FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 2(2)

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 402-428.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.402

It is a deeply significant fact that in Hellas of all countries star-gods, the numina of the Far, are wanting. Helios was worshipped only in half-Oriental Rhodes and Selene had no cult at all. [...] The old Roman religion, in which the Classical world-feeling was expressed with special purity, knew neither sun nor moon, neither storm nor cloud as deities. The forest stirrings and the forest solitude, the tempest and the surf, which completely dominated the Nature of Faustian man (even that of prc-Faustian Celts and Teutons) and imparted to their mythology its peculiar character, left Classical man unmoved.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.403

The bases of the Apollinian and the Faustian Nature-images respectively are in all contexts the two opposite symbols of individual thing and unitary space. Olympus and Hades are perfectly sense-definite places, while the kingdom of the dwarfs, elves and goblins, and Valhalla and Niflheim are all somewhere or other in the universe of space.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.404

The ever-increasing emphasis with which Classical polytheism somatically individualized its deities is peculiarly evident in its attitude to "strange gods." For Classical man the gods of the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and the Germans, in so far as they could be imagined as figures, were as real as his own gods. Within his world-feeling the statement that such other gods "do not exist" would have no meaning. When he came into contact with the countries of these deities he did them reverence. The gods were, like a statue or a polis, Euclidean bodies having locality. They were beings of the near and not the general space. If a man were sojourning in Babylon, for instance, and Zeus and Apollo were far away, all the more reason for -particularly honouring the local gods.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.406

In the first generations of the Imperial age, the antique polytheism gradually dissolved, often without any alteration of outward ritual and mythic form, into the Magian monotheism. A new soul had come up, and it lived the old forms in a new mode. The names continued, but they covered other numina. In all Late-Classical cults, those of Isis and Cybele, of Mithras and Sol and Serapis, the divinity is no longer felt as a localized and formable being. [...] Hitherto, names had been the designations of so many gods different in body and locality, now they are titles of the One whom every man has in mind. This Magian monotheism reveals itself in all the religious creations that flooded the Empire from the East the Alexandrian Isis, the Sun-god favoured by Aurelian (the Baal of Palmyra), the Mithras protected by Diocletian (whose Persian form had been completely recast in Syria), the Baalath of Carthage (Tanit, Dea Caelestis) honoured by Septimius Severus.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.408-409

Atheism is a subject that the psychologist and the student of religion have hitherto regarded as scarcely worth careful investigation. Much has been written and argued about it, and very roundly, by the free-thought martyr on the one hand and the religious zealot on the other. But no one has had anything to say about the species of atheism; or has treated it analytically as an individual and definite phenomenon, positive and necessary and intensely symbolic; or has realized how it is limited in time. [...] Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic. It is entirely compatible with a living wistful desire for real religiousness therein resembling Romanticism, which likewise would recall that which has irrevocably gone, namely, the Culture and it may quite well be in a man as a creation of his feeling without his being aware of it, without its ever interfering with the habits of his thought or challenging his convictions. [...] Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with the dawn of the Civilization. It belongs to the great city, to the "educated man" of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his forefathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically. In respect of the Classical feeling of God, Aristotle is an atheist unawares. The Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism is atheistic like the Socialism of Western and the Buddhism of Indian modernity, reverently though they may and do use the word "God." But, if this late form of world-feeling and world-image which preludes our "second religiousness" is universally a negation of the religious in us, the structure of it is different in each of the Civilizations. There is no religiousness that is without an atheistic opposition belonging uniquely to itself and directed uniquely against itself.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.410

The degree of piety of which a period is capable is revealed in its attitude torwards toleration. One tolerates, either because the form-language appears to be expressing something of that which in one's own lived experience is felt as divine, or else because that experience no longer contains anything so felt.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.411

If we turn back from Nature-feeling become form to Nature-knowledge become system, we know God or the gods as the oiigin of the images by which the intellect seeks to make the world-around comprehensible to itself.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.412-413

"Force" is a mythical quantity, which does not arise out of scientific experimentation but, on the contrary, defines the structure thereof a priori. It is only the Faustian conception of Nature that instead of a magnet thinks of a magnetism whose field of force includes a piece of iron, and instead of luminous bodies thinks of radiant energy, and that imagines personifications like "electricity," "temperature" and "radioactivity." That this "force" or "energy" is really a numen stiffened into a concept (and in nowise the result of scientific experience) is shown by the often overlooked fact that the basic principle known as the First Law of Thermodynamics says nothing whatever about the nature of energy, and it is properly speaking an incorrect (though psychologically most significant) assumption that the idea of the "Conservation of Energy" is fixed in it. Experimental measurement can in the nature of things only establish a number, which number we have (significantly, again) named work. But the dynamical cast of our thought demanded that this should be conceived as a difference of energy, although the absolute value of energy is only a figment and can never be rendered by a definite number. There always remains, therefore, an undefined additive constant, as we call it; in other words, we always strive to maintain the image of an energy that our inner eye has formed, although actual scientific practice is not concerned with it. This being the provenance of the force-concept, it follows that we can no more define it than we can define those other un-Classical words Will and Space. There remains always a felt and intuitively-perceived remainder which makes every personal definition an almost religious creed of its author. Every Baroque scientist in this matter has his personal inner experience which he is trying to clothe in words. Goethe, for instance, could never have defined his idea of a world-force, but to himself it was a certainty.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.417

But with this, it cannot be denied, the Western physics is drawing near to the limit of its possibilities. At bottom, its mission as a historical phenomenon has been to transform the Faustian Nature-feeling into an intellectual knowledge, the faith-forms of springtime into the machine-forms of exact science. And, though for the time being it will continue to quarry more and more practical and even "purely theoretical" results, results as such, whatever their kind, belong to the superficial history of a science. To its deeps belong only the history of its symbolism and its style, and it is almost too evident to be worth the saying that in those deeps the essence and nucleus of our science is in rapid disintegration.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.418-419

The theory of gravitation, which since Newton has been an impregnable truth, has now been recognized as a temporally limited and shaky hypothesis. The principle of the Conservation of Energy has no meaning if energy is supposed to be infinite in an infinite space. [...] Since Newton, the assumption of constant mass the counterpart of constant force has had uncontested validity. But the Quantum theory of Planck, and the conclusions of Niels Bohr therefrom as to the fine structure of atoms, which experimental experience had rendered necessary, have destroyed this assumption. Every self-contained system possesses, besides kinetic energy, an energy of radiant heat which is inseparable from it and therefore cannot be represented purely by the concept of mass. For if mass is defined by living energy it is ifso facto no longer constant with reference to thermodynamic state.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.419-420

But, if these are serious enough doubts, the ruthlessly cy nical hypothesis of the Relativity theory strikes to the very heart of dynamics. Supported by the experiments of A. A. Michelson, which showed that the velocity of light remains unaffected by the motion of the medium, and prepared mathematically by Lorentz and Minkowski, its specific tendency is to destroy the notion of absolute time. Astronomical discoveries (and here present-day scientists are seriously deceiving themselves) can neither establish nor refute it. "Correct" and "incorrect" are not the criteria whereby such assumptions are to be tested; the question is whether, in the chaos of involved and artificial ideas that has been produced by the innumerable hypotheses of Radioactivity and Thermodynamics, it can hold its own as a useable hypothesis or not. But however this may be, it has abolished the constancy of those "physical quantities into the definition of which time has entered, and unlike the antique statics, the Western dynamics knows only such quantities. Absolute measures of length and rigid bodies are no more. And with this the possibility of absolute quantitative delimitations and therefore the "classical" concept of mass as the constant ratio between force and acceleration fall to the ground just after the quantum of action, a product of energy and time, had been set up as a new constant. If we make it clear to ourselves that the atomic ideas of Rutherford and Bohr signify nothing but this, that the numerical results of observations have suddenly been provided with a picture of a planetary world within the atom, instead of that of atom-swarms hitherto favoured; if we observe how rapidly card-houses of hypothesis are run up nowadays, every contradiction being immediately covered up by a new hurried hypothesis; if we reflect on how little heed is paid to the fact that these images contradict one another and the "classical" Baroque mechanics alike, we cannot but realize that the great style of ideation is at an end and that, as in architecture and the arts of form, a sort of craft-art of hypothesis-building has t aken its place. Only our extreme maestria in experimental technique true child of its century hides the collapse of the symbolism.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.420-421

Amongst these symbols of decline, the most conspicuous is the notion of Entropy, which forms the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first law, that of the conservation of energy, is the plain formulation of the essence of dynamics not to say of the constitution of the West-European soul, to which Nature is necessarily visible only in the form of a contrapuntaldynamic causality (as against the static-plastic causality of Aristotle). The basic clement of the Faustian world-picture is not the Attitude but the Deed and, mechanically considered, the Process, and this law merely puts the mathematical character of these processes into form as variables and constants. But the Second Law goes deeper, and shows a bias in Nature-happenings which is in no wise imposed a priori by the conceptual fundamentals of dynamics. Mathematically, Entropy is represented by a quantity which is fixed by the momentary state of a self-contained system of bodies and under all physical and chemical alterations can only increase, never diminish; in the most favourable conditions it remains unchanged. [...] What has never hitherto been fully felt, and what leads me to regard the Entropy theory (1850) as the beginning of the destruction of that masterpiece of Western intelligence, the old dynamic physics, is the deep opposition of theory and actuality which is here for the first time introduced into theory itself. [...] If the Entropy theory is followed out to its conclusion, it results, firstly, that in theory all processes must be reversible which is one of the basic postulates of dynamics and is reasserted with all rigour in the law of the Conservation of Energy but, secondly, that in actuality processes of Nature in their entirety are irreversible.Difference between Mathematics and Statistics, very i mportant

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.421-422

The "smallest particles" of a body (an image, no more) throughout perform reversible processes, but in actual things the smallest particles are in disorder and mutually interfere; and so the irreversible process that alone is experienced by the observer is linked with increase of entropy by taking the mean probabilities of occurrences. And thus theory becomes a chapter of the Calculus of Probabilities, and in lieu of exact we have statistical methods. Evidently, the significance of this has passed unnoticed. Statistics belong, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating Life, to Destiny and Incident and not to the world of laws and timeless causality. As everyone knows, statistics serve above all to characterize political and economic, that is, historical, developments. In the "classical" mechanics of Galileo and Newton there would have been no room for them. And if, now, suddenly the contents of that field are supposed to be understood and understandable only statistically and under the aspect of Probability instead of under that of the a priori exactitude which the Baroque thinkers unanimously demanded what does it mean? It means that the object of understanding is ourselves.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.424

It remains now to sketch the last stage of Western science. From our standpoint of to-day, the gently-sloping route of decline is clearly visible. This too, the power of looking ahead to inevitable Destiny, is part of the historical capacity that is the peculiar endowment of the Faustian. The Classical died, as we shall die, but it died unknowing. It believed in an eternal Being and to the last it lived its days with frank satisfaction, each day spent as a gift of the gods. But we know our history. Before us there stands a last spiritual crisis that will involve all Europe and America. What its course will be, Late Hellenism tells us. The tyranny of the Reason of which we are not conscious, for we are ourselves its apex is in every Culture an epoch between man and old-man, and no more. Its most distinct expression is the cult of exact sciences, of dialectic, of demonstration, of causality. Of old the Ionic, and in our case the Baroque were its rising limb, and now the question is what form will the down-curve assume? In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of science. Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword. First, in the 18th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the 19th, its powers, and now its historical rôle is critically reviewed. But from Skepsis there is a path to "second religiousness," which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect. The individual renounces by laying aside books. The Culture renounces by ceasing to manifest itself in high scientific intellects. But science exists only in the living thought of great savant-generations, and books are nothing if they are not living and effective in men worthy of them. Scientific results are merely items of an intellectual tradition. It constitutes the death of a science that no one any longer regards it as an event, and an orgy of two centuries of exact scientific-ness brings satiety. Not the individual, the soul of the Culture itself has had enough, and it expresses this by putting into the field of the day ever smaller, narrower and more unfruitful investigators.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.425

But before the curtain falls, there is one more task for the historical Faustian spirit, a task not yet specified, hitherto not even imagined as possible. There has still to be written a morphology of the exact sciences, which shal l discover how all laws, concepts and theories inwardly hang together as forms and what they have meant as such in the life-course of the Faustian Culture. The re-treatment of theoretical physics, of chemistry, of mathematics as a sum of symbols this will be the definitive conquest of the mechanical world-aspect by an intuitive, once more religious, world-outlook, a last master-effort of physiognomic to break down even systematic and to absorb it, as expression and symbol, into its own domain.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.425-426

The separate sciences epistemology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy are approaching one another with acceleration, converging towards a complete identity of results. [...] This convergence has not yet been observed, for the reason that since Kant indeed, since Leibniz there has been no philosopher who commanded the problems of all the exact sciences. Even a century ago, physics and chemistry were foreign to one another, but to-day they cannot be handled separately witness spectrum analysis, radio-activity, radiation of heat.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.428

The uniting of the several scientific aspects into one will bear all the marks of the great art of counterpoint. An infinitesimal music of the boundless world-space that is the deep unresting longing of this soul, as the orderly statuesque and Euclidean Cosmos was the satisfaction of the Classical. That formulated by a logical necessity of Faustian reason as a dynamic-imperative causality, then developed into a dictatorial, hard-working, world-transforming science is the grand legacy of the Faustian soul to the souls of Cultures yet to be, a bequest of immensely transcendent forms that the heirs will possibly ignore. And then, weary after its striving, the Western science returns to its spiritual home.