Benjamin Ogden

This paper demonstrates the important role that Oswald Spengler's skeptical philosophy played in motivating Edmund Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences (1936). To date, almost no scholarship has considered the place of Spengler in Husserl's critique of philosophical skepticism and his philosophy of history. To underscore the relationship between Spengler and Husserl, this paper draws extensively from a previously ignored and untranslated source in English scholarship: the Spenglerheft (1921), published in the journal Logos, which Husserl co-edited. These essays, published during the Spengler-Streit, anticipate many of the arguments which Husserl would develop a decade later in the Crisis. They thereby evidence that Husserl's turn to the philosophy of history in the Crisis participated in a broader effort to overcome a Spengler's philosophical skepticism, and that Husserl's method clearly builds on arguments being levelled explicitly against Spengler in the Spenglerheft. The Spenglerheft emerges as a critical moment in advancing a philosophically robust dialogue between Spengler and Husserl.

In the Weimar period, Oswald Spengler and Edmund Husserl each published distinct philosophies of history which can be construed as teleological: The Decline of The West (1918) and The Crisis of European Sciences (1936) respectively. These texts arose out of a common historical-cultural climate in Germany and share common diagnoses of Europe’s condition. Yet the two models of teleology and the normative imperatives which characterize their respective methods could not be more distinct. This paper examines the two models and demonstrates how Husserl’s recollective teleology possesses the possibility of cultural salvation against the fatalism imbued in Spengler’s teleology of destiny. In this vein, the author places this paper alongside other recent efforts to show the soteriological character of Husserl’s phenomenology. Far from just another way into philosophy, Crisis presents a distinctly normative and rational method of teleology in the face of Spengler’s aesthetic and prophetic counter-rationalism.