Oswald Spengler’s Critique of Eurocentrism in Western Historiography

A high-culture has a predetermined life cycle of approximately a millennium. Spengler divides the life cycle of a culture into four phases, or seasons, parallel to the four seasons that mark the change in weather following Earth’s complete orbit around the Sun. The historical development of a culture commences with a rurally intuitive spring period where the spirit of the countryside is dominant. Followed by a summer phase which symbolizes the ripening of the consciousness and first manifestations of urban settlements. An autumn period signaling the victory of money and the zenith of intellectual creativity, this period embodies the blossoming of the culture. Ending in a winter period where a materialistic world outlook prevails and exhausts the creative forces of the respective cultures. Spengler argued that the only culture that is present today is the Western-European Germanic culture, which he names Faustian, an eponym relating to the legendary Faust within German folklore. Therefore, the tome he published following the culmination of the First World War was mainly aimed at the Professional Western historians whose methods and conclusions Spengler rejected as false and extremely Eurocentric. The Western natural scientists have freed themselves from dogmatic presuppositions that distort truth within their respective disciplines, Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and the trajectory of these disciplines within the late 19th century and early 20th century are perfect cases in point. The historians on the other hand have failed to accomplish the same feat, as Spengler stated “To the Western historian the 19th century AD is more important than the 19th century BC; but the moon, too, seems to us bigger than Jupiter and Saturn”. In regards to relative distance, the physicist “has long ago freed himself”, but not the historian in relation to temporality. To Spengler world-history is the infinite transformation of organic entities, to the professional historian “a tapeworm industriously adding on itself one epoch after another”. The tripartite periodization model, which is the only model that Western professional historians are able to organize their historical data, has already started to fail as archaeologists successfully and continuously discover historical material that undermines the scheme. Under the Eurocentric scheme, the medieval or middle age is never described in positive terms, despite the arrival of historical data that proves the contrary. A perfect illustration is “the feeble treatment of Persian, Arabian and Russian history”. The Western European conception of history essentially begins “In the Eastern Mediterranean regions and then, with an abrupt change of scene at the migrations (an event important only to Western Europeans and exaggerated by them, an event of purely Western and not even Arabian significance), –of Western-Central Europe”. Hence, although Spengler criticizes Hegel for unwisely affirming that he intentionally dismissed the cultures that cannot be absorbed into his framework, his condemnation was mainly directed at the methodology adopted by Western historians. From this perspective “Hegel was only making an honest avowal of methodic premises that every historian finds necessary for his purpose”.

Geography, or a Western notion of geography in specific, has played a big role in shaping the Eurocentric conception of history. False geographic presumptions, such as assuming a continent of Europe, is essentially an abstract notion, which obliges the historian to draw a framework in accordance with an assumed border separating Europe and Asia. Spengler argued that the word Europe “ought to be struck out of history”, for there is no specific European category within history. Instead, Spengler opts for an imaginative approach that appreciates the mutable nature of cultural borders, their proclivity to overlap and the consequences of cultural borders overlapping within history. The notion of a fixed European continent has led to three disastrous circumstances. The first, is the construction of a false connection between the Western-European Germanic culture and the Greco-Roman culture. This obsession with Greco-Roman culture, as a result of a Eurocentrism, has drastically effected the European historian’s ability to comprehend the significance of Western culture and assess its trajectory –destiny. Additionally, it has led to historical confusion that in turn leads to the failure creating a true interpretation of where Western culture and civilization stands in relation to other cultures. In the words of Spengler “To toy with phrases such as “Greek Middle Ages” or “Germanic antiquity” does not in the least help us to form a clear and inwardly-convincing picture in which China and Mexico, the empire of Axum and that of the Sassanids have their proper places”. Finally, it has given rise to historical outlook which links Russia with the West, which Spengler believed, led to severe consequences within the Russian world. Linking Russian culture with the West has triggered what Spengler terms “Pseudomorphosis” a term he borrows from Geology. This phenomenon, which has previously inhibited the growth and distorted the shape of the Judeo-Christian Islamic culture, is currently constraining the birth of a new Slavic culture. The aggression evident within Slavophiles, as a result of this pseudomorphosis, is embodied in the concept of “Mother Russia” in opposition to Europe as apparent with the works Danilevsky, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Western history and philosophy has been a victim of geographic and scientific presumptions, Spengler said “Today we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so”. Spengler argued that within the Western Eurocentric notion of history, the historians seem to have cherry-picked a specific episode of world-history (that of Greco-Roman and Western Europe) and placed it on a pedestal, whilst neglecting thousands of years of non-European cultures. In effect, what the Western historians have done could be compared to the Ptolemaic model astronomical model, whereby the Western culture is given a superior, albeit false, position within the center of world-history and the rest of the cultures that make up world-history are made to revolve around this center point. Spengler ruthlessly criticizes the poor treatment of sixty centuries of non-European history, in comparison to the position of superiority given to the periods of the renaissance, enlightenment and industrial revolution. Regarding this, Spengler states: 

Is it not ridiculous to oppose a “modern history of a few centuries, and that history it all intents localized in West Europe, to an ancient” history which cover as many millennia – incidentally dumping into that “ancient history” the whole mass of the pre-Hellenic cultures, unprobed and unordered, as mere appendix-matter? This is no exaggeration. Do we not, for the sake of keeping the hoary scheme, dispose of Egypt and Babylon – each as an individual and self-contained history quite equal in the balance to our so called “world-history” from Charlemagne to the World-War and well beyond it – as a prelude to classical history? Do we not relegate the vast complexes of Indian and Chinese culture to foot-notes, with a gesture of embarrassment? As for the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that they do not “fit in” entirely ignore them?

Hence, this leads Spengler to equate the Eurocentric tripartite scheme and outlook of world-history with the outdated and incorrect Ptolemaic astronomical model and presents the framework presented within his work as a Copernican discovery within the discipline. A discovery which he truly believed would bring about a paradigm shift within the field of study. Spengler’s Copernican model of world-history is one where no culture is given privilege over any other, and no culture is marginalized and excluded from world-history. A Spenglerian analysis of world-history is only possible through Nietzschean total detachment, to view “the whole fact of man from an immense distance, to regard individual cultures, including one’s own, as one regard the range of mountain peaks along a horizon”.