Transformation of Spengler's Philosophy of World History
* Article: The Transformation of Spengler's Philosophy of World History. By John Farrenkopf. Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1991), pp. 463-485
URL = https://www.jstor.org/stable/2710047
Excerpts
Spengler's Unpublished Work
John Farrenkopf:
"In 1924, approximately two years after completing the second volume of his Hauptwerk, the ambitious thinker, except for brief intervals when his passion for politics reasserted itself, increasingly and ultimately almost exclusively focused his attention on the vast period of civilizational development which preceded that of the rise of cultures.6 The excitement generated by some of the greatest discoveries hitherto made in the allied fields of archeology, prehistory, and ethnology and his friendship with the unorthodox ethnologist, Leo Frobenius, fueled Spengler's enthusiasm for the study of prehistory.
Spengler pursued two related projects. In the second volume of The Decline of the West he had already declared his intention to produce a tome on metaphysical questions relating to the human experience of world history. The second project involved the composition of a major work on prehistory and early civilizational history. In his sedulous study of this immense subject Spengler sought to illumine the origins of the cultures whose cyclical qualities and different cultural styles he had investigated in his Hauptwerk. Moreover, despite his continuing awareness of the discontinuities in world history exemplified by the recurrent phenomenon of civilizational growth and decay, he strove, in sharp contrast to the relativistic perspective he had championed in The Decline of the West, to ascertain the direction and significance of history for the whole of mankind. Spengler, who had emphatically denied in his Hauptwerk that mankind had a collective historical destiny, publicly voiced in 1931 his aspiration to fathom "the great secret of the destiny of man." He entertained the hope that his projected works, in combination with his already published Hauptwerk, would constitute a bona fide universal history. Unfortunately, Spengler was unable to finish either of these parallel projects, not only because of his worsening health but more likely because they were extraordinarily ambitious. Thus, the new vision of world history he conceived in his later years unfortunately never achieved the kind of detailed, systematic exposition his original philosophy of history had attained in his chef d'oeuvre. However, the Spengler specialist Anton M. Koktanek diligently collated and edited his extensive notes on prehistory and early civilizational history and his metaphysical speculations about world history, publishing the material in the mid-sixties in two separate volumes, Urfragen (Primary Questions) and Fruhzeit der Weltgeschichte (Early Period of World History). Both tomes are structured in conformance with provisional outlines found in Spengler's Nachlass. Before his death in 1978 Koktanek also produced an authoritative biography of Spengler and a large edited volume of correspondence. These four products of his years of painstaking research in the Spengler Archive are indispensable for scholarly inquiry into Spengler's historical universe.
Scholars writing in English on Spengler, including some who have authored critical works dealing solely with his thought, were unaware that the philosophy of history he had showcased in The Decline of the West, underwent a metamorphosis after he simultaneously absorbed the criticism of the work13 and significantly expanded the scope of his inquiry."