CITIES AND PEOPLES (A) THE SOUL OF THE CITY

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 87-110

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.89-90

Primeval man is a ranging animal, a being whose waking-consciousness restlessly feels its way through life, all microcosm, under no servitude of place or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert t o drive off some element of hostile Nature. A deep transformation sets in first with agriculture for that is something artificial, with which hunter and shepherd have no touch. He who digs and ploughs is seeking not to plunder, but to alter Nature. To plant implies, not to take something, but to produce something. But with this, man himself becomes -plant namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earthboundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes the friend; earth becomes Mother Earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up. A new devoutness addresses itself in chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up along with man. And as completed expression of this life-feeling, we find everywhere the symbolic shape of the farmhouse, which in the disposition of the rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood of its inhabitants. The peasant's dwelling is the great symbol of settledness. It is itself plant, thrusts its roots deep into its "own" soil. [...] What his cottage is to the peasant, that the town is to the Cultureman. As each individual house has its kindly spirits, so each town has its tutelary god or saint. The town, too, is a plantlike being, as far removed as a peasantry is from nomadism and the purely microcosmic. Hence the development of a high form-language is linked always to a landscape. Neither an art nor a religion can alter the site of its growth; only in the Civilization with its giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage ourselves from these roots. Man as civilized, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensually. "Ubi bene, ibi patria" is valid before as well as after a Culture. [...] To-day, at the end of this Culture, the rootless intellect ranges over all landscapes and all possibilities of thought. But between these limits lies the time in which a man held a bit of soil to be something worth dying for.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.91

It goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is not size, but the presence of a soul. Not only in primitive conditions, such as those of central Africa, but in Late conditions too China, India, and industrialized Europe and America we find very large settlements that are nevertheless not to be called cities. They are centres of landscape; they do not inwardly form worlds in themselves. They have no soul. Every primitive population lives wholly as peasant and son of the soil the being "City" does not exist for it. That which in externals develops from the village is not the city, but the market, a mere meeting-point of rural life-interests. Here there can be no question of a separate existence. The inhabitant of a market may be a craftsman or a tradesman, but he lives and thinks as a peasant. We have to go back and sense accurately what it means when out of a primitive Egyptian or Chinese or Germanic village a little spot in a wide land a city comes into being. It is quite possibly not differentiated in any outward feature, but spiritually it is a place from which the countryside is henceforth regarded, felt, and experienced as "environs," as something different and subordinate. [...] Every springtime of a Culture is ipso facto the springtime of a new city-type and civism. The men of the pre-Culture are filled with a deep uneasiness in the presence of these types, with which they cannot get into any inward relation. On the Rhine and the Danube the Germans frequently, as at Strassburg, settled down at the gates of Roman cities that remained uninhabited.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.92-93

The new Soul of the City speaks a new language, which soon comes to be tantamount to the language of the Culture itself. The open land with its village-mankind is wounded; it no longer understands that language, it is nonplussed and dumb. All genuine style-history is played out in the cities. It is exclusively the city's destiny and the life-experience of urban men that speaks to the eye in the logic of visible forms.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.94

What do we know of the Classical cities, seeing that we do not know the lines that they presented under the Southern noon, under clouds in the morning, in the starry night? The courses of the streets, straight or crooked, broad or narrow; the houses, low or tall, bright or dark, that in all Western cities turn their facades, their faces, and in all Eastern cities turn their backs, blank wall and railing, towards the street; the spirit of squares and corners, impasses and prospects, fountains and monuments, churches or temples or mosques, amphitheatres and railway stations, bazaars and town-halls!

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.94

In the earliest time the landscape-figure alone dominates man's eyes. It gives form to his soul and vibrates in tune therewith. Feelings and woodland rustlings beat together; the meadows and the copses adapt themselves to its shape, to its course, even to its dress. The village, with its quiet hillocky roofs, its evening smoke, its wells, its hedges, and its beasts, lies completely fused and embedded in the landscape. The country town confirms the country, is an intensification of the picture of the country. It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.95

An obvious case in point is, of course, the Classical world, in which the Euclidean feeling of existence connected the city-idea with its need of minimizing extension and thus, with ever-increasing emphasis, identified the State with the stone body of the individual Polis. But, quite apart from this instance, we find in every Culture (and very soon) the type of the capital city. This, as its name pointedly indicates, is that city whose spirit, with its methods, aims, and decisions of policy and economics, dominates the land. The land with its people is for this controlling spirit a tool and an object. The land does not understand what is going on, and is not even asked.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.96

All effectual history begins with the primary classes, nobility and priesthood, forming themselves and elevating themselves above the peasantry as such. The opposition of greater and lesser nobility, between king and vassal, between worldly and spiritual power, is the basic form of all primitive politics, Homeric, Chinese, or Gothic, until with the coming of the City, the burgher, the Tiers tat, history changes its style. But it is exclusively in these classes as such, in their class-consciousness, that the whole meaning of history inheres. The peasant is historyless. [...] The peasant is the eternal man, independent of every Culture that ensconces itself in the cities. He precedes it, he outlives it, a dumb creature propagating himself from generation to generation, limited to soil-bound callings and aptitudes, a mystical soul, a dry, shrewd understanding that sticks to practical matters, the origin and the ever-flowing source of the blood that makes worldhistory in the cities.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.96-97

The city is intellect. The Megalopolis is "free" intellect. It is in resistance to the "feudal" powers of blood and tradition that the burgherdom or bourgeoisie, the intellectual class, begins to be conscious of its own separate existence. It upsets thrones and limits old rights in the name of reason and a bove all in the name of "the People," which henceforward means exclusively the people of the city. Democracy is the political form in which the townsman's outlook upon the world is demanded of the peasantry also. The urban intellect reforms the great religion of the springtime and sets up by the side of the old religion of noble and priest, the new religion of the Tiers Etat, liberal science. The city assumes the lead and control of economic history in replacing the primitive values of the land, which are for ever inseparable from the life and thought of the rustic, by the absolute idea of money as distinct from goods. The immemorial country word for exchange of goods is "barter"; even when one of the things exchanged is precious metal, the underlying idea of the process is not yet monetary i.e., it does not involve the abstraction of value from things and its fixation in metallic or fictitious quantities intended to measure things qua "commodities."

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.97

Presently there arrived an epoch when the development of the city had reached such a point of power that it had no longer to defend itself against country and chivalry, but on the contrary had become a despotism against which the land and its basic orders of society were fighting a hopeless defensive battle in the spiritual domain against nationalism, in the political against democracy, in the economic against money. At this period the number of cities that really counted as historically dominant had already become very small. And with this there arose the profound distinction which was above all a spiritual distinction between the great city and the little city or town. The latter, very significantly called the country-town, was a part of the no longer co-efficient countryside. It was not that the difference between townsman and rustic had become lessened in such towns, but that this difference had become negligible as compared with the new difference between them and t he great city.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.98

With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer merely serves for the understanding of economic intercourse, but subjects the exchange of goods to its own evolution. It values things, no longer as between each other, but with reference to itself. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading cities the "money-markets" it is ignored. Money has now become a power, and, moreover, a power that is wholly intellectual and merely figured in the metal it uses, a power the reality of which resides in the waking-consciousness of the upper stratum of an economically active population, a power that makes those concerned with it just as dependent upon itself as the peasant was dependent upon the soil. [...] Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional dictatorship of money, though taking different forms in different Cultures. But this is the reason, too, for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian's time, it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its place.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.100-101

And now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical, utterly land-alien product of a pure intellectual satisfaction in the appropriate, the city of the city-architect. In all Civilizations alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the symbol of soullessness. Regular rectangle-blocks astounded Herodotus in Babylon and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of "abstra ct" cities begins with Thurii, which was "planned" by Hippodamus of Miletus in 441. Priene, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the ups and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become in turn models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age. The Islamic architects laid out Baghdad from 761, and the giant city of Samarra a century later, according to plan. In the West-European and American world the lay-out of Washington in 1791 is the first big example. There can be no doubt that the world-cities of the Han period in China and the Maurya dynasty in India possessed this same geometrical pattern. Even now the world-cities of the Western Civilization are far from having reached the peak of their development. I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of to-day's and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.101-102

Consequently these city-bodies extended in general not in breadth, but more and more upward. The block-tenements of Rome such as the famous Insula Feliculas, rose, with a street breadth of only three to five metres [ten to seventeen feet] to heights that have never been seen in Western Europe and are seen in only a few cities in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already reached to the level of the hill-saddle. But always the splendid mass-cities harbour lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man in Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.102-103

What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking-consciousness become more and more dangerous. It must be remembered that in a microcosm the animal, waking side supervenes upon the vegetable side, that of being, and not vice versa. Beat and tension, blood and intellect, Destiny and Causality are to one another as the country-side in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing per se to something existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but tension. The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations, is dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension. Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension, and in every Culture these heads are the types of its final men one has only to compare them with the peasant heads, when such happen to emerge in the swirl of the great city's street-life. The advance, too, from peasant wisdom "slimness," mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals upon the sensed beat of life through the city-spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence the very word with its sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.103-104

And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama the sterility of civilised man. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood a s an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.105

The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding." It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady's who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne's who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine's who "belongs to herself" they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.105

At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.107

If the Early period is characterized by the birth of the City out of the country, and the Late by the battle between city and country, the period of Civilization is that of the victory of city over country, whereby it frees itself from the grip of the ground, but to its own ultimate ruin. Rootless, dead to the cosmic, irrevocably committed to stone and to intellectualism, it develops a form-language that reproduces every trait of its essence not the language of a becoming and growth, but that of a becomeness and completion, capable of alteration certainly, but not of evolution.