FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 1(2)

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 377-402.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.377

Helmholtz observed, in a lecture of 1869 that has become famous, that "the final aim of Natural Science is to discover the motions underlying all alteration, and the motive forces thereof; that is, to resolve itself into Mechanics." What this resolution into mechanics means is the reference of all qualitative impressions to fixed quantitative base-values, that is, to the extended and to change of place therein. It means, further if we bear in mind the opposition of becoming and become, form and law, image and notion the referring of the seen Nature-picture to the imagined picture of a single numerically and structurally measurable Order. The specific tendency of all Western mechanics is towards an intellectual conquest by measurement, and it is therefore obliged to look for the essence of the phenomenon in a system of constant elements that are susceptible of full and inclusive appreciation by measurement, of which Helmholtz distinguishes motion (using the word in its everyday sense) as the most important.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.377-378

For most people, indeed, "mechanics" appears as the selfevident synthesis of Nature-impressions. But it merely appears to be so. For what is motion? Is not the postulate that everything qualitative is reducible to the motion of unalterably-alike mass-points, essentially Faustian and not common to humanity? Archimedes, for example, did not feel himself obliged to transpose the mechanics that he saw into a mental picture of motions. Is motion generally a purely mechanical quantity? Is it a word for a visual experience or is it a notion derived from that experience? Is it the number that is found by measurement of experimentally-produced facts, or the picture that is subjected to that number, that is signified by it?

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.378-379
Theoria means image, vision, and it is this that makes a Nature-law out of a figure-and-letter formula. Everything exact is in itself meaningless, and every physical observation is so constituted that it proves the basis of a certain number of imaged presuppositions; and the effect of its successful issue is to make these presuppositions more convincing than ever. Apart from these, the result consists merely of empty figures. But in fact we do not and cannot get apart from them. Even if an investigator puts on one side every hypothesis that he knows as such, as soon as he sets his thought to work on the supposedly clear task, he is not controlling but being controlled by the unconscious form of it, for in living activity he is always a man of his Culture, of his age, of his school and of his tradition. Faith and "knowledge" are only two species of inner certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it dominates all the conditions of knowing, be they never so exact. And thus it is theories and not pure numbers that are the support of all natural science.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.379

Every savant's experiment, be it what it may, is at the same time an instance of the kind of symbolism that rules in the savant's ideation. All Laws formulated in words are Orders that have been activated and vitalized, filled with the very essence of the one and only the one Culture. As to the "necessity" which is a postulate in all exact research, here too we have to consider two kinds of necessity, viz., a necessity within the spiritual and living (for it is Destiny that the history of every individual research-act takes its course when, where and how it does) and a necessity within the known (for which the current Western name is Causality).

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.380

For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved with inward certainty of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized light-rays, errant ions, flying and colliding gas-particles, magnetic fields, electric currents and waves are they not one and all Faustian visions, closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the upthrust of Gothic architecture, the Viking's voyaging into unknown seas, the longings of Columbus and Copernicus? Did not this world of forms and pictures grow up in perfect tune with the contemporary arts of perspective oil-painting and instrumental music? Are they not, in short, our passionate directedness,our passion of the third dimension, coming to symbolic expression in the imagined Nature-picture as in the soul-image?

"Second religiousness" - isn't it creationism?

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.380-381

It follows then that all "knowing" of Nature, even the exactest, is based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the purpose of all this imaginationmachinery) to reduce Nature, presupposes a dogma namely, the religious world-picture of the Gothic centuries. For it is from this world-picture that the physics peculiar to the Western intellect is derived. There is no science that is without unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the researcher has no control and which can be traced back to the earliest days of the awakening Culture. There is no Natural science without a precedent Religion. In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world both say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science [...] Now, the history of the higher Cultures shows that "science" is a transitory spectacle, belonging only to the autumn and winter of their life-course, and that in the cases of the Classical, the Indian, the Chinese and the Arabian thought alike a few centuries suffice for the complete exhaustion of its possibilities. Classical science faded out between the battle of Cannas and that of Actium and made way for the world-outlook of the "second religiousness." And from this it is possible
to foresee a date at which our Western scientific thought shall have reached the limit of its evolution.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.382

The "Nature" of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of bodies, a physics of the near. The Arabian Culture owned the arabesque and the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious efficient substantialities like the "philosophical mercury," which is neither a material nor a property but some thing that underlies the coloured existence of metals and can transmute one metal into another. And the outcome of Faustian man's Nature idea was a dynamic of unlimited span, a physics of the distant. To the Classical therefore belong the conceptions of matter and form, to the Arabian (quite Spinozistically) the idea of substances with visible or secret attributes, and to the Faustian the idea of force and mass. Apollinian theory is a quiet meditation, Magian a silent knowledge of Alchemy the means of Grace (even here the religious source of mechanics is to be discerned), and the Faustian is from the very outset a working hypothesis.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.383-384

The rise of a chemical method of the Arabian style betokens a new worldconsciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow made an end of Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics, is linked with the enigmatic name of Hermes Trismegistus, who is supposed to have lived in Alexandria at the same time as Plotinus and Diofhantus. Similarly it was just at the time of the definite emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry l was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry and mathematic alike became pure analysis.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.384

What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamics words that as used in modern science are merely traditional distinctions without deeper meaning are really the respective physical systems of the Apollinian, Magian and Faustian souls, each of which grew up in its own Culture and was limited as to validity to the same. Corresponding to these sciences, each to each, we have the mathematics of Euclidean geometry, Algebra and Higher Analysis, and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue. We may differentiate these three kinds of physics (bearing in mind of course that other Cultures may and in fact do give rise to other kinds) by their standpoints towards the problem of motion, and call them mechanical orderings of states, secret forces and processes respectively.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.384-385

Now, the tendency of human thought (which is always causally disposed) to reduce the image of Nature to the simplest possible quantitative form-units that can be got by causal reasoning, measuring and counting in a word, by mechanical differentiation leads necessarily in Classical, Western and every other pos sible physics, to an atomic theory. Of Indian and Chinese science we know hardly more than the fact they once existed, and the Arabian is so complicated that even now it seems to defy presentation. But we do know our own and the Apollinian sciences well enough to observe, here too, a deeply symbolical opposition. The Classical atoms are miniature forms, the Western minimal quanta, and quanta, too, of energy.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.387

Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience. In it the Culture, through the contemplative-creative power of its great physicists, reveals its inmost essence and very self. It is only a preconceived idea of criticism that extension exists in itself and independently of the form-feeling and world-feeling of the knower. The thinker, in imagining that he can cut out the factor of Life, forgets that knowing is related to the known as direction is to extension and that it is only through the living quality of direction that what is felt extends into distance and depth and becomes space. The cognized structure of the extended is a projection of the cognizing being.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.389-390

This puts the fundamentals of Faustian and Apollinian Nature-science in quite another light. No "Nature" is pure there is always something of history in it. If the man is ahistorical, like the Greek, so that the totality of his impressions of the world is absorbed in a pure point-formed present, his Natureimage is static, self-contained (that is, walled against past and future) in every individual moment. Time as magnitude figures in Greek physics as little as it does in Aristotle's entelechy-idea. If, on the other hand, the Man is historically constituted, the image formed is dynamic. Number, the definitive evaluation of the become, is in the case of ahistoric man Measure, and in that of the historical man Function. One mea sures only what is present and one follows up only what has a past and a future, a course. And the effect of this difference is that the inner inconsistencies of the motion-problem are covered up in Classical theories and forced into the foreground in Western.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.394-395

We can now say without any hesitation that the form-world of a Natural science corresponds to those of the appropriate mathematic, the appropriate religion, the appropriate art. A deep mathematician by which is meant not a master-computer but a man, any man, who feels the spirit of numbers living within him realizes that through it he "knows God." Pythagoras and Plato knew this as well as Pascal and Leibniz did so. Terentius Varro, in his examination of the old Roman religion (dedicated to Julius Cassar), distinguished with Roman seriousness between the theologia civilis, the sum of officially-recognized belief, the theologia mythica, the imagination-world of poets and artists, and the theologia physica of philosophical speculation. Applying this to the Faustian Culture, that which Thomas Aquinas and Luther, Calvin and Loyola taught belongs to the first category, Dante and Goethe belong to the second; and to the third belongs scientific physics, inasmuch as behind its formulas there are images.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.395

From the later days of the Renaissance onward, the notion of God has steadily approximated, in the spirit of every man of high significance, to the idea of pure endless Space.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.399

Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture "advances," this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, and had not the morphology of history remained to this day an almost un explored field, the supposedly universal mythopoetic power would long ago have been found to be limited to particular periods. It would have been realized that this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols like and consistent amongst themselves belongs most decidedly not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures. Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There it must be.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.399

It was in the Homeric age (1100-800 B.C.) and in the corresponding knightly age of Teutonism (900-1100 A.D.), that is, the epic ages, and neither before nor after them, that the great worldimage of a new religion came into being. The corresponding ages in India and Egypt are the Vedic and the Pyramid periods; one day it will be discovered that Egyptian mythology did in fact ripen into depth during the Third and Fourth Dynasties.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.400-401

The deep inward unity of this Faustian world of myth and saga and the complete congruence of its expression-symbolism has never hitherto been realized, and yet Siegfried, Baldur, Roland, Christ the King in the "Heliand," are different names for one and the same figure. Valhalla and Avalon, the Round Table and the communion of the Grail-templars, Mary, Frigga and Frau Holle mean the same. [...] The old Celtic and old Germanic myth-motives have to be treated, like the repertory of Classical forms possessed by the learned monk, and like the entire body of Christian-Eastern faith taken over by the Western Church, simply as the material out of which the Faustian soul in these centuries created a mythic architecture of its own.