Cultural and philosophical reflection on Spengler's Decline of the West in Chinese thought in the 1920s–1940s

Sukhomlinova Viktoriia Postgraduate student, the department of Philosophy, Moscow State Institute of International Relations 119454, Russia, Moskva oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Pr. Vernadskogo, 76, of. 4114a pavlenko1993@gmail.com

Introduction

Between 1918 and 1922 two volumes of O. Spengler's "The Decline of the West" were published. G. Simmel called this work "the most significant in the philosophy of history since Hegel." Enthusiastic responses followed from Hesse, Ortega y Gasset found it necessary to publish the book in Spanish (Stepanova 2016: 73). By contrast, there was a flurry of negative assessments in the German academia, with accusations of dilettantism and charlatanism, which was to some extent compensated by the furor produced by the book in broad, non-academic circles (Svas'yan 1998: 15-20). In Russia a collected volume "Oswald Spengler and The Decline of the West" was published in 1922. N. Berdyaev wrote that he had likewise anticipated "the twilight of Europe, and that Europe as a monopolist of culture approaches its historical end, that culture will inevitably go beyond Europe, to other continents, to other races," and "one can foresee that philosophical thought will henceforth deal not so much with the problems of epistemology as with the problems of the philosophy of history" (Berdyaev 1922).

However, "The Decline of the West" resonated not only with European and Russian cultural discourses, but also with the emerging Chinese view of culture. In the early 1920s Chinese students who studied in Germany mentioned Spengler in their articles and notes, and by the 1930s his philosophical ideas had started to serve as a basis for the emerging Chinese cultural concepts. Some of the current Chinese studies mention that "The Decline of the West" is as important as the First World War and the crisis of European identity, in shaping China's cultural identity in the 1920s.

At first my research attempted to trace parallels in the philosophical and cultural methodology of Spengler and those Chinese intellectuals who actively mentioned his name and applied his ideas and terminology. The task seemed even more complicated by the fact that Spengler's theory focus group was the Europeans. Claiming it to be a universal interpretation of history, Spengler nevertheless defined it as the voice of Western European culture at a certain stage of its history. In this regard, it was necessary to define why Spengler's Eurocentric concept resonated so strongly with Chinese culture, and what kind of discourse can be used for analyzing this resonance within the framework of philosophy of culture.

My paper eventually states that the ideas of Spengler's Chinese followers are not logically coherent with his ideas, and in this respect do not inherit his methodology. However, the way Spengler’s theory was integrated into Chinese thought can still be viewed as a method of philosophy of culture. A similar approach is applied by contemporary scholars of Cultural Studies, including American anthropologist Clifford Geertz and his work "Interpretation of Cultures" (Geertz 2004). What is more, Western philosophical community has recently tried to incorporate non-Western approaches to knowledge into the arsenal of its epistemological concepts (Posholi 2020). In this respect granting the integration of Spengler's ideas into Chinese thought with a philosophical status also seems justifiable.

China at the time of the publication of "The Decline of the West"

The publication of "The Decline of the West" came at an important moment in Chinese history. The defeat in the Opium Wars (1840-1842; 1856-1860) had made the Qing empire what it was later called a "partly feudal, partly colonial" state. The wars shaped two major societal shifts that China was still experiencing in the 1920s.

The first shift was the appropriation of the Western way of life and thinking. At the initial stage of this process, immediately after the Opium Wars, it was the Western weapons and production technologies that was of the greatest importance to China. At the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Chinese officials began to consider Western political and legislative systems. After the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the imperial regime of the Qing Dynasty, the so-called New Culture Movement (xin wenhua yundong 新文化运动) gained momentum in the new Republic of China. The radicals among Chinese intellectuals who belonged to the movement delved into Western philosophy (Chow 2013: 327). What was peculiar about this first societal shift was that attempts to introduce certain elements of the Western way of life into socio-political practice in China were made right along with the actual study of it. The reason for that haste was an acute state crisis which threatened, as it seemed then, the very existence of China.

The second major societal shift was the search for national and cultural identity. To some extent this process was a part of the first one, since the concepts like "nation”, "culture", "identity" originated in the European discourse, even though Chinese theoreticians found them Chinese equivalents - minzu 民族, wenhua 文化, rentong 认同. However, it was also broader than the first, since it included the specific way of how Chinese intellectuals conceptualized their belonging to Chinese culture. This conceptualization was largely unfolding in its traditional terms and according to its traditional model — through a reflexive interpretation of ancient Confucian texts.

Recognizing the importance of integrating the achievements of Western civilization turned out to be a painful experience for the Chinese worldview, since it essentially meant recognizing the existence of another civilization with a different cultural code and project. In the past Chinese thinkers considered the universe as a single organism centered on the imperial palace, and the conceptual borders of Confucianism coincided so closely with those of Chinese state and culture (with likewise hardly any distinctions between these two) that the "national identity of the Chinese", as well as their "cultural identity", hardly existed (Blitstein 2021: 29-31).

Thus, a hundred years ago the concept of cultural equality and the dialogue of cultures was as unusual for Chinese intellectuals as for the European progressionists. The most energetic members of the New Culture Movement (Chen Duxiu 陈独秀, Hu Shi 胡适, Li Dazhao 李大钊, etc.) advocated for a complete rejection of the very pillars of traditional Chinese worldview in favor of Western cultural worldview (The History of China 2002: 397). The editor of a major periodical "Dongfang zazhi" Du Yaquan 杜亚泉was one of the few, and perhaps the only Chinese intellectual who wrote about the possibility of combining the achievements of Eastern and Western cultures, as well as the need for "self-awareness", "self-confidence", for affirming the equality of Chinese and Western culture (Lomanov 2017: 108).

The First World War and Paris Peace Conference (at which the Entente countries rejected the demands of the Chinese delegation) radically changed this situation. The Europeans themselves were disappointed in the path of their culture, which degenerated into the triumph of militarism, many European intellectuals began to travel to the East and subsequently describe Eastern cultures as independent and full-fledged (Russel 1966: 41). Public figures in the former colonies, for example, the world-famous Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, took this as an opportunity to criticize the pressure of the European materialistic culture on the spiritual culture of the East. Japanese magazines wrote that "civilization is not a European patent" – the point actively reprinted by Chinese journals. That was the moment when China gave up on its strive towards liberal values and way of thinking and embarked on defining the limits of Westernization of Chinese culture (Zheng Shiqun 1997: 208-209).

The response of Chinese intellectuals to the "Decline of the West”

Spengler's theory almost immediately spread among Chinese students who were studying in Germany. One of them, named Wei Shizhen, published an article in 1921, where he proudly noted that the idea of the imminent decline of the European Enlightenment culture forced many European intellectuals to turn to Chinese philosophy as a source of cultural innovation (Li Changlin 2004: 162).Another one - Zong Baihua 宗白华, whose role will be further analyzed below, also wrote in 1921: "After the war, there has been an unexpected uplift in the German intellectual circles, books are published incessantly, mostly devoted to the discussion of the theory of relativity, but there are others about the criticism of "culture". Among the latter, the two most popular works are "The Decline of the West" and "The Philosopher's Travel Diary". Both speak of the insolvency, the collapse of Europe and the beauty of Eastern culture" (Li Xiaoqian 2012: 107).

On their return to China after studying in Western countries, Chinese intellectuals, who had been influenced by Spengler, featured “The Decline of the West” as a subject of lectures on European and comparative history and even separate courses at Chinese universitites. At that time “The Decline of the West” was not yet translated into Chinese, which nevertheless did not prevent Chinese scholars or even Chinese students from familiarizing themselves with the English translation or even the German original.

The reason for Spengler's popularity in China was partly because Spengler was "the first of Western historians" who showed that the scope of “culture” is not conceptually limited to modern European culture, just as Copernicus once refuted the idea of a geocentric system of the world (Spengler 1998: 146-147). I assume that Chinese intellectuals could regard this as a validation of their personal quest for the path of historical development and the way of understanding this path. There are reasons to believe that only a European philosophical concept – not a Chinese one – could have triggered this quest. That is why several years previous to that the ideas of Du Yaquan, who had also been advocating for the autonomous development of Chinese cultural thought, did not gain momentum. In those historical conditions, with China experiencing political and spiritual crisis and eager to master the idea of modernization, only a European theory could safeguard – in metaphysical sense – its emerging cultural self-awareness.

Spengler's statement that culture is a living, organismic unity capable of both progress and decline and even death, and that each culture has its own "passions, desires, feelings" (Spengler 1998: 151)also appealed to the Chinese worldview. Zong Baihua even called Spengler's concept a "historical ecology" (Li Xiaoqian 2012: 108).

By the 1940s, two parties stood out among Spengler's Chinese followers: The so-called School of Politics of the Warring States (zhanguo cepai战国策派) led by Lin Tongji (林同济, 1906-1980) and the aesthetic approach of Zong Baihua (1897-1986), and Fan Dongmei 方东美 (1899-1978).

The basis for the concept of the School of Politics of the Warring States, in addition to Spengler’s morphology of culture, was formed by Nietzsche's idea of will to power, as well as the ancient Chinese "Book of Changes". Their core idea (and their major difference from Spengler) suggested that a certain cultural form of the past could be reconstructed in the present. According to Spengler, cultural forms are unique, their life circles are enclosed and cannot be repeated. Lin Tongji and others, in their turn, argued that if there had been a bright, creative cultural form in the nation’s history, it could be "reproduced", since the descendants’ self-consciousness was sure to contain its “cultural codes”. For China, the Warring States period (476-221 BC), with its political fragmentation and yet cultural flourishment, was exactly that kind of cultural form. As the School of Politics of the Warring States claimed, political fragmentation was always the most favorable time for the culture to flourish and torealize its creative force. However, this period always ends with a devastating war, and as a result feudal states are urged to find a political consensus. The Europe witnessed by the authors of the concept, having survived the First World War, found itself exactly in this kind of state. It needed to curb its cultural freedom, which its nation-states have enjoyed for more than 500 years, for the sake of political stability. China, by contrast, had enjoyed stability for two thousand years, which had degenerated into stagnation and the fear of any historical action. Therefore China needed to revive the spirit – or cultural form – of the Warring States, with its cult of power (both spiritual and physical), the "will to power" and the role of personality in history (Hu Jihua 2002: 78-80).

Zong Baihua, a Chinese poet and art critic, was most imbued with Spengler's concept of “prime symbol” of the cultural form which centers its entire sensory matrix. Unlike Lin Tongji, Zong believed that the spirit of Chinese culture lies in its aesthetic, rather than chivalric tradition. He proceeded fromSpengler's idea that the prime symbol of European Faustian culture is an infinitely expanding space. In Chinese culture, Zong argues, it is not the long gaze into infinity that structures space, but the head’s rhythmical turns in different directions. The category of rhythm, also borrowed from Spengler, was elevated by Zong Baihua to serve as the foundation of the transcendental method. Rhythm, music is something that is shared by nature and man. Rhythmical, musical turns of the head with short glances in different directions prevents a person from grieving for the distant and inaccessible, he feels joy from being in the center of a space, albeit limited, but structured by him — "look up, look down — and be satisfied" (fuyang zide俯仰自得). This, according to Zong Baihua, is the prime symbol of Chinese culture and the essence of his own cosmology (Hu Jihua 2002: 81-83).

Another Chinese thinker Fang Dongmei was deeply inspired by the manner Spengler described the decline of European "Faustian" culture. Nihilism, the desire for boundless freedom and at the same time the fear of this freedom, unsuccessful attempts to master time – all of this, Fan Dongmei agreed, made the "decline of Europe" inevitable. However, he immediately offered to remedy European culture through infusions of Chinese aesthetics, its love of life, spontaneity and utopianism. Having correctly interpreted Spengler's "culture" as a cultural form based on a unique spirit and a unique symbolic system, Fang Dongmei, however, neglected Spengler's thought about the isolation of culture and the inevitability — without a positive or negative connotation — of its demise.

At the same time, for Fang Dongmei, as well as for Zong Baihua, Spengler's concept of time and space became an effective angle for a new interpretation of traditional Chinese culture. Fang Dongmei wrote that a Confucian was a "man of time", that he perceived the flow of changes that constitute life as a gift from Heaven and tried to embrace the idea behind these changes in his moral life in order to assist Heaven in its creative enterprise. The Taoist, by contrast, is a "man of space" who strives to transcend morality and to relocate himself to where the world is portrayed as "a mixture of wisdom and folly" (Fang Dongmei’s collected works 2013: 82-84). "Space" here means "poetic space", a place for artistic expression. Fang Dongmei went further, developing all possible forms of synthesis: Mahayana Buddhists were designated by him as "people of space-time with the ability to forget both", neo-Confucians of the Song-Ming era – as "people capable of simultaneously feeling both space and time" (Zheng 2021: 170-171).

The way Western philosophy influenced Chinese thought

"The Decline of the West" was a book intended for the European reader — for those who identify themselves with European culture or have long coexisted with it and could therefore view Spengler's ideas as a conceptual framework for their own reflections on culture. In this respect it is possible to speak about the reception (not about the mere influence) of Spengler's ideas in the works of N. Berdyaev (Chernyaev, Berdnikova 2020: 78) than about the reception of Spengler's ideas in Chinese thought. Spengler's contemporaries had already posed a question whether the understanding of culture in terms of "prime symbols", "gestalt", "time-space" was an attribute of a universalist, a Eurocentric worldview, even though it proclaimed the end of the Eurocentric era.

On the one hand, Spengler did claim that “cultures speak in different languages” and “all of them are valid” (Spengler 1998: 155). On the other hand, he wrote that the decline which European culture experienced was exactly the reason why this culture produced concepts of world history, and perhaps after its decline no culture would bother with such concepts (Spengler 1998: 143-144). Having expanded his subject to the framework of the universal morphology of history – and at the same time reducing the research view to the voice of a specific era and a specific culture, Spengler found himself in a paradox. His theory could no longer claim to be a genuine philosophical truth, which means that it cannot serve as a meta-theory of culture (Dobrokhotov, Kalinkin 2010: 292).

In this regard, it seems that whatever angle Chinese thinkers would choose to approach Spengler's theory and even if they had studied his methodology in great detail and tried to interpret world history proceeding from his theory, they were doomed to be methodologically incorrect, only because Chinese civilization is not capable of understanding the language of forms of world history — only "Westerners" are capable of it (Spengler 1998: 157). However, the Chinese followers of Spengler — that is, those thinkers who explicitly called Spengler their teacher — as I have shown, did not try to interpret world history. The gestalt of Western culture, whose mouthpiece Spengler considered himself to be, and his entire language of forms, is also of interest to the Chinese only insofar as its universality is denounced.

Despite all this, there is a multidimensional influence of Spengler's ideas on Chinese thought. The first aspect relates more to the sentiments that arose in China due to the mere fact of the appearance of such a work as "The Decline of the West", and the second — to the conceptual content of the work.

Firstly, the "Decline of the West" and the historical background against which it appeared encouraged Chinese thought to appropriate the idea of cultural consciousness. The Chinese were deeply impressed by Spengler's idea of equality of cultures and cultural polyphonism (wenhua duo yuan hua 文化多元化), as well as by the fact that this idea also implied the crisis of European identity (Zhen Shiqun 1997: 212). It created prospects for Chinese thinkers to distance themselves both from Western culture, and from the "civilization–barbarism" dichotomy. That is, in fact, it contributed to shaping the Chinese cultural consciousness — the awareness of one's belonging to a certain self-sufficient and unique culture. It is no coincidence that it was during these years that the first theoretical comparative study in China – "Eastern and Western Cultures and their philosophy" by Liang Shumin (1922) was published. If we assume that the idea of national identity was assimilated by the Chinese officials and intellectuals due to the defeat in the Opium Wars and the foreign interventions that followed (Blitstein 2021: 32-34), then it can be argued that the idea of cultural consciousness became largely accessible to them thanks to Spengler's theory of world history.

Secondly, this case reveals several indicative features of the reception of Western philosophy in modern Chinese philosophy. This process has lasted up to this day and has a certain significance in terms of philosophy of culture — the very one to which Spengler sought to contribute. If we suggest that Chinese intellectuals could not master Spengler’s methodological framework, then at least they could assimilate his conceptual apparatus. Although their work does not seem to be a genuine philosophical reception (which would imply that their conclusions can serve as a contribution to the development of Spengler's historical and cultural theory), this work should not be denied a philosophical status.

Chinese philosophical thought is defined by its reflexivity. This feature traces back to the philosophy of the largest Neo Confucian Wang Yangming (1472-1529), who chose to be consciously subjective in interpreting ancient classical canons. Wang Yangming writes texts "stringing" statements from the canons on a semantic structure of his own. That is the reason why some critics are inclined to accuse him of psychologism and mysticism, but at the same time his approach can be viewed as a form of hermeneutical and existential analysis (Li Xiaoqian 2012: 109-110). The foundations of such an approach go back to the depths of ancient Chinese philosophy, to the famous statement of Meng-tzu (372-289 BC) that all humans are innately good (shan 善). This statement was later interpreted by representatives of the new Confucianism in the 20^th century as a fundamental refusal to double-check the primary judgments of the senses and an inclination to trust intuitive understanding.

A culture as strong and deep as the Chinese masters the historical context in which it is immersed by incorporating of this context into its own cultural symbolism (Sukhomlinova 2020). Observing the phenomena of another culture, she simultaneously observes her own observation of this culture. This kind of existential understanding no longer looks like something exotic and incorrect in the light of the latest trends in Western humanities. For example, an American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, wrote about a similar approach, urging to pay attention to what the data obtained by the ethnographer can tell about his own cultural symbolism (Geertz 2004: 19-23). In this regard, Chinese intellectuals act as ethnographers in relation to European thought about culture, and considering the current trend towards epistemological decolonization (Posholi 2020), this scholarly stance appears to be an interesting and relevant cultural philosophical methodology.

Conclusion

Thus, the ideas and concepts articulated by Spengler have found their niche in modern Chinese culture, giving names to those phenomena that were accumulated in it at that time, but have not yet been linguistically and conceptually identified. In line with K. Geertz’s approach, whether there was a “methodologically correct” reception or not is of minor interest to us. What would be truly novel is to analyze what are the cultural and symbolical connotations of Chinese thinkers borrowing Spengler's concepts and ideas (Geertz 2004: 17). In this regard, we came to the following conclusions:

1. By the time "The Decline of the West" was published, the Chinese intellectuals were overwhelmed by contradictory sentiments: on the one hand, there remained the desire of the European modernization scenario. On the other hand, there was a growing need to consider traditional Chinese worldview. Against this background it was crucial that the original analysis of Chinese culture was validated by a European concept.

2. Spengler's idea that "cultures" are autonomous entities, existing each in its own symbolic universes of time and space, turned out to be a suitable theoretical basis for the post-imperial China cultural identity. After the end of the First World War and the publication of "The Decline of the West", it became a common discourse among Chinese intellectuals that "Chinese culture" as an independent entity which can be compared with the West and can serve as a source of their cultural consciousness.

3. The culture analysis offered by Lin Tongji, Zong Baihua and Fan Dongmei is an analysis of Chinese culture using O. Spengler's philosophical and cultural vocabulary, and not an attempt to incorporate the experience of the Chinese intellectual tradition to expand his morphology of world history. In other words, Chinese culture is their object, and the "The Decline of the West" is their optics, and not vice versa.

4. Spengler's theory "coincided" with the traditional Chinese view on the essence of culture and human creativity to an extent that was necessary to the Chinese culture to make “The Decline of the West” serve as a new perspective for self-interpretation. This is a classical case of Chinese cultural modernization.

5. As far as the European epistemological approaches are concerned, such assimilation of ideas (or better to say cultural appropriation) cannot be called a true philosophical reception, since it is methodologically incorrect: it ignores the paradigmatic framework of the concept under study, and the use of terms invented by Spengler looks rather intuitive.

6. At the same time, providing the currently proliferating approaches of human sciences and their interaction with non-Western epistemological concepts, as well as the traditionally reflective nature of Chinese philosophy, we can claim that such a method of mastering an alien idea has a solid cultural basis and is philosophical in nature.