Three Philosophers, One Concept

Three Philosophers, One Concept: A comparison of St. Augustine, Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler on their Philosophy of History

Saint Augustine, Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler are 3 great philosophers of history who contributed to our better understanding of history. Although the 3 philosophers are different in their philosophical approach on history, they share the same common concept. The concept was the same: that history has a beginning and has an end. Saint Augustine’s concept of history was linear and comparative.

In his work, “City of God” he compared two developments of two cities; the city of Man and the city of God. The importance of history is largely in the cyclical patterns that forge the past, present, and future into a continuous whole, emphasizing what is repeated and common over what is idiosyncratic and unique. In Augustine, we find a conception of human history that in effect reverses this schema by providing a linear account that presents history as the dramatic unfolding of a morally decisive set of non-repeatable events.

Approached from this angle, what wants an explanation is why one would subordinate indispensable patterns and regularities in order to emphasize what is idiosyncratic and unique. Here, as in the case of the will, it is important to understand that Augustine is bringing together two quite disparate traditions, and here again one needs to take note of his efforts to capture the data of revelation he sees embedded in Judeo-Christian scripture.

Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler’s "The Decline of the West" focused on the cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations. When Decline came out in 1917, it was a wild success because of the perceived national humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and economic depression fueled by hyperinflation seemed to prove Spengler right (Spengler had in fact believed that Germany would win while he was writing the book).

It comforted Germans because it seemingly rationalized their downfall as part of larger world-historical processes. But it was widely successful outside of Germany as well, and by 1919 was translated into several other languages. He rejected a subsequent offer to become Professor of Philosophy at the University of Goettingen, saying he needed time to focus on writing. It is now a truism that Spengler's "pessimism" and "fatalism" was an unbearable shock to minds nurtured in the Nineteenth-century illusion that everything would get better and better forever and ever.

Spengler's cyclic interpretation of history stated that a civilization was an organism having a definite and fixed life span and moving from infancy to senescence and death by an internal necessity comparable to the biological necessity that decrees the development of the human organism from infantile imbecility to senile decrepitude. Napoleon, for example, was the counterpart of Alexander in the ancient world.

Lastly, Arnold Joseph Toynbee’s “A Study of History” was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline. This kind of philosophy of history was unheard of during Toynbee’s time. Toynbee was interested in the seeming repetition of patterns in history and, later, in the origins of civilization. It was in this context that he read Spengler’s Decline of the West and although there is some superficial similarity, both men describe the rise, flowering and decline of civilizations, their work moved in different directions.

Toynbee agreed with Spengler that there were strong parallels between their situation in Europe and the ancient Greco-Roman civilization. Toynbee saw his own views as being more scientific and empirical than Spengler's, he described himself as a "meta historian" whose "intelligible field of study" was civilization. In his “Study of History”, Toynbee describes the rise and decline of 23 civilizations. His over-arching analysis was the place of moral and religious challenge, and response to such challenge, as the reason for the robustness or decline of a civilization. He described parallel life cycles of growth, dissolution, a "time of troubles," a universal state, and a final collapse leading to a new genesis.

Although he found the uniformity of the patterns, particularly of disintegration, sufficiently regular to reduce to graphs, and even though he formulated definite laws of development such as "challenge and response," Toynbee insisted that the cyclical pattern could, and should, be broken. In conclusion, these three philosophers share common concept in their philosophy of history; a somewhat linear and a cycle of rise and fall of history. Yet in contrast, one is more spiritual, one is pessimistic and one saw an endless loop of patterns. Yet despite these, all are in synthesis of what history for them. All of them contributed to our deeper understanding and knowledge of history.