Rethinking the decline of the West : three modes of the untergang discourse

Abstract

The sad fate of Oswald Spengler was far from becoming a tool in the hands of Nazis or their intellectual and political heirs. Spengler's infatuation with historical and cultural determinism, as well as his biological metaphors, cannot outweigh and cast a shadow on the substance of his theory - the theory on the controlling and unifying principle of civilization combined with what he termed the morphological method. The French writer Michel Houellebecq, in his novel The Possibility of an Island, does what Spengler does - only differently. His epoch no longer is that of the cyclical interpretation of history and of the Bildungsroman. Houellebecq is a master of sociologically perceptive narration and at the same time a sociologizing novelist. Or perhaps a sociologist of culture's crisis masked as a writer of fiction. Zygmunt Bauman's sociology is a sociology of the imagination, of feelings, of human relations - love, friendship, despair, indifference, insensitivity - and of intimate experience. In his theory, focus is on moral blindness - self-chosen, self-imposed, or fatalistically accepted - in an epoch that more than anything needs quickness and acuteness of apprehension and feeling.