Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Rosenberg Alfred
Title : Oswald Spengler by Alfred Rosenberg
Year : 1925

Link download : Rosenberg_Alfred_-_Oswald_Spengler_by_Alfred_Rosenberg.zip

The personality of Oswald Spengler has stood for years, since the appearance of his chief work The Decline of the West (in 1918), at the center of public interest. Without question this famous work is riddled with many flaws. There is no question that next to fascinating ideas, often platitudes are found. Without a doubt there is something embarrassing about receiving many views of other people served up ostensibly as Spengler’s intellectual property. In spite of everything however, the attack on our school wisdom has had a refreshing effect and set in motion many agreeing and opposing forces, thus begetting life. And in the spiritual quagmire of the present, that is in any case to be welcomed. I do not want to discuss the Spenglerian worldview in general here. Let only one question be selected: Spengler is supposedly an irrationalist (i.e. he is averse to purely rational judgment). He seeks soul and form, but in the course of his work turns into a purely naturalistic dogmatist who arrives at his finding of the inner and outer decline of our culture on the basis of more or less bald, rational observations, and therein overlooks precisely the form and soul of the Eveningland. Spengler regards the rise and fall of cultures as an occurrence similar to the life and death of a plant, but forgets in the adducement of this richly superficial comparison that races of plants as such do not die out if they are not destroyed, crippled, mixed with inimical types. The "race" of the fir tree persists although the single fir dies. The "race" of the linden tree is still the same as many thousands of years ago. And the races of men as such could remain just as eternally young, if hostile blood is not mixed with them, if unassimilable spiritual opposites do not clash and mix with them, without being able to be blended. Thus Spengler’s treatment of history remains stuck in a somewhat exalted environmental theory; his doctrine of the cultural group (Kulturkreislehre) lacks the essential thing: the organic-racial prerequisites, and, bound with them, the embodiment of the spiritual forces that created this cultural group. It is significant above all that Spengler vigorously combats the folkish idea, dismisses anti-Semitism, and yet, despite all these protests ... succumbs, and truly in such a scope that he makes almost all folkish political positions into his own, without however admitting this, even with a single word. In the first place Spengler is united with us in the rejection of the spiritual and political orientation of our political parties collectively. Democracy is also for him inwardly dead; Parliamentarism is damned for all eternity; Marxism has decayed into the Mark, hostile to life. ...