Oswald Spengler and the Singularity
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler’s sprawling opus The Decline of the West is rarely read today, except as a historical curiosity. Grand world-historical theorizing on the scale of Spengler’s project—which developed a model for explaining the rise and fall of every major culture in recorded history—is no longer much in fashion.
But the core insight that makes Spengler’s work so arresting, even today, has little to do with whether he was correct that all “modernities”—and yes, there have been many—have their own life cycle and inevitable end. At the heart of Spengler’s theory of culture was his claim that the world’s great civilizations were each unified by a single distinctive “prime symbol,” or conception of ultimate reality structuring how ordinary people perceived the cosmos. For the “Classical” (Greco-Roman) culture, the prime symbol was the concrete body set off against the “bad infinite” of formlessness (apeiron). For the “Arabian” (early Abrahamic/Zoroastrian) culture, the prime symbol was the “cavern,” or Ptolemaic universe of concentric cosmic spheres periodically penetrated by the transcendent. And for the “Faustian” (Latin Christian/modern) culture, the prime symbol was the idea of infinite immanent space extending “outwards and upwards.” On Spengler’s account, these prime symbols tend to structure all dimensions of a culture, from its spirituality to its literature to its architecture. For example, the temples of the Greeks were dominated by enormous statues representing corporeal bodies; the Arabian Islamic tradition constructed domed mosques shot through with beams of light from the outside; the Christians of medieval Europe built vast, vaulted Gothic cathedrals stretching to the heavens, reifying the theme of unbounded space.
Like all large-scale interpretations of history, Spengler’s approach risks becoming unduly reductive, and it’s easy enough to come up with counterexamples to his theory. Nevertheless, even if Spengler overstated the point, his thesis remains a rich and suggestive one, especially given the vast amounts of cross-cultural evidence Spengler adduces. And even more tantalizingly, Spengler leaves his own scheme incomplete: the reader is left to speculate what prime symbols might’ve informed the “Babylonian,” “Indian,” or “Mexican” (that is, Mesoamerican) cultures at their zenith.
That is not the only question Spengler leaves unanswered. If no culture can prevail forever, and (as Spengler believed) the Western (“Faustian”) civilization is headed towards its end, what symbol might orient the culture that comes next—if we can bring ourselves to even pose such a question? Today, as political realignments and geopolitical instability continue apace, indicating that proclamations of the liberal “end of history” were premature, the question is worth asking anew.
Indeed, perhaps the prime symbol of such a new culture—a culture whose rise was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—is already at hand.
This unifying symbol of a culture-to-be is the Singularity, or point of infinite depth, in which being is essentially coterminous with consciousness. It is the precise inversion of Faustian space; it is infinite space “turned in on itself,” abandoning concern with the “out there” in favor of the “in here.” And it is the implicit metaphysical principle that orients a way of life mediated almost purely through screens and through the internet, where material culture becomes increasingly irrelevant to the concerns of the day. (It is not coincidental that this “singularity” was perhaps most famously theorized by technologist Ray Kurzweil as the moment of emergence of true artificial intelligence.)
The prospect of such a development has long been latent within modern (Western) philosophy. Against Martin Heidegger and the existentialists who came after him, Emmanuel Levinas sought to reorient the philosophical question of infinity away from transcendental philosophy and toward the face of the Other—that is, toward a realization of the genuine interiority of other persons, an interiority permanently inaccessible to a separated subject. For Levinas, the truth of infinity is grasped in the encounter with this alterity, which resists any efforts at systematization or control: “To think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is hence not to think an object.”
Nothing, though, logically precludes an inversion of Levinas’s paradigm, a relocation of the absolutely infinite in the interiority of the ego-subject. Is the “I” of experience ever fully known to itself, capable of delivering once-for-all judgments on its own history? And if not, what unexplored depths might it possess? Moreover, while Levinas stressed that the phenomenon of interiority “institutes an order different from historical time in which totality is constituted,” might not the discovery of this interiority represent a historical event all its own? Might it not, in fact, represent the fateful emergence of a new prime symbol and a new culture, in the Spenglerian sense?
For digital natives, the symbol of the Singularity is already, as Spengler would put it, “operative through the form-sense of every man, every community, age and epoch and dictates the style of every life-expression.” In the contemporary digital ecosystem, the untapped depths of the individual’s selfhood are always mediated through a complex of screens and freestanding digital personae. Through such a complex, the “I” may choose to disclose truths about itself, or conversely adopt a mode of self-presentation altogether alien to its “meatspace” existence (e.g., the “anon account”). In such a digital world, the individual’s range of options for action and self-expression are not limited by the physical attributes of the individual that stands “behind” the persona, but solely by the rules of the information environment, which are almost always themselves malleable in principle. Society, therefore, is best conceived as a constellation of individual Singularities, brought together solely by choice and engaging solely on their own terms.
Such a culture would seem to open up, perhaps for the first time in world history, the possibility of a genuinely radical egalitarianism—one in which race, class, and other material advantages do not determine individuals’ destinies. That positive vision underpinned the techno-optimism of the 1990s. But the decades since have not been kind to such hopes. The turn from Faustian infinite space to the digitized, individuated Singularity seems to have led to a forgetfulness of both the transcendental condition—the horizon, that is, that makes encounter with other Singularities possible—and the human faces that, for Levinas, immediately exerted an urgent moral claim upon the subject.
Here lies, perhaps, one of the deep reasons that conflicts over free speech online have become so urgent and intractable. On Levinas’s account, language was a generous act of placing-something-in-common within a shared domain, an “offering of the world . . . which answers to the face of the Other or which questions him, and first opens the perspective of the meaningful.” For instance, to describe a sunset as “beautiful” is to invite another to simultaneously apprehend it as such. But in a culture oriented by the symbol of the Singularity, language does not place the world in common before another, but merely expresses one’s own infinite depths out of one’s individual experience: against Wittgenstein’s dictum that a private language is no language at all, the “I” that is Singularity insists that it must become a language. No longer does there exist the milieu of common reference that, for Levinas, provided the opportunity for generous sharing of one’s experience with another. On this model, the refusal of another to adopt a new vocabulary, no matter how unfamiliar (“pangender,” “demiromantic,” and so forth), is necessarily an invalidation of that private language, a refusal to accept the “common world” that the “I” articulates. And such a refusal to accept the discursive terms of the “I” is a constraint placed on the Singularity—which must be infinitely free in order to be itself.
It remains to be seen how—or whether—these internal tensions in the nascent digital culture will be worked out. The transition toward a full-blown culture oriented by the Singularity has barely begun: Spengler stressed that “a Destiny of a different order does not replace this form-world, suddenly and basically, by another.” The replacement of an exhausted culture by a new one is almost never an immediate event, but unfolds across centuries. Here, that process—if it has indeed begun—has only been unfolding across the most recent couple of decades.
If Spengler was right, though, close at hand may be a new, and doubtless very different, sort of “modernity.”
John Ehrett is an STM candidate at the Institute of Lutheran Theology, where he focuses on political theology and the Continental philosophical tradition.