure to the internationally famous. Among them are obscure authors like Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, for his work, later appropriated by the Nazis, Das Dritte Reich (1923—available in English as Germany’s Third Empire) and Edgar Julius Jung, who is seen as the leader of the movement, for his work Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen (“The Reign of the Mediocre”, 1927), and more famously for Franz von Papen’s “Marburg Speech”, the last open condemnation of Nazism made in Weimar Germany. However, members of the movement also included men like the internationally acclaimed Ernst Jünger, for his famous memoir of the World War, In Stahlgewittern (first published in 1920 and having been revised by the author 7 times, it is now available in very good translation by Michael Hoffmann as Storm of Steel), Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (“Battle as Inner Experience”, 1922), Das Wäldchen 125 (“Copse 125”, 1925) and Feuer und Blut (“Fire and Blood”, 1925) as well as the famous and widely translated Carl Schmitt, now well known for his works Die Diktatur (1921—now available in translation as On Dictatorship), Politische Theologie (1922—available as Political Theology), Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (1923—now available in a good translation by Ellen Kennedy titled The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy), and his extremely significant Der Begriff des Politischen (1926—now available as The Concept of the Political). The unifying feature of the movement was a desire to bridge the gap between nationalist conservatism and socialism, though another major factor was the distaste that all the men had for Adolf Hitler and his, in the words of Moeller van den Bruck, “proletarian primitiveness”.^[39]

Spengler’s interactions with other conservatives were largely done through his involvement in the Juniclub (“June Club”) a gathering of Conservatives and Monarchists who shared Spengler’s hatred of the Versailles Treaty (commonly known in Germany as the Versailles Diktat because of the lack of input allowed from the German delegation). Among the group’s founding members was Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, with whom Spengler had many encounters from 1919 until Moeller’s suicide in 1925 through lectures that both gave to the Juniclub. At the Juniclub he also had the opportunity to meet and begin correspondence with Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, Walther Rathenau, Erich Ludendorff, Hans von Seeckt, and create friendships and lasting ties to major industrialists like Paul Reusch, Roderich Schlubach, Alfred Hugenberg, Karl Helfferich, and Hugo Stinnes.^[40] Aside from Moeller, however, his encounters with the other major thinkers of the Conservative Revolutionary movement seemed few; he had some contact later with Jung, who wrote him on several occasions. However, his major inclination during his years of involvement with the Juniclub was toward becoming actively involved in conservative politics, not merely being a theoretician. His ambitions during this time were as disparate and far-flung as leading German intellectuals into politics and founding a newspaper cartel in imitation of William Randolph Hearst.^[41]

Spengler’s letters during this time are often brief (owing to his preference for meeting people rather than writing them) and to a wide variety of people, including invitations to tea with Erich Ludendorff and his wife, which he maintained as a regular affair until Ludendorff’s involvement in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. There was also an extended correspondence with the German government regarding interaction with General Jan C. Smuts, who had invited General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (with whom Spengler also corresponded) to a dinner for African commanders of the war.^[42] He also met semi-regularly, it would seem, with the Prussian royal family; Crown Prince Wilhelm wrote him a number of times, and Spengler sent copies of his magnum opus to Huis Doorn. He also managed to elicit a positive response from Gregor Strasser, a prominent rival of Hitler’s in the National Socialist party who was murdered in the Night of the Long Knives.^[43]

Spengler, however, remained primarily a theoretician; he met many men with whom he had lasting friendships, but he was not a man of political action and he was acutely aware of that. Throughout his brief political career, he was advised by friends not to waste his genius on petty affairs of state, and he eventually gave in and retreated from public life in 1924 after five years of immense popularity and prolific writing. In addition to the one or two speeches and articles in the White collection, in 1924 alone Spengler published Frankreich und Europa (“France and Europe”), Aufgaben des Adels (“Tasks of the Nobility”), Politische Pflichten der deutschen Jugend (“Political Duties of the German Youth”), Neubau des deutschen Reiches (“Reconstruction of the German Reich”), Neue Formen der Weltpolitik (“New Forms of Global Politics”) all of which were derived from speeches and lectures he had given at the Juniclub or at various Industrial clubs and conferences during his involvement there. Some of them, including Politische Pflichten and Neubau would appear in Spengler’s Politischen Schriften of 1932, the others would only be published together in 1937 in the posthumous Reden und Aufsätze collection. The works, all expressing a common theme of the necessity to “reclaim socialism” from Marx and bring about a new birth of “Prussianism” in the German population, brought Spengler immense notoriety in Germany while Decline was making its way through foreign circles. Other presentations included his Das Verhältnis von Wirtschaft und Steuerpolitik seit 1750 (“The Relationship of Economy and Tax Policy since 1750”, 1924). His lectures drew tremendous crowds and he participated in a number of public debates between 1919 and 1924.

Prussianism and Socialism: A Brief Glance

Of all Spengler’s political writings and speeches, both from his public career and after, the most detailed and the most significant remains Prussianism and Socialism. In the work, Spengler makes two arguments, one unique to his own time and one with far-reaching relevance. The work’s principal argument surrounds the “true German spirit” with “the German Michel”, which Spengler declares “the sum of all our weaknesses: our fundamental displeasure at turns of events that demand attention and response; our urge to criticise at the wrong time; our pursuit of ideals instead of immediate action; our precipitate action at times when careful reflection is called for; our Volk as a collection of malcontents; our representative assemblies as glorified beer gardens.”^[44] The thrust of the work is a contrast between “English” parliamentarianism and liberalism, which the “German Michel” typifies, the Marxist socialist movement of the Sparticists, which at least has the integrity that the “German Michel” lacked, and real “German” socialism, which Spengler ties to Prussian military spirit and civic duty to create the “Prussian socialism” that he insists is the only way to bring about a rebirth of the German Reich.

The opening of Prussianism and Socialism declares the same sense of destiny found in Decline, quoting Seneca's aphorism ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt (“Fate leads along the willing soul and drags the unwilling”).^[45] He declares that “the spirit of Old Prussia and the socialistic attitude, at present driven by brotherly hatred to combat each other, are in fact one in the same”, defining “socialism” itself, which he claims “everyone thinks… means something different”.^[46] Spengler’s hero of socialism is August Bebel, the Marxist founder of the SPD who was famously born in a Prussian army barracks. He praises Bebels’ party for its “militant qualities…the clattering footsteps of workers’ battalions, a calm sense of determination, good discipline, and the courage to die for a transcendent principle” and damns the SPD in power in the Weimar Republic for abandoning the revolution and throwing in its lot with the “foe of yesteryear” and encouraging the Freikorps to crush the Spartacists, who Spengler felt “retained a modicum of integrity”.^[47] It is not the Marxism of the Social Democrats Spengler admires, however; rather, it is their integrity and their dedication to their beliefs—something that simply does not exist for the “German Michel”, the contemporary parliamentarian.

He goes on to condemn the “so-called German Revolution” that took place in November, saying that the Germans “produced pedants, schoolboys, and gossips in the Paulskirche and in Weimar, petty demonstrations in the streets, and in the background a nation looking on with faint interest”—not at all what a real revolution entails, but something feeble, something belonging to the parliamentarian and the “German Michel”.^[48] Spengler establishes the foundation of Prussian Socialism with “the real German Socialist Revolution” which he says happened in 1914—a real revolution because it involved “the whole people: one outcry, one brazen act, one rage, one goal”.^[49] He further asserts that the revolution is not over—a notion he expands on in later speeches and essays. The Revolution of the German people cannot come to full fruition for Spengler and his fellow conservatives, until the German nation is truly born—for 1918 in Germany was not 1789 in France; the nation and the revolution were not the same.

He concludes that “Socialism is not an instinct of dark primeval origin… it is, rather, a political, social, and economic instinct of realistically-minded peoples, as such it is a product of one stage of our civilisation—not of our culture.”^[50] He asserts a thoroughly modern origin and a thoroughly modern role for socialism: the realistic, the enemy of the dictatorship of money and capitalism, defined in socialistic form by a sense of duty to the whole, that whole being the German nation. It is in this way that “all Germans are workers”, so that the failing of Marx, he asserts, is his inability to grasp anything more in Hegel, “who by and far represented Prussianism at its best” than mere method.^[51] Marx misleads socialism by creating class antagonism when in reality the bourgeois is a meaningless term, Spengler asserts—and the real enemy is the English spirit of mercantilism and parliamentarianism of the feeble “German Michel”; it is not worker against burgher, nor burgher against elite, but German against the Englishman in himself. This is why the German Revolution is incomplete: because the national revolution that unites and brings about the birth of the German nation has not been achieved.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of this and subsequent political texts is the complete absence of any mention of Germany’s Jews. Spengler did not believe, as many of his day did, that the Jewish people had any connexion to parliamentarianism or Marxism or Capitalism or any other distinctly Western phenomenon; rather Western man was at war with himself and himself alone in the conflict between Prussian Socialism and English Mercantilism, between Revolution and Cowardice. He calls Marx “an exclusively English thinker”, unable to see beyond mere economics and ignoring the notion of everyone working for the whole, but each in his own destined place—the King for Spengler’s socialist is “the first servant of the state”, in the highest place among the rest of the nation serving a single, national goal. It is such a different picture than the typical anti-Bolshevik stance in Germany that never tired of reminding the world of Marx’s Jewish origins (his grandfather was a rabbi). This, for Spengler, was as much a simplification as Marx’s class antagonism, because it directed anger and action toward an invented foe instead of directing it toward corrective measures in the West itself.

The Hermit-Scholar (Return to Private Life 1924-1930)

After he retreated from public life, Spengler returned to the lonely life of the hermit scholar, and rededicated himself to work on the theories put forth in Decline. His re-entry into politics was prevented both my deteriorating health as well as a decrease in opportunity with the rising tide of National Socialism. Of all the Conservative Revolutionary thinkers, only Jünger and Schmitt would live to see the Second World War, and their literary lives were even shorter; Spengler was silenced by the Nazi state as early 1933, Jung was murdered, along with several of Spengler’s friends, in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, and Moeller van den Bruck had a nervous breakdown and committed suicide as early as 1925. Others, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan George (especially famous for his Das Neue Reich of 1928), died of natural causes, Hofmannsthal of a stroke in 1929, George four years later of old age. It is indubitable with his voracious appetite for the latest works that Spengler encountered these men through their writing, but no correspondence between them exists. This is not terribly surprising—Spengler wrote letters when he felt the passion to do so (such as to Admiral Tirpitz), or when it furthered his studies (such as the many letters to academics and professors). This was not out of a dislike of people; rather, it was because he detested the task of writing letters and preferred to grant an interview or meet with friends in person, something he did frequently—his sister, Hilde, who became primary caretaker of his estate after his death, remarked that “he always disliked writing letters, even when he was a child.”^[52] Those political letters he did write he wisely burned in 1933 to protect himself and others from the National Socialist state.

The return to private living gave Spengler a tremendous opportunity to begin scholarly work again after some years of pamphleteering (something he himself hated, remarking to a friend in 1919, referring to Prussianism and Socialism that “I am not a born journalist and consequently I wrote out 500 pages of rough draft in four weeks and then started paring to get 100 pages of readable German. I realise now how I ought to work and shall never again accept any assignment that carries a deadline with it”).^[53] He never ceased his correspondences with high-level academics and contributors in almost every field of study, but after 1924 he was able to begin to write more widely. He wrote frequently to Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche and it was in 1924 after his departure from public life that he presented his paper “Nietzche and His Century”.

From 1925 onward his time was dominated by lectures, correspondences, and his old reading habits. He took several holidays in Italy and elsewhere, and as early as 1925 was in correspondence with Benito Mussolini, who would write a review of Hour of Decision in 1933 for Il Popolo d’Italia in December of that year. The Italian dictator, it would seem, was somewhat reserved about Spengler, who he felt tread close to Fascism but was not close enough.^[54] He was not alone; after Spengler’s retreat from politics, was when his works came under heaviest fire from popular political personalities. His correspondence with Gregor Strasser in 1925 displays the chief dispute with Spengler, which seems to be his dislike of “popular movements”, like National Socialism, which he regarded as vulgar and mob-driven.^[55] Aside from these, however, the bulk of his letters are not with political men but with academics.

The reason for this likely had much to do with Germany’s growing stability after 1925. Arthur Helps, who translated Spengler’s letters, suggests that Spengler left the public sphere precisely because of this; however, it is more likely that Spengler simply tired of the time he spent in the public eye—the constant assault of attention from both enthusiastic supporters and detractors of all stripes wore on the man whose sensitivity was well-known only to his sister and perhaps very close friends. He was a man who throughout his life was soft-hearted and sympathetic, ever striving to overcome the little boy whose nightmares in his bedroom in Halle haunted him vividly until he was well into his forties; the image he had inadvertently created of the hard-hearted, iron-willed prophet of doom was not an easy persona for him to fulfil on a constant basis, and put tremendous stress on his body. Fischer observes in his biographical sketch that “he agonised about his weaknesses with the same honesty as Rousseau did in the Confessions, with the difference that Spengler rarely tried to project his shortcomings on society… [he] believed that, in the final analysis, the individual has to assume responsibility for his own weaknesses”.^[56]

Spengler’s physical weaknesses became acute during his time in politics, as the stress increased his headaches and other ailments. In 1925, rarely does a letter mention an illness or time of sickness—he seemed to recover from his ailments from getting away from stress of politics and the dismal state in which he perceived his beloved German Reich to be. He took cures in the sun of Italy, writing in February of 1925 from Palermo, after which he travelled to Rome and elsewhere.^[57] In 1926, deep in the scholarly world once again, Spengler was invited by the Philosophical Congress in the United States to travel to America and conduct a lecture tour (C.F. Atkinson’s translation of the first volume of Decline appeared that very year). His excuse for declining the offer was that he felt America would leave too deep an impression on him that would disrupt the work he was conducting on his latest book (still unfinished at his death), Urfragen (“Primordial Questions”). His letters are strewn with questions to experts and professors of ancient history after information about Babylonian tablets and other Middle Eastern interests.

These interests, as a preparation for Urfragen, had begun as early as 1924, when Spengler appeared before the Oriental Institute in Munich with a lecture titled “Plan eines neuen Atlas Antiquus” (“Plan for a new Atlas Antiquus”), which detailed the need of a new cartographic project to map the ancient world within the scope of the Apollonian Kultur-Zivilisation organism.^[58] The general thrust of his work, whether this lecture or the later letters to colleagues, is a collaborative effort that would overcome the increasing specialisation of history already in its adolescence in Spengler’s day and still increasing in contemporary academic history. During subsequent years he also became first enthralled and then embroiled with the famous archaeologist and ethnographer of Africa, Leo Frobenius, whose initial agreement with cyclical history caught Spengler’s attention, but his argued proofs for slow, gradual development of civilisations drew the censure of the author of Decline, who believed in epochal moments rather than gradual evolution (he detested all forms of Darwinism). His correspondence took him in more positive directions with the famous Assyriologist Alfred Jeremias, who took an immense interest in Spengler’s work.

Most striking about Spengler’s time as a private scholar in the late 1920s was the vast amount of interest being generated in his works abroad. 1927 saw contacts coming from The New York Times attempting to solicit an article from him; the paper had featured him in full-page articles twice before, and after including him in an article “Will our Civilization Survive?” of 1925, hoped he might appear in print with them—they even offered a sum of $100, which was no small sum of money in Germany at the time.^[59] No response to their inquest ever came, however, and it does not appear Spengler showed any interest in taking up any journalistic venture. A query that Spengler felt did merit response came from André Fauconnet, a professor at Poitiers whose Un philosophe allemeand contemporain Oswald Spengler. Le prophète du déclin de l'Occident (“A Contemporary German Philosopher: Oswald Spengler, the Prophet of the Decline of the Occident”) appeared in 1925. He also received an invitation to speak at the University of Saragossa, which promised he could speak in German and translations of his speech would be distributed beforehand.^[60] Spengler accepted the engagement, spending the entire month of April of 1928 on holiday in Spain; he loved the climate and found the place to have a profoundly positive affect on his demeanour—he even did some mountain climbing. He wrote his sister Hilde from Granada (where he stayed for about a week), “Grenada is beautiful beyond all description… I could live here”, and, later that week, that “here every day pleases me better”.^[61]

During all of his touring and international correspondence, Spengler did manage to make one or two forays back into political life; the first occasion was a speech in Düsseldorf before the Industry-Club titled “Das heutige Verhältnis zwischen Weltwirtschaft und Weltpolitik” (“The Contemporary Relationship between World Economics and World Politics”) in 1926, and was solicited by Edgar Julius Jung a year later to make a speech before the German Student Union, historically a hotbed for right-wing politics. 1927 also saw him begin writing on the topic again, with “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Deutschen Presse” (“Toward a Developmental History of the German Press”) appearing in the Der Zeitungsverlag and “Vom Deutscher Volkscharakter” (“On the German National Character”) appearing in Deutschland the same year. After some time of soliciting his attention, Richard Korherr also finally convinced Spengler to write a brief introduction to his thesis “Über den Geburtenrückgang” (“Regarding the Decline of Birthrates”) of two years previous, which the author had dedicated to Spengler. Korherr hounded Spengler with information of the thesis, especially when it was translated into Italian by deputies of Mussolini’s in 1928.^[62] Spengler regarded the young student well, and congratulated him on his success; he would probably not have had so positive a view of the young Dr. Korherr twelve years later, when he became one of Heinrich Himmler’s most loyal lieutenants in executing the “Final Solution”.^[63]

Cassandra (Last Writings and Death, 1930-1936)

The years of 1929 and 1930 were eventful for Germany, but for Spengler much of the same that he had experienced in the second half of the 1920s. His pessimism was beginning to be proven true, with the stock market crash in 1929 and the swift rise of National Socialist and German Communist party power in the shattered Weimar Republic. In September 1930, the results gave the Nazis 107 seats in the Reichstag, and increased the Communist seats from 54 to 77. When the Reichstag took its seats, no business could be conducted, with the National Socialist “delegates” showing up in full uniform, sometimes with flags, interrupting the proceedings with chants, shouts, and songs; the Communists, not to be outdone, followed suit, and together they made a mockery of what was left of Weimar democracy.^[64] Spengler was generally not disappointed with the turn of events, and, having put his Urfragen project on hold, wrote a prolegomena to his planned work titled Der Mensch und die Technik (“Man and Technics”) in 1931.

The work can hardly be said to be of the same calibre as Decline or even of Prussianism and Socialism—but then, it was never meant to be. The most important introductory note that can be given on Man and Technics is that it is fundamentally meant to be a primer for planned works. It is, by and large, a restatement of things said in Decline, and an expansion on the relationship between human beings and the tools they create. Fischer describes the book by saying “Spengler tried to show that primitive man was a magnificent predatory animal who possessed two major advantages over other beasts of prey: a superior brain and ambidextrous hands.”^[65] The work is a true experiment in Nietzschean psychology by Fischer’s estimate: a tragic conflict between a naturally savage and predatory human being with the moral codes he makes to contain his savagery, but he cannot flee from it, for as he develops his technology, he also develops his means of savagery, and therefore his savagery itself.^[66]

In greater detail, the book develops themes of conflict between man and external nature as well. Farrenkopf highlights that Spengler sees a religious grounding for this conflict—a suggestion not lost on several subsequent environmentalists—declaring that Spengler “claims to have uncovered the ‘religious origins’ of Western technical thought in the meditations of early Gothic monks, who in their prayers and fastings wrung God’s secrets from Him.”^[67] Farrenkopf, working at the turn of the twenty-first century, attempts to make Spengler the prophet of “climate change” and “ecological disasters”, and points to a thesis in his own work—that Spengler’s thought changed from Decline to his later works—to say that Spengler was arguing for the inevitable failure of mankind’s struggle against nature. Whether his thesis has merit or not is not really a line of inquiry this introduction need undertake, but the conflict and eventual failure of humankind because of its own “progress” is certainly present in the work. A line from Decline of the West, quoted above, accurately encapsulates the entire purpose of Man and Technics: “the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.”^[68]

The urban sprawl and disappearance of the “green belt” that contemporary commentators, especially in America, where there is so much of the “green belt”, have witnessed is somewhat captured in this picture. The dangers of an industrial dystopia and plea for an agrarian Reich was one also being preached by the National Socialists at this time—Walther Darré’s 1928 pamphlet “Das Bauerntum als Lebensquell der nordischen Rasse” (“The Peasantry as the Life-source of the Nordic Race”) stands as a testament to that. The Nazis, though, were better at selling their message than Spengler was his own, primarily because of what each promised the German people. Spengler promised that the path of Western civilisation was destined and irreversible, and the coming destruction guaranteed by the very nature of Faustian man of his home-soil should be greeted with a Nietzschean amor fati. The Germans in 1931 were in no mood to hear that they were themselves to blame for their situation, and that it was an inescapable destiny.

The Nazis, on the other hand, gave the Germans an enemy—the Jews—that were causing this industrialisation and destruction of the nation, and if they could just get rid of them, there was a bright hope and future for Germans. The German people declared which message they preferred with dismal sales for Man and Technics, and subsequent tremendous victories at the ballot for the National Socialists. Hitler’s biographer, Lord Bullock gives a deep insight into the exact state of affairs; “taking 1928 as a measuring rod,” he declares, “the gains made by Hitler – close on thirteen million in four years – are still more striking,” adding that by early 1932, “with a voting strength of 13,700,000 electors, a party membership of over a million and a private army of 400,000 S.A. and S.S., Hitler was the most powerful political leader in Germany, knocking on the doors of the Chancellery at the head of the most powerful political party Germany had ever seen.”^[69]

Spengler was shocked, if not a little appalled, by this turn of events. To Spengler, as he had been to Moeller, Adolf Hitler was an idiot in the scientific sense of the word: a vulgar proletarian clown shouting and flailing his arms and playing about in the muck, not a statesman who could lead Germany to her rebirth or a realistic forward-thinker. For the time being, though, there were few other options, and Spengler was willing to give the Führer the benefit of the doubt before meeting him—a meeting at which he hoped that his stature as one of Germany’s leading conservative intellectuals might moderate the Austrian firebrand somewhat.^[70] He was dreadfully wrong.

Spengler met with Hitler in 1933 at the invitation of the National Socialist Party, hoping to make use of Spengler’s sustained popularity. Fischer describes the meeting, of which little account exists on either side. It was Hitler, characteristically, who did most of the talking when the two men met, and used all of his well-accounted-for charm. Spengler was sufficiently fooled that Hitler, though a clown, was a well-meaning clown who basically wanted what was best for Germany. He nevertheless would remark later that “sitting next to him one did not gain the slightest inkling that he represented anything significant”—the jobless Austrian post-card painter may have built himself up into a powerful and captivating demagogue, but in the end he remained the disaffected young delinquent who wandered the streets of Munich and Vienna building a fantasy world in which he was important.^[71] According to a popular anecdote, when the men had finished their encounter, Hitler asked Spengler for advice, to which the scholar enigmatically replied “watch your Praetorian guard!” a comment many have taken to be a bit of advice Hitler acted on in the Night of the Long Knives, when he purged his “praetorian guard” and replaced it—the S.A.—with a new one, the S.S. There is no evidence that this is accurate, but if it is, as Fischer asserts, it would be the first time Spengler had any direct influence on a public leader.^[72]

It was not long, however, before the spell of Hitler’s charm over coffee wore off. The Nazis went on to preach a proletarian utopian future founded fundamentally in scapegoating the Jews and answering Germany’s problems with “party-theatre” of mass rallies and a well-tuned propaganda machine. It was in answer to the delusions of the National Socialist political machine that Spengler wrote his final book, Jahre der Entscheidung (“Years of Decision”, more popularly known in translation as Hour of Decision) in 1933. This work, largely considered Spengler’s most overtly political and explicit in its message, was banned by the Nazis as soon as they figured out what was in it—which took them a full year, even after one of their own published a critique of the book (Arthur Zweininger’s Oswald Spengler im dritten Reich), by which time the book had already made it into English translation and had received extensive comment by The New York Times.^[73] Spengler also, naïvely, sent a signed copy directly to Hitler, accompanied by an expression of hope that the two might meet and discuss the work in the future.^[74] Hitler consented to meet, but disparaged Spengler’s pessimism in what he was selling as Germany’s brightest hour.

Jahre der Entscheidung deserves some specific attention to be paid to it. The first thing worth mention is that it was originally intended to be the first volume of a several-volume work, but after it was banned in 1934, Spengler abandoned the work, writing Goebbels that he would only write the conclusions of his own mind and that he would “not write books for confiscation”.^[75]

The press was especially cruel to the new work, evoking (despite Fischer’s claims to the opposite) a number of highly sympathetic letters to Spengler from old conservative colleagues like Alfred Hugenburg, Crown Prince Wilhelm, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler (later executed as a resistance leader), as well as some new names, including Grand Duke Joseph Franz von Habsburg, who was enthralled by the new work, and Rudolf Graber, a professor of Theology and later Bishop of Regensburg. Despite the press and the Nazis, however, the book was initially a tremendous success, especially compared with Man and Technics. Heinrich Beck wrote to Spengler in November of 1933 that “the success of your Jahre der Entscheidung already surpasses, at least as far as tempo is concerned, The Decline of the West. You will certainly be pleased and I am proud also of publishing such a book.”^[76] The Roman Curia was also impressed, and allowed the book to be placed by the Cardinal Hayes Literature Committee in the “First Circle” of their “White List” for Roman Catholics in America; the section was named for the First Circle of Hell in Dante’s inferno, where honest pre-Christian thinkers who were valuable to Christianity resided—on the White List proper for that year were titles like Essays in History by Pope Pius XI.^[77]

The contents of the book are significant not just for Spengler’s life, but to his overall philosophy as well. Spengler frequently uses what critics have called “fetishistic” terms in his works like “blood”, “race”, “soul”, etc. The accusations of critics were left largely unanswered until Jahre der Entscheidung, which saw Spengler for the first time seriously take on the task of defining what he meant by “race” especially. Benito Mussolini, at the time still in his virulent anti-racist stage, received a copy of the work almost immediately after it was published, and wrote a review of the work highlighting that “Spengler clearly wishes to differentiate his views from the vulgar, materialistic Darwinism now fashionable among anti-Semites in Europe and America” (words he was in fact borrowing from Spengler) and points to Spengler’s declaration that “ ‘racial unity’ is a grotesque phrase considering that for centuries all types and kinds have mixed.”^[78]

Spengler does indeed use the word “race”; however, he defines against the biological racial theories of Chamberlain, Gobineau and the various authors of National Socialism. “Race” to Spengler was captured in a spiritual feeling or will of a culture—thus in Jahre der Entscheidung, even the Russians find themselves included in Spengler’s “Coloured World”. The Faustian soul—and the Faustian will—that is the Faustian “race”. Farrenkopf observes from reading Spengler’s unpublished political writings that “Race for Spengler meant having ‘strong instincts’”, something reflected in Gedanken, where Spengler says “Men without race are without Will. Indeed, the more of a “race” one has, the more resolute is his sense of self”.^[79] Spengler references this notion in Man and Technics as well, concluding with the exemplary of a man with “strong race”, the legionary who kept his post in Pompey as Vesuvius erupted because his superiors had forgotten to relieve him; “It is greatness, namely to have race”.^[80] This sort of conception of race is one that has fled the English and German languages (and most other languages, really) in the wake of the biological racialist movements of the early twentieth century, but is still present in English when one says “the human race”—but for Spengler, there is no “human race”, there are different spiritual types of humans. Farrenkopf quotes him “There are not any noble races. There are only noble specimens of all races.”^[81]

With this sense of “race” in mind, Spengler portrays two revolutions taking place in the coming decades and centuries: a White World-Revolution and a Coloured World-Revolution, the former of which will be a class revolution, and the latter will be a racial revolution. As he suggested in Decline, the Occident is failing, and some other Kultur-Zivilisation organisms must come into itself in order to replace the dying Faustian Zivilisation. This is what is meant in the “Coloured World-Revolution”; a collapse of the Western direct control over the rest of the world and the beginning of a new birth. The “White World-Revolution”, on the other hand, will be one of class: not because of Bolshevism, but because of the liberalism that destroyed the social structure of the West in the Autumnal season and brought about the new sense of egalitarianism. These combined “World-Revolutions” must ultimately arise from a great World War which Spengler foresees in the near future; it is his hope that the War will set the West back on its path toward Ceasarism, and begin the final phase of decay which has been prevented, be believes, by the defeat of the “Prussian Spirit” in the First World War; he therefore proclaims at the end of the work that, “Only the militarist Prussian spirit remains as a shaping force, not only for Germany, but everywhere.”^[82]

Farrenkopf offers the critique that Spengler does not sufficiently “probe” into “how geopolitical competition among non-Western powers will interact with the conflict between the West and the non-West”.^[83] Nevertheless, for a German in a time of when the general feeling of the nation was one of peace and plenty, to foresee a world-shattering global conflict that would bring about a post-colonial age is hauntingly astute, and speaks to the significance of Spengler’s overall corpus to contemporary political and historical study. Another testament to his skills of prophecy is the very military power gained by the United States subsequent to the Second World War; Farrenkopf also observes that Spengler discounted America but nevertheless may be applied in an American paradigm.

With all the talk of “race” and the “militaristic Prussian spirit” and Spengler’s relationship to National Socialism, it seems fitting that a special word be said of Spengler’s relationship to the Jewish community. He himself found anti-Semitism especially abhorrent, and recognised it for exactly what it was: namely, social and political scapegoating. As Fischer observes, “Spengler observed that the character of the Jew was moulded by his position as an outsider…[who is] generally forced to adopt attitudes that are inimical to the mainstream of society,” which is why they are viewed as threats; the only solution Spengler could see for the Jews to escape this inevitable situation was to assimilate or, though Spengler never suggests it, to leave.^[84] A similar conclusion was reached by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, in his 1896 Der Judenstaat, which proposed the second option: that the Jews remove themselves from European society physically to escape anti-Semitism.

After his name was officially banned from the press and his book taken off the shelves in German bookstores, Spengler once again retreated from the public eye, this time never to return. Unlike other intellectuals of the day, he declined offers to university jobs, including the rectorship of the University of Leipzig’s Institute for Cultural and Universal History and a professorship at the University of Marburg. He was, nevertheless, honoured in 1933 with membership in the Senate of the German Academy, which he maintained even after his work was officially censored by the Nazi state. He was encouraged by friends to flee Germany and emigrate to America or England and continue his studies, but he refused to leave. He did, however, continue his work on Urfragen and his other unfinished book, Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte. He still received some attention from other countries, and in 1935 wrote an article entitled “Zur Weltgeschichte des zweiten vorchristlichen Jahrtausends” (“Toward a World History of the Second Millennium BC”) in the journal Die Welt als Geschichte.

Spengler’s final contribution while he was alive was a reply to a cable from Hearst International Cosmopolitan magazine, which at the time was still a respectable publication that gave attention to serious global political issues. The work, entitled Ist Weltfriede moeglich? (“Is World Peace Possible?”) was translated by editors of the magazine and published in January of 1936. This last work is largely ignored by Spengler biographers, but is rather his last real political offering, in which he expressed that the question was one that “can only be answered by someone familiar with world history… [which] means to know most humans as they have been and always will be.”^[85] His next words encapsulate his “strong pessimism”, when he says that “there is a vast difference… between viewing the history of the future as it shall be and as one might like it to be. Peace is the wish, war is an actuality”: he echoes his introduction to Jahre der Entscheidung, “it is the great task of the connoisseur of history to understand the actualities of his age and, using them, to sense the future, to indicate and to sketch out what will come, whether we desire it or not.”^[86] He follows it saying that, ultimately, man will always resort to violence in some form or another. He declares that a man may “be branded a criminal, a class can be called revolutionary or traitorous, a people bloodthirsty, but that does not alter the actuality” that violence is in escapable.^[87]

He then repeats a his message to the Western world, hoping perhaps for an audience in liberal America where he had lost his in Germany: “It is a deadly reality that today only the white peoples speak of ‘world peace’, not the many coloured peoples. As long as individual thinkers and idealists do this—and they have done it in all ages—it is ineffective. When, on the other hand, entire peoples become pacifistic, it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent breeds do not do it: it is abandonment of the future, because the pacifist ideal is a terminal state that contradicts the reality of life.”^[88] Spengler would go to his grave convinced that half of the Occident had adopted this very abandonment of the future, and the other half had gone mad on the drunkenness of National Socialism. Fischer observes that “convinced of the truth of his ideas, Spengler seems to have resigned himself to a life of quiet desperation.”^[89] His desperation ended before the dawn of the 8th of May 1936, when a sudden heart attack mercifully took him from the world before he could witness his most recent predictions of death and doom become reality.

Eleven days after Spengler’s death, his closest friend, August Albers, who Fischer calls his “philosophical sounding board”, which he had been since Decline in 1917, threw himself in front of a train, unable to cope with the absence of his mentor and friend. His sister collected his papers and would spend the rest of her life handling the publication of his remaining papers; her daughter would devote most of her academic life to studying and publicising his contributions to history, politics, and philosophy. Paul Reusch chose and paid for the grave marker, a simple block of polished black granite with SPENGLER etched across it in stark white letters. Beneath it Spengler rests holding a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Goethe’s Faust.

---

[1] H. Stuart Hughes, Oswald Spengler: A Critical Estimate (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1952), 1.

[2] Anton Mirko Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in Seiner Zeit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1968), 435.

[3] Koktanek, Spenger in Seiner Zeit, 427.

[4] Oswald Spengler, Ich beneide jeden, der lebt, ed. Gilbert Merlio and Hilde Kornhardt (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007), 16. The original title of the text was to be Eis heauton, in imitation of Marcus Aurelius, and the manuscript was originally edited by Spengler’s niece and her mother, both named Hilde Kornhardt.

[5] Spengler, Ich beneide, 14.

[6] John Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2001), 9.

[7] Koktanek, Spengler in Seiner Zeit, 19.

[8] Farrenkopf, Prophet, 7-8.

[9] Farrenkopf, Prophet, 8-9.

[10] Klaus P. Fischer, History and Prophecy: Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 34.

[11] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 35.

[12] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 36.

[13] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 36.

[14] Farrenkopf, Prophet, 11.

[15] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 28.

[16] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 37.

[17] Spengler, Ich beneide, 73.

[18] Farrenkopf, Prophet, 15.

[19] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 45.

[20] Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1969), x.

[21] Thomas A. Brady, German Histories in the Ages of Reformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009), 3.

[22] G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Leiden: A.H. Adriani, 1902), 238.

[23] Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, trans. C.F. Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), 21. He derives this notion from Goethe, who says in a letter to Heinrich Luden (†1847), “‘Die Menschheit’? Das ist ein Abstraktum. Es hat von jeher nur Menschen gegeben und wird nur Menschen geben.” (“‘Mankind’? It is an abstraction. There have only ever been men and will only ever be men.”) (p 28¹)

[24] The proper rendering of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in English is highly disputed among translators; the former is often translated as “community” but may also be understood (perhaps more clearly) as “communion”, while the latter is rendered both as “society” and “association,” with the latter being favoured in recent scholarship. Cf. Ferdinand Tönnies: A New Evaluation, ed. Werner J. Cahnman (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1973).

[25] Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1912), 3-4.

[26] Spengler, Decline, 109.

[27] Spengler, Decline, 31.

[28] Spengler, Decline, 53.

[29] Spengler, Decline, 212.

[30] Spengler, Decline, 191-192.

[31] Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1933), 43. He doesn’t, however, make clear what the implications of Stalin’s “modernisation” policies and the five-year plan might be.

[32] Oswald Spengler, “Pessimismus?” in Rede und Aufsätze (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1937), 63-64.

[33] Spengler, Decline, 485. N.B. The notion of “race” here should not be understood as the restrictive biological concept but retaining its nineteenth-century use as a term for a broad cultural unit.

[34] Oswald Spengler, Letters 1913-1936, trans. Arthur Helps (London: George Allen Unwin, 1966), 87.

[35] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 68.

[36] Spengler, Letters, 92.

[37] Spengler, Letters, 93.

[38] Donald O. White, Introduction to Selected Essays, by Oswald Spengler, trans. and ed. Donald O. White (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), xiii.

[39] Timothy Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 112.

[40] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 61.

[41] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 61.

[42] Spengler, Letters, 133-138.

[43] Spengler, Letters, 181.

[44] Spengler, Selected Essays, 7.

[45] Spengler, Selected Essays, 3.

[46] Spengler, Selected Essays, 1, 3.

[47] Spengler, Selected Essays, 10-11.

[48] Spengler, Selected Essays, 13.

[49] Spengler, Selected Essays, 13.

[50] Spengler, Selected Essays, 29.

[51] Spengler, Selected Essays, 92.

[52] Spengler, Letters, 11.

[53] White, Introduction, xi.

[54] Benito Mussolini, “Anni decisive di Osvaldo Spengler”, Il Popolo d’Italia, 15 December 1933, p. 16.

[55] Spengler, Letters, 184.

[56] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 71.

[57] Spengler, Letters, 180.

[58] Cf. Oswald Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1937), 96.

[59] Spengler, Letters, 211; “Will Our Civilization Survive?” New York Times, 24 May 1925, SM1; “Doom of Western Civilization,” New York Times, 2 May 1926, BR1. 

[60] Spengler, Letters, 222.

[61] Spengler, Letters, 229.

[62] Spengler, Letters, 203, 204, 219-220, 235.

[63] Spengler, Letters, 203¹.

[64] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 73.

[65] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 66.

[66] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 66.

[67] Farrenkopf, Prophet, 202.

[68] Spengler, Decline, 109.

[69] Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 217-218.

[70] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 74.

[71] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 74.

[72] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 74.

[73] William McDonald, “Spengler’s New Challenge” New York Times, 11 February 1934.

[74] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 78.

[75] Farrenkopf, Prophet, 238.

[76] Spengler, Letters, 291.

[77] “June ‘White List’ of Books Issued” New York Times, 26 May, 1934, p. 15.

[78] Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung, 157.

[79] Farrenkopf, Prophet, 256; Oswald Spengler, Gedanken, (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1941), 23.

[80] Spengler, Der Mensch und die Technik (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1931), 89.

[81] Farrenkopf, Prophet, 256.

[82] Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung, 165.

[83] Farrenkopf, Prophet, 258.

[84] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 76.

[85] Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze, 292.

[86] Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze, 292; Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung, vii.

[87] Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze, 292.

[88] Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze, 292-293.

[89] Fischer, History and Prophecy, 68.

Philosophy as a Way of Life

Natella Speranskaya

Ex: https://medium.com

The Philosophy has long ceased to be a way of life, a manner of being, it has become a field of research, a “philosophical speech”; it no longer thinks of the basic principles, it no longer deals with the transformation of thinking, the formation of the mind and soul, the inner transformation of man. The ancient Greek was engaged in philosophy, which was for him an existential choice, a form of life, a way of thinking. And reading the works of Heraclitus, Pherecides, or Empedocles was for him a “spiritual exercises” (Pierre Hadot), a strong-willed personal practice.

The philosophical writings of thinkers of the Hellenistic and Roman era were not aimed at informing, but at forming and transforming the thinking of readers. Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle did not philosophize in front of their students to provide them with as much information as possible, they were engaged exclusively in the formation of minds, opening up to their listeners other ontological levels, other modes of being they pushed them to an internal transformation comparable to that experienced by initiates in the mysteries.

As Pierre Hadot rightly points out, the texts of early thinkers were not a statement of a certain system (for the first time the idea of systematic philosophy will appear only in the medieval scholar Francisco Suarez), they were “spiritual exercises” aimed at transforming the individual. Philosophy in Antiquity was a mode of existence that required the philosopher to be internally transformed and personally involved in every moment of his life. Spiritual exercises involved the whole Mind. Nevertheless, modern historians of philosophy continue to approach the philosophy of Antiquity with the standards of the Middle Ages and Modern times, i.e. they persist in seeing it as a theoretical and abstract activity, but not as a practice. Philosophy has ceased to be thought of as a way of life. Hadot believed that this was a consequence of the absorption of philosophy by Christianity.

In the scholastics of the Middle Ages, theology and philosophy were at a considerable distance from each other, and philosophy was relegated to the rank of “the Handmaid of Theology”. It was only during the Renaissance that we rediscovered Seneca, Epictetus, and later Marcus Aurelius, and then also Cicero, and Epicureanism, and realized that philosophy can be a way of life. Andre van der Braak also writes that philosophy ceased to be a way of life with the rise of Christianity. He points out that Nietzsche sought to revive the Greek approach to philosophizing as a way of life. We can add that the same goal was pursued by Michel Foucault and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

When we begin to read the texts of ancient thinkers, we should once and for all abandon the habit of applying to them the value system of modernity. “Before that, I considered philosophical texts — whether they are texts of Aristotle, or St. Thomas, or Bergson-as if they are timeless and words always have the same meaning that does not depend on the epoch. I realized that we need to take into account the evolution of thoughts and mentalities over the centuries, “ admits Pierre Hadot. The texts of ancient philosophy and the texts of modern philosophy cannot be perceived in the same way. Hadot believes that the philosophical texts of Antiquity were always intended for limited public and had very specific recipients-either a group of students or a specific follower to whom they were written. For example, according to the testimony of Porphyry, Plotinus wrote his work in response to the questions asked by the audience. The teaching of philosophy for three centuries, that is, from Socrates to the first century, was almost always presented in a question-and-answer scheme. Dialogue as a philosophical genre has almost disappeared today, replaced by systematic treatises. Hadot himself is very skeptical about the possibility of reviving the Dialogic character of ancient philosophy in our days.

To know that Pierre Hadot means by “spiritual exercises”, need to find out what he invests in the concept of “Spirit.” Spirit he calls what Plotinus called Intellect, Nous, the Highest Reality. Nous is that which is between the One and the plurality. Pierre Hadot: “I would define spiritual exercises as voluntary, personal practices intended to bring about a transformation of the individual, a transformation of the self.” Before to stop the choice on the epithet of “spiritual”, he considered various options: intellectual exercises, ethical exercises, mental exercises, soul exercises, and finally, in his intention to talk about the philosophical tradition in Greco-Roman antiquity, Hadot stopped at «spiritual exercises». Then he explained at length than these spiritual exercises are not exactly (for example, they are not synonymous with “theological” or “religious”, since the latter are no more than a part of them).

If Pierre Hadot had stopped at the adjective “ethical”, he would have had to go into lengthy explanations. How do we interpret the word “ethics”? Commonly it is believed that ethics is a doctrine of morality, of virtue, however, let’s turn our attention to the Greek word ἦθος, ethos (“character”, “disposition”, “temper”), and especially to the famous dictum of Heraclitus: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων (which can be translated as: “A man’s character is his daimon”). Daimon, i.e. the intermediary between the divine world and the human world (without the negative connotations that appeared in the post-antique era). The word ἦθος also has the meaning of “whereabouts”. And what are these whereabouts, if not the intermediate midpoint where a person and a deity meet/merge and/or collide? The middle, according to Aristotle, is that which always chooses virtue. This is her whereabouts. When the immoralist Nietzsche attacked modern morality, he did it in the name of “virtue in the Renaissance style, virtù, virtue free of moralic acid.”

According to the Hadot, the formation of minds was the basis of the Humanities. Can philosophy be attributed to the Humanities? Andrii Baumeister emphasizes that the term “Humanities” appeared in the Renaissance, in the XV century, but the philosophy is much older. In this case, can philosophy be considered a humanitarian science? The Humanities focus on man, on an anthropocentric understanding of the world, while philosophy can act as a path that leads beyond the “ Human, All Too Human”. (Nietzsche).

The philosopher Peter Kingsley was able to revive the Greek approach to philosophy as a way of life. “As I was drawn back into the world of the Presocratics, as I became absorbed into the ancient Greek texts they had left behind, I soon started discovering something different. These so-called philosophers weren’t theoretical thinkers or speculators, and they were nothing like rationalists in the modern sense. Many of them were immensely powerful spiritual beings. Greek texts which I was soon to realize had been misunderstood and mistranslated for centuries reveal when the distortions and mistaken interpretations are blown away, extraordinary spiritual teachings and extremely potent meditation techniques that can still be applied and practiced nowadays. I practiced them myself and was transformed. I had been brought into direct contact with the lineage and teachings of the ancient Masters who, at the dawn of our civilization, helped shape the Western world and bring our culture into being, “ says Peter Kingsley.

“He recounts a conversation in the Classics Department at UCLA after a talk on Parmenides. A faculty member complained that Kingsley is too dogmatic, that his interpretation is no better than anyone else’s. Kingsley responded: “But you and I are not the same. You read Parmenides so that you can change his meaning to suit yourself. I read Parmenides so that he can change me,” John Bussanich writes.

The very concept of “philosophy” should receive a different meaning. Remember Nietzsche’s words: “The very fact that Dionysus is a philosopher, and that therefore Gods also philosophize, seems to be a novelty which is not unensnaring”? It is known that Nietzsche called himself a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus. It is certain that by philosophizing, the man enters into the sphere of the divine. Much earlier, in the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola had said something similar: “The sacred names of Apollo, if anyone examines their meanings and hidden mysteries, will sufficiently show that that god is no less philosopher than prophet.”

You can only be a philosopher if you are the one who carries out the action, for thought is action. Get rid of the misconception that a philosopher is a boring know-it-all who communicates with the world through endless scientific studies. Similarly, we should banish the other idea that the mindless fuss that most people produce is an action.

Philosophy implies active intervention in an endlessly lasting cosmogonic act by transforming the external world, subtly influencing it by identifying the paradigmatic structures that underlie the universe; philosophy is an attempt to transfer “archetypal images” from mundus imaginalis to the material world, the world of forms.

A philosopher is not a profession, it is impossible to become one. This is a kind of ontological task that a person either implements or allows it to fade away. There is an old beautiful legend about the Angel of Death, whose wings are dotted with countless eyes. When an Angel arrives too early, it only touches the person with its wing and, so that the person does not forget about this meeting, gives him an additional pair of eyes. An eye that looks into pre-being. So, philosophy is such a “gazing” into pre-being. The philosopher receives his second pair of eyes at the same time as the first, but these eyes do not open immediately. Sometimes this requires a teacher, a book, a sudden shock, a collision with death, an experience of the numinous. In ancient times, Mysteries were used for this purpose.

Natella Speranskaya

Russian philosopher, cultural scientist, a specialist in Antiquity, curator of Janus Academy.

The Two Faces Of Russia And Germany’s Eastern Problems

Oswald Spengler:

The Two Faces Of Russia And Germany’s Eastern Problems

An address delivered on February 14, 1922, at the Rhenish-Westphalian Business Convention in Essen

First published in Spengler, Politische Schriften (Munich, 1932).

Ex: https://europeanheathenfront.wordpress.com

In the light of the desperate situation in which Germany finds itself today -- defenseless, ruled from the West by the friends of its enemies, and the victim of undiminished warfare with economic and diplomatic means -- the great problems of the East, political and economic, have risen to decisive importance. If from our vantage point we wish to gain an understanding of the extremely complex real situation, it will not suffice merely to familiarize ourselves with contemporary conditions in the broad expanses to the east of us, with Russian domestic policy and the economic, geographic, and military factors that make up present-day Soviet Russia. More fundamental and imperative than this is an understanding of the world-historical fact of Russia itself, its situation and evolution over the centuries amid the great old cultures -- China, India, Islam, and the West -- the nature of its people, and its national soul. Political and economic life is, after all, Life itself; even in what may appear to be prosaic aspects of day-to-day affairs it is a form, expression, and part of the larger entity that is Life.

One can attempt to observe these matters with "Russian" eyes, as our communist and democratic writers and party politicians have done, i.e., from the standpoint of Western social ideologies. But that is not "Russian" at all, no matter how many citified minds in Russia may think it is. Or one can try to judge them from a Western-European viewpoint by considering the Russian people as one might consider any other "European" people. But that is just as erroneous. In reality, the true Russian is basically very foreign to us, as foreign as the Indian and the Chinese, whose souls we can likewise never fully comprehend. Justifiably, the Russians draw a distinction between "Mother Russia" and the "fatherlands" of the Western peoples. These are, in fact, two quite different and alien worlds. The Russian understands this alienation. Unless he is of mixed blood, he never overcomes a shy aversion to or a naïve admiration of the Germans, French, and English. The Tartar and the Turk are, in their ways of life, closer and more comprehensible to him. We are easily deceived by the geographic concept of "Europe," which actually originated only after maps were first printed in 1500. The real Europe ends at the Vistula. The activity of the Teutonic knights in the Baltic area was the colonization of foreign territory, and the knights themselves never thought of it in any other way.

Soviet architecture, 1920s

In order to reach an understanding of this foreign people we must review our own past. Russian history between 900 and 1900 A.D. does not correspond to the history of the West in the same centuries but, rather, to the period extending from the Age of Rome to Charlemagne and the Hohenstaufen emperors. Our heroic poetry, from Arminius to the lays of Hildebrand, Roland, and the Nibelungs, was recapitulated in the Russian heroic epics, the byliny, which began with the knights at the court of Prince Vladimir (d. 1015), the Campaign of Igor, and with Ilya Muromets, and have remained a vital and fruitful art form through the reigns of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, the Burning of Moscow, and to the present day. [1] Yet each of these worlds of primeval poetry expresses a very different kind of basic feeling. Russian life has a different meaning altogether. The endless plains created a softer form of humanity, humble and morose, inclined to lose itself mentally in the flat expanses of its homeland, lacking a genuine personal will, and prone to servility. These characteristics are the background for high-level politics in Russia, from Genghis Khan to Lenin.

(1. Cf. my The Decline of the West, II, 192ff.)

Furthermore, the Russians are semi-nomads, even today. Not even the Soviet regimen will succeed in preventing the factory workers from drifting from one factory to another for no better reason than their inborn wanderlust. [2] That is why the skilled technician is such a rarity in Russia. [3] Similarly, the home of the peasant is not the village or the countryside into which he was born, but the great expanses. Even the mir or so-called agrarian commune -- not an ancient idea, but the outgrowth of administrative techniques employed by the tsarist governments for the raising of taxes -- was unable to bind the peasant, unlike his Germanic counterpart, to the soil. Many thousands of them flooded into the newly developed regions in the steppes of southern Russia, Turkestan, and the Caucasus, in order to satisfy their emotional search for the limits of the infinite. The result of this inner restlessness has been the extension of the Empire up to the natural borders, the seas and the high mountain ranges. In the sixteenth century Siberia was occupied and settled as far as Lake Baikal, in the seventeenth century up to the Pacific.

(2. Cf. several stories of Leskov, and particularly of Gorki.)

(3. Except perhaps in the earlier arteli, groups of workers under self-chosen leaders, which accepted contracts for certain kinds of work in factories and on estates. There is a good description on an artel’ in Leskov’s The Memorable Angel.)

Even more deep-seated than this nomadic trait of the Russians is their dark and mystical longing for Byzantium and Jerusalem. It appears in the outer form of Orthodox Christianity and numerous religious sects, and thus has been a powerful force in the political sphere as well. But within this mystical tendency there slumbers the unborn new religion of an as yet immature people. There is nothing Western about this at all, for the Poles and Balkan Slavs are also "Asiatics."

The economic life of this people has also assumed indigenous, totally non-European forms. The Stroganov family of merchants, which began conquering Siberia on its own under Ivan Grozny [4] and placed some of its own regiments at the tsar’s disposal, had nothing at all in common with the great businessmen of the same century in the West. This huge country, with its nomadic population, might have remained in the same condition for centuries, or might perhaps have become the object of Western colonial ambitions, had it not been for the appearance of a man of immense world-political significance, Peter the Great.

(4. Grozny means "the terrifying, just, awe-inspiring" in the positive sense, not "the terrible" with Western overtones. Ivan IV was a creative personality as was Peter the Great, and one of the most important rulers of all time.)

There is probably no other example in all of history of the radical change in the destiny of an entire people such as this man brought about. His will and determination lifted Russia from its Asiatic matrix and turned it into a Western-style nation within the Western world of nations. His goal was to lead Russia, until then landlocked, to the sea -- at first, unsuccessfully, to the Sea of Asov, and then with permanent success to the Baltic. The fact that the shores of the Pacific had already been reached was, in his eyes, wholly unimportant; the Baltic coast was for him the bridge to "Europe." There he founded Petersburg, symbolically giving it a German name. In place of the old Russian market centers and princely residences like Kiev, Moscow, and Nizhni-Novgorod, he planted Western European cities in the Russian landscape. Administration, legislation, and the state itself now functioned on foreign models. The boyar families of Old Russian chieftains became feudal nobility, as in England and France. His aim was to create above the rural population a "society" that would be unified as to dress, customs, language, and thought. And soon an upper social stratum actually formed in the cities, having a thin Western veneer. It played at erudition like the Germans, and took on esprit and manners like the French. The entire corpus of Western Rationalism made its entry -- scarcely understood, undigested, and with fateful consequences. Catherine II, a German, found it necessary to send writers such as Novikov and Radishchev into jail and exile because they wished to try out the ideas of the Enlightenment on the political and religious forms of Russia. [5]

(5. "Jehova, Jupiter, Brahma, God of Abraham, God of Moses, God of Confucius, God of Zoroaster, God of Socrates, God of Marcus Aurelius, God of the Christians -- Thou art everywhere the same, eternal God!" (Radishchev).)

And economic life changed also. In addition to its ages-old river traffic, Russia now began to engage in ocean shipping to distant ports. The old merchant tradition of the Stroganovs, with their caravan trade to China, and of the fairs at Nizhni-Novgorod, now received an overlay of Western European "money thinking" in terms of banks and stock exchanges. [6] Next to the old-style handicrafts and the primitive mining techniques in the Urals there appeared factories, machines, and eventually railroads and steamships.

(6. Cf. Decline of the West, II, 480f., 495.)

German architecture, 1920s, "Chilehaus" in Hamburg and Berlin Tempelhof

Most important of all, Western-style politics entered the Russian scene. It was supported by an army that no longer conformed to conditions of the wars against the Tartars, Turks, and Kirghiz; it had to be prepared to do battle against Western armies in Western territory, and by its very existence it continually misled the diplomats in Petersburg into thinking that the only political problems lay in the West.

Despite all the weaknesses of an artificial product made of stubborn material, Petrinism was a powerful force during the two hundred years of its duration. It will be possible to assess its true accomplishments only at some distant future time, when we can survey the rubble it will have left behind. It extended "Europe," theoretically at least, to the Urals, and made of it a cultural unity. An empire that stretched to the Bering Strait and the Hindu Kush had been Westernized to the extent that in 1900 there was hardly much difference between cities in Ireland and Portugal and those in Turkestan and the Caucasus. Travel was actually easier in Siberia than in some countries in Western Europe. The Trans-Siberian Railway was the final triumph, the final symbol of the Petrinist will before the collapse.

Yet this mighty exterior concealed an internal disaster. Petrinism was and remained an alien element among the Russian people. In reality there existed not one but two Russias, the apparent and the true, the official and the underground Russia. The foreign element brought with it the poison that caused that immense organism to fall ill and die. The spirit of Western Rationalism of the eighteenth century and Western Materialism of the nineteenth, both remote and incomprehensible to genuine Russian thought, came to lead a grotesque and subversive existence among the intelligentsia in the cities. There arose a type of Russian intellectual who, like the Reformed Turk, the Reformed Chinese, and the Reformed Indian, was mentally and spiritually debased, impoverished, and ruined to the point of cynicism by Western Europe. It began with Voltaire, and continued from Proudhon and Marx to Spencer and Haeckel. In Tolstoy’s day the upper class, irreligious and opposed to all native tradition, preened itself with blasé pretentiousness. Gradually the new world view seeped down to the bohemians in the cities, the students, demagogues, and literati, who in turn took it "to the people" to implant in them a hatred of the Western-style upper classes. The result was doctrinaire bolshevism.

At first, however, it was solely the foreign policy of Russia that made itself painfully felt in the West. The original nature of the Russian people was ignored, or at least not understood. It was nothing but a harmless ethnographic curiosity, occasionally imitated at bals masques and in operettas. Russia meant for us a Great Power in the Western sense, one which played the game of high politics with skill and at times with true mastery.

What we did not notice was that two tendencies, alien and inimical to each other, were operative in Russia. One of these was the ancient, instinctive, unclear, unconscious, and subliminal drive that is present in the soul of every Russian, no matter how thoroughly westernized his conscious life may be -- a mystical yearning for the South, for Constantinople and Jerusalem, a genuine crusading spirit similar to the spirit our Gothic forebears had in their blood but which we hardly can appreciate today. Superimposed on this instinctive drive was the official foreign policy of a Great Power: Petersburg versus Moscow. Behind it lay the desire to play a role on the world stage, to be recognized and treated as an equal in "Europe." Hence the hyper-refined manners and mores, the faultless good taste -- things which had already begun to degenerate in Paris since Napoleon III. The finest tone of Western society was to be found in certain Petersburg circles.

At the same time, this kind of Russian did not really love any of the Western peoples. He admired, envied, ridiculed, or despised them, but his attitude depended practically always on whether Russia stood to gain or lose by them. Hence the respect shown for Prussia during the Wars of Liberation (Russia would have liked to pocket Prussian territory) and for France prior to the World War (the Russians laughed at her senile cries for revanche). Yet, for the ambitious and intelligent upper classes, Russia was the future master of Europe, intellectually and politically. Even Napoleon, in his time, was aware of this. The Russian army was mobilized at the western border; it was of Western proportions and was unmistakably trained for battle on Western terrain against Western foes. Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905 can be partly explained by the lack of training for warfare under anything but Western conditions.

Such policies were supported by a network of embassies in the great capitals of the West (which the Soviet government has replaced with Communist party centers for agitation). Catherine the Great took away Poland, and with it the final obstacle between East and West. The climax came with the symbolic journey of Alexander I, the "Savior of Europe," to Paris. At the Congress of Vienna, Russia at times played a decisive role, as also in the Holy Alliance, which Metternich called into being as a bulwark against the Western revolution, and which Nicholas I put to work in 1849 restoring order in the Habsburg state in the interest of his own government.

By means of the successful tradition of Petersburg diplomacy, Russia became more and more involved in great decisions of Western European politics. It took part in all the intrigues and calculations that not only concerned areas remote from Russia, but were also quite incomprehensible to the Russian spirit. The army at the western border was made the strongest in the world, and for no urgent reason -- Russia was the only country no one intended to invade after Napoleon’s defeat, while Germany was threatened by France and Russia, Italy by France and Austria, and Austria by France and Russia. One sought alliance with Russia in order to tip the military balance in one’s favor, thus spurring the ambitions of Russian society toward ever greater efforts in non-Russian interests. All of us grew up under the impression that Russia was a European power and that the land beyond the Volga was colonial territory. The center of gravity of the Empire definitely lay to the west of Moscow, not in the Volga region. And the educated Russians thought the very same way. They regarded the defeat in the Far East in 1905 as an insignificant colonial adventure, whereas even the smallest setback at the western border was in their eyes a scandal, inasmuch as it occurred in full view of the Western nations. In the south and north of the Empire a fleet was constructed, quite superfluous for coastal defense: its sole purpose was to play a role in Western political machinations.

On the other hand, the Turkish Wars, waged with the aim of "liberating" the Christian Balkan peoples, touched the Russian soul more deeply. Russia as the heir to Turkey -- that was a mystical idea. There were no differences of opinion on this question. That was the Will of God. Only the Turkish Wars were truly popular wars in Russia. In 1807 Alexander I feared, not without reason, that he might be assassinated by an officers’ conspiracy. The entire officers’ corps preferred a war against the Turks to one against Napoleon. This led to Alexander’s alliance with Napoleon at Tilsit, which dominated world politics until 1812. It is characteristic how Dostoyevsky, in contrast to Tolstoy, became ecstatic over the Turkish War in 1877. He suddenly came alive, constantly wrote down his metaphysical visions, and preached the religious mission of Russia against Byzantium. But the final portion of Anna Karenina was denied publication by the Russian Messenger, for one did not dare to offer Tolstoy’s skepticism to the public.

As I have mentioned, the educated, irreligious, Westernized Russians also shared the mystical longing for Jerusalem, the Kiev monk’s notion of the mother country as the "Third Rome," which after Papal Rome and Luther’s Wittenberg was to take the fulfillment of Christ’s message to the Jerusalem of the apostles. This barely conscious national instinct of all Russians opposes any power that might erect political barricades on the path that leads to Jerusalem by way of Byzantium. In all other countries such political obstacles would simply disturb either national conceit (in the West) or national apathy (in the Far East); in Russia, the mystical soul of the people itself was pierced and profoundly agitated. Hence the brilliant successes of the Slavophil movement, which was not so much interested in winning over Poles and Czechs as in gaining a foothold among the Slavs in the Christian Balkan countries, the neighbors of Constantinople. Even at an earlier date, the Holy War against Napoleon and the Burning of Moscow had involved the emotions of the entire Russian people. This was not just because of the invasion and plundering of the Russian countryside, but because of Napoleon’s obvious long-range plans. In 1809 he had taken over the Illyrian provinces (the present Yugoslavia) and thus became master of the Adriatic. This had decisively strengthened his influence on Turkey to the disadvantage of Russia, and his next step would be, in alliance with Turkey and Persia, to open up the path to India, either from Illyria or from Moscow itself. The Russians’ hatred of Napoleon was later transferred to the Habsburg monarchy, when its designs on Turkish territory -- in Metternich’s time the Danubian principalities, and after 1878 Saloniki -- endangered Russian moves toward the south. Following the Crimean War they extended their hatred to include Great Britain, when that nation appeared to lay claim to Turkish lands by blockading the Straits and later by occupying Egypt and Cyprus.

Finally, Germany too became the object of this hatred, which goes very deep and cannot be allayed by practical considerations. After 1878, Germany neglected its role as a Russian ally to became more and more the protector and preserver of the crumbling Habsburg state, and thereby also, despite Bismarck’s warning, the supporter of Austro-Hungarian intentions in the Balkans. The German government showed no understanding of the suggestion made by Count Witte, the last of the Russian diplomats friendly to Germany, to choose between Austria and Russia. We could have had a reliable ally in Russia if we had been willing to loosen our ties to Austria. A total reorientation of German policy might have been possible as late as 1911.

Following the Congress of Berlin, hatred of Germany began to spread to all of Russian society, for Bismarck succeeded in restraining Russian diplomacy in the interest of world peace and maintaining the balance of power in "Europe." From the German point of view this was probably correct, and in any case it was a master stroke of Bismarckian statesmanship. But in the eyes of Petersburg it was a mistake, for it deprived the Russian soul of the hope of winning Turkey, and favored England and Austria. And this Russian soul was one of the imponderables that defied diplomatic treatment. Hostility to Germany kept on growing and eventually entered all levels of Russian urban society. It was diverted momentarily when Japanese power, rising up suddenly and broadening the horizons of world politics, forced Russia to experience the Far East as a danger zone. But that was soon forgotten, especially since Germany was so grotesquely inept as to understand neither the immediate situation nor the future possibilities. In time, the senseless idea of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway came up; Germany now seemed intent on capturing full control of this path to Constantinople, a move which would have benefitted neither German politics nor the German economy.

Just as in the field of politics, the economic life of Russia was divided into two main tendencies -- the one active and aggressive, the other passive. The passive element was represented by the Russian peasantry with its primitive agrarian economy; [7] by the old-style merchants with their fairs, caravans, and Volga barges; by Russian craftsmen; and finally by the primitive mining enterprises in the Urals, which developed out of the ancient techniques of pre-Christian "blacksmith tribes," independent of Western mining methods and experience. The forging of iron was invented in Russia in the second millennium B.C. -- the Greeks retained a vague recollection of the beginning of this art. This simple and traditional form of economy gradually found a powerful competitor in the civilized world of Western-style urban economy, with its banks, stock exchanges, factories, and railroads. Then it was money economy versus goods economy; each of these forms of economic existence abhors the other, each tries to attack and annihilate the other.

(7. On the contrast between agrarian and urban economy, see Decline of the West, II, 477ff.)

The Petrinist state needed a money economy in order to pay for its Westernized politics, its army, and its administrative hierarchy, which was laced with primitive corruption. Incidentally, this form of corruption was habitual public practice in Russia; it is a necessary psychological concomitant of an economy based on the exchange of goods, and is fundamentally different from the clandestine corruption practiced by Western European parliamentarians. The state protected and supported economic thinking that was oriented toward Western capitalism, a type of thinking that Russia neither created nor really understood, but had imported and now had to manage. Furthermore, Russia had also to face its doctrinary opposite, the economic theory of communism. Communism was in fact inseparable from Western economic thinking. It was the Marxist capitalism of the lower class, preached by students and agitators as a vague gospel to the masses in the Petrinist cities.

Still, the decisive and truly agitating factor for Russia’s future was not this literary, theoretical trend in the urban underground. It was, rather, the Russians’ profound, instinctively religious abhorrence of all Western economic practices. They considered "money" and all the economic schemes derived from it, socialistic as well as capitalistic, as sinful and satanic. This was a genuine religious feeling, much like the Western emotion which, during the Gothic centuries, opposed the economic practices of the Arabic-Jewish world and led to the prohibition for Christians of money-lending for interest. In the West, such attitudes had for centuries been little more than a cliché for chapel and pulpit, but now it became an acute spiritual problem in Russia. It caused the suicide of numerous Russians who were seized by "terror of the surplus value," whose primitive thought and emotions could not imagine a way of earning a living that would not entail the "exploitation" of "fellow human beings." This genuine Russian sentiment saw in the world of capitalism an enemy, a poison, the great sin that it ascribed to the Petrinist state despite the deep respect felt for "Little Father," the Tsar.

Such, then, are the deep and manifold roots of the Russian philosophy of intellectual nihilism, which began to grow at the time of the Crimean War and which produced as a final fruit the bolshevism that destroyed the Petrinist state in 1917, replacing it with something that would have been absolutely impossible in the West. Contained within this movement is the orthodox Slavophils’ hatred of Petersburg and all it stood for, [8] the peasants’ hatred of the mir, the type of village commune that contradicted the rural concept of property passed down through countless family generations, as well as every Russian’s hatred of capitalism, industrial economy, machines, railroads, and the state and army that offered protection to this cynical world against an eruption of Russian instincts. It was a primeval religious hatred of uncomprehended forces that were felt to be godless, that one could not change and thus wished to destroy, in order that life could go on in the old-fashioned way.

(8. "The first requirement for the liberation of popular feeling in Russia is to hate Petersburg with heart and soul" (Aksakov to Dostoyevsky). Cf. Decline of the West, II, 193ff.)

The peasants detested the intelligentsia and its agitating just as strongly as they detested what these people were agitating against. Yet in time the agitation brought a small clique of clever but by and large mediocre personalities to the forefront of power. Even Lenin’s creation is Western, it is Petersburg -- foreign, inimical, and despised by the majority of Russians. Some day, in some way or other, it will perish. It is a rebellion against the West, but born of Western ideas. It seeks to preserve the economic forms of industrial labor and capitalist speculation as well as the authoritarian state, except that it has replaced the Tsarist regime and private capitalist enterprise with an oligarchy and state capitalism, calling itself communism out of deference to doctrine.

It is a new victory for Petersburg over Moscow and, without any doubt, the final and enduring act of self-destruction committed by Petrinism from below. The actual victim is precisely the element that sought to liberate itself by means of the rebellion: the true Russian, the peasant and craftsman, the devout man of religion. Western revolutions such as the English and French seek to improve organically evolved conditions by means of theory, and they never succeed. In Russia, however, a whole world was made to vanish without resistance. Only the artificial quality of Peter the Great’s creation can explain the fact that a small group of revolutionaries, almost without exception dunces and cowards, has had such an effect. Petrinism was an illusion that suddenly burst.

The bolshevism of the early years has thus had a double meaning. It has destroyed an artificial, foreign structure, leaving only itself as a remaining integral part. But beyond this, it has made the way clear for a new culture that will some day awaken between "Europe" and East Asia. It is more a beginning than an end. It is temporary, superficial, and foreign only insofar as it represents the self-destruction of Petrinism, the grotesque attempt systematically to overturn the social superstructure of the nation according to the theories of Karl Marx. At the base of this nation lies the Russian peasantry, which doubtless played a more important role in the success of the 1917 Revolution than the intellectual crowd is willing to admit. These are the devout peasants of Russia who, although they do not yet fully realize it, are the archenemies of bolshevism and are oppressed by it even worse than they were by the Mongols and the old tsars. For this very reason, despite the hardships of the present, the peasantry will some day become conscious of its own will, which points in a wholly different direction.

The peasantry is the true Russian people of the future. It will not allow itself to be perverted and suffocated, and without a doubt, no matter how slowly, it will replace, transform, control, or annihilate bolshevism in its present form. How that will happen, no one can tell at the moment. It depends, among other things, on the appearance of decisive personalities, who, like Genghis Khan, Ivan IV, Peter the Great, and Lenin, can seize Destiny by their iron hand. Here, too, Dostoyevsky stands against Tolstoy as a symbol of the future against the present. Dostoyevsky was denounced as a reactionary because in his Possessed he no longer even recognized the problems of nihilism. For him, such things were just another aspect of the Petrinist system. But Tolstoy, the man of good society, lived in this element; he represented it even in his rebellion, a protest in Western form against the West. Tolstoy, and not Marx, was the leader to bolshevism. Dostoyevsky is its future conqueror.

There can be no doubt: a new Russian people is in the process of becoming. Shaken and threatened to the very soul by a frightful destiny, forced to an inner resistance, it will in time become firm and come to bloom. It is passionately religious in a way we Western Europeans have not been, indeed could not have been, for centuries. As soon as this religious drive is directed toward a goal, it possesses an immense expansive potential. Unlike us, such a people does not count the victims who die for an idea, for it is a young, vigorous, and fertile people. The intense respect enjoyed over the past centuries by the "holy peasants" whom the regime often exiled to Siberia or liquidated in some other way -- such figures as the priest John of Kronstadt, even Rasputin, but also Ivan and Peter the Great -- will awaken a new type of leaders, leaders to new crusades and legendary conquests. The world round about, filled with religious yearning but no longer fertile in religious concerns, is torn and tired enough to allow it suddenly to take on a new character under the proper circumstances. Perhaps bolshevism itself will change in this way under new leaders; but that is not very probable. For this ruling horde -- it is a fraternity like the Mongols of the Golden Horde -- always has its sights set on the West as did Peter the Great, who likewise made the land of his dreams the goal of his politics. But the silent, deeper Russia has already forgotten the West and has long since begun to look toward Near and East Asia. It is a people of the great inland expanses, not a maritime people.

An interest in Western affairs is upheld only by the ruling group that organizes and supports the Communist parties in the individual countries -- without, as I see it, any chance of success. It is simply a consequence of Marxist theory, not an exercise in practical politics. The only way that Russia might again direct its attention to the West -- with disastrous results for both sides -- would be for other countries (Germany, for instance) to commit serious errors in foreign policy, which could conceivably result in a "crusade" of the Western powers against bolshevism -- in the interest, of course, of Franco-British financial capital. Russia’s secret desire is to move toward Jerusalem and Central Asia, and "the" enemy will always be the one who blocks those paths. The fact that England established the Baltic states and placed them under its influence, thereby causing Russia to lose the Baltic Sea, has not had a profound effect. Petersburg has already been given up for lost, an expendable relic of the Petrinist era. Moscow is once again the center of the nation. But the destruction of Turkey, the partition of that country into French and English spheres of influence, France’s establishment of the Little Entente which closed off and threatened the area from Rumania southwards, French attempts to win control of the Danubian principalities and the Black Sea by aiding the reconstruction of the Hapsburg state -- all these events have made England and, above all, France the heirs to Russian hatred. What the Russians see is the revivification of Napoleonic tendencies; the crossing of the Beresina was perhaps not, after all, the final symbolic event in that movement. Byzantium is and remains the Sublime Gateway to future Russian policy, while, on the other side, Central Asia is no longer a conquered area but part of the sacred earth of the Russian people.

In the face of this rapidly changing, growing Russia, German policy requires the tactical skill of a great statesman and expert in Eastern affairs, but as yet no such man has made his appearance. It is clear that we are not the enemies of Russia; but whose friends are we to be -- of the Russia of today, or of the Russia of tomorrow? Is it possible to be both, or does one exclude the other? Might we not jeopardize such friendship by forming careless alliances?

Similarly obscure and difficult are our economic connections, the actual ones and the potential ones. Politics and economics are two very different aspects of life, different in concept, methods, aims, and significance for the soul of a people. This is not realized in the age of practical materialism, but that does not make it any less fatefully true. Economics is subordinate to politics; it is without question the second and not the first factor in history. The economic life of Russia is only superficially dominated by state capitalism. At its base it is subject to attitudes that are virtually religious in nature. At any rate it is not at all the same thing as top-level Russian politics. Moreover, it is very difficult to predict its short and long-range trends, and even more difficult to control these trends from abroad. The Russia of the last tsars gave the illusion of being an economic complex of Western stamp. Bolshevist Russia would like to give the same illusion; with its communist methods it would even like to become an example for the West. Yet in reality, when considered from the standpoint of Western economics, it is one huge colonial territory where the Russians of the farmlands and small towns work essentially as peasants and craftsmen. Industry and the transportation of industrial products over the rail networks, as well as the process of wholesale distribution of such products, are and will always remain inwardly foreign to this people. The businessman, the factory head, the engineer and inventor are not "Russian" types. As a people, no matter how far individuals may go toward adapting to modern patterns of world economics, the true Russians will always let foreigners do the kind of work they reject because they are inwardly not suited to it. A close comparison with the Age of the Crusades will clarify what I have in mind. [9] At that time, also, the young peoples of the North were nonurban, committed to an agrarian economy. Even the small cities, castle communities, and princely residences were essentially marketplaces for agricultural produce. The Jews and Arabs were a full thousand years "older," and functioned in their ghettos as experts in urban money economy. The Western European fulfills the same function in the Russia of today.

(9. Cf. Decline of the West, II, Chapters XIII and XIV, "The Form-World of Economic Life.")

Machine industry is basically non-Russian in spirit, and the Russians will forever regard it as alien, sinful, and diabolical. They can bear with it and even respect it, as the Japanese do, as a means toward higher ends, for one casts out demons by the prince of demons. But they can never give their soul to it as did the Germanic nations, which created it with their dynamic sensibility as a symbol and method of their struggling existence. In Russia, industry will always remain essentially the concern of foreigners. But the Russians will be able to distinguish sensitively between what is to their own and what is to the foreigners’ advantage.

As far as "money" is concerned, for the Russians the cities are markets for agricultural commodities; for us they have been since the eighteenth century the centers for the dynamics of money. "Money thinking" will be impossible for the Russians for a long time to come. For this reason, as I have explained, Russia is regarded as a colony by foreign business interests. Germany will be able to gain certain advantages from its proximity to the country, particularly in light of the fact that both powers have the same enemy, the financial interest-groups of the Allied nations.

Yet the German economy can never exploit these opportunities without support from superior politics. Without such support a chaotic seizure of opportunities will ensue, with dire consequences for the future. The economic policy of France has been for centuries, as a result of the sadistic character of the French people, myopic and purely destructive. And a serious German policy in economic affairs simply does not exist.

Therefore it is the prime task of German business to help create order in German domestic affairs, in order to set the stage for a foreign policy that will understand and meet its obligations. Business has not yet grasped the immense economic significance of this domestic task. It is decidedly not a question, as common prejudice would have it, of making politics submit to the momentary interests of single groups, such as has already occurred by means of the worst kind of politics imaginable, party politics. It is not a question of advantages that might last for just a few years. Before the war it was the large agricultural interests, and since the war the large industrial interests, that attempted to focus national policy on the obtaining of temporary advantages, and the results were always nil. But the time for short-range tactics is over. The next decades will bring problems of world-historical dimensions, and that means that business must at all times be subordinate to national politics, not the other way around. Our business leaders must learn to think exclusively in political terms, not in terms of "economic politics." The basic requirement for great economic opportunity in the East is thus order in our politics at home.

Oswald SPENGLER: Nietzsche And His Century

Oswald SPENGLER:

Nietzsche And His Century

An address delivered on October 15, 1924, Nietzsche’s eightieth birthday, at the Nietzsche Archive, Weimar

First published in Spengler, Reden und Aufsätze (Munich, 1937).

Ex: https://europeanheathenfront.wordpress.com

Looking back at the nineteenth century and letting its great men pass before the mind’s eye, we can observe an amazing thing about the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche, something that was hardly noticeable in his own time. All the other outstanding personages, including Wagner, Strindberg, and Tolstoy, reflect to a certain degree the color and shape of those years. Each of them was somehow bound up with the shallow optimism of the progress-mongers, with their social ethics and utilitarianism, their philosophy of matter and energy, pragmatism and "adaptation"; each of them made sacrifice after sacrifice to the spirit of the time. Only one person represents a radical departure from this pattern. If the word "untimely," which he himself coined, is applicable to anyone at all, then it is Nietzsche. One searches in vain throughout his whole life and all of his thought for any indication that he might have yielded inwardly to any vogue or fad.

In this respect he is the antithesis of, and yet in some ways profoundly related to, the second German of modern times whose life was one great symbol: Goethe. These are the only two notable Germans whose existence has profound significance apart from and in addition to their works. Because both were aware of this from the beginning and continually gave utterance to this awareness, their existence has become a treasure for our nation and an integral part of its spiritual history.

It was Goethe’s good fortune to be born at the high noon of Western culture, at a time of rich and mature intellectuality which he himself eventually came to represent. He had only to become the epitome of his own time in order to achieve the disciplined grandeur implied by those who later called him the "Olympian." Nietzsche lived a century later, and in the meantime a great change had occurred, one which we are only now able to comprehend. It was his fate to come into the world after the Rococo period, and to stand amid the totally cultureless 1860’s and 1870’s. Consider the streets and houses he had to live in, the clothing fashions, furniture, and social mores he had to observe. Consider the way people moved about in social circles in his day, the way they thought, wrote, and felt. Goethe lived at a time filled with respect for form; Nietzsche longed desperately for forms that had been shattered and abandoned. Goethe needed only to affirm what he saw and experienced around him; Nietzsche had no recourse but to protest passionately against everything contemporary, if he was to rescue anything his forebears had bequeathed to him as a cultural heritage. Both of these men strove during their whole lives for strict inner form and discipline. But the eighteenth century was itself "in form." It possessed the highest type of society that Western Europe has ever known. The nineteenth century had neither a distinguished society nor any other kind of formal attributes. Apart from the incidental customs of the urban upper class it possessed only the scattered remains, preserved with great difficulty, of aristocratic and middle-class tradition. Goethe was able to understand and solve the great problems of his time as a recognized member of his society, as we learn in Wilhelm Meister and Elective Affinities; Nietzsche could remain true to his task only by turning his back on society. His frightful loneliness stands as a symbol over against Goethe’s cheerful gregariousness. One of these great men gave shape to existing things; the other brooded over nonexisting things. One of them worked for a prevailing form; the other against a prevailing formlessness.

Aside from this, however, form was something very different for each of them. Of all the great German intellectuals, Nietzsche was the only born musician. All the others -- thinkers, poets, and painters alike -- have either been shapers of material or have taken material apart. Nietzsche lived, felt, and thought by ear. He was, after all, hardly able to use his eyes. His prose is not "written," it is heard -- one might even say sung. The vowels and cadences are more important than the similes and metaphors. What he sensed as he surveyed the ages was their melody, their meter. He discovered the musical keys of foreign cultures. Before him, no one knew of the tempo of history. A great many of his concepts -- the Dionysian, the Pathos of Distance, the Eternal Recurrence -- are to be understood quite musically. He sensed the rhythm of what is called nobility, ethics, heroism, distinction, and master morality. He was the first to experience as a symphony the image of history that had been created by scholarly research out of data and numbers -- the rhythmic sequence of ages, customs, and attitudes.

He himself had music, just as he walked, spoke, dressed, experienced other people, stated problems, and drew conclusions. What Bildung had been for Goethe, was for Nietzsche tact in the broadest sense: social, moral, historical, and linguistic tact, a feeling for the proper sequence of things, made all the keener by his suffering in an age that had very little of this feeling. Like Zarathustra, Goethe’s Tasso was born of suffering, but Tasso succumbed to a feeling of weakness when challenged by a contemporary world which he loved and which he regarded as superior to himself. Zarathustra abhorred the contemporary world, and fled from it to distant worlds of the past and future.

The inability to feel "at home" in one’s own time -- that is a German curse. Because of the guilt of our past we came into bloom too late and too suddenly. Beginning with Klopstock and Lessing, we had to cover in eighty years a distance for which other nations had centuries. For this reason we never developed a formal inner tradition or a distinguished society that could act as guardian of such a tradition. We borrowed forms, motifs, problems, and solutions from all sides and struggled with them, whereas others grew up with them and in them. Our end was implicit in our beginning. Heinrich von Kleist discovered -- he was the first to do so -- the problematics of Ibsen at the same time that he strove to emulate Shakespeare. This tragic state of affairs produced in Germany a series of outstanding artistic personalities at a time when England and France had already gone over to producing literati -- art and thought as a profession rather than a destiny. But it also caused the fragmentation and frustration expressed in much of our art, the thwarting of final aims and artistic thoroughness.

Today we use the terms "Classical" and "Romantic" to denote the antithesis that appeared around 1800 everywhere in Western Europe, literary Petersburg included. Goethe was a Classic to the same extent that Nietzsche was a Romantic, but these words merely designate the predominant hues in their essential natures. Each of them also possessed the other potentiality, which at times urged its way to the foreground. Goethe, whose Faust-monologues and West-Eastern Divan are high points of Romantic sensibility, strove at all times to confine this urge for distance and boundlessness within clear and strict traditional forms. Similarly, Nietzsche often suppressed his acquired inclination for the Classical and rational, which held a twofold fascination for him by reason of temperament and philological profession, to what he termed the Dionysian, at least when he was evaluating. Both men were borderline cases. Just as Goethe was the last of the Classics, Nietzsche was, next to Wagner, the last of the Romantics. By their lives and their creations they exhausted the possibilities of these two movements. After them, it was no longer possible to render the meaning of the ages in the same words and images -- the imitators of the Classical drama and the latter-day Zarathustras have proved this. Moreover, it is impossible to invent a new method of seeing and saying like theirs. Germany may well bring forth impressive formative minds in the future; however, fortunate for us, they will nonetheless be isolated occurrences, for we have reached the end of the grand development. And they will always be overshadowed by the two great figures of Goethe and Nietzsche.

An essential characteristic of Western Classicism was its intense preoccupation with the contemporary world. While seeking to control human drives that tend in opposite directions, it attempted to make the past and the future coalesce in the contemporary situation. Goethe’s dictum about the "Demands of the Day," his "cheerful present," imply after all that he called upon various kinds of past figures and events -- his Greeks, his Renaissance, Götz von Berlichingen, Faust, and Egmont -- in order to infuse them with the spirit of his own time. The result is that when reading such works as Tasso or Iphigenia we are not at all mindful of historical precedent. Just the opposite is the case with the Romantics; their proper domain was remote places and times. They longed for withdrawal from the present to distant and foreign realms, to the past and future of history. None of them ever had a profound relationship with the things that surrounded him.

The Romantic is enticed by whatever is strange to his nature, the Classic by what is proper to his nature. Noble dreamers on the one hand, noble masters of dreams on the other. The one type adored the conquerors, rebels, and criminals of the past, or ideal states and supermen of the future; the other type construed statesmanship in practical, methodical terms or, like Goethe and Humboldt, even practiced it themselves. One of Goethe’s great masterpieces is the conversation between Egmont and William of Orange. He loved Napoleon, for he was witness to his deeds in his own time and locality. He was never able to recreate artistically the violent personalities of the past; his Caesar went unwritten. But that is precisely the type of personality that Nietzsche worshipped -- from a distance. At close range, as with Bismarck, he was repelled by them. Napoleon would also have repelled him. He would have seemed to him uncouth, shallow, and mindless, like the Napoleonic types that lived around him -- the great European politicians and the rough-and-ready businessmen whom he never even saw, much less understood. He needed a vast distance between the Then and the Now in order to have a genuine relationship with a given reality. Thus he created his Superman and, almost as arbitrarily, the figure of Cesare Borgia.

These two tendencies are tragically present in the most recent German history. Bismarck was a Classic of politics. He based his calculations entirely on things that existed, things he could see and manipulate. The fanatical patriots neither loved nor understood him until his creative work appeared as a finished product, until he could be romantically transfigured as a mythic personage: "The Old Man of the Saxon Forests." On the other hand, Ludwig II of Bavaria, who perished as a Romantic and who never created or even could have created anything of enduring value, actually received this kind of love (without returning it), not only from the people at large, but also from artists and thinkers who should have looked more closely. Kleist is regarded in Germany with, at best, a reluctant admiration that is tantamount to rejection, particularly in those instances where he succeeded in overcoming his own Romantic nature. He is inwardly quite remote from most Germans, unlike Nietzsche, whose nature and destiny were in many ways similar to the Bavarian king’s, and who is instinctively honored even by those who have never read him.

Nietzsche’s longing for remoteness also explains his aristocratic taste, which was that of a completely lonely and visionary personality. Like the Ossian-type Romanticism that originated in Scotland, the early Classicism of the eighteenth century began on the Thames and was later taken across to the Continent. It is impossible to consider it apart from the Rationalism of the same period. The Classicists engaged in the act of creativity consciously and deliberately; they replaced free imagination with knowledge, at times even with scholarly erudition. They understood the Greeks, the Renaissance, and inevitably also the world of contemporary active affairs. These English Classicists, all of them of high social standing, helped create liberalism as a philosophy of life as it was understood by Frederick the Great and his century: the deliberate ignoring of distinctions that were known to exist in the practical life but were in any case not considered as obstacles; the rational preoccupation with matters of public opinion that could neither be gotten rid of nor hushed up, but that somehow had to be rendered harmless. This upper-class Classicism gave rise to English democracy -- a superior form of tactics, not a codified political program. It was based on the long and intensive experience of a social stratum that habitually dealt with real and practicable possibilities, and that was therefore never in danger of losing its essential congeniality.

Goethe, who was also conscious of his social rank, was never an aristocrat in the passionate, theoretical sense -- unlike Nietzsche, who lacked the habituation to regular practical experience. Nietzsche never really became familiar with the democracy of his time in all its strength and weakness. To be sure, he rebelled against the herd instinct with the wrath of his extremely sensitive soul, but the chief cause of his anger was to be found somewhere in the historical past. He was doubtless the first to demonstrate in such radical fashion how in all cultures and epochs of the past the masses count for nothing, that they suffer from history but do not create it, that they are at all times the pawns and victims of the personal will of individuals and classes born to be rulers. People had sensed this often enough before, but Nietzsche was the first to destroy the traditional image of "humanity" as progress toward the solution of ideal problems through the agency of its leaders. Herein lies the immense difference between the historiography of a Niebuhr or a Ranke, which as an idea was likewise of Romantic origin, and Nietzsche’s method of historical vision. His way of looking into the soul of past epochs and peoples overcame the mere pragmatic structure of facts and events.

Yet such a technique required detachment. English Classicism, which produced the first modern historian of Greece in George Grote -- a businessman and practical politician -- was quite exclusively the affair of higher society. It ennobled the Greeks by regarding them as peers, by "present-ing" them in the truest sense of the word as distinguished, cultivated, intellectually refined human beings who at all times acted "in good taste" -- even Harner and Pindar, poets whom the English school of classical philology was the first to prefer over Horace and Virgil. From the higher circles of English society this Classicism entered the only corresponding circles in Germany, the courts of the small principalities, where the tutors and preachers acted as intermediaries. The courtly atmosphere of Weimar was the world in which Goethe’s life became the symbol of cheerful conviviality and purposeful activity. Weimar was the friendly center of intellectual Germany, a place that offered calm satisfaction to a degree unknown by any other German writer, an opportunity for harmonious growth, maturing, and ageing that was Classical in a specifically German sense.

Next to this career there is the other, which likewise ended in Weimar. It started out in the seclusion of a Protestant pastor’s home, the cradle of many if not most of Germany’s great minds, and reached its height in the sun-drenched solitude of the Engadin. No other German has ever lived such an impassioned private existence, far removed from all society and publicity -- though all Germans, even if they are "public" personalities, have a longing for such solitude. His intense yearning for friendship was in the last analysis simply his inability to lead a genuine social life, and thus it was a more spiritual form of loneliness. Instead of the friendly "Goethe house" on Weimar’s Frauenplan, we see the joyless little cottages in Sils-Maria, the solitude of the mountains and the sea, and finally a solitary breakdown in Turin -- it was the most thoroughly Romantic career the nineteenth century ever offered.

Nevertheless, his need to communicate was stronger than he himself believed, much stronger at any rate than Goethe’s, who was one of the most taciturn of men despite the social life that surrounded him. Goethe’s Elective Affinities is a secretive book, not to speak of Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering and Faust II. His most profound poems are monologues. The aphorisms of Nietzsche are never monologues; nor are the Night Song and the Dionysus Dithyrambs completely monologues. An invisible witness is always present, always watching. That is why he remained at all times a believing Protestant. All the Romantics lived in schools and coteries, and Nietzsche invented something of the sort by imagining that his friends were, as listeners, his intellectual peers. Or again, he created in the remote past and future a circle of intimates, only to complain to them, like Novalis and Hölderlin, of his loneliness. His whole life was filled with the torture and bliss of renunciation, of the desire to surrender and to force his inner nature, to bind himself in same way to something that always proved to be foreign to himself. Yet that is how he developed insight into the soul of epochs and cultures that could never reveal their secrets to self-assured, Classical minds.

This organic pessimism of his being explains the works and the sequence in which they appeared. We who were not able to experience the great flourishing of materialism in the mid-nineteenth century should never cease to be amazed at the audacity that went into the writing, at such a tender age and contrary to the opinions of contemporary philological scholarship, of The Birth of Tragedy. The famous antithesis of Apollo and Dionysus contains much more than even today’s average reader can comprehend. The most significant thing about that essay was not that its author discovered an inner conflict in "Classical" Greece, the Greece that had been the purest manifestation of "humanity" for all others except perhaps Bachofen and Burckhardt. More important still was that even at that age he possessed the superior vision that allowed him to peer into the heart of whole cultures as if they were organic, living individuals. We need only read Mommsen and Curtius to notice the tremendous difference. The others regarded Greece simply as the sum of conditions and events occurring within a certain span of time and space. Our present-day method of looking at history owes its origin, but not its depth, to Romanticism. In Nietzsche’s day, history, as far as Greece and Rome were concerned, was little more than applied philology, and as far as the Western peoples were concerned little more than applied archival research. It invented the idea that history began with written records.

The liberation from this view came out of the spirit of music. Nietzsche the musician invented the art of feeling one’s way into the style and rhythm of foreign cultures, aside from and often in contradiction to the written documents. But what did written documents matter anyway? With the word "Dionysus" Nietzsche discovered what the archaeologists eventually brought to light thirty years later -- the underworld and the undersoul of Classical culture, and ultimately the spiritual force that underlies all of history. Historical description had become the psychology of history. The eighteenth century and Classicism, including Goethe, believed in "culture" -- a single, true, mental and moral culture as the task of a unified humanity. From the very beginning Nietzsche spoke quite unforcedly of "cultures" as of natural phenomena that simply began at a certain time and place, without reason or goal or whatever an all-too-human interpretation might wish to make of it. "At a certain time" -- the point was made clear from the very first time in Nietzsche’s book that all of these cultures, truths, arts, and attitudes are peculiar to a mode of existence that makes its appearance at one certain time and then disappears for good. The idea that every historical fact is the expression of a spiritual stimulus, that cultures, epochs, estates, and races have a soul like that of individuals -- this was such a great step forward in historical depth-analysis that even the author himself was at the time not aware of its full implications.

However, one of the things the Romantic yearns for is to escape from himself. This yearning, together with the great misfortune of having been born in that particular period in history, caused Nietzsche to serve as a herald for the most banal form of realism in his second book, Human, All-Too-Human. These were the years when Western Rationalism, after abandoning its glorious beginnings with Rousseau, Voltaire, and Lessing, ended as a farce. Darwin’s theories, together with the new faith in matter and energy, became the religion of the big cities; the soul was regarded as a chemical process involving proteins, and the meaning of the universe boiled down to the social ethics of enlightened philistines. Not a single fiber of Nietzsche’s being was party to these developments. He had already given vent to his disgust in the first of his "Untimely Meditations," but the scholar in him envied Chamfort and Vauvenargues and their lighthearted and somewhat cynical manner of treating serious topics in the style of the grand monde. The artist and enthusiast in him was perplexed by the massive sobriety of an Eugen Dühring, which he mistook for true greatness. Priestly character that he was, he proceeded to unmask religion as prejudice. Now the goal of life was knowledge, and the goal of history became for him the development of intelligence. He said this in a tone of ridicule that served to heighten his own passion, precisely because it hurt to do so, and because he suffered from the unrealizable longing to create in the midst of his own time a seductive picture of the future that would contrast with everything he was born into.

While the ecstatic utilitarianism of the Darwinian school was extremely remote from his way of thinking, he took from it certain secret revelations that no true Darwinist ever dreamed of. In The Dawn of Day and The Gay Science there appeared, in addition to a way of looking at things that was meant to be prosaic and even scornful, another technique of examining the world -- a restrained, quiet, admiring attitude that penetrated deeper than any mere realist could ever hope to achieve. Who, before Nietzsche, had ever spoken in the same way of the soul of an age, an estate, a profession, of the priest and the hero, or of man and woman? Who had ever been able to summarize the psychology of whole centuries in an almost metaphysical formula? Who had ever postulated in history, rather than facts and "eternal truths," the types of heroic, suffering, visionary, strong, and diseased life as the actual substance of events as they happen?

That was a wholly new kind of living forms, and could have been discovered only by a born musician with a feeling for rhythm and melody. Following this presentation of the physiognomy of the ages of history, a science of which he was and will always be the creator, he reached to the outer limits of his vision to describe the symbols of a future, his future, which he needed in order to be cleansed of the residue of contemporary thought. In one sublime moment he conjured the image of Eternal Recurrence, as it had been vaguely surmised by German mystics in the Middle Ages -- an endless circling in the eternal void, in the night of immeasurable eons, a way to lose one’s soul utterly in the mysterious depths of the cosmos, regardless of whether such things are scientifically justifiable or not. Into the midst of this vision he placed the Superman and his prophet, Zarathustra, representing the incarnate meaning of human history, in all its brevity, on the planet that was his home. All three of these creations were completely distant, impossible to relate to contemporary conditions. For this very reason they have exerted a curious attraction on every German soul. For in every German soul there is a place where dreams are dreamed of social ideals and a finer future for mankind. Goethe lacked such a corner in his soul, and that is why he never became a truly popular personage. The people sensed this lack, and thus they called him aloof and frivolous. We shall never overcome this reverie of ours; it represents within us the unlived portion of a great past.

Once having arrived at this height, Nietzsche posed the question as to the value of the world, a question that had accompanied him since childhood. By doing so he brought to an end the period of Western philosophy that had considered the types of knowledge as its central problem. This new question likewise had two answers: a Classical and a Romantic answer or, to put it in the terms of the time, a social and an aristocratic answer. "Life has value to the same degree as it serves the totality" -- that was the answer of the educated Englishmen who had learned at Oxford to distinguish between what a person stated as his considered opinion and what the same person did at decisive moments as a politician or businessman. "Life is all the more valuable, the stronger its instincts are" -- that was the answer given by Nietzsche, whose own life was delicate and easily injured. Be that as it may, for the very reason that he was remote from the active life he was able to grasp its mysteries. His ultimate understanding of real history was that the Will to Power is stronger than all doctrines and principles, and that it has always made and forever will make history, no matter what others may prove or preach against it. He did not concern himself with the conceptual analysis of "will"; to him the most important thing was the image of active, creative, destructive Will in history. The "concept" of will gave way to the "aspect" of will. He did not teach, he simply pointed matters out: "Thus it was, and thus it shall be." Even if theoretical and priestly individuals will it a thousand times differently, the primeval instincts of life will still emerge victorious.

What a difference between Schopenhauer’s world view and this one! And between Nietzsche’s contemporaries, with their sentimental plans for improving the world, and this demonstration of hard facts! Such an accomplishment places this last Romantic thinker at the very pinnacle of his century. In this we are all his pupils, whether we wish to be or not, whether we know him well or not. His vision has already imperceptibly conquered the world. No one writes history any more without seeing things in his light.

He undertook to evaluate life using facts as the sole criteria, and the facts taught that the stronger or weaker will to succeed determines whether life is valuable or worthless, that goodness and success are almost mutually exclusive. His image of the world reached its culmination with a magnificent critique of morality in which, instead of preaching morality, he evaluated the moralities that have arisen in history -- not according to any "true" moral system but according to their success. This was indeed a "revaluation of all values," and although we now know that he misstated the antithesis of Christian and master-morality as a result of his personal suffering during the 1880’s, nonetheless the ultimate antithesis of human existence lay behind his statement; he sought it, and sensed it, and believed that he had captured it with his formula.

If instead of "master morality" we were to say the instinctive practice of men who are determined to act, and instead of "Christian morality" the theoretical ways in which contemplative persons evaluate, then we would have before us the tragic nature of all mankind, whose dominant types will forever misunderstand, combat, and suffer from each other. Deed and thought, reality and ideal, success and redemption, strength and goodness -- these are forces that will never come to terms with one another. Yet in historical reality it is not the ideal, goodness, or morality that prevails -- their kingdom is not of this world -- but rather decisiveness, energy, presence of mind, practical talent. This fact cannot be gotten rid of with laments and moral condemnations. Man is thus, life is thus, history is thus.

Precisely because all action was foreign to him, because he knew only how to think, Nietzsche understood the fundamental essence of the active life better than any great active personality in the world. But the more he understood, the more shyly he withdrew from contact with action. In this way his Romantic destiny reached fulfillment. Under the force of these last insights, the final stage of his career took shape in strict contrast to that of Goethe, who was not foreign to action but who regarded his true calling as poetry, and therefore restrained his actions cheerfully.

Goethe, the Privy Councillor and Minister, the celebrated focal point of European intellect, was able to confess during his last year of life, in the final act of his Faust, that he looked upon his life as having attained fulfillment. "Tarry now, thou art so fair!" -- that is a phrase expressive of the most blissful satiety, spoken at the moment when the active physical work is completed under Faust’s command, to endure now and forevermore. It was the great and final symbol of the Classicism to which this life had been dedicated, and which led from the controlled cultural education of the eighteenth century to the controlled exercise of personal talent of the nineteenth.

Yet one cannot create distance, one can only proclaim it. Just as Faust’s death brought a Classical career to an end, the mind of the loneliest of wanderers vanished with a curse upon his age during those mysterious days in Turin, when he watched the last mists disappear from his image of the world and the highest peaks come ever clear into view. This puzzling final episode of his life is the very reason Nietzsche’s existence has had the stronger influence on the world ever since. Goethe’s life was a full life, and that means that it brought something to completion. Countless Germans will honor Goethe, live with him, and seek his support; but he can never transform them. Nietzsche’s effect is a transformation, for the melody of his vision did not end with his death. The Romantic attitude is eternal; though its form may at times be unified and complete, its thought never is. It will always conquer new areas, either destroying them or changing them radically. Nietzsche’s type of vision will pass on to new friends and enemies, and these in turn will hand it down to other followers and adversaries. Even if someday no one reads his works any longer, his vision will endure and be creative.

His work is not a part of our past to be enjoyed; it is a task that makes servants of us all. As a task it is independent of his books and their subject matter, and thus a problem of German destiny. In an age that does not tolerate otherworldly ideals and takes vengeance on their authors, when the only thing of recognized value is the kind of ruthless action that Nietzsche baptized with the name of Cesare Borgia, when the morality of the ideologues and world improvers is limited more radically than ever to superfluous and innocuous writing and speech-making -- in such an age, unless we learn to act as real history wants us to act, we will cease to exist as a people. We cannot live without a form of wisdom that does not merely console in difficult situations, but helps one to get out of them. This kind of hard wisdom made its first appearance in German thought with Nietzsche, despite the fact that it was cloaked in thoughts and impressions he had gathered from other sources. To the people most famished for history in all the world, he showed history as it really is. His heritage is the obligation to live history in the same way.

A Renaissance Human in the Digital Age

Natella Speranskaya

 

Ex: https://medium.com

THE MAIN PROBLEMS OF MODERN HUMAN

I want to start with the question: “Is it possible to become Renaissance Man in the Digital Age?»

The problem of modern human living in the era of Big Data is that he is drowning in the flow of information. The human of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, had a particular amount of knowledge. Today, we can’t even determine what we need to know. Most often, this is determined by our profession and the direction of our activity. Given the fact that the modern world is still dominated by the tendency to narrow specialization, we can come to disappointing conclusions. A modern human needs to be able to find in a massive flow of unstructured information, the one that will serve for its comprehensive and harmonious development.

Nowadays, only a few people know how to work with information. It is not chaotic to absorb, not to be satisfied with an incomplete acquaintance, but to be selective, to show the art of separating important from secondary, necessary from casual. There are two opposite approaches to knowledge: simple accumulation of information and transformation by knowledge. These two approaches are based on two principles — forma formanta and forma informanta. The first is inherent in a person initially. The forma formanta action is directed from the center to the periphery. We can say that this is the inner Logos or axis of the soul. This principle conditions all internal transformations that we experience. Forma formanta is related to “vertical knowledge”. Forma informanta is an external force that acts from the periphery to the center. It determines all other people’s influences (especially the importance of society). This is “horizontal knowledge”. I realized very early on that our entire educational system is based on forma informanta. In educational institutions, we are informed at best, but we are not formed in any way. In the twenty-first century, we have to synthesize these two principles.

There are other problems faced by the modern human, who can no longer imagine his life without digital assistants. According to research conducted by cognitive neurobiologists, people barely read texts. They don’t read anymore; they just scan them. Scattered attention, fragmentary perception of information, search for keywords, “surfing” rather than reading — this is the result. Of course, many people have decided to abandon paper books altogether and wholly switched to electronic ones. The skill of reading is increasingly lost. It is no secret that many people are no longer able to read Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game “, much less Schelling’s” Philosophy of mythology”. How can we counter the trend outlined here? One of the ways today is called slow read. For this purpose, reading groups are created all over the world. They allow you to experience time differently and reopen text that is not scanned but is slowly read, parsed, discussed, and commented on.

Another problem with a modern human is poor memory. Why remember something if you can find all the information on the Internet? Xenophon reports that Athenian politician and general Nicias forced his son Niceratus to memorize by heart the works of Homer. Now no one even tries to set such a task for themselves. It has reached the point that today not everyone is also able to finish reading the epic of Homer to the end. Alberto Manguel writes in “Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography” that memory training in the Byzantine educational system was given considerable attention: after several years of practice, students had to know the Iliad by heart.

CREATION A WORLDVIEW

Creation a worldview is a complex and lengthy process. We often meet people who do not have any worldview. At best, they have a particular set of opinions (in most cases, not their own) and incomplete knowledge, based on which they draw conclusions and make decisions. If there is no worldview, then there is no internal axis, center, or reference point around which a separate world is formed. A person “just lives”, unaware of the values, views, and desires imposed on him. The inability to cope with the massive flow of information that today threatens to wash away any truth from the face of the earth leads it to a chaotic capture, senseless accumulation. He does not know how to choose the most important thing from this inexhaustible stream. If he had a worldview, a particular coordinate system, then approaching the bookshelves or looking at a series of links and headlines in his news feed, a person would instantly make the right decision: “take” or “put aside”. To build your worldview, you need to be a good architect.

In the process of forming ourselves, we always lose sight of the fact that human is a process, as the act of creation. It is in constant development and transformation. There is an ontological gap between the human of Antiquity and the human of the Middle ages. And those who naively believe that humans are always the same, that we are the same today as we were hundreds of years ago, make an unforgivable mistake. When we talk about the “ancient Greek,” “medieval European,” “Renaissance human,” “Modern human,” “postmodern individual,” we are talking about entirely different and, I would venture to say more radically, diametrically different human types. Changing paradigms always means a fundamental change that can be correlated with a “re-creation of the world.” Everything changes the ontological status of a human, his view of life, death and the afterlife, time and space, the divine; his ideals, his values, etc. change. The understanding of these changes dictates the division into historical periods.

Joel Barker, in his book “Paradigms: Business of Discovering the Future”, emphasizes that he does not agree with Thomas Kuhn, who believed that paradigms exist only in science. I always emphasize that I use the word “paradigm” without any reference to Kuhn’s paradigm theory, and take its original meaning (from Greek. παράδειγμα, “example, model, sample”). So, Barker is convinced that the new paradigm comes sooner than there is a need for it. The paradigm is always ahead of demand. And, of course, the apparent reaction to this is rejection. Who is changing the paradigm, according to Barker? It’s always an outsider. The one who breaks the rules turns them — at the same time improving the world. “What is defined as impossible today is impossible only in the context of present paradigms,” says Barker. Let’s put the question again: “is it Possible to become Renaissance human in the digital age? This is not possible only in the context of the old paradigm. But that paradigm could disappear by tomorrow.

PARADIGM SHIFT: A REVOLUTION IN HUMAN THINKING

The type of personality that appeared in the pre-Socratic period delighted Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote about the Republic of Geniuses, where the philosopher was a magician, a king, and a priest. This type of personality will still manifest itself in the Middle ages — in the person of the philosopher, scientist, and theologian Albert the Great (Doctor Universalis), the Arab scientist Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham and the philosopher and naturalist Roger Bacon. And in the Renaissance — as homo univeralis, the most striking embodiment of which will be Leonardo da Vinci: painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, musician, writer, and scientist, ahead of his time. Then it will be replaced by another type-a a scientist of narrow specialization. It’s no longer a microcosm that reflects the entire universe (macrocosm). The world becomes too vast for him, so the specialist decides to confine himself to a small island, where he spends the rest of his days in the eternal scientific studies, to come to results that can easily be refuted by a new generation of such scientists. E. R. Dodds wrote:

The sort of specialisation we have today was quite unknown to Greek science at any period, and some of the greatest names at all periods are those of nonspecialists, as may be seen if you be seen if you look at a list of the works of Theophrastus or Eratosthenes, Posidonius, Galen, or Ptolemy.

In the age of Antiquity, the idea of a perfect human necessarily included the concept of “kalokagathos” (Ancient Greek: καλὸς κἀγαθός). It was a symbol of the harmonious union of external and internal virtues. Another idea that will become the basis of the system of classical education — “Paideia” (παιδεία), that is, the formation of a holistic personality, it was closely related to “kalokagathos.” The harmonious system of ancient (classical) education laid the foundation for the future educational system of Europe.

For the ancient Greeks, the human was not just an individual but an idea. And this idea included all stages of the spiritual and intellectual development of society.

In the Middle Ages, the concept of the ideal human changes significantly, and in place of harmony between external and internal comes the realization of the original sinfulness of the human being; between God and human, an abyss appears, forcing the latter to take the path of redemption to restore the lost harmony. The flesh begins to be thought of as sinful and despicable, the earthly world as a place that must to reject and devote all your thoughts to the service of God. Knowledge gives way to faith. An ascetic monk takes the place of the ancient Greek. The fundamental idea of” imitating God” remains unchanged, only God and the nature of the imitation itself change. If the ancient Greeks imitated the Olympian gods and heroes, the medieval human imitated Christ. The changes in human perception of the world during the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages are so radical that at the time we are talking not just about two different ideas about the “perfect human”, but also about two different ontological levels: “the level of the Mystery” and “the level of baptized”. In both cases, the person experienced profound changes, after which his life was strictly divided into “before” and “after”. It is no coincidence that Hans Sedlmayr begins the periodization of Western culture from the Middle ages (skipping Antiquity) — it was another world, another human, another ideal, another look at the choice of life, a different view of death. And another way of looking at philosophy. For a medieval human, philosophy was “the handmaiden of theology.”

Philosophia et septem artes liberales, the seven liberal arts

It was in the middle ages that the first universities began to appear, which immediately acquired the status of centers of philosophy and culture, science, and education. As a rule, the medieval University consisted of three higher faculties: theology, medicine, and law. Before entering one of these faculties, the student was trained at the artistic (preparatory) faculty, where he studied seven Liberal arts. And only after receiving the title of bachelor or master, he had the right to enter one of the three faculties, were at the end of the training, he won the title of doctor of law, medicine or theology. The seven Liberal arts were divided into two cycles: trivium (grammar, dialectics (logic), rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, or harmonica). Despite the fact that the origins of the seven Liberal arts go back to the Hellenistic era (the Sophist Hippias), in the Middle ages this system was in the service of religion: grammar was intended for the interpretation of Church books, dialectics was used for polemics with heretics, rhetoric was necessary as a tool for creating religious sermons, etc.

Only in the Renaissance age (which was primarily the Renaissance of Antiquity) does the medieval idea of a sinful being give way to the idea of homo universalis, a harmonious and holistic personality; inevitably this means a return to the fundamental principles of the Ancient idea of the perfect human — “kalokagathos”, “paideia”, “arete”. After Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine of Hippo come to Georgius Gemistus, Marsilio Ficino and Pico Della Mirandola. Classical education, based on the study of ancient languages as a way to comprehend the cultural heritage of Antiquity, was founded in this era. As the Russian poet and playwright Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov rightly remarked: “European thought constantly and naturally returns for new stimuli to the genius of Greece.”

In the Renaissance, a paradigm shift occurs again: appear is a gap between the medieval worldview and the worldview of the Renaissance human. The same gap to separate the person of the Renaissance from the individual of the New time when there was a break with the classical model of education. One of the embodiments of the anti-classical approach to education was the French sociologist Jean Fourastie (1909–1990), who insisted that we should discard the classical humanitarian culture and focus on the new ideal of an educated person — a specialist of a narrow profile who has the ability to quickly adapt to the constantly changing realities of the modern world. This specialist was not required to have a high level of culture since the range of his tasks was reduced to the effective service of the world, the values of which were now determined not by homo universalis, but by homo economicus.

REINVENTION OF HUMAN

Today it is common to talk about the collapse of humanism, but we still use the word “humanitarian” out of habit. What is humanitas, and does the range of modern Humanities correspond to its original purpose? Why do we observe how the very “idea of human” is lost? “The Fatigue from human”, “the overthrow of the human”, “the destruction of the human”, “the disappearance of the human” arise in all spheres of our existence.

The latest trends in modern thought reduce a person to the level of an object, depriving him of his prior ontological status. A toothpick and a Buddhist monk, a Hummer and a Heidegger, a nail file, and a talented painter are placed on the same line. One is equal to the other. Object-oriented thinking that puts a THING at the center of being. Metaphysics of things. Being is no longer hierarchical. The same tendency can be found in modern theater and in contemporary painting, which is looking for an opportunity to free themselves from a human finally. Objects and things are increasingly taking the place of the human. The human himself, sometimes installed in work, turns into an object. The human image “disintegrates”, is dismembered, disassembled into parts, like a mechanism. In painting, there has long been a fragmentation of the human image (from distortion of proportions and emphasis on bodily ugliness to the dismemberment of the body). At Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum, the focus on painful and damaged bodies becomes constant. American artist and sculptor Sarah Sitkin is engaged in splitting the human image, deliberately distorting it. We can see the same thing in the works of other artists: Marcello Nitti, Radu Belchin, Christian Zucconi, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Emil Alzamora, João Figueiredo.

The human is almost banished. But in his place did not come, neither a Superman nor a Godman. Rare attempts to put a different anthropological formation in the position of the disappearing human can be noticed even among European symbolists: Jean Delville, Simeon Solomon, Fernand Khnopff, Emile Fabry, and others. But this was instead a warning of the” new human,” his barely perceptible breath, a secret call. Science fiction writers (for example, Herbert Wells) managed to anticipate the phenomenon of its complete opposite — Digital Human. Who is he, this child of the network century, communicating through tags and tweets — a harbinger of the end of humanity or the Creator of a new “Digital God” — Artificial Intelligence? All attempts by inhumanists, speculative realists, “space pessimists”, etc. to solve the problem of “Lost Centre” and learn to think beyond the limits of human are initially doomed to failure. They do not create breakthroughs in the field of thought; all they do is reveal the symptoms of a dangerous disease called “death of the idea of human”.

I am convinced that the crisis of the Humanities is connected with the plight of the “idea of the human.” And only a return to the “idea of human”, to the spiritual dimension of human existence, but at a new stage, can lead to the revival of the Humanities. In this and only in this case will humanitas regain its original meaning. However, it is not enough just to go back to the old definition of human, today we have to “reinvention of human”. Redefine its meaning, redefine its purpose and place in the world, and understand its advantages over Artificial Intelligence.

Tobias Rees is the founding Director of the Institute’s Transformations of the Human Program. He suggests that fields such as Artificial Intelligence and synthetic biology should be seen as philosophical and artistic laboratories where new concepts of human, politics, understanding of nature, and technology are formed. What was traditionally associated with the main tasks of the Humanities, which were centered on human, has now moved to the fields of natural and technical sciences. The Humanities have stopped answering the question: “What is a human?” But this is the fundamental and critical issue today. Specialists who are closed within the boundaries of their disciplines are not able to answer it. Tobias Rees sends philosophers and artists to the world’s largest corporations to work with engineers and technologists to form a new idea of the human.

At the same time, we must clearly understand that rethinking the idea of the human will undoubtedly entail a rethinking of the entire corpus of Humanities. What is it like to be a human being in the age of intelligent machines? What is the fundamental advantage of a human? What will never, under any circumstances, be impossible to automate, calculate, and turn into Algorithms? Futurologist Gerd Leonhard, contrary to Yuval Harari, who is obsessed with Algorithms, puts forward the idea of androrithms, that is, specific non-enumerable attributes that make us humans. These attributes are exclusively human and can never be assigned by a machine. To androrithms, Leonhard includes empathy, intuition, compassion, emotional intelligence, imagination, and Dasein (Heidegger). Leonhard writes:

«Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ depicted the ideal proportions of the human body — maybe now we need a ‘neoluvian man’ describing the future relationship of humans and technology?».

In the article “2020 Will Bring A New Renaissance: Humanity Over Technology”, Gerd Leonhard argues that we will soon witness a resurgence of humanism and the Humanities. Undoubtedly, this trend is gradually gaining influence in the Western world. It is enough to read the book “Sensemaking: The Power of the Humanities in the Age of the Algorithm” by Christian Madsbjerg to see how modern world leaders and corporate heads are rediscovering the Humanities and applying its methods to solve critical problems in their industry. Madsbjerg himself is a well-known business consulting specialist and founder of ReD Associates. He founded a consulting company when he was only 22 years old and developed an innovative approach to business thinking (his company specializes in strategic consulting based on the foundation of the Humanities). He is a genuine Polymath that has a dominant intellectual (theoretical and practical) foundation in the field of philosophy, Ethnography, anthropology, sociology, literary studies, history, discursive analysis, business management, etc.

The ‘Neoluvian’ Man

You might be surprised to find that more than a third of Fortune 500 CEOs have degrees in the Humanities. The illusory idea that only a narrow specialization in STEM will give us a guarantee of building a successful career is a thing of the past. Even the Israeli historian Yuval Harari was forced to admit that the development of AI can displace many people from the labor market. Still, at the same time, there will be new jobs for philosophers. It is their skills and knowledge that will suddenly be in high demand. And American billionaire Mark Cuban believes that “In 10 years, a liberal arts degree in philosophy will be worth more than a traditional programming degree.”

We live in the age of Big Data, but we need to remember that Big Data will never replace Big Ideas. It is the absence of Big Ideas that can be considered the main characteristic of the modern era. Big Ideas always carry transformational potential, imply radical transformations, and those who dare to express them, as a rule, are tested by distrust on the part of a society that is not ready for changes. But only these people have had and will continue to have an impact on the course of human history — Renaissance human, polymath — the Big Idea that underlies the new paradigm of thinking. If you need to define this type of thinking, the most appropriate epithet for it is “integrative”. Roger Martin limits it’s as “the ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.” Most people are used to thinking in the “or-or” mode; it is difficult for them to keep two mutually exclusive ideas in their heads at the same time and, without throwing either of them away, to generate a new one (and this process involves intelligence, intuition and every time a unique human experience).

They also find it challenging to create a synthesis of knowledge and skills from different disciplines, and the implementation of integration of various industries seems almost fantastic to them.

I want to emphasize that this is not just about one type of thinking. It is a critical meta-skill that is a human advantage and will never be mastered by a machine, despite the development that Artificial Intelligence will soon achieve.

Strictly speaking, today, we can distinguish three main types of thinking: algorithmic (machine), traditional and integrative (holistic). In the age of Algorithms, only integrative thinking can withstand the battle with AI. The struggle is not just for resources, power, or influence, but for a human.

Natella Speranskaya

Russian philosopher, cultural scientist, a specialist in Antiquity, curator of Janus Academy.

Hommage à Oswald Spengler

Hommage à Oswald Spengler

Armin Mohler

 

Extrait du numéro 1 de la revue Orientations (1982)

Ex: https://philippedelbauvre.blogspot.com

 

Il y a plusieurs façons d’ignorer les pensées des grands hommes et de vivre comme si ces pensées n’avaient jamais été émises. En 1980, c’est ce que tout observateur a pu constater en Allemagne Fédérale. On y célébrait le centenaire de la naissance d’Oswald Spengler. Même dans les hommages rendus au philosophe, on doit, objectivement, constater des lacunes. Les uns ont souligné l’importance de la philosophie spenglérienne de l’Histoire, dont les prophéties auraient été confirmées par les événements ; mais, ainsi, ils ont évité d’aborder les affirmations politiques de l’auteur du Déclin de l’Occident. D’autres ont voulu “sauver” le Spengler politicien, en faisant de lui un antifasciste et en n’étudiant que très superficiellement les liens qui ont existé entre Spengler, Hitler et le national-socialisme. Je ne dirais rien des “brillants” essayistes, qui se sont prodigieusement acharné à l’étude de Spengler pour en tirer très peu de choses.

 

Le Spengler total

 

Ce fut un autre vénérable grand homme, Herbert Cysarz (né 16 ans après Spengler) qui put vraiment saisir l’œuvre de Spengler dans sa totalité. L’hommage qu’il lui rend, dans le numéro de janvier 1980 de la revue Aula, éditée à Graz en Autriche, commence par ces mots : « Aucun historien contemporain n’a connu une aussi grande gloire qu’Oswald Spengler. Aucun n’a été, de son vivant, aussi incontestablement original. Cet homme, hostile à toute littérature et à tout idéalisme, totalement étranger au monde abstrait des livres, a fait entrevoir les grands thèmes et les multiples imbrications de l’Histoire et a souligné, comme cela n’avait jamais auparavant été fait, l’intensité qui réside dans le vouloir et l’agir. Il a donné au monde une nouvelle manière de concevoir la politique, ainsi qu’un style particulier de voir, de penser et de présenter l’Histoire ». Bien évidemment, Cysarz sait que Spengler est plus qu’un historien ; à propos de son œuvre, il écrit qu’elle reste un signe du destin qui s’est manifesté au tournant de notre temps.

Un homme de la même génération que Cysarz, Ernst Jünger avait déjà écrit des choses de ce genre dans les années vingt, même si le ton était plus mesuré, moins pathétique. Dans un très important article politique de l’époque (dont, bien entendu, on ne prévoit pas la réédition dans les œuvres complètes de Jünger), il exprimait une opinion partagée par beaucoup de contemporains : pour un cerveau de la trempe de celui de Spengler, ils donneraient bien tout un Parlement.

 

Les faiblesses de l’œuvre de Spengler

 

Une acceptation aussi enthousiaste de la totalité de l’œuvre de Spengler ne signifie toutefois pas qu’on en avalise tous les détails, sans formuler aucune critique. Spengler n’est pas un surhomme ; il a, lui aussi, ses faiblesses. À coté des prophéties qui se sont effectivement réalisées, il y a celles qui n’ont eu aucune suite. Les études approfondies de Spengler sur les diverses cultures de l’Histoire, nous obligent à constater que tous les domaines de l’activité créatrice de l’homme ne lui sont pas également familiers. Par exemple, le style littéraire de Spengler n’est pas toujours à la hauteur de ses sujets ; il n’y a pas lieu de s’en étonner, car ces textes suscitent de trop fortes émotions. Les ennemis de Spengler se plaisent d’ailleurs à citer les phrases où transparaît un certain “kitsch”. De plus, Spengler accuse une faiblesse, comme bon nombre de visionnaires : ce qui est tout immédiat lui échappe. Ainsi, selon lui, le grand poète de sa génération n’est ni Stefan George ni Rainer Maria Rilke, mais Ernst Droem, qui est, à juste titre, resté inconnu.

 

Très révélatrice est la réaction de l’auteur du Déclin de l’Occident à l’envoi, par un jeune écrivain, d’un livre capital de notre siècle. En 1932, en effet, Ernst Jünger fit envoyer à Spengler, accompagné de tous ses respects, son livre intitulé Der Arbeiter (Le Travailleur). Spengler s’est contenté de feuilleter le livre et écrivit : « En Allemagne, la paysannerie est encore une force politique. Et lorsque l’on oppose à la paysannerie — prétendument moribonde — le “Travailleur”, c’est-à-dire l’ouvrier des fabriques, on s’éloigne de la réalité et l’on s’interdit toute influence sur l’avenir… ». Comme Spengler n’a pas lu le livre, il ne peut savoir que Jünger ne parle pas de l’ouvrier des fabriques. Mais il est fort étonnant qu’il surévalue les potentialités politiques d’une paysannerie qui, quelques années plus tard, allait être complètement annihilée.

 

Le barrage intérieur

 

Ni ces quelques aveuglements ni les aspects bizarres de la vie de Spengler ne doivent détourner notre attention de l’ensemble de son œuvre. Cet homme susceptible se mit un masque, prit un style qu’il ne faut pas prendre tel quel. Ainsi, les admirateurs de Spengler éviteront de confondre sa personnalité véritable avec ce “masque césarien” qu’il affichait lors de ses nombreuses apparitions publiques (1).

 

Les détracteurs de Spengler, de leur côté, s’efforceront de ne pas le décrire, à la lumière de sa vie privée, comme une sorte de totem bizarre de la bourgeoisie déclinante.

 

Bien sûr, la vie recluse de Spengler permet de telles suppositions. Il est né le 29 mai 1880, fils d’un haut fonctionnaire des postes, à Blankenburg dans le Harz (2). Ce n’était pas le père, homme paisible, qui dominait la vie familiale mais la mère, une créature à moitié folle, dévorée d’ambitions pseudo-artistiques. Elle remplissait leur grand appartement d’une telle quantité de meubles que le jeune Oswald et ses trois sœurs devaient loger dans des débarras, sous le toit !

 

Après avoir soutenu une dissertation sur Héraclite, Spengler devint professeur de mathématiques et de sciences naturelles, dans un lycée (Gymnasium). Ensuite, le décès de sa mère ne lui laissa pas d’héritage consistant, mais lui permit quand même de vivre sans travailler ; de 1911 à la mortelle crise cardiaque du 7 mai 1936, il vivra retiré, en chercheur indépendant, à Munich, dans un appartement immense de style “Gründerzeit” (le style des années 1870-1880), bourré de meubles massifs et situé dans la Widenmayerstraße. Une des ses sœurs le soignait.

 

Il voyageait peu et n’entretenait qu’un cercle restreint de relations. Il a refusé les postes de professeur qu’on lui offrait. Il a été réformé lors de la Première Guerre mondiale. Cette vie semble dominée par un refus farouche de tous contacts humains. On ne sait rien d’éventuelles relations érotiques. Dès le départ, il y a repli vers l’intériorité. Et seul, chez Spengler, nous intéresse le résultat qu’a produit cet isolement dès 1917. La chasteté de cette existence n’est nullement un argument contre l’œuvre de Spengler. Comme, du reste, l’isolement dans une cellule monacale ne saurait être un argument contre Augustin.

 

Au-delà de l’optimisme et du pessimisme

 

Dans l’histoire des idées, la signification de l’œuvre de Spengler réside en ceci que, dans une situation de crise, il ramène à la conscience les fondements “souterrains” de la pensée, avec une vigueur qui rappelle celle d’un Georges Sorel. Mais quel fut cette situation de crise ? L’effondrement, à cause de la Première Guerre mondiale, du Reich allemand qui, pendant des siècles, avait été le centre de l’Europe. Et quels sont ces fondements “souterrains” ? C’est la pensée résolument réaliste amorcée par Héraclite et l’école du Portique (Stoa). C’est une pensée qui renonce, depuis toujours, aux fausses consolations et aux mirages des systèmes fondés sur de pseudo-ordres cosmiques. De manière magistrale, Spengler confronte la génération de la guerre à cette pensée. Son style était un curieux mélange de “monumentalité” classique et d’expressionnisme, fait de couleurs criardes. Et ce sont précisément ceux qui, le plus profondément, avaient expérimenté l’effondrement du monde bourgeois (celui de la “Maison de Poupée”) (3), qui entendirent son appel.

 

Cette pensée se situe au-delà de l’optimisme et du pessimisme. Le titre que l’éditeur choisit pour l’œuvre majeure de Spengler (Le Déclin de l’Occident) trompe. Il est possible, qu’en privé, Spengler ait déploré l’effondrement d’un monde qui lui était cher. Mais son œuvre ne déplore rien ; elle nous apprend bien plutôt que l’Histoire est un unique mouvement d’émergence et de déclin et qu’il ne reste rien d’autre à l’homme que de faire face, avec contenance, à cette réalité, dans le lieu que le destin lui a désigné. C’est ce qui a empêché Spengler de s’identifier au IIIe Reich et qui l’a amené, en 1933, dans son dernier ouvrage, Jahre der Entscheidung (Années décisives), à reprocher au NSDAP son aveuglement en politique extérieure. Pour Spengler, la politique extérieure, parce qu’elle est combat, est primordiale par rapport à la politique intérieure qui, elle, insiste davantage sur le bien-être. Ainsi le caractère hybride du national-socialisme apparaît clairement : en tant que socialisme, il recèle une forte tendance à l’utopie, même s’il connaît aussi la fascination de la mélodie héraclitéenne.

 

Sans doute, aucune praxis politique n’est possible sans une certaine dose d’espérance et sans allusions à un ordre (cosmique) doté de sens (téléologique). Seule une minorité d’individus soutient le regard de la Gorgone. Dans cette minorité, le pourcentage des hommes d’action est plus élevé que celui des intellectuels, des prêtres et des autres fabricants d’opinions. De toutes façons, les disciples d’Héraclite disposent de leur propre consolation, qu’ils tirent précisément de ce qui constitue, pour les autres, une source de terreur. La lecture de Spengler nous démontre le double aspect de la pensée héraclitéenne.

 

L’inflexibilité

 

C’est avec pertinence que Herbert Cysarz a cité les deux phrases qui montrent le plus implacablement ce qui sépare Oswald Spengler tant de la société libérale que de toute espèce de dictature du bien-être (qu’elle soit rouge ou brune) (4). La première de ces phrases dit : « Les faits sont plus importants que les vérités ». La seconde : « La vie n’est pas sainte ». C’est là le rude côté de la philosophie spenglérienne et c’est dans L’Homme et la Technique (1931), un livre épuré de toute ambiguïté, que Spengler la souligne tout particulièrement, par défi contre tous les bavardages de notre siècle.

Heinz Friedrich, dans son article de Die Welt, rédigé pour le centenaire du philosophe, a eu des formules plus concises encore. Il part du fait que Spengler lui-même se déclare disciple de Goethe et de Nietzsche. Cysarz, lui, disait que la notion spenglérienne de destin révélait davantage d’affinités électives avec les sagas germaniques et l’héroïsme tragique de Shakespeare qu’avec l’humanisme classique. Heinz Friedrich écrit, dans un langage qui n’a rien de spenglérien (il parle des “vérités” !) : « À la fin de ce siècle de chaos, les citoyens doivent s’habituer à ne pas seulement prendre connaissances des vérités, mais aussi à les vivre et à vivre avec elles. Comme le disait Goethe, il n’y a pas que la Nature qui soit insensible, il y a aussi l’Histoire car, pour paraphraser Spengler, on peut dire qu’elle détient plus de caractéristiques naturelles que nous voulons bien l’admettre. En conséquence, c’est avec indifférence qu’elle ignore nos espoirs et nos craintes ».

 

Pour Heinz Friedrich, ce qu’il y a de nietzschéen dans cela, c’est le diagnostic qui pose la décadence comme faiblesse vitale : « L’agent de la vie, le facteur favorisant l’éternel devenir, c’est, pour Nietzsche, la Volonté de Puissance ». Friedrich ajoute un avertissement : « La Volonté de Puissance, reconnue par Nietzsche comme principe vital, est tout autre chose que l’orgueil biologique et musculaire qu’aujourd’hui encore, l’on veut entendre par là ». Cette conception vulgaire des choses est partagée par les adeptes de Nietzsche comme par ses adversaires). Cela signifie tout simplement que toute vie a la pulsion de s’affirmer. Spengler est plus qu’un disciple de Nietzsche : il le complète et le transforme. La contribution personnelle de Spengler à cette école de pensée est qu’il réalise quelque chose, qu’il a trouvé, chez Nietzsche, sous la forme d’un appel.

 

Les couleurs de la vie

 

Celui qui résiste au regard de la Gorgone, n’est pas détourné du monde. Bien au contraire, il voit le monde de manière plus intense, plus plastique, plus colorée. C’est cela la réalité paradoxale. Le regard des espérances, en revanche, ne veut voir que des cohérences, des lois et, de ce fait, détourne l’attention du particulier pour se perdre dans le général : il désenchante le monde.

 

Il faut se rendre compte combien les Weltanschauungen dominantes, qui sont un piètre mélange de la fade idéologie des Lumières et de christianisme sécularisé, ont, pour l’homme moyen, transformé le monde en un ensemble de schémas tristes. C’est le résultat d’une vision bien déterminée de l’Histoire (dans l’Histoire, l’homme décrypte le monde pour le comprendre). Dans cette vision, d’où la vie tient-elle sa valeur ? De quelque chose qui sera atteint dans un lointain futur après une longue évolution et après notre mort. Rien n’est soi-même ; chaque chose n’existe qu’à partir du moment où elle signifie quelque chose d’autre, qui se trouve “derrière” elle.

 

La vie se voit alors réduite à une rationalité moyenne, qui interdit toutes ces grandes effervescences qui entraînent soit vers le haut soit vers le bas ; l’homme se meut alors dans un cadre étroit qui ne lui propose rien de plus que la satisfaction de ses besoins physiques. Au-dessus de ce cadre, souffle un tiède ventelet d’éthique behavioriste. Arnold Gehlen appelait cela « l’eudémonisme de masse ». Les masses sont constituées d’individus isolés, qui ne s’enracinent dans rien de solide, qui ne sont insérés dans aucune structure concrète, qui errent sans but dans le “général”.

 

C’est placé devant un tel arrière-plan que le cyclone spenglérien doit être compris: il brise la monotonie de ce qui prétend s’appeler “moderne” et réinjecte, dans le monde, de vibrantes tonalités. Dans la vision spenglérienne, l’homme n’incarne plus une quelconque “généralité”, qu’il partageait avec tous ses semblables. Bien au contraire, il appartient à une culture spécifique, qui ne peut être ramenée à quelque chose d’autre mais qui a son propre sens. Chaque culture est de nature totalement cultuelle, parce que, dans tout ce qu’elle produit, ressort le symbole particulier auquel elle s’identifie et par lequel elle se distingue. Spengler voit vivre ces cultures comme vivent des plantes, avec leurs phases de croissance et de décomposition. Chacune de ces phases de croissance occupe son propre rang. Quelle puissante mélodie résonne dans son évocation de la fin d’une culture ou du césarisme ! On citerait à plaisir des pages entières du premier volume du Déclin :

« Une vie véritable se mène. Elle ne se détermine pas par l’intellect. Les vérités se situent au-delà de l’Histoire et de la vie. (…) Les peuples de culture sont des formes jaillies du fleuve de l’existence. (…) Pour moi, le peuple (Volk) est une unité d’âme (Seele). (…) Le regard libère des limites de l’éveil. (…) Ce qui confère de la valeur a un fait singulier, est tout simplement la grande ou la faible puissance ce son langage formel, la force de ses symboles. Au-delà du bien et du mal, du supérieur et de l’inférieur, du nécessaire et de l’idéal ».

Il faut encore ajouter un dernier mot à propos de l’Allemand que fut Oswald Spengler. Celui-ci n’a pas évoqué la pluralité des cultures pour se sublimer dans l’exotisme. Il a écrit ses livres pour les Allemands qui vivaient l’effondrement du Reich. Spengler ne traîne pas les Allemands devant un quelconque tribunal de la “généralité”, mais les confronte à leur spécificité, dans le miroir de leur histoire. Dans tous les écrits de Spengler, on sent sa conviction que les Allemands ont joué, dans le passé, un rôle particulier et que les Prussiens en joueront un, dans l’avenir. Ces convictions de Spengler dérangent évidemment tous ceux qui veulent maintenir la mentalité de frustrés qui règne aujourd’hui.

 

► Armin Mohler, Orientations n°1, 1982.

(traduction française : Robert Steuckers)

 

Cet article d’Armin Mohler a paru dans Criticón n°60-61, octobre 1980. Ce numéro était intégralement consacré à la question allemande. Il célébrait également le dixième anniversaire de la revue et voulait, de ce fait, axer ses réflexions sur l’histoire nationale.

 

◘ Sur l’auteur : Armin Mohler est l’auteur d’un ouvrage capital : Die Konservative Révolution in Deutschland, 1918-1932 (2ème édition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1972). Il a été le secrétaire de l’écrivain Ernst Jünger et correspondant de plusieurs journaux allemands ou suisses alémaniques à Paris. Né à Bâle en 1920, il s’est fixé à Munich en 1961 (où il décède le 4 juillet 2003). À partir de 1964, il dirige la Fondation Friedrich von Siemens de Munich et, en tant que tel, organise plusieurs colloques dont les actes ont été publiés. En outre, Armin Mohler est l’auteur de plusieurs livres sur la politique allemande. Armin Mohler morigène sans cesse nos voisins de l’Est, à cause de leur défaitisme politique.

 

Nous ne saurions achever cette introduction au dossier Spengler sans mentionner un ouvrage récent et remarquablement bien fait sur sa pensée. Il s’agit de Spengler heute, Sechs Essays (Spengler aujourd’hui, six essais), préfacé par Hermann Lübbe, sous la direction de Peter Christian Ludz. Cet ouvrage est paru aux éditions CH Beck de Munich. Il comprend des textes de Hermann Lübbe (Historisch-politische Exaltationen : Spengler wiedergelesen = Exaltations historico-politiques : Une relecture de S.), d’Alexander Demandt (Spengler und die Spätantike = Spengler et la Haute-Antiquité), de Horst Möller (Oswald Spengler : Geschichte im Dienste der Zeitkritik = O.S. : L’Histoire au service de la critique du temps), de Tracy B. Strong (O.S. : Ontologie, Kritik und Enttäuschung = S. : Ontologie, critique et déception), du spécialiste français Gilbert Merlio (S. und die Technik = S. et la technique) et de G.L. Ulmen (Metaphysik des Morgenlandes - S. über Russland = Métaphysique de l’Orient, S. et la Russie). La lecture de cet ouvrage est indispensable pour pouvoir comprendre et utiliser Spengler aujourd’hui.

 

Notes :

• 1. On pourra, bien sûr, discuter du bon goût de publier la photo de Spengler sur son lit de mort. Cette photo prouve toutefois que ce masque n’a pas, de façon durable, imprégné la physionomie de Spengler.
• 2. Un autre protagoniste de la Konservative Révolution, issu de cette ville, est August Winnig. Il est né deux ans avant Spengler, en 1878, et est le fils du fossoyeur.
• 3. Puppenspiel, le mot qu’employé Armin Mohler, signifie “guignol”, “théâtre de marionnettes”. Nous avons traduit par “Maison de Poupées”, en voulant faire allusion à la pièce d’Ibsen. Cet auteur norvégien ne s’est jamais lassé de critiquer le monde bourgeois. Et dire du monde bourgeois qu’il est une “Maison de Poupées”, c’est souligner son souci d’échapper aux vicissitudes du monde et de l’Histoire. (n.d.t.)
• 4. En Allemagne, la couleur rouge, en politique, est attribuée aux partis d’inspiration marxiste, communiste ou sociale-démocrate. La couleur brune aux nationaux-socialistes. La couleur noire aux partis confessionnels. Elle symbolise la soutane des prêtres. Aujourd’hui, une nouvelle couleur politique est née : la verte des écologistes. Le bleu est attribué aux libéraux. (n.d.t.)

◘ LIENS :

• Karl Kraus & Spengler
• Rosenzweig & Spengler
• Gabrielle Roy & Spengler
• Critique de Heidegger envers la morphologie des cultures
• Oswald Spengler (Encyclopédie de L'Agora) cf. La conception de Spengler
• Déclin de l'Occident ou débâcle de l'Europe ?
• La vengeance de Spengler
• « Ce que des auteurs infréquentables ont à dire à ceux qui ne veulent pas leur ressembler » (J. Bouveresse, Agône n°48, 2012)
• « Spengler l'infréquenté » [JL Evard, traducteur et documentaliste, est intéressant en ce qu'il montre également — à son insu — ce qu'il en est d'une certaine réception de Spengler. Voué à la manie comparatiste comme nombre d'auto-proclamés historiens des idées qui sont de fait des (bien souvent mauvais) idéologues masqués (avec l'habituel souci d'objectivité comme cache-sexe d'une dépolitisation égotiste), il ne peut saisir ce qu'implique véritablement l'intempestivité (Unzeitgemäss) au sens nietzschéen, à savoir en quoi un enjeu civilisationnel fait historicité (bien qu'ayant pourtant traduit un court texte de G. Simmel dans la RMM rappelant la nécessité de construire un cadre historique pour contextualiser et expliciter son approche). L'auteur des Années décisives n'est pas interrogé quant à ce que recèle sa stratégie d'écriture, autrement dit sa volonté de destin devant rompre avec la logique d'un Occident malade en stade final, mais est momifié comme vieux réactionnaire atrabilaire prussien (en somme une icône néo-droitière), échappant de peu aux déjà menés procès inquisitoriaux estampillant de préfascisme, comme du temps de l'Allemagne années 50, Jünger pourtant en prise avec la question du nihilisme ou bien Klages mû par un romantisme anti-capitaliste faisant chair avec le cauchemar de l'histoire et en prise avec la question de l'aliénation posée vivement par un processus d'industrialisation déshumanisant, conforté alors par le mythe du Progrès]
• Divers articles (plusieurs langues)
• Aphorismes
• Articles en anglais

 

◘ Études critiques :

• Oswald Spengler (H. S. Hughes)
• Urkultur n°10
• Cahiers Science & Vie n°109
• Actualité de Spengler (R. Hervé, 1983)
• Nouvelle École n°59/60 (2011) [éditorial]
• Essai sur l'anti-progressisme, H. Kauffman, ch. VIII, Paris, thèse de 1936
• Irrationalisme et humanisme : critique d'une idéologie impérialiste (T. Schwarz)
• Oswald Spengler : Témoin de son temps, G. Merlio, 2 vol. (issus de sa thèse),  Akad. V., Stuttgart, 1982

◘ Sur notre site  :

• Entrée Spengleriana
• « Ernst Jünger et Oswald Spengler » (M. Hietala)
• « Du déclin de l'Europe : de Nietzsche à Rohrmoser » (B. Sob)
• « Défis postmodernes : entre Faust et Narcisse » (R. Steuckers)
• « Spengler, Marx, Heidegger : penser la technique » (A. de Benoist) |à venir]
• « Altheim, Spengler, Nietzsche et la décadence, mythe de la Révolution conservatrice » (L. Arcella)

The Revolutionary Conservative Critique of Oswald Spengler 

Lucian Tudor

Ex: https://motpol.nu

Oswald Spengler is by now well-known as one of the major thinkers of the German Conservative Revolution of the early 20th Century. In fact, he is frequently cited as having been one of the most determining intellectual influences on German Conservatism of the interwar period – along with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Ernst Jünger – to the point where his cultural pessimist philosophy is seen to be representative of Revolutionary Conservative views in general (although in reality most Revolutionary Conservatives held more optimistic views).[1]

To begin our discussion, we shall provide a brief overview of the major themes of Oswald Spengler’s philosophy.[2] According to Spengler, every High Culture has its own “soul” (this refers to the essential character of a Culture) and goes through predictable cycles of birth, growth, fulfillment, decline, and demise which resemble that of the life of a plant. To quote Spengler:

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul.[3]

There is an important distinction in this theory between Kultur (“Culture”) and Zivilisation (“Civilization”). Kultur refers to the beginning phase of a High Culture which is marked by rural life, religiosity, vitality, will-to-power, and ascendant instincts, while Zivilisation refers to the later phase which is marked by urbanization, irreligion, purely rational intellect, mechanized life, and decadence. Although he acknowledged other High Cultures, Spengler focused particularly on three High Cultures which he distinguished and made comparisons between: the Magian, the Classical (Greco-Roman), and the present Western High Culture. He held the view that the West, which was in its later Zivilisation phase, would soon enter a final imperialistic and “Caesarist” stage – a stage which, according to Spengler, marks the final flash before the end of a High Culture.[4]

Perhaps Spengler’s most important contribution to the Conservative Revolution, however, was his theory of “Prussian Socialism,” which formed the basis of his view that conservatives and socialists should unite. In his work he argued that the Prussian character, which was the German character par excellence, was essentially socialist. For Spengler, true socialism was primarily a matter of ethics rather than economics. This ethical, Prussian socialism meant the development and practice of work ethic, discipline, obedience, a sense of duty to the greater good and the state, self-sacrifice, and the possibility of attaining any rank by talent. Prussian socialism was differentiated from Marxism and liberalism. Marxism was not true socialism because it was materialistic and based on class conflict, which stood in contrast with the Prussian ethics of the state. Also in contrast to Prussian socialism was liberalism and capitalism, which negated the idea of duty, practiced a “piracy principle,” and created the rule of money.[5]

Oswald Spengler’s theories of predictable culture cycles, of the separation between Kultur and Zivilisation, of the Western High Culture as being in a state of decline, and of a non-Marxist form of socialism, have all received a great deal of attention in early 20th Century Germany, and there is no doubt that they had influenced Right-wing thought at the time. However, it is often forgotten just how divergent the views of many Revolutionary Conservatives were from Spengler’s, even if they did study and draw from his theories, just as an overemphasis on Spenglerian theory in the Conservative Revolution has led many scholars to overlook the variety of other important influences on the German Right. Ironically, those who were influenced the most by Spengler – not only the German Revolutionary Conservatives, but also later the Traditionalists and the New Rightists – have mixed appreciation with critique. It is this reality which needs to be emphasized: the majority of Conservative intellectuals who have appreciated Spengler have simultaneously delivered the very significant message that Spengler’s philosophy needs to be viewed critically, and that as a whole it is not acceptable.

The most important critique of Spengler among the Revolutionary Conservative intellectuals was that made by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.[6] Moeller agreed with certain basic ideas in Spengler’s work, including the division between Kultur and Zivilisation, with the idea of the decline of the Western Culture, and with his concept of socialism, which Moeller had already expressed in an earlier and somewhat different form in Der Preussische Stil (“The Prussian Style,” 1916).[7] However, Moeller resolutely rejected Spengler’s deterministic and fatalistic view of history, as well as the notion of destined culture cycles. Moeller asserted that history was essentially unpredictable and unfixed: “There is always a beginning (…) History is the story of that which is not calculated.”[8] Furthermore, he argued that history should not be seen as a “circle” (in Spengler’s manner) but rather a “spiral,” and a nation in decline could actually reverse its decline if certain psychological changes and events could take place within it.[9]

The most radical contradiction with Spengler made by Moeller van den Bruck was the rejection of Spengler’s cultural morphology, since Moeller believed that Germany could not even be classified as part of the “West,” but rather that it represented a distinct culture in its own right, one which even had more in common in spirit with Russia than with the “West,” and which was destined to rise while France and England fell.[10] However, we must note here that the notion that Germany is non-Western was not unique to Moeller, for Werner Sombart, Edgar Julius Jung, and Othmar Spann have all argued that Germans belonged to a very different cultural type from that of the Western nations, especially from the culture of the Anglo-Saxon world. For these authors, Germany represented a culture which was more oriented towards community, spirituality, and heroism, while the modern “West” was more oriented towards individualism, materialism, and capitalistic ethics. They further argued that any presence of Western characteristics in modern Germany was due to a recent poisoning of German culture by the West which the German people had a duty to overcome through sociocultural revolution.[11]

Another key intellectual of the German Conservative Revolution, Hans Freyer, also presented a critical analysis of Spenglerian philosophy.[12] Due to his view that that there is no certain and determined progress in history, Freyer agreed with Spengler’s rejection of the linear view of progress. Freyer’s philosophy of culture also emphasized cultural particularism and the disparity between peoples and cultures, which was why he agreed with Spengler in terms of the basic conception of cultures possessing a vital center and with the idea of each culture marking a particular kind of human being. Being a proponent of a community-oriented state socialism, Freyer found Spengler’s anti-individualist “Prussian socialism” to be agreeable. Throughout his works, Freyer had also discussed many of the same themes as Spengler – including the integrative function of war, hierarchies in society, the challenges of technological developments, cultural form and unity – but in a distinct manner oriented towards social theory.[13]

However, Freyer argued that the idea of historical (cultural) types and that cultures were the product of an essence which grew over time were already expressed in different forms long before Spengler in the works of Karl Lamprecht, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Hegel. It is also noteworthy that Freyer’s own sociology of cultural categories differed from Spengler’s morphology. In his earlier works, Freyer focused primarily on the nature of the cultures of particular peoples (Völker) rather than the broad High Cultures, whereas in his later works he stressed the interrelatedness of all the various European cultures across the millennia. Rejecting Spengler’s notion of cultures as being incommensurable, Freyer’s “history regarded modern Europe as composed of ‘layers’ of culture from the past, and Freyer was at pains to show that major historical cultures had grown by drawing upon the legacy of past cultures.”[14] Finally, rejecting Spengler’s historical determinism, Freyer had “warned his readers not to be ensnared by the powerful organic metaphors of the book [Der Untergang des Abendlandes] … The demands of the present and of the future could not be ‘deduced’ from insights into the patterns of culture … but were ultimately based on ‘the wager of action’ (das Wagnis der Tat).”[15]

Yet another important Conservative critique of Spengler was made by the Italian Perennial Traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola, who was himself influenced by the Conservative Revolution but developed a very distinct line of thought. In his The Path of Cinnabar, Evola showed appreciation for Spengler’s philosophy, particularly in regards to the criticism of the modern rationalist and mechanized Zivilisation of the “West” and with the complete rejection of the idea of progress.[16] Some scholars, such as H.T. Hansen, stress the influence of Spengler’s thought on Evola’s thought, but it is important to remember that Evola’s cultural views differed significantly from Spengler’s due to Evola’s focus on what he viewed as the shifting role of a metaphysical Perennial Tradition across history as opposed to historically determined cultures.[17]

In his critique, Evola pointed out that one of the major flaws in Spengler’s thought was that he “lacked any understanding of metaphysics and transcendence, which embody the essence of each genuine Kultur.”[18] Spengler could analyze the nature of Zivilisation very well, but his irreligious views caused him to have little understanding of the higher spiritual forces which deeply affected human life and the nature of cultures, without which one cannot clearly grasp the defining characteristic of Kultur. As Robert Steuckers has pointed out, Evola also found Spengler’s analysis of Classical and Eastern cultures to be very flawed, particularly as a result of the “irrationalist” philosophical influences on Spengler: “Evola thinks this vitalism leads Spengler to say ‘things that make one blush’ about Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism, and Greco-Roman civilization (which, for Spengler, is merely a civilization of ‘corporeity’).”[19] Also problematic for Evola was “Spengler’s valorization of ‘Faustian man,’ a figure born in the Age of Discovery, the Renaissance and humanism; by this temporal determination, Faustian man is carried towards horizontality rather than towards verticality.”[20]

Finally, we must make a note of the more recent reception of Spenglerian philosophy in the European New Right and Identitarianism: Oswald Spengler’s works have been studied and critiqued by nearly all major New Right and Identitarian intellectuals, including especially Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Pierre Krebs, Guillaume Faye, Julien Freund, and Tomislav Sunic. The New Right view of Spenglerian theory is unique, but is also very much reminiscent of Revolutionary Conservative critiques of Moeller van den Bruck and Hans Freyer. Like Spengler and many other thinkers, New Right intellectuals also critique the “ideology of progress,” although it is significant that, unlike Spengler, they do not do this to accept a notion of rigid cycles in history nor to reject the existence of any progress. Rather, the New Right critique aims to repudiate the unbalanced notion of linear and inevitable progress which depreciates all past culture in favor of the present, while still recognizing that some positive progress does exist, which it advocates reconciling with traditional culture to achieve a more balanced cultural order.[21] Furthermore, addressing Spengler’s historical determinism, Alain de Benoist has written that “from Eduard Spranger to Theodor W. Adorno, the principal reproach directed at Spengler evidently refers to his ‘fatalism’ and to his ‘determinism.’ The question is to know up to what point man is prisoner of his own history. Up to what point can one no longer change his course?”[22]

Like their Revolutionary Conservative precursors, New Rightists reject any fatalist and determinist notion of history, and do not believe that any people is doomed to inevitable decline; “Decadence is therefore not an inescapable phenomenon, as Spengler wrongly thought,” wrote Pierre Krebs, echoing the thoughts of other authors.[23] While the New Rightists accept Spengler’s idea of Western decline, they have posed Europe and the West as two antagonistic entities. According to this new cultural philosophy, the genuine European culture is represented by numerous traditions rooted in the most ancient European cultures, and must be posed as incompatible with the modern “West,” which is the cultural emanation of early modern liberalism, egalitarianism, and individualism.

The New Right may agree with Spengler that the “West” is undergoing decline, “but this original pessimism does not overshadow the purpose of the New Right: The West has encountered the ultimate phase of decadence, consequently we must definitively break with the Western civilization and recover the memory of a Europe liberated from the egalitarianisms…”[24] Thus, from the Identitarian perspective, the “West” is identified as a globalist and universalist entity which had harmed the identities of European and non-European peoples alike. In the same way that Revolutionary Conservatives had called for Germans to assert the rights and identity of their people in their time period, New Rightists call for the overcoming of the liberal, cosmopolitan Western Civilization to reassert the more profound cultural and spiritual identity of Europeans, based on the “regeneration of history” and a reference to their multi-form and multi-millennial heritage.

Lucian Tudor 

 

Notes

[1] An example of such an assertion regarding cultural pessimism can be seen in “Part III. Three Major Expressions of Neo-Conservatism” in Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

[2] To supplement our short summary of Spenglerian philosophy, we would like to note that one the best overviews of Spengler’s philosophy in English is Stephen M. Borthwick, “Historian of the Future: An Introduction to Oswald Spengler’s Life and Works for the Curious Passer-by and the Interested Student,” Institute for Oswald Spengler Studies, 2011, <https://sites.google.com/site/spenglerinstitute/Biography>.

[3] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol. 1: Form and Actuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 106.

[4] Ibid.

[5] See “Prussianism and Socialism” in Oswald Spengler, Selected Essays (Chicago: Gateway/Henry Regnery, 1967).

[6] For a good overview of Moeller’s thought, see Lucian Tudor, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: The Man & His Thought,” Counter-Currents Publishing, 17 August 2012, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/08/arthur-moeller-van-den-bruck-the-man-and-his-thought/>.

[7] See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 238-239, and Alain de Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea No. 15 (11 June 2011), p. 30, 40-42. <http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__15>.

[8] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck as quoted in Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” p. 41.

[9] Ibid., p. 41.

[10] Ibid., pp. 41-43.

[11] See Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990), pp. 183 ff.; John J. Haag, Othmar Spann and the Politics of “Totality”: Corporatism in Theory and Practice (Ph.D. Thesis, Rice University, 1969), pp. 24-26, 78, 111.; Alexander Jacob’s introduction and “Part I: The Intellectual Foundations of Politics” in Edgar Julius Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, Vol. 1 (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1995).

[12] For a brief introduction to Freyer’s philosophy, see Lucian Tudor, “Hans Freyer: The Quest for Collective Meaning,” Counter-Currents Publishing, 22 February 2013, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/hans-freyer-the-quest-for-collective-meaning/>.

[13] See Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 78-79, 120-121.

[14] Ibid., p. 335.

[15] Ibid., p. 79.

[16] See Julius Evola, The Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009), pp. 203-204.

[17] See H.T. Hansen, “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” in Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002), pp. 15-17.

[18] Evola, Path of Cinnabar, p. 204.

[19] Robert Steuckers, “Evola & Spengler”, Counter-Currents Publishing, 20 September 2010, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/09/evola-spengler/> .

[20] Ibid.

[21] In a description that applies as much to the New Right as to the Eurasianists, Alexander Dugin wrote of a vision in which “the formal opposition between tradition and modernity is removed… the realities superseded by the period of Enlightenment obtain a legitimate place – these are religion, ethnos, empire, cult, legend, etc. In the same time, a technological breakthrough, economical development, social fairness, labour liberation, etc. are taken from the Modern” (See Alexander Dugin, “Multipolarism as an Open Project,” Journal of Eurasian Affairs Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 2013), pp. 12-13).

[22] Alain de Benoist, “Oswald Spengler,” Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea No. 10 (15 April 2011), p. 13.<http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__10>.

[23] Pierre Krebs, Fighting for the Essence (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 34.

[24] Sebastian J. Lorenz, “El Decadentismo Occidental, desde la Konservative Revolution a la Nouvelle Droite,”Elementos No. 10, p. 5.

The Future Belongs to Polymaths

Natella Speranskaya

 

Ex: https://medium.com

I want to start with a little story. Many years ago, I saw a fresco by Raphael. “The School of Athens” is one of the pearls of Renaissance art. On it, the artist depicted immortal images of great thinkers: Heraclitus, Empedocles, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates…and there was among them the only one woman who has always been for me a kind of model, an archetype of female wisdom — Hypatia of Alexandria. Raphael gave her the features of his beloved Margherita Luti. I looked at this collection of great minds of mankind and even then I understood that I knew the one secret. Lorenzo de’ Medici also knew it.

In the XV century, he established the Platonic Academy in Florence, headed by Marsilio Ficino. This Academy brought together outstanding philosophers, artists, architects, sculptors, and poets of the Renaissance. This was the time of the total triumph of a new type of man — homo universalis, a prominent representative of which was Leonardo da Vinci-painter, architect, sculptor, inventor, writer, musician and scientist. The very embodiment of the Union of music and mathematics, science and art. Why did this type of personality disappear today-in an era of deep specialization, and the place of the universal thinker who saw the whole picture of the world was taken by the one who looks at the world through the keyhole of his profession? These are the questions I started asking.

The XXI century presents us with global challenges. We are watching the rapid development of new technologies. But it seems that neither politicians, nor businessmen, nor inventors know the opportunities and risks associated with the development of Artificial Intelligence and biotechnologies. The problems we will soon have to deal with are beyond our comprehension. Fundamental climate changes and the risk of environmental disaster, the growth of the world’s population and migration processes, unknown epidemics and pandemics, unemployment-these are just some of the problems that can radically change our lives. These are the main questions that we have to answer.

But to solve these problems, you need a different type of thinking. As Albert Einstein said, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” To understand these problems, we need a global perspective. But where does the global perspective come from if narrow specialization is imposed everywhere? However, it is not enough today. I told you I knew a secret. It’s time to tell it.

The future belongs to polymaths. The polymaths were the most influential people in the history of mankind. They could create atypical combinations of skills, to combine and synthesize knowledge from different disciplines. Only polymaths can comprehend and respond to the challenges facing man in the XXI century.

How to create conditions for the formation of individuals with polymathic thinking? To do this, it is necessary to transform the entire educational paradigm and create a new educational model. How? We need to unite the best minds of mankind. Lorenzo de ‘Medici had a Big Idea. She inspired me. We live in an era when we need to dare to think on a larger scale. For many years, while developing a project called Janus Academy, I tried to create a matrix of the future educational system that will replace or become a real alternative to the educational model being implemented today.

The modern educational model is focused on the formation of a specialist of a narrow profile who has passed the “school of skills and competencies”, but not the “school of knowledge”. The result is obvious: the skills and competencies acquired today need an immediate upgrade tomorrow because they are outdated. A student enters an endless race by replacing one worn-out part with another. Without a basic knowledge axis, he simply has nowhere to integrate the acquired skills. As a result, we do not get a person who has realized his potential, but a “one-button specialist” with a “passport of competencies”, who adapts flexibly to changing trends. An individual who knows how to use Agile, but knows nothing about the history of civilizations, structural linguistics, world culture, classical and modern art.

Today, education has ceased to be a way of inheriting culture and has become a tool for achieving career success.

However, if we look at the founders of the five largest companies in the world - Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos - we find that they are all polymaths, universal personalities, but not narrow specialists.

The same universal personalities were Aristotle, Ptolemy, Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Kepler, Leibniz, Descartes, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin and others.

When we dream of succeeding in a rapidly changing world, we often forget that the most successful people are polymaths. And gradually, interdisciplinary employees, people with polymathic thinking become one of the most valuable assets.

We are afraid that soon robots will replace us in the workplace and all processes will be automated. The machine will surpass man in his abilities. Of course, it will surpass — if we are talking about the abilities of a narrow specialist. But she would never be able to beat the polymath. Historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto emphasizes: “Specialists can invent gadgets, formulate algorithms and exchange blows. But to transcend experience and change the world, ideas need mental space where influences from all disciplines can mingle alchemically. Those spaces are in polymaths’ brains. To conquer empires of the intellect, you have to exceed your own domain. Classical Greece, Renaissance Italy and Victorian England all revered and rewarded generalists, for whom today universities have little or no space or patience. “

Society abandoned the idea of polymaths after the industrial revolution. As Ellwood Cubberley, was an American educator and a pioneer in the field of educational administration, said in 1898: “Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.”

What problems do polymaths face today, does society accept them, does it allow them to discover their deep potential, apply all their knowledge and skills and be at the center of world processes? In one of the articles I met the opinion that in our society there is a clear rejection of people who lead a polymathic lifestyle. However, it does not get tired of encouraging narrow specialists in every possible way. This is one of the consequences of industrialization: the idea that man is just a mechanism in a huge machine. Moreover, this is the result of the industrialization of consciousness. Because of the reaction of society, many polymaths avoid calling themselves polymaths. Some people start deliberately talking about themselves as specialists, believing that this will help them have a successful career. Others name different functions, depending on the context. Still, others are waiting for an opportunity to demonstrate their many skills, i.e. they are waiting for a “request” from the society itself.

Leonardo da Vinci, the most outstanding example of a polymath, also faced serious problems. Waqas Ahmed, the author of the fundamental study “The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility” says in an interview: “If you look at Leonardo Da Vinci, who’s considered the archetype of the polymath in the Western mind, he faced a lot of adversity. He did not have the socioeconomic status to excel in one field, let alone multiple fields, but he had an innate curiosity and that curiosity overcame any obstacles that he faced in his work environment or in his social environment. And so that curiosity does inevitably build in a kind of fearlessness that you see in many polymaths over history. ( … ) You need to have unfaltering belief in your method to creativity and to progress and you need to be able to deal with the kind of cynicism and skepticism and even envy that you will inevitably face moving forward.”

I face this problem. The question of the nature of my work has always puzzled me. Of course, over time, I had to introduce myself as: “Philosopher, publicist, cultural scientist, a specialist in Antiquity, curator of Janus Academy” (sometimes even shortening all this to: “philosopher, a specialist in Antiquity”). But the field of my interests and intellectual practices covers the entire field of Humanities, and if I am so passionate about antiquity, it does not mean that I am limited by It. Also, I specialized in personalized learning, developing individual educational programs. Organizing conferences, seminars, presentations, and cultural events; strategic planning; experience in public speaking; working with experts, embassies, and public figures; negotiating; creating (and curating) intellectual and art clubs; developing educational programs for cultural venues; conducting interviews; and working as an editor-compiler of scientific magazines. Besides, writing books, playing in the theater. So who am I? And most importantly, how can I design my life so that the diversity of my knowledge and experience can open up to the world and change something in it?

And in response to this question, I decided to release my “Black Swan”. To create a project that will mark the beginning of a revolution in education. The mission of this project is to consolidate all the most important thinkers, researchers, cultural figures and scientists who set themselves the goal of creating a new interdisciplinary educational program that meets the challenges of the XXI century and can maintain its main task — to be a way of inheriting culture.

Often can you see students who do not listen to what their lecturers say? And only imagine that this very lecture is given to a student by his favorite writer or scientist, whose books he reads with great interest. Will he be more attentive to every word, will he take the learning process more seriously and most importantly-will he has a passion, a passion for learning, for mastering new disciplines, new areas, and directions? Would you like to learn from the best of the best? Learn in the process of live communication?

In Janus Academy students do not acquire a narrow specialization, but fundamental knowledge that allows them to unlock their cognitive and intellectual potential.

1. interdisciplinary program “POLYMATH” (2 years of study)

2. 32 directions

3. more than 150 author’s courses that form a unique educational complex:

- a complex of humanitarian disciplines that give students fundamental knowledge,

- a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) complex that develops innovative thinking and the ability to collect, analyze, systematize and critically comprehend information.

4. brilliant teaching staff (about 200 leading Russian and European scientists and specialists, researchers, philosophers, cultural and artistic figures)

5. training of international communities of polymath teachers to solve global problems of mankind.

My friend told me that you should be able to explain an interesting idea even to a 6-year-old child. And he asked me to explain to his 6-year-old daughter the purpose of my project. “How will you tell her about the polymaths, about the Renaissance man?” And I said to the little girl,” Imagine a small island. Did you imagine? Now imagine a vast continent, no! — imagine a whole world! See how different they are? In ordinary educational institutions, people are made into small Islands, and in my Academy, everyone will have the opportunity to become a whole world!” And the little girl understood me.

How do I see the project, for example, in 10 years? From the very beginning, I laid the Foundation of Janus Academy not only with the revolutionary potential but also with the potential for growth. In other words, I have a good idea of how this project will grow to an entire Empire within a few years, with its well-thought-out, branching structure. It will cover the whole world and unite the best minds of mankind. And at the center of this Empire will be the idea of a polymath.

If this type of personality does not begin to form now, if it is not allowed to express itself as much as possible in all areas of human activity, if it is not allowed to find the key to the global challenges that the XXI century throws at us, we will disappear as metaphysical beings, as intellectual individuals, and as a biological species. We have entered a transitional stage, Interregnum, when the outdated paradigm has already been destroyed and the new one has not yet emerged. It’s time to “reinvent the world”.

Natella Speranskaya

Russian philosopher, cultural scientist, a specialist in Antiquity, curator of Janus Academy.

The Faustian impulse and European exploration

The Faustian impulse and European exploration

By Ricardo Duchesne

Ex: https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk

IN HIS 2003 book, Human Accomplishment: Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950, Charles Murray argued that the great artistic and scientific accomplishments were overwhelmingly European. ”What the human species is today,” he wrote, “it owes in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just half a dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.”

This claim goes against the modern grain of the world history community – indeed, against fashionable belief. The New York Times unsurprisingly called it “more bluster than rigor” and “unconvincing”¹, but it was nonetheless the first attempt to quantify “as facts” the creative genius of individuals in terms of cultural origin and geographic distribution. Murray did this by calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Based on this metric, he concluded that “whether measured in people or events, 97 percent of accomplishment in the sciences occurred in Europe and North America” from 800 BC to 1950.  Murray’s inventories of the arts also confirmed the overpowering role of Europe, particularly after 1400. Although Murray did not compare their achievements but compiled separate lists for each civilization, he noted that the sheer number of “significant figures” in the arts is higher in the West in comparison to the combined number of the other civilizations. He explained this remarkable “divergence” in human accomplishments in terms of the degree to which cultures promote or discourage autonomy and purpose. I am persuaded that individualism is one of the critical variables.²

The point I want to make, however, is that Murray pays no attention to accomplishments in other human endeavors such as leadership, exploration, and heroic deeds. The achievements he measures come only in the form of “great books” and “great ideas.” In this respect, Murray’s book is similar to certain older-style Western Civ textbooks where the progression of modern liberal ideals is the central theme. David Gress dubbed this type of historiography the “Grand Narrative.” By teaching Western history in terms of the realization of liberal democratic values, these texts “placed a burden of justification on the West … to explain how the reality differed from the ideal.’³ Gress called upon historians to do away with this idealized image of Western uniqueness and to emphasize the realities of Western geopolitical struggles and mercantile interests. Norman Davies, too, has criticized the way early Western civilization courses tended to “filter out anything that might appear mundane or repulsive.”⁴

MY VIEW IS that Europeans were not only exceptional in their literary endeavors, but also in their agonistic and expansionist behaviors. Their great books, including their liberal values, were themselves inseparably connected to their aristocratic ethos of competitive individualism. There is no need to concede to multicultural critics, as Davies does, “the sorry catalogue of wars, conflict, and persecutions that have dogged every stage of the [Western] tale.”⁵ The expansionist dispositions of Europeans as well as their literary and other achievements were similarly driven by an aggressive and individually felt desire for superlative and undemocratic recognition.

It has been said that when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization he answered, “I think it would be a good idea.” Academics today interpret this answer to mean that the actual history of the West—such things as the conquest of the Americas and the expansion of the British Empire— belie its great ideas and great books. I challenge this naïve separation between an idealized and a realistic West borrowing Oswald Spengler’s image of the West as a strikingly vibrant culture driven by a type of personality overflowing with expansive, disruptive, and creative impulses. Spengler designated the West as a “Faustian” culture whose “prime-symbol” was “pure and limitless space.” This spirit was first visible in medieval Europe, starting with Romanesque art, but particularly in the “spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals;” “the heroes” of the Scandinavian, Germanic, and Icelandic sagas; the Crusades; the Viking sailing of the North Atlantic Ocean; the Germanic conquest of the Slavonic East; the Spaniards in the Americas; and the Portuguese in the East Indies.⁶

“Fighting,” “progressing,” “overcoming of resistances,” struggling “against what is near, tangible and easy”—these are some of the terms Spengler used to describe this soul. This Faustian being is animated with the spirit of a “proud beast of prey,” like that of an “eagle, lion, [or] tiger.” Moreover, the seemingly peaceful achievements of the West, not just its warlike activities, were infused with this Faustian impulse. As John Farrenkopf puts it:

[T]he architecture of the Gothic cathedral expresses the Faustian will to conquer the heavens; Western symphonic music conveys the Faustian urge to conjure up a dynamic, transcendent, infinite space of sound; Western perspective painting mirrors the Faustian will to infinite distance; and the Western novel responds to the Faustian imperative to explore the inner depths of the human personality while extending outward with a comprehensive view.⁷

IN MY BOOK, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, I trace the West’s Faustian creativity and libertarian spirit back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers who began to migrate into Europe roughly after 3500 BC, combining with and subordinating the ‘ranked’ Neolithic cultures of this region. Indo-European speakers originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppes. They initiated the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the riding of horses and the invention of wheeled vehicles in the fourth millennium BC, together with the efficient exploitation of the “secondary products” of domestic animals (dairy goods, textiles, large-scale herding), and the invention of chariots in the second millennium. The novelty of Indo-European culture was that it was led by an aristocratic elite that was egalitarian within the group rather than by a single despotic ruler. Indo-Europeans prized heroic warriors striving for individual fame and recognition, often with a “berserker” style of warfare. In the more advanced and populated civilizations of the Near East, Iran, and India, local populations absorbed this conquering group. In Neolithic Europe, the Indo-Europeans imposed themselves as the dominant group, and displaced the native languages but not the natives.

I maintain that the history of European explorations stands as an excellent subject matter for the elucidation of this Faustian restlessness. An overwhelming number of the explorers in history have been European. The Concise Encyclopedia of Explorers lists a total of 274 explorers, of which only 15 are non-European, with none listed after the mid-fifteenth century.⁸ In the urge to explore new regions of the earth and map the nameless, we can detect, in a crystallized way, the “prime-symbol” of Western restlessness. We can also detect the Western mind’s desire – if I may borrow the language of Hegel – to expand its cognitive horizon, to “subdue the outer world to its ends with an energy which has ensured for it the mastery of the world.”⁹

The Greeks initiated the science of geography. But just as pertinent is how contentious individuals, born in a culture engaged in widespread colonizing activities between 800 and 500 BC, drove this science. Hecataeus (550 – 476 BC), the author of the first book of geography, Journey Round the World, based his knowledge on his extensive travels along the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. To be sure, the Phoenicians, starting around the first millennium BC, established approximately 30 colonies throughout the African shores in the western Mediterranean, Sardinia, Malta, and as far west as Cádiz in modern Spain. However, more than thirty Greek city-states each established multiple colonies, with some estimating that the city of Miletus alone set up ninety colonies. All in all, Greek colonies were stretched throughout the Mediterranean coasts, the shores of the Black Sea, Anatolia in the east, southern France, Italy, Sicily, and in the northern coast of Africa, not to mention the long colonized islands of the Aegean Sea.

A popular explanation as to why the Greeks launched these overseas colonies is population growth and scarce resources at home. But the evidence shows that much of these colonial operations were small-scale undertakings rather than mass migrations led by impoverished farmers. Commercial interests and the incentive to gain new agricultural lands were motivating factors. But I would also emphasize the “general spirit of adventure” permeating the Greek world since Mycenaean times. Many of the colonies, as A. G. Woodhead has shown, had “their origins in purely individual enterprise or extraordinary happenings.”¹⁰

Hecataeus envisioned the world as a disc surrounded by an ocean. But soon there would be a challenger – Herodotus, born in 484BC. He too offered numerous geographical and ethnographic insights based on his extensive travels, and he did so in explicit awareness of his own contributions and in direct criticism of his predecessor. This competitive desire on the part of individuals to stand out from others was ingrained in the whole social outlook of classical Greece: in the Olympic Games, in the perpetual warring of the city-states, in the pursuit of a political career, in the competition among orators for the admiration of the citizens, and in the Athenian theater festivals, where numerous poets would take part in Dionysian competitions amid high civic splendor and religious ritual. New works of drama, philosophy, and music were expounded in the first-person form as an adversarial or athletic contest in the pursuit of truth.

DURING THE HELLENISTIC centuries, explorers would venture into the Caspian, Aral, and Red Seas, establishing trading posts along the coasts of modern Eritrea and Somalia. Perhaps the most successful of Hellenistic explorers was Pytheas. In his book, On the Ocean, he recounts an amazing journey (ca. 310BC) northward to Brittany across the Channel into Cornwall, through the Baltic Sea, the coast of Norway, and even Iceland.¹¹

These explorations encouraged astronomical and geographical scholarship leading to the full conceptualization of the shape of the earth itself by Eratosthenes (276-185BC), who not only contextualized the location of Europe in relation to the Atlantic and the North Sea, but calculated the spherical size of the earth (within 5 percent of its true measure), with the obvious implication that the Mediterranean was only a small portion of the globe. This spirit of inquiry continued through the second century AD, when Ptolemy wrote his System of Astronomy and his Geography, where he rationally explained the principles and methods required in mapmaking and produced the first world map depicting India, China, South-East Asia, the British Isles, Denmark and East Africa.

There was far less desire to explore the geography and landscapes of the world among the peoples of the non-Western world. While in the first century BC the Han dynasty extended its geographical boundaries south into Vietnam, north into Korea, and east into the Tarim Basin, the Chinese showed little geographical interest beyond their own borders. What is striking about Chinese maps in general is how insular they were in comparison with the much earlier maps of Ptolemy. Even a sixteenth-century reproduction of Zheng He’s sailing maps lacks any apposite scale, size, and sense of proportion regarding the major landmasses of the earth.

The Chinese supposition that the earth was flat remained almost unchanged from ancient times until Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century brought modern ideas. In stark contrast, Greek philosophers of the fifth and fourth centuries BC were already persuaded that the earth was a sphere. Aristarchus of Samos, who lived about 310 to 230 BC, went so far as to postulate the Copernican hypothesis that all planets revolve in circles around the sun, and that the earth rotates on its axis once in twenty-four hours.

Indian civilization showed little curiosity about the geography of the world; its maps were symbolic and removed from any empirical concern with the actual location of places. Maritime activity among the isolated civilizations of America was restricted to fishing from rafts and canoes. The Phoenicians left no geographical documents of their colonizing expeditions.¹²

The Vikings “discovered in their gray dawn the art of sailing the seas which emancipated them”—so says Spengler.¹³ During the last years of the eighth century, marauding bands of Vikings pillaged their way along the coast lines of Northern Europe and down around Spain, into the Mediterranean, Italy, North Africa, and Arabia. Some hauled their long boats overland from the Baltic and made their way down the great Russian rivers all the way to the Black Sea. During the ninth and tenth centuries, their primary aim was no longer plunder as much as finding new lands to settle. Their voyages far into the North Atlantic were “independent undertakings, part of a 300-year epoch of seaborne expansion” which resulted in the settlement of Scandinavian peoples in Shetland, Orkney, the Hebrides, parts of Scotland and Ireland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland (present-day Newfoundland).¹⁴ They colonized the little-known and unknown lands of Iceland from 870AD onward, Greenland from 980 onward, and then Vinland by the year 1000 AD. The Icelandic geographers of the Middle Ages showed considerable detailed knowledge in their descriptions of the Arctic regions, stretching from Russia to Greenland, and of the eastern seaboard of the North American continent. This is clearly attested in an Icelandic Geographical Treatise preserved in a manuscript dating from about 1300, but possibly based on a twelfth-century original.

Peter Whitfield speculates that “some conscious impulse towards exploration and conquest” must have motivated these voyages, “prompted by harsh living conditions at home.”¹⁵ Jesse Byock explains that the settlement of Iceland was led by sailor-farmers seeking to escape population pressures in the Scandinavian mainland, and that, in turn, the settlement of Greenland was initiated by Icelanders escaping Malthusian pressures in Iceland. At the same time, the cultural world Byock reveals, through his careful reading of numerous heroic sagas associated with these voyages and settlements, is that of aristocratic chieftains and free farmers venturing into unknown lands, competing with other chieftains and struggling for survival and renown.¹⁶

In the next centuries after the Vikings, the travels of Marco Polo (1254-1324) throughout the Asian world found expression in the Catalan Atlas of 1375, which was quite innovative in showing compass-lines, and in the accurate delineation of the Mediterranean. On the strength of Ptolemy’s work, Islam fostered its own geographical tradition with the benefit of their extensive dominions and travels. Ibn Battuta (1304-1374), the greatest Muslim traveler, visited every Muslim country and neighboring lands. But his “overmastering impulse,” to use his own words, was to visit “illustrious sanctuaries”¹⁷ – unlike Marco Polo’s desire, which was to visit non-Christian lands barely visited by Europeans and learn about the unknown tribes of Asia, including the numinous land of Cathay.¹⁸ In 1154, the greatest Islamic cartographer, al-Idrisi, produced a large planispheric silver relief map that was original in not portraying the Indian Ocean in a landlocked way and in offering a more precise knowledge of China’s eastern coast. But Islamic geography would go no further.

SPENGLER WRITES THAT the Spaniards and the Portuguese “were possessed by the adventured-craving for uncharted distances and for everything unknown and dangerous.’¹⁹ By the beginning of the 1400s, the compass, the portolan chart and certain shipping techniques essential for launching the Age of Exploration were in place. The Portuguese, under the leadership of Henry the Navigator would go on, in the course of the fifteenth century, to round the southern tip of Africa, impose themselves through the Indian Ocean, and eventually reach Japan in the 1540s. They would create accurate maps of West Africa as far as Sierra Leone, as well as rely on Fra Mauro’s new maps, one of which (1457) mapped the totality of the Old World with unmatched accuracy while suggesting, for the first time, a route around the southern tip of Africa. A mere two years after Diaz had sailed around the Cape; Henricus Martellus created his World Map of 1490, which showed both the whole of Africa generally and the specific locations of numerous places across the entire African west coast, detailing the step-by-step advancement of the Portuguese.

The question of what motivated the expeditions of the Portuguese is a classic one, and, conversely, so is the question of why China abandoned the maritime explorations started by Zheng He. Why were his expeditions not as consequential historically as the ones initiated by Henry the Navigator? For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Zheng He’s voyages were displays of “China’s ability to mount expeditions of crushing strength and dispatch them over vast distances.” Zheng He’s expeditions did not last and were less consequential, according to Fernández-Armesto, because China’s Confucian government assigned priority to “good government at home” rather than “costly adventures” abroad, particularly in the face of barbarian incursions from the north.²⁰

At the same time, Fernández-Armesto portrays China’s mode of exploration in rather admiring terms: her peaceful commerce, scholarship, and even “vital contributions to the economies of every place they settled.’²¹He almost implies, indeed, that the Chinese, not the Europeans, were the true explorers, on the grounds that He’s expeditions along the Indian Ocean were more difficult (due to wind patterns) than the European ones through the Atlantic, and that the Europeans navigated through the Atlantic in order to overcome their marginalized economic position rather than to explore.

The major flaw in Fernández-Armesto’s account (as in all current accounts) is the unquestioned assumption that the Chinese expeditions were “explorations” stirred by disinterested curiosity while the Portuguese expeditions were primarily economic in motivation. The Chinese did little that can be considered new in the exploratory sense; they did not discover one single nautical mile; the Indian Ocean had long been a place of regular navigation, unlike the Atlantic and the western coasts of Africa. The Portuguese, it is true, were poor and many of the sailors manning the ships were longing for better opportunities, but what drove the leading men above all else was a chivalric desire for renown and superior achievement in the face of economic costs, persistent hardships, and high mortality rates.

The Chinese were ahead of Europe in technology when the 1400s started, but their technology thereafter remained for the most part unchanged; whereas the Portuguese (and Europeans) would advance continuously. Furthermore, the nautical problems the Portuguese had to face were more difficult.  As Joseph Needham has noted,

Almost as far as Madagascar the Chinese were in the realms of the monsoons, with which they had been familiar in their own home waters for more than a millennium. But the inhospitable Atlantic had never encouraged sailors in the same way, and though there had been a number of attempts to sail westwards, that ocean had never been systematically explored.²²

The main motivations of the Portuguese cannot be adequately explained without considering the chivalric and warlike spirit of the aristocratic fidalgos. Fernández-Armesto acknowledges that the ethos of chivalric honor “did make the region peculiarly conducive to breeding explorers.”²³ But to him this was an ethos rooted in medieval romances exclusive to Portugal and Spain. Besides, he rejects any notion of Western uniqueness, and does not properly explain the differences between economic, religious, and chivalric motivations.

As I see it, the chivalric motivations of the Portuguese colored and intensified all their other motivations, and this is why they exhibited an excessive yearning for spices, a crusading zeal against non-Christians, a relentless determination to master the seas. The chivalry of the Portuguese was a knightly variation of the same Faustian longing the West has displayed since prehistoric times. The ancient Greeks who established colonies throughout the Mediterranean, the Macedonians who marched to “the ends of the world,” the Romans who created the greatest empire in history, the Franks who carved out Charlemagne’s Empire, and the Portuguese, were all similarly driven by an “irrepressible urge to distance.”

NO SOONER DID Columbus sight the “West Indies” in 1492, than one European explorer after another came forth eager for great deeds. By the 1520s, Europeans had explored the entire eastern coast of the two Americas from Labrador to Rio de la Plata. From 1519 to 1522 Ferdinand Magellan led the first successful attempt to circumnavigate the earth through the unimagined vastness of the Pacific Ocean. It has been said that Magellan’s energy and vision equaled that of Columbus; he “shared with his great predecessor the tenacity of a man driven by something deeper than common ambition.’²⁴

Between 1519 and 1521 Hernán Cortés put himself at the command of an expedition that would result in the conquest of the Aztec Empire. These days many regard Cortés as something of a criminal, and this is true. The campaigns he conducted against the Mexicans were graphically barbaric. At the same time, Cortés was a prototypical Western aristocrat, or, as described by his secretary, a man “restless, haughty, mischievous, and given to quarrelling.’²⁵ The running story on Cortés today is that if he had not conquered Mexico someone else would have. The real agents were the guns, the steel swords, the horses, and the germs. Without denying any of these factors, I agree with Buddy Levy’s recent portrayal of Cortés as a man who displayed, again and again, an extraordinary combination of leadership, tenacity, diplomacy, and tactical skill. Finding gold was a priority for Cortés and his men, but, as Cortés’s impassioned speeches and the character descriptions of his contemporaries both testify, he was above all a man driven by an “insatiable thirst for glory and authority;” “he thinks nothing of dying himself, and less of our death.”²⁶ A similar account can be given of Francisco Pizarro.

The same spirit that drove Cortés and Pizarro drove Luther in his uncompromising challenge to the papacy’s authority: “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.” It drove the “intense rivalry” that characterized the art of the Renaissance, among patrons, collectors, artists, and that culminated in the persons of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian.²⁷ It motivated Shakespeare to outdo Chaucer, creating more than 120 characters, “the most memorable personalities that have graced the theater – and the psyche – of the West.’²⁸ Let us recall that the age of the conquistadores was Spain’s golden age; the age of El Greco, Velázquez, Calderón de la Barca, and Francisco López de Gómara; the time of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and the realist transformation of the chivalrous imagination, of Lope de Vega and the creation of a new literary style in the picaresque novel with its sympathetic story of thieves and vagabonds. This century saw, additionally, a veritable revolution in cartography. As early as 1507, the German cosmographer, Martin Waldseemüller, produced a map depicting a coastline from Newfoundland to Argentina, and showed the two American continents clearly separated from Asia.

IN THE FACE of a list of rather ordinary human motivations, such as the motivation to acquire wealth and conquer new lands, it is very difficult to ascertain the Faustian character of the explorers, extract its essential nature, and apprehend it for itself. I want to suggest, even so, that the history of exploration during and after the Enlightenment era offers us an opportunity to apprehend clearly this soul. For it is the case that, from about the 1700s onward, explorers come to be increasingly driven by a will to discover irrespective of the pursuit of trade, religious conversion, or even scientific curiosity. My point is not that the unadulterated desire to explore exhibits the Faustian soul as such. The urge to accumulate wealth and advance knowledge may exhibit this Faustian will just as intensively. The difference is that in the desire to explore for its own sake we can see the West’s psyche striving to surpass the mundane preoccupations of ordinary life, comfort and liberal pleasantries, proving what it means to be a man of noble character.

The minimization of any substantial differences among humans cultivated by the modern model of human nature has clouded our ability to apprehend this Faustian desire.  The original outlook of Locke and French Enlightenment thinkers, themselves the product of the persistent Western quest to interpret the world anew, fostered a democratic model wherein humans came to be seen as indeterminate and more or less equal, a “white paper,” a malleable being determined by outside circumstances, tradition-less and culture-less. This egalitarian view was nurtured as well in the philosophy of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Kant, with its emphasis on the innate and equally a priori cognitive capacities of humans qua humans.

It should come as no surprise, then, that historians (and psychologists) write of human passions and motivations as essentially alike across all cultures. In our subject of inquiry, exploration, we are normally told that “the desire to penetrate and explore the world’s wild places is a fundamental human impulse.” Frank Debenham’s Discovery and Exploration, a broad survey published in 1960, informs us that “man’s natural inquisitiveness has been a mainspring of discovery and exploration.”²⁹ Yet, much of Debenham’s book is about modern Europeans exploring the world. There is an appendix that lists a total of 203 famous explorers, of which only eight are non-Western.³⁰

Likewise, Fernández-Armesto’s book Pathfinders is described as “a study of humankind’s restless spirit,” but once he reaches the period after the 1500s, he has no explorers outside the West to write about. This may explain why he becomes disparaging toward European explorers, particularly those who came after the 1700s, describing them (David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Roald Amundsen, and others) as “failures,” “naïve,” “bombastic,” “mendacious,” “useless,” and “incompetent.”³¹

My view is the opposite: the history of exploration provides us with a profoundly revealing index of Western heroic self-fashioning. There is much to be learned about the uniqueness of the West in the life experiences and the motivations driving such men as Captain Cook. During the course of his legendary three Pacific journeys between 1768 and 1779, it is said that he explored more of the earth’s surface than any other man in history. His methods were said to be “practical and humane,” and yet he was also a heroic figure, filled with a zeal for greatness. In his own words, what he wanted above all else was the “pleasure of being first;” to sail “not only farther than man has been before me but as far as I think it possible for man to go.”³²

Fernández-Armesto is highly critical of Robert Falcon Scott’s somber expressions of boldness, risk, duty, and resolve during the last days of his tragic expedition to the South Pole in 1911-12. Max Jones offers a far more incisive assessment of the significance of Scott, less as a “great” explorer than as someone who “composed the most haunting journal in the history of exploration.’³³ Jones extols the captivating drama of the journals, the mounting tension and ever present anxiety as the ship battles to reach the Antarctica coast, and the epic-like account of the relentless march to the Pole. Jones situates Scott within a wider cultural setting: his immersion in polar literature, his awareness of characters in major novels who sought to prove themselves, his copy of Darwin’s Origins of Species and Scott’s “bleak vision of the universe as a struggle for existence,” the literary influences of Ibsen and Thomas Hardy and their fascination with the dependency of the human will on the indifferent power of nature and necessity.

Overall, the pervading idea of the journals is the heroic vision of exploration as a test of individual worthiness and national character. From his early manhood, Scott was filled with anxiety and doubts about his adequacy in life’s struggles: “I write of the future; of the hopes of being more worthy; but shall I ever be – can I alone, poor weak wretch that I am bear up against it all.”³⁴ Expedition narratives through the nineteenth century, Jones observes, became ever more focus on the character of the explorer than on the economic externalities, so exploration became an inner journey, “a journey into the self, nowhere more so than in the emptiest of continents, Antarctica.’³⁵ Scott understood this: “Here the outward show is nothing; it is the inward purpose that counts.” There was nothing to see in the center of Antarctica except the reflection of the inner Western quest to face the struggle of life in a heroic fashion.

 ♦

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Ricardo Duchesne is professor at the University of New Brunswick, Department of Social Science, Saint John, Canada. He is the author of The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011). [US Amazon link.]

This article was revised 8 October 2012 to correct an editing error.

NOTES:

1. Judith Shulevitz, “‘Human Accomplishment:’ the Best and the Brightest,” The New York Times,  30 November 2003. ↩
2. Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment, The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences 800 BC to 1950 (New York: HarperCollins Publishing Inc, 2003), 252-259. ↩
3. David Gress, From Plato to NATO, The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (The Free Press, 1996). ↩
4. Norman Davies, A History of Europe (New York: Random House, 1997), 28. ↩
5. Davies, 15-16. ↩
6. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: I: Form and Actuality, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973), 183-216. ↩
7. John Farrenkopf, Prophet of Decline: Spengler on World History and Politics (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 46. ↩
8. Ibid. ↩
9. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind. Being Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, translated by William Wallace (Oxford University Press, 1971), 45. ↩
10. A.G. Woodhead, The Greeks in the West (New York: Praeger, 1966), 32-33. Robin Lane Fox’s Travelling Heroes: Greeks and The Epic Age of Homer (Allen Lane, 2008), deals with how their travels from one end of their world to the other shaped the Greeks’ myth, heroes, and gods. ↩
11. For an up-to-date review of the Greek explorations of the Atlantic world, including a chapter on Roman expeditions to the North Sea, see Duane Roller’s Through the Pillars of Herakles: Greco-Roman Exploration of the Atlantic (Routledge, 2006). ↩
12. Rome is not known to have carried as many explorations as the Greeks; still, it should be noted that the Romans penetrated deeper into Africa than any European power until well into the nineteenth century; see L. P Kirwan, “Rome Beyond The Southern Egyptian Frontier,” The Geographical Journal, (123.1: 1957). ↩
13. Decline of the West, 332. ↩
14. Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland (Penguin Books, 2001). ↩
15. Peter Whitfield, New Found Lands. Maps in the History of Exploration (New York: Routledge, 1998), 18. ↩
16.  The Vinland Sagas, The Norse Discovery of America, translated with an introduction by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson (Penguin Books, 1965). ↩
17. Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers (Vintage Books, 1985), 121. ↩
18. John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). ↩
19. Decline of the West, 333. ↩
20. Pathfinders, A Global History (New York: Norton, 2006), 109-117. ↩
21. Ibid. ↩
22.  Joseph Needham, The Shorter Science and Civilization in China, Volume 3: A Section of Volume IV, Part I and a Section of Volume IV, Part 3 of Needham’s Original Text (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 141. ↩
23. Pathfinders, 145. ↩
24. Whitfield, 93. ↩
25. Buddy Levy, Conquistador, Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs (Bantam Books, 2009), 3. ↩
26. Levy, 203. ↩
27. See Rona Goffe’s, Renaissance Rivals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), for an account of the passionate strivings of the greatest artists of the Renaissance to outdo both living competitors and the masters of antiquity. ↩
28. Frank Dumont, A History of Personality Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 20. ↩
29. Frank Debenham, Discovery and Exploration (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1960), 6. ↩
30. The same line of reasoning occupies Piers Pennington’s The Great Explorers (London: Aldus Books, 1979): “this book tells the story of the world’s great adventures into the unknown,” yet the fifty-plus explorers listed are from the Occident. See also The Discoverers: An Encyclopedia of Explorers and Exploration, ed. Helen Delpar (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980). ↩
31. Pathfinders, 394. ↩
32. Cited in Hanbury-Tenison, ed., The Oxford Book of Exploration (Oxford University Press, 1993), 490-3. This book is an anthology of writings by explorers. ↩
33. Max Jones, “Introduction” in Robert Falcon Scott’s Journals: Captain Scott’s Last Expedition (Oxford University Press), xvii. ↩
34. Ibid., xix. ↩
35. Ibid, xxxiv-xxxv. ↩

Bachelard penseur de l’écologie ?

Bachelard penseur de l’écologie ?

par Frédéric Andreu

« Bachelard penseur de l’Écologie ? » n’est pas une problématique qui s’impose à l’esprit à la première lecture de l’œuvre du philosophe. En effet, dans cette œuvre foisonnante, le terme «écologie» semble anachronique ; quant à la notion de «nature», elle n’est jamais conceptualisée mais passe par le prisme d’un environnement natif magnifié. Bachelard évoque souvent sa « Champagne native » : «Je suis né dans un coin de la Champagne vallonnée, de ruisseaux et de rivières, dans le Vallage», image qui répond à l’ «appel des sources et des fontaines». La « nature », cher Bachelard, s’envisage incontestablement sur fond de nostalgie narrative.

Autre difficulté : l'écologie contemporaine, quant à elle, s’inscrit moins sur fond de nostalgie des origines que comme critique radicale du système capitaliste, un système qui entraînerait un innéluctable "réchauffement climatique" et autres «effet de serre».

Nous verrons en quoi la rêverie bachelardienne peut s'avérer utile à dépasser les testaments idéologiques de notre temps, a refuser d’entrer dans le jeu dialectique entre "partisans de la nature" et "partisan du progrès". A mon sens, cette problématique ne peut pas être élucidé  sans prendre en compte l’imaginaire contemporain de la nature. Nous n'hésiterons donc pas à emprunter "les avenues du rêve" auxquelles Bachelard nous invite. Si tels ou tels musiques, poèmes, événements rencontrés au cours de notre méditation nous y engagent, pourquoi ne pas les suivre ?

Mais commençons par rappeler le sens de quelques mots-clés contenu dans la question. Le mot "écologie", d'origine grecque, a étymologiquement partie liée avec la maison ("éco"). La maison est le circonscrit, le limité, la dualité ouvert/fermé matérialisé par les fenêtres qui s’ouvrent et se ferment, autant de notions incompatible avec l'"hybris" contemporain, tant redouté par les Anciens Grecs. C’est l’orgueil humain qui conduit l'abolition des limites, des bornes, entraînant la destruction de la diversité, sceau même du vivant. Les partisans écologistes s’inscrivent-ils dans cette conception traditionnelle ? tournent-ils le dos à l’ «hybris», ou bien partagent-ils avec les progressistes, une conception « ouverte » de la nature ? En d'autres termes, le «citoyen de la planète» se veut-il traditionnel ou progressiste, messianiste ?

Soulignons également que l’époque antique est celle où les dieux étaient les garants de l'harmonie du cosmos. Ils interviennent par ailleurs dans les rêves des hommes pour leur délivrer des messages. A plusieurs reprises, Athéna intervient dans les songes d’Ulysse pour le guider.

Que l'on prenne « Eco » au sens restreint d'"habitat" ou au sens large de "nature", Bachelard a donc toute légitimité. Pourquoi ?

L’auteur de ‘la Psychanalyse du feu’ a toujours gardé un contact charnel avec sa nature, puisqu'il a vécu dans la campagne de l'Aude, né dans une maison située "en lisière de la ville". Il nous rappelle qu’une maison doit avoir une cave "où l'on descend les escaliers avec un chandelier" et un grenier où «l'enfant boudeur peut monter les escaliers pour se réfugier». Si l’on transpose cette anecdote à la nature, on comprends que la cave et la grenier renvoie aux dimensions de la rêverie diurne, voire nocturne, quant les testaments idéologiques de notre temps équivaudrait plutôt à des appartements de HLM.

Voici tout l'art de Bachelard, refuser les raccourcis, les captations conceptuelles de la pensée abstraite, non pour les nier mais pour les ouvrir, les dilater a des dimensions plus grandes, plus oniriques.

Dans le même esprit, Bachelard critiqua en son temps la Psychanalyse dans une époque où elle se voulait souveraine sur les savoirs. A plusieurs reprises, il dit qu’elle aurait « dépoétiser les symboles ».

Refusant les génuflexions devant les idéologies totalisantes de son temps, Bachelard aurait-il accepter les nôtres ?

Rêvons avec Bachelard...

A la lecture de Bachelard, l’Homme ordinaire est un roi détrôné qui a oublié son royaume. Les rêveurs le savent bien eux, qui, au petit matin, pendant les instants dorés qui entrent dans l’état de veille se consument comme une comète dans l’atmosphère, portent encore la couronne étoilée du rêve.

Son double onirique retourne à l’oubli, le laissant orphelin, seul sur terre.

Nous sommes des rois sans couronne et nous habitons le pire des royaumes, celui qui se croit isolé, univers et universel, dans le plus absurde des théâtres où une planète se croirait isolée dans l'univers. Ayant substitué son imaginaire cosmo-centré autour de la figure du roi par un universalisme abstrait, la France est particulièrement touchée par ce sortilège. Seul existe l’individu-roi dans son royaume « technique » ; le règne qui nous entoure est devenu une sorte de méga-machine complexe, il est bien le résultat d’un messianisme, mais terrestre ; le monde de la technoscience est, lui, a côté de ce monde. D’années en années, la campagne préindustrielle recule au profit d’une périphérie Bouygues universelle. Quelques siècles d’idéologies matérialistes sont parvenu à faire de Pinocchio une marionnette de bois, incapable de se souvenir d'autre chose, au volant de son automobile, que du Code de la Route. Le conte dit que la Fée Bleue (la rêverie cosmique), celle qui donne la clé des songes, apparaîtra dans l’atelier de Gepetto.  

Le feu passe au rouge, tu t'arrêtes ; le feu passe au vert, tu avances.  Voici ta condition de marionnette. C'est tout ce qu'il nous reste du feu originel. Imaginaire normatif et atrophié.

La domestication du feu fut une avancée fulgurante de l’humanité, à côté de laquelle l’avion supersonique n’est qu’un jouet de bac-à-sable. Il paraît même que l'Homme a dérobé le feu aux dieux. Mais a-t-on pris conscience que le feu n'est pas de ce monde ? Voyons comme le feu (un vrai feu de camps) est à la fois difficile à allumer et difficile à atteindre comme s’il ne rentrait que difficilement dans les lois de ce monde. Le flamme monte verticalement comme si elle cherchait à fuir ce monde et retrouver sa patrie originelle.

Or, le feu et le rêve appartiennent au même monde. Ils partagent les mêmes propriétés peu à l’aise avec celles de ce monde. Le rêve est comme le feu, immatériel, fluctuant, instable, prompte à retourner dans son monde nocturne.  

Mais, alors que l'invention du briquet-à-galène s'est depuis longtemps banalisée, nous n'avons rien inventé d’équivalent pour le rêve, le "briquet-à-rêve" n’existe pas, à moins d'admettre qu'un poème de poche pourrait jouer cette fonction.

La banalisation du feu domestique, la perte du signifiant originel avec notamment la plaque électrique, n’est pas le moindre signe du matérialisme moderne. Il nous faut réapprendre à allumer un vrai «feu de camps», fendre le bois, frotter le silex, afin de redevenir spirituel c’est-à-dire retrouver l’Enfant Eternel. Pour cela, le bushkraft est une voie salutaire. La rêverie stimulée par le feu de camps m’emporte vers d’autres rivages. Elle me dit que la flamme est à la fois ici et ailleurs, simultanément. Un ailleurs non spatio-temporel, mystérieux, spirituel, onirique ; un feu sur la terre est aussi un feu dans une autre dimension du réel, dans un «ciel» imaginaire. C’est pourquoi le feu nous relie à l’ailleurs. Nous communions au spectacle des flammes ondulantes moins pour nous réchauffer que pour communier avec le monde des rêves.

De même, abandonné à la rêverie, nous sommes en deux endroits simultanés, le rêve fait de nous un bi-national. Il nous intime l’idée que, bien que de « citoyenneté terrestre », notre véritable patrie est ailleurs. Notre "patrie" est celle des dieux, l’azur immaculé de l’Enfant Eternel.

Nous avons été envoyés ici en mission exploratrice et nous avons oubliés de rentrer chez nous. La religion chrétienne est la religion insolite du « retour » allégorisée dans la personne de Jésus-Christ. Devant le gouverneur romain Pons Pilate, qui avait le pouvoir de la mettre à mort, Jésus dit «mon royaume n’est pas de ce monde». Beaucoup de Chrétiens inversent cette révélation sismique en son contraire : ils veulent faire de ce monde un royaume.

Devant cette tentation, le rêve marque un arrêt-sur-image, une piccure de rappel du véritable univers onirique et pré-onirique. Soudain, l'identification étroite du moi et de ce monde s'évanouïe. Le rêve est une ressouvenance lente, allégorisée, de l'Autre Monde.  

Poussée par force nostalgie, l’humanité est parvenue à se hisser dans l’espace. L’homme a marché sur la lune, escale retour d’un aller métaphorique vers la planète terre, vers le plan matériel, dont la mémoire s’est perdue. Vu sous cet angle, la conquête de l’Espace n'est qu’une manifestation de la nostagie profonde qui habite l’homme.

Elle donne l’impression d’un voyage-retour. Or, ce voyage-retour peut se faire sans quitter cette terre, dans sa rêverie du jour, étape de l’état d’homo mechanicus vers l’état d’Homo Legendicum.

Gaston Bachelard fut le Newton de la science du rêve ; il nous manque un Einstein de cette même science qui rendra fusées et roquettes totalement désuètes. Ce génie découvrira peut-être l’«atome-germe», l’agent actif surnaturel caché dans les images, les univers et les mondes pliés de l’imaginaire. Il faut « s’évertuer à trouver, derrière les images qui se montrent, celles qui se cachent, aller à la racine même de la force imaginante » nous exhorte Bachelard. Pour se faire, ni le microscope, ni le sonar ultramoderne ne seront d’un grand secours, ou du moins, le seront-ils pour confirmer les rêveries intimes du rêveur éveillé ayant rencontré en lui l'Enfant Eternel.

On découvrira alors que nos existences ne sont que les oripeaux d’anciennes croyances, de fausses identifications. Tel Ulysse de retour à Ithaque, l’Éveillé livrera un combat aux usurpateurs, les prétendants aux trône, ces fausses identifications de lui-même. Il renouera ainsi avec Pénélope, allégorie de cet atome autonome doué d’un puissance qui n’est pas de ce monde. Et si Ithaque était le cœur de l’Homme enfin investi du vrai germe-divin et si Pénélope était le germe divin, Ulysse la reddition du moi.  

Alors, comme l’écrit Victor Ségalen, ce bon voyageur «parviendra sans mérites ni peines, non pas au marais des joies immortelles, mais aux remous pleins d’ivresses du grand fleuve Diversité».

« Seul un dieu peut nous sauver » ou le barbare salvateur

En recherchant, tel un sourcier, les sources actuelles de l’imaginaire écologique, je vécu dans l'appréhension qu'une sorte de crochet conceptuel en vienne à déchirer brutalement la grande voile méditative de ma rêverie. Je ne voulais pas que la fleur vitale de l'âme se rétracte subitement en elle-même à cause d'une événement extérieure mineur. Son parfum est celle-même de la vie véritable qui est à la fois d'ici et d'ailleurs. Notre mémoire traumatique est polluée de semblables angoisses.

Je trouvais refuge dans le hors espace-temps de Conan le Barbare, un peu comme on se blotti prêt d'un feu en hiver. Diffusée tel un rempart, la musique recouvrait toute ma ville tel un vortex. Un morceau plus que les autres, à la grande beauté aurorale, enchanta mon âme. Je cherchais dans le dictionnaire le sens exact de son titre : "Orphans of Doom/Awakning» , et ce que je trouvais me subjugua au plus haut point. "Doom" veut dire à la fois «ruine» et «destin tragique», quant à Awakening, c'est "L'éveil oui, l'éveil, comment sortir de ce sortilège infernal. Le drame cosmique faite musique. Je me reportais à la scène correspondante du film : on y voyait Thulsa Doom, le Guru de la secte du Serpent, haranguant une foule d'adeptes anesthésiés et serviles. Subitement, le guru est décapité d'un coup d'épée par celui qui a gardé le secret de l'acier, Conan. Les "orphans" (orphelins du champs astral du guru) jettent un après l'autre leurs bâtons enflammés dans une fontaine. Cette fin rituelle me fit penser à la disparition des étoiles, au petit matin. Cette musique d’une étrange beauté métaphorise à merveille celle de la reddition du moi. Les adeptes s'en retournent chez eux comprenant que c'est la fin d'un monde. L’imaginaire individuel et collectif se retrouve tout-à-coup libéré de fascination nocturne du guru.

Pourquoi Conan, le libérateur, est-il un "barbare" ? Sans doute afin de surligner sa nature différente, étrangère à celle du monde. Moins au pays lui-même qu'à la nature même de ce monde. De même, Ulysse arrive en étranger à Ithaque, habillé en mendiant hirsute alors qu'il se présenta au palais d'Ithaque, prêt à en découdre avec les prétendants au trône.

La superbe musique de Basil Poledouris m'avait conduit ce matin vers des rivages du rêve où des fréquences de douceurs qui bercent quelque chose comme un souvenir d'enfance, comme si un drap onirique m'entraînait vers un repos profond. Ma rêverie matinale miroitait de mille images enchantées et douces, maternantes, bienveillantes.

Mais, au lieu de glisser dans la pente du sommeil, une idée me vint à l'esprit avec la vitesse d'un éclair. J'en étais venu à l'idée que derrière Conan le Barbare, le personnage de film, se cache une figure métaphorique centrale. On trouve bien sûr les héros tueur de dragon, Siegfried ou Saint Georges, mais Conan a une particularité. Il est revanchard. Son ennemi est un homme qui a le pouvoir de transformation. Il peut en effet se transformer en serpent. Il est un enchanteur car il symbolise l'enchantement coupé de sa source quant Conan représente la source elle-même.

Un des plus haut mystère qui touche à la littérature et au langage est de savoir pourquoi les mythes anciens métaphorisent le combat symbolique vers la lumière, l'entrée et la sortie du labyrinthe ? Un saut de géant s'est produit le jour où je compris que les mythes comportent une telle structure uniquement parce qu'ils portent eux-même les impulsions de l'imaginaire et que l'imaginaire est lui-même une ondulation divine, algorithmique, auto-structurante. C'est là un point capital, les légendes "racontées au coin du feu" proviennent d'un rayonnement qui n'est pas de ce monde. Pas étonnant qu'elles contiennent sous forme métaphorique, le fameux Plan de Retour. C'est en tout cas la seule explication rationnelle possible.

L'univers qui nous entoure peut parfois faire penser à une "ruine". Le HLM étant la ruine caractérisée. Incomplétude, brisement de l'origine, processus déshumanisant, le HLM est l'habitat de l'insecte mécanique. L'homme moderne est l'équivalent des ruines, désenchanté, mécanisé, interchangeable. Les ruines nourrissent aussi l'imaginaire du retour.

Face à ce déclin algorithmique, le combat le plus haut, le plus noble est le réenchantement qui seul peut être conduire par un "barbare radical", l'étranger provenant d'un autre monde, l'étranger en nous-même que Bachelard appelle l'"Enfant Eternel". Le prix du réenchantement, c'est le choc frontal entre les spectres d'une réalité desséchée et la puissance du rêve. Une version de ce combat s'est récemment illustré avec le magistral Cameraman Gods de Neil Gaiman. On y voit une lutte à mort entre les "nouveaux dieux" du système de la consommation et des médias de l'Amérique et les dieux anciens, oubliés et jusque-là réduits à la portion congrue.

A travers ces exemples, on est saisi par l'idée qu'un immense et implacable dispositif concerté a visé, depuis des temps immémoriaux (serait-ce même la pente de l'Histoire ?), a assécher l'imaginaire des peuples par un imaginaire de substitution. Ce dispositif est apparu historiquement avec le pouvoir centralisateur de l'Empire Romain, les Conciles, et devenu totalement incontrôlable par la suite, comme une machine planétaire devenue folle. Il poursuit aujourd'hui sa course folle avec la réplique de l'Empire qu'est l'Empire Américain, le Soft Power, le Nouvel Ordre Mondial qui contrôle à la fois le capitalisme avec sa technoscience destructrice de l'environnement et l'imaginaire de l'écologie et des médias.

Ce roman magistral montre que le combat pertinent et salvateur se situe moins entre la technoscience et l'écologie qu'entre deux imaginaires, l'ancien et le nouveau.

Les grands esprits de notre temps ont bien compris ce subterfuge. Bachelard exhortait a trouvé le germe-racine de l'imaginaire. Dans un entretien au Spiegel de 1956, Heidegger prononce une phrase énigmatique qui n’est pas sans évoquer la geste mythique de Conan le Barbare : "Seul un dieu peut nous sauver".

Quoi de commun entre la marionnette de bois et le petit garçon qui court et qui va à l'école? aucun. Une transformation totale les sépare.
Le "barbare" n’est-il pas, aussi, notre double onirique ?

« L’appel des sources » contre l’idéologie écologiste

A travers les exemples cités, on comprends que notre époque a sans doute moins besoin d’une pythie adolescente (Greta Gunberg) qu’un « dieu » au sens mystérieux donné par par Heidegger ou un « barbare» décliné dans la Science Fiction, notamment l’Héroic Fantasy. Ils répondent parfaitement à cet «appel des sources» cher à Bachelard.

On notera que l’imaginaire de la Fantasy n’est pas toujours celle d’une lutte à mort entre technologie et nature vierge, mais produit parfois des univers où la plus haute technologie cohabite avec la nature la plus luxuriante, univers « archéo-futuriste » où les hommes généralement cohabitent avec les dieux.

La croisade écologiste relayée par les mass-médias s‘inscrit tout comme la destruction de la nature sous l’horizon du progrès. Elle nous projette dans les mêmes espoirs et ornières que la psychanalyse au temps de Bachelard.

Gaston Bachelard s’en prend à la psychanalyse qui nous aurait  « écarté de la méditation de l’image primitive», « dépoétisé le rapport au monde» et aurait « intellectualiser les symboles». Gageons qu’il en dirait de même, aussi bien de la science désenchantée que de l’écologie militante !    

 

Oswald Spengler and the Morphology of Cultures

Arthur Chandler

Ex: http://www.arthurchandler.com

(originally printed in Humanities, 1978)

Morphology: “the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features” (Wikipedia)

Prelude

Under the gloom of the funeral day, adult hands persuade the child to the pews. The minister intones the solemn ceremony, while grown-up faces weep, or press their sadness between steady eyes and firm lips. The child feels the strange oppressiveness of the atmosphere, but as yet cannot fathom the reason. 

Then the final processional: grim men and women file by the casket. The father’s hands reach down and lift the child high: and there, hovering like a captive angel in his father’s grip, the child first sees the shell of his grandfather’s soul. He stares down at the face he knew last week: the same face, but now shrunken into something remote and unfamiliar. It’s not like grandfather sleeping: something is gone.

“The child suddenly grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is: something that has become wholly matter, wholly space; and at the same moment it feels itself an individual being in an alien and extended world. Here, in the decisive moments of existence, when the child first becomes man and realizes his immense loneliness in the universal, the world-fear reveals itself for the first time as the human fear in the presence of death.”

Later, back in the subdued warmth of his own home, the child gazes out the window. People walk, cats prowl, birds dart. All live — but not grandfather. He will never walk the earth again. Never.

The day completes its cycle. Distinctions blur in the landscape. Stars wink into sight — tiny brightnesses in a vast dark. People lie down to sleep. Some people, like grandfather, will never see the morning: this the child now knows with certitude. 

The tears well up and shatter down his cheeks. He cries not only for the loss of what grandfather was for him: he cries for the inescapable loneliness that the sureness of grandfather’s death now means.

In these moments, the soul of the culture, like the soul of the child, is born. 

First Act: The Birth of the Soul of the Culture

“Primeval man is a ranging animal, a being whose waking consciousness restlessly feels its way through life, under no servitude of place or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert to drive off some element of hostile Nature. A deep transformation sets in at first with agriculture — for that is something artificial, with which the hunter and shepherd have no touch. He who digs and plows is seeking not to plunder, but to alter nature. To plant implies, not to take something, but to produce something. Man roots in the earth that he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earth-boundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes the friend, earth becomes Mother Earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up.”

People in landscape — this is the one fundamental, the basic unity of life and place that accompanies the birth of every culture. And from the shared unity of experience of the landscape comes the Culture: that totality of traditions and institutions that marks the expansion of a people’s existence into an organic unity greater than the sum of the individual lives that compose it.

The local earth and air surround them. The new-born are delivered into a regional Nature that envelops them with its special shape of hills, demands of the soil, felt rhythm of the seasons, and sublime procession of the heavens at night. The old are finally delivered into the earth, or scattered to the winds — back to the mother-landscape. All life between infancy and death becomes a participation in the greater life of the Culture itself. 

In every culture, attitudes toward the surrounding world coalesce, and shape themselves, in their highest mode of expression, as religion. In the springtime of a society, the myth of a people expresses for them what the world is and means, why it is fashioned thus, and what they must do in obedience to the Ordering Principle. It is here, in the forms and assumptions of each religion, where cultural axioms reside.

Most of the countless human societies that come into being never become civilizations. With a very few Cultures, however, a new form of growth cycle begins. The first herald of this beginning is the birth of the soul of a town. “This is a mass-soul of a wholly new kind, which suddenly buds off from the general spirituality of its Culture. As soon as it awakes, it forms for itself a visible body. Out of the rustic group of farms and cottages, each of which has its own history, arises a totality. And the whole lives, breathes, grows, and acquires a face and an inner form and history.” When this budding culture metamorphoses into a civilization, the fateful and fated cycle has begun. Thenceforward the style-history of the Culture ever more resides in the town, the city, and finally in the gigantic megalopolis.

The Prime Symbol

As the town grows in the passage of time, the grand religious myths of its beginnings take on a style — those recognizable traits that separate each culture from all others — and mark the limits and possibilities of its soul. “Style itself is the rhythm of the process of self-implementing.” And it is the style that tells us that a building is Roman and not Renaissance, that a proof of a theorem belongs to Desargues and not Euclid, that a bas-relief is Assyrian and not Sumerian.

As an individual, everyone enacts a personal style of gesture, inflection, habit. The overall rhythm is given to us by the Culture, but its inflections are our own. Just so, people build and paint and create mathematics. Every architect, every artist, every mathematician shows forth in their work a style: unique personal inflections on the overarching rhythms of tradition. The unity of that cultural rhythm, the basic bond that integrates all branches of a culture into a pervasive whole, is its Prime Symbol. This symbol exists in every phase of a culture’s life, no matter how apparently grand or modest. But in its highest modes of creativity — in art, thought, political action and above all in religion, that the Prime Symbol is expressed with greatest purity and force.

“All that is, symbolizes.” In the great cultures — those entities that are destined to unfold into civilizations — world-fear and world-longing find expression in their Prime Symbols, which set the limits and define the possiblities of their growth and the secret of their inner principle of decay.

For Faustian Civilization — the outcome of the Culture of Western Europe and its siblings — the matrix of all reality, the core of its Prime Symbol, is infinite space.

The Gothic Cathedral’s spires and arches yearn upward for the infinite, just as its space-commanding giant of sound, the bellows organ, storms heaven with its counterpoint of expanding volume. In Faustian painting, the ever-present and unifying device of perspective commands the eye to follow out to the vanishing point at infinity. In the realm of mathematics — where cultures show their beliefs about reality in purest form — Western mathematicians posit an infinitely extensive and infinitesimally divisible grid of space-points which radiate out to infinity in three dimension — and later, in an infinite number of directions.

For the classical culture of Greece, the Prime Symbol was radically different — and so, too, was the form-ideal is sought to express in its arts and thought. For the people of classical civilization, the near and present bodily form of things made up the basis, the ἀρχή, of existence. Greek painting contains no ordered distances, only bodies. Euclidean geometry always gives us the mathematics of surface and volume, never point-systems of variables in a matrix of infinite, Cartesian space. Even the music of Greece, with its supposed harmonic connection with Western music, is in fact based on a sound-appreciation of a radically different sort. For the classical mind, harmony consists of the relationship of two sounded notes. To the Western sensibility, music consists of the ever-changing relationship among moving intervals — mobile spaces between note clusters — that provides the sense of sonic dynamism.

The Western/Faustian mind perceives the universe as infinite space: the Classical/Apollonian as well-ordered aggregates of bodily forms beneath a corporeal vault of the heavens. A third civilization — the Near-Eastern/Magian — conceives of the universe as a cavern. Here, the primordial light-versus-dark struggle pervades the cavern dome of the heavens even as it dominates the eternal wars among the human race. The Magian world is thus a cosmos of opposing substances: God versus the devil, the righteous versus the infidel. “Even death, for the author of the John Gospel, as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a Something, a death force that contends with the life-force for the possession of man.”

By setting the high cultural achievements of the Magian world alongside those of the Apollonian and Faustian, we perceive the radical dissimilarity among them. The classical temple is an architectural body of ordered elements, optically graspable in a single glance, designed as a completely exterior experience for the eye. The Western cathedral is an expression of an inward yearning for the light from infinity. The Near-Eastern mosque is a cavern from which the symbolic duality of light and dark contend in the enclosing dome.

In Classical mathematics, proportions among magnitudes comprise the entirety of number-thought. In the West, it is the relationships among varying functions operating in infinite space that make up the concept of number. In Arabian mathematics, is the “alchemical” transmutation of undefined qualities that pervades the essence of mathematics. “And as Euclidean geometry is to Attic statuary (the same expression-form in a different medium) and the analysis of space to polyphonic music, so is algebra to the Magian art of the gold mosaic and the arabesque.”

Infinite space, the cavern cosmos, the sum of the forms of bodies — these are the essential cultural axioms of three of the great civilizations that have actualized their Prime Symbols. To the historical imagination searching for the morphology of other cultures, other Prime Symbols can be discovered:

For the Egyptian, reality was “a resolute march down the path once entered.” The pyramids, seen in this light, are not buildings in the Western sense but pathways enclosed by mighty masonry.

“For the Chinese, the world-around is approached as a hither-and-thither wandering that nevertheless goes to the goal.” It is The Way: and in a culture where the path through Nature becomes the highest and deepest form of sensibility, landscape gardening becomes a high art, comparable in its richness and philosophical depth to the Gothic Notre Dame, the Magian Blue Mosque, and the Parthenon.

For the soul of India, the world is illusion, an existential zero, and its goal, the ever-circling phantom show of creation and destruction, to be escaped by attaining Nirvana. Here, the Prime Symbol is Zero — an idea which, in the realm of numbers, meant something entirely different to traditional Indian mathematicians than to their Faustian counterparts, for whom the 0 has always entailed deep paradoxes.

Interlude

The Child attains maturity. In the course of life, the growing youth encounters heroes and villains, profound thinkers and shallow phrased-spinners, firm friends and sly enemies. From all these people, real and fictional, we learn — but they do not influence us. We choose what we will take, and what we will ignore. Tough we expand and deepen our outlook throughout life, it is a deepening and expansion of our own nature. All outside forces are converted by our minds and bodies to our own uses. Those forces do not influence us: we pick and choose among them.  

We see a painting, hear a symphony, read a sonnet. In doing so, we “experience something in ourselves, but cannot give any account of the relation between this experience and what the creators lived in themselves. We see a form, but we do not know what in the other’s soul begat that form: we can only have some belief about the matter, and we believe by putting in our own soul. However definitely and distinctly a religion may express itself in words, they are words, and we put our own sense into them. However impressive the artist’s notes to colors, he sees and hears in them only ourselves, and if we cannot do so, the work is for us meaningless.”

Just so, the relationships between Cultures: connotations are not transferrable.

The Integrity of the Prime Symbol

Once a culture’s own Prime Symbol is established and expressed, its essence is unalterable. Individual works, or whole expression-forms such as Attic drama or Arabian alchemy, can be studied by Western dramatists or scientists. But outside their culture of origin, such works are lifeless. They have no power within themselves to move people of another origin. The choice to use this or that element must be made; and at that point, the user, not the work, dictates the nature to which the plot or formula will be put.

Furthermore, most alien works are never “borrowed” at all. “In all conventional history, it is only the relations that are accepted that we observe. But what of those that were not accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in Classical expression-forms — supposedly “influenced” by Egypt — the pyramid, pylon, obelisk, hieroglyphic? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was not accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily?”

“Consider how every living Culture is continuously bathed in innumerable potential influences. But out of these, only some few are admitted as such — the great majority are not. Is the choice, then, concerned with the works, or with those creators who choose or ignore them?”

In the end, nothing reaches maturity except through the fulfillment of its own nature. Each Culture transvalues all its borrowings and makes them its own. Denotations may be taken, but connotations are inevitably transformed. The Prime Symbol, the Culture’s basic attitude toward its environment, translates all influences, expands, grows deeper and richer thereby, but remains in its essence inviolable.

Finale

Children become men and women, marry, and beget their own children. In them and through them, the parents seem to be reborn, surrounding their offspring with affection, knowledge and moral lessons condensed from life. But for all the parents’ efforts, children still go their own ways, absorbing, rejecting, and recreating themselves with all that their environment offers them. The child is the father and mother of the adult.

And so the child grows old, following the unalterable decay endemic to all creatures born and moving through time. Early creativity stiffens into pattern and habit. The fire in the blood cools, leaving noble the lukewarm pleasures of the philosophic mind, or a death-driven flight into a second religiousness.

But even in the winter years, there are tasks to perform. Twilight and winter leave bare the shape of things: the darkening mountain, the leafless tree, the multicolored past stripped to its essential components and toned down by the blank certitude of impending death. Still the world-fear and world-longing are at work, even in the deficient veins of the old; and if accident and senility can be avoided, the prime feelings of meaning in the world may yet produce final, austere monuments as departing symbols of a mature mind drawing to a close.

And then, the only end of age.

The Last Task

Some civilizations, like the Egyptian and the Indian, prolong their final years into centuries. In extended crepuscule of long-lived civilizations, the main creative works had long since been accomplished, and only a diminished echo of earlier greatness lingered in art and thought.

In some instances, late megalopolitans yearn and clamor for barbarian vigor, and turn aside from their own spiritual sources in an attempt to rediscover  meaning in borrowed forms. This second religiousness sprouts like mushroom clusters on the great sitting tree of the civilization ion. And though the death of the Culture may be postponed, the decline may not, and must proceed on its destined course to the end.

For Western/Faustian culture, ripe autumn — the period known as the Enlightenment — has concluded. Already with the advent of Romanticism, the yellow softness of decay appears in the arts, and even in science and mathematics. “Impressionism is atheism in colors,” and n-dimensional geometry liberates Western mathematics from the obligation of perfecting the analogy between number and reality. Even the Prime Symbol of infinite space comes under challenge from thinkers who argue for a finite but unbounded universe.

In the sciences, arts, mathematics — in all of the highest orders of Faustian enterprise — the sureness of feel, the universal acceptance of the Prime Symbol of infinite space, has been lost. In all areas, a pervasive skepticism replaces certitude — a skepticism which is, in all cases, the mark of later stages of the Culture’s advance into Civilization. But in the West, this skepticism takes on an especially historical form. Faustian skepticism does not mean, as it did the Apollonian mind, a denial of the possibility of knowledge, nor, as it did for the Magians, a world-weary acceptance of Kismet. Faustian doubt takes the form of acknowledging that different conditions produce different results, that there is no truth that holds true everywhere and in all circumstances. In this connection, it is an occurrence of high cultural significance that Newton’s Laws have given way to Einstein’s theories.

With the loss of the sure feel of tradition, each of us stands at the center of our own conceptual universe and propounds our own unique theory of coherence. For each of us, this theory grows from the roots of Truth as we see it, and puts into practice the principles of action that anyone who aspires to first rank must have. But next to us in the city-scape grows another human-plant, sinking different roots and bearing different fruit. The whole of our era in Faustian civilization is a rich, varied complexity of such exotic growths, each one vying, unsuccessfully, to cover the land, to establish a new Prime Symbol.

Only in the world of technics is the high level of traditional Faustian world-view maintained, and where the Prime Symbol is pursued with something like the intensity of earlier centuries. In the realm of technics, Faustian longing aspires towards its final achievement: the application of power-knowledge for the conquest of astronomical space. “Not this or that bit of the world, as when Prometheus stole fire, but the world itself, complete with its secrets of force, is dragged away as spoil to be built into our culture.”

Religious faith comes at the beginning, practical results at the end. The faith that first sustained Western Culture comes to be superseded by causal, scientific myths which are, nevertheless, still predicated through and through upon the religious foundations at the origin of belief. It is the expansion, refinement, and universal application of technics for the mastery of endless space that constitutes the last and greatest task of Faustian Culture.

“And so the drama of a high Culture — that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities — closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow. Time triumphs over space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man — a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes.”

In the end, Faustian Culture, like all that lives, must pass away. “Even our machine technics, which seems so imperishable, a contribution to the history of civilization, will end with the Faustian civilization and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten — our railways and steamships as dead as the Roman roads and the Chinese wall, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon.”

To hope, in fond and vain delusion, for renewed life, or for technics itself to save us from the decline is worse than folly. “Optimism is cowardice.” To recognize the inevitable, and yet perform what our heritage demands of us — this is the highest form of creativity left to us in the final season of our life-course. To face the world-fear of extinction, if not with the confidence of spring then with the determination of age — that is the last task of Faustian technics.

“We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man.”

All quotations in this essay are from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and Man and Technics, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson.

Backstory to “Oswald Spengler and the Morphology of Cultures”

When  I joined the interdisciplinary humanities program at my university, I at once recognized that I needed a unifying structure to unify the various works of literature, the fine arts, philosophy and history that I would be teaching — and, eventually, writing about. I had long been interested in all those fields, plus mathematics, film and photography — but had never thought about them or their interrelationships in any systematic way.

Over a lunch one day, a friend and colleague, David Renaker, suggested that I should look into Spengler’s Decline of the West for just such a unifying overview. I had heard of the book, but assumed it was just another one of the many apocalyptic pronouncements that had been popular in recent decades. But on the strength of David’s recommendation, I bought the book and started reading.

The Decline of the West, I discovered, as neither a traditional history book or a dirge predicting the end of civilization as we know it. Instead, Spengler opened up vast and profound vistas of world cultures, often with startling insights like this:

"Who amongst [present-day historians] realizes that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean geometry, between the space perspective of Western oil painting and the conquest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between contrapuntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities?" (Spengler, Decline of the West, Volume I, page 7)

The special attraction of the book for me was Spengler’s unusual willingness to see mathematics, not as a system of universal truth, but as yet another creation of each culture, just as much bound to its cultural “Prime Symbol” as its works of literature, art, and religion.

Later, Spengler’s thought served as my inspiration for an essay I wrote for the Western Humanities Review (link here). And though, in the passage of time, I’ve become skeptical of some of his wide-ranging assertions, I still admire the power of his mind and his heroic determination to find unity in the infinite diversity of human history.

La Haute Culture Surhumaniste:
l’avenir de l’Occident

By Ted Sallis

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

English original here ^[2]

L’Occident et ses peuples peuvent-ils être sauvés ? Et que faudra-t-il pour cela – en particulier si nous recherchons une solution à long terme plutôt qu’une dernière digue « provisoire » ? Une nouvelle Haute Culture de l’Occident peut-elle naître pour assurer l’existence des peuples de l’Occident pour une longue durée ? Quelles caractéristiques une telle nouvelle culture devrait-elle posséder ?

Je supposerai que le lecteur connaît le the modèle civilisationnel d’Oswald Spengler ^[3], un  modèle en grande partie adopté par Francis Parker Yockey dans ses divers travaux sur l’Occident et ses possibilités futures. Avec un Printemps, un Eté, un Automne et un Hiver dans une Haute Culture, l’« Hiver » est la phase de la fin imminente. Il est clair, du moins pour moi (et il semble que Michael O’Meara soit d’accord avec cette évaluation), que nous sommes dans l’« Hiver » de notre Haute Culture Occidentale (c’est-à-dire « faustienne ») moderne actuelle. Et, immergée dans ce déclin, privée d’un principe organisateur dominant qui puisse fournir une structure spirituelle permettant la continuation de son existence, la race blanche est en train de mourir, ne parvient plus à se reproduire, est remplacée par des étrangers, et oppose un degré de résistance inapproprié à la mort de l’Occident.

Dans les véritables saisons du climat physique, le printemps suit l’hiver. La même chose peut-elle être vraie pour des peuples particuliers et leurs Hautes Cultures ? Si la volonté de (re)-naissance civilisationnelle conduit à la survie raciale à long terme, devrions-nous au moins examiner les possibilités ? Bien sûr, on ne peut pas prédire avec une entière exactitude si une (re)-naissance civilisationnelle aura lieu, et encore moins la forme précise qu’un tel événement prendra. De plus, on ne peut pas planifier à l’avance et créer une Haute Culture de la même manière qu’on établit la formulation générale d’une stratégie et qu’on conduit ensuite les troupes à la bataille. Une Haute Culture doit se développer selon ses propres lois, d’après des facteurs qui ne sont pas entièrement sous contrôle humain (conscient). Cependant, on peut et on doit examiner les données, envisager les possibilités, et, dans la mesure du possible, encourager les tendances conduisant à une (re)-naissance civilisationnelle. De plus, ces tendances pourraient et devraient être guidées, dans la mesure du possible, dans des directions qui seraient plus fructueuses et plus cohérentes avec la nature de notre peuple.

Un point de départ est d’examiner notre Haute Culture actuelle, dont nous voyons les vestiges mourant autour de nous. La dénommée civilisation « occidentale » ou « faustienne » a été décrite par Spengler, et est résumée ainsi ^[4]:

« …les Occidentaux ^[5] modernes étant faustiens ^[6]. D’après ses théories, nous vivons maintenant dans l’hiver de la civilisation ^[7] faustienne. Sa description de la civilisation faustienne est celle d’une civilisation où la masse recherche constamment l’inaccessible – faisant de l’Homme Occidental une figure fière mais tragique, car tout en luttant et en créant il sait secrètement que le but réel ne sera jamais atteint. »

Ici nous voyons deux caractéristiques définissantes de la civilisation « faustienne » de l’Occident moderne (c’est-à-dire post-antique) : d’abord, un accent placé sur l’infini et l’inconnu, et ensuite que l’effort dirigé vers cela sera toujours infructueux ; les objectifs de l’Occidental sont toujours « inaccessibles ». Le second point et ses implications seront discutés plus loin. Pour l’instant, acceptons le modèle spenglérien et acceptons aussi que nous sommes dans l’Hiver de la culture faustienne. Or l’école spenglérienne, imbue d’« acceptation stoïque » (de « pessimisme »), nous conseillera d’accepter nos circonstances et d’en tirer le meilleur parti. L’ère dans laquelle nous vivons est ce qu’elle est, et, comme le soldat romain montant la garde sous le Vésuve en éruption, nous devons rester à notre poste jusqu’à la fin, jusqu’à ce que tout soit submergé par le déclin inévitable (l’entropie civilisationnelle, si vous préférez).

Mais si la race et la culture sont liées, la disparition de la culture signifie la destruction de la race. Mais est-ce vrai ? La Culture Faustienne n’est pas la première Haute Culture de l’Europe ; elle fut précédée par la Culture Antique. Spengler et son adepte Yockey rompent avec les interprétations culturelles précédentes pour souligner la forte discontinuité entre cultures antique et faustienne. Elles sont perçues comme deux Hautes Cultures distinctes, aussi différentes l’une de l’autre que, disons, la culture égyptienne et la culture « magique ».

Par conséquent, dans le même article sur l’œuvre de Spengler, nous lisons:

Spengler emprunte fréquemment à la philosophie mathématique. Il affirme que les mathématiques ^[8]et l’art d’une civilisation révèlent sa vision-du-monde. Il note que dans les mathématiques antiques grecques il y a seulement des entiers ^[9] et pas de véritables concepts  des limites ^[10] ou de l’infini ^[11]. Par conséquent, sans le concept de l’infini, tous les événements du passé lointain étaient vus comme également lointains, et ainsi Alexandre le Grand ^[12] n’avait aucune gêne à se déclarer descendant d’un dieu. D’autre part, le monde occidental – qui a des concepts du zéro ^[13], de l’infini, et de la limite – possède une vision-du-monde historique qui accorde une grande importance aux dates exactes.

De même, Revilo Oliver écrit ^[14] :

« Spengler identifie comme deux civilisations entièrement séparées et distinctes la civilisation antique (‘apollinienne’), entre 1100 av. J.C. et 300 apr. J.C., et la civilisation occidentale (‘faustienne’), entre 900 et 2200 apr. J.C. Ce sont les deux pour lesquelles nous avons l’information la plus complète, et entre elles Spengler établit quelques-uns de ses plus brillants synchronismes (par ex., Alexandre le Grand correspond à Napoléon). Même un siècle plus tôt, cette dichotomie aurait semblé presque folle, car chacun savait et prenait comme allant de soi que quoi qu’il puisse en être des cultures étrangères, la nôtre était une continuation, ou du moins un renouveau, de l’antique. Le rejet par Spengler de cette continuité était l’aspect le plus radical et le plus étonnant de sa synthèse historique, mais son influence écrasante a été si grande que cet aspect a été accepté par une majorité des nombreux auteurs ultérieurs sur la philosophie de l’histoire, dont nous pouvons mentionner ici seulement Toynbee, Raven, Bagby et Brown (20). L’antique, nous dit-on, était une civilisation comme les Egyptiens, maintenant morte et enterrée et sans lien organique avec la nôtre. (…)

Spengler (que Brown suit particulièrement à cet égard) appuie sa dichotomie drastique en opposant d’une manière impressionnante les mathématiques et la technologie gréco-romaines aux nôtres ; à partir de cette opposition, il déduit des différences dans la perception de l’espace et du temps, manifestées particulièrement dans la musique, et parvient à la conclusion que la Weltanschauung antique était essentiellement statique, ne désirant et ne reconnaissant qu’un monde strictement délimité et familier, alors que la nôtre est dynamique et manifeste un désir passionné pour l’infini et l’inconnu. On peut avancer diverses objections aux généralisations que j’ai si brièvement et inadéquatement résumées (par ex., la différence de vision est-elle réellement plus grande qu’entre la littérature ‘classique’ de l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle et le romantisme de l’ère suivante ?), mais le point crucial est de savoir si les différences, qui appartiennent à l’ordre que nous devons appeler spirituel par manque d’un meilleur terme, sont fondamentales ou épiphénoménales. »

J’ai tendu vers l’explication épiphénoménale – mais en tous cas, on peut accepter la conclusion globale d’Oliver dans ses divers travaux : soit la civilisation antique et la civilisation faustienne sont des phases différentes mais connectées de la même Civilisation, soit, même si elles sont complètement distinctes, l’Homme Occidental est capable de produire de multiples Hautes Cultures. De toute manière, on peut en conclure deux choses : (1) un successeur de la Haute Culture faustienne est possible et a un précédent, et (2) ce successeur sera intimement connecté de manières importantes à son (ses) prédécesseur(s) (même si Spengler et Yockey nieraient que cela soit possible).

Par conséquent, soit la civilisation antique et la civilisation faustienne sont effectivement liées (par une réserve génétique commune, une « âme raciale », et une attitude occidentale), soit, si elles sont vraiment distinctes, elles ne sont pas complètement déconnectées, puisqu’elles proviennent d’une source commune ou d’un fondement commun (encore une fois, la réserve génétique générale, l’« âme raciale », et la mentalité occidentale d’individualisme et d’empirisme plus grands que dans d’autres peuples et d’autres cultures). Non seulement la civilisation antique et la civilisation faustienne sont en un certain sens liées, mais, contrairement à ce que disent Spengler et Yockey – et c’est en fait un blasphème pour l’école spenglérienne, qui rejette l’histoire linéaire –, il y a une idée de progression, car la vision-du-monde de la civilisation faustienne est plus large que celle de l’antique ; en effet, cette plus grande largeur de vision est une caractéristique définissante de la faustienne. Cette largeur se manifestant dans des phénomènes comme la technique de haut niveau, et une connaissance massive de base de la science, de l’histoire, de la philosophie et de la moralité et de l’éthique, les bases sont donc posées pour une nouvelle Haute Culture ayant une vision encore plus large que celle de la faustienne. Un spenglérien dirait qu’une Haute Culture de l’Occident, même si elle est possible (et il nierait peut-être cette possibilité), serait complètement déconnectée des aspects « faustiens » de la précédente Haute Culture faustienne occidentale (c’est-à-dire de l’actuelle). Cependant, je dirais que, ayant été éveillé à l’univers dans son ensemble, il est peu probable que l’homme blanc créerait une nouvelle Haute Culture qui serait insulaire, rejetant l’infini. Dans la mesure (limitée) où nous pouvons prédire, ou même influencer, le développement d’une nouvelle Haute Culture, une direction potentielle serait une direction qui ne serait pas purement « faustienne » – au sens de la recherche de l’inaccessible. Au lieu de cela, on pourrait projeter une future Haute Culture qui serait basée sur la réalisation ultime et réussie (finale) de ce qui était précédemment considéré comme « inaccessible ».

Je dirais que le fondement Chrétien de la Haute Culture faustienne est responsable du fait que les buts ultimes que l’homme occidental cherche à atteindre finissent par être « inaccessibles » – et qu’il sait secrètement qu’ils sont « inaccessibles ». La mentalité chrétienne place des limites inhérentes dans l’esprit de l’homme occidental, et il est donc condamné à échouer finalement même si le plein succès est théoriquement possible (finalement). Après tout, le centre d’intérêt du christianisme est Dieu et non pas l’Homme, c’est le « salut » et non le triomphe, et l’accent est mis sur « l’autre monde » et non celui-ci, notre monde réel. Car que l’homme parvienne à la divinité – ou même qu’il ait cela pour but – est une forme de « blasphème », c’est quelque chose qui ne peut pas être toléré. Par conséquent, l’échec ultime doit survenir, puisque la réalisation du but « faustien » (la réalisation elle-même ferait d’ailleurs en sorte que l’événement ne serait plus vraiment « faustien ») n’est simplement pas possible dans une Haute Culture basée sur le christianisme. Le plein développement de l’homme occidental a été restreint par une religion étrangère qui a placé des chaînes sur son esprit et son âme. Nietzsche a bien reconnu les contraintes imposées par le (judéo)-christianisme ; dans L’Antéchrist ^[15], nous lisons (caractères gras ajoutés) :

« A-t-on vraiment compris la célèbre histoire qui se trouve au commencement de la Bible – de la terreur mortelle de Dieu devant la science ?… Personne, en fait, ne l’a comprise. Ce livre de prêtre par excellence commence, comme il convient, avec la grande difficulté intérieure du prêtre : celui-ci connaît un seul grand danger ; par conséquent, ‘Dieu’ connaît un seul grand danger.

L’ancien Dieu, tout ‘esprit’, tout grand-prêtre, tout perfection, musarde dans ses jardins : il s’ennuie et cherche à tuer le temps. Contre l’ennui, même les dieux luttent en vain. Que fait-il ? Il crée l’homme – l’homme est distrayant… Mais ensuite il remarque que l’homme aussi s’ennuie. La pitié divine pour la seule forme de détresse qui envahit tous les paradis ne connaît plus de bornes : il crée sans tarder d’autres animaux. Première erreur de Dieu : l’homme ne trouva pas ces autres animaux distrayants – il chercha à les dominer ; il ne voulut plus être un ‘animal’ lui-même. – Dieu créa donc la femme. De cette manière il mit fin à l’ennui – et aussi à beaucoup d’autres choses ! La femme fut la seconde erreur de Dieu. – ‘La femme, dans son essence, est serpent, Heva’ – tout prêtre sait cela ; ‘de la femme proviennent tous les malheurs du monde’ – tout prêtre sait cela aussi. Par conséquent, la science aussi vient d’elle… C’est par la femme que l’homme apprit à goûter de l’arbre de la connaissance. – Qu’arriva-t-il ? L’ancien Dieu fut saisi par une terreur mortelle. Voici que l’homme lui-même était devenu sa plus grosse bévue ; il s’était créé un rival ; la science rend les hommes pareils aux dieux – c’en est fait des prêtres et des dieux quand l’homme devient scientifique ! – Morale : la science est l’interdit en soi ; elle seule est interdite. La science est le premier des péchés, le germe de tous les péchés, le péché originel. Voilà toute la morale. – ‘Tu ne connaîtras pas’ – le reste découle de cela. – La terreur mortelle de Dieu, cependant, ne le priva pas de son ingéniosité. Comment se défend-on contre la science ? Pendant longtemps ce fut pour lui le problème capital. Réponse : chasser l’homme du paradis ! Le bonheur, le loisir encouragent la pensée – et toutes les pensées sont de mauvaises pensées. – L’homme ne doit pas penser. – Et donc le prêtre invente la détresse, la mort, les dangers mortels de l’enfantement, toutes sortes de misères, la vieillesse, la décrépitude, la maladie surtout – autant d’armes dans le combat contre la science ! Les problèmes de l’homme ne lui permettent pas de penser… Et pourtant – quelle horreur ! – l’édifice de la connaissance commence à s’élever, assaillant le ciel, faisant de l’ombre aux dieux – que faire ? – L’ancien Dieu invente la guerre ; il sépare les peuples ; il les fait se détruire les uns les autres (– les prêtres ont toujours eu besoin de la guerre…). La guerre – parmi d’autres choses, un grand perturbateur de la science ! – Incroyable ! La connaissance, l’affranchissement du joug des prêtres, prospère en dépit de la guerre. – Alors l’ancien Dieu en arrive à sa dernière résolution : ‘L’homme est devenu scientifique – il n’y a plus rien à faire, il faut le noyer !’… »

Effectivement. Si « les doux hériteront de la Terre », il n’y a pas de place pour un effort humain vers l’infini, qui atteigne son but, et qui place l’Homme sur le même plan que Dieu. Si la douceur, l’humilité, l’« humble agneau de Dieu » est l’archétype fondateur d’une culture, alors bien sûr l’infini et l’inconnu ne pourront jamais être atteints. « Tu ne connaîtras pas » : il est étonnant de voir tout ce que nous avons réalisé en dépit de cela, et ces remarquables réalisations occidentales sont survenues – pas par hasard – principalement pendant les périodes automnale et hivernale de la Haute Culture faustienne. C’est seulement quand les contraintes imposées par la culture à définition chrétienne se sont dissipées dans une large mesure que l’acceptation a priori de l’échec s’est affaiblie. Le problème est qu’avec une haute Culture décadente et mourante, cette émancipation (partielle) vis-à-vis du culte de l’humilité ne mènera nulle part. Seule une nouvelle Haute Culture bâtie sur le concept fondamental de la transcendance humaine, et sur la conquête de l’infini et de l’inconnu, permettra à l’Homme Occidental d’accomplir son destin. Les ruines croulantes de la Haute Culture précédente peuvent servir de blocs de construction pour le futur, c’est certain, elles peuvent fournir une inspiration, certainement, et être une source de fierté, c’est sûr. Mais nous devons regarder vers le Futur, et non pas monter la garde auprès d’un Passé mourant ou mort, comme le soldat romain de Spengler.

Si je n’ai aucun dédain pour les croyances des gens, qu’elles soient chrétiennes ou païennes, je ne vois pas un renouveau des anciens dieux païens comme une amélioration avancée par rapport au déclin du faustianisme. Remplacer Jésus par Thor, à mon avis, revient simplement à remplacer une béquille par une autre. Les hommes blancs ne devraient plus aller chercher des dieux exogènes, qu’ils soient nouveaux ou anciens ; nous devrions plutôt rechercher la divinité pour notre race. Pour l’homme blanc, il est temps de grandir et de rejeter les fantaisies de l’enfance, les fantaisies des dieux et des forces intelligentes externes contrôlant un destin que nous devrions être les seuls, vraiment les seuls, à modeler. La devise du monde antique était « Connais-toi toi-même », alors que celle de l’Age Faustien était une combinaison de « Tu ne connaîtras pas » et de « Tu tenteras de connaître et tu échoueras ». Pour la nouvelle Haute Culture de l’Occident, je propose la devise : « Tu connaîtras et tu triompheras ». Cela inaugurera une ère dans laquelle l’Homme Occidental libérera son potentiel en brisant les chaînes imposées par une infériorité supposée devant des dieux imaginaires.

La citation suivante de Yockey, dans The Enemy of Europe ^[16], résume l’objectif palingénésique que nous tenterions d’atteindre, si nous le voulions :

« Notre Mission européenne est de créer la Culture-Nation-Etat-Imperium de l’Occident, et ainsi nous accomplirons de telles actions, accomplirons de tels travaux, et transformerons tellement notre monde que notre descendance lointaine, en voyant les vestiges de nos édifices et de nos remparts, dira à ses petits-enfants qu’une tribu de dieux vivait jadis sur le sol de l’Europe. »

En d’autres mots, pas de dieux imaginaires. C’est l’Homme qui deviendra « Dieu ». Dans le livre The Portable Nietzsche, l’éditeur Walter Kaufmann interprète ainsi le « surhomme » de Nietzsche :

« ce qui est évoqué n’est pas une super-brute mais un être humain qui a créé pour lui-même cette position unique dans le cosmos, que la Bible considérait comme son droit de naissance. »

Tout cela est très bien sauf la dernière partie : « La Bible ». Non, monsieur Kaufman, la Bible ne considère pas le Surhomme comme le droit ultime de l’humanité, elle considère plutôt que c’est le « dernier homme ». C’est nous qui devons choisir ce qu’est notre « droit de naissance », pas les fantaisies délirantes de « la Bible ». Cependant, cela étant dit, le reste de la description est sain, si nous considérons qu’elle est appliquée à la race dans son ensemble et pas seulement à des individus sélectionnés dans cette race. Plus d’échec « fier et tragique » dans « l’effort vers l’inaccessible » comme dans la culture « faustienne » – au contraire, la Culture Surhumaniste sera caractérisée par le fier accomplissement réussi de la recherche de l’infini. C’est ce qu’un individu optimiste peut envisager comme nouvelle Haute Culture de l’Occident, avec des liens avec la culture antique et avec la culture faustienne, mais surpassant les deux dans le but et l’objectif de l’esprit humain. Voilà ce que peut être et doit être le Destin Occidental.

Que pouvons-nous faire pour pousser les choses dans la bonne direction ?

Bien que l’auteur juif Isaac Asimov ne soit peut-être pas très populaire parmi les nationalistes blancs, sa série Fondation ^[17] peut fournir une analogie utile. « La Fondation » était conçue comme piste de lancement pour une nouvelle civilisation après l’effondrement de l’« Empire galactique », afin que l’« ère barbare » après l’effondrement ne dure que quelques milliers d’années, au lieu de 30.000 ans. Placés comme nous le sommes devant l’effondrement de l’Occident à travers l’Hiver de l’Age Faustien, il serait prudent de semer les graines d’une nouvelle civilisation occidentale blanche émergente sur le long terme, tout en luttant aussi à court terme et à moyen terme pour préserver la race blanche et sauver la plus grande partie possible de la civilisation faustienne occidentale. Sans ces objectifs à plus court terme, la renaissance civilisationnelle à long terme ne sera pas possible. Inversement, sans une renaissance civilisationnelle, le préservationnisme blanc à long terme serait contestable.

Ainsi, il y a deux choses qui sont nécessaires ici. D’abord il y a la lutte pour la préservation raciale blanche et pour sauver autant que possible de la culture faustienne, pour servir de base de connaissance et de blocs de construction pour la nouvelle Haute Culture de l’Occident. Ensuite, il faut initier un effort pour commencer à poser les fondations de cette nouvelle Haute Culture. Comme indiqué plus haut, une Haute Culture est bien sûr un phénomène organique qui ne peut pas être créé sous une forme préparée à l’avance et artificiellement imposée à un peuple. Néanmoins, il est possible de semer les graines et d’avoir quelque choix concernant les gaines qui doivent être semées. Et ensuite, nous pourrons nourrir le jeune plant pendant qu’il poussera, et pendant qu’il se développera d’après son propre caractère inhérent. Cela, nous pouvons le faire et nous devons le faire.

C’est une question sérieuse requérant une stratégie pensée à l’avance et d’un caractère visionnaire extrême, pas une chose qui peut être « discutée » légèrement sur des « liens de blogs » ou sur des forums publics (typiquement malsains). Ce n’est pas une chose qui peut être faite en un jour. C’est un projet à long terme, sur plusieurs générations, qui doit être entrepris par des individus dévoués voulant poser les fondations de quelque chose de grand et de noble pour la postérité. Ce ne sera pas une « réparation rapide » dont les résultats pourraient être vus dans une décennie ou deux ; au contraire, c’est un projet qui a le potentiel pour influencer le cours de l’histoire humaine, et il doit être mis en œuvre à ce niveau supérieur.

Par conséquent, cet essai est simplement un appel à l’action et un examen initial et rapide des possibilités. Si un tel projet est initié un jour, il ne devrait pas et ne doit pas se perdre dans les détails des « mouvements » habituels qui obsèdent beaucoup de militants, et ne peut pas non plus être lié à l’activisme « défensif » plus sérieux, mais à court terme, qui est requis pour sauver notre peuple et notre culture aujourd’hui. C’est une autre question, sur un plan entièrement différent.

Beaucoup sont appelés ; peu sont élus. Le Futur attend.

Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: https://www.counter-currents.com

URL to article: https://www.counter-currents.com/2012/06/la-haute-culture-surhumaniste-l-avenir-de-loccident/

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: https://cdn.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/DaliColossus.jpg

[2] here: https://www.counter-currents.com/2010/10/the-overman-high-culture-future-of-the-west/

[3] modèle civilisationnel d’Oswald Spengler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spengler%27s_civilization_model

[4] ainsi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West

[5] Occidentaux: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world

[6] faustiens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faustian

[7] civilisation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

[8] mathématiques: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics

[9] entiers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer

[10] limites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limit_%28mathematics%29

[11] infini: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity

[12] Alexandre le Grand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great

[13] zéro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_%28number%29

[14] écrit: http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/Enemy_1.html

[15] L’Antéchrist: http://www.fns.org.uk/ac.htm

[16] The Enemy of Europe: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Francis_Parker_Yockey#The_Enemy_of_Europe_.281953.29

[17] Fondation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series

 

 

Le métissage des cultures est-il possible?

Le métissage des cultures est-il possible?

par Pierre Marcowich

Ex: https://oswald-spengler-le-retour.e-monsite.com

Pour Oswald SPENGLER, les cultures sont des courants de vie organiques, c’est-à-dire un ensemble d’organes par lesquels la vie s’exprime et constitue un processus créateur de formes diverses (peuples, État, nation, religion, langues, droit, art, économie, coutumes, etc.). 

Remarquons, au passage, que, pour Oswald SPENGLER, c’est la culture qui crée le peuple, et non pas le peuple qui crée sa culture, comme il est d’usage de penser. 

Oswald SPENGLER constate que moins la pensée historique connaît ces courants de vie (cultures), plus elle s’acharne à considérer que la vie se trouve dans les relations multiples de ces cultures entre elles, et, par conséquent (et paradoxalement) moins elle comprend ces relations elles-mêmes : 

« Quelle richesse de psychologie dans ces cultures qui s’attirent, se repoussent, se rapprochent, s’étudient, se corrompent, s’entrechoquent ou se sacrifient, soit qu’elle s’admirent ou se combattent en contact immédiat, soit qu’elles vivent isolées en face du monde formel d’une culture défunte, dont le paysage montre encore les ruines. » (1) 

Oswald SPENGLER porte, à mon avis, un regard très perspicace sur les différentes sortes de relations que peuvent avoir les cultures entre elles. Qui d’entre nous, lecteur, je vous le demande, n’a pas lu un ouvrage ou un article répertoriant et décrivant avec minutie les relations commerciales depuis 1.000 ans entre l’Occident et le monde arabe, ou entre le monde arabe et la Chine, dans lequel l’auteur conclue, péremptoire, que ces relations démontrent l’influence réciproque des cultures, sans analyser plus au fond, c’est-à-dire sans tenter de découvrir l’univers intérieur produit dans chaque être par les différentes cultures qui se rencontrent. 

En effet, la pensée historique actuelle ne voit ou ne comprend pas l’univers intérieur des hommes de cultures différentes, nous dit Oswald SPENGLER. Ce sont alors deux mondes aux antipodes l’un de l’autre. Mais l’historien rationaliste et causaliste ne veut voir que les faits bruts avec lesquels il construit une chaîne continue de relations de cause à effet. 

Oswald SPENGLER nous donne l’explication du comportement de l’historien moderne : 

« À la base de cette mentalité scientifique se trouve l’image grandiose d’une unité de l’histoire humaine, telle qu’elle est apparue un jour aux grands maîtres du gothique. » (2) 

C’est donc, nous dit Oswald SPENGLER, une vision purement occidentale. L’homme occidental veut embrasser le monde entier pour le comprendre. Du coup, il s’élève à la généralisation des êtres humains la plus élevée possible, en ignorant les courants de vie qui sont propres aux cultures.

L’unicité de l’être humain, comme on dit au XXIème siècle, signifie que tous les êtres humains ont le même univers intérieur, le même regard sur le monde, les cultures n’étant qu’un habit superficiel. 

Et Oswald SPENGLER de constater : 

« C’est une dynamique purement faustienne. Aucun homme d’une autre culture ne s’est représenté ainsi l’histoire. » (3) 

En effet, nous dit Oswald SPENGLER, jamais l’esprit grec n’a recherché les effets des unités d’expression communes entre le drame attique et l’art égyptien. Pour l’homme antique, chaque nation menait sa vie propre. 

Qu’on pense également à la notion de gentils  ou d’infidèles (païens) propre à la culture arabe (qu’on la considère au stade juif ou au stade islamique) : pas de salut pour les païens. 

Nous sommes alors, dans ces cultures, en présence d’une ligne de démarcation infranchissable : grecs/barbares, peuple élu(juif)/gentilité (idolâtres), croyants(musulmans)/infidèles (qafir). 

Par contre, pour le christianisme, qui se trouve à la racine de la culture occidentale, le païen ou l’adepte d’une autre religion (musulman, juif, indou) peut toujours mériter le paradis chrétien, même s’il ne devient pas chrétien. 

C’est pourquoi, l’homme d’Occident fait la recherche chaque jour de l’élément spécifique et général de l’être humain. 

Mais pour ce faire, il doit théoriser toute chose pour parvenir, je dirais, au plus grand commun dénominateur général. 

Oswald SPENGLER nous décrit la logique de la pensée historique moderne : 

« On confond l’être avec l’être éveillé, la vie avec ses moyens d’expression […] la pensée théorique voit partout des unités théoriques mouvantes » (4) 

Oswald SPENGLER décrit alors la logique du chercheur faustien (=occidental) en sociologie, en histoire, psychologie, etc. : 

1)   il perçoit un système de formes d’expression (langue, coutumes, État, etc.) ;

2)   il lui donne un nom ;

3)    le nom dégage à ses yeux un réseau de rapports ;

4)   dès lors il croira que le nom est un organisme vivant ayant une fonction constituée de rapports entre des formes d’expression. 

On ne peut qu’admirer la perspicacité d’Oswald SPENGLER pour démonter le système de la plupart de nos théoriciens en sciences humaines, même contemporains, plagiant la méthode scientifique.

On ne peut pas, non plus, s’empêcher de penser, parmi d’autres, à Claude LEVY-STRAUSS avec son structuralisme, voulant, avec un acharnement inouï, construire un système de rapports de parenté global, applicable à toute l’humanité et à toutes les cultures et réussissant à obtenir que l’on mette à son service un mathématicien pour tenter (en vain) de traduire ce système structuraliste en fonctions mathématiques.

On comprend qu’un de ses laudateurs ait loué Claude LEVY-STRAUSS pour le fait qu’il voyait une égalité totale entre la diversité culturelle (humaine) et la diversité naturelle (végétale ?). On ne peut pas aller plus loin dans la généralisation théorique : le niveau supérieur consiste à intégrer les étoiles. Ce n’est plus seulement une simple spécificité occidentale. Cela devient de l’arrogance, la fameuse hybris occidentale ! 

Un autre exemple pourrait être pris dans la notion d’indo-européen qui représente un système de rapports entre diverses langues situées de l’Inde à l’Europe. À partir de ce système d’expression linguistique, on a créé ex nihilo le « peuple indo-européen » ! 

En réalité, nous dit Oswald SPENGLER, lorsque l’homme occidental découvre une structure étrangère à sa culture (religion, forme étatique, coutumes, etc.), il ignore, en général, ce qui l’a engendré dans l’âme de l’autre. Sa réaction immédiate, consiste à  projeter sa propre âme dans cette forme d’une culture qui lui est étrangère. 

Cette constatation d’Oswald SPENGLER, nous la découvrons quotidiennement dans les articles de journaux ou dans les ouvrages d’« experts » à la mode. Ainsi, cherchant à comprendre (ou plutôt « expliquer ») l’islamisme, ces « experts » considèrent que le monde musulman est divisé entre partisans de la laïcité (les « modernes ») et les intégriste (les « conservateurs »). L’Occidental ne peut même pas comprendre que la notion de « laïcité » ne peut se concevoir en Islam sans remettre en cause la nature même de l’Islam. Un « musulman avec une vision laïque » n’est déjà plus tout-à-fait musulman, me semble-t-il, ou c’est la religion islamique qui a muté, et c’est un autre problème. Il en de même pour la notion de « nation », typiquement occidentale, que l’Occidental tente de coller aux pays musulmans ou autres, et pour bien d’autres points. 

Mais, peut-on objecter, si l’on convertit l’homme de l’autre culture à notre religion, n’est-il pas possible de le transformer en Occidental ? 

La réponse d’Oswald SPENGLER est, sur ce point, formellement négative. 

En effet, selon Oswald SPENGLER, il ne peut pas y avoir de « transhumance psychique » (comme il dit) entre deux individus de culture différentes : 

« Une religion a beau se révéler dans des paroles aussi claires que possible, elle reste parole et l’auditeur y projette son sens intérieur. » (5) Il en est de même au plan artistique, politique, etc. 

Oswald SPENGLER concède tout de même que le don de « transhumance psychique », « très rare et très moderne est réservé à quelques hommes éminemment historiques », parmi lesquels, je me permets de l’ajouter, il se compte certainement, ce qui nous fait de bénéficier de son intéressante et magistrale vision de l’histoire universelle. 

Oswald SPENGLER précise qu’il y a incommunicabilité psychique entre deux cultures différentes que ce soit au niveau artistique ou religieux. Celui qui écoute ne fait qu’y projeter sa propre âme. 

Mais alors, que penser des influences indubitables que l’on peut constater entre deux cultures étrangères ? le chiffre 0 conçu par la culture indoue et transmis par les Arabes à l’Occident, l’arc en forme de voûte des églises romanes et gothiques empruntée à la culture arabe ? 

Oswald SPENGLER commence par définir ce qu’est une « influence » : 

Pour Oswald SPENGLER, une influence est une activité organique, c’est-à-dire qu’elle est une action exercée par un courant de vie organique, une unité cosmique (vision globale du monde), en l’espèce une culture. 

Par contre, les formes d’expression d’une culture donnée (art, langue, sciences, religion, formes étatiques, etc.) et- qui apparaissent concrètement dans les relations interculturelles, Oswald SPENGLER les définit comme des unités microcosmiques, car une forment un univers particulier, réduit à une sphère spécifique, produit par la culture, courant de vie organique. 

Et Oswald SPENGLER d’observer que, dans les multiples relations interculturelles, « ce ne sont pas les unités microcosmiques qui se déplacent, mais les unités cosmiques qui les choisissent et se les approprient. » (6) 

Autrement dit, lorsqu’un homme de culture A entre en relation avec un homme de culture B, chacun des deux dispose, pour lui-même, une multitude de systèmes d’expression (art, sciences, formes politiques, langues, coutumes, etc.) spécifiques à sa propre cultures. 

Pourtant, tout au long de la relation interculturelle, seuls quelques uns des systèmes d’expression passeront dans l’autre culture. 

En effet, si les influences entre les cultures s’étaient librement donné cours, il n’y aurait depuis longtemps qu’une seule « civilisation » éternelle. Ce n’est pas le cas. 

Lorsque deux hommes de cultures différentes entrent en relation, ce ne sont pas les unités d’expression (art, structures de la parenté, religion, etc.) qui sont actives, c’est, nous dit Oswald SPENGLER, l’homme seul qui est actif. Et l’action de l’un ne peut être intégré dans l’autre de façon vivante que si l’autre la sent dans son propre être. 

Ainsi, pour Oswald SPENGLER, ce n’est pas le bouddhisme qui a émigré de l’Inde dans la Chine, mais ce sont les Chinois d’une certaine culture (d’une certaine orientation de sentiments) qui ont accueilli le bouddhisme et l’ont transformé en une nouvelle sorte d’expression religieuse.

 En outre, Oswald SPENGLER constate que, au mépris de la théorie de ceux qui prétendre qu’il y a continuité entre les vieilles civilisations et les plus jeunes cultures, ce sont seulement les plus jeunes cultures qui empruntent aux organismes plus âgés un petit nombre d’éléments qu’elles interprètent sans égard à leurs significations originelles (dans la culture plus âgée). 

Pour Oswald SPENGLER, prétendre qu’il y a continuité entre la philosophie grecque et la nôtre, c’est utiliser un « jargon artificiel ». 

En effet, nous dit Oswald SPENGLER, l’interprétation de la philosophie grecque par les Grecs eux-mêmes, puis les Arabes et enfin par les Occidentaux constitue trois interprétations différentes. 

« […] : il n’ y a pas une seule proposition d’Héraclite, de Démocrite, de Platon, qui soit vrai pour nous, si nous ne l’avons pas tout d’abord rectifiée. » (7) 

On ne peut qu’être d’accord avec Oswald SPENGLER, en particulier lorsqu’on pense au destin de la fameuse proposition de PROTAGORAS « L'homme est la mesure de toute chose », qui était la marque d’un relativisme absolu (une sorte de nihilisme de l’homme antique), et à laquelle l’homme occidental déclinant donne spontanément un sens humanitariste, comme on a pu le constater notamment lors des affoulements provoqués par les déplacements de feu le Pape JEAN XXIII dans divers pays, durant lequels cette proposition avaient transformée en slogan sous le regard approbateur des grands médias. 

En outre Oswald SPENGLER pose alors la question que ne se posent pas les philosophes "modernes" : pourquoi certaines influences ne sont pas acceptés ? pourquoi ne montre-t-on que les influences acceptées ? 

En effet, observe Oswald SPENGLER, il est dit que la Renaissance fut entièrement sous l’influence de l’art antique. « mais alors qu’a-t-elle fait » de la forme du temple dorique, de la colonne ionique, de la tectonique des statues, etc. ? 

Pour Oswald SPENGLER, l’acceptation d’une influence, choix inconscient, constitue une exception qui va entraîner une nouvelle interprétation du sens profond de l’apport accepté. 

Oswald SPENGLER donne des exemples concrets de ces nouvelles interprétations dans le christianisme avec ses deux interprétations, sans qu’un seul mot du dogme soit modifié : culture magique (juive, arabe)  et culture faustienne (occidental). 

Ainsi, les premiers conciles chrétiens ressortaient de la conception magique (juive, arabe) où chaque homme est l’expression du pneuma (souflle, esprit) divin. Donc, dans le rassemblement conciliaire, l’idée d’origine était que  la majorité exprime la parole divine, la Vérité immédiate. Ce raisonnement était inintelligible pour l’homme d’Occident qui a fait du Concile un moyen de contrôle du pouvoir spirituel du Pape à l’époque gothique. Puis, dans un mouvement de spiritualisation totale, spécifique à l’esprit occidental, l’infaillibilité papale s’est imposée. 

On constate la même transformation du sens profond pour le dogme de la résurrection des morts, prise à l’origine au sens propre (résurrection de chair) dans la culture magique (juive), car le pneuma divin a élu domicile dans le corps humain. Cette résurrection de la chair, bien que jamais remise en cause, s’est transformée dans le christianisme occidental, porté à la spiritualisation, en l’immortalité de l’âme humaine. 

Oswald SPENGLER cite également d’autres exemples sur CALVIN et LUTHER dans ouvrage auquel j’invite le lecteur de se reporter. 

Comme le démontre Oswald SPENGLER, la jeune culture occidentale (faustienne), tout en maintenant le dogme ancien, l’a totalement réinterprété dans le sens d’une spiritualisation qui lui convenait, tout en créant de nouveaux dogmes (confession auriculaire) sur la base des Écritures évangéliques dont pas un iota n’aura été modifié depuis la période de la culture magique (juive). 

Pierre Marcowich 

(1)  Oswald SPENGLER, Le Déclin de l’Occident ; Éditions Gallimard, 1948, renouvelé en 1976, Tome II, Chap. I, Origine et paysage, § 12, page 54, alinéa 2 ;  

(2)     Ibidem, § 12, page 54, alinéa 3 ; 

(3)     Ibidem, § 12, page 55, alinéa 1 ; 

(4)     Ibidem, § 12, pages 54 et 55, alinéa 1 ; 

(5)     Ibidem, § 12, pages 55, alinéa 2 ; 

(6)     Ibidem, § 12, pages 56, alinéa 1 ; 

(7)     Ibidem, § 12, pages 57, alinéa 1 ; 

 

Renaud Beauchard : Christopher Lasch Une éthique de l'espérance

 

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Carl Schmitt spiegato ai giovani

Carl Schmitt spiegato ai giovani

Intervista con Niccolò Rapetti

Ex: https://ragionipolitiche.wordpress.com

La complessità e la irriducibilità a formule del pensiero politico di Carl Schmitt sono immediatamente evidenti guardando alla sua travagliata fortuna scientifica. Si tratta innanzitutto di un reazionario cattolico, un conservatore compromesso nel regime hitleriano; negli anni però la sua critica anti-imperialista e anti-liberale ha iniziato a piacere molto anche alla sinistra e pur nel suo evidente anti-americanismo il suo libro Il nomos della Terra è oggi lettura obbligata per gli ufficiali di marina americana. Professor Carlo Galli, mi viene spontanea una domanda: di chi è Carl Schmitt?

È un grande giurista del diritto pubblico e del diritto internazionale, che ha avuto il dono di un pensiero veramente radicale, e la sorte di vivere in un secolo di drammatici sconvolgimenti intellettuali, istituzionali e sociali. Ciò ne ha fatto anche un grande filosofo e un grande scienziato della politica; e lo ha esposto a grandi sfide e a grandi errori.

È innanzitutto necessario chiarire la posizione di Schmitt nella storia delle idee e del diritto: Carl Schmitt è «l’ultimo consapevole rappresentante dello jus publicum europaeum, l’ultimo capitano di una nave ormai usurpata». Che cos’è lo jus publicum europaeum? Come e quando inizia il suo declino, che Schmitt attraversò «come Benito Cereno visse il viaggio della nave pirata»?

Lo jpe è l’ordine del mondo eurocentrico della piena modernità; un ordine che è anche Stato-centrico, al quale Schmitt sa di appartenere anche se è ormai in rovina. Un ordine, per di più, che egli stesso decostruisce, mostrando che si fondava sul disordine, cioè non solo sull’equilibrio fra terra e mare ma anche sulla differenza di status fra terra europea e terre extra-europee colonizzate. Il declino di quell’ordine nasce quando si perde la consapevolezza della sua origine di crisi: quando l’uguaglianza formale fra Europa e non-Europa viene affermata nelle teorie (gli universalismi dell’economia, del diritto, delle teorie politiche democratiche e della morale) e nella pratica (l’imperialismo delle potenze anglosassoni, la loro – interessata – esportazione del capitalismo e della democrazia). Cioè per Schmitt dai primi anni del XX secolo.

Come si coniugano gli elementi «febbrilmente apocalittici» (teologia) e quelli «causticamente razionali» (diritto) nel pensiero politico di Carl Schmitt? In che posizione si trova il giurista Schmitt nei confronti di tecnica e teologia, diritto positivo e katechon?

Schmitt non è un apocalittico in senso proprio, nonostante sia così interpretato da Taubes. La teologia è, nel suo pensiero, un punto di vista, sottratto all’immanenza moderna, a partire dal quale comprendere diritto e politica, e le loro dinamiche. La teologia non ha la pretesa di essere una sostanza fondativa (Schmitt non è un fondamentalista) ma è anzi la consapevolezza dell’assenza di sostanza (di Dio), nell’età moderna. Questa assenza, che Schmitt reputa irrimediabile, è la spiegazione del fatto che la modernità è instabile, e che il suo modo d’essere è l’eccezione: questa richiede la decisione perché si possano formare ordini, e continua a vivere dentro gli ordini e le forme, che quindi non possono mai essere chiusi, razionali, neutralizzati. Da ciò deriva anche l’importanza del potere costituente, ovvero dell’atto sovrano che fonda un ordine a partire da una decisione reale sull’amico e sul nemico. E da ciò anche la tarda insistenza sulla terra (sulla concretezza spaziale) come possibile fondamento stabile degli ordini.

Considerando la distinzione politica fondamentale Freund-Feind, che opinione può avere Schmitt di tendenze fondamentali del suo e del nostro tempo, universalismo e pacifismo, che escludono per definizione l’idea di nemico?

Schmitt pensa – e lo spiega in tutta la sua produzione internazionalistica, dal 1926 al 1978 – che ogni universalismo e ogni negazione della originarietà del nemico siano un modo indiretto per far passare una inimicizia potentissima moralisticamente travestita, per generare guerre discriminatorie. Per ogni universalismo chi vi si oppone è un nemico non concreto e reale ma dell’umanità: un mostro da eliminare. Perché ci sia pace ci deve essere la possibilità concreta del nemico, non la sua criminalizzazione, secondo Schmitt.

Dopo aver annunciato la morte dello Stato nel saggio Il Leviatano di Hobbes, Schmitt teorizzò un’alternativa al potere statale, adeguata alla nuova concezione globale del pianeta che conservando la natura plurale del politico, potesse compiere la grande impresa «degna di un Ercole moderno»: domare la tecnica scatenata. Stiamo parlando dei Grandi Spazi, la cui formulazione è contenuta nella conferenza L’ordinamento dei grandi spazi nel diritto internazionale scritto nel 1939. Ce ne può parlare?

Il Grande Spazio, o Impero, è la risposta di Schmitt al Lebensraum nazista. Non ha caratteristiche biologiche, ma è in pratica la proposta di egemonia di una forma politica all’interno di uno spazio geografico-politico in cui continuano a esistere altre forme politiche non pienamente sovrane. Il GS è più che una sfera d’influenza, perché è gerarchicamente organizzato al proprio interno e perché è chiuso a influenze esterne; ed è diverso dallo Stato perché non è del tutto omogeneo giuridicamente: perché non è un «cristallo». I GS sono i soggetti di una concezione plurale delle relazioni internazionali; le due superpotenze del secondo dopoguerra, invece, per Schmitt erano due universalismi (capitalismo e comunismo) in lotta fra di loro e in instabile equilibrio.

Negli interrogatori dell’immediato dopoguerra Schmitt difese strenuamente la propria concezione del nuovo ordinamento spaziale chiarendone la differenza rispetto alla vera dottrina politica del Terzo Reich cioè lo spazio vitale razziale-biologico. È però indubbio che nel grande spazio come pensato da Schmitt si annidi un antisemitismo coerente con ciò che è condizione sine qua non della teoria: un rapporto forte e concreto tra etnia-popolo e terra civilizzata. Il nemico quindi, per Schmitt, non è l’ebreo in quanto Un-mensch (sotto-uomo, razza inferiore), ma l’«ebreo assimilato» che si pone come elemento sradicante della territorialità e della concretezza di una cultura. Dove sta allora la verità, che cosa direbbe sull’imputato e sull’imputazione: ideologia o scienza?

In Schmitt ideologia e scienza non sono distinguibili: ogni scienza è orientata,  storica; è affermazione di un ordine concreto, oltre che ricostruzione genealogica degli ordini. L’antisemitismo, poi, è presente in tracce più o meno evidenti in buona parte della filosofia tedesca – da Hegel a Schopenhauer, da Marx a Heidegger –, in forme diverse e con significati diversi; nei grandi filosofi non è mai determinante – ovvero, non è il motivo che dà origine al filosofare –: l’ebreo è utilizzato come un esempio di non-appartenenza, di individualistico sradicamento, di coscienza infelice e al contempo aggressiva. Il capitalismo, il socialismo e  la tecnologia sono spiegati anche (certo, non soltanto – soprattutto nel caso di Marx –) attraverso l’ebraismo, insomma. Questo atteggiamento – che è presente con forse maggiore virulenza anche nella destra francese – è ai nostri occhi gretto, insensato, pericolosissimo e tendenzialmente criminale. Schmitt, come persona, è stato antisemita in seguito al suo cattolicesimo (una delle fonti dell’antisemitismo in Europa; ma anche Lutero era violentemente antisemita), senza però che l’antisemitismo fosse particolarmente rilevante o importante nel suo pensiero; la sua adesione al nazismo, che a suo tempo ha sorpreso tutti,  non è dovuta all’antisemitismo ma a un misto di disperazione (per la caduta di Weimar, che aveva cercato vanamente di salvare), di orgoglio (la pretesa di poter guidare il nazismo verso un pensiero «civilizzato» e verso la soluzione della crisi dello Stato) e di ambizione (la chiamata in cattedra a Berlino, la vicepresidenza della associazione dei giuristi tedeschi, il ruolo tecnico rilevantissimo nella stesura di alcune leggi costituzionali come quella dei «luogotenenti del Reich» – 1933 –, la nomina a consigliere di Stato prussiano). Data la struttura radicale del suo pensiero, cioè dato il nichilismo che dopo tutto vi alberga e che gli impedisce ogni valutazione di carattere morale, e dato anche il suo precedente larvato antisemitismo, Schmitt non ha avuto remore nell’adeguarsi all’antisemitismo nazista – ben diverso da ogni altro – che pure non gli apparteneva, e che ha prodotto effetti terribili e grotteschi nei testi da lui scritti dal 1933 al 1936 (anno della crisi del suo rapporto con il regime), con alcuni strascichi nel libro hobbesiano del 1938 e nei testi «segreti» del primo dopoguerra (in realtà scritti per essere pubblicati postumi). In generale, per lui l’ebraismo è un altro nome del liberalismo (il problema è che nella fase nazista è trattato come la causa del liberalismo). La responsabilità politica, morale e storica è tutta sua; gli studiosi devono sapere che la forza del suo pensiero sta altrove, e al tempo stesso devono sapere che quel pensiero è indifeso davanti a questo tipo di aberrazioni (ma anche ad altre analoghe, di altro segno).

Carl Schmitt si è spento nel 1985 a Plettenberg in Westfalia alla veneranda età di 97 anni. Ciò significa che il suo sguardo non supera la «cortina di ferro» e si estende solo alla realtà della guerra fredda. Anche durante questo delicato periodo Schmitt ha continuato la sua attività di studioso e attento indagatore delle questioni di diritto internazionale dei suoi anni. Si espresse quindi sul dualismo USA-URSS, vedendo in esso una tensione verso l’unità del mondo nel segno della tecnica che avrebbe sancito l’egemonia universale di un «Unico padrone del mondo». Superando il 1989, e guardando al presente, possiamo dire che gli Stati Uniti dopo il ’91 hanno definitivamente preso scettro e globo in mano? L’American way of life è il futuro o il passato? Già Alexandre Kojève, per esempio, parlava di un nuovo attore politico e culturale e di una possibile «giapponizzazione dell’occidente».

Lascerei da parte Kojève, a suo tempo affascinato da Schmitt ma studioso di tutt’altra provenienza e di altre ambizioni. Quanto al resto, non è vero che gli Usa siano stati i padroni solitari del mondo, se non forse negli anni Novanta quando hanno affermato che il cuore del nomos della Terra è il benessere del cittadino americano. Hanno esportato la democrazia, e in realtà il loro capitalismo, ovunque e con ogni mezzo, praticando guerre presentate come azioni di polizia internazionale, con o senza la copertura dell’Onu. Ma hanno anche trovato resistenze ovunque: i terrorismi che spesso hanno armato, e  che si sono rivoltati contro di loro; ma anche soggetti geo-politici e geo-economici abbastanza forti da essere in grado di  affermare le proprie pretese – Cina, Russia, Iran, la stessa Germania con la sua forza economica di esportazione, solo per fare qualche esempio –. In ogni caso, gli Usa hanno dovuto assumere, dopo la crisi del 2008, una postura difensiva: protezionismo, per difendersi da economie più dinamiche della loro; ritiro militare da aree un tempo strategiche, come parte del Medio Oriente; scarsa propensione a interventi massicci in aree di crisi (che è la vera differenza fra l’amministrazione Trump e quelle democratiche che lo hanno preceduto); severa compressione della omogenea diffusione del benessere nella loro società. Resta invariato il diritto che gli Usa rivendicano ed esercitano di intervenire ovunque nel mondo con azioni mirate contro i loro nemici, che ora come sempre essi criminalizzano. Ma oggi non sono i padroni del mondo: l’Eurasia (Cina e Russia) ha un peso pari a quello dell’Euro-America (a parte il fatto, importantissimo, che entrambe queste macro-realtà sono divise al loro interno).

Al conflitto parziale e regolato tipico dello jus publicum europaeum (1648-1914) Schmitt contrapponeva la moderna guerra discriminatoria condotta per justa causa dove il nemico è concepito come criminale sul piano legale e inferiore moralmente. Le parti in conflitto non si pensano più come justi hostes, nemici reali che si riconoscono reciprocamente come sovrani sui propri confini, ma esprimono una guerra giusta che legittima l’impiego dei moderni mezzi di annientamento. La guerra regolare e circoscritta diventa allora con i due conflitti mondiali, totale e discriminatoria alla stregua di una guerra civile su scala mondiale; una guerra non tra regolari eserciti ma in cui anche i civili e la proprietà privata diventano oggetto di annientamento attraverso i bombardamenti aerei. Eppure in questa lucida e terribile diagnosi Schmitt aveva ancora la forza della speranza e concludendo il Dialogo sul nuovo spazio scrive: «sono convinto che dopo una difficile notte di minacce provenienti da bombe atomiche e simili terrori, l’uomo un mattino si sveglierà e sarà ben felice di riconoscersi figlio di una terra saldamente fondata». La questione, invece, oggi non solo è irrisolta ma si è radicalizzata lasciandoci uno Schmitt spaesato. Come si configura una guerra in un mondo globalizzato dove «le uniche linee generate dall’economia che siano geograficamente leggibili sono quelle degli oleodotti» e la religione torna ad essere politica e fortemente identitaria?

Oggi la guerra non ha più, prevalentemente, le forme della guerra totale che ha assunto nella Seconda guerra mondiale. Ma resta una guerra discriminatoria, come fu quella: democrazia contro terrorismo, Bene contro Male (concetto reversibile, com’è evidente). Nell’età globale, poi, in un mondo reso indistinto dall’omogeneità spaziale richiesta dal capitalismo, con l’ausilio dell’elettronica, si è rafforzata la tendenza verso la guerra discriminatoria, poliziesca, asimmetrica (Stati – e i loro contractors– contro bande armate, in mezzo a popolazioni civili): una guerra globale che scavalca i confini e che piomba dall’alto ovunque siano lesi gli interessi di alcune grandi potenze. Una guerra, certo, che – da entrambi i lati – non rispetta i vecchi parametri: distinzione fra interno ed esterno, fra civile e militare, fra nemico e criminale, fra pubblico e privato, fra religione e politica. Una guerra tanto lontana dai modelli tradizionali che un generale inglese ha potuto scrivere, citando John Lennon, «war is over».

Che cosa rimane dello studio di Schmitt sulla figura del combattente partigiano nell’epoca del terrorismo islamico e delle «crociate» americane per la democrazia e la libertà? Oggi il partigiano è ancora «l’ultima sentinella della terra»?

La figura del partigiano, elaborata da Schmitt nei primissimi anni Sessanta del XX secolo, è uno dei tentativi di pensare il ‘politico’ – in sé destabilizzante – in modo concreto e relativamente stabile: il che è possibile perché il partigiano è tellurico, perché difende un territorio. Il partigiano è portatore di inimicizia reale, non assoluta: combatte per uno scopo, non per mera volontà di distruggere. Non è un terrorista, un figlio dell’universalismo, della tecnica, di una volontà di dominio  globale. Se al tempo di Schmitt il partigiano poteva essere il vietcong (il che provocò a Schmitt qualche precoce simpatia a sinistra), oggi non è chiaro dove e con chi possa essere identificato.

La grande questione dello Schmitt del secondo dopoguerra, concentrato su questioni di diritto internazionale, è l’urgenza di un «nuovo nomos della terra» che supplisca ai terribili sviluppi della dissoluzione dello jus publicum europaeum. Porsi il problema di un nuovo nomos significa considerare la terra come un tutto, un globo, e cercarne la suddivisione e l’ordinamento globali. Ciò sarebbe possibile solo trovando nuovi elementi di equilibrio tra le grandi potenze e superando le criminalizzazioni che hanno contraddistinto i conflitti bellici nel ’900. A scompaginare il vecchio bilanciamento tra terra e mare, di cui l’Inghilterra, potenza oceanica, si fece garante nel periodo dello jus publicum europaeum, si aggiunge, però, una nuova dimensione spaziale: l’aria. L’aria non è solo l’aereo, che sovverte le distinzioni «classiche» di «guerre en forme» terrestre e guerra di preda marittima, ma è anche lo spazio «fluido-gassoso» della Rete. Grazie ai nuovi sviluppi della politica nel mondo si rende sempre più evidente come l’era del digitale non apra solamente nuove possibilità (e nuovi problemi) per l’informazione e la comunicazione, ma si configuri, nella grande epopea degli uomini e della Terra, come l’ultima, grande, rivoluzione spaziale-globale. Come possono rispondere le categorie del nomos di Carl Schmitt al nuevo mundo del digitale?

Se Schmitt non è solo il pensatore del conflitto indiscriminato, ma di un conflitto che è destinato a produrre un ordine, sia pure transitorio e mai neutrale, è chiaro che allora non convive bene né col capitalismo mondializzato, né con la tecnica globalizzata, né con la dimensione fluida e virtuale della Rete. In realtà, un significato contemporaneo di Schmitt sta in varie altre circostanze: inizia un’età post-globale, e per molti versi post-liberaldemocratica (ma non necessariamente post-statuale), contrassegnata da un nuovo pluralismo politico fra Grandi Spazi (non chiusi economicamente, però: questo è il problema) e quindi da un nuovo rilievo delle logiche geopolitiche e geostrategiche (di cui Schmitt è stato interprete originale e non pedissequo); nascono nuove richieste di sovranità anche in Occidente, dove prima regnava l’ideologia del mercato; la gestione della politica è sempre più spesso affidata a esecutivi forti, che agiscono attraverso «stati d’eccezione» più o meno espliciti; le dinamiche dell’esclusione interna verso i «diversi» si fanno più esplicite e il conflitto si fa più aspro (anche su questioni simboliche di fondo). Ma più ancora che di una importanza di Schmitt per decifrare il presente, è da sottolineare il suo grandissimo rilievo per decifrare la modernità e la sua crisi; per ri-codificare e ri-trascrivere la storia intellettuale, istituzionale e politica degli ultimi tre secoli (si pensi solo ai suoi libri sul parlamentarismo, sulla dittatura, sulla costituzione); per criticare genealogicamente e per decostruire il razionalismo e il pensiero dialettico. È questo rilievo critico – da assumere in modo non a-critico – a spiegare l’immensa  fortuna attuale di Schmitt nella letteratura scientifica, filosofico-politica, a livello davvero mondiale, tanto a  destra quanto a  sinistra, tanto in Europa quanto nelle Americhe e in Asia: attraverso Schmitt si ri-pensa il rapporto fra ragione e politica, fra opacità e  trasparenza, fra conflitto e ordine.

Décadence, effondrement, apocalypse

par Antonin Campana

Ex: http://www.autochtonisme.com

L’idée de « décadence nationale » hante le XIXe siècle. Taine souligne la médiocrité de la vie intellectuelle et la futilité des nouvelles générations. Ernest Renan, espère une réforme intellectuelle et morale qui désintoxique le pays des idéaux qui compromettent « l’état moral de la France » (1874). Plus concret, l’écrivain légitimiste Claude-Marie Raudot s’alarme, chiffres à l’appui, de la diminution du nombre des naissances, du déclin de la moralité, des « dépenses énormes » et de la « déperdition de forces » causées par la colonisation de l’Algérie. Il accuse la fièvre du changement : « La France est continuellement en révolution, écrit-il, comme un malade qui s’agite, croit trouver dans le changement un soulagement à ses maux et ne fait que les aggraver, la France est en décadence, donc elle s’appuie sur des institutions funestes et des principes faux  » (De la décadence de la France, 1850). Avec une clairvoyance extraordinaire, il répond d’avance à ceux qui voudraient endiguer le reflux démographique par la fabrication de nouveaux Français : « N’est-ce pas un rêve, écrit-il en 1862, de croire qu’on fera des Français avec les Arabes et les Kabyles ? Nous aurons en eux des sujets obéissants, tant que nous serons les plus forts, des concitoyens jamais » (Mes Oisivetés ).

Tout ce qui a été craint par les esprits les plus affûtés du XIXe siècle est arrivé à la France, mais amplifié au centuple ! Ils se plaignaient du fléchissement intellectuel de leur siècle ? Mais celui-ci avait encore ses Lamartine, ses Auguste Comte, ses Proudhon, ses Verlaine et ses Stendhal !  Aujourd’hui, nous n’avons plus que des Badinter, des Attali, des Luc Ferry ou des BHL ! Ils se plaignaient de la diminution du nombre de naissances en France ? Mais aujourd’hui, les naissances françaises sont directement remplacées par des naissances étrangères ! Ils se plaignaient de l’état moral de la France ? Mais aujourd’hui le sens moral se vautre dans le transsexualisme, l’idéologie LGBTQ, le féminisme, l’idéologie du genre, l’idéologie « no-child » et la stigmatisation de « l’homme blanc hétérosexuel de plus de 50 ans » ! Ils craignaient que l’on fabrique un jour des Français de papier ? Mais aujourd’hui ces Français de papier se comptent par millions et font la loi ! 

Les intellectuels réalistes du XIXe siècle ne se trompaient pas : la décadence avait bien commencé. Mais la décadence qui est alors dénoncée nous paraît insignifiante au regard de l’effondrement multiforme et gigantesque que nous connaissons aujourd’hui. C’est que le  pourrissement commençait à peine. Seul un nez exercé en percevait les premiers effluves. De nos jours, les odeurs sont insupportables et le cadavre est à un stade de pourrissement avancé. Peut-on encore parler de « décadence nationale » quand la nation est déjà morte ?

Pourquoi la décadence ?

Les auteurs dont nous parlons sont unanimes à dénoncer les dérives du sens moral. Pour Renan, l’affaiblissement moral de la France explique largement la défaite. L’idée que la défaite de 1870 procède de causes spirituelles plutôt que politiques ou militaires est d’ailleurs largement partagée à cette époque. On se souvient ainsi que la basilique du Sacré-Cœur de Paris fut construite en réparation des fautes morales commises par le pays. Or, l’idée d’une décadence qui serait le résultat d’un affaissement moral et spirituel n’est pas aussi absurde qu’il peut paraître.

On le sait, la société européenne traditionnelle a toujours été le produit d’un équilibre subtil entre le spirituel et le temporel, entre ce qui appartient à Dieu et ce qui appartient à César. La société française traditionnelle n’échappe pas, jusqu’à la révolution « française » tout au moins, à cette loi d’équilibre. Par son action, la République atteint l’Eglise, c’est-à-dire un pilier essentiel de l’ordre moral et de l’ordre social. Comment s’étonner alors du déclin progressif de la moralité et de la société ? Le refoulement du spirituel, qui irrigue l’ordre moral et l’ordre social traditionnel, ne pouvait que provoquer une rupture des équilibres antérieurs.

Or, une société ne peut rester en déséquilibre très longtemps. En effet, un déséquilibre se traduit toujours par une souffrance, un manque, une tension qui préfigurent la rupture et une nouvelle recomposition. Le déséquilibre « précipite ». Mécaniquement, l’organisation sociale va donc agir sur elle-même pour trouver un nouvel équilibre. Mais cet équilibre sera impossible à atteindre puisqu’une de ses conditions anthropologiques fondamentales, la spiritualité, aura été écartée. La société va donc se lancer dans une quête perpétuelle de remise en question et de changements sans fin. Comme une personne sur le point de tomber enchaîne des pas de plus en plus rapides pour tenter de se rattraper, la société en déséquilibre va enchaîner des transformations de plus en plus rapides… qui vont accentuer son déséquilibre et précipiter sa chute ! On l’a vu, Claude-Marie Raudot exprime parfaitement ce processus lorsqu’il écrit que la France est « continuellement en révolution », qu’elle est « comme un malade qui s’agite » et que le « changement » grâce auquel le pays espère se rétablir ne fait au contraire qu’aggraver ses problèmes.

Prenons l’exemple de la dénatalité, puisqu’il est pointé par Raudot :

Au déséquilibre démographique, le régime répond ainsi par un « changement » : l’ouverture des frontières, l’organisation d’une immigration de masse et des naturalisations intensives (celles, précisément, que semblait redouter Raudot). Mais cette immigration crée à son tour des déséquilibres encore plus importants : des zones de non-droit apparaissent, la France connaît une guerre civile de basse intensité. Le régime cherche alors à résoudre ce nouveau déséquilibre par un nouveau « changement » : il discrimine économiquement la France périphérique, avantage les banlieues et tient un discours qui stigmatise les Français de souche. Mais ce changement engendre un autre déséquilibre : la France périphérique se révolte (Gilets jaunes) sans que pour autant les allochtones se tiennent tranquilles (Bataclan). Le régime répond à cette agitation par un nouveau changement : il accentue les violences policières et se dote de lois qui l’autorisent à placer la population sous surveillance. Mais ce changement exacerbe les tensions et rapproche le pays d’une guerre civile de forte intensité. Le régime y répondra sans doute par une violence encore plus dure, avant de disparaître définitivement sous le poids des changements qu’il a provoqués.  

Nous pourrions prendre d’autres exemples comme le mariage, la famille ou la langue. Comment est-on passé du mariage comme sacrement devant Dieu au « mariage pour tous » ? Comment est-on passé de la famille patriarcale à la famille homoparentale non genrée ? Comment est-on passé des sermons de Bossuet à l’écriture inclusive ? Ce sont bien des principes absurdes, avec la complicité d’institutions dévoyées, qui par étapes successives ont entraîné la décadence de tous les aspects de la France !

En fait, quand le spirituel « laisse les clés » au temporel, alors l’effondrement est inévitable. Pour Durkheim, la religion fait l’unité du groupe. Cela signifie que s’il n’y a plus de religion, alors il y a fractionnement. Et s’il y a fractionnement, il y a lutte d’intérêts entre les parties. Autrement dit, le déséquilibre de la société, implique une lutte de plus en plus âpre entre des parties qui auront tendance à se scinder en sous-parties, elles-mêmes en lutte les unes contre les autres et elles-mêmes se scindant à leur tour. Le déséquilibre engendre un déséquilibre de plus en plus grand, de plus en plus rapide, de plus en plus diversifié et de plus en plus diversifiant jusqu’à l’effondrement final. La société se cannibalise : les allochtones contre les Autochtones, les femmes contre les hommes, les homosexuels contre les hétérosexuels, les jeunes contre les vieux, le privé contre le public, les lesbiennes contre les gays, les végans contre  les végétariens, les végétariens contre les flexitariens…

Confirmant Durkheim, l’historien David Engels, explique que l’athéisme est l’un des marqueurs de la décadence de la République romaine (voyez ici).

L’Ancien Testament expose quant à lui que l’oubli des commandements de Dieu empêchera les champs de produire, transformera les villes en désert, dispersera le peuple parmi les nations. En d’autres termes, transparaît l’idée que l’athéisme est cause d’effondrement.

 A l’autre bout du monde, les études de Claude Lévi-Strauss montrent qu’il y a un rapport entre la destruction, par les missionnaires salésiens, des structures cérémonielles des indiens Bororos du Brésil (par le démantèlement de l’organisation géométrique de leur habitat) et l’effondrement ultérieur de leur société.

Chez nous, en France, le processus d’effondrement (économique, démographique, culturel, moral…) commence véritablement à partir de la Révolution. Or la Révolution installe, avec une violence inouïe, un régime qui systématise le rejet de la religion traditionnelle…

Il se pourrait que l’effondrement des sociétés humaines commence lorsque le spirituel n’est plus opérationnel dans le social, lorsqu’il n’irrigue plus le tissu social, lorsqu’il n’a plus son mot à dire dans la structuration sociale et la bonne marche de la société. Religion, religare, relier : quand le spirituel ne relie plus, alors la société se désagrège et disparaît.

Que rajouter de plus de notre point de vue autochtoniste, étant posé que cette société en putréfaction nous est désormais totalement étrangère ? Tout d’abord, que l’enchainement de plus en plus rapide des déséquilibres rend inutile de s’impliquer en faveur de l’une ou de l’autre des « parties » actuellement en lutte, sauf si des nécessités stratégiques ou tactiques l’exigent. Ensuite que le processus de désintégration du corps politique est maintenant irréversible : il ira jusqu’au bout, c’est-à-dire jusqu’à cet effondrement apocalyptique de la société que nous commençons à voir. Enfin, sans doute, qu’il est nécessaire que l’effondrement atteigne son terme. Il semble maintenant que notre peuple ne renaîtra pas avant que son « reste pur » ne puisse dire, tel Jésus sur sa croix :

« Tout est achevé ! ».

Antonin Campana

Gisela Horst Panajotis KondylisLeben und Werk – eine Übersicht

Gisela Horst

Panajotis KondylisLeben und Werk – eine Übersicht

564 Seiten | Broschur | Format 15,5 × 23,5 cm

Epistemata Philosophie, Bd. 605

€ 58,00 | ISBN 978-3-8260-6817-1 

Dieses Buch enthält erstmals umfangreiche biografische Daten des Philoso-phen und Ideengeschichtlers Panajotis Kondylis (1943–1998) und einen in-haltlichen Überblick über sein umfangreiches Werk. – Kondylis promovierte in Heidelberg und verfasste bedeutende geistesgeschichtliche Standardwerke zum Konservativismus, zur europäischen Aufklärung, zur Dialektik, zur Mas-sendemokratie und zur Metaphysikkritik, und er bezog als Autor Stellung zum politisch-sozialen Zeitgeschehen. Sein Beitrag zur Philosophie besteht in anthropologischen Grundeinsichten, die in Macht und Entscheidung und Sozialontologie entwickelt werden. Er lieferte zwei Beiträge zum histori-schen Lexikon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe und war Träger von Ehrungen und Preisen, u.a. erhielt er den Wissenschaftspreis der Humboldtstiftung, war Fellow des Berliner Wissenschaftskollegs und Träger der Goethemedaille.Die AutorinGisela Horst (geb. 1946) kennt Kondylis aus persönlichen Gesprächen; nach Ende ihrer beruflichen Tätigkeit als Naturwissenschaftlerin studierte sie Lite-ratur- und Geschichtswissenschaft an der Fernuniversität in Hagen und ver-fasste dort eine Dissertation zu Leben und Werk von P. Kondylis bei Prof. Dr; Peter Brandt

Julien Freund : La fin des conflits ?

Julien Freund : La fin des conflits ?

par Chantal Delsol

Ex: https://www.chantaldelsol.fr

Communication prononcée au colloque Julien Freund, Strasbourg, 2010

On sait que Julien Freund ne croit pas à la fin possible des conflits dans le monde humain. C’est bien d’ailleurs ce postulat, fondamental dans sa philosophie, qui l’avait opposé à son premier directeur de thèse, Jean Hyppolite, l’avait conduit à chercher un autre directeur de thèse qu’il avait trouvé en la personne de Raymond Aron, et avait occasionné un débat pathétique et drolatique avec Hyppolite lors de la soutenance de thèse.

L’accusation d’utopisme porté par Freund aux pacifistes ne l’englue pas dans un empirisme cynique, mais laisse la porte ouverte à une espérance qui est d’une autre sorte. Je voudrais montrer que cet idéal, outre qu’il marque l’empreinte religieuse dans l’esprit de notre auteur, signe la marque de son temps : il n’a pas pu voir quel genre de « fin des conflits » est attendue aujourd’hui, tout autre que celle des utopies présentes à son époque. Ce qui montre l’inscription de sa pensée dans une époque, en même temps que sa pérennité.

Appartenant à cette minuscule espèce des intellectuels non-marxisants de son temps, Freund use une bonne partie de son énergie à argumenter contre les utopies de la paix universelle. Il aime partir de l’argument kantien : si les rois européens ont réussi à éteindre les conflits privés sur leurs terres afin de constituer des Etats souverains nantis du monopole de la violence légitime, pourquoi un Etat universel ne pourrait-il un jour éradiquer les conflits inter-étatiques ? L’idée est belle, elle appelle l’instauration du souverain bien, si l’on veut apercevoir que le bien, inverse du diabolos, est lien, sumbolos – donc paix et fraternité. Mais l’instauration du souverain bien, déclinée comme un programme politique international, est simplement « l’un des rêves du socialisme ». La paix sous cet aspect universel et abstrait est une valeur non médiatisée, donc impraticable, car dès qu’il faudra en donner la définition, les conflits se développeront à ce sujet (« rien n’est plus ‘polémogène’ que les idées divergentes sur la perfection », Politique et Impolitique, Sirey, 1987, p.207). Pour Freund, les conflits existent simplement parce que les hommes nourrissent des croyances et des attachements, au nom desquels ils se querellent, et vouloir annihiler les conflits serait vouloir priver les hommes de pensée. Si l’on reprend un slogan actuel qui marque la misanthropie de notre contemporain : « les animaux, eux, au moins, ne se battent que pour manger », on pourrait dire que pour anéantir les conflits humains il faudrait tous nous décerveler, nous ramener à l’état animal… Cela signifie que l’Etat mondial ne sera pas soustrait, parce qu’unique, aux querelles et combats internes, d’autant qu’il pourra aisément, parce qu’unique, se retourner contre ses peuples (qui jugera le juge ultime ?). Freund se saisit lui aussi de la conclusion du dernier Kant : un Etat mondial serait despotique.

Il reste que la notion de « nature humaine », expression que Freund utilise souvent -je préfèrerais « condition humaine », qui est moins statique et moins fondée dans une dogmatique-, est plurivoque.

La « nature humaine » sous entend des caractères humains immuables et enracinés dans des spécificités : essentiellement, ici, quand il s’agit de la pérennité des conflits, la liberté humaine devant l’impossibilité d’atteindre la Vérité, et donc le débat infini entre les croyances ; et en même temps, l’enracinement de l’homme dans une culture particulière qu’il ne pourra que défendre face aux autres et contre les autres.

Mais aussi, la « nature humaine » comprise dans la dimension de l’espérance, sous entend que l’homme partout et toujours vise le bien parfait, entendu universellement comme un lien.

Ainsi, la paix est un idéal, et en tant que telle, comme l’espérance d’Epiméthée, elle mérite nos efforts plus que nos ricanements. Il est juste que nous fassions tout pour faire advenir une paix lucide, sachant bien qu’elle ne parviendra jamais à réalisation. En ce sens, l’aspiration à la société cosmopolite est une aspiration morale naturelle à l’humanité, et vouloir récuser cette aspiration au nom de la permanence des conflits serait vouloir retirer à l’homme la moitié de sa condition. En revanche, prétendre atteindre la société cosmopolite comme un programme, à travers la politique, serait susciter un mélange préjudiciable de la morale et de la politique. Parce que nous sommes des créatures politiques, nous devons savoir que la paix universelle n’est qu’un idéal et non une possibilité de réalisation. Parce que nous sommes des créatures morales, nous ne pouvons nous contenter benoîtement des conflits sans espérer jamais les réduire au maximum. Le « règne des fins » ne doit pas aller jusqu’à constituer une eschatologie politique (qui existe aussi bien dans le libéralisme que dans le marxisme, et que l’on trouve au XIX° siècle jusque chez Proudhon), parce qu’alors il suscite une sorte de crase dommageable et irréaliste entre la politique et la morale. Mais l’espérance du bien ne constitue pas seulement une sorte d’exutoire pour un homme malheureux parce qu’englué dans les exigences triviales d’un monde conflictuel : elle engage l’humanité à avancer sans cesse vers son idéal, et par là à améliorer son monde dans le sens qui lui paraît le meilleur, même si elle ne parvient jamais à réalisation complète.

Or sur quoi repose cette notion d’idéal, et l’espérance qui la fonde ? Sur une vision du temps fléché, vision apparue avec les judéo-chrétiens et poursuivie à partir de la saison des Lumières grâce à la croyance au Progrès. Julien Freund se situe dans le temps fléché.

Dans la conclusion de Politique et Impolitique, Freund évoque la désaffection du politique, désaffection en plein développement. Il la lie au désir de destruction qui caractérise les courants extrêmes de son époque, et il évoque la complexité croissante des problèmes et l’identification de la politique et de la technique. Mais Freund n’a pas connu le développement tout récent d’un âge vraiment technocratique, notamment à partir du « gouvernement » européen depuis le début des années 90. Il s’agit là d’une gestion plutôt que d’un gouvernement, d’une administration au sens où Platon prétendait qu’ « il n’y a pas de différence de nature entre une grande oikos et une petite polis » (aussitôt critiqué à ce sujet par Aristote dans La Politique). Freund n’a pas connu le déploiement récent de l’idée de « gouvernance », et la fascination qu’exerce sur nous l’idée de consensus.

Le consensus, « mot-hourrah », représente une aspiration permanente depuis la fin du XX° siècle, et traduit la méfiance vis à vis du vote majoritaire en vigueur en Europe depuis le XIII° siècle (et même depuis le VII° siècle dans les monastères). Le consensus était le système de décision qui prévalait dans toutes les assemblées populaires anciennes, depuis le purhum mésopotamien jusqu’au fokonolona merina malgache, en passant par les diverses assemblées populaires de la plupart des peuples avant l’apparition des régimes autocratiques. Le regain du consensus se développe d’abord aujourd’hui dans les sociétés scandinaves, mais il se déploie dans les organisations internationales (ce qui est logique, puisque chaque pays y représente une souveraineté : il faut s’y soumettre dans la plupart des cas à une sorte de liberum veto). Le consensus est à la mode dans les instances dites de gouvernance, assemblées horizontales censées se substituer à la souveraineté et à la contrainte gouvernementale, ou au moins s’y surajouter. La gouvernance, type de gouvernement sans gouvernement, voudrait remplacer le débat entre les visions du monde par la négociation des intérêts. Dans un monde dénué désormais de croyances et d’idéologies communes, et marqué par le matérialisme, la querelle entre les finalités (ou guerre des dieux) est censée être remplacée par un compromis entre les intérêts matériels (on peut négocier les intérêts, mais on ne peut négocier les croyances).

L’appel au consensus s’accompagne de la récusation de la démocratie, récusation présente depuis peu d’années (alors que la démocratie se trouvait encore en pleine gloire après la chute du Mur). Les perversions démocratiques (corruptions des gouvernants), la lassitude des citoyens marginalisés (absentéisme électoral massif), l’accusation d’incompétence des citoyens devant des décisions de plus en plus complexes, et en outre, le soupçon devant un peuple conservateur voire sauvage (vote sur les minarets en Suisse), apportent de l’eau au moulin des antidémocrates et suscite l’avènement d’une ère technocratique, du gouvernement des experts – dans son Livre Blanc de la Gouvernance, la Commission européenne parle d’expertise et non de gouvernement. C’est, en termes grecs, le remplacement de la polis par l’oikos.

Ces évolutions extrêmement rapides traduisent une nouvelle manière de voir la société, en terme de fin attendue des conflits. Elles sous entendent :

– la recherche de la paix comme unique horizon : répondant à la fatigue du fanatisme partout présent au XX° siècle, fanatisme suscité par la multiplicité des croyances. On pouvait dire : fiat justitia pereat mundus, on pouvait dire : que le monde périsse, pourvu qu’il nous reste la classe pure ou la race pure, au moins on ne peut plus dire : que le monde périsse, pourvu qu’il nous reste la paix, ce serait contradictoire dans les termes.

– des sociétés marquées par le soin exclusif de la vie quotidienne, qui se négocie toujours, et probablement la gouvernance indique-t-elle des sociétés corporatistes ou « organiques », communautaires selon les adeptes de la philosophie pragmatiste qui se trouve à la pointe de ces changements de mentalité.

– la fin des idéologies, certes, mais plus encore : la fin des visions du monde pluralistes au sens de la fin des croyances en des « vérités » plurielles.

Le consensus, qui remplace l’attente d’un monde meilleur par la recherche permanente de la paix, enferme le monde social en lui-même et par là nous sort de la flèche du temps. La vie morale sans recherche de vérité nous replace dans le monde de la sagesse qui avait cours avant les monothéismes et qui a cours dans toutes les civilisations hors la nôtre. C’est là un changement de monde tel que Freund n’a pu le prévoir. Cela ne remet pas en cause sa pensée, selon laquelle le monde politique s’enracine dans le conflit, et selon laquelle le conflit demeure essentiel à l’humain, parce que les tragiques questions humaines sont médiatisées par de multiples cultures. Car même dans les sociétés structurées par des sagesses, les conflits surviennent pour des raisons de territoires ou de puissance, hors les conflits religieux ou idéologiques inexistants. C’est dire que dans l’avenir, les combats idéologiques ont toute chance d’être remplacés, non par la paix consensuelle qui est encore une utopie, mais par des conflits d’identités : la fin des « vérités » de représentation (liberté, justice, droits de l’homme), engendrera le retour des « vérités » d’être (patries, tribus).

Il n’en reste pas moins que cette tentative nouvelle pour biffer les conflits était difficile à prévoir dans la seconde moitié du XX° siècle, même si les appels étaient fréquents dès après-guerre à la féminisation du monde (Giono, Camus, Gary) qui en est un signe avant-coureur. Freund se situe dans un monde dominé par les idéologies, qu’il récuse, et dans la vision du temps fléché, qui lui inspire l’idéal d’une paix toute kantienne (s’agissant du dernier Kant). La rupture dans laquelle nous sommes se produit juste après lui. Nous aimerions qu’il soit encore là pour analyser cet aspect du post-moderne qu’il n’a pas pu voir.