Heidegger and the Historical World of Spirit

Spengler's life cycle of civilizations seems to me to be a naturalistic reductionism. A civilization is not a plant or an animal, nor does it have an organism with defined morphological structures, but rather a set of vital and spiritual forces arranged by a culture in a specific cultural form. That is why we see forces in ascension and decline operating together in the same civilization. When one spiritual dimension declines, another is in full ascending movement.

If Hobbes sought to reduce the political body to the mechanical structure of an animal physiology, Spengler did the same with the notion of civilization, operating with Nietzsche's naturalistic vitalism and Goethe's organicism. What Spengler lacks is the capacity of the cultural and spiritual dimension to regenerate itself through conflict and the constant clash of belligerent forces. Spengler's organicist and vitalist historicism is based on an organicism that mimics nature, encapsulating the spiritual life of a people in a deterministic morphology of a biological nature.

Heidegger's historicism is a great antidote to such biologism, in addition to being existentially deeper. Heidegger understands history as the opening to an existential horizon based on a particular experience of a people who, through a primordial moment in their foundation, captured something of the structure of Being and bequeathed it to us through history. In this way, the natural dimension is just another structural component of a deeper existential experience that cannot be reduced to the mere natural domain. An ethnos, a people, a civilization cannot be compared to an organism because a biological organism is a set of unconscious functions directed towards an immanent end; while an ethnos and a civilization are the radical opening to a concrete experience of Being linked to a dimension that at the same time encompasses the natural and transcends it. Spengler is a great analyst of the cultural decline of civilizations, but his analytical model, despite bringing important reflections and insights, is as flawed as Marx's economic reductionism.

And here we touch on the core of the modern spiritual crisis that reached its peak at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century – the Cartesian split between mind and nature that generates irreconcilable polarities. It is to this philosophical problem, which is in fact a true spiritual pathology, that Heidegger seeks to respond. We can see in Nietzsche someone who appeals to physiology and nature as a form of ultimate intelligibility because he can no longer see any role for the spiritual dimension other than as parasite of life. Marx operates with the economy and the factors of production in the same way; as does Freud and the primacy of the unconscious in the explanation of psychomental phenomena. It was a theoretical fetish of the turn of the 19th century to the 20th century to try to attribute everything in the explanation of something to just one causal vector. Spengler continues this intellectual stance by assuming a strict determinism in the predominance of organic factors as the main reason for explaining the intelligibility of the historical process of the rise and decline of civilizations - the cycle of civilizations occurring with a historical regularity typical of a physiological organism. It is clear that Spengler grants great autonomy to culture as the top of the edifice of a form of life. However, the organicist determinism that Spengler mobilizes ends up detaching the regenerative role of the spirit within the domain of culture from the center of the historical process.

It is clear that processes of rise and decline of cultural formations and forms of life occur through stages that can be understood within intelligible moments and that establish certain standard regularities. However, the picture is not one of a fixed and inexorable circular movement. There is a deficit of dialectical understanding here on the part of Spengler, who ends up ignoring the movement of the spirit within the global framework of Universal History. It is clear that there are epochs that represent blackouts of the spirit within history, or as Hegel said[1], when we look at history we see a scene full of ruins. But as Hegel understood very well, what matters from the point of view of the human spirit is the cultural and spiritual form that appears on the scene in the plane of history and reveals something new. The fact that such a form will disappear at some point is only an inexorable ontological fact of reality – that everything dies. But what matters from the point of view of the spirit of a people is the revelation of a cultural form that such a spirit realizes.

Heidegger here finds himself closer to Hegel than to Spengler. Reflecting on the character of philosophy, Heidegger says that it is:

“... the manifestation through thought of the paths and perspectives of a knowledge, which establishes criteria and hierarchies. Based on this knowledge and from it, a people conceives and fully realizes its existence in the Historical world of the spirit.”[2]

We see here that Heidegger agrees with Hegel's historical dialectic, where the proper space for the realization of a people and race is found in the spiritual dimension realized through history. But this does not mean that the spiritual dimension nullifies the biological and natural dimension, but rather that the biological-natural dimension is only a necessary condition for the realization of a race, but not a sufficient condition. Or as Heidegger said, “ ... race can only be a condition of a people, but never what is unconditioned and essential of that people.”[3]

Although Spengler is not a strict biological reductionist, and like Hegel and Heidegger, he understands race as a spiritual rather than a biological achievement, his historical morphology ends up encapsulating the spiritual life of a people within a circular movement disconnected from the larger picture of the development of the spirit in human history. Hence the genesis of Spengler’s famous “pessimism,” since there is not much that can be done to halt the decline of a form of life and culture, all that remains is despair. And there is no other cause for the separation between culture and civilization, the latter being merely the deteriorated shell of a spirit that was once alive. But such a separation between culture and civilization only emanates from the inability to integrate the spirit into the history of a people as a factor of cultural regeneration.

And that is what a civilization is: the ability to rise again and heal its wounds. And this was not the example of the West throughout human history? That of always being reborn like a Phoenix from the ashes of its existential and cultural misery? That is why it is the intellectual duty of every Western man concerned with the future of his race and civilization to undertake a phenomenology of the historical spirit of the West; returning to the origins of that spirit with the Greeks down to our own day, tracing the path of ideas that constitute the fabric of our spiritual life, and thus seeking that which is primordial and essential in the Western spirit, that which must be reborn as a primary condition for the re-emergence of our civilization.

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[1] Philosophy of History - Hegel

[2] Introduction to Metaphysics - Heidegger

[3] Black Notebooks 1931 – 1938 - Heidegger