Nothing new:society sunk into depravity comparable to the mythic Sodom and Gomorra

Goethe was the basis of Spengler’s historical method. He is cited throughout The Decline of The West. Of the method of historical morphology developed from Goethe, Spengler states:

“Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past history and future world-history. The deep, and scarcely appreciated, idea of Goethe, which he discovered in his ‘living nature’ and always made the basis of his morphological researches, we shall here apply – in its most precise sense – to all the formation of man’s history, whether fully matured, cut off in the prime, half opened or stifled in the seed. It is the method of living into (erfühlen) the object, as opposed to dissecting it”. 106

This is what Spengler calls Goethe’s “looking into the heart of things”, “but the century of Darwin is as remote from such a vision as it is possible to be”. We look in vain for any treatment of history that is “entirely free from the methods of Darwinism”.107 Spengler credits Goethe with describing the “epochs of the spirit” of a civilisation that agrees with his own, preliminary, early, late, and civilised stages,108 which Goethe called in an 1817 essay, Epochs of the Spirit, the Ages of Poetry, Theology, Philosophy, and the Prosaic. They equate with Spengler’s seasonal metaphors (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) which he calls “spiritual epochs”.

The Age of Poetry is one of myth and imagination. The Age of the Holy or the Age of Theology, is one of religion and awe before the divine. Already in this epoch rationalism enters and “reason” destroys what it is reasoning about, proceeding with the Age of Reason (Age of Philosophy) or the Enlightenment as it is called in Western civilisation. The historical life-course ends with the Prosaic Age, which is the culmination of the prior epoch in rationalising mystery to extinction. This ends in confusion as the masses, detached from all spirituality, blindly attempt to find alternatives to the shallowness of the Prosaic Age.109

Spengler remains the most recognised exponent of what has been persistently called German “cultural pessimism”, distinct from the Anglo-American and French positivist utopian faith in perpetual progress. It is however nothing more than the “pessimism” of recognising that all organisms die, and are replaced by other organisms that go through the same life cycles, unless they are prematurely aborted by external factors such as invasion or natural disaster.

The Weimar era (1919-1933), during which Spengler wrote and lectured, starkly showed the character of Civilization in the degeneracy wrought by Germany’s wartime defeat. There were no barriers to experimentation in the arts and morals, and society sunk into depravity comparable to the mythic Sodom and Gomorra. However, there was nothing novel about this. The depravity had been enacted many times before over millennia.

Spengler made a comparative study of the cultural epochs of the Indian, Egyptian, Chinese, Classical, Arabian, and Western civilisations. He showed that each have analogous cycles of birth (Spring), adolescence (Summer), maturity (Autumn), and decay (Winter).

106 Spengler, The Decline…, Vol. I, 105.
107 Ibid.
108 Ibid., Vol. II, 37.
109 Erich Heller, 18-19.

Kerry Bolton
The Decline and Fall of Civilizations