The Antithesis of Culture and Civilisation

Chapter 6 traces the complex dialogue Jones maintained with the works of Oswald Spengler from the 1930s onwards. While in the past critics have tried to distance him from the controversy that surrounded Spengler, this chapter examines Jones’s theories as direct and provocative responses to the historian’s ideas. Only by doing so can Jones’s concepts of ‘the Break’ between past and present, and the antithesis of culture and civilisation (in particular, through the divisions of truth-men and fact-men and of the feminine and masculine principles), be recognised as creative reformulations of Spengler’s ideas. When considered in this context, his visual artworks and poetic fragments—including ‘The Dream of Private Clitus’ (c.1940), ‘The Agent’ (c.1940), ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’ (1958) and ‘The Tutelar of the Place’ (c.1960)—act as creative spaces in which Jones was able to challenge Spengler’s nihilistic vision of decline and fight for the renewal of culture.