The future of the theory and philosophy of history
Willem Styfhals
(Centre for Metaphysics and Philosophy of Culture – Institute of Philosophy,
KULeuven)
Pseudomorphosis and Re-occupation: the philosophical nature of historical change and
epochal transition
Introduction
Change is the condition of possibility of history. In a universe where everything is essentially
fixed and unchangeable and where the same things eternally return, it does not make sense to
talk about history. One can only inquire into the past as past if it is significantly different from
the present, i.e. if there is at least a minimal amount of change or discontinuity between then
and now. In this sense, the concept of change is a methodological and even ontological
presupposition of the historical sciences. As such, the discipline of history itself cannot define
or make explicit its conception of change, as it cannot be perceived empirically. Ultimately,
the nature of historical change is a philosophical question that requires theoretical reflection.
In this paper, I elaborate on a specific type of historical change, namely the change
that takes place in the transition between two historical epochs. In this regard I focus on two
philosophical attempts to conceptualize epochal transition in the history of ideas: first, on
Oswald Spengler’s concept of Historical Pseudomorphosis, second, on Hans Blumenberg’s
concept of Umbesetzung – often translated as Re-occupation. Both notions share sensitivity to
a practical complexity of historical change and epochal transition. Although historical change
is intuitively understood as the discontinuity between successive historical facts, proper
change cannot equal mere discontinuity. Discontinuity as such is historically unintelligible,
and the one-sided focus on sudden change and inexplicable difference is simply uninteresting.
What is more, if there were not even a minimal continuity or causal relation between two
successive epochs, the historical interpretation of their respective decline and genesis would
be impossible. In this regard, historical science would be restricted to the mere empirical
registration of disconnected facts. Paradoxically, a practicable conception of change thus has
to take continuity as well as discontinuity into account, sameness as well as difference. In
light of this, Blumenberg’s concept of re-occupation can be considered as an attempt to
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explain how a legitimately new and fully-fledged modern epoch is by definition bound to premodern problems and questions. These questions do not intrinsically belong to the new epoch,
but neither can they be eliminated. Similarly, Spengler’s notion of Pseudomorphosis shows
how a properly new epoch – or ‘Culture’, to put it in his own terminology – can be
determined by the cultural vocabulary of the preceding one. In spite of an undeniable
structural affinity between these two concepts, however, I will argue that Spengler’s
underlying ontology of history is less convincing than Blumenberg’s. Ultimately, Spengler’s
rigid conception of the intrinsic essence of a culture does not allow him to account for a real
historical interaction or a reciprocal influence between two epochs/cultures. In other words, it
does not allow him to make epochal transition and historical change really intelligible.
Oswald Spengler: historical pseudomorphosis
In Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Oswald Spengler famously develops a philosophy of
history by trying to uncover universal laws that structure the course of world history. He
drops the traditional triadic division between antiquity, middle ages and modernity, and
replaces it by a less Eurocentric perspective that recognizes at least eight higher cultures or
epochs in the history of the world – Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican,
Classical (Apollonian), Arabic (Magian) and Western (Faustian). For Spengler, each of these
cultures’ historical development is determined by the same unchangeable laws. Although the
specific essences and worldviews of different cultures are fundamentally incomparable and
even inaccessible to one another, each culture is structured according to the iron logic of
genesis, flourishing and decline. Consequently, certain phases or events in one culture, though
incomparable qua content, structurally return in other cultures. Spengler, for example, refers
to the structural affinities between the phases of Hellenism in the classical culture and the
period before the First World War in the Western/Faustian culture. He even calls these
historical phases “contemporaneous.”
In spite of this shared cyclic determinism of growth and decline, the historical gap
between cultures is fundamentally unbridgeable. Cultures are impenetrable, indivisible,
unchangeable, and thus closed historical entities – much like Thomas Kuhn’s scientific
paradigms. In this sense, the evolution of a culture is determined exclusively by its internal
logic, not by any external cultural influence. This position is not only historically counterintuitive, but, more than that, this perspective also retrains Spengler from elaborating on the
problem of epochal transition. If there is no connection whatsoever between cultures, he can
only account for the genesis of a new culture as a sudden, inexplicable and discontinuous
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appearance lacking any determinate historical cause. Accordingly, in Spengler’s perspective,
historical change is only intelligible within the development of a culture, while the transition
from one culture to another (epochal change) is absolutely unintelligible.
However, in the Chapter Problems of the Arabian Culture, Spengler introduces a
concept that might allow him him to develop the interrelation between two independent
cultures: this is the concept of Pseudomorphosis. This notion explains how a new culture’s
development is influenced, but especially curtailed by the legacy of an older one. As it
happens, Spengler borrows the notion of pseudomorphosis from geology. In this scientific
context, the concept refers to a complex mineralogical phenomenon where crystals in a rockstratum are gradually washed out by streams of water. In this process, the crystal eventually
disappears, but the mold it created in the rock-stratum remains. In this hollow mold, a new
crystal can develop that necessarily takes the external shape of its predecessor. Spengler
argues that a similar process can take place in world history as well. He defines Historical
pseudomorphosis as the case in which “an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land
that a young Culture cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific
expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness.”1 In short, the new
culture’s development is contained within the historical mold its predecessor left behind.
Because the new culture has not yet developed its proper means of expression, it develops a
radically new content in the older and outdated form of the previous culture. Although an
different cultural dynamic is at work, the new culture takes the shape (morphè) of the older
one, and appears as if (pseudo) it were still the older.2
The question, however, remains whether Spengler’s pseudomorphosis is a practicable
concept for the understanding of historical change. I argue that it is not: first, because
pseudomorphosis does not function and is not meant to function as a concept of historical
change in Der Untergang des Abendlandes, second, and more importantly, because
pseudomorphosis does not allow for an intrinsic interrelation between two cultures. In
Spengler’s perspective, two independent cultures can influence each other’s forms of
expression, but they cannot influence or change the inner nature of the culture itself.
Accordingly, pseudomorphosis cannot really grasp the change itself taking place in the
transition between these two cultures. Since pseudomorphosis changes a culture on a merely
1
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, ed. Helmut Werner, Arthur Helps and Charles Francis Atkinson
(New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 268.
2
In the chapter where Spengler develops the notion of pseudomorphosis, he specifically focuses on the restrictive
climate of a dominant classical culture in which the Arabian/Magian culture (the culture of the monotheistic
religions) struggles to develop its own self-consciousness – hence the title of this chapter: Problems of the
Arabian Culture.
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superficial and extrinsic level, the confrontation between two cultures cannot give rise to
something fundamentally new. Consequently, the novelty a culture does arise in relation to its
predecessor, but is as it were presupposed in Spengler’s perspective. Despite the possibility of
a structural interrelation between two cultures, Spengler thus sticks to an essentialism of
cultures: each culture has a specific essence that is radically fixed and historically
unchangeable. A scientific analogy can be illuminating here: the pseudomorphic relation
between two cultures is not the one of a chemical reaction between two substances giving rise
to a completely new substance; rather it is a mere mixture, an emulsion of two substances
whose molecular structures do not alter by being brought together. Moreover, if every culture
has a specific and intrinsic essence that cannot be altered, any external influence on this
culture is considered to be a restriction of the inner development of its essence rather than a
positive enrichment of this essence – hence pseudomorphosis’ negative connotation.
I can conclude this section on Spengler by affirming what I stated earlier: Spengler’s
position cannot explain real epochal transition or historical change. Ultimately, he cannot
grasp how and why specific new cultures or epochs arise in world history. Therefore, I turn to
Hans Blumenberg’s concept of epochal transition. His concept of Re-occupation is
structurally almost identical to Spengler’s pseudomorphosis, but, interestingly enough,
Blumenberg discards Spengler’s historical essentialism of cultures. To Blumenberg, there are
no fixed cultural identities or universal historical laws. Indeed, he radically rejects the
“substantialistic ontology of history” that presupposes “the existence of constants in the
history of ideas.”3 The rise and the nature of an epoch rather result from a complex and
contingent dynamic of different historical and cultural elements.
Hans Blumenberg: Umbesetzung/Re-occupation
In Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, Blumenberg develops the concept of re-occupation
(umbesetzung) in response to the concept of secularization. In the 1950s and 60s, the latter
notion was used in and out of fashion to explain the nature of modernity or different modern
phenomena. In the form of the formula “modern phenomenon X is the secularization of premodern/theological phenomenon Y”, secularization became a central topic in the postwar
debate about modernity. Karl Löwith, for example, defined progress as secularized Christian
eschatology, and Carl Schmitt argued that the sovereignty of the modern statesman is the
secularization of divine omnipotence. Blumenberg’s Legitimität der Neuzeit fundamentally
3
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983),
113.
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questions the explanatory value of this topical notion of secularization. By overemphasizing
the fundamental continuity between modern and pre-modern culture, ultimately,
secularization does not explain anything. In the perspective of secularization theory,
modernity is the mere rephrasing of Christian content into secular terms. Accordingly, these
theories gloss over the real epochal difference between the Middle Ages and modernity, and
reduce it the to a superficial and formal distinction. In this regard, Blumenberg wants to do
away with the concept of secularization altogether.
His disavowal of secularization, however, does not reject any continuity between
modernity and pre-modernity. On the contrary, Blumenberg wanted to develop a conceptual
framework that would allow him to grasp the historical interrelation between modernity and
pre-modernity without compromising modernity’s legitimately new content, i.e. without
succumbing to secularization theory’s pitfall of defining modernity as mere watered down
Christianity. Here, the notion of re-occupation comes in. The concept explains how a
legitimately new and fully-fledged modern epoch is essentially bound to pre-modern
problems and questions. These questions do not belong to this new epoch, but neither can they
be eliminated. Unlike the theory of secularization, Blumenberg thus refuses to recognize a
continuity of content between modernity and pre-modernity in which theological ideas are
transposed from the one epoch to the other. He argues that the interrelation between
modernity and pre-modernity implies the continuity of questions rather than the continuity of
answers.
“What mainly occurred in the process that is interpreted as secularization … should
be described not as the transposition of authentically theological contents into
secularized alienation from their origin but rather as the re-occupation of answer
positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be
eliminated.”4
In this respect, re-occupation shows, not unlike Spengler’s pseudomorphosis, how a
new culture or epoch “is bound to the frame of reference of what it renounces.” 5 To put it in
Spengler’s terminology, a new culture or epoch arises in the historical mold the preceding
epoch left behind. For Blumenberg, this mold is the set of answer positions that have become
vacant for modernity after the decline of the Christian middle ages. Accordingly, modernity
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5
Ibid., 65.
Ibid., 69.
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can only express its legitimately new and original content in the form of the preceding
culture’s framework of questions that remains to be meaningful. In spite of the structural
similarity between pseudomorphosis and Re-occupation, there is, however, at least one crucial
difference between the two notions of epochal transition. Contrary to Spengler, Blumenberg
maintains that re-occupation constitutes rather than restrains the development of the new
epoch. Instead of imprisoning the new content, the historical mold in which modernity arises
is the condition of possibility of its manifestation. It is the language in which new ideas can be
expressed before they are able to give rise to their own proper modes of expression. In this
respect, the relation with the older epoch fundamentally determines the development and even
the nature of the new epoch. Consequently, the essence of an epoch cannot be understood
without reference to the way in which it deals with the legacy of its predecessor. Unlike
pseudomorphosis, re-occupation thus influences the inner constitution of a culture or epoch.
To come back to my scientific analogy, the relation of re-occupation is not a mere mixture of
two stable substances. Rather, re-occupation resembles the relation of a chemical reaction: the
substances that are brought together change each other’s molecular structure and generate a
completely new substance.
Conclusion
For two reasons, Blumenberg’s conception of epochal transition is a more practicable tool for
the historical understanding of epochal change in the history of ideas than Spengler’s
pseudomorphosis. First, Blumenberg’s re-occupation accounts for the complex relation
between continuity and discontinuity that characterizes real historical change. He neither
overemphasizes continuity between modernity and pre-modernity, like the theories of
secularization, nor mere discontinuity, like Spengler. Blumenberg namely recognizes the
continuity of questions and answer positions, but a discontinuity of content. Second, this
approach allows him to grasp how a preceding epoch can change the internal structure of a
new epoch, but without compromising the originality and legitimacy of this new epoch.
Unlike Blumenberg’s re-occupation, Spengler’s pseudomorphosis does not allow for this
complex intrinsic interrelation between cultures that is necessary for a historical
understanding of change and epochal transition.
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