Johan Huizinga
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Yesterday was the 151st anniversary of the birth of Johan Huizinga (07 December 1872 – 01 February 1945), who was born Groningen in the Netherlands on this date in 1872.
Huizinga was a contemporary of Spengler, and, having written his most famous work about the decline of medieval civilization, one can readily understand that Huizinga would have appreciated Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Unlike a lot of profesional historians, Huizinga was respectful of Spengler and one can see the influence of Spengler on Huizinga in the twenties (a hundred years ago now, when there was great ferment not only in the philosophy of history but also in the philosophy of logic and mathematics). It is remarkable that Huizinga says of Spengler’s main work that it, “…consisted of 600 pages of clearly reasoned and brilliantly expressed historical exegesis.” This is a rare tribute by a professional historian to Spengler’s virtues as a writer—virtues for which Spengler is not usually recommended.
Apocalyptic doom was in the air during the interwar period, despite the roaring twenties (which may have been a response to concealed despair—eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!), and Spengler set the tone by publishing The Decline of the West just as the Great War was coming to an end. Huizinga’s In the Shadow of Tomorrow was based on a lecture delivered in 1935—the same year that Husserl gave his lecture in Vienna, “Philosophy in the Crisis of European Mankind,” which formed the basis of his final book, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Huizinga and Husserl were both working through apocalyptic premonitions of Europe heading into another war, arguably following in the tradition of Spengler. Husserl mentioned Spengler only once, in his untranslated Einleitung in die Ethik, but Huizinga mentions Spengler several times in In the Shadow of Tomorrow, starting with this observation:
“To-day… the sense of living in the midst of a violent crisis of civilization, threatening complete collapse, has spread far and wide. Oswald Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes has been the alarm signal for untold numbers the world over. This is not to say that all those who have read Spengler’s famous work have become converts to his views. But it has jolted them out of their unreasoning faith in the providential nature of Progress and familiarized them with the idea of a decline of existing civilization and culture in our own time. Unperturbed optimism is at present only possible for those who through lack of insight fail to realise what is ailing civilization, having themselves been affected by the disease, and for those who in their social or political creed of salvation think to have the key to the hidden treasureroom of earthly weal from which to scatter on humanity the blessings of the civilization to come.”
While Huizinga mentioned Spengler frequently in this book, his references are uniformly critical, despite Huizinga’s respectful engagement with Spengler’s thought, so that Spengler for Huizinga was a warning and a cautionary figure, as implied in the following:
“Looking more deeply into Spengler’s sombre vision one finds a number of inconsistencies which seem to impair its validity. In the first place, the standards by which he judges human action prove to be closely tied up with a certain romantic sentiment. His ideas of ‘greatness,’ ‘the will of the stronger,’ ‘sound instincts,’ ‘healthy warlike joy’ (kriegerische gesunde Freude), ‘nordic heroism’ and ‘Cæsarism of the Faustian world’ have their roots in the soil of a naïve Romanticism. It is furthermore beyond dispute, I think, that the course of Western civilization during the seventeen years since Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes first appeared, has definitely not been that of the ascendance of the type of Zivilisation as he developed it. For though it is true that society has been tending in this direction, that is, in the direction of greater technical control in the exercise of power and deliberate calculation of the desired effect, the type of human being has at the same time become ever more uncontrolled, more puerile, more susceptible to reactions of feeling. It is not the hard-bitten iron men of Spengler’s conception who are ruling us to-day. One might perhaps put it this way: the world shows the aspect of Spengler’s Zivilisation plus a measure of insanity, humbug and cruelty, coupled with sentimentality, which he did not foresee. For even his ‘noble animal,’ which he considers man to be, should be free of all this.”
Huizinga not only produced historical works such as The Waning of the Middle Ages and Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century, but also historiographical works that spelled out his understanding of history and the task of the historian. In “A Definition of the Concept of History” he is at his most explicit in formulating the task of history:
“If history as an intellectual activity is an imposition of form, then we may say that as a product it is a form—an intellectual form for understanding the world, just as philosophy, literature, jurisprudence, physical science are forms for understanding the world. History is distinguished from these other intellectual forms in that it is related to the past and nothing but the past. Its purpose is to understand the world in and through the past. The intellectual fascination which underlies the form of history is the desire to understand the meaning of that which has happened in former times. The mind is attracted, engrossed by the past. The impetus and value of this mental tension and of its product, history, lie in the complete earnestness which distinguishes it. There is an absolute craving to penetrate to the genuine knowledge of that which truly happened, even when we are aware of the inadequacy of the means to the end. The sharp distinction between history and literature lies in the fact that the former is almost entirely lacking in that element of play which underlies literature from beginning to end.”
Earlier in this essay Huizinga defines history as, “…the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past,” but as the essay develops, this definition is broadened and transformed into something more profound. Huizinga says above that the purpose of history, “is to understand the world in and through the past,” and I will observe that this could also extend to understanding the future and human destiny in and through the past, which would be one way to describe Spengler’s project, and also Huizinga’s response to Spengler. Although Huizinga does not explicitly say this, among the reasons Huizinga criticized Spengler is that Spengler got the history wrong, and therefore, from an historian’s perspective, he got the rest wrong as well.
Further Resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Huizinga
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16829/pg16829-images.html
https://archive.org/details/dutchcivilisatio0000huiz
https://archive.org/details/homoludensstudyo0000huiz
https://archive.org/details/philosophyhistor0000klib
In 1976 Radio Netherlands produced a six part series, Autumn of the Middle Ages, focused on the music of the period, which is a nice supplement to Huizinga’s treatment of the same.