A faithless metaphysics: Spengler's influence on Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences

Abstract

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.