The Rise and Fall of Cultures.

The Rise and Fall of Cultures.

Cultures are beings similar to organisms and their course resembles that of the seasons. Cultures go through winter, spring, summer, autumn and eventually again a new winter or even a new seasonal cycle as a whole with smaller differences, smaller "amplitudes". Two examples can be seen in my avatar. (1) The first example shows the development in a larger framework from the first cave drawings to the present and can be called "Metaculture"; probably the most prominent signs are: (a) painted pictures, (b) first writing, (c) first vowel writing, (d) first "running pictures" (movies). (2) The second example shows one of the "advanced civilizations" (according to Spengler eight in number, all included in the "Metaculture" mentioned above): the occidental culture; for its time span, however, I do not estimate about 1000 years like Spengler, but about 2000 years. The order is to be seen in my avatar from left to right and from top to bottom.

Spengler. Culture morphology.

Oswald Spengler (translated):

"Cultures are organisms. World history is their total biography. The immense history of the Chinese or ancient culture is morphologically the exact side piece to the small history of the individual human being, an animal, a tree or a flower. This is not a demand for the Faustian view, but an experience. If one wants to know the everywhere repeated inner form, the comparative morphology of the plants and animals has long prepared the method for it."

- Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918, S. 140 (translated).


From the Film "Linear History and Vulgar Optimism":

"Spengler made the astonishing claim, that he had introduced a 'Copernican' model of history. History is not linear, but rather the organic rise and fall of High Cultures. Modern Man believs in the idea of 'progress', the idea that history moves along a linear path of moral, political, social and technolgical improvement. The final state of this 'improvement' will be, the Modern Man believes, an utopia of peace, equality, freedom, material abundance and security. Nature will no longer be able to constrain man. It is the Faustian longing for boundless infinity. Culture is an organic process with stage of birth, maturity and ultimately death. Western culture's boundless optimism lies within Christianity. The idea of progression of time towards a final, perfect heaven and earth. This feeling of progress was rationalized, naturalized and secularized in the Enlightenment. For Modern Man his religion is Enlightenment ideology. He believes that the holy trinity - equality, Democracy and Materialism - will lead inevitably to utopia on earth, despite evidence to the contrary. His faith in them is absolutely certain. Pacifism will not 'save' mankind. Equality will not 'save' mankind. Science will not 'save' mankind. Capitalism will not 'save' mankind. There is nothing that will usher in an utopia for man and this world. Utopian ideals are perfect and static. Life is change. When an entire society chases after utopian fantasies, it is a sign of old age. Every culture/civilization, no matter how formerly great, has ended / will end. Fairy tales of heaven on earth through tolerance and understanding are foolish dreams. A people must insist on its own existence, no one else will.Spengler was quite conscious of this clash of orientations in the West. He knew that men are generally disdainful of experience and that, driven by limitless and uncontrolled hope, they like to conceptualize the future in terms of what they consider the desirable rather than the likely course of events. In counterpoint to these, in his view, irrational trends, he remarked that optimism is naive and in some respects even vulgar, and that it surely stands for cowardice when one is afraid to face the fact that life is fleeting and transient in all its aspects. These thoughts touch a major motif in Spengler's philosophy which critics tend to ignore, namely the recognition of the place of tragedy in the Occidental cultural world. Tragic modes of experiencing life can only evolve there, where the individual human being is presumed autonomous in his feelings, thoughts, and actions, and where he is therefore vulnerable to the agony of having to make choices between conflicting interests and commitments."

Oswald Spengler (translated):

"Since Newton, the assumption of constant mass — the counterpart of constant force — has had uncontested validity. But the Quantum theory of Planck, and the conclusions of Niels Bohr therefrom as to the fine structure of atoms, which experimental experience had rendered necessary, have destroyed this assumption. Every self-contained system possesses, besides kinetic energy, an energy of radiant heat which is inseparable from it and therefore cannot be represented purely by the concept of mass. For if mass is defined by living energy it is ipso facto no longer constant with reference to thermodynamic state. Nevertheless, it is impossible to fit the theory of quanta into the group of hypotheses constituting the 'classical' mechanics of the Baroque; moreover, along with the principle of causal continuity, the basis of the Infinitesimal Calculus founded by Leibniz is threatened (1). But, if these are serious enough doubts, the ruthlessly cynical hypothesis of the Relativity theory strikes to the very heart of dynamics. Supported by the experiments of A. A. Michelson, which showed that the velocity of light remains unaffected by the motion of the medium, and prepared mathematically by Lorentz and Minkowski, its specific tendency is to destroy the notion of absolute time. Astronomical discoveries (and here present-day scientists are seriously deceiving themselves) can neither establish nor refute it. 'Correct' and 'incorrect' are not the criteria whereby such assumptions are to be tested; the question is whether, in the chaos of involved and artificial ideas that has been produced by the innumerable hypotheses of Radioactivity and Thermodynamics, it can hold its own as a useable hypothesis or not. But however this may be, it has abolished the constancy of those physical quantities into the definition of which time has entered, and unlike the antique statics, the Western dynamics knows only such quantities. Absolute measures of length and rigid bodies are no more. And with this the possibility of absolute quantitative delimitations and therefore the 'classical' concept of mass as the constant ratio between force and acceleration fall to the ground — just after the quantum of action, a product of energy and time, had been set up as a new constant.

(1) See M. Planck, Entstehung und bisherige Entwicklung der Quantentheorie (1920), pp. 17, 25.

If we make it clear to ourselves that the atomic ideas of Rutherford and Bohr (2) signify nothing but this, that the numerical results of observations have suddenly been provided with a picture of a planetary world within the atom, instead of that of atom-swarms hitherto favoured; if we observe how rapidly card-houses of hypothesis are run up nowadays, every contradiction being immediately covered up by a new hurried hypothesis; if we reflect on how little heed is paid to the fact that these images contradict one another and the 'classical' Baroque mechanics alike, we cannot but realize that the great style of ideation is at an end and that, as in architecture and the arts of form, a sort of craft-art of hypothesis-building has taken its place. Only our extreme maestria in experimental technique — true child of its century — hides the collapse of the symbolism.

(2) Which in many cases have led to the supposition that the 'actual existence' of atoms has now at last been proved — a singular throw-back to the materialism of the preceding generation.

Amongst these symbols of decline, the most conspicuous is the notion of entropy, which forms the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first law, that of the conservation of energy, is the plain formulation of the essence of dynamics — not to say of the constitution of the West-European soul, to which nature is necessarily visible only in the form of a contrapuntal-dynamic causality (as against the static-plastic causality of Aristotle). The basic element of the Faustian world-picture is not the attitude but the feed and, mechanically considered, the process, and this law merely puts the mathematical character of these processes into form as variables and constants. But the Second Law goes deeper, and shows a bias in nature-happenings which is in no wise imposed a priori by the conceptual fundamentals of dynamics.

Mathematically, entropy is represented by a quantity which is fixed by the momentary state of a self-contained system of bodies and under all physical and chemical alterations can only increase, never diminish; in the most favourable conditions it remains unchanged. Entropy, like force and will, is something which (to anyone for whom this form-world is accessible at all) is inwardly clear and meaningful, but is formulated differently by every different authority and never satisfactorily by any. Here again, the intellect breaks down where the world-feeling demands expression.

Nature-processes in general have been classified as irreversible and reversible, according as entropy is increased or not. In any process of the first kind, free energy is converted into bound energy, and if this dead energy is to be turned once more into living, this can only occur through the simultaneous binding of a further quantum of living energy in some second process; the best-known example is the combustion of coal — that is, the conversion of the living energy stored up in it into heat bound by the gas form of the carbon dioxide, if the latent energy of water is to be translated into steam-pressure and thereafter into motion. It follows that in the world as a whole entropy continually increases; that is, the dynamic system is manifestly approaching to some final state, whatever this may be. Examples of the irreversible processes are conduction of heat, diffusion, friction, emission of light and chemical reactions; of reversible, gravitation, electric oscillations, electromagnetic waves and sound-waves.

What has never hitherto been fully felt, and what leads me to regard the Entropy Theory (1850) as the beginning of the destruction of that masterpiece of Western intelligence, the old dynamic physics, is the deep opposition of theory and actuality which is here for the first time introduced into theory itself. The First Law had drawn the strict picture of a causal nature-happening, but the Second Law by introducing irreversibility has for the first time brought into the mechanical-logical domain a tendency belonging to immediate life and thus in fundamental contradiction with the very essence of that domain.

If the Entropy theory is followed out to its conclusion, it results, firstly, that in theory all processes must be reversible — which is one of the basic postulates of dynamics and is reasserted with all rigour in the Law of the Conservation of Energy — but, secondly, that in actuality processes of nature in their entirety are irreversible. Not even under the artificial conditions of laboratory experiment can the simplest process be exactly reversed, that is, a state once passed cannot be re-established. Nothing is more significant of the present condition of systematics than the introduction of the hypotheses of 'elementary disorder' for the purpose of smoothing-out the contradiction between intellectual postulate and actual experience. The 'smallest particles' of a body (an image, no more) throughout perform reversible processes, but in actual things the smallest particles are in disorder and mutually interfere; and so the irreversible process that alone is experienced by the observer is linked with increase of entropy by taking the mean probabilities of occurrences. And thus theory becomes a chapter of the Calculus of Probabilities, and in lieu of exact we have statistical methods.

Evidently, the significance of this has passed unnoticed. Statistics belong, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating Life, to destiny and incident and not to the world of laws and timeless causality. As everyone knows, statistics serve above all to characterize political and economic, that is, historical, developments. In the 'classical' mechanics of Galileo and Newton there would have been no room for them. And if, now, suddenly the contents of that field are supposed to be understood and understandable only statistically and under the aspect of probability — instead of under that of the a piori exactitude which the Baroque thinkers unanimously demanded — what does it mean? It means that the object of understanding is ourselves. The nature 'known' in this wise is the nature that we know by way of living experience, that we live in ourselves. What theory asserts (and, being itself, must assert) — to wit, this ideal irreversibility that never happens in actuality — represents a relic of the old severe intellectual form, the great Baroque tradition that had contrapuntal music for twin sister. But the resort to statistics shows that the force that that tradition regulated and made effective is exhausted. Becoming and become, destiny and causality, historical and natural-science elements are beginning to be confused. Formulas of life, growth, age, direction and death are crowding up.

That is what, from this point of view, irreversibility in world-processes has to mean. It is the expression, no longer of the physical, but of genuine historical, inwardly-experienced time, which is identical with destiny.

Baroque physics was, root and branch, a strict systematic and remained so for as long as its structure was not racked by theories like these, as long as its field was absolutely free from anything that expressed accident and mere probability. But directly these theories come up, it becomes physiognomic. 'The course of the world' is followed out. The idea of the end of the world appears, under the veil of formulas that are no longer in their essence formulas at all. Something Goethean has entered into physics — and if we understand the deeper significance of Goethe's passionate polemic against Newton in the 'Farbenlehre' we shall realize the full weight of what this means. For therein intuitive vision was arguing against reason, life against death, creative image against normative law. The critical form-world of nature-knowledge came out of nature-feeling, God-feeling, as the evoked contrary. Here, at the end of the late period, it has reached the maximal distance and is turning to come home.

So, once more, the imaging-power that is the efficient in dynamics conjures up the old great symbol of Faustian man's historical passion, care — the out-look into the farthest far of past and future, the back-looking study of history, the foreseeing state, the confessions and introspections, the bells that sounded over all our country-sides and measured the passing of Life. The ethos of the word time, as we alone feel it, as instrumental music alone and no statue-plastic can carry it, is directed upon an aim. This aim has been figured in every life-image that the West has conceived — as the Third Kingdom, as the New Age, as the task of mankind, as the issue of evolution. And it is figured, as the destined end-state of all Faustian 'nature' in entropy.

Directional feeling, a relation of past and future, is implicit already in the mythic concept of force on which the whole of this dogmatic form-world rests, and in the description of natural processes it emerges distinct. It would not be too much, therefore, to say that entropy, as the intellectual form in which the infinite sum of nature-events is assembled as a historical and physiognomic unit, tacitly underlay all physical concept-formation from the outset, so that when it came out (as one day it was bound to come out) it was as a 'discovery' of scientific induction claiming 'support' from all the other theoretical elements of the system. The more dynamics exhausts its inner possibilities as it nears the goal, the more decidedly the historical characters in the picture come to the front and the more insistently the organic necessity of destiny asserts itself side by side with the inorganic necessity of causality, and direction makes itself felt along with capacity and intensity, the factors of pure extension. The course of this process is marked by the appearance of whole series of daring hypotheses, all of like sort, which are only apparently demanded by experimental results and which in fact world-feeling and mythology imagined as long ago as the Gothic age.

Above all, this is manifested in the bizarre hypotheses of atomic disintegration which elucidate the phenomena of radioactivity, and according to which uranium atoms that have kept their essence unaltered, in spite of all external influences, for millions of years and then suddenly without assignable cause explode, scattering their smallest particles over space with velocities of thousands of kilometres per second. Only a few individuals in an aggregate of radioactive atoms are struck by destiny thus, the neighbours being entirely unaffected. Here too, then, is a picture of history and not 'nature,' and although statistical methods here also prove to be necessary, one might almost say that in them mathematical number has been replaced by chronological.

With ideas like these, the mythopoetic force of the Faustian soul is returning to its origins. It was at the outset of the Gothic, just at the time when the first mechanical clocks were being built, that the myth of the world's end, Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, arose. It may be that, like all the reputedly old-German myths Ragnarok (whether in the Voluspa form or as the Christian Muspilli) was modelled more or less on Classical and particularly Christian-Apocalyptic motives. Nevertheless, it is the expression and symbol of the Faustian and of no other soul. The Olympian college is historyless, it knows no becoming, no epochal moments, no aim. But the passionate thrust into distance is Faustian. Force, Will, has an aim, and where there is an aim there is for the inquiring eye an end. That which the perspective of oil-painting expressed by means of the vanishing point, the Baroque park by its pint de vue, and analysis by the the term of an infinite series — the conclusion, that is, of a willed directedness — assumes here the form of the concept. The Faust of the Second Part is dying, for he has reached his goal. What the myth of Götterdammerung signified of old, the irreligious form of it, the theory of entropy, signifies today — world's end as completion of an inwardly necessary evolution."

- Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918, S. 540-547 (translated).

It is the rejection of life in a group, especially the rejection of what holds the group together. This rejection goes as far as the rejection of one's own identity

"Infertility and Decay.

And now from the fact that existence becomes more and more rootless, the wakefulness more and more tense, finally that phenomenon emerges, which was prepared in silence long ago and now suddenly moves into the bright light of history to put an end to the whole spectacle: the infertility of civilized man. This is not something that could be understood with everyday causality, for example physiologically, as modern science has naturally tried to do. Here is a thoroughly metaphysical turn to death. The last man of the world cities does not want to live any more, certainly as an individual, but not as a type, as a multitude; in this total being the fear of death expires. That which afflicts the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the thought of the extinction of the family and the name, has lost its meaning. The continuation of the related blood within the visible world is no longer felt as the duty of this blood, the lot of being the last is no longer felt as a doom. Not only because children have become impossible, but above all because the intelligence, which has been increased to the utmost, no longer finds reasons for their existence, they remain absent."  (Translated by me.)

- Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918, S. 678-679.

According to Spengler, the civilization of a culture is its downfall and the time after that, if it still exists, i.e. a petrified, frozen, solidified being in winter. When the culture becomes civilization, its urbanites begin to reject the community, all tradition and history, even the parents. And in the end, the culture/civilization consists almost entirely of city dwellers (except the most faithfully country people). The individual culture/civilization member just wants to be himself, not a member of his culture/civilization anymore.

Peter Sloterdijk said something about this too in almost all of his books, but especially in his 2014 published book "Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit" ("The terrible children of modern times" - there is no English translation of the book yet, as far as I know), which I consider to be the best of his books. He says that in the course of history there are (a) at first few, (b) then already some more and (c) afterwards very many "terrible children", who all fight against their history, i.e. their origin, their tradition, their belonging to a culture, history, homeland, family etc.. The curve for the number of "terrible children" in history suddenly rises exponentially.

Sloterdijk's division of culture into three evolutionary or historical stages - "early culture", "high culture", "late culture" (this understood in the sense of Gehlen) -, which is often found in his books, does not coincide with the division which Spengler prefered in his philosophy of culture and history and which I prefer in my philosophy of culture and history. That which I call the human "primitive culture" or "hunter-gatherer culture" lasting until the invention of writing, i.e. lasting for a very long time, he calls "early culture"; that which I call the human "metaculture" (see my last post) or "historical culture" (consisting of eight "historical cultures" / "high cultures"), he calls "high culture", which according to him lasts from the time of the invention of writing either (a) up to the "axis time" (Jaspers) or (b) up to the late Middle Ages resp. to the beginning of modern times or even to the French Revolution; the time after that is still a time of "high culture" (now almost civilization, "late culture") according to my theory of culture, but for Sloterdijk it is the time of "late culture" (understood in the sense of Gehlen - as already said).