Haller on Spengler and Wittgenstein

Recently I've been reading a paper entitled 'Was Wittgenstein Influenced by Spengler?' by Rudolf Haller published in his Questions on Wittgenstein. The author is best known for his seminal work on Austrian philosophy including W.. This collection of essays consists of nine short pieces (almost) each of which attempts to answer one particular question concerning Wittgensteinian philosophy.

The answer to the question whether W. was (profoundly) influenced by Spengler is, not surprisingly for the contemporary reader, affirmative. However, the fact that the influence seems so obvious to us doesn't mean that it was recognized from the beginning. In fact, Haller starts his discussion by noting that "until the discovery of the notes that are now collected in the Vermischte Bemerkungen no one would have associated Wittgenstein with Spengler in any way [...]". (Haller 1988, p.74) Janik & Toulmin and von Wright are mentioned as perceptive interpreters who did recognize the connection (in the form of a shared, pessimistic attitude, for example) but failed to infer to an actual influence from it. (I think one can mention in defense of von Wright that W. himself seems to suggest a shared critical Einstellung or Zeitgeist rather than a particular 'line of thinking' by referring to the notion of 'Weltanschauung' along with the name 'Spengler' in the precursors of PI §122 (e.g. TS 220, §100).)

Before going into the details of Spengler's actual influence on W. Haller spends some time articulating the above mentioned cultural pessimism shared by both authors and what he thinks is 'dubious' about this agreement. He points out that W., like Spengler, obviously considered himself a Kulturkritiker (see e.g. the prefaces to PR, PI, several remarks in CV etc.). This however, so Haller's argument goes, doesn't explain why W. should have considered Spengler as influential to his own thinking. Another puzzling circumstance is that the Decline was heavily attacked and ridiculed by philosophers (in one way or another) close to W., namely Schlick and Neurath. Even more remarkable than the fact that W. listed Spengler as an influence is the fact that he never cited him. Haller's (for my mind convincing) solution to these puzzles is that while W. may or may not have agreed to Spengler's particular analyses, forecasts etc. the importance of the Decline lay for him somewhere else, namely in its method. This shows that while W. needn't have agreed with Spengler on any particular application of the method of descriptive morphology he could nevertheless recognize something substantial, "an original and independent line of thinking" (p.78) and regard it as crucial for understanding his own conception of philosophy.

The whole issue of Spenglerian influences on W. gets really interesting when Haller starts discussing some details of descriptive morphology and its application i.e. comparative research. Haller quotes a passage from the Decline where Spengler claims that as a result of his proposed method "one ought to be able to discover the original form of all culture, which lies at the basis of all individual cultures, free of cloudiness and insignificances." (p.79) Nothing in this is very surprising if one takes into account the fact, admitted by the author, that the basic idea had been inspired by Goethe's theoretical works. As Goethe put it in 1787: "[f]rom first to last, the plant is nothing but leaf, which is so inseparable from the future germ that one cannot think of one without the other." (quoted in Baker & Hacker 2005a, p.316) The interesting thing here is, I think, that both Spengler's and Goethe's projects are obviously essentialist ones, i.e. both attempt to find an original form or archetype shared by all instances of a particular species (cultures or plants). One thing that Haller hints at (and Baker and Hacker discuss explicitly mention) is that W. accused Spengler of "not realizing that he had not discovered laws of history but only introduced an illuminating form of description." (Baker & Hacker 2005a, p.320) (Note that this seems to lead to some inconsistencies in Hacker's reading. That is to say, on the one hand he admits that W. conceived of his own method as significantly distinct from the ones proposed by Goethe and Spengler, while on the other he insists that the purpose of that method was basically the same, i.e. to map out the fundamental grammatical relations underlying our language.)

Haller then goes on identifying resonances of Spengler's theory in W.'s thoughts. This includes finding Wittgensteinian counterparts for dichotomies like 'causality' vs. 'destiny', 'natural law' vs. 'fate', the 'mechanical' vs. the 'organic', and 'systematic' vs. 'physiognomic' morphology. More interesting than this, however, is Haller's comparative analysis of W.'s method and another proposed by Christian von Ehrefels for gauging 'Gestalt-level' and 'Gestalt-purity'. Haller suggests that the latter, i.e. accidentally dismantling (the representations of) objects in order to see what degree of change they can tolerate is similar to how language games (i.e. perspicuous representations) function as frames of reference (i.e. objects of comparison) in W.. I'm not sure I see Haller's point here, and unfortunately the matter doesn't become much clearer when he says in the concluding paragraph that "[i]n so far as [perspicuity] is primarily suited to that which possesses form (Gestalt), those who see a relationship between Wittgenstein and Gestalt psychology are at least aiming in the right direction […]". (p.87)

Finally, it is interesting to note that Haller and Hacker give different answers to the question "How would W. have answered his own question if the method of giving perspicuous representations was a 'Weltanschauung'?" Hacker seems to interpret Weltanschauung as something similar to Zeitgeist, i.e. as "a way of looking at things, characteristic of leading intellectuals of [W.'s] times" and states that "[i]n this he was surely mistaken."(Baker & Hacker 2005a, p.320) But, Haller argues, Weltanschauung need not stand for the cultural, intellectual etc. climate of W.'s times - it might simply refer to a particular way of looking at the world characteristic to W. and his intellectual predecessors, in contrast to those obsessed with the "scientific method". Haller's way of solving the riddle seems preferable to me because it points in the direction of an important insight so far unmentioned. That is, I think that the pessimistic attitude shared by Spengler and W. and the more specific methodological similarity are in fact tightly connected. More precisely, what I'm suggesting is that W.'s reasons for rejecting essentialism (most prominently in the Family resemblance discussion) and his reasons for rejecting the main cultural direction of the 20th century are one and the same.