ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (A) THE COSMIC AND TH E MICROCOSM

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 3-19.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.3

Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence. [...] The individual is not free to look out for itself, will for itself, or choose for itself. An animal, on the contrary, can choose. It is emancipated from the servitude of all the rest of the world. This midget swarm that dances on and on, that solitary bird still flying through the evening, the fox approaching furtively the nest these are little worlds of their own within another great world.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.3-4

The seeds of a flowering plant show, under the microscope, two sheath-leaves which form and protect the young plant that is presently to turn towards the light, with its organs of the life-cycle and of reproduction, and in addition a third, which contains the future root and tells us that the plant is destined irrevocably to become once again part of a landscape. In the higher animals, on the contrary, we observe that the fertilized egg forms, in the first hours of its individualized existence, an outer sheath by which the inner containers of the cyclic and reproductive components i.e., the plant element in the animal body are enclosed and shut off from the mother body and all the rest of the world. This outer sheath symbolizes the essential character of animal existence and distinguishes the two kinds in which the Living has appeared on this earth. There are noble names for them, found and bequeathe d by the Classical world. The plant is something cosmic, and the animal is additionally a microcosm in relation to a macrocosm. [...] All that is cosmic bears the hall-mark of periodicity; it has "beat" (rhythm, tact). All that is microcosmic possesses polarity; it possesses "tension." [...] A human being asleep, discharged of all tensions, is leading only a plantlike existence.Cosmic plant as the become - animal, a microcosm, is becoming.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.5

We possess two cyclic organs of the cosmic existence, the blood system and the sex-organ, and two differentiating organs of microcosmic mobility, senses and nerves. We have to assume that in its origin the whole body has been both a cyclic and a tactual organ. The blood is for us the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds without pause, from generation to death, from the mother body in and out of the body of the child, in the waking state and in sleep, never-ending. The blood of the ancestors flows through the chain of the generations and binds them in a great linkage of destiny, beat, and time. Originally this was accomplished only by a process of division, redivision, and ever new division of the cycles, until finally a specific organ of sexual generation appeared and made one moment into a symbol of duration.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.6-7

The eye comes into existence and in and with the eye, as its opposite pole, light. Abstract thinking about light may lead (and has led) to an ideal light representable by an ensemble picture of waves and rays, but the significance of this development in actuality was that thenceforward life was embraced and taken in through the light-world of the eye. This is the supreme marvel that makes everything human what it is. Only with this lightworld of the eye do distances come into being as colours and brightnesses; only in this world are night and day and things and motions visible in the extension of illumined space, and the universe of infinitely remote stars circling above the earth, and that light-horizon of the individual life which stretches so far beyond the environs of the body. In the world of this light not the light which science has deduced indirectly by the aid of mental concepts, themselves derived from visions (" theory" in the Greek sense) it comes to pass that seeing, human herds wander upon the face of this little earth-star, and that circumstances of light the full southern flood over Egypt and Mexico, the greyness of the north contribute to the determination of their entire life. It is for his eye that man develops the magic of his architecture, wherein the constructional elements given by touch are restated in relations generated by light. Religion, art, thought, have all arisen for light's sake, and all differentiations reduce to the one point of whether it is the bodily eye or the mind's eye that is addressed. And with this there emerges in all clarity yet another distinction, which is normally obscured by the use of the ambiguous word "consciousness (Bewusstsein)." I distinguish being or "being there" (Dasein) from waking-being or waking-consciousness (Wachsein). Being possesses beat and direction, while waking-consciousness is tension and extension. In being a destiny rules, while waking-consciousness distinguishes causes and effects.Cosmic plant as being - animal, a microcosm, as waking-consciousness.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.7-8

With this we are brought face to face with man. In man's waking-consciousness nothing disturbs the now pure lordship of the eye. The sounds of the night, the wind, the panting of beasts, the odour of flowers, all stimulate in him a "whither" and a ''whence" in the world of light. [...] The only space that remains to us is visual space, and in it places have been found for the relics of other senseworlds (such as sounds, scents, heat and cold) as properties and effects of lightthings it is a seen fire that warmth comes from, it is a seen rose in illumined space that gives off the scent and we speak of a certain tone as violin-tone. As to the stars, our conscious relations with them are limited to seeing them over our heads they shine, describing their visible path. But of these sense-worlds there is no doubt that animals and even primitive men still have sensations that are wholly different from ours; some of these sensations we are able to figure to ourselves indirectly by the aid of scientific hypotheses, but the rest now escape us altogether.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.9

More and more often there appears, in lieu of the simple comprehension of the gross intake, a comprehension of the significances of the component senseimpressions, which have hardly been noticed as such before. Finally these impressions themselves are discarded and replaced by the felt connotations of familiar word-sounds. The word, originally the name of a visual thing, changes imperceptibly into the label of a mental thing, the "concept."

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.10

Understanding detached from sensation is called thought. Thought has introduced a permanent disunity into the human waking-consciousness. From early times it has rated understanding and sensibility as "higher" and "lower" soul-power. It has created the fateful opposition between the light-world of the eye, described as a figment and an illusion, and the world-imagined ("vorgestellte," "set before" oneself), in which the concepts, with their faint but ineffaceable tinge of light-coloration, live and do business. And henceforth for man, so long as he "thinks," this is the true world, the world-in-itself. [...] Clearly, then, thought, when it became independent, discovered a new mode of activity for itself. To the practical thought which is directed upon the constitution of the light-t hings in the world-around, with reference to this or that practical end, there is added the theoretical, penetrating, subtilizing thought which sets itself to establish the constitution of these things "in themselves," the natura rerum. From that which is seen, the light is abstracted, the depth-experience of the eye intensifies itself in a grand and unmistakable course of development into a depth-experience within the tinted realm of wordconnotations. Man begins to believe that it is not impossible for his inner eye to see right through into the things that actually are. Concept follows upon concept, and at last there is a mighty thought-architecture

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.11

The plantlike-cosmic, Being heavy with Destiny, blood, sex, possess an immemorial mastery and keep it. They are life. The other only serves life. But this other wills, not to serve, but to rule; moreover, it believes that it does rule, for one of the most determined claims put forward by the human spirit is its claim to possess power over the body, over "nature." But the question is: Is not this very belief a service to life? Why does our thought think just so? Perhaps because the cosmic, the "it," wills that it shall? Thought shows off its power when it calls the body a notion, when it establishes the pitifulness of the body and commands the voices of the blood to be silent. But in truth the blood rules, in that silently it commands the activity of thought to begin and to cease. There, too, is a distinction between speech and life Being can do without consciousness and the life of understanding, but not vice versa. Thought rules, after all, in spite of all, only in the "realm of thought."

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.12

But for an animal, not truths, but only facts exist. Here is the difference between practical and theoretical understanding. Facts and truths differ as time and space, dest iny and causality. A fact addresses itself to the whole waking-consciousness, for the service of being, and not to that side of the waking-consciousness which imagines it can detach itself from being. Actual life, history, knows only facts; life experience and knowledge of men deal only in facts. The active man who does and wills and fights, daily measuring himself against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant. The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.14

Waking-consciousness, however whether it be that of sensation or that of understanding is synonymous with the existence of oppositions, such as that between cognition and the object cognized, or thing and property, or object and event. Wherein consists the essence of these oppositions? And so arises the second problem, that of causality. When we give the names "cause" and "effect" to a pair of sensuous elements, or "premiss" and "consequence" to a pair of intellectual elements, we are fixing between them a relation of power and rank when one is there, the other must be there also.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.15-16

For this is the decisive fact, of which the observer is unconscious his whole effort of seeking is aimed not at life, but at the seeing of life, and not at death, but at the seeing of death. We try to grasp the cosmic as it appears in the macrocosm to the microscosm, as the life of a body in the light-world between birth and death, generation and dissolution, and with that differentiation of body and soul that follows of deepest necessity from our ability to experience the inward-proper as a sensuous alien. [...] That we do not merely live but know about "living" is a consequence of our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life, not death. Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of dying, for to feel death and to die would be identical. But animals, even though they hear the death-cry, see the dead body, and scent putrefaction, behold death with-out comprehending it. Only when understanding has become, through language, detached from visual awareness and pure, does death appear to man as the great enigma of the light-world about him. Then, and only then, life becomes the short span of time between birth and death, and it is in relation to death that that other great mystery of generation arises also. Only then does the diffuse animal fear of everything become the definite human fear of death. It is this that makes the love of man and woman, the love of mother and child, the tree of the generations, the family, the people, and so at last world-history itself the infinitely deep facts and problems of destiny that they are. To death, as the common lot of every human being born into the light, adhere the ideas of guilt and punishment, of existence as a penance, of a new life beyond the world of this light, and of a salvation that makes an end of the death-fear. In the knowledge of death is originated that world-outlook which we possess as being men and not beasts.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.16

There are born destiny-men and causality-men. A whole world separates the purely living man peasant and warrior, statesman and general, man of the world and man of business, everyone who wills to prosper, to rule, to fight, and to dare, the organizer or entrepreneur, the adventurer or bravo or gambler from the man who is destined either by the power of his mind or the defect of his blood to be an "intellectual" the saint, priest, savant, idealist, or ideologue. Being and waking-being, pulse and tension, motives and ideas, cyclic organs and touch-organs there has rarely been a man of any significance in whom the one side or the other has not markedly predominated. All that motives and urges, the eye for men and situations, the belief in his star whic h every born man of action possesses and which is something wholly different from belief in the correctness of a standpoint, the voices of the blood that speak in moments of decision, and the immovably quiet conviction that justifies any aim and any means all these are denied to the critical, meditative man. Even the footfall of the fact-man sounds different from, sounds more planted than, that of the thinker, in whom the pure microcosmic can acquire no firm relation with earth.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.16-17

Destiny has made the man so or so subtle and fact-shy, or active and contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without (and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those ethicopolitico-social reform-projects which demonstrate, unanswerably, how things ought to be and how to set about making them so theories that without exception rest upon the hypothesis that all men are as rich in ideas and as poor in motives as the author is (or thinks he is). Such theories, even when they have taken the field armed with the full authority of a religion or the prestige of a famous name, have not in one single instance effected the slightest alteration in life. They have merely caused us to think otherwise than before about life. And this, precisely, is the doom of the "late" ages of a Culture, the ages of much writing and much reading that they should perpetually confuse the opposition of life and thought with the opposition between thoughtabout-life and thought-about-thought. All world-improvers, priests, and philosophers are unanimous in holding that life is a fit object for the nicest meditation, but the life of the world goes its own way and cares not in the least what is said about it. And even when a community succeeds in living "according to rule," all that it achieve s is, at best, a note on itself in some future history of the world if there is space left after the proper and only important subject-matter has been dealt with.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.17

For, in the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives in the actual world, the world of political, military, and economic decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count. Here a shrewd blow is more than a shrewd conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded the "ink-slinger" and the "bookworm" who think that world-history exists for the sake of the intellect or science or even art. Let us say it frankly and without ambiguity: the understanding divorced from sensation is only one, and not the decisive, side of life. A history of Western thought may not contain the name of Napoleon, but in the history of actuality Archimedes, for all his scientific discoveries, was possibly less effective than that soldier who killed him at the storming of Syracuse.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.17

Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not in the train of great events. They misunderstand completely the role played, for example, by the political Sophists in Athens or by Voltaire and Rousseau in France. Often enough a statesman does not "know" what he is doing, but that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success; the political doctrinaire, on the contrary, always knows what should be done, and yet his activity, once it ceases to be limited to paper, is the least successful and therefore the least valuable in history. These intrusions happen only too frequently in times of uncertainty, like that of the Attic enlightenment, or the French or the German revolutions, when the ideologue of word or pen is eager to be busy with the actual history of the people instead of with systems. He mistakes his place. He belongs with his principles and programs to no history but the history of a literature. Real history passes judgment on him not by controverting the theorist, but by leaving him and all his thoughts to himself.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.18

Under all the plurality of microcosmic beings, we are perpetually meeting with the formation of inspired mass-units, beings of a higher order, which, whether they develop slowly or come into existence in a moment, contain all the feelings and passions of the individual, enigmatic in their inward character and inaccessible to reasoning though the connoisseur can see into and reckon upon their reactions well enough. [...] One can join or resign from an intellectual association as one pleases, for only one's waking-consciousness is involved. But to a cosmic unity one is committed, and committed with one's entire being. Crowds of this order of unity are seized by storms of enthusiasm or, as readily, of panic.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.19

All grand events of history are carried by beings of the cosmic order, by peoples, parties, armies, and classes, while the history of the intellect runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools, levels of education, "tendencies" and "isms." And here again it is a question of destiny whether such aggregates at the decisive moments of highest effectiveness find a leader or are driven blindly on, whether the chance headmen are men of the first order or men of no real significance tossed up, like Robespierre or Pompey, by the surge of events. It is the hall-mark of the statesman that he has a sure and penetrating eye for these mass-souls that form and dissolve on the tide of the times, their strength and their duration, their direction and purpose. And even so, it is a question of Incident whether he is one who can master them or one who is swept away by them.