ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (B) THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 23-51.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.23-24

The mark of Nature is an extension that is inclusive of everything, but History is that which comes up out of the darkness of the past, presents itself to the seer, and from him sweeps onward into the future. He, as the present, is always its middle point, and it is quite impossible for him to order the facts with any meaning if he ignores their direction which is an element proper to life and not to thought. Every time, every land, every living aggregate has its own historical horizon, and it is the mark of the genuine histhistorical thinker that he actualizes the picture of history that his time demands.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.24

The history that is actually lived with and participated in never reaches over more than a grandfather's span neither for ancient Germans and present-day Negroes, nor for Pericles and Wallenstein. Here the horizon of living ends, and a new plane begins wherein the picture is based upon hearsay and historical tradition, a plane in which direct sympathies are adapted to a mind-picture that is both distinct and, from long use, stable. The picture so developed shows very different amplitudes for the men of the different Cultures. For us Westerners it is with this secondary picture that genuine history begins, for we live under the aspect of eternity, whereas for the Greeks and Romans it is just then that history ceases.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.26

I repeat, every being livingly experiences every other being and its destiny only in relation to itself. A flock of pigeons is regarded by the farmer on whose fields it settles quite otherwise than by the nature-lover in the street or the hawk in the air. [...] Put a man in a new situation, make the revolutionary a minister, the soldier a general, and at once history and the key men of history become for him something other than what they were. [...] It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to, a profound knowledge of men that the appraiser should see through glasses of his own colour. This knowledge, indeed, is exactly the component that we discern to be wanting in those generalizations that distort or altogether ignore that all-important fact, the uniqueness of the constituent event in history the worst example of this being the "materialistic" conception of history, about which we have said almost all there is to say when we have described it as physiognomic barrenness.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.28-29

In all other Cultures the aspects of world-history and of man-history coincide. The beginning of the world is the beginning of man, and the end of man is the end of the world. But the Faustian infinity-craving for the first time separated the two notions during the Baroque, and now it has made human history, for all its immense and still unknown span, a men episode in world-history, while the Earth of which other Cultures had seen not even the whole, but only superficial fractions as "the world" has become a little star amongst millions of solar systems.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.29-30

The typically Faustian separation of human history, as such, from the far wider history of the world has had the result that since the end of the Baroque our world-picture has contained several horizons dispo sed one behind the other in as many planes. For the exploration of these, individual sciences, more or less overtly historical in character, have taken shape. Astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, one after the other follow up the destinies of the starworld, the earth's crust, life, and man, and only then do we come to the "world "-history as it is still called even to-day of the higher Cultures, to which, again, are attached the histories of the several cultural elements, family history, and lastly (that highly developed speciality of the West) biography.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.31-32

The picture that we possess of the history of the Earth's crust and of life is at present still dominated by the ideas which civilized English thought has developed, since the Age of Enlightenment, out of the English habit of life Lyell's "phlegmatic" theory of the formation of the geological strata, and Darwin's of the origin of species, are actually but derivatives of the development of England herself. In place of the incalculable catastrophes and metamorphoses such as von Buch and Cuvier admitted, they put a methodical evolution over very long periods of time and recognize as causes only scientifically calculable and indeed mechanical utility-causes. This "English" type of causality is not only shallow, but also far too narrow. It limits possible causal connexions, in the first place, to those which work out their entire course on the earth's surface; but this immediately excludes all great cosmic relations between earthly life-phenomena and the events of the solar system and the stellar universe, and assumes the impossible postulate that the exterior face of the earth-ball is a completely insulated region of natural phenomena. And, secondly, it assumes that connexions which are not comprehensible by the means at present available to the human consciousness namely, sensation refined by instruments and thought precised by theory do not even exist. [...] T he two concepts, Goethe's form-fulfilment and Darwin's evolution, arc in as complete opposition as destiny to causality, and (be it added) as German to English thought, and German to English history.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.32-33

There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely "transitional" types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of to-day. [...] But the assumption of utility-causes or other visible causes for these phenomena has no support of actuality. It is a Destiny that evoked into the world life as life, the ever-sharper opposition between plant and animal, each single type, each genus, and each species. And along with this existence there is given also a definite energy of the form by virtue of which in the course of its self-fulfilment it keeps itself pure or, on the contrary, becomes dull and unclear or evasively splits into numerous varieties and finally a life-duration of this form, which (unless, again, incident intervenes to shorten it) leads naturally to a senility of the species and finally to its disappearance. As for mankind, discoveries of the Diluvial age indicate more and more pointedly that the man-forms existing then correspond to those living now; there is not the slightest tr ace of evolution towards a race of greater utilitarian "fitness. " And the continued failure to find man in the Tertiary discoveries indicates more and more clearly that the human life-form, like every other, originates in a sudden mutation (Wandlung) of which the "whence," "how," and "why" remain an impenetrable secret. If, indeed, there were evolution in the English sense of the word, there could be neither defined earth-strata nor specific animal-classes, but only a single geological mass and a chaos of living singular forms which we may suppose to have been left over from the struggle for existence. [...] So, too, we observe that swift and deep changes assert themselves in the history of the great Cultures, without assignable causes, influences, or purposes of any kind. The Gothic and the Pyramid styles come into full being as suddenly as do the Chinese imperialism of Shi-hwang-ti and the Roman of Augustus, as Hellenism and Buddhism and Islam. It is exactly the same with the events in the individual life of every person who counts at all, and he who is ignorant of this knows nothing of men and still less of children. Every being, active or contemplative, strides on to its fulfilment by epochs and we have to assume just such epochs in the history of solar systems and the world of the fixed stars. The origins of the earth, of life, of the free-moving animal are such epochs, and, therefore, mysteries that we can do no more than accept.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.33-34

That which we know of man divides clearly into two great ages of his being. The first is, as far as our view is concerned, limited on the one side by that profound fugue of planetary Destiny which we call the beginning of the Ice Age and about which we can (within the picture of world-history) say no more than that a cosmic change took place and on the other by the beginnings of high cultures on Nile and Euphrates, with which the whole meaning of human existence became suddenly diff erent. We discover everywhere the sharp frontier of Tertiary and Diluvial, and on the hither side of it we see man as a completely formed type, familiar with custom, myth, wit, ornament, and technique and endowed with a bodily structure that has not materially altered up to the present day. We will consider the first age as that of the primitive Culture. The only field in which this Culture endured throughout the second age (though certainly in a very "late" form) and is found alive and fairly intact to-day is north-west Africa. [...] The ethnologist-psychologist, on the contrary, delights in collecting, from all over the five continents, fragments of peoples who really have nothing in common but the negative fact of living a subordinate existence in the middle of one or another of the high Cultures, without participation in its inner life. The result is a congeries of tribes, some stationary, some inferior, and some decadent, whose respective modes of expression, moreover, are indiscriminately lumped together. But the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something strong and integral, something highly vital and effectual. Only, this Culture is so different from everything that we men of a higher Culture possess in the way of spiritual potentialities that we may question whether even those people which have carried the first age very deep into the second are good evidence, in their present modes of being and waking-being, for the condition of the old time.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.34-35

Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by inter tribal relations, there shot up suddenly (about 3000 B.C.) the Culture of Egypt and Babylonia. Probably for a millennium before that date both these fields had been nursing something that differed radically from every primitive Culture in kind and in intent, something having an inward unity common to all its forms of expressio n and directional in all its life. To me it seems highly probable that, if not indeed all over the earth's surface, at any rate in man's essence a change was accomplished at that time; and if so, then any primitive Culture worthy of the name that is still found living later, ever dwindling, in the midst of higher Cultures, should itself be something different from the Culture of the first Age. But, with reference to primitive Culture of any sort, that which I call the pre-Culture (and which can be shown to occur as a uniform process in the beginning of every high Culture) is something different in kind, something entirely new.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.36

The oldest speech that we know of belongs to the primitive Culture, and has lawless destinies of its own which cannot be deduced from those of, say, Ornament or Marriage. But the history of script belongs integrally with the expressionhistory of the several higher Cultures. That the Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Mexican each formed a special script in its pre-Cultural age that the Indian and the Classical on the other hand did not do so, but took over (and very late) the highly developed writing of a neighbouring Civilization that in the Arabian, again, every new religion and sect immediately formed its particular script all these are facts that stand in a deeply intimate relation to the generic form-history of these Cultures and its inner significance.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.36-37

My kind of thought and observation is limited to the physiognomy of the actual. [...] The existence of these two ages is a fact of historical experience; more, our experiencing of the primitive Culture consists not only in surveying, in its relics, a self-contained and closedoff thing, but also in reacting to its deeper meaning by virtue of an inward relation to it which persists in us. But the second age opens to us another a nd quite different kind of experience. It was an incident, the sense of which cannot now be scrutinized, that the type of the higher Culture appeared suddenly in the field of human history. Quite possibly, indeed, it was some sudden event in the domain of earth-history that brought forth a new and different form into phenomenal existence. But the fact that we have before us eight such Cultures, all of the same build, the same development, and the same duration, justifies us in looking at them comparatively, and therefore justifies our treating them as comparable, studying them comparatively, and obtaining from our study a knowledge which we can extend backwards over lost periods and forwards over the future provided always that a Destiny of a different order does not replace this form-world, suddenly and basically, by another. Our licence to proceed thus comes from general experience of organic being. As in the history of the Raptores or the Coniferse we cannot prophesy whether and when a new species will arise, so in that of Cultural history we cannot say whether and when a new Culture shall be. But from the moment when a new being is conceived in the womb, or a seed sinks into the earth, we do know the inner form of this new life-course; and we know that the quiet course of its development and fulfilment may be disturbed by the pressure of external powers, but never altered. This experience teaches, further, that the Civilization which at this present time has gripped the earth's whole surface is not a third age, but a stage a necessary stage of the Western Culture, distinguished from its analogues only by the forcefulness of its extension-tendency. Here experience ends, and all speculation on what new forms will govern the life of future mankind (or, for that matter, whether there will be any such new forms) all building of majestic card-houses on the foundation of "it should be, it shall be" is mere trifling far too futile, it seems to me, to justify one single life of any value being expended on it.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.37

The group of the high Cultures is not, as a group, an organic unit. That they have happened in just this number, at just these places and times, is, for the human eye, an incident without deeper intelligibility. The ordering of the individual Cultures, on the contrary, has stood out so distinctly that the historical technique of the Chinese, the Magian, and the Western worlds often, indeed, the mere common consent of the educated in these Cultures has been able to fashion a set of names upon which it would be impossible to improve.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.39

About 3000 after a long "Merovingian" period, which is still distinctly perceptible in Egypt, the two oldest Cultures began, in exceedingly limited areas on the lower Nile and the lower Euphrates.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.40

After 1500 three new Cultures begin first, the Indian, in the upper Punjab; then, a hundred years later, the Chinese on the middle Hwang-Ho; and then, about noo, the Classical, on the Aegean Sea.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.42

The Arabian Culture l is a discovery. Its unity was suspected by late Arabians, but it has so entirely escaped Western historical research that not even a satisfactory name can be found for it. Conformably to the dominant languages, the seed-time and the spring might be called the Aramaic and the later time the Arabian, but there is no really effectual name.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.43-44

Meantime yet another new Culture developed in Mexico. This lay so remote from the rest that no word even passed between them. All the more astonishing, therefore, is the similarity of its development to that of the Classical. [...] All these states including a world-power and more than one federation with an extent and resources far superior to those of the Greek and Roman states of Hannibal's day; with a comprehensive policy, a carefully ordered financial system, and a highly developed legislation; with administrative ideas and economic tradition such as the ministers of Charles V could never have imagined; with a wealth of literature in several languages, an intellectually brilliant and polite society in great cities to which the West could not show one single parallel all this was not broken down in some desperate war, but washed out by a handful of bandits in a few years, and so entirely that the relics of the population retained not even a memory of it all. [...] The most appalling feature of the tragedy was that it was not in the least a necessity of the Western Culture that it should happen. It was a private affair of adventurers, and at the time no one in Germany, France, or England had any idea of what was taking place. This instance shows, as no other shows, that the history of humanity has no meaning whatever and that deep significances reside only in the life-courses of the separate Cultures. Their inter-relations are unimportant and accidental. In this case the accident was so cruelly banal, so supremely absurd, that it would not be tolerated in the wildest farce. A few cannon and handguns began and ended the drama.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.48

A battle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan, or between the Cherusci and Chatti of Czesar's time, or what is substantially the same between ant-communities, is merely a drama of "living Nature." But when the Cherusci beat the Romans, as in the year 9, or the Aztecs the Tlascalans, it is history. [...] Primitive man has history only in the biological sense, and all prehistoric study boils down to the investigation of this sense.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.51

These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture, and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life.