Neither Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) nor Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) require much of an introduction to regular readers of my Substack, at least as they are discussed within their own particular fields of interest, but this series of essays is more unusual in that it will attempt to contrast the ideas of the Austrian and the German directly.

Between 1920 and 1922, Steiner produced a series of three lectures and four essays on Spengler’s celebrated two-part study, The Decline of the West, a groundbreaking work that had just been published at a time when Germany was still recovering from the horrors of the First World War. For Spengler, Occidental civilisation is irrevocably doomed and “optimism is cowardice”. For Steiner, survival depends on the cultivation of our inner spirit and the dynamic will-power that it can unleash.

Taking the form of a detailed critique, Steiner’s analysis of Spenglerian philosophy offers a new perspective on how we should approach the crisis in modern Europe and it is this that I shall attempt to examine over the course of this series.

Born in 1861 at the village of Murakirály, once part of the former Austrian Empire, Rudolf Steiner has received worldwide acclaim for his efforts to transform spiritual principles into practical reality. For those fortunate enough to have encountered Steiner’s ideas, his Anthroposophical movement has dramatically remoulded the spheres of education, medicine, agriculture, literature, art, mathematics, astronomy and science into an organic, complementary whole.

As a philosopher, mystic and clairvoyant, Steiner wrote many books and spoke at thousands of meetings and events throughout Europe, attracting so much attention that his organisation was eventually outlawed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. In 1925, once Steiner had left this earthly realm and embarked upon his own personal journey in the afterlife, the world – for those with eyes to see – had been transformed beyond recognition.

Raised in the health resort of Blankenburg, close to the Harz Mountains, Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) became a leading German thinker and one of the foremost luminaries of the Conservative Revolution. His masterpiece, The Decline of the West, was published in two volumes between 1918 and 1922. Inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Spengler formulated the idea that cultures and civilisations are cyclical and rise and fall like biological organisms. The text was a dagger thrust at the erroneous heart of the prevailing belief that history is purely linear and that Western civilisation is somehow immune to the indomitable march of time.

Spengler’s other books include Prussianism and Socialism (1920), Man and Technics (1931) and The Hour of Decision (1933), but it was The Decline of the West which really fired the imagination of Germany at a time when the country had just suffered a major defeat in the First World War and was now rushing headlong into a new age of totalitarianism.

This series will focus on three lectures and four articles that were undertaken by Rudolf Steiner between 1920 and 1922. The material under discussion – either separately, or as part of a collection – has appeared in a number of different forms and these include The Renewal of the Social Organism (1919), Articles from “Das Goetheanum,” 1921-1925 (1961) and The Mystery of the Trinity: Mission of the Spirit (1991).

The source I have used to construct this series is Steiner’s Oswald Spengler: Prophet of World Chaos. It was translated by Henry B. Monges and published in 1949 by Anthroposophic Press. Spengler’s quotations are taken from the Alfred A. Knopf edition of The Decline of the West and were translated by Charles Francis Atkinson.

What did Steiner make of this radical German upstart who was almost twenty years his junior, and which of these intellectual giants – both Germanic, each operating within the same time-frame – can offer the most fitting solution for our battered and beleaguered planet at a time when the future of humanity appears so bleak and ill-fated? This series will help you find out.

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IN the first of three lectures, each given in the Swiss-German town of Dornach, Rudolf Steiner presented the members of his Anthroposophical audience with a preliminary outline of Oswald Spengler’s work. It is, of course, important to remember that Steiner’s observations were contemporary to the publication of Spengler’s text and that a great deal of interest had been generated by its publication.

Germany was gradually recovering from the horrors of modern warfare and yet Spengler was eager to ensure that the weary hearts and minds of his fellow countrymen were not seduced by the optimistic platitudes that were emanating from the political classes. Steiner, too, was harbouring few illusions about the post-war severity of the country’s plight:

One who looks around a little in Germany today, and not at externals but with the eye of the soul; one who sees not only what offers itself to the casual visitor, who seldom learns the true conditions during his visit; one who does not cling to the fact that a few chimneys are smoking again and the trains are running on time; one who can to some degree see into the spiritual situation; such a person sees a picture which is symptomatic not only for this territory but for the whole decay of our world-culture in the present cycle. I would like today to point out to you, in an introductory way, a psycho-spiritual symptom which is far more significant than many sleeping souls even in Germany allow themselves to dream. (Steiner, PWC)

Steiner fully accepted that “decay and decline” were the order of the day in Germany, but whilst it is common for people to assume that the welcome flowers of recovery will once again bloom on the ruins of catastrophe the Austrian warned his listeners that such attitudes ignore the “deeper-lying symptoms”. This attitude, at least, certainly begins to approach that of Spengler, who once remarked that “optimism is cowardice”.

Despite the economic abyss into which Germany had recently plunged, The Decline of the West was fast becoming a nationwide sensation:

As I have said, this book makes a particularly strong impression on the younger generation. And if you try to sense the imponderables of life, the things which are between the lines, then you will be particularly struck by such a thing. In Stuttgart I recently had to give a lecture to the students of the technical college, and I went to this lecture entirely under the impression made by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. It is a thick book. Thick books are very costly now in Germany, yet it is much read. You will realise their costliness when I tell you that a pamphlet which cost five cents in 1914 now costs thirty-five cents. Of course, books have not risen in the same proportion as beer, which now costs ten times as much as in 1914. Books must always be handled more modestly, even under the present impossible economic conditions. Still the price increase on books shows what has happened to the economic system in the last few years. (Steiner, PWC)

Having recently discussed The Decline of the West before an Anthroposophical gathering in Stuttgart, he subsequently informed his assembled guests in Dornach that he had strongly disagreed with the basis of Oswald Spengler’s philosophy from the very beginning and “combatted it strenuously”.

Steiner explained how, according to Spengler, the West had now reached a stage of erosion comparable to that suffered by the vanished civilisations of the ancient Orient, Greece and Rome. Embarking upon a vast odyssey of human cultural experience, complete with a series of detailed historical comparisons, the German was adamant that the Occident would experience the same tragic fate by the end of the twenty-first century.

When it came to the veracity of philosophy, however, Steiner had his own litmus test and this was centred on whether or not its progenitor had been motivated by some form of spirituality. Spengler had not, even describing Christianity as an early form of Bolshevism, so for Steiner The Decline of the West is a work that offers a merely one-sided form of rationalism. At the same time, he says, Spengler

has completely mastered ten or fifteen sciences. He has a penetrating judgement on the whole historical process, as far as history reaches. And he also has something which men of today almost never have, a sound eye for the phenomena of decline in the civilisations of the present day. There is a fundamental difference between Spengler and those who do not grasp the nature of the impulses of decline and who try all kinds of arrangements for extracting from the decayed ideas some appearance of upward motion. Were it not heart-rending it might be humorous to see how people with traditional ideas all riddled with decay meet today in conferences and believe that out of decay they can create progress by means of programmes. Such a man as Oswald Spengler, who really knows something, does not yield to such a deception. He calculates like a precise mathematician the rapidity of our decline and comes out with the prediction (which is more than a vague prophecy) that by the year 2200 this Occidental culture will have fallen into complete barbarism. (Steiner, PWC)

It was Spengler’s attempts to present his readers with the gradual collapse of the Occident in accordance with strict historical laws that had such an intensely profound impact on young Germans, hastened – in Steiner’s opinion – by the concomitant disintegration of the nation’s “psycho-spiritual field”.

Spengler was not just offering the kind of existential pessimism that one might find in the nineteenth-century philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), but a well-constructed assemblage of scientific theories that appeared to demonstrate how our ultimate calamity is fundamentally unavoidable. It is this that Steiner found so unpalatable, the sheer fatalism that appears to preclude any realistic form of escape. On the other hand, he was certainly not out to lessen the obvious gravity of the situation:

One may well ask where we shall find the forces, the inner will-forces, to spur men to work upward again, if our best people, after surveying ten or fifteen sciences, have reached the point of saying that this decay is not only present but can be proved like a phenomenon in physics. This means that the time has begun when belief in decay is not represented by the worst people. We must stress again and again how really serious the times are, and what a mistake it is to sleep away this seriousness of the times. (Steiner, PWC)

Steiner wished to temper the prevailing notion that Western societies experiencing a state of decline are incapable of undergoing some form of regeneration. The fact that Spengler was chiefly a materialist who was motivated by notions of modern scientism, Steiner argued, led to his becoming dependent on the theory that human civilisations – just like natural organisms – spring into being, reach a certain point of maturity and then gradually wither and die like badly-tended flora.

At the time of Steiner’s lecture, Spengler had only issued the first volume of his work – ‘Form and Actuality’ (1918) – and yet when it came to providing solutions the text offered nothing in the way of hope:

Only the first volume of the book is now available. One who lets this first volume work upon him finds a strict theoretical vindication and proof of the decline, and nowhere a spark of light pointing to a rise, nothing which gives any hint of a rise. And one cannot say that this is an erroneous method of thought for a scientist. For if you consider the life of today and do not yield to the delusion that fruit for the future can grow out of bodiless programmes, then you see that an upward movement nowhere appears in what the majority of men recognise in the outer world. If you regard rising and declining cultures as organisms, and then look at our culture, our entire Occidental civilisation, as an organism, then you can only say that the Occident is perishing, declining into barbarism. You find no indication where an upward movement could appear, where another centre of the world could form itself. (Steiner, PWC)

Curiously, Steiner firmly believed that The Decline of the West still contained “spiritual qualities”. Indeed, the fact that Spengler had taken it upon himself to analyse the political, social and economic collapse of the Occident meant that he was dealing with forces that effectively transcend purely material or temporal considerations.

However, Spengler seems to have ignored the obvious fact that the Oriental, Greek and Roman civilisations that we know from the ancient world still exist in a different form and this indicates a process of continuity. Steiner attributes their survival to the “wisdom of intuition” that both complements and emphasises the ongoing evolution of humankind:

For if this wisdom of initiation were entirely ignored by men, if it were suppressed, if it could play no role in the further development of mankind — what would be the necessary consequence? You see, if we look at the old Indian culture, it is like an organism in having infancy, maturity, ageing, decay, and death; then it continues itself. Then we have the Persian, Egyptian, Chaldean, Greco-Latin, and our own time, but always we have something which Oswald Spengler did not take into account. He has been reproached for this by several of his opponents. (Steiner, PWC)

Even if the West did collapse by the year 2200, Steiner told his audience, it would – like its ancient predecessors – still prevail in one form or another. Spengler was far too busy searching for cracks in the societal edifice to consider the possible existence of the odd acorn, from which other mighty oaks may grow. As Steiner suggests, he

who can look a little deeper into things knows that in the old Indian life, apart from the external civilisation, there lived the initiation-wisdom of primeval times. And this initiation-wisdom of primeval times, which was still mighty in India, inserted a new seed into the Persian culture. The Persian mysteries were already weaker, but they could still insert the seed into the Egypto-Chaldean time. The seed could also be carried over into the Greco-Latin period. And then the stream of culture continued itself as it were by the law of inertia into our own time. And there it dries up. (Steiner, PWC)

Although Steiner had once compared the life-cycle of the Anthroposophical movement to that of a tree, he was referring to the “activating growth-forces of the pith”. In other words, the actual essence or teleological principle that drives the entire process.

Spengler’s narrow, materialist stance resulted in The Decline of the West becoming a scientific treatise that failed to take into consideration the possibility of any spiritual vision whatsoever. At those moments when religious or spiritual phenomena do receive a mention, it is always with a critical eye and the inference that such things have contributed to the overall degeneration of society itself. According to Steiner, if

you take all that can be drawn out of modern science and form therefrom a method of contemplation which you then apply to social or, better still, to historical life, you will be able to grasp thereby only phenomena of degeneration. If you examine history with the methods of observation taught by science, you will see only what is declining, if you apply this method to social life, you will create only the phenomena of degeneration. (Steiner, PWC)

That Spengler has based his entire weltanschauung on the waning characteristics of past civilisations, Steiner tells us, is one of the reasons why Germans were not even prepared to accept that some of the political, social and economic developments in the early twentieth century – female suffrage, being one such example – could offer any hope for the future. Notwithstanding, either, the fact that Steiner was also critical of so-called “democracy”.

Whilst voting for establishment politicians hardly offers much hope for those of us living in the midst of such uncertain times, particularly when they are part and parcel of the problem, Steiner was trying to explain that by looking to older forms of civilisation Spengler was ignoring the fresh shoots of human potential that promise a way out of the decline:

The concern of which I have spoken must be spoken of because it is now necessary that a wholly new initiation-wisdom should begin out of the human will and human freedom. If we resign ourselves to the outer world and to what is mere tradition, we shall perish in the Occident, fall into barbarism; while we can move upward again only out of the will, out of the creative spirit. The initiation-wisdom which must begin in our time must, like the old initiation-wisdom (which only gradually succumbed to egoism, selfishness, and prejudice), proceed from objectivity, impartiality, and selflessness. From this base it must permeate everything. (Steiner, PWC)

Steiner was more than aware that serious efforts to provide a civilisational lifeline are often “distorted into a caricature” and that a general lack of selflessness means that any attempt to stem the encroaching tide by calling for social justice invariably leads to all forms of cultural and economic life becoming subsumed into the all-encompassing whirlpool of the state. Steiner’s thoughts on politics interfering with other aspects of human existence, aired over a century ago, are particularly relevant for our own times.

Whilst it has been shown that Spengler fails to address the modified continuance of previous civilisations in the guise of the new – thereby indicating that the former did not pass away completely, after all – the Austrian strongly advised against displaying the kind of blind faith that makes survival inevitable. This, he says, is no different to assuming that Spengler’s philosophy has sealed our fate:

You cannot say to people — Believe in the Gods, believe in this, believe in that, and then all will be well. You must confess that those who speak of, and even demonstrate, the phenomena of degeneration are right with regard to what lives in the outer world. But we, every individual human being must take care that they shall not remain right. For the upward movement does not come out of anything objective, it comes out of the subjective will. Each person must will, each person must will to take up the spirit anew, and from the newly received spirit of the declining civilisation each person must himself give a new thrust; otherwise it will perish. You cannot appeal today to any objective law, you can appeal only to the human will, to the good-will of men. (Steiner, PWC)

The “good-will” of which Steiner speaks can only become manifest in the way of selfless actions and deeds, for these expressions of human participation are the only means by which the German’s effervescent fatalism may be overcome. Anything short of this and Spengler will be proved right. Moreover, it could even be said that Western civilisation will rightly deserve to perish.

Steiner believed that it is foolish to rely on old “prejudices” and that speaking of tradition without attempting to combine it with the best of the contemporary world offers little relief. We only have to listen to the way people engage with one another to realise that most have developed a deeply pessimistic mindset that appears to preclude all hope of long-term survival. As Steiner explains, it is

a question, not of assimilating something which can easily be understood out of the phenomena of decline, but of assimilating something to understand which one must first enhance his powers. Such is the nature of initiation-wisdom. But how can we expect that those who now aspire to be the teachers or leaders of the people should discern that what gives man a capacity for judgement must first be fetched out of the subconscious depths of soul-life and is not sitting up there in the head all ready-made. What really sits up there in the head is the destructive element. (Steiner, PWC)

Naturally, this change in attitude requires great effort and yet there seems to be a contradiction between the need to engage in society and the feeling that, ultimately, everything is going to collapse and that we are irreversibly doomed. At the same time, efforts to implement political, social and economic reform are completely worthless if there is nothing beyond notions of material gain. Even the satisfaction of one’s own soul is not enough, he contends, because our future – if it is to be secured – rests on far more than dressing one’s temporal efforts in the token colours of mysticism.

In order to avoid what Steiner calls “universal barbarism,” therefore, it is necessary to create a spiritual vision which permeates the spheres of science and education. Anything less is merely wasting time and effort, he informed his listeners, for without seeking to apply initiation-wisdom in all aspects of human life people will remain trapped in ignorance:

If something is rolling along with the ancient impulses, no one will stop it in its rolling; and we should have an eye to how many younger people (especially in the conquered countries) are still filled with old catch-words, old chauvinism. These young people do not come into consideration. But those young people do come into consideration on whom rests the whole pain of the decline. And there are such. They are the ones whose wills can be broken by such theories as those of Spengler’s book. Therefore, in Stuttgart I called this book of Oswald Spengler’s a clever but fearful book, which contains the most fearful dangers, for it is so clever that it actually conjures up a sort of fog in front of people, especially young people. (Steiner, PWC)

Even those who have retained their determination to survive whatever is thrown at them, he suggests, rely far too much on faith. However, it is not faith but will that offers a way out of the crisis of Western civilisation and that which Steiner terms “spiritual science” must be viewed in practical terms.

Steiner concludes his talk on Spengler by insisting that it is not enough to simply cultivate the kind of optimism that provides self-comfort, and this even applies to readers of Steiner’s own works:

Only one who knows that in every moment of reading he must, out of the depths of his own soul, and through his most intimate willing, create something for which the books should be only a stimulus — only such a one can regard these books as musical scores out of which he can gain the experience in his own soul of the true piece of music. (Steiner, PWC)

Waking up, in other words, means discovering one’s place in the overall battle for survival.