MAKROKOSMOS. (1) THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE PROBLEM OF SPACE

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 163-180.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.163

The notion of a world-history of physiognomic type expands itself therefore into the wider idea of an all-embracing symbolism. Historical research, in the sense that we postulate here, has simply to investigate the picture of the onceliving past and to determine its inner form and logic, and the Destiny-idea is the furthest limit to which it can penetrate.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.163

Every impulse proper to oneself has an expression and every impulse alien to oneself makes an impression. And thus everything of which we are conscious, whatever the form in which it is apprehended "soul" and "world" or life and actuality, or History and Nature, or law and feeling, Destiny or God, past and future or present and eternity has for us a deeper meaning still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a symbol.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.164-165

A whole series of grades of consciousness leads up from the root-beginnings of obscure childish intuition, in which there is still no clear world for a soul or selfconscious soul within a world, to the highly intellectualized states of which only the men of fully-ripened civilizations are capable. This gradation is at the same time an expansion of symbolism from the stage in which there is an inclusive meaning of all things to one in which separate and specific signs are distinguished. It is not merely when, after the manner of the child, the dreamer and the artist, I am passive to a world full of dark significances; or when I am awake without being in a condition of extreme alertness of thought and act (such a condition is much rarer even in the consciousness of the real thinker and man of action than is generally supposed) it is continuously and always, for as long as my life can be considered to be a waking life at all, that I am endowing that which is outside me with the whole content that is in me, from the half-dreamy impressions of world-coherence to the rigid world of causal laws and number that overlies and binds them. And even in the domain of pure number the symbolical is not lacking, for we find that refined thought puts inexpressible meanings into signs like the triangle, the circle and the numbers 7 and 12.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.165

This is the idea of the Macrocosm, actuality as the sum total of all symbols in relation to one soul. From this property of being significant nothing is exempt. All that is, symbolizes. From the corporeal phenomena like visage, shape, mien (of individuals and classes and peoples alike), which have always been known to possess meaning, to the supposedly eternal and universally-valid forms of knowledge, mathematics and physics, everything speaks out of the essence of one and only one soul.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.166-167

It is because there is this deep and significant identity that we so often find the awakening of the inner life in a child associated with the death of some relation. The child suddenly grasps the lifeless corpse for what it is, something that has become wholly matter, wholly space, and at the same moment it feels itself as an individual being in an alien extended world. "From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance," said Tolstoi once. Here, in the decisive moments of existence, when man first becomes man and realizes his immense loneliness in the universal, the world-fear reveals itself for the first time as the essentially human fear in the presence of death, the limit of the light-world, rigid space. Here, too, the higher thought originates as meditation upon death. Every religion, every scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it. Every great symbolism attaches its form-language to the cult of the dead, the forms of disposal of the dead, the adornment of the graves of the dead. The Egyptian style begins with the tomb-temples of the Pharaohs, the Classical with the geometrical decoration of the funerary urns, the Arabian with catacomb and sarcophagus, the Western with the cathedral wherein the sacrificial death of Jesus is re-enacted daily under the hands of the priest. From this primitive fear springs, too, historical sensitiveness in all its modes, the Classical with its cleaving to the life-abundant present, the Arabian with its baptismal rite that wins new life and overcomes death, the Faustian with its contrition that makes worthy to receive the Body of Jesus and therewith immortality. Till we have the constantly-wakeful concern for the life that is not yet past, there is no concern for that which is past, The beast has only the future, but man knows also the past. And thus every new Culture is awakened in and with a new view of the world, that is, a sudden glimpse of death as the secret of the perceivable world. It was when the idea of the impending end of the world spread over Western Europe (about the year 1000) that the Faustian soul of this religion was born.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.170

We have already seen that Time is not a "form of perception" nor for that matter a form at all forms exist only in the extended and that there is no possibility of defining it except as a counterconcept to Space. But there is the further question does this word "space" exactly cover the formal content of the intuitively-perceived? And beyond all this there is the plain fact that the "form of perception" alters with distance. Every distant mountain range is "perceived" as a scenic plane. No one will pretend that he sees the moon as a body; for the eye it is a pure plane and it is only by the aid of the telescope i.e. when the distance is artificially reduced that it progressively obtains a spatial form. Obviously, then, the "form of perception" is a function of distance.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.172

As becoming is the foundation of the become, continuous living history that of fulfilled dead nature, the organic that of the mechanical, destiny that of causal law and the causally-settled, so too direction is the origin of extension. The secret of Life accomplishing itself which is touched upon by the word Time forms the foundation of that which, as accomplished, is understood by (or rather indicated to an inner feeling in us by) the word Space.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.174

Of course the child is not without experience of the extended, of a very simple kind, but there is world-perception; distance is felt, but it docs not yet speak to the soul. And with the soul's awakening, direction, too, first reaches living expression - Classical expression in steady adherence to the near-present and exclusion of the distant and future; Faustian in direction-energy which has an eye only for the most distant horizons; Chinese, in free hithcr-and-thithcr wandering that nevertheless goes to the goal; Egyptian in resolute march down the path once entered. Thus the Destiny-idea manifests itself in every line of a life. With it alone do we become members of a particular Culture, whose members are connected by a common world-feeling and a common world-form derived from it. A deep identity unites the awakening of the soul, its birth into clear existence in the name of a Culture, with the sudden realization of distance and time, the birth of its outer world through the symbol of extension; and thenceforth this symbol is and remains the prime symbol of that life, imparting to it its specific style and the historical form in which it progressively actualizes its inward possibilities. From the specific directedness is derived the specific prime-symbol of extension, namely, for the Classical world-view the near, strictly muted, self-contained Body, for the Western infinitely wide and infinitely profound three-dimensional Space, for the Arabian the world as a Cavern. And therewith an old philosophical problem dissolves into nothing: this prime form of the world is innate in so far as it is an original possession of the soul of that Culture which is expressed by our life as a whole, and acquired in so far that every individual soul re-enacts for itself that creative act. and unfolds in early childhood the symbol of depth to which its existence is predestined, as the emerging butterfly unfolds its wings.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.174-175

From now on, we shall consider the kind of extension as the prime symbol of a Culture. From it we are to deduce the entire form-language of its actuality, its physiognomy as contrasted with the physiognomy of every other Culture and still more with the almost entire lack of physiognomy in primitive man's world-around. For now the interpretation of depth rises to acts, to formative expression in works, to the trans-forming of actuality, not now merely in order to subserve necessities of life (as in the case of the animals) but above all to create a picture out of extensional elements of all sorts (material, line, colour, tone, motion) a picture, often, that re-emerges with power to charm after lost centuries in the world-picture of another Culture and tells new men of the way in which its authors understood the world.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.175

Infinite space is the ideal that the Western soul has always striven to find, and to see immediately actualized, in its world-around; and hence it is that the countless space-theories of the last centuries possess over and above all ostensible "results" a deep import as symptoms of a world-feeling.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.178

Each of the great Cultures, then, has arrived at a secret language of worldfeeling that is only fully comprehensible by him whose soul belongs to that Culture. We must not deceive ourselves. Perhaps we can read a little way into the Classical soul, because its form-language is almost the exact inversion of the Western; how far we have succeeded or can ever succeed is a question which necessarily forms the starting-point of all criticism of the Renaissance, and it is a very difficult one. But when we are told that probably (it is at best a doubtful venture to meditate upon so alien an expression of Being) the Indians conceived numbers which according to our ideas possessed neither value nor magnitude nor relativity, and which only became positive and negative, great or small units in virtue of position, we have to admit that it is impossible for us exactly to re-experience what spiritually underlies this kind of number. [...] It takes a Brahmanic soul to perceive these numbers as self-evident, as ideal emblems of a self-complete world-form ; to us they are as unintelligible as is the Brahman Nirvana, for which, as lying beyond life and death, sleep and waking, passion, compassion and dispassion and yet somehow actual, words entirely fail us. Only this spirituality could originate the grand conception of nothingness as a true number, zero, and even then this zero is the Indian zero for which existent and non-existent are equally external designations.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.179-180

And now I draw the conclusions. There is a plurality of prime symbols. It is the depth-experience through which the world becomes, through which perception extends itself to world. Its signification is for the soul to which it belongs and only for that soul, and it is different in waking and dreaming, acceptance and scrutiny, as between young and old, townsmen and peasant, man and woman. It actualizes for every high Culture the possibility of form upon which that Culture's existence rests and it does so of deep necessity. All fundamentals words like our mass, substance, material, thing, body, extension (and multitudes of words of the like order in other culture-tongues) are emblems, obligatory and determined by destiny, that out of the infinite abundance of world-possibilities evoke in the name of the individual Culture those possibilities that alone are significant and therefore necessary for it. None of them is exactly transferable just as it is into the experiential living and knowing of another Culture. And none of these prime words ever recurs. The choice of prime symbol in the moment of the Culture-soul's awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil a moment that for one who can read world-history thus contains something catastrophic decides all.