III. TWENTIETH-CENTURY
DEVELOPMENTS
Only two influential theories of cycles need be cited
as representative of
twentieth-century thinking on this
problem, the theories of Oswald Spengler
and those
of Arnold Toynbee.
According to Spengler, and Toynbee as well, human
history must be divided
longitudinally into the biogra-
phies of
civilizations, cultures, nations. These historical
items are to be
considered under the metaphor of a
living organism which is born, matures,
and dies. In
Spengler's view, as given in his Decline of
the West
(German 1918; English 1926-28), people begin in a
creative state of mind, which he calls
“Faustian”—very
similar to what Nietzsche
had called in his Birth of
Tragedy
“Dionysian,” where music and the dance,
where the
dramatic and the lyrical, are the dominant
features of life. This period he
calls that of a culture.
But as a culture develops, it inevitably gives way
to
rationality, and the Apollonian attitude, where the
geometric, the
static, the formal predominate. When
such features reach their height,
there is no longer a
culture, there is only a civilization. As a result
the
people's creative spirit dies. The Decline of the
West
is the story of how this has happened in the Occident.
The same story has been repeated and presumably will
be repeated again in
the Orient. Thus the cycle of
culture-civilization-death-culture goes on
forever.
Toynbee is a bit less discouraging. For to his way
of thinking there have
been twenty-six nations or civi-
lizations
so far in world history. All have undergone
the same stimuli, known as
challenges. To these chal-
lenges they have
responded in various ways and the
ways are what we call their histories. So
far none has
succeeded in successfully meeting the challenges which
have been put to them. But there is always the possi-
bility that some civilization will succeed in doing
so.
The latter half of the twentieth century will see how
successfully occidental civilization can meet the chal-
lenge which has confronted it. Just what
this challenge
is, is far from clear, unless it is the challenge that
communism has put up to capitalism. But since capi-
talistic countries have absorbed certain socialistic
de-
vices and communistic countries have
either retained
or introduced capitalistic devices, there must be some
other explanation that Toynbee has in mind. What
recurs eternally in both
Spengler and Toynbee is the
general pattern of history, not the individual
events.
There have been and probably will continue to be
international
wars, for instance, but no given war will
be repeated. The problem that
such historians have
to face is how to use their classifications, how
much
similarity they will demand of those events to which
they give
the same name. In one sense of the word,
every time a person is born there
is a repetition of
a set of events. But what is born, beyond that
which
is named by the noun “person,” is individual
and
different from every other member of his class. This
problem is
one that few historians have been willing
to face, for it carries one off
into the regions of meta-
physics.
Related to the doctrine of historical cycles is that
based on the metaphor
of the swinging pendulum,
according to which an historical movement will
reach
an extreme and then turn back until it reaches an
opposite
extreme. Thus radicalism and conservatism in
politics, romanticism and
classicism in art, skepticism
and authoritarianism in religion, have all
been said to
occur in this manner. But the extremes have never been
clearly defined except possibly by Hegel, whose histor-
ical theory is discussed elsewhere.
