CITIES AND PEOPLES (B) PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 1(2)

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 113-137

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.113-114

Throughout the nineteenth century the scientific picture of history was vitiated by a notion that was either derived from, or at any rate brought to a point by, Romanticism the idea of the "People" in the moral-enthusiastic sense of the word. If, here and there, in earlier time a new religion, a new ornamentation, a new architecture, or a new script appeared, the question that it raised presented itself to the investigator thus What was the name of the people who produced the phenomenon? This enunciation of the problem is peculiar to the Western spirit and the present-day cast of that spirit; but it is so false at every point that the picture that it evokes of the course of events must necessarily be erroneous. [...] The purpose of this chapter is to demolish this romantic conception. What has inhabited the earth since the Ice Age is man, not "peoples." In the first instance, their Destiny is determined by the fact that the bodily succession of parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a landscape. Even nomadic tribes confine their movements within a limited field. Thereby the cosmic-plantlike side of life, of Being, is invested with a character of duration. This I call race. Tribes, septs, clans, families all these are designations for the fact of a blood which circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or a wide landscape.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.114

But these human beings possess also the microcosmic-animal side of life, in waking-consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the form in which the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation with that of another I call language, which begins by being a mere unconscious living expression that is received as a sensation, but gradually develops into a conscious technique of communication that depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching to signs. In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every language the efficient form of one great waking-consciousness that connects many individual beings. And we shall never reach the ultimate discoveries about either unless they are treated together and constantly brought into comparison with one ano ther. But, further, we shall never understand man's higher history if we ignore the fact that man, as constituent of a race and as possessor of a language, as derivative of a blood-unit and as member of an understanding-unit, has different Destinies, that of his being and that of his waking-being. That is, the origin, development, and duration of his race side and the origin, development, and duration of his language side are completely independent of one another. Race is something cosmic and psychic (Seelenhafi), periodic in some obscure way, and in its inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations. Languages, on the other hand, are causal forms, and operate through the polarity of their means. We speak of race-instincts and of the spirit of a language. But they are two distinct worlds. To Race belong the deepest meanings of the words "time" and "yearning"; to language those of the words "space" and "fear." But all this has been hidden from us, hitherto, by the overlying idea of "peoples."

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.115

This, however, leads at once to the very significant distinction between two genera of language the language which is only an expression for the world, an inward necessity springing from the longing inherent in all life to actualize itself before witnesses, to display its own presence to itself, and the language that is meant to be understood by definite beings. There are, therefore, expression-languages and communication-languages. The former assume only a state of waking-being, the latter a connexion of waking-beings.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.116-117

And here at last is the key to those two strange words which were discovered by the ethnologists in two entirely different parts of the world in rather limited applications, but have since been quietly moving up into the foreground of research "totem" and "taboo." [...] Totem and Taboo describe the ultimate meanings of Being and Waking-Being, Destiny and Causality, Race and Language, Time and Space, yearning and fear, pulse and tension, politics and religion. The Totem side of life is plantlike and inheres in all being, while the Taboo side is animal and presupposes the free movement of a being in a world. Our Totem organs are those of the blood-circulation and of reproduction, our Taboo organs those of the senses and the nerves. All that is of Totem has physiognomy, all that is of Taboo has system. In the Totemistic resides the common feeling of beings that belong to the same stream of existence. It cannot be acquired and cannot be got rid of; it is a fact, the fact of all facts. That which is of Taboo, on the other hand, is the characteristic of linkages of waking-consciousness, it is learnable and acquirable, and on that very account guarded as a secret by cult-communities, philosophers' schools, and artists' guilds each of which possesses a sort of cryptic language of its own.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.117

On this account it is necessary to distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in itself a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with the signs. When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a language is spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its flesh that we can know. This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit, and all other languages that we have merely deciphered from texts and inscriptions, and we are right in calling these languages dead, for the human communities that were formed by them have vanished. We know the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the Egyptians.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.119

A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its "home," but it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in everchanging landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plantnature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has made its mark upon them - generation by generation they become more and more like the people they eradicated.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.119-120

Not so with language. The home of a language means merely the accidental place of its formation, and this has no relation to its inner form. Languages migrate in that they spread by carriage from tribe to tribe. Above all, they are capable of being, and are, exchanged indeed, in studying the early history of races we need not, and should not, feel the slightest hesitation about postulating such speech-changes. It is, I repeat, the form-content and not the speaking of a language that is taken over, and it is taken over (as primitives are for ever taking over ornament-motives) in order to be used with perfect sureness as elements of their own form-language. In early times the fact that a people has shown itself the stronger, or the feeling that its language possesses superior efficacy, is enough to induce others to give up their own language and with genuinely religious awe to take its language to themselves. Follow out the speech-changes of the Normans, whom we find in Normandy, England, Sicily, and Constantinople with di fferent languages in each place, and ever ready to exchange one for another. Piety towards the mother tongue the very term testifies to deep ethical forces, and accounts for the bitterness of our ever-recurring language-battles is a trait of the Late Western soul, almost unknowable for the men of other Cultures and entirely so for the primitive.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.120

Of all expressions of race, the purest is the House. From the moment when man, becoming sedentary, ceases to be content with mere shelter and builds himself a dwelling, this expression makes its appearance and marks off, within the race "man" (which is the element of the biological world-picture) the human races of world-history proper, which are streams of being of far greater spiritual significance. The prime form of the house is everywhere a product of feeling and of growth, never at all of knowledge. [...] One need only compare the lay-out of the old Saxon and that of the Roman house to feel that the soul of the men and the soul of the house were in each case identical.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.122

If we possessed in western Europe only pottery remains for the centuries between Trojan and Chlodwig, we should not have the least inkling of the event that we know as the "great Migrations." But the presence of an oval house in the Aegean region l and of another and very striking example of it in Rhodesia, and the much-discussed concordance of the Saxon peasant-house with that of the Libyan Kabyle disclose a piece of race-history. Ornaments spread when a people incorporates them in its form-language, but a house-type is only transplanted along with its race. The disappearance of an ornament means no more than a change of language, but when a house-type vanishes it means that race is extinguished.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.122-123

At the outset of a Culture two well-defined forms of a higher order rise up over the peasant village, as expressions of being and language of waking-being. They are the castle and the cathedral In them the distinction between Totem and Taboo, longing and fear, blood and intellect, rises to a grand symbolism. The ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chinese, the Classical, the South-Arabian, and the Western castle stands, as the home of continuing generations, very near to the peasant cottage, and both, as copies of the realities of living, breeding, and dying, lie outside all art-history. [...] The cathedral, on the other hand, is not ornamented, but is itself ornament. Its history is coincident with that of the Gothic style, and the same is true of the Doric temple and all other Early Culture buildings. So complete is the congruence, in the Western and every other Culture whose art we know at all, that it has never occurred to anyone to be astonished at the fact that strict architecture (which is simply the highest form of pure ornament) is entirely confined to religious building.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.123

We distinguish, then, the building that has a style and the building in which men have a style. Whereas in monastery and cathedral it is the stone that possesses form and communicates it to the men who are in its service, in farmhouse and feudal stronghold it is the full strength of the countryman's and the knight's life that forms the building forth from itself. Here the man and not the stone comes first, and here, too, there is an ornamentation; it is an ornament which is proper to man and consists in the strict nature and stable form of manners and customs. We might call this living, as distinct from rigid, style.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.124

The practical importance of the house as race-expression begins to be appreciated as and when one realizes the immense difficulty of approaching the kernel of race. I do not refer to its inner essence, its soul as to that, feeling speaks to us clearly enough and we all know a man of race, a "thoroughbred," when we see one. But what are the hall-marks for our sense, and above all for our eye, by which we recognize and distinguish races? This is a matter that belongs to the domain of Physiognomic just as surely as the classification of tongues belongs to that of Systematic. But how immense and how varied the material that would be required ! How much of it is irretrievably lost by destruction, and how much more by corruption ! In the most favourable cases, what we have of prehistoric men is their skeletons, and how much does a skeleton not tell us ! Very nearly everything. Prehistoric research in its naïve zeal is ready to deduce the incredible from a jaw-bone or an arm-bone. But think of one of those mass-graves of the War in northern France, in which we know that men of all races, white and coloured, peasants and townsmen, youths and men lie together. If the future had no collateral evidence as to their nature, it would certainly not be enlightened by anthropological research. In other words, immense dramas of race can pass over a land without the investigator of its grave-skeletons obtaining the least hint of the fact.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.125

When language is used as a differentia, it is to classify races, not according to their way of speaking, but according to the grammatical structure of the speech, which is just anatomy and system of another sort. No one as yet has perceived that the investigation of these speech-races is one of the most important tasks that research can possibly set itself. In the actuality of daily experience we all know perfectly well that the way of speaking is one of the most distinctive traits in present-day man examples are legion; each of us knows any number of them. In Alexandria the same Greek was spoken in the most dissimilar race-modes, as we can see even to-day from the script of the texts. In North America the native-born speak exactly alike, whether in English, in German, or for that matter in Indian.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.125

But science has completely failed to note that race is not the same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the microcosmic side of life a fresh group of characters appears, and that for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that a completely different significance must be attached to "races" when the word denotes subdivisions within the integral race "Man." With its talk of adaptation and of inheritance it sets up a soulless causal concatenation of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are expressing themselves secrets that cannot be inspected and measured, but only livingly experienced and felt from eye to eye.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.127

Further, there is a statistical aspect of the matter which has received far less attention than it should. For every human being alive to-day there were a million ancestors even in A.D. 1300 and ten million in A.D. 1000. This means that every German now living, without exception, is a blood-relative of every European of the age of the Crusades and that the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more intensely close as we narrow the limits of its field, so that within twenty generations or less the population of a land grows together into one single family; and this, together with the choice and voice of the blood that courses through the generations, ever driving congeners into one another's arms, dissolving and breaking marriages, evading or forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that in utter unconsciousness fulfil the will of the race.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.129

In reality, the race-expression of a human head can associate itself with any conceivable skull-form, the decisive element being not the bone, but the flesh, the look, the play of feature. Since the days of Romanticism we have spoken of an "Indogermanic" race. But is there such a thing as an Aryan or a Semitic skull? Can we distinguish Celtic and Prankish skulls, or even Boer and Kaffir? And if not, what may not the earth have witnessed in the way of history unknown to us, for which not the slightest evidences, but only bones, remain!

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.130

Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once in every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of the heavy hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from the South to the Rhine, and there it has certainly not visibly i.e., botanically changed.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.130-131

Race, Time, and Destiny belong together. But the moment scientific thought approaches them, the word "Time" acquires the significance of a dimension, the word "Destiny" that of causal connexion, while Race, for which even at that stage of scientific askesis we still retain a very sure feeling, becomes an incomprehensible chaos of unconnected and heterogeneous characters that (under headings of land, period, culture, stock) interpenetrate without end and without law.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.132

But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous. Speaking is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in contradiction to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular creatures devoid of all sense-organs can be conceived of as speechless. To be a microcosm in the macrocosm is one and the same thing as having a power to communicate oneself to another. To speak of a beginning of speech in animal history is meaningless.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.137

Finally, speech and truth exclude one another. And in fact this is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical "judge of men," who is all race and knows how to take the being that is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind the prayer the heart, and behind the common good-tone the more intimate levels of social importance and that instantaneously, immediately, and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything cosmic that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom one language at any rate carries conviction.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.137

A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a word's being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far beyond the collective existence of the higher animal-world, deep in the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliverance from the waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.