Spengler on the Phenomenal Foundations of Culture

My typical approach to analyzing cultures is to research and understand their moral foundations. I look at behaviors and try to understand what kinds of constitutive goods they are oriented around. But now that I’ve started looking at subcultures based on embodied practices, I’m noticing that I need to expand my toolkit and ask about physiological foundations as well. One thinker who has been influencing my thinking in this regard is Oswald Spengler, a character who left quite a mark on 20th century historians and on controversial political movements. He’s a cult favorite of doom-preaching reactionaries who take inspiration from the title of his famous book The Decline of the West but who haven’t learned much of his methodology, which turns out to be useful for understanding my subject. Over the summer I slogged through Volume 1. It’s a McLuhanesque romp through history, a bombastic comparative study of great cultures.

Spengler thinks that physiological sensations, derived from some natural experience, give rise to every other aspect of a culture. What a culture physically sense and experience gives rise to its mathematical ambitions (what it measure), its moral ambitions (how it evaluates), its artistic ambitions (what it expresses), and its religious and ultimately scientific ambitions (how it understands). So the moral and the phenomenological are isomorphic: they correspond in structure and form. For an overview of Spengler’s analysis of Classical Greco-Roman culture versus Modern “Faustian” culture, I recommend the excerpt linked here.

I am wary of Spengler’s claim that every culture has a “prime symbol,” a single phenomenological experience that symbolically prefigures everything else the culture develops. But I think the gist of the method is useful, and that there are certainly structural and thematic similarities across many cultural forms. For instance, every one of the practices I’m looking at has a teleology that you can see by looking a its most expert masters. Practices transform participants. Old-timers in group therapy communities I’ve been a part of have a specific way of interacting with people. They’re often trying to interact with people in an emotionally honest way, using specialized language for agreeing such as “I’ll join you in that.” The so-called “here-and-now work” that they’ve done for years transforms how they think about interacting with others in the interpersonal field of moral, relational, and physiological meanings.

Another example is old-timers in martial arts. Look at how jiu jitsu legend Rickson Gracie can move himself after years of practice:

As I’ve thought about how to research these practices I’ve been finding myself asking a question that drives at both the physiological and moral component: what does this want to do with your body? What group therapy “wants,” what circling “wants,” what breathwork “wants,” what analytic psychology “wants,” and what yoga practice “wants” are not the same. So key to the kind of inquiry I want to do is a close read of what these practices and subcultures say they are doing, while comparing that to how people are transforming through engaging with them.

Reading Spengler’s torturous Nietzschean prose inspired me to write a brief fragment that applies his style of analysis to American culture and the kinds of practices I’m encountering in California. I’m including that below. It’s an awful ramble, but there are seeds of ideas here. Some useful background: for Spengler, the prime symbol of Faustian culture is infinite space. He sees this expressed in the rising complexity of Gothic architecture, the functional mathematics of the calculus, and the moral expression of the Will. “The Western, Gothic, form-feeling . . . is that of an unrestrained, strong-willed far-ranging soul, and its chosen badge is pure, imperceptible, unlimited space.”

The expansion-element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must not confuse this hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-to-power.

On Spengler’s brief section on discovery, expansion, and geographical exploratory tendencies: the American impulse to colonize and to worship its own culture above others is no different. What is uniquely American is the medium of expansion. America is the culture of radio, television, and the internet. It replaces direct evangelism with transmission. When Balaji Srinivasen writes that his “Network School” is for people who believe in Western values but think they should be promoted by the internet, he is only saying what has already taken place. Generally speaking the democratic spirit is carried by the protocol, or at least the fundamental American principle, the principle of choice.

America retains something of the Will of the Faustian. The Romantic move was to take the starting point of this Willful striving and move it inward, to locate its potentiality in the person. Yet at the same time, secularity removed any notion of a soul while leaving a the possibility of purity and perfectibility intact. Thus Americans are left with two notions of the self: the body and its life. Of these the body has surely been the more neglected of the two, which is why American countercultures have always engaged in much more sensuous activities than the mainstream. The conscious American mind is all about controlling the body, visually perfecting it—because this body is for a viewer, not for its possessor, the vessel for life but not life itself. It is only with the free love communes of the 19th century, the subversive adoption of yoga practices, and the Esalen-led enlightenment of the body, with American countercultures, that the body becomes the way of life for Americans. This divide is even visible in Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die movement. Johnson-style body monitoring is about ignoring the felt sensations of bodily desire and listening only to the data. It is the same neurotic sense of control, but the “viewer” here is not another set of eyes but quantitative metrics.

On the other hand, Americans embrace an ethos of life. Mary Oliver’s poem about one’s “wild and precious life” captures this beautifully. Life is the notion of the will stripped of directionality, and imbued with the possibility of choice. The American does not feel he has a destiny, he is instead pure potentiality. What he could be or could do is the quartz at the ticking heart of his self. Thus a politics, a tax system, an inheritance law, and an attitude toward religion that maximize the potentiality of this self. Americans love the notion of agency, as they think it speaks to maximizing potentiality. Optionality is something they attempt to increase, only sheepishly realizing hey sometimes have to compromise it. The core American traditions are leaving the family and church of origin; an American has to discover from the zeroth state what is for him, what he is about. So even America’s vast spiritual marketplace is one expression of its notion of life as pure potentiality.

With life as potentiality and choice as the expression of being, it becomes hard for Americans to challenge each other on anything that isn’t paltry. Conflict aversion is a part of the culture, such as you wouldn’t expect for a culture which allows for such great striving. Yet the essence of this striving is—do not interfere with me! I am doing something great. The paradoxical thing about choice is that it means Americans worship anything that comes about by the market while absolutely avoiding imposing on others personally. It is the dominance of the market and the unfortunate replacement of life with choice—a downgrade—that corrupts the American spirit. Life has to be ignited within the body to fully realize itself. Americans of this kind are regrettably few. Whitman, Roosevelt, who in the later 20th century embodies it?

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Another property of the American sensibility, really the Californian sensibility, is the dissolution of boundaries. This is something that psychedelics first brought into the repertoire of American senses. Now it is visible everywhere in California. The noticeable thing about group houses and “healing” scenes in Berkeley and Los Angeles is that people make eye contact for too long—too long for a New Yorker anyway. I can stand more eye contact than most, and I always want to escape those lingering eye touches. I could fall in too far. The effect of eye gazing exercises popular in authentic relating games and Landmark (more California exports) is that the gazer exposes him or herself far more than in a normal stare, like the dog making eye contact with you while it defecates—a moment of true vulnerability. Eye contact breeds connection, exchange, union, merger, in short it means the dissolution of the self-other boundary.

This is the implicit goal of the circling practice, whether between two parties or between one and a group. One person comes into a deep in-the-moment awareness of what others are feeling about them. The exchange of thoughts and feelings moves back and forth at a rapid pace so that everyone becomes involved in the flow of emotion. A push and pull is there, but the essence of it is release into a flow of self-other-self-other.

Naturally the groups who adopt these practices are the same ones inclined toward polyamory, the dissolution of boundaries par excellence. Note polyamory’s goal is not the contravening of the spousal pairwise partnership. The boundary it demolishes is the one that monogamy erects between a person and all the other fishes in the sea. Like in unearned eye contact and the unearned intimacy of circling, it is all about falling in—the potentiality of connection. Polyamory recognizes the possibility of connection and union between anyone. It says: when you feel the signs, go for it—fall in!

I say “unearned” but there are potential virtues in the ethos of union. Spengler says that even morality can be worked out from the phenomenal sense. For Faustian man, the ethos of the conquest, the drive, the fulfillment of life, the stretching and yearning of men toward the heavens—it all derives from the sense of distance, from the “passion for the third dimension.” Well the California sensibility is the exact inverse. It is about the merger. The 20th century split the atom; the 21st will fuse it. Who knows what this means in the moral realm, but it certainly means something other than turning the will inwards. You can clearly see the difference: Eric Wollberg calls the users of his lucid dream induction device “the Darwins of consciousness,” an obvious expression of the self-as-frontier. An art form representative of the California sensibility is more Turrell than renaissance painting.

What “goods,” what constitutive moralities will the prime phenomenon of merger produce? We already see that the internet is not what it claims to be. It betrays every ideal of “separation” foisted on it. It is the preeminent tool of groupthink, control, and merger. It makes many minds act like one. A truly positive articulation of the internet’s convergent possibilities was announced in Squad Wealth: here the atomic unit of is not a person but a group.