ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (C) THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 55-83.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.55

Although consideration of the Cultures themselves should logically precede that of the relations between them, modern historical thought generally reverses the order. The less it really knows of the life-courses which together make up a seeming unity of world-happenings, the more zealously it searches for life in the web of relations, and the less it understands even of these. What a wealth of psychology there is in the probings, rejections, choices, transvaluations, errors, penetrations, and welcomings! and not only between Cultures which immediately touch one another, wonder at one another, fight one another, but also as between a living Culture and the form-world of a dead one whose remains still stand visible in the landscape. And how narrow and poor, on the other hand, are the conceptions which the historians label "influence," "continuity," and "permanent effects"!

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.55

At bottom, this mode of treatment rests upon that idea which inspired the great Gothics long ago, the idea of a significant singleness in the history of all mankind. They saw how, on earth, men and peoples changed, but ideas stayed, and the powerful impressiveness of the picture has not worn itself out even to-day. Originally it was seen as a plan that God was working out by means of the human instrument. And it could still be regarded as such at a far later stage, in fact so long as the spell of the "ancient-mediaeval-modern" scheme lasted and its parade of permanence prevented us from noting that actuality was ever changing.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.56-57

The German whom Boniface converted did not transfer himself into the missionary's soul. It was a springtide quiver that passed in those days through the whole young world of the North, and what it meant was that each man found suddenly in conversion a language wherein to express his own religiousness. Just so the eyes of a child light up when we tell it the name of the object in its hand. It is not, then, microcosmic units that move, but cosmic entities that pick amongst them and appropriate them. Were it otherwise were these systems very beings that could exercise an activity (for "influence" is an organic activity) the picture of history would be quite other than what it is. Consider how every maturing man and every living Culture is continuously bathed in innumerable potential influences. Out of all these, only some few are admitted as such the great majority are not. Is choice concerned with the works, or with the men?

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.57

The historia n who is intent upon establishing causal series counts only the influences that are present, and the other side of the reckoning those that are not does not appear. [...] Two Cultures may touch between man and man, or the man of one Culture may be confronted by the dead form-world of another as presented in its communicable relics. In both cases the agent is the man himself. The closed-off act of A can be vivified by B only out of his own being, and to ipso it becomes B's, his inward property, his work, and part of himself. There was no movement of "Buddhism" from India to China, but an acceptance of part of the Indian Buddhists' store of images by Chinese of a certain spiritual tendency, who fashioned out a new mode of religious expression having meaning for Chinese, and only Chinese, Buddhists. What matters in all such cases is not the original meanings of the forms, but the forms themselves, as disclosing to the active sensibility and understanding of the observer potential modes of his own creativeness. Connotations are not transferable. Men of two different kinds are parted, each in his own spiritual loneliness, by an impassable gulf. Even though Indians and Chinese in those days both felt as Buddhists, they were spiritually as far apart as ever. The same words, the same rites, the same symbol but two different souls, each going its own way.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.57-58

Searching through all Cultures, then, one will always find that the continuation of earlier creations into a later Culture is only apparent, and that in fact the younger being has set up a few (very few) relations to the older being, always without regard to the original meanings of that which it makes its own. What becomes, then, of the "permanent conquests" of philosophy and science? We are told again and again how much of Greek philosophy still lives on to-day, but this is only a figure of speech without real content, for first Magian and then Faustian humanity, each w ith the deep wisdom of its unimpaired instincts, rejected that philosophy, or passed unregarding by it, or retained its formulas under radically new interpretations. [...] Our custom is simply to overlook as incidental "errors" such conceptions as Democritus's theory of atomic images, the very corporeal world of Plato's "ideas," and the fifty-two hollow spheres of Aristotle's universe, as though we could presume to know what the dead meant better than they knew themselves!

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.58-59

All round the Classical landscape there were working, or had worked, Egyptians, Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, and Phoenicians, and the works of these peoples their buildings, ornaments, art-works, cults, state-forms, scripts, and sciences were known to the Greeks in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did the Classical soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the relations that are accepted that we observe. But what of those that were not accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former category the pyramid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or cuneiform? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was not accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily? It is impossible to overpraise the wisdom (quite unconscious) that governed the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of what was chosen. Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception, but also a misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly evidenced as it is in this art of deliberate misunderstanding. The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.59

Truly, someone ought to have written the history of the "three Aristotles" Greek, Arabian, and Gothic who had not one conce pt or thought in common. Or the history of the transformation of Magian Christianity into Faustian ! We are told in sermon and book that this religion extended from the old Church into and over the Western field without change of essence. Actually, Magian man evolved out of the deepest depths of his dualistic worldconsciousness a language of his own religious awareness that we call "the" Christian religion. So much of this experience as was communicable words, formulas, rites was accepted by the man of the Late-Classical Civilization as a means of expression for his religious need; then it passed from man to man, even to the Germans of the Western pre-Culture, in words always the same and in sense always altering. Men would never have dared to improve upon the original meanings of the holy words it was simply that they did not know these meanings. Let's study the historical philosophy of law!

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.60-61

Law, in the Classical world, is law made by citizens for citizens and presupposes that the state-form is that of the Polis. It was this basic form of public life that led and self-evidently to the notion of the person as identical with the man who, added to others like him, made up the body (soma) of the State. From this formal fact of Classical world-feeling grew up the whole structure of Classical law. "Persona" then is a specifically Classical notion, possessing meaning and valency only in the Classical Culture. The individual person is a body which belongs to the stock of the Polis. [...] The man who followed the public career in Rome had necessarily to be jurist, general, administrator, and financial manager. When he gave judgment as prastor, he had behind him a wide experience of many fields other than law. A judicial class, professionally (let alone theoretically) specialized in law as its sole activity, was entirely unknown to the Classical. [...] It would give an incorrect idea to oppose Greek and Roman law to one ano ther as quantities of the same order. Roman law in its whole development is an individual city law, one amongst hundreds of such, and Greek law as a unity never existed at all.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.62

This jurisprudence, however, was built up by the mind of an intensely ahistorical species of man. Classical law, consequently, is law of the day and even the moment; it was in its very idea occasional legislation for particular cases, and when the case was settled, it ceased to be law. To extend its validity over subsequent cases would have been in contradiction to the Classical sense of the present.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.63

In the West it is conspicuously the other way about. The tendency is from the first to bring the entire living body of law into a general code, ordered for ever and exhaustively complete, containing in advance the decision of every conceivable future problem. All Western law bears the stamp of the future, all Classical the stamp of the moment.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.64

It is a grave error to suppose that a law that surveys all things evenly and without being influenced by political and economic interests can exist at all. [...] Every law is established by a class in the name of the generality.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.67-68

The first creation of "Arabian" law was the concept of the incorporeal person. Here is an element entirely absent in Classical law, and appearing quite suddenly in the "Classical" jurists (who were all Aramaeans), which cannot be estimated at its full value, or in its symbolic importance as an index of the new world-feeling, unless we realize the full extent of the field that this "Arabian" law covered. [...] Wonderfully, the law of individual citi es which is so self-evident on Classical ground is here silently transmuted into a law of creed-communities. It is Magian, magic, through and through. Always one Pneuma, one like spirit, one identical knowledge and comprehension of whole and sole truth, welds the believers of the same religion into a unit of will and action, into one juristic person. A juristic person is thus a collective entity which has intentions, resolutions, and responsibilities as an entity.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.69

This Arabian concept of nationality is a new and wholly decisive fact. The frontiers between "home" and "abroad" lay in the Apollinian world between every two towns, and in the Magian between every two creed-communities. What the "enemy," the peregrin, was to the Roman, the Pagan was to the Christian, the Amhaarez to the Jew. What the acquisition of Roman citizenship meant for the Gaul or the Greek in Cassar's time, Christian baptism meant for him now entry into the leading nation of the leading Culture.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.72

Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of practical experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested it through the intellect of chosen and enlightened men. [...] The authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that of the Arabian on the majesty of the name that they bear. But it matters very considerably indeed in a man's feelings whether he regards law as an expression of some fellow man's will or as an element of the divine dispensation. In the one case he either sees for himself that the law is right or else yields to force, but in the other he devoutly acknowledges ("Islam" = to commit, devote).

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.78-79

With this I reach the objective and look around me. I see three law-histories, connected merely by the elements of verbal and syntactical form, taken over by one from another, voluntarily or perforce, but never revealing to the new user the nature of the alien being which underlay them. Two of these histories are complete. The third is that in which we ourselves are standing standing, too, at a decisive point where we embark in our turn upon the big constructive task that Rome and Islam, each for itself and in its season, have accomplished before us. [...] All through our legal history runs, as basic motive, the conflict between book and life. The Western book is not an oracle or magician's text with Magian under-sense, but a piece of preserved history. It is compressed Past that wants to become Future, through us who read it and in whom its content lives anew. Faustian man does not aim, like Classical man, at bringing his life to a self-contained perfection, but at carrying on a life that emerged long before him and will draw to its end long after him.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.79-80

Now, legal thought is forced to attach itself to something tangible there must be something before it can abstract its concepts; it must have something from which to abstract. And it was the misfortune of Western jurisprudence that, instead of quarrying in strong, firm custom of social and economic life, it abstracted prematurely and in a hurry from Latin writings. [...] Owing to this, we have been completely cut off from touch with the fact that private law is meant to represent the social and economic existence of its period. [...] And consequently we possess a private law that rests on the shadowy foundations of the Late Classical economy. The intense embitterment which, in these beginnings of our Civilization's economy, opposes the name of Capitalism to the name of Socialism comes very largely from the fact that scholarly jurisprudence, and under its influence educated thought generally, have tied up such all-important notions as person, thing, and property to the conditions and the dispositions of Classical life. [...] The learned meaning thereby the book-learned weigh up everything to this day in scales that are essentially Classical. The man who is merely active and not trained to judgment feels himself misunderstood. He sees the contradiction between the life of the times and the law's outlook upon it, and calls for the heads of those who to gain their private ends, as he thinks have promoted this opposition.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.81

How was it that in 1900 the theft of electric power after grotesque discussions as to whether the matter in dispute was a corporeal thing had to be dealt with under an ad hoc statute? Why was it impossible to work the substance of patent law into the ensemble of the law about things? Why was copyright law unable conceptually to differentiate the intellectual creation, its communicable form the manuscript, and the objective product in print? Why, in contradiction with the law of things, had the artistic and the material property in a picture to be distinguished by separating acquisition of the original from acquisition of the right to reproduce it? Why is the misappropriation of a business idea or a scheme of organization unpunishable, and theft of the piece of paper on which it is set forth punishable? Because even to-day we are dominated by the Classical idea of the material thing. We live otherwise. Our instinctive experience is subject to functional concepts, such as working power, inventiveness, enterprise, such as intellectual and bodily, artistic and organizing, energies and capacities and talents. In our physics (of which the theory, advanced though it is, is but a copy of our present mode of life) the old idea of a body has in principle ceased to exist as in this very instance of electrical power. Why is our law conceptually helpless in the presence of the great facts of modern economics? Because persons, too, are known to it only as bodies?

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.82

It must be emphasized then and with all rigour that Classical law was a law of bodies, while ours is a law of functions. The Romans created a juristic statics; our task is juristic dynamics. For us persons are not bodies, but units of force and will; and things are not bodies, but aims, means, and creations of these units. The Classical relation between bodies was positional, but the relation between forces is called action. For a Roman the slave was a thing which produced new things. A writer like Cicero could never have conceived of "intellectual property," let alone property in a practical notion or in the potentialities of talent; for us, on the contrary, the organizer or inventor or promoter is a generative force which works upon other, executive, forces, by giving direction, aim, and means to their action. Both belong to economic life, not as possessors of things, but as carriers of energies.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.83

Roman law has ceased to be our source for principles of eternal validity. But the relation between Roman existence and Roman law-ideas gives it a renewed value for us. We can learn from it how we have to build up our law out of our experiences.