Spengler’s The Decline of the West builds up an account of history from first principles about how human cognition works, to strikingly specific analyses of men, historical events, artistic masterpieces and intellectual achievement. He wrote it to show that there are discrete eras that play out, over a thousand years, the development of primary symbols that inform a culture’s thinking. What he accomplishes in two volumes alone, fifty years before their emergence, is arguably the equal, or superior, account of historical scepticism to the many post-structuralists who today define the atmosphere of academia. Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and the Lark have very similar philosophical fundamentals to Spengler's that inform their cultural analysis, but they neglect a few key components that allow them to claim they are something separate. Spengler was held back by the general ridicule of German historicism during and after World War II, but as it stands, I regard him as a successor to Foucault and Derrida should their ideas be refuted.
Post-structuralist philosophy greatly informs modern progressive beliefs, and as those beliefs are criticised, so too is post-structuralism disproven by the crises it creates. But because its central claim is that there are no overarching metanarratives and that truth isn’t directly accessible, causing narratives to be enforced by power structures, it is sticky to get rid of and has produced an almost cynical post-modern Right wing in response. It is not helpful for us to adopt their priors, and we need some alternative to look at the world through that isn’t Foucault dressed in Nietzsche’s clothes and makeup. That is why I will criticise post-structuralism in this essay and show why cultural morphology is its superior.
Derrida’s Differance
Derrida’s Differance is an idea put forth in his Of Grammatology that explores how far a reader is allowed to go in explaining a text by appeal to something outside it, such as the author’s life, a historical event, or a psychological fact:
“There is nothing outside of the text [il n’y a pas de hors-texte].” — Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Part II
His point is that there is no stopping point where a word, like the word “chair”, is defined satisfactorily through more words. We keep deferring the meaning to a different word or sentence within a language structure, rather than finding some bottom or base that explains the chair and everything else in the structure. There is therefore no fixed meaning behind our words that could serve as the final court of appeal for what they mean, which he called the “transcendental signified”. If there is no external anchor point that words could be checked against from outside the language itself, then the language therefore doesn’t describe reality or even approach it, instead simulating reality from within itself.
He goes on in his essay Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, to elaborate on the importance of this. He claims that Western thought has always organised itself around a fixed “center” that anchors meaning and therefore stops it from spinning out of control.
“It was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. … In the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse … a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely.” — Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, “Structure, Sign and Play”
Every philosophy claims to have found one fixed referent point: origin, essence, God, Man, and in Spengler’s case, a hundred more, that everything can be measured against. Derrida claims that no such point exists or ever did, only an endless, unanchored substitution of signs for other signs, and the belief in a center was always a kind of wishful thinking dressed as metaphysics. He concludes, therefore, that ranking one term over another, such as in oppositions like speech and writing, or presence and absence, is arbitrary, imposing a “center” on what is really an unranked field of differences.
It is the exposure of these assumed centres that forms the basis of post-structural analysis and provides the intellectual foundations for the wider post-modern attitude of “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Lyotard).
Spengler’s position contextualizes Derrida’s preoccupation with these language structures. In Volume 2, he establishes two kinds of existence in the form of Being and Waking-Being. Being is Spengler’s natural state of existence, undifferentiated and moving through temporal durations, while Waking-Being emerges out of Being by becoming conscious of it, receiving the natural world through senses like the eye and converting it into tensions: discrete opposites like I and thou, cause and effect, and sense and object. Tension itself conjures the idea of spatial extension between two points; for this reason, it holds things in place and rejects the flow of movement and change, but when a Waking-Being relaxes, sleeps, or passes away, it releases those tensions and either approaches or completely returns to simple being again.
Being, the Cosmic, Race, Time, etc., are all facts as far as the universe is concerned and are therefore primary, while our cognition is secondary and emerges out of it. But for a microcosm like a human being, the first things our senses, and therefore our waking-consciousness, engage with are space and depth, recognising the apparentness of this tree or that twig or that rock before harder identifiers are attempted. The fact of Being is only apprehended afterwards as a “counter-concept” that engages with the parts of life that aren’t simply apparent but have a part of their constitution that can’t be clearly defined; for example, Time is understood as a counter-concept to Space. This separates Being into ‘Being the reality’ and ‘Being the idea’.
Derrida engages with language structures as fields of meaning without any hierarchy except that which is arbitrarily set for the sanity of the philosopher, but he rejects the premise that the oppositions he comes across may touch on a qualitative difference within the words selected that can’t be dissolved so easily. A philosopher, artist, or politician may happily proclaim something to be superior to another with a kind of arrogance that prompts further inquiry, but the solution to equalise the playing field in every instance is hardly justified.
We can look at a few examples that demonstrate this. Derrida attacks the opposition of speech and writing in particular, which Spengler himself has a few words on. He highlights how, from Aristotle to Rousseau, the belief about writing was that it was something secondary to speech, that speech came first and is closer to truth, and writing is supplementary to it. Rousseau, in particular, uses this word “supplement”, and Derrida then uses it to pull apart his point and expose how speech actually needed writing more than Rousseau admitted. The goal was to show that speech was something whole, and writing an arbitrarily added-on corruption, but in truth, speech was not self-contained but needed writing in part to define itself. He calls this “the logic of the supplement” and uses it on our examples two and three as well.
For Derrida’s supplement trick to work, he specifically needs a story of original plenitude followed by a fall: something was whole, then something else got added and corrupted it, as in the case of Rousseau's civilisation. Spengler’s Being and Waking-Being requires no such narrative. He never claims that Being was ever, at some point, self-sufficient and finished in its goal, such that any form of conscious existence in Waking-Being supplemented or corrupted it. Plants have pure being and do nothing else, but no plant utopia fell with the emergence of animal consciousness. Spengler’s opposition is a standing dependency, like a foundation and the house built on it, not a plenitude and its later corruption like Eden and the fall. You can ask “Did the foundation need the house?” and the answer is simply no, without any contradiction. The foundation was never claimed to be complete in the sense of having accomplished something that the house later supplements. Derrida’s tool is built to catch hierarchies that secretly presuppose an original completeness; Spengler’s hierarchy never asserts one, so there’s nothing for the tool to catch.
In the second major example, Derrida uses Lévi-Strauss’s nature/culture distinction and the problem of incest:
“The incest prohibition is universal; in this sense one could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense one could call it cultural... it can no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition... it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them — probably as the condition of their possibility.” — Claude Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Part I
Derrida’s conclusion is the same as with speech and writing: since this one case can’t be sorted cleanly, the whole nature/culture opposition is unstable and illegitimate. But Spengler’s system deals with the fact without needing to abandon the distinction at all. In “Peoples, Races, Tongues,” he already flags that sexuality sits at the Totem/Taboo seam. The reproductive, blood-continuing side of life (Totem, nature, Being) inevitably gets regulated by the learned, social side (Taboo, culture, waking-being), because reproduction is the point where blood has to pass through a social system to keep flowing. A boundary institution showing up exactly there isn’t a scandal that dissolves the category; rather, it’s exactly where you’d expect one given that the two domains are asymmetrically related. Blood-continuation can and does happen without any social norm at all, for example, animals reproduce without incest taboos, but a norm about who may mate cannot exist without a prior biological fact of reproduction for it to regulate. One hard case at a real seam doesn’t prove there’s no seam; it proves there is a seam. Derrida’s error is inferring “no stable border exists anywhere” from “here is one place the border is hard to draw,” which is a much bigger claim than the evidence supports.
Derrida even approaches the Being/Waking-Being distinction with his attack on consciousness in “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Freud’s model has the unconscious registering “traces” that are only ever accessed by consciousness after the fact and never directly. He wants to use this to show that consciousness is never a simple “translation” of some prior, fixed unconscious content:
“The conscious text is thus not a transcription, because there is no text present elsewhere as an unconscious one to be transposed or transported... There is then no unconscious truth to be rediscovered by virtue of having been written elsewhere.” — Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”
His target is the same one every time: any claim that one term (here, the unconscious) is a stable, self-present origin that the other term (consciousness) merely re-presents. He wants both sides caught in the same undifferentiated play of traces, with nothing prior.
Derrida can only reach that conclusion by assuming, without arguing for it, that the only alternative to “consciousness translates a fixed unconscious text” is “there’s no priority at all, just differential play.” He never considers a third option: that what’s beneath consciousness isn’t a text of any kind, fixed or unfixed, translatable or untranslatable; it’s simply Being. Spengler’s cosmic Being has real structure (rhythm, “beat,” periodicity, the cyclic organs of blood) without being made of signs or differences in the first place. Derrida’s argument that there’s “no text present elsewhere” is both true and irrelevant. Of course there’s no text under there, because it was never a text to begin with, but not because it’s dissolved into differance. He’s ruled out the naive alternative and then quietly treated his own view as the only thing left standing, when a non-linguistic, non-differential substrate was the actual alternative all along, and it’s the one Spengler is describing.
The conclusion is that Derrida’s revulsion of hierarchy in sign and language structures is misplaced against Spengler. What he perceives as hierarchy to stabilise systems of knowledge is more often than not the play of the mind, crystallising a world in motion into a world of tensions that oppose the concepts of duration against those of extension.
Having shown that Derrida’s objection to hierarchy doesn’t touch Spengler’s own, we can push further into the concept that generates the objection in the first place. Differance isn’t just a tool for levelling oppositions; it’s a claim about what language is made of, and once we’ve established tension and counter-concept as Spengler’s terms for how Waking-Being actually operates, we’re in a position to ask whether Derrida’s picture of language can be made out of those materials at all.
Derrida is direct about what he’s committed to. Quoting Saussure, he writes that language is made of nothing but differences, and describes what this leaves for anyone supposedly speaking it:
“In language there are only differences... Writing can never be thought under the category of the subject; however it is modified, however it is endowed with consciousness or unconsciousness, it will refer... to the substantiality of a presence unperturbed by accidents, or to the identity of the selfsame in the presence of self-relationship.” — Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, “Linguistics and Grammatology” (quoting Ferdinand de Saussure)
Stated plainly, a word only ever means its relation to other words, and nothing, no subject, no presence, no ground, stands behind that relation to close it off. The chain of differences is the whole of it.
As far as it goes, that’s correct. Try to cash out any word by substituting other words for it, and you never arrive anywhere. Ask what “time” means, and you get duration, sequence, change, and if you ask what those mean, you get further words still. Run that honestly, and it doesn’t stop. Derrida hasn’t misdescribed the mechanics, but what he has misdescribed is what the mechanics prove. An endless chain of substitutions only shows that words can’t define each other conclusively; it doesn’t show that this is the whole of how a word comes to mean something to somebody. The real question isn’t whether the chain runs forever, it’s whether it has to finish before anyone understands the word, and it plainly doesn’t.
“Space is a conception, but time is a word to indicate something inconceivable, a sound-symbol, and to use it as a notion, scientifically, is utterly to misconceive its nature... [Time is] that which we actually feel at the sound of the word... If no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.” — Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. I, “The Idea of Destiny and the Principle of Causality” (quoting Augustine)
We already know what “time” means, and nobody has ever produced a finished chain of substitutions proving it. Knowing the word and defining it are two different acts, and the second one failing doesn’t touch the first. Spengler treats this as a general condition, not a peculiarity of one word:
“For every logician and psychologist, however sceptical he may be, there is a point at which criticism falls silent and faith begins... the point at which analysis is confronted with itself.” — Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. I, “Soul-Image and Life-Feeling”
“Faith and ‘knowledge’ are only two species of inner certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it dominates all the conditions of knowing, be they never so exact.” — Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. I, “Faustian and Apollinian Nature-Knowledge”
Every chain of definition has to stop somewhere, and what stops it is never one more term in the chain, it’s a conviction that closes the question before the chain is finished. That conviction is the occupier differance rules out by definition.
Derrida has a reply waiting: the moment you try to say what that conviction is, you’re back in words, back in the same system of differences you claimed to escape. But saying a thing and knowing a thing aren’t the same operation, which is the whole point of Augustine’s line. You can gesture at a certainty in language without the gesture becoming one more link that itself needs defining, in the same way pointing at the sun isn’t a source of light. Spengler makes the same move from the other side, on how a symbol lands on a listener at all:
“However definitely and distinctly a religion may express itself in words, they are words, and the hearer puts his own sense into them... we believe by putting in our own soul.” — Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol. II, “Origin and Landscape”
Meaning isn’t handed down link by link along an open chain. It’s supplied, each time, by a conviction the chain itself can’t manufacture.
This is a different complaint than the one about missing subjects, and it needs to be kept separate from it. Derrida wants no occupier standing behind the sign, and objecting to its absence just hands the argument back to him. The real problem is narrower: a system built entirely out of differences, with the one thing that could close it ruled out on principle, can explain why it never terminates, but not how “time,” or any word at all, manages to mean something to the person using it regardless. Spengler’s answer is that meaning was never running on difference alone to begin with. Something has to do the work of turning an open chain into a closed one, and differance is a method built, deliberately, never to look for it.
Differance is a language structure with no idea of Being in it at all. Every term in it- trace, spacing, deferral- is a description of tension, and tension, on Spengler’s own account, is Waking-Being’s whole vocabulary. Derrida builds his system entirely out of one side of Spengler’s opposition and forgets the other side exists. Spengler’s language never makes that mistake, because tension is only ever a tension of something, a Waking-Being rooted in Being, and Being is what the words are ultimately standing in for, however imperfectly. Differance has no such anchor by design, and that’s the whole difference between them: one language structure knows it’s a symptom of something more real, the other thinks it’s the only thing there is.
