Oswald Spengler’s and Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Perspectives on History, Authority, and Freedom

9 min readSep 23, 2022

“Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static, but when you see that the truth is something living, moving, which has no resting place, which is in no temple, mosque or church, which no religion, no teacher, no philosopher, nobody can lead you to — then you will also see that this living thing is what you actually are.”

Introduction

Freedom is a weighed concept. Many people feel it to be the most important thing in their lives, but only a few stop to question or reflect on what it actually means. Is it something to be found outside our immediate experience or within it? Does it exist in the social realm or does it lurk in the psyche? What is freedom’s relation to authority? Is it for or against it? Finally, what role does thinking play in all of this? Is it the key to freedom, or is it its gatekeeper? For us to inquire into these questions more deeply, in this week’s reflection I am going to reflect on the works of two fairly well-known authors: the late Indian scholar and public speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti and German philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler.

Indoctrination and the diffusion of ideas

As it is apparent in many of his public talks, Jiddu Krishnamurti was not a fan of authority and its figures. He did not trust much of the knowledge presented by various scholars, priests, specialists, gurus, or leaders of any type for that matter. For him, individual free inquiry and open observation were the only valid tools that when employed correctly could open the windows into the state of our current predicament not just societally, but also psychologically, and environmentally. All of us can interpret reality, but every person has to take the information presented by others with a grain of salt, for both his and the perceptions of others are limited and more often than not, twisted by various ideologies, beliefs, or other forms of conditioning. In his book, Krishnamurti asks:

“How can we be free to look and learn when our minds from the moment we are born to the moment we die are shaped by a particular culture in the narrow pattern of the ‘me’? For centuries we have been conditioned by nationality, caste, class, tradition, religion, language, education, literature, art, custom, convention, propaganda of all kinds, economic pressure, the food we eat, the climate we live in, our family, our friends, our experiences — every influence you can think of — and therefore our responses to every problem are conditioned.”

Being born in a certain cultural context, all of us are raised and groomed in a particular manner. From very early days we’re taught what is expected from us: how we should behave, what values we should uphold, which religion to follow, and of course, how we should perceive, speak, and think.

Though most of us don’t see ourselves as religious people, religion still runs deep within us. It is reflected in our aims, values, and perspectives. Even the way we perceive time cannot escape religious imprints. For those who are born into the context of one of the three major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) time appears linear, flowing from conception (the birth of the universe) to finish (its end). For such a person there is only one savior, one life, one birth, and one death. Both for a Hindu and a Buddhist alike this approach might come across as quite odd. Why only one life? Why one death? Why one birth? In their context, the process of life is marked by an infinitude of comings and goings not just of the soul (the person), but also that of the universe itself. Therefore Buddhists, Taoists, and Hindus experience time as cyclical rather than linear.

Religion and Science

Being a successor of scholasticism and Christian thinking, Western science has borrowed many dogmas from early Christian thought, just like Christianity has borrowed its logic from Aristotle, ideas from Plato, and various beliefs from Judaism, Stoicism, Egyptian religiosity, and other. Heck, even the Hebrews have borrowed much of their fate from Zoroastrianism — one of the oldest organized faiths ever to have existed. Born in the valleys of Iran, it dates back to around the 2nd millennium BCE, far before Abraham and his interpreters.

Human beings are great copycats. We take what is invented by others and claim that it is has been done by us. Even the first law of thermodynamics is a byproduct of Judaic thinking. In the old testament, it is stated:

“I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.” — Ecclesiastes 3:14

Similarly, the law of conservation of energy reads:

“Energy can neither be created nor destroyed — only converted from one form of energy to another.”

Some of the most basic scientific principles can be traced back to religious thinking. That is how ideas get diffused and adopted, changing with the times and geographical proximities. In this light, by stating that we are not religious we would also state that we do not accept the founding dogmas of science. And that’s ok! Why should we? We don’t want to think as our predecessors did, yet cultural conditioning often runs much deeper than we think. Similarly, more often than not, we are not as conscious and in control as we would like to be. That is why even though many ideas and beliefs can be scrutinized and questioned, sometimes we lack the tools to create the necessary distance and see them for what they are — ideas.

Cultural hemispheres: The East and the West

What we take for granted in the Western hemisphere, such as the idea of subject-object separation or the concept of an individual “I” for those raised in an Eastern setting can appear as a result of thousands of years of Western socio-cultural conditioning. Of course, the Buddhists, just like the Hindus or The Taoists needn’t forget that they had undergone a cultural indoctrination of their own, simply in another way and form. Every culture has its own shortcomings. This was illustrated beautifully by Oswald Spengler in his 20th-century hit The Decline of the West. There he wrote:

“It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it — insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity, the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal” views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves.”

The pre-Socratians saw the world as fire, water, or ether; the early Scholastic people perceived it as God, the Newtonians saw it as a mechanism, and the quantum physicists perceive it as a possibility. Who is right? Can we surely say that one of the camps is 100% correct while the others aren’t? Perception is not stable. It changes and shifts with time, according to historical circumstances and societal fancies. Many people in the future will laugh and scorn us for our ignorance and naivete, similarly like we mock the beliefs of the early Christian scholars or the theories of early scientists and scholars. It is hard to accept the fact that any type of knowledge that we have gathered throughout centuries of scientific, philosophical, and religious inquiry might not be enough to finally say “Yes! That’s how it is!”, but it is even harder to consider the possibility that maybe even the present fields of epistemology do not hold the answers to the questions we are seeking. Then, what should we do? Where should we look for answers?

Freedom, the known, and history

Even though Spengler and Krishnamurti were two people raised in very different contexts, some of their ideas I find quite similar. What united them was their inquisitive minds, deep skepticism, and curiosity. For Krishnamurti — all types of authority and belief stand in the way between the person and his perceptions. Even the accumulation of former knowledge, the ideas present in his memory, can become a burden if not adjusted carefully. Therefore, in his book Freedom From The Known he wrote:

“To be free of all authority, of your own and that of another, is to die to everything of yesterday, so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion. It is only in that state that one learns and observes. And for this, a great deal of awareness is required, actual awareness of what is going on inside yourself, without correcting it or telling it what it should or should not be, because the moment you correct it you have established another authority, a censor.”

Careful observation of his mind led the author to conclude that even though thought is always moving and changing, at the same time it is old, dead, and static. Therefore, it cannot be used to perceive the present. Its functions are purely technical and operational. Memory is to be used to make interpretations, communicate, but not to perceive. Perception requires a mind that is empty, not a mind full of words, ideas, beliefs, or theories. Otherwise what one will perceive are words, ideas, theories, but not the facts themselves. That is why freedom, at least for Krishnamurti, was to be found in one’s ability to distance himself from all the information that he has acquired. The accumulation of knowledge is not identical to knowing. Perception is silent, attentive, and deeply aware. Accumulation is static, blind, and presumptuous.

Oswald Spengler, being a historian first and a philosopher second, had not arrived at the same conclusion personally, but throughout his works, he made some other interesting observations about the mind, perception, and culture. In the Decline of the West, he cautions his readers not to make the same mistake as so many of his former colleagues did. There he suggested seeing the whole process of history not just as a stagnant collection of facts, but as a living and changing entity, perceivable from many angles instead of only one. For him — every culture is unique and should not be disregarded as “backward” for the simple reason that it is not “Western.” Thus, he writes:

“ [A] Chinese historian is quite entitled to frame a world-history in which the Crusades, the Renaissance, Caesar, and Frederick the Great are passed over in silence as insignificant. (…) Do we not relegate the vast complexes of Indian and Chinese culture to foot-notes, with a gesture of embarrassment? As for the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that they do not “fit in” (with, what?), entirely ignore them?”

Later, he adds:

“The most appropriate designation for this current West-European scheme of history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round us as the presumed centre of all world-happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history. The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Copernican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico — separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power.”

In conclusion…

Knowing that as a culture we know less than we don’t is important. Therefore, we should never forget that any type of knowledge, be it of the past, present, or future is always limited to its own context. Yes, accumulated knowledge is necessary to advance mathematics, sciences, and technologies, but if not managed carefully — it can make us pay dearly. Knowledge without sense can spell disaster, as would warfare with our current technological prowess. For that reason, thinking should always consult factual perception. It cannot run wild without being rooted in an awareness of life as it is, otherwise, the mind starts to function separately from the reality in which it is nested and distorts its own lived experience. Therefore, memory (thought) should aid us in our technical pursuits, yet it shouldn’t establish itself as a source of unquestionable authority, be it in the words of another or in the mind of one’s own self. Awareness is it the key, thought is but a gatekeeper. It is important, but not absolute.

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