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

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 138-160.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.139

What is destiny, what incident, the spiritual experiences of the individual soul and of the Culture-soul decide. Acquired knowledge, scientific insight, definition, are all powerless. Nay more, the very attempt to grasp them epistemologically defeats its own object. For without the inward certainty that destiny is something entirely intractable to critical thought, we cannot perceive the world of becoming at all. Cognition, judgment, and the establishment of causal connexions within the known (i.e., between things, properties, and positions that have been distinguished) are one and the same, and he who approaches history in the spirit of judgment will only find "data." But that be it Providence or Fate which moves in the depths of present happening or of represented past happening is lived, and only lived, and lived with that same overwhelming and unspeakable certainty that genuine Tragedy awakens in the uncritical spectator. Destiny and incident form an opposition in which the soul is ceaselessly trying to clothe something which consists only of feeling and living and intuition, and can only be made plain in the most subjective religious and artistic creations of those men who are called to divination. This is a challenge for you Jeromie

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.140

On the surface of history it is the unforeseen that reigns. Every individual event, decision and personality is stamped with its hall-mark. No one foreknew the storm of Islam at the coming of Mohammed, nor foresaw Napoleon in the fall of Robespierre. The coming of great men, their doings, their fortune, are all incalculables. No one knows whether a development that is setting in powerfully will accomplish its course in a straight line like that of the Roman patrician order or will go down in doom like that of the Hohenstaufen or the Maya Culture. And science notwithstanding it is just the same with the destinies of every single species of beast and plant within earth-history and beyond even this, with the destiny of the earth itself and all the solar systems and Milky Ways. The insignificant Augustus made an epoch, and the great Tiberius passed away ineffective. Thus, too, with the fortunes of artists, artworks and art-forms, dogmas and cults, theories and discoveries. That, in the whirl of becoming, one element merely succumbed to destiny when another became (and often enough has continued and will continue to be) a destiny itself that one vanishes with the wave-train of the surface while the other makes this, is something that is not to be explained by any why-and-wherefore and yet is of inward necessity.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.141

We can proceed to the further elucidation of the incidental (or casual) without running the risk of considering it as an exception or a breach in the causal continuity of "Nature," for Nature is not the world-picture in which Destiny is operative. Wherever the sight emancipates itself from the sensiblebecome, spiritualizes itself into Vision, penetrates through the enveloping world and lets prime phenomena instead of mere objects work upon it, we have the grand historical, trans-natural, super-natural outlook, the outlook of Dante and Wolfram and also the outlook of Goethe in old age that is most clearly manifested in the finale of Faust II. If we linger in contemplation in this world of Destiny and Incident, it will very likely seem to us incidental that the episode of "world-history" should have played itself out in this or that phase of one particular star amongst the millions of solar systems; incidental that it should be men, peculiar animal-like creatures inhabiting the crust of this star, that present the spectacle of "knowledge" and, moreover, present it in just this form or in just that form, according to the very different versions of Aristotle, Kant and others; incidental that as the counter-pole of this "knowing" there should have arisen just these codes of "natural law," each supposedly eternal and universally-valid and each evoking a supposedly general and common picture of "Nature." Physics quite rightly banishes incidentals from its field of view, but it is incidental, again, that physics itself should occur in the alluvial period of the earth's crust, uniquely, as a particular kind of intellectual composition. The world of incident is the world of once-actual facts that longingly or anxiously we live forward to (entgegcnleberi) as Future, that raise or depress us as the living Present, and that we contemplate with joy or with grief as Past. The world of causes and effects is the world of the constantly-possible, of the timeless truths which we know by dissection and distinction. Napoleon was and had a destiny.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.144

Napoleon had in his graver moments a strong feeling for the deep logic of world-becoming, and in such moments could divine to what extent he was, and to what extent he had, a destiny. "I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know. As soon as I shall have reached it, as soon as I shall become unnecessary, an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then, not all the forces of mankind can do anything against me," he said at the beginning of the Russian campaign. Here, certainly, is not the thought of a pragmatist. In this moment he divined how little the logic of Destiny needs particular instances, better men or situations. Supposing that he himself, as "empirical person" had fallen at Marcngo then that which he signified would have been actualized in some other form.Destiny was not understood in the Classical Culture.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.146-147

For this reason, the Euclidean soul of the Classical Culture could only experience its existence, bound as this was to present foregrounds, in the form of incidents of the Classical style. If in respect of the Western soul we can regard incident as a minor order of Destiny, in respect of the Classical soul it is just the reverse. Destiny is incident become immense that is the very signification of Ananke, Heimarmene, Fatum. As the Classical soul did not genuinely live through history, it possessed no genuine feeling for a logic of Destiny. We must not be misled by words. The most popular goddess of Hellenism was Tyche, whom the Greeks were practically unable to distinguish from Ananke. But Incident and Destiny are felt by us with all the intensity of an opposition, and on the issue of this opposition we feel that everything fundamental in our existence depends. Our history is that of great connexions, Classical history its full actuality, that is, and not merely the image of it that we get in the historian (e.g., Herodotus) is that of anecdotes, of a series of plastic details. The style of the Classical life generally, the style of every individual life within it, is anecdotal, using the word with all seriousness. The sense-perceivable side of events condenses on anti-historical, daemonic, absurd incidents; it is the denial and disavowal of all logic of happening. The stories of the Classical mastertragedies one and all exhaust themselves in incidents that mock at any meaning of the world; [...] in contrast to the Shakesperian logic of incident. Consider CEdipus once more: that which happened to him was wholly extrinsic, was neither brought about nor conditioned by anything subjective to himself, and could just as well have happened to anyone else. This is the very form of the Classical myth. Compare with it the necessity inherent in and governed by the man's whole existence and the relation of that existence to Time that resides in the destiny of Othello, of Don Quixote, of Werther. It is, as we have said before, the difference of situation-tragedy and character-tragedy. And this opposition repeats itself in history proper every epoch of the West has character, while each epoch of the Classical only presents a situation. While the life of Goethe was one of fate-filled logic, that of Caesar was one of mythical incidentalness, and it was left to Shakespeare to introduce logic into it. Napoleon is a tragic character, Alcibiades fell into tragic situations. Astrology, in the form in which from Gothic to Baroque the Western soul knew it was dominated by it even in denying it was the attempt to master one's whole future life-course; the Faustian horoscope, of which the best-known example is perhaps that drawn out for Wallenstein by Kepler, presupposes a steady and purposeful direction in the existence that has yet to be accomplished. But the Classical oracle, always consulted for the individual case, is the genuine symbol of the meaningless incident and the moment; it accepts the point-formed and the discontinuous as the elements of the world's course, and oracle-utterances were therefore entirely in place in that which was written and experienced as history at Athens.The Classical mentality governed both Classical History and how history was understood.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.147

The ultimate meaning of this significant fact can now be understood. History is the actualizing of a soul, and the same style governs the history one makes as governs the history one contemplates. The Classical mathematic excludes the symbol of infinite space, and therefore the Classical history does so too. It is not for nothing that the scene of Classical existence is the smallest of any, the individual Polis, that it lacks horizon and perspective notwithstanding the episode of Alexander's expedition just as the Attic stage cuts them off with its flat back-wall, in obvious contrast to the long-range efficacy of Western Cabinet diplomacy and the Western capital city. A contrafactual example to show what is incidental and what is destiny.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.148

We may now point our moral with a few examples, which, though hazardous, ought not at this stage to be open to misunderstanding. Imagine Columbus supported by France instead of by Spain, as was in fact highly probable at one time. Had Francis I been the master of America, without doubt he and not the Spaniard Charles V would have obtained the imperial crown. The early Baroque period from the Sack of Rome to the Peace of Westphalia, which was actually the Spanish century in religion, intellect, art, politics and manners, would have been shaped from Paris and not from Madrid. Instead of the names of Philip, Alva, Cervantes, Caldcron, Velasquez we should be talking to-day of great Frenchmen who in fact if we may thus roundly express a very difficult idea remained unborn. The style of the Church which was definitively fixed in this epoch by the Spaniard Loyola and the Council of Trent which he spiritually dominated; the style of politics to which the war-technique of Spanish captains, the diplomacy of Spanish cardinals and the courtly spirit of the Escorial gave a stamp that lasted till the Congress of Vienna and in essential points till beyond Bismarck; the architecture of the Baroque; the great age of Painting; ceremonial and the polite society of the great cities all these would have been represented by other profound heads, noble and clerical, by wars other than Philip II's wars, by another architect than Vignola, by another Court. The Incidental chose the Spanish gesture for the late period of the West. But the inward logic of that age, which was bound to find its fulfilment in the great Revolution (or some event of the same connotation), remained intact. This French revolution might have been represented by some other event of different form and occurring elsewhere, say in England or Germany. But its "idea," which (as we shall see later) was the transition from Culture to Civilization, the victory of the inorganic megalopolis over the organic countryside which was henceforward to become spiritually "the provinces," was necessary, and the moment of its occurrence was also necessary. To describe such a moment we shall use the term (long blurred, or misused as a synonym for period) epoch. When we say an event is epoch-making we mean that it marks in the course of a Culture a necessary and fateful turning-point. The merely incidental event, a crystallization-form of the historical surface, may be represented by other appropriate incidents, but the epoch is necessary and predeterminate. And it is evident that the question of whether, in respect of a particular Culture and its course, an event ranks as an epoch or as an episode is connected with its ideas of Destiny and Incidents, and therefore also with its idea of the Tragic as "epochal" (as in the West) or as "episodic" (as in the Classical world).Critique of "scientific" history.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.151-152

Man-knowing and Nature-knowing are in essence entirely incapable of being compared, but nevertheless the whole Nineteenth Century was at great pains to abolish the frontier between Nature and History in favour of the former. The more historically men tried to think, the more they forgot that in this domain they ought not to think. In forcing the rigid scheme of a spatial and anti-temporal relation of cause and effect upon something alive, they disfigured the visible face of becoming with the construction-lines of a physical nature-picture, and, habituated to their own late, megalopolitan and causally-thinking milieu, they were unconscious of the fundamental absurdity of a science that sought to understand an organic becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as the machinery of the thingbecome. Day is not the cause of night, nor youth of age, nor blossom of fruit. Everything that we grasp intellectually has a cause, everything that we live organically with inward certitude has a past. The one recognizes the case, that which is generally possible and has a fixed inner form which is the same whenever and wherever and however often it occurs, the other recognizes the event which once was and will never recur. And, according as we grasp something in our envelope-world critically and consciously or physiognomically and involuntarily, we draw our conclusion from technical or from living experience, and we relate it to a timeless cause in space or to a direction which leads from yesterday to to-day and to-morrow. But the spirit of our great cities refuses to be involuntary. Surrounded by a machine-technique that it has itself created in surprising Nature's most dangerous secret, the "law," it seeks to conquer history also technically, "theoretically and practically." What Spengler hoped for as the future of Western philosophy.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.159-160

Herein, then, I see the last great task of Western philosophy, the only one which still remains in store for the aged wisdom of the Faustian Culture, the preordained issue, it seems, of our centuries of spiritual evolution. No Culture is at liberty to choose the path and conduct of its thought, but here for the first time a Culture can foresee the way that destiny has chosen for it. Before my eyes there seems to emerge, as a vision, a hitherto unirnagined mode of superlative historical research that is truly Western, necessarily alien to the Classical and to every other soul but ours a comprehensive Physiognomic of all existence, a morphology of becoming for all humanity that drives onward to the highest and last ideas; a duty of penetrating the worldfeeling not only of our proper soul but of all souls whatsoever that have contained grand possibilities and have expressed them in the field of actuality as grand Cultures. This philosophic view to which we and we alone are entitled in virtue of our analytical mathematic, our contrapuntal music and our perspective painting in that its scope far transcends the scheme of the systematist, presupposes the eye of an artist, and of an artist who can feel the whole sensible and apprehensible environment dissolve into a deep infinity of mysterious relationships. So Dante felt, and so Goethe felt. To bring up, out of the web of world-happening, a millennium of organic culture-history as an entity and person, and to grasp the conditions of its inmost spirituality such is the aim. Just as one penetrates the lineaments of a Rembrandt portrait or a Caesar-bust, so the new art will contemplate and understand the grand, fateful lines in the visage of a Culture as a superlative human individuality. To attempt the interpretation of a poet or a prophet, a thinker or a conqueror, is of course nothing new, but to enter a culture-soul Classical, Egyptian or Arabian so intimately as to absorb into one's self, to make part of one's own life, the totality expressed by typical men and situations, by religion and polity, by style and tendency, by thought and customs, is quite a new man ner of experiencing life. Every epoch, every great figure, every deity, the cities, the tongues, the nations, the arts, in a word everything that ever existed and will become existent, are physiognomic traits of high symbolic significance that it will be the business of quite a new kind of "judge of men" (Menschenkenner) to interpret. Poems and battles, Isis and Cybcle, festivals and Roman Catholic masses, blast furnaces and gladiatorial games, dervishes and Darwinians, railways and Roman roads, "Progress" and Nirvana, newspapers, mass-slavery, money, machinery all these are equally signs and symbols in the world-picture of the past that the soul presents to itself and would interpret. "Allcs Vergangliche ist nur tin Gleicbnis." Solutions and panoramas as yet unimagined await the unveiling. Light will be thrown on the dark questions which underlie dread and longing those deepest of primitive human feelings and which the will-to-know has clothed in the "problems" of time, necessity, space, love, death, and first causes. There is a wondrous music of the spheres which wills to be heard and which a few of our deepest spirits will hear. The physiognomic of world-happening will become the last Faustian philosophy.