Physiognomy and the Physiognomic

Hegel and Spengler Debate Skinheads

David Foster Wallace began a famously awkward interview by claiming that Wittgenstein believed humor is the only way we can address the deeper and darker problems of an era. I found myself laughing recently at something that’s indeed quite dark.

The Bar

Two years ago, I waited for a club soda at a bar counter in Lakeside, Montana. Two burly men arrived on motorcycles, tattooed with Thor’s hammer and clad in Knights Templar tank tops. They plopped down at the bar, and, noticing that I was pretending to watch the Summer Olympics on the bar’s television, chatted me up. At first glance I thought they looked like particular characters, but out the gate they left no ambiguity about who they were. One asked me about the racial provenance of the North Macedonian Olympic team playing volleyball.

I responded, I guess naively, “Well, that’s a Slavic country on the Adriatic.”

“Slavs, huh? On the Med?”

Jeez. Someone read Bronze Age Mindset.

He then asked me if I thought it was fair to ban a Russia from the Olympics over the use of performance-enhancing drugs and whether the spirit of the sports wasn’t watching roided-out freaks clobber each other.

I told him that the Olympics were named after a Greek gathering, not the kind of Roman gladiatorial blood sport that he had in mind.

Big mistake. I had indulged him and he began to ramble about Roman history. His friend, sporting a white Viking-braided beard, chimed in. They told me about how they were visiting family in Idaho.

At this point I, connected the dots and assumed “Idaho” meant the infamous Couer d’Alene County where all the skinhead compounds in the country are located. (Richard Spencer himself famously got kicked out of nearby Whitefish when the towns of Montana started to worry about their reputation.) I felt sick to the stomach — my friend accompanying me at the bar is Moroccan, and frankly it crossed my mind that these guys might actually be murderers given their lifestyle commitments — and orchestrated an exit.

What got me after the fact, though — and I’ll return to this — is that they were really interested in all these racial types. It wasn’t enough for them to believe in a master race, etc., but they clearly needed to delineate out the Slavs for some reason. For folks who peddle pseudoscience to clumsily justify hate crimes, they were taking it pretty seriously in a para-academic way. It kind of felt like Jo Jo Rabbit.

Skinheads

White nationalists are sickening. They’re also largely pathetic. But there is something about the way they think that has this mysterious staying power or this certain tug on people.

On the fringe right, there’s a recent profusion of weird memes about their patron saint Oswald Spengler that have taken over the Internet. A bunch of stuff about the Yamnaya people and the original Indo-European religion that seems like a weird rebirth of late-nineteenth-century Bismarckian propaganda. I don’t understand it — I even took it upon myself to read the entirety of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West recently!

(Comparisons to Late Rome is a theme that I’ve been following for a while, of course)

I did this, I should add, only to find that the man was quite the anti-racist in many ways. He certainly didn’t believe the half-baked visions of German racial supremacy had any coherence or potential. He hated the search for a German race just as much as his idol, Nietzsche did.

In the mainstream, there’s a certain image of white nationalists that came out of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and has for various reasons, some of which good, stuck around. It clings to Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and to some degree to Donald Trump. I agree that there’s a disturbing unwillingness on the part of many right-wingers to disavow these guys or to get domestic terrorists charged as such.

However, there is a moral contagion that comes with the mention of the fringe right. Oswald Spengler, for instance, has quite the bad reputation now and I probably wouldn’t go around telling people how much I enjoyed his rock opera of a treatise. It was only after Walter Kaufmann translated Nietzsche that he was saved in the United States from his prior (spurious) associations with Nazism. Some stuff came out about Heidegger recently that indicates his family have actively tired to doctor his worst commitments out of the corpus. In short, there’s a decent amount of moral complexity involved in evaluating the canon of German thinkers active between 1870 and 1945, and it’s understandable for well-intentioned folks to stay away at first from something that they believe has a certain stench. (I was asked seriously many times in college if Nietzsche was a Nazi, etc.)

Which makes it really pathetic to watch the guys on the actual fringe right pile in and try to “yes Chad” the whole situation. Oswald Spengler, I guarantee you, would disown these creeps in a heartbeat. And yet there he is on their weird memes. They don’t know anything. They’re sad. But again, they take their little pseudoscience seriously enough to make these high-effort memes about it. When they’re not committing horrifying violent crimes, I find it kind of funny in a dark way.

The Lake

So I returned to Flathead Lake two years later and came upon the dark joke.

Flathead. Hey, the skinheads were here last time. Flathead. Skinhead. Ha ha, physiognomy!

Only after years of brewing in the Internet, studying the history of early anthropology as part of a linguistics degree, hearing from a favorite professor again and again how Immanuel Kant’s skull was actually very small, reading Louis Menand’s book about my skull-collecting neighbors at the Museum of Natural History, and realizing that Spengler peculiarly uses the word “Physiognomic” to mean “art history” in the same book where he decries actual physiognomy, did I come to find this funny.

It’s dark, but I earnestly believe it’s important to be able to have a laugh at this one.

The Phenomenology

Physiognomy is a particularly funny thing to see pop up in texts like The Phenomenology of Spirit.

I happened to be chewing through the tome that week, and I came across the section where Hegel uses the example of physiognomy and phrenology to show how self-consciousness comes to understand that pure observation of the world is insufficient to find recognition. (marxists.org of course has the link to the full section, which is rather difficult, and I recommend the help of Gregory Sadler.)

Particularly, Hegel uses the example of physiognomy an an exemplar among all sorts of superstition that he believes dialectical philosophy should overcome: astrology, belief that putting out laundry to dry summons the rain, and so on. In very short, once self-consciousness becomes aware that reason is inherent to the experience of things — patterns are intelligible to us and constitute our experience of the world — Hegel explains that the logical next step is to start examining correlations and sorting things into types and expected behaviors. Hence, we start to wonder how the arrangement of the stars determines someone’s character and so on.

I have quite the distaste for astrology. To use a spurious correlation of the variety listed above, you might say that this is highly predictable for someone like me — a Leo who loves German philosophy. I appreciate that Hegel thinks physiognomy to be the exemplary form of it.

The conclusion of the section is that the regard the skull as indicative of some kind of “type” inferred from interacting with others is to make a couple of leaps — first, someone’s personality is experienced through speech and meaningful gestures. Something like a skull-bone is not actually used for articulation and therefore could not have any necessary connection to personality. And yet so many people — white nationalists, in particular, with their racialized pseudoscience — persist here. Hegel actually believes it is one of the worst places for half-baked reason to get stuck:

The untutored instinct of self-conscious reason will reject without examination phrenology — this other observing instinct of self-conscious reason, which having succeeded in malting a guess at knowledge has grasped knowledge in the soulless form that the outer is an expression of the inner. But the worse the thought, the less sometimes does it strike us where its badness, definitely lies, and the more difficult it is to explain it. For a thought is said to be the worse, the barer and emptier the abstraction, which thought takes to be the essential truth. But in the antithesis here in question the component parts are individuality conscious of itself, and the abstraction of a bare thing, to which externality has been reduced — the inner being of mind taken in the sense of a fixed soulless existence and in opposition to just such a being.

(Paragraph 340)

In the end, says Hegel, you can’t just dismiss out of hand where they got stuck. They got there by reasoning and their reasoning keeps them there. No amount of stench or shaming will dislodge a fascination with a pseudoscience. It requires a feat of will to turn all the way around and recognize the obvious antinomy that’s occurred.

Why does consciousness go through the world putting things into types? Well, because on some level there’s a desire to be understood and to see the image of oneself in another. To regard the essence of others as “types” or skulls or determinisms of personality of any variety eventually has to reach the logical conclusion that such a determination would make oneself, at least outwardly, the same. Physiognomy reduces one’s own outward being to a skull shape that may as well be dead.

And there’s the dialectic. The way out is to recognize that taxonomizing everything can’t account for what’s being sought, which is the certainty of one’s own conscious being. Failing to accord that in others is a sort of solipsism. Surely the civilized person recognizes that people are free to react in whichever way they choose to their genes or cultural background or date of birth. And surely the refined mind can get itself away from abstractly-formulated correlations grounded in no essential connections.

Well, it turns out we’re all pretty bad at this.

The Decline

The sun set over the lake. I thought about the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde. Christa Ludwig sings about the arrival of a silver barque.

A slightly less funny pun came to mind: Sonnenuntergang des Abendlandes.

When I read Spengler, it terrified me. He tries to spell out every civilization that’s ever existed, and he pattern-matches them to explain how they segment into similar eras. He uses mathematic, art history, architecture, science, music, urban planning, and economics to build up a “general Physiognomic” that can provide a lexicon for talking about the destinies of civilizations. He tries to use particular parables from the collapse of the Aztecs to divine the future of Western civilization.

It sounds insane, but as I described, it’s a rock opera. No fewer than Henry Kissinger, Camille Paglia, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Samuel Huntington, and Joseph Campbell have been deeply indebted to it. Adorno responded to it and as much as acknowledged that much subsequent literature has thrived in the lacunae Spengler left behind.

(To name a few, his treatment of Indian and Chinese history doesn’t quite fit the pattern, he doesn’t really touch on West African empires, Cahokia, South American civilizations like the Amazonians, and I feel like he’s overly pessimistic about the power or function of hermeneutics.)

In short, Spengler presents a pretty compelling case that social conditions for serious scientific inquiry tend to be a self-eliminating process and that the development of institutions tends to lead toward the emergence of pure force-politics. Spengler himself was clearly mourning his era, lamenting that he’d never be a peer to Schiller and Goethe and was instead stuck instead being told by Bismarck and Wilhelm to figure out how to build a jet engine. My linguist-turned-software-engineer’s heart goes out to the guy.

In his analysis, Spengler enumerates civilizations by what he calls their “prime phenomena” — a concept taken from Goethian biology. For Spengler, Western civilization is defined by linear perspective drawing and an imagination of the universe as being made of point masses moved by forces. Islamic civilization is defined by seeing the world as a great cavern at the center of infinity waiting for the Messiah to return. Classical civilization is defined by a kosmos of individual bodies that ought to be concerned with their own respective natures. Cultures and civilizations arise when the prime phenomenon is used to facilitate a system of exchange between smaller groups. Each prime phenomenon has a certain amount of potential in it, like the mustard seed in the Gospel of Mark, and the process of cultures becoming civilizations is the simple actualization of the potentialities of the particular prime phenomenon.

Spengler’s approach is certainly morphological in that it wants to segment people into different civilizations and then segment those civilizations by which stage of actualization they have reached. The prime phenomenon sounds like astrology. There’s some determinism to read into it about what a civilization can accomplish. The rise of Nazism was considered to be some confirmation of Spengler’s vision of late civilizations dominated by caesarism. He certainly foretells that men of his own generation and onward would be constrained to certain, as it were, higher-hanging fruit of Western civilization’s remaining potentialities. I think there’s something about the “civilizational succession is not automatic progress” flourish that makes him look edgy from a distance.

Also, the book is a whopping 1000 pages. I needed serious agitation from a bored former boss trying to distract himself from raising a first child to make it through the whole thing. Almost no one has actually read it.

The Dialogue

Here, in the land of the Flatheads and the skinheads, I imagined the Germans arguing by the lakeshore. I asked myself: does Spengler’s Physiognomic method constitute Hegelian physiognomy? Can Hegel’s critique, powerful enough to defeat the white nationalists, defeat the deeper civilizational pessimism that’s haunted me for the last few months?

I had to answer no.

For one, Spengler is not trying to constrain individual humans into types as much as he’s trying to explain what the organizing principles of civilizations constitute. He gives plenty of examples of civilizations birthing new cultures (Rome birthing pre-Islamic Christian culture, Petrinist Russia birthing a nascent Russian culture) or of people or communities immigrating and finding new potentials in their new cultural surroundings. He also doesn’t identify causal mechanisms in many cases — the fact is that the account is in most of its facets an empirical one. In my reading, Spengler has no general account of how civilizations end because there is no general reason. Is Cortes appearing on the horizon, Mel-Gibson-style, part of a general reason for civilizational collapse?

No, I believe Spengler’s project is a very German attempt to create something like an empirical botany of human organizations. Spengler was evidently not extremely well-read in Hegel despite his intimate familiarity with Kant and Goethe and Nietzsche. Adorno accuses him of being unfamiliar with dialectics and too stuck on a certain range of evidence and categories of interpretation that could change as the world changes. Trying to construct this “Physiognomic” set of categories within a highly unstable historical process may seem a bit like casting a stone in a glass house. I’m not sure I can evaluate if this criticism holds up, since I also think Spengler tosses in there that every Physiognomic evaluation will have to be of-its-era, but I reckon it’s a concern worth thinking about.

It’s worth mentioning here that Hegel’s own historical theories are rather strange and can certainly be seen to inform Spengler’s. (They’ve also come under intense reprisal by English-speaking thinkers after the Great War and especially after the Second World War.) Hegel claimed that the Prussian state was the culmination of a process of universal, world-historical development. Spengler would react starkly and insist that Western Civilization began with Saxon princes and had no meaningful roots in Roman or Byzantine-Islamic traditions. Given the broad influence of Marxism, which is deeply indebted to Hegel’s theory of history, the dominant assumptions about history one sees today are pretty progressive and would find Hegel’s theses a bit crude but recognizable. Spengler’s ideas about how different cultures and civilizations operate on fundamentally different rhythms and “build upon” each other far less than they delude themselves comes across as quite strange to the modern reader.

(Kissinger explained this to Buckley once.)

In any case, despite not quite grasping dialectics, Spengler was certainly aware of a number of Hegel’s ideas, disagreed with what were probably the worse ones, and did not fall into the trap of racialism or determining the character of people. He was concerned with determining the potentialities of civilizations according to their organizing principles.

The Joke

To get back to our point of departure: why is it so possible to find humor in the existence or prevalence of physiognomy?

Well, to a German, perhaps it’s not so funny. It illustrates how society since Hegel’s day has been able to move itself largely on the basis of spurious association. This is a dark theme in German history — a lot of the reprisal of Hegel I mentioned above comes from people like A. J. P. Taylor, who blames the German academic class all the way back to Goethe for failing to embrace the liberalism forced on them by Napoleon, and, moreover, for failing to incorporate into their philosophy any serious account of intellectual freedom capable of actually protecting them from eventually being rounded up by Bismarck. The first postulate of Prussian liberalism, so goes the critique, was belief in its own futility.

To an American, someone whose scientific institutions are backed by a navy that defends liberal values, it’s easy to laugh at something so nutty as imagining that skull shapes indicate essential character or that a certain genetic or cultural lineage is blessed by some kind of racial Providence. I do it every time I walk past the Museum of Natural History. Certainly those beliefs do lurk in corners of this country, or even burst onto the main stage in horrifying ways, but I don’t see them unifying the nation in quite the way that Arendt described the spread of Nazi ideology in Weimar Germany.

But I think there’s something important in the act of the laugh, as I mentioned David Foster Wallace remarking at the top of this post. It’s dark, but it is important to give a nod to the absurdity of the whole thing — it’s a “silly” belief, after all, that’s scaffolded some of the defining atrocities of the last two hundred and fifty years.

And I think that an ability to laugh at it — to try to distance oneself from the carnage of it all — is important to escape from the moral contagion. It’s too easy to give power over to these people when you let them take ownership Nietzsche or Spengler. They thrive on mystique and the idea that they dwell in dark corners of the Internet that contain something other than incoherent memes and lots of hentai. It’s very important, in my view, not to “respectfully engage” or anything of the sort with these folks, but to make sure they have to emerge into the daylight with their intellectual bankruptcy on full display.

So try to have a laugh with me: Yeah, physiognomy. That’s what people will actually believe.