THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY. (2) THE DESTINY-IDEA AND THE CAUSALITY-PRINCIPLE 1(2)

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 117-138.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.117

Following out this train of thought to the end, we come into the presence of an opposition in which we perceive the key the only key wherewith to approach, and (so far as the word has any meaning at all) to solve, one of the oldest and gravest of man's riddles. This is the opposition of the Destiny Idea and the Causality Principle an opposition which, it is safe to say, has never hitherto been recognized for what it is, the necessary foundation of worldbuilding. Anyone who understands at all what is meant by saying that the soul is the idea of an existence, will also divine a near relationship between it and the sure sense of a destiny and must regard Life itself (our name for the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished) as directed, irrevocable in every line, fate-laden. Primitive man feels this dimly and anxiously, while for the man of a higher Culture it is definite enough to become his vision of the world - though this vision is communicable only through religion and art, never through notions and proofs.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.118

In the Destiny-idea the soul reveals its world-longing, its desire to rise into the light, to accomplish and actualize its vocation. To no man is it entirely alien, and not before one has become the unanchored "late" man of the megalopolis is original vision quite overpowered by matter-of-fact feeling and mechanizing thought. Even then, in some intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness, shattering in a moment all the causality of the world's surface. For the world as a system of causal connexions is not only a "late" but also a highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high Cultures are capable of possessing it or perhaps we should say, devising it with conviction. Back to the difference between physiognomic and systematic.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.118-119

He who comprehends the light-world that is before his eyes not physiognomically but systematically, and makes it intellectually his own by the methods of causal experience, must necessarily in the end come to believe that every living thing can be understood by reference to cause and effect that there is no secret and no inner directedness. He, on the other hand, who as Goethe did and for that matter as everyone does in nine out of ten of his waking moments lets the impressions of the world about him work merely upon his senses, absorbs these impressions as a whole, feels the become in its becoming. The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere ceasing to think. Suddenly, Time is no more a riddle, a notion, a "form" or "dimension" but becomes an inner certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its irreversibility its livingness, is disclosed the very meaning of the historical world-picture. Destiny and Causality are related as Time and Space.The primacy of Culture.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.118

The existence of the Classical soul is the condition for the appearance of Democritus's method, the existence of the Faustian soul for that of Newton's. We may well imagine that either of these Cultures might have failed to produce a natural science of its own, but we cannot imagine the systems without their cultural foundations.
Causality works on the extended.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.120

Now, Causality has nothing whatever to do with Time. To the world of to-day, made up of Kantians who know not how Kantian they are, this must seem an
outrageous paradox. And yet every formula of Western physics exhibits the "how" and the "how long" as distinct in essence. As soon as the question
is pressed home, causality restricts its answer rigidly to the statement that something happens and not when it happens. The "effect" must of necessity be put with the "cause." The distance between them belongs to a different order, it lies within the act of understanding itself (which is an element of life) and not within the thing or things understood. It is of the essence of the extended that it overcomes directedness, and of Space that it contradicts Time, andyet the latter, as the more fundamental, precedes and underlies the former.Time is part of the becoming, directedness.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.122

The problem of Time, like that of Destiny, has been completely misunderstood by all thinkers who have confined themselves to the systematic of the Become. In Kant's celebrated theory there is not one word about its character of directedness. Not only so, but the omission has never even been noticed. But what is time as a length, time without direction? Everything living, we can only repeat, has "life," direction, impulse, will, a movement-quality (Bewegtheit) that is most intimately allied to yearning and has not the smallest element in common with the "motion" (Bewegung) of the physicists. The living is indivisible and irreversible, once and uniquely occurring, and its course is entirely indeterminable by mechanics. For all such qualities belong to the essence of Destiny, and "Time" that which we actually feel at the sound of the word, which is clearer in music than in language, and in poetry than in prose has this organic essence, while Space has not.Time is a discovery of high cultures.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.122

For primitive man the word "time" can have no meaning. He simply lives, without any necessity of specifying an opposition to something else. He has time, but he knows nothing of it. All of us are conscious, as being aware, of space only, and not of time. Space "is," (i.e. exists, in and with our senseworld) as a self-extension while we are living the ordinary life of dream, impulse, intuition and conduct, and as space in the strict sense in the moments of strained attention. "Time," on the contrary, is a discovery, which is only made by thinking.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.124

All that has been said about time in "scientific" philosophy, psychology and physics the supposed answer to a question that had better never have been asked, namely what is time? touches, not at any point the secret itself, but only a spatially-formed representative phantom. The livingness and directedness and fated course of real Time is replaced by a figure which, be it never so intimately absorbed, is only a line, measurable, divisible, reversible, and not a portrait of that which is incapable of being portrayed; by a "time" that can be mathematically expressed in such forms as vt, t2, -t, from which the assumption of a time of zero magnitude or of negative times is, to say the least, not excluded.Here is a new duality, between taboo and totem connected to extension and directedness.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.127-128

In every work that displays the whole man and the whole meaning of the existence, fear and longing lie close together, but they are and they remain different. To the fear, to the Causal, belongs the whole "taboo" side of art its stock of motives, developed in strict schools and long craft-training, carefully protected and piously transmitted; all of it that is comprehensible, learnable, numerical; all the logic of colour, line, structure, order, which constitutes the mother-tongue of every worthy artist and every great epoch. But the other side, opposed to the "taboo" as the directed is to the extended and as the development-destiny within a form-language to its syllogisms, comes out in genius (namely, in that which is wholly personal to the individual artistsy their imaginative powers, creative passion, depth and richness, as against all mere mastery of form) and, beyond even genius, in that superabundance of creativeness in the race which conditions the rise and fall of whole arts. This is the "totem" side, and owing to it notwithstanding all the aesthetics ever penned there is no timeless and solely-true way of art, but only a history of art, marked like everything that lives with the sign of irreversibility. And this is why architecture of the grand style which is the only one of the arts that handles the alien and fearinstilling itself, the immediate Extended, the stone is naturally the early art in all Cultures, and only step by step yields its primacy to the special arts of the city with their more mundane forms the statue, the picture, the musical composition. Different Cultures have different concepts of history.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.131

In the capacity of experientially living history and the way in which history, particularly the history of personal becoming, is lived, one man differs very greatly from another. Every Culture possesses a wholly individual way of looking at and comprehending the world-as-Nature; or (what comes to the same thing) it has its own peculiar "Nature" which no other sort of man can possess in exactly the same form. But in a far greater degree still, every Culture including the individuals comprising it (who are separated only by minor distinctions) possesses a specific and peculiar sort of history and it is in the picture of this and the style of this that the general and the personal, the inner and the outer, the world-historical and the biographical becoming, are immediately perceived, felt and lived. Thus the autobiographical tendency of Western man revealed even in Gothic times in the symbol of auricular confession is utterly alien to Classical man; while his intense historical awareness is in complete contrast to the almost dreamy unconsciousness of the Indian. And when Magian man primitive Christian or ripe scholar of Islam uses the words "world-history," what is it that he sees before him? Funerals as symbols of Cultures.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.132-133

Another symbol, as deeply significant and as little understood as the symbol of the clock, is that of the funeral customs which all great Cultures have consecrated by ritual and by art. The grand style in India begins with tombtemples, in the Classical world with funerary urns, in Egypt with pyramids, in early Christianity with catacombs and sarcophagi. In the dawn, innumerable equally-possible forms still cross one another chaotically and obscurely, dependent on clan-custom and external necessities and conveniences. But every Culture promptly elevates one or another of them to the highest degree of symbolism. Classical man, obedient to his deep unconscious life-feeling, picked upon burning, an act of annihilation in which the Euclidean, the hereandnow, type of existence was powerfully expressed. He willed to have no history, no duration, neither past nor future, neither preservation nor dissolution, and therefore he destroyed that which no longer possessed a present, the body of a Pericles, a Caesar, a Sophocles, a Phidias. And the soul passed to join the vague crowd to which the living members of the clan paid (but soon ceased to pay) the homage of ancestor-worship and soul-feast, and which in its formlessness presents an utter contrast to the ancestor-series, the genealogical tree, that is eternalized with all the marks of historical order in the family-vault of the West. In this (with one striking exception, the Vedic dawn in India) no other Culture parallels the Classical. And be it noted that the Doric-Homeric spring, and above all the "Iliad," invested this act of burning with all the vivid feeling of a new-born symbol; for those very warriors whose deeds probably formed the nucleus of the epic were in fact buried almost in the Egyptian manner in the graves of Mycenas, Tiryns, Orchomenos and other places. And when in Imperial times the sarcophagus or "flesh-consumer" began to supersede the vase of ashes, it was again, as in the time when the Homeric urn superseded the shaft-grave of Mycenas, a changed sense of Time that underlay the change of rite. The Egyptians, who preserved their past in memorials of stone and hieroglyph so purposefully that we, four thousand years after them, can determine the order of their kings' reigns, so thoroughly eternalized their bodies that today the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, recognizable in every lineament, a symbol of grim triumph while of Dorian kings not even the names have survived. For our own part, we know the exact birthdays and deathdays of almost every great man since Dante, and, moreover, we see nothing strange in the fact. Yet in the time of Aristotle, the very zenith of Classical education, it was no longer known with certainty if Leucippus, the founder of Atomism and a contemporary of Pericles i.e., hardly a century before had ever existed at all; much as though for us the existence of Giordano Bruno was a matter of doubt and the Renaissance had become pure saga. Cultures with different mentality give rise to different types of states.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.137-138

And here again the history of higher Cultures shows us three examples of state-formations in which the element of care is conspicuous: the Egyptian administration even of the Old Kingdom (from 3000 B.C.); the Chinese state of the Chou dynasty (1169-2.56 B.C.), of the organization of which the Chou Li gives such a picture that, later on, no one dared to believe in the authenticity of the book; and the states of the West, behind whose characteristic eye-tothe-future there is an unsurpassably intense Will to the future. And on the other hand we have in two examples the Classical and the Indian world a picture of utterly care-less submission to the moment and its incidents. Different in themselves as are Stoicism and Buddhism (the old-age dispositions of these two worlds), they are at one in their negation of the historical feeling of care, their contempt of zeal, of organizing power, and of the duty-sense; and therefore neither in Indian courts nor in Classical market-places was there a thought for the morrow, personal or collective. The carpe diem of Apollinian man applies also to the Apollinian state.