N.I. DANILEVSKY (1822-1885)
WESTERN
CIVILISATION FROM A RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW
By B.L.
1. The idea that history is a cyclic movement of rising and declining
civilizations is by no means an
invention of our time. It was formerly
recognized by the stoics,
Machiavelli, Montaigne, among others,
although none of these made any
serious attempt to test the theory
by comparing it with the historical facts.
2. . This theory was first elaborated in detail by the eighteenth
century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who suggested that
history moves in cycles and called these cyclical movements ‘ricorsi’.
According to Vico every nation must pass through the same course of
development, according to a universal law. It starts with a period of
heroism characterized by 'barbarism of the senses', rises to a stage
of true civilization and thereupon declines into a hyper-intellectual,
decadent 'barbarism of reason'. Thus every civilization in its rise
and subsequent decline forms a circular movement, the circle being
closed only to give way to a new cycle which is identical to the
previous one, albeit enriched by new values. It is obvious that
Vico's view on the cyclic movement of history was essentially a
spiritual one, in that it implied a definite element of rise
(i.e. improvement).
3. It was not until one and a half centuries after Vico that the
same idea was suggested again and put to the practical test by a
comparison of facts deriving from
various civilizations. Even then
the subject was dealt with almost
accidentally, as a kind of
digression in the course of a study
relating to another subject.
4. In 1869 the Russian magazine Zaria issued a series of articles by Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevsky, a natural scientist/civil servant who
wrote on the history of language with almost the same ease as on Darwinism, the
devaluation of the rouble and on goiter and cretinism in Russia. These articles, which were published under
the title 'Russia and Europe: A Survey of the Cultural and Political Relations between the Slavic and Germano-Roman World', at once raised great
interest in Russia, although they remained almost completely unknown to the Anglo-Saxon world. Danilevsky's ideas are nonetheless so large in scope and penetration that he has to be considered a
predecessor of Spengler and Toynbee, two of the most famous representatives of his spiritual inheritance. Neither of them, however, pays any attention to him; for the latter, when elaborating his theory, cannot have known him, whereas the former is very unlikely to have had any
acquaintance with his work.
5. As is suggested by the
title of his study, Danilevsky did not aim at framing a comparative philosophy
of civilization - since his actual purpose was to scrutinize the relations
between Europe and Russia and to explain why these two entities were enemies
and were to remain enemies forever. This
hostile condition, according to the author, must be explained
by reference to the instinctive antipathy which Europe harbors towards Russia,
and which is inspired by the fact that Russia is not a real part of the
declining European civilization but constitutes a rising civilization of its
own.
6. The author's description
of European aggressiveness against Russia in
the course of centuries, and the way he illustrates how Europe has always
responded with hostility and distrust 'Russian sincerity and self-denial',
deserve even more interest in these days than at the
moment they were first issued. The
present-day importance of Danilevsky's study
especially relates to the insight it provides in the
Slavic view on the unfair treatment given to Russia by its European neighbors. As for the rest, this aspect of Danilevsky's study is irrelevant to our subject-matter, suffice it to say that we recommend reading his work to anyone who deals with the relations between Russia
and the West.
7. As already mentioned above, it is merely
by way of a deviation from his main subject that
Danilevsky puts forward his theory about the
development of what he calls 'types of cultural history' - which, for reasons of simplicity, we shall designate as 'types of civilizations’
8. According to this Russian scholar European civilization is by no
means of a universal type, as was the
common belief in those days.
Neither is it the only dynamic or
progressive civilization; it is but
one civilization out of many and it
has no other scope than that of
the Germanic and Roman cultures.
Most other civilizations, even the
Greek one to a certain degree,
originated outside Europe. The same
goes for Russian civilization since,
according to Danilevsky, Russia
does not belong to Europe in that it neither forms part of European
civilization, nor even represents
some of its offspring. Russia has
hardly had any part in the life and
experiences of Europe; it has,
on the contrary, led an existence on its own.
9. After having settled with the then dominant Eurocentric western
conception of history and culture, Danilevsky exposes his own point
of view. According to him human
history consists of a certain number
of 'cultural types', each having
their own characteristics and each
contributing in their own way to the common cultural inheritance of
mankind. Danilevsky distinguishes
between twelve of such civilizations.
Summed up in a chronological order they are: the Egyptian, the Chinese, the
Assyrian-BabyIonic, the Phoenician-Chaldaic, the Ancient-Semitic, the Hindu, the Persian, the Hebrew, the Greek, the Roman, the
New-Semitic or Arabic and the Germano-Roman or European civilizations in the eastern
hemisphere; and the Mexican and Peruvian civilizations, which have both come to a violent end without accomplishing their cycles, in the Western
hemisphere.
10. Subsequently Danilevsky
divides all tribes and nations into three major
categories according to the respective parts they play with regard to civilization. The first category consists of those playing a positive, i.e creative part in the development of culture in that they generate the civilizations mentioned above. The second category comprises all such nations or tribes which play a negative, i.e. a destructive
part by giving the finishing stroke to decadent civilizations.
The third category comprises the large, colorless, average
majority of peoples never acquiring an individuality of their own in history,
in that they neither manage to build up a real civilization
themselves, nor contribute actively to the destruction of a civilization in decline. These peoples do not make history, neither in a positive nor in a negative way; instead they serve as passive material for the positive or negative forces in history.
11. At unspecified
intervals within the course of human history, and alongside
the positive types of culture, temporary negative forces arise, such as the
Huns, the Mongols and the Turks. By
helping dying civilizations to come to an end, and spreading the remnants
afterwards, they accomplish a destructive task, after which they disappear
again into their former anonymity. These
are called the negative forces of history. Sometimes,
however, one and the same people may accomplish both a constructive and
a destructive task, as has been the case with the Germans and the Arabs. A final category is represented by such
tribes or nations whose creative forces, for one reason or another, have been
stopped in an early stage and which are, therefore, predestined
to form neither a constructive (positive) nor a
destructive (negative) force in history. They only constitute ethnographic material, some kind of an organic matter penetrating the organs of history, i.e. of the various civilizations. Undoubtedly these tribes contribute to enhancing the variety and abundance of civilizations,
but they do not acquire an historical individuality of their own.
12. Sometimes even extinct civilizations may
disintegrate into such ethnographic material,
until a new creative principle recombines their parts
with a mixture of heterogeneous elements into a new organic part of history, thus giving them a new life and reshaping them as new civilizations. The example of the peoples constituting the Roman Empire of the West is quite illustrative in this respect.
13. Briefly stated, the part played in
history by a tribe or nation can be threefold: either the positive, creative
part of a cultural-historical type (a civilization), or the destructive part of
the so-called 'scourge of God’ (Attilla) whose task consists in
giving the finishing stroke to petrified civilizations on the verge of expiring, or the part of merely serving as ethnographic material for other peoples'
purposes.
14. In the further course of his study
Danilevsky formulates five universal laws or regularities which apply to all
nations in analogous stages of development. The fourth of these laws emphasizes the demands of variegation and independence to be met by the peoples
constituting the ethnographic material of the civilization. This law is therefore of great importance for our
time. An interesting aspect of this law is that, more than seven decades before Toynbee, Danilevsky put forward the principle that a civilization is the true unit of the
study of history. In Ancient Greece a
separate history of Athens or Sparta is inconceivable beyond the framework of
Greek civilization as a whole. Neither
can the history of France, Germany or Italy be studied outside the context of
European civilization. Countries which do not form part of one and the same civilization, on the other hand, have little in common and therefore their respective histories should be dealt with
independently.
15.
Of even greater importance for our subject, however, is Danilevsky's
fifth
'law':
'The evolution of civilizations is similar to
that of superannuated plants: they live during an
indefinite period of time but have only a
relatively short period of flowering and fruit-bearing, which exhausts them
for good and all.'
In a closer elaboration of this law the
author puts the case that as a rule a civilization
passes through three stages of development. In the
first stage, which we might call antiquity, the population in question only forms 'ethnographic material'. This stage may last for thousands of years and ends as soon as the unorganized, merely
ethnographic way of living passes into an organized society. The second (or middle) stage which enters
then, comprises the growth of cultural and political
independence. This is the period during which are
built up the creative forces constitutive for the third stage, which is the stage of 'true civilization'. In this stage civilization fully develops its productivity and realizes its ideals with regard to
personal and social welfare. This period
is comparatively short -from four to six centuries - since the creative
activity makes high demands upon its forces. According to Danilevsky no civilization whatsoever 'has the privilege of endless improvement, and every nation sooner or later gets tired and exhausts its creative forces in the long
run'.
16. Consequently the period of flourishing is followed by a period
of decline. As so often in nature,
this process of decline starts
long before its outward symptoms can be observed. It may even already
have started when, seen from the
outside, a civilization is still
flourishing and seems to go through
its heydays. Especially in view
of Europe Danilevsky even claims that
the weaker the creative force
of a civilization becomes, the stronger its
want for expansion and world-power will manifest itself.
17. Degeneration leads
either to a condition of apathy, self-satisfaction and petrification - in which
the ideals of the past are imitated 'ad infinitum' as
petrified (or dead) models - or to a period of
great political and social oppositions and conflicts. The latter condition, however, usually sooner or later changes into the former state of petrification.
18. On the basis of these
general principles Danilevsky formulates his explanation of the inevitable
hostility between the European and Slavonic-Russian civilizations.
According to him, the latter is passing through an
intermediary position from the second to the third stage,
whereas the former, being five hundred years older, has already reached the end of its flowering-age. The decay of European civilization therefore, according to Danilevsky, must already have set in in the seventeenth century. Yet it became only observable in the nineteenth century and manifested itself in a weakening of its
creative forces, a slackening of Christian faith, increasing cynicism and a desire of world-dominion on the
political as well as on the economic and cultural level. This desire of Europe to impose its own
culture on the whole world makes any form of friendship with the younger and more vigorous Russian civilization impossible, especially
since the latter regards it as its historical task to bridle Europe's ambitions. Once Europe will have settled its own internal problems, Danilevsky assumes, a war with the unified Slavonic world will be inevitable. In this confrontation, however, the latter will appear as the victor over the senile and exhausted Europe and will take over the leadership of the world. After all, Danilevsky's study not only turns out to be a brilliant essay in the field of the philosophy of culture and cultural sociology, but also - and perhaps mainly -to contain a witty and exact political prediction. There is, indeed, a
striking similarity between his ideas about the relation between Russia and
Europe and their respective futures, and the ideas of the Soviet government about the same issues. If one omits Marxist terminology and some characteristic details from the contemporary
political propaganda of the Soviet leaders, Danilevsky's ideology and that of
the masters of the Kremlin with regard to the relations between Europe and
Russia are essentially the same. 'A most
conservative Slavophile and the Communist Politbureau shake hands with
each other, one can hardly imagine stranger bedfellows (1) .
In his Üntergang des Abendlandes Oswald Spengler
replaces the current
idea of the history of mankind as a unity centering round Antiquity
and Western Europe by a conception of organic cultures standing side by side. He calls his discovery 'die Tat des Copernicus' by which the so-called Ptolemaic Eurocentric system is abolished. Only few people are likely to know that
Spengler's discovery was anticipated by Danilevsky. Danilevsky's
'Russia and Europe’, published in 1867, already
contains the same pluralistic doctrine of organic cultures as was put forward
afterwards by Spengler, including the latter's denial of the unity and
continuity of the historical development of mankind
and his disavowal of the universal meaning of European culture.
19. That Danilevsky, as a
Russian, fostered such ideas becomes understandable if one knows, among other
things, that the Russians have always shown a critical attitude towards Europe,
even to the degree that the early thinkers of the nineteenth century elaborated
this criticism into a philosophy of history. Whereas the latter still hold basically universal ideas, Danilevsky on his part disavows any cultural connection between Russia and Europe. In this disavowal he was influenced by the Krim
war events, which pushed Russian nationalism in
general into the direction of strong anti-Western feelings.
20. According to
Danilevsky, the idea that European culture is the eternal bed in which the
stream of evolution will ever continue to flow
and fertilize all nations and peoples, is as erroneous a view on cultural history as the Ptolemaic system was for the discipline of astronomy. Also in the field of zoology it was not until Cuvier suggested his classification according to morphological types, that the
older idea of a hierarchical system of species based on subordination was dropped. There are degrees of natural evolution, to be sure, but only within each type. The same goes for the division of history in periods like antiquity, Middle Ages and modern times,
which only applies rightly if it is made within each cultural type. For there is no such thing as one universal
culture, but there are a certain number of cultures.
21.
Danilevsky's philosophy of culture shows striking similarities to
Spengler's.
Not only does it stand comparison with the Copernican discovery, but it also rejects the universal scheme of European Antiquity-Middle Ages-Modern Times and the unity of historical evolution; it modifies the idea of humanity and cosmopolitanism; it understands cultures as organic beings with a regular course of growth, flowering, fruit-bearing and dying, so that even the further
course of non-accomplished
cultures is predictable.
22. Although they slightly differ in their
respective classifications of cultures, both Danilevsky and Spengler consider
Western Culture worn out as opposed to Russia, which despite their diverging
ideas about the true nature of the Russian culture they both regard as the nation of the
future.
23. On the other hand their approaches also show remarkable differences. Deriving their ideas mainly from the physical sciences, both Danilevsky and Spengler treat their historical material with a brilliant inexactitude. However, whereas Danilevsky's argumentation, combining scientific regularity with a sarcastic one-sidedness, is
essentially rational, Spengler's approach is highly irrational; it is almost the view of a prophet. Yet Spengler's knowledge is broader and his
interpretation more deep-going than Danilevsky’s. Spengler attempts to understand the 'soul of a culture'
from the symbolism of its art and science (mathematics), whereas Danilevsky,
according to the Hegelian recipe, remains more formal: the Greeks are the worshippers of beauty, the
Romans are the founders of law and the nation,
the Jew's of Monotheism, Western Europe introduced the physical sciences, etc. In other words:
Danilevsky differs from Spengler in that he shows
more remnants of universalism than is consistent with his
pluralistic conception of historical evolution.
24. Despite these differences, the question
remains whence the striking similarities come. Did Spengler know
Danilevsky’s 'Russia and Europe'? This may seem
rather improbable at first sight, since Spengler
completed his work in 1922 (the first volume appeared in 1918), whereas a German translation of Danilevsky's book was not published until 1920. Spengler may however have read Danilevsky in the original version, since there are strong indications that he knew Russian.
25. Or, can both theories
be traced back to a common source? The latter
supposition seems to rest on stronger evidence than the former (at least for the time being). The similarity between Spengler's and Danilevsky's ideas can be explained by the fact that Spengler's morphology
of Cultures is a historical application of Goethe's idealistic
morphology, whereas Danilevsky was influenced by the French biologist Cuvier, who was a contemporary of Goethe and whose
classification of species was based on similar morphological ideas.
26. An alternative
explanation lies in the assumption that both scholars derived their theories
from a common German source, namely from the German historian and philologist
Heinrich Ruckert, whose 'Lehrbuch der
Weltgeschichte in organischer Darstellung' (1857) introduces
the concept of various cultures coexisting throughout the history of mankind ('Kulturreihen'). This assumption however loses much of its explanatory force in that, contrary to Danilevsky’s revolutionary view on the development of civilizations, Ruckert still adheres strongly to the traditional universalistic and Eurocentric ideas about historical evolution. Especially the idea that the evolution of
organic cultures in its regular course involves the decline
of Europe and the rise of Russia - i.e. the basic idea shared by both Danilevsky and Spengler - is totally missing in Ruckert's work.
27.
Therefore it appears most plausible, after all, to assume that
Spengler did know Danilevsky's work and was
influenced by it. At any
rate, it seems legitimate to consider
Danilevsky a remarkable predecessor of the German historian.
'We have here an example of a work whose
vitality has increased rather than decreased in the course of time, for two
reasons: the character of Danilevsky's philosophy of history in general, and the contemporary tension between Europe and Russia that makes Danilevsky's views startlingly up to date. His "Russia and
Europe" is more alive today than it was eighty years ago.’
