THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY. (1) PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 93-113.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.93-94

The modern historian, in the very act of priding himself on his "objectivity," naively and unconsciously reveals his prepossessions. For this reason it is quite legitimate to say and it will infallibly be said some day that so far a genuinely Faustian treatment of history has been entirely lacking. By such a treatment is meant one that has enough detachment to admit that any "present" is only such with reference to a particular generation of men; that the number of generations is infinite, and that the proper present must therefore be regarded just as something infinitely distant and alien is regarded, and treated as an interval of time neither more nor less significant in the whole picture of History than others. [...] It is true that the 19th Century A.D. seems to us infinitely fuller and more important than, say, the 19th Century B.C.; but the moon, too, seems to us bigger than Jupiter or Saturn. The physicist has long ago freed himself from prepossessions as to relative distance, the historian not so. We permit ourselves to consider the Culture of the Greeks as an "ancient" related to our own "modern." Were they in their turn "modern" in relation to the finished and historically mature Egyptians of the court of the great Thuthmosis who lived a millennium before Homer? For us, the events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of "world "-history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which in his "world"-history are epoch-making.The duality between "becoming" and "the become" corresponds to physiognomic and systematic.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.95

Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated. It carries the hall-mark of Direction ("Time"), of irreversibility . That which has happened is thenceforth counted with the become and not with the becoming, with the stiffened and not the living, and belongs beyond recall to the past. Our feeling of world-fear has its sources here. Everything cognized, on the contrary, is timeless, neither past nor future but simply "there," and consequently permanently valid, as indeed the very constitution of natural law requires that it should be. Law and the domain of law are anti-historical. They exclude incident and casuality. The laws of nature are forms of rigorous and therefore inorganic necessity. It becomes easy to see why mathematics, as the ordering of things-become by number, is always and exclusively associated with laws and causality. Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure. No deep and pure historical research seeks for conformities with causal laws or, if it does so, it does not understand its own essence.Systematic science can only be applied to "the become". The post war processual archaeology was a project, totally misguided, to make the study of prehistory scientific but there are lots of other examples.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.96

Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that at bottom the wish to write history scientifically involves a contradiction. True science reaches just as far as the notions of truth and falsity have validity: this applies to mathematics and it applies also to the science of historical spade-work, viz., the collection, ordering and sifting of material. But real historical vision (which only begins at this point) belongs to the domain of significances, in which the crucial words are not "correct" and "erroneous," but "deep" and "shallow." The true physicist is not deep, but keen: it is only when he leaves the domain of working hypotheses and brushes against the final things that he can be deep, but at this stage he is already a metaphysician. Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. The first volume is named Form and Actyality and here comes an explanation.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.97

There emerge, then, as the two basic elements of all world-picturing, the principle of Form (Gestalt) and the principle of Law (Gesetz). The more decidedly a particular world-picture shows the traits of "Nature," the more unconditionally law and number prevail in it; and the more purely intuitive the picture of the world as eternally becoming, the more alien to numbers its manifold and intangible elements. "Form is something mobile, something becoming, something passing. The doctrine of formation is the doctrine of transformation. Metamorphosis is the key to the whole alphabet of Nature," so runs a note of Goethe's, marking already the methodic difference between his famous "exact percipient fancy" which quietly lets itself be worked upon by the living, and the exact killing procedure of modern physics.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.98

"Nature," in the exact sense, is a way of possessing actuality which is special to the few, restricted to the megalopolitans of the late periods of great Cultures, masculine, perhaps even senatorial; while History is the naive, youthful, more or less instinctive way that is proper to all men alike. At least, that is the position of the number-based, unmystical, dissectable and dissected "Nature" of Aristotle and Kant, the Sophists and the Darwinians, modern physics and chemistry, vis-a-vis the lived, felt and unconfined "Nature" of Homer and the Eddas, of Doric and Gothic man. To overlook this is to miss the whole essence of historical treatment. It is history that is the truly natural, and the exact mechanically-correct "Nature" of the scientist that is the artificial conception of world by soul. Hence the paradox that modern man finds "nature "-study easy and historical study hard.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.100

All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be described as Morphology. The Morphology of the mechanical and the extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny, is called Physiognomic.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.100

In the West, the Systematic mode of treating the world reached and passed its culminating-point during the last century, while the great days of Physiognomic have still to come. In a hundred years all sciences that are still possible on this soil will be parts of a single vast Physiognomic of all things human. This is what the "Morphology of World-History" means. In every science, and in the aim no less than in the content of it, man tells the story of himself. Scientific experience is spiritual self-knowledge. It is from this standpoint, as a chapter of Physiognomic, that we have just treated of mathematics. We were not concerned with what this or that mathematician intended, nor with the savant as such or his results as a contribution to an aggregate of knowledge, but with the mathematician as a human being, with his work as a part of the phenomenon of himself, with his knowledge and purposes as a part of his expression. This alone is of importance to us here. He is the mouthpiece of a Culture which tells us about itself through him, and he belongs, as personality, as soul, as discoverer, thinker and creator, to the physiognomy of that Culture. The Western Culture is named by Faust.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.101-102

Descriptive, creative, Physiognomic is the art of portraiture transferred to the spiritual domain. Don Quixote, Werther, Julian Sorel, are portraits of an epoch, Faust the portrait of a whole Culture. For the nature-researcher, the morphologist as systematist, the portrayal of the world is only a business of imitation, and corresponds to the "fidelity to nature" and the "likeness" of the craftsman-painter, who, at bottom, works on purely mathematical lines. But a real portrait in the Rembrandt sense of the word is physiognomic, that is, history captured in a moment. The set of his self-portraits is nothing else but a (truly Goethian) autobiography. So should the biographies of the great Cultures be handled. The "fidelity" part, the work of the professional historian on facts and figures, is only a means, not an end. The countenance of history is made up of all those things which hitherto we have only managed to evaluate according to personal standards, i.e., as beneficial or harmful, good or bad, satisfactory or unsatisfactory political forms and economic forms, battles and arts, science and gods, mathematics and morals. Everything whatsoever that has become is a symbol, and the expression of a soul. Only to one having the knowledge of men will it unveil itself. You cannot learn physiognomy if you are not born a physiognomist. Am I getting this right?

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.102

The nature-researcher can be educated, but the man who knows history is born. He seizes and pierces men and facts with one blow, guided by a feeling which cannot be acquired by learning or affected by persuasion, but which only too rarely manifests itself in full intensity. Direction, fixing, ordering, defining by cause and effect, are things that one can do if one likes. These things are work, but the other is creation. Form and law, portrayal and comprehension, symbol and formula, have different organs, and their opposition is that in which life stands to death, production to destruction. Reason, system and comprehension kill as they "cognize." That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity. Poetry and historical study are kin. Calculation and cognition also are kin. [...] The artist or the real historian sees the becoming of a thing (schaut, wie etwas wird), and he can reenact its becoming from its lineaments, whereas the systematist, whether he be physicist, logician, evolutionist or pragmatical historian, learns the thing that has become. The artist's soul, like the soul of a Culture, is something potential that may actualize itself, something complete and perfect in the language of an older philosophy, a microcosm. The systematic spirit, narrow and withdrawn (" abs-tract") from the sensual, is an autumnal and passing phenomenon belonging to the ripest conditions of a Culture. Linked with the city, into which its life is more and more herded, it comes and goes with the city.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.104

Cultures are organisms, and world-history is their collective biography. Morphologically, the immense history of the Chinese or of the Classical Culture is the exact equivalent of the petty history of the individual man, or of the animal, or the tree, or the flower. For the Faustian vision, this is not a postulate but an experience; if we want to learn to recognize inward forms that constantly and everywhere repeat themselves, the comparative morphology of plants and animals has long ago given us the methods. In the destinies of the several Cultures that follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch, overshadow, and suppress one another, is compressed the whole content of human history. And if we set free their shapes, till now hidden all too deep under the surface of a trite "history of human progress," and let them march past us in the spirit, it cannot .but be that we shall succeed in distinguishing, amidst all that is special or unessential, the primitive culture-form, the Culture that underlies as ideal all the individual Cultures. Well, I think that the 20th Century is lost for the discovery of physiognomic methods.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.105

At present, however, we look in vain for any treatment of history that is entirely free from the methods of Darwinism - that is, of systematic natural science based on causality. A physiognomic that is precise, clear and sure of itself and its limits has never yet arisen, and it can only arise through the discoveries of method that we have yet to make. Herein lies the great problem set for the 20th Century to solve to explore carefully the inner structure of the organic units through and in which world-history fulfils itself, to separate the morphologically necessary from the accidental, and, by seizing the purport of events, to ascertain the languages in which they speak. There's a big difference between clans, tribes, peoples and races and Cultures.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.106

Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of the generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify a series of generations within this or that limited area of the historical surface. As widely as these differ in creative power, so widely do the images that they create vary in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power dies out, the physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish also and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations. Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians, Berbers, Bantus are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous images of this order. But over this surface, too, the great Cultures accomplish their majestic wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.109

The notion of life-duration as applied to a man, a butterfly, an oak, a blade of grass, comprises a specific time-value, which is quite independent of all the accidents of the individual case. Ten years are a slice of life wrhich is approximately equivalent for all men, and the metamorphosis of insects is associated with a number of days exactly known and predictable in individual cases. For the Romans the notions of -pueritia, adolescentia, iuventus, virilitas, senectus possessed an almost mathematically precise meaning. Without doubt the biology of the future will in opposition to Darwinism and to the exclusion in principle of causal fitness-motives for the origins of species take these freordained life durations as the starting-point for a new enunciation of its problem. The duration of a generation whatever may be its nature is a fact of almost mystical significance. An individual as a model for a Culture.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.110-111

In this sense, too, every individual being that has any sort of importance recapitulates, of intrinsic necessity, all the epochs of the Culture to which it belongs. In each one of us, at that decisive moment when he begins to know that he is an ego, the inner life wakens just where and just how that of the Culture wakened long ago. Each of us men of the West, in his child's daydreams and child's play, lives again its Gothic the cathedrals, the castles, the hero-sagas, the crusader's "Dieu le veult," the soul's oath of young Parzival. Every young Greek had his Homeric age and his Marathon. In Goethe's Werther, the image of a tropic youth that every Faustian (but no Classical) man knows, the springtime of Petrarch and the Minnesanger reappears. When Goethe blocked out the Urfaust* he was Parzival; when he finished Faust I, he was Hamlet, and only with Faust II did he become the world-man of the 19th Century who could understand Byron. Even the senility of the Classical - the faddy and unfruitful centuries of very late Hellenism, the second-childhood of a weary and blase intelligence can be studied in more than one of its grand old men.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.111

Biology employs the term homology of organs to signify morphological equivalence in contradistinction to the term analogy which relates to functional equivalence. This important, and in the sequel most fruitful, notion was conceived by Goethe (who was led thereby to the discovery of the "os intermaxillare" in man) and put into strict scientific shape by Owen; l this notion also we shall incorporate in our historical method. Contemporary is definied in a new way.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.112

The application of the "homology" principle to historical phenomena brings with it an entirely new connotation for the word "contemporary." I designate as contemporary two historical facts that occur in exactly the same relative positions in their respective Cultures, and therefore possess exactly equivalent importance. It has already been shown how the development of the Classical and that of the Western mathematic proceeded in complete congruence, and we might have ventured to describe Pythagoras as the contemporary of Descartes, Archytas of Laplace, Archimedes of Gauss. The Ionic and the Baroque, again, ran their course contemporaneously. Polygnotus pairs in time with Rembrandt, Polycletus with Bach. The Reformation, Puritanism and, above all, the turn to Civilization appear simultaneously in all Cultures; in the Classical this last epoch bears the names of Philip and Alexander, in our West those of the Revolution and Napoleon. Contemporary, too, are the building of Alexandria, of Baghdad, and of Washington; Classical coinage and our double-entry book-keeping; the first Tyrannis and the Fronde; Augustus and Shih-huang-ti; Hannibal and the World War.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.113

It is possible, given the physiognomic rhythm, to recover from scattered details of ornament, building, script, or from odd political, economic and religious data, the organic characters of whole centuries of history, and from known elements on the scale of art-expression, to find corresponding elements on the scale of political forms, or from that of mathematical forms to read that of economic. This is a truly Goethian method rooted in fact in Goethe's conception of the prime phenomenon which is already to a limited extent current in comparative zoology, but can be extended, to a degree hitherto undreamed of, over the whole field of history.