Permutations of Pseudomorphosis
The View from Oregon — 327: Friday 07 February 2025
It often happens to me that I require a nudge from outside in order to pay attention to something that I have hitherto neglected. Now I find this to be the case with Spengler’s conception of pseudomorphosis. I’ve been reading some of the papers and posts of Naif Al Bidh, and his references to pseudomorphosis have forced me to consider this idea in a way that I hadn’t previously. Some of the relevant pieces I have in mind are Cultural Pseudomorphosis and the Tragedy of the Russian Soul, Cultural Pseudomorphosis & the Inversion of Islamic-Magian Spirituality, and Oswald Spengler: Further Critiques. The term “pseudomorphosis” is from geology (or mineralogy). A Dictionary of Geological Terms (Anchor, 1974) that I happen to have to hand gives this definition of pseudomorph:
“A crystal, or apparent crystal, having the outward form proper to another species of mineral, which it has replaced by substitution or by chemical alteration.”
Spengler doesn’t get around to his explicit discussion of pseudomorphosis until the second volume of The Decline of the West, Chapter VII, “Problems of the Arabian Culture.” In the first paragraph of this chapter Spengler gives an account of pseudomorphosis similar to that above, and in the next paragraph he describes the analogous use of the term that applies to history rather than geology:
“By the term ‘historical pseudomorphosis’ I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.”
In Spengler’s conception of historical pseudomorphosis we can distinguish the purely structural or descriptive features of historical pseudomorphosis from the moral consequences that follow, of which Spengler names a failure of a young culture express its own distinctive character, and the growing hatred that comes to being subject to the constraint of alien forms of expression. Both are of interest in shaping civilization, but I want to focus on the first, the descriptive side of pseudomorphosis, because once I started reading about this I think that the concept can be generalized in a way that makes it a central mechanism in the development of civilization. Maybe I’ll return to the moral side of pseudomorphosis later, as there is an obvious Nietzschean interpretation of the monstrous hate that grows up in the way Spengler describes, and we can’t discuss human historical action in any kind of authentic way without taking account of the moral elements involved and the passions that enter into every decision.
The first obvious generalization of pseudomorphosis is that it admits of degrees of greater or less. I would be willing to go further and say that pseudomorphosis is rarely entirely absent; it’s a matter of whether the pseudomorphosis is a sufficient constraint on a culture that it results in distorting the culture, thus the kind of moral reaction that Spengler describes. Low level pseudomorphosis can pass with very little notice and little power to result in the malformation of a culture. There have been only a handful of pristine civilizations in the whole of human history — those few civilizations that arose without any predecessor in their geographical region, and no other civilizations in sufficient proximity to exercise any constraining influence on the development of the first civilization. These pristine civilizations are free from pseudomorphosis, but they are a small minority of the civilizations that have existed. Even in the cases where a civilization has utterly collapsed and has been forgotten — say, Minoan civilization or the Indus Valley civilization — these early and long-lasting civilizations contributed so much to the baseline culture of their respective geographical regions in language, in art, in technology, and informal social institutions that even though the civilizations themselves disappeared, their legacy lived on in what was to follow.
This legacy left by earlier civilizations means that all later civilizations are young souls cast in old moulds, as Spengler put it. The second obvious observation is related to the first, that pseudomorphosis admits of degrees, and that is that the pervasive pseudomorphosis that characterizes all non-pristine civilizations can be equally a facilitation of the powers of the young culture as it can be a constraint. Usually it is both, and both admit of degrees. A high degree of facilitation coupled with a low degree of constraint would not likely issue in monstrous hatred, but a low degree of facilitation coupled with a high degree of constraint easily could lead to hatred of an unwelcome legacy. When a civilization invents something and the invention expands through idea diffusion not only geographically, but also historically, the invention is inherited by later cultures that may choose to adopt it (or they may choose to reject it). The first written script developed in west Asia was Cuneiform, and Cuneiform was widely successful, being adopted as the written linguistic form for many of the languages in the region. On the one hand I could argue that this preexisting written language was an imposition on later cultures, but on the other hand the fact that a written language was already available meant that these cultures didn’t need to invent written language for themselves. In this sense, written language facilitated the development of later cultures, and this facilitation of development may have been felt more keenly than the constraint to the form of expression entailed by the use of a character set. And even a widely adopted written language won’t be universally adopted within a geographical region. The Egyptians notably didn’t adopt Cuneiform, but instead had their own written language of hieroglyphics.
European languages today use the character set of Latin, and this character set defines a region of linguistic influence. It is one of the shared legacies that make the peoples of Western civilization part of one civilization with regional expressions rather than many civilizations. In this way, the possession of a shared legacy is a positive force that binds peoples together into a larger whole, and not necessarily a resented constraint. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine instances of an attempt to impose a shared legacy that is resented.
In newsletter 291 (and in some subsequent newsletters) I discussed the familiar imperial strategy of imposing an official language in schools and official text books from a central capital that marginalizes the languages and histories of students in imperial schools. This kind of inorganic imposition of a common language or a common history definitely does cause resentment and defiance, and the more a central power attempts to impose itself on its periphery in this way, the more the peoples of the periphery grow to hate their imperial overlords. This can be taken as an instance of what I’ve called ersatz civilizations in newsletters 95 and 170.
The imperial model brings us to another aspect of pseudomorphosis. I have awkwardly called this “templatization” because I didn’t have a better term handy, but pseudomorphosis is a better term, as long as it’s understood as one of many aspects of pseudomorphosis. I especially discussed templates in The Role of Science in Enlightenment Universalism, which was a response to a paper by Susanne Langer. Langer had written a paper in 1961, “Scientific Civilization and Cultural Crisis,” in which she said:
“Civilization — the practical structure of life — is like an outline tracing of the culture that begot it. As long as an outline lies on the painting from which it is made it takes special attention to abstract it; but moved away it appears as a stark and empty form, and imposed on another painting it makes for confusion. Our modern technology, transferred to practically all countries in the world, has caused civilization everywhere to follow its lines, and to change the conduct of life so radically that actuality and tradition seem to have no contact with each other. Even religious practices become untenable in the new practical frame; and with any failure of religious support, individuals tend to lose their emotional and moral stability. The community of feeling disintegrates when institutions lose their sacredness and seem merely old-fashioned, not venerable.”
The idea of an “outline tracing” I picked up from this essay and called it a template. I could just as well call it a form of pseudomorphosis. Langer’s point about the imposition of modern technology is similar to a point made by Naif Al Bidh in his Oswald Spengler: Further Critiques:
“Adorno criticizes Spengler’s view of Western technology within his Man and Technics, arguing that the Western technic’s drive to establish ‘mastery over nature’ is not exclusive to the West, since the East is also industrializing and should, in turn, be held responsible. Yet in Spenglerian terms, the Faustian technics are unique to the West, and hence their appropriation by the East is essentially a form of pseudomorphosis. ”
An expanding civilization has a model for itself that it imposes throughout the reach of its power projection. In the process of colonization, the imposition of an imperial template is conscious and explicitly pursued. An expanding power brings its architecture, its formal social institutions, its language, its styles of art to a region that it dominates politically and militarily and this reproduces the colonizing civilization to the extent possible in the colonized geographical region. I say “to the extent possible” because there are biological and climatological limitations to the imposition of a template of civilization.
The staple foods of the colonizing power may not grow in the colonized geographical regions, and the kind of structures built in the home country may be impractical in the colonized region. And if the colonizing population chooses to live as a leisure class, taking its servants from the native population, the colonizers may well be assimilated to colonized peoples over time. It could go either way; we have historical examples of the “successful” imposition of a civilizational template that endures for hundreds of years, and we have historical examples of peoples who “go native” because they adopt native foods, native modes of dress, native architecture for their houses, and eventually their descendants marry into the native population.
The imperial model can vary considerably among empires, from the organic to the inorganic, and they can vary according to whether the population upon which an empire imposes its template welcomes or rejects the template. And there are cases of the expansion of the model of civilization that are so organic that it would be incorrect to refer to them as being imposed. The Romans initially imposed themselves and their template of civilization on the Mediterranean basin, but at some point the expansion of Roman cultural power (much of it involving culture borrowed from the Greeks) took on a life of its own, and peoples wanted to be part of the Roman project, adopting the manners and fashions of the Romans. Imitation, as we know, is the sincerest form of flattery. King Attalus III of Pergamon had no male heirs and willed his kingdom to Rome. I believe there were other examples like this, but this is the only one I recall at present. When a civilizational template is sought out and imitated, it isn’t the kind of pseudomorphosis that Spengler introduced, but it could yet become this. Just because our parents seek out a successful civilization to imitate, doesn’t mean that the children won’t turn against it and come to hate it.
