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The Decline of Western Science: Defending Spengler’s Account of the End of Science: Within Reason

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Abstract

Haack classifies Spengler’s views on the end of science as what she terms annihilationist in that he forecasts the absolute termination of scientific activity as opposed to its completion or culmination. She also argues that in addition to his externalist argument that Western science, as cultural product, cannot survive the demise of Western Culture, Spengler also puts forward an internalist argument that science, regardless of the imminent demise of Western Culture, is in terminal decline as evidenced by its diminishing returns. I argue against Haack that Spengler’s argument for the diminishing returns of modern science is in fact an externalist one, in that he locates the sources of science’s current decline outside the discipline of science itself, attributing them to a change in cultural attitude towards scientific endeavours. I further argue that Spengler’s prediction of the imminent end of science was directed specifically at pure science, and that he in fact held that applied science would continue to develop. I also take issue with Haack’s suggestion that Spengler’s views on science were outmoded at the time that he wrote them.

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Notes

  1. Faustian culture is Spengler’s term for Western culture which he views as having come into existence around 1000 AD.

  2. See Swer (2017).

  3. Although if this is the case then it would appear that Haack has undermined her case for treating Spengler as dyed-in-the-wool annihilationist, by establishing that he was also a completionist in this regard.

  4. One can interpret this endorsement of applied science and technics over pure science as a sign of Spengler’s commitment to what Herf calls “reactionary modernism”, an intellectual current amongst conservative revolutionaries of the Weimar period that combined a quasi-mystical reverence for modern technology with a rejection of Enlightenment values (Herf 1984). I do not explore this topic here for the following reasons. Whilst I have no issue with Herf’s concept of reactionary modernism, nor his location of Spengler within this movement, I suggest that Herf’s depiction of Spengler as a reactionary modernist is rendered problematic by his assumption of philosophical continuity across Spengler’s oeuvre. Recent scholarship on Spengler has argued, following Koktanek’s (1968) suggestion, that Spengler’s thought is best understood as having two phases (see for instance Farrenkopf 2001; Conte 2004). It is Spengler’s later work, particularly Man and Technics (2002), that best conforms to the contours of reactionary modernism, whilst it is his early work, particularly The Decline of the West, Volume 1, that features the cyclical model of world-history for which Spengler is best known. Herf, and most commentators, tend to conflate the two periods in Spengler’s thought and read Spengler’s later social Darwinist Lebensphilosophie back into his cyclical philosophy of history. The bearing of the above on this paper is that it is in Spengler’s early work that we find his analysis of science and, more specifically, his account of the end of science. Whilst it may well be the case that Spengler’s early work is also imbued with the features of reactionary modernism, at present this fact has not yet been established, and indeed cannot be established until sufficient work has been done on reconstructing the role of science and technology in Spengler’s early philosophy. And it is to this latter task that this paper hopes, in a small way, to contribute.

  5. The fictionalist character of Spengler’s philosophy of science was, to the best of my knowledge, first noted by Merlio (1980) who attributes it to the influence of Vaihinger.

  6. Note here the recurrent themes of the Faustian character: inwardness, unimpeded vision, the convergence of mathematics and physics. Atomic theory, on Spengler’s account, sounds inherently Faustian.

  7. Even Musil, who took Spengler to task for his sloppiness and imprecision in employing mathematical concepts, conceded the validity of his points regarding the cultural and social shaping of scientific activity (Musil 1990).

  8. Cited in Schnädelbach (1984, 89).

  9. The movement from individual to more collective science, and Spengler’s occasionally disdainful tone in describing it, does seem to suggest that he saw in it the general cultural tendency to move from aristocratic individual genius to mass, democratic technique.

  10. Turning to Classical science, and its focus on the surfaces of self-contained bodies, Spengler notes that such a concept of experience would have seemed anathema to Classical scientists. He writes, “What for us is the way to acquire knowledge is for the Greek the way to lose it” (Spengler 1926, 394).

  11. See Swer (forthcoming).

  12. As Conte notes, it is not by chance that Spengler chose to bookend the first volume of The Decline of the West with chapters on science (Conte 2004, 20).

  13. Of course, the decline of pure science is not instantaneous and Spengler’s position by no means requires that it produce no further theoretical innovations. It is rather than such innovations will no longer have the cultural impact that they once had, except amongst the remnant of science aficionados, unless they have clear practical implications.

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Swer, G.M. The Decline of Western Science: Defending Spengler’s Account of the End of Science: Within Reason. J Gen Philos Sci 50, 545–560 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-019-09461-x

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