ADORNO ON SPENGLER & HEIDEGGER

[Ralph Dumain]

WARM-UP:

"When the second volume of the _Decline_ [of the West_] appeared, in 1922,
its reception did not even remotely approach that of the first, even though
the thesis of the decline is not concretely developed until the second
volume.  The laymen who had read Spengler as they had read Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer before him had in the meantime become estranged from
philosophy; the professional philosophers were soon to flock to Heidegger,
whose work was to give their irritation more dignified and refined
expression.  He exalted death and promised to transform the thought of it
into a professional secret for academics; Spengler had simply decreed it
without respect to persons.  Spengler was left behind...."  [Theodor W.
Adorno, PRISMS, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982, "Spengler After the
Decline", p. 53] 

THE PITCH:

"Spengler scrutinizes the individual sciences from top to bottom, as though
for a clearance sale.  If one were to characterize Spengler himself in the
terminology of the civilization he denounces and name him in his own style,
one would have to compare the _Decline of the West_ to a department store
where the intellectual agent sells the dried literary scraps he purchased at
half-price at the close-out sale of culture.  His procedure reveals the
embittered resentment of the German middle-class scholar who wants to make
capital of his learning at last and invest it in the most promising banch of
the economy, which at the time was heavy industry.  Spengler's insight into
the helplessness of liberal intellectuals in the shadow of rising
totalitarian power prompts him to become a turncoat.  By denouncing itself
the mind makes itself capable of providing anti-ideological ideologies.
Spengler's proclamation of the demise of culture conceals wishful thinking.
The mind which denies itself and sides with force hopes to be pardoned."
[p. 63]

MIGHTY SPENGLER IS STRUCK OUT.

This was not only Spengler, but Heidegger to a T, and the whole caboodle
that have followed in his wake.