/ world today news/ “Uncontrolled scientific and technical progress will lead us to moral decline, to a deep crisis in spiritual culture”, wrote the German philosopher Oswald Spengler /1880-1936/ about a hundred years ago in his famous work “The Sunset of the West” / 1919/. I offer the readers two points of view on this current topic from the Russian thinker Nikolai Berdyaev /1874-1948 on photo 1// and the contemporary English philosopher George Walden /on photo 2/.
NIKOLAI BERDYAEV
THE DEATH THOUGHTS OF “FAUST”
Every culture inevitably passes into civilization. Civilization is destiny, part of culture. Civilization ends with death, but it is also the beginning of death, the exhaustion of the creative forces of culture.
THE SIXTH CIVILIZATION
This is the leading idea in Oswald Spengler’s book The Sunset of the West. How does civilization actually differ from culture? Culture is fundamentally religious, civilization is not. According to Spengler, this is the main difference. He is considered a man of civilization because he is not religious. Culture originates from cult. It is connected with the cult of the ancestors and is impossible without the sacred traditions. Civilization is the will to world power, to the established order of the Earth. Culture is national, civilization is supranational. Civilization is a global city. Imperialism and socialism are equally civilization but not culture. Philosophy, art exist only in culture, in civilization they are neither possible nor necessary. Only the art of engineering is possible and necessary in civilization. The culture is organic. Civilization – mechanical. Culture is the basis of equality, of qualities. Civilization is imbued with a quest for equality! It is based on quantity. The culture is aristocratic. Civilization – democratic. The distinction between culture and civilization is extraordinarily fruitful. Spengler has a very keen sense of the irreversibility of the process of the victory of civilization over culture. The sunset of Western Europe for him is above all the sunset of the old European culture, the exhaustion of its creative forces, the decline of art, philosophy, religion. But civilization has not yet disappeared. She is yet to celebrate new victories. But after it, the death of the Western European cultural race will inevitably occur. Then culture will be able to bloom again, but in other races, in other souls.
THE FORECASTED AGONY
Oswald Spengler expressed these thoughts with astonishing brilliance. But are they new to us? we Russians could not be too surprised. We have long distinguished between culture and civilization. All Russian religious thinkers affirmed this distinction. All have felt some holy horror at the demise of culture and the celebration of civilization. Civilization is unfortunately permeated by a spirit of bourgeoisie and guildsmanship. Capitalism and socialism are equally infected by this spirit. Beneath the hatred of many Russian writers and thinkers for the West lies not so much hatred of Western culture as of Western civilization. Konstantin Leontiev, one of the most insightful Russian thinkers, discovered the Law of the Transition of Culture into Civilization.
In fact, Dostoevsky was not an enemy of Western culture either. He detested the godless, irreligious culture of Europe. Many people in the West also feel sadness, almost agony, at this celebration of an ugly, completely irreligious civilization. Not only Russian intellectuals, but also ordinary and sensitive people in Europe have repeatedly stated, with great sadness, that the great, sacred Western culture is slowly dying, that a new civilization is coming in its place – without religion, without sufficient spirituality, without real culture. And in this triumphant march of supranational icilization, the soul of Europe, its centuries-old remarkable culture, dies. But the originality of Oswald Spengler is not in the staging of this theme, but in the fact that he does not want to be a romantic and mourn the dying culture of the recent past. On the contrary, he wants to live fully, truly, to be a citizen of the world city of civilization. He agrees to replace religion, philosophy, art with technology, with machines. The peculiarity of Spengler is that there was no one else who thought like him, who lived with the sad consciousness of the irreversible decline of the old culture. This requires both a thick skin and callousness, as well as an unshakable, naïve faith in the limitless progress of technical civilization. And Spengler perfectly understood all this. But he is not the new man of this civilization, he is the dying Faust – the representative of the old European culture. In our time, Western culture is turning towards the East. A new type of culture, a new soul of culture can emerge there. For us, these thoughts are interesting: this turning of the West towards Russia, these expectations. In fact, Russia is the mediator between East and West. In it, the two currents of world history collide. There is a secret hidden in Russia, we cannot figure it out ourselves…
THE WORLD WILL PERISH
in the uniform distribution of the thermal energy of the universe – energy irreversible in other forms. The creative energies creating the diversity of the Cosmos will be lost. The world will perish in this irresistible and fatal drive for physical equality. Yes, isn’t there really a striving for equality in the social world as well – entropy, the destruction of the social cosmos? The reflections that awaken the themes posed by Oswald Spengler evoke these sad findings. And yet, this bitterness need not be so hopeless and gloomy. The final word on the fate of the world and man is not just physics and sociology, is it?
GEORGE WALDEN
IS THE WEST IN DECLINE?
Can we hope that Russia or China will breathe new life into our ailing culture? In China, I recently spoke with a publisher. The scale of book publishing there is truly spectacular. In my opinion, there has been no such precedent so far. For most of twenty years, over a billion people on this planet have been forcibly torn from their culture, and then it was most unexpectedly returned to them along with the culture of other peoples. The effect for them was amazing!
WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO RUSSIA?
As for Russia… It will be interesting to find out what will happen to the Russian tradition of reading books even in the subway. Until recently, this was a great advantage of the Russians: they could effortlessly ignore their boring television, but now after the changes there, it is no longer so simple. In The Sunset of the West, Oskar Spengler wrote,
that gunpowder and printing were discovered in China at the same time. He emphasizes that the first ever use of leaflets for propaganda coincided with the massive artillery attack at the Battle of Valmi /1792/. It is truly striking that the popularization of the printed word and long-range shooting began at the same time. And Spengler calls these discoveries “two Faustian means of waging war at a distance” /!/. He was pleased to “find out” about – also the simultaneous one! – appearance of two more types of powerful weapons: television and thermonuclear missiles.
TELEVISION REMOVES THE DISTANCE
“But television will bring us closer together, supporters of this medium would argue. She will raise a new race – peaceful citizens of the planet. I do not know! Television will finally eliminate the concept of “distance” and lead us /according to the expression of Martin Heidegger/ to the concept of “sameness without distance”, where everything is mixed and can be referred forever”. All things will lose their true value and, in a certain sense, their being. The idea that the “eternal world” can be secured by technical means / communications or “star wars” / or through intergovernmental contacts is simply a delusion.
In practice, the question is this: what will happen when the belated, limited and generally doubtful enlightenment of the East will meet the “anti-enlightenment” of the West? In his lecture “On the future of the victory of democracy”, Thomas Mann said that the world and democracy will triumph only if the latter manages to preserve “a deep and living memory of itself” and “constantly renews its spiritual and moral self-awareness”.
I think it is these abilities that have been neglected by our education system. Ironically, the East began its uncertain and long journey to democracy when we were already losing touch with its roots.
Complaints against the education system are not from yesterday. In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel gives an amusing example. In 1803 in Rome, to the question “What attitude do you have towards educational institutions?” one professor replied: “As for brothels – I tolerate them!” If the American system goes too far with its reckless pragmatism, ours, the British one, is too hypocritical and pretentious. The industry?! It is not a job for aristocrats. Technology is not for gentlemen and sophisticated ladies… If Britain had consciously turned its ship against the current of recent history and educated generations of high-minded humanitarians, we would now be an economically sophisticated but spiritually rich country. But we did not go that way, and our schools and colleges are organized on a different principle. And if our universities still produce a certain amount of truly educated humanitarians, it is due to the conservative moments of our educational system.
ULTIMATE PRAGMATISM AND EDUCATION
There is no doubt that it was the failed experiment with egalitarianism in the Enlightenment that caused irreparable damage in the spiritual realm. When market principles are introduced without any reservations in education as well, we reach extreme utilitarianism.
Our teachers now look like prison priests. With a pious expression, they mumble under their breath various humanitarian truths that they themselves no longer believe. Those who claim that Britain is lagging far behind in technical education are quite right. But I think it is even more difficult to admit another fact. The thing is that our country is the only one in this world that managed to reconcile the “anti-business” tradition with the “anti-intellectual” tradition in enlightenment.
In America, one exists, but the other is simply absent. The government agrees with this because the country needs more scientists and a skilled workforce. Teachers agree to maintain the illusion that they are working hard to educate their students in the humanities. Parents put up because they want their children to find work. And all this distances the masses from the highest values, and the persons clothed in power remain the only “guardians of the canon”, even though they have long distrusted it or lacked the courage to defend it.
DEMOCRACY IS WITHOUT AN ALTERNATIVE
However vulnerable my words may seem to you now, I am firmly convinced that the great values of education and culture, on the one hand, and the world, on the other, are inextricably linked. Of course, this thought is by no means original: I took it from Kant. But it is partly suggested by my twenty-year experience as a diplomat – mainly in communist countries.
It is quite clear that the world will be guaranteed only when democracy is established in all countries. But without education and without culture democracy could never be true, just as education and culture without ethics could never be true.
Note and translation:
Ognyan STAMBOLIEV
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