SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING. (1) ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 299-337.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.299

Every professed philospher is forced to believe, without serious examination, in the existence of a Something that in his opinion is capable of being handled by the reason, for his whole spiritual existence depends on the possibility of such a Something. [...] The proposition "there is a soul, the structure of which is scientifically accessible; and that which I determine, by critical dissection of conscious existence-acts into the form of psychic elements, functions, and complexes, is my soul" is a proposition that no psychologist has doubted hitherto. And yet it is just here that his strongest doubts should have arisen. Is an abstract science of the spiritual possible at all? Is that which one finds on this path identical with that which one is seeking? Why has psychology meaning thereby not knowledge of men and experience of life but scientific psychology always been the shallowest and most worthless of the disciplines of philosophy, a field so empty that it has been left entirely to mediocre minds and barren systematists? The reason is not far to seek. It is the misfortune of "experimental" psychology that it does not even possess an object as the word is understood in any and every scientific technique. Its searches and solutions are fights with shadows and ghosts. What is it the Soul? If the mere reason could give an answer to that question, the science would be ab initio unnecessary.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.300

It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting-knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.302

I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we try to "figure to ourselves" the stirrings of our own or others' souls) has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should surely be "soul" if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course actualizes.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.303

A soul-image is never anything but the image of one quite definite soul. No observer can ever step outside the conditions and the limitations of his time and circle, and whatever it may be that he "knows" or "cognizes," the very cognition itself involves in all cases choice, direction and inner form, and is therefore ab initio an expression of his proper soul.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.304

Classical, Apollinian man, the man of Euclidean point-formed being, looked upon his soul as a Cosmos ordered in a group of excellent parts. Plato [...] compared it with man, beast and plant [...]. What seems to be copied here is Nature as seen by the Classical age, a wellordered sum of tangible things, in contrast to a space that was felt as the nonexistent, the Nonent. Where in this field is "Will"? or the idea of functional connexions? or the other creations of our psychology? Do we really believe that Plato and Aristotle were less sure in analysis than we are, and did not see what is insistently obvious to every layman amongst us? Or is it that Will is missing here for the same reason as space is missing in the Classical mathematic and force in the Classical physics? Take, on the contrary, any Western psychology that you please, and you will always find a functional and never a bodily ordering. The basic form of all impressions which we receive from within is y = f(x), and that, because the function is the basis of our outer world. Thinking, feeling, willing no Western psychologist can step outside this trinity, however much he may desire to do so; even in the controversies of Gothic thinkers concerning the primacy of will or reason it already emerges that the question is one of a relation between forces.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.305-306

The Faustian and the Apollinian images of the soul are in blunt opposition. Once more all the old contrasts crop up. In the Apollinian we have, so to call it, the soul-body, in the Faustian the soul-space, as the imagination-unit. The body possesses parts, while the space is the scene of processes. Classical man conceives of his inner world plastically. [...] The hall-mark of the Magian soul-image is a strict dualism of two mysterious substances, Spirit and Soul. Between these two there is neither the Classical (static) nor the Western (functional) relation, but an altogether differently constituted relation which we are obliged to call merely "Magian" for want of a more helpful term, though we may illustrate it by contrasting the physics of Democritus and the physics of Galileo with Alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone. A Russian mentality forced into Western Culture.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.309

Now this, precisely this, the genuine Russian regards as contemptible vainglory. The Russian soul, will-less, having the limitless -plane as its primesymbol, seeks to grow up serving, anonymous, self-oblivious in the brother-world of the plane. To take "I" as the starting-point of relations with the neighbour, to elevate "I" morally through "I's" love of near and dear, to repent for "I's" own sake, are to him traits of Western vanity as presumptuous as is the upthrusting challenge to heaven of our cathedrals that he compares with his plane church-roof and its sprinkling of cupolas. [...] Something of the kind underlies the Magian soul-image also. "If any man come to me," says Jesus (Luke xiv, 26), "and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple"; and it is the same feeling that makes him call himself by the title that we mistranslate "Son of Man." The Consensus of the Orthodox too is impersonal and condemns "I" as a sin. So too with the truly Russian conception of truth as the anonymous agreement of the elect.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.312

Thought no sooner leaves Religion for Science than we get the double myth of concepts, in physics and psychology. The concepts "force," "mass," "will," "passion" rest not on objective experience but on a life-feeling. Darwinism is nothing but a specially shallow formulation of this feeling.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.315

There are as many morales as there are Cultures. Nietzsche was the first to have an inkling of this; but he never came anywhere near to a really objective morphology of morale "beyond good" (all good) "and evil" (all evil). He evaluated Classical, Indian, Christian and Renaissance morale by his own criteria instead of understanding the style of them as a symbol.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.315

If ever there was a group of nations that kept the "struggle for existence" constantly before its eyes, it was the Classical Culture. All the cities, big and little, fought one another to sheer extinction, without plan or purpose, without mercy, body against body, under the stimulus of a completely anti-historical instinct. But Greek ethics, notwithstanding Heraclitus, were far from making struggle an ethical principle. The Stoics and the Epicureans alike preached abstention from it as an ideal. The overcoming of resistances may far more justly be called the typical impulse

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.317-319

This opposition, further, has produced forms of tragedy that differ from one another radically in every respect. The Faustian character-drama and the Apollinian drama of noble gesture have in fact nothing but name in common. [...] Baroque drama with ever-increasing emphasis makes character instead of occurrence its centre of gravity [...]which gives the scenic facts position, sense, and value in relation to itself. [...] The Classical tragedy relates to general situations and not particular personalities. [...] It is not enough to distinguish Classical and Western tragedy merely as action-drama and event-drama. Faustian tragedy is biographical, Classical anecdotal; that is, the one deals with the sense of a whole life and the other with the content of the single moment. What relation, for instance, has the entire inward past of OEdipus or Orestes to the shattering event that suddenly meets him on his way? l There is one sort of destiny, then, that strikes like a flash of lightning, and just as blindly, and another that interweaves itself with the course of a life, an invisible thread that yet distinguishes this particular life from all others.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.325

In general, every art and every Culture has its significant times of day. The music of the 18th Century is a music of the darkness and the inner eye, and the plastic of Athens is an art of cloudless day. [...] The Classical vase-painting and fresco though the fact has never been remarked has no time-of-day. No shadow indicates the state of the sun, no heaven shows the stars. There is neither morning nor evening, neither spring nor autumn, but pure timeless brightness. For equally obvious reasons our oilpainting developed in the opposite direction, towards an imaginary darkness, also independent of time-of-day, which forms the characteristic atmosphere of the Faustian soul-space. [...] In fact, steady brightness and steady twilight are the respective hall-marks of the Classical and the Western, alike in painting and in drama; and may we not also describe Euclidean geometry as a mathematic of the day and Analysis as a mathematic of the night?

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.326

Now, whatever is sensuously-near is understandable for all, and therefore of all the Cultures that have been, the Classical is the most popular, and the Faustian the least popular, in its expressions of life-feeling. A creation is "popular" that gives itself with all its secrets to the first comer at the first glance, that incorporates its meaning in its exterior and surface. In any Culture, that element is "popular" which has come down unaltered from primitive states and imaginings, which a man understands from childhood without having to master by effort any really novel method or standpoint and, generally, that which is immediately and frankly evident to the senses, as against that which is merely hinted at and has to be discovered by the few, and sometimes the very, very few. There are popular ideas, works, men and landscapes. Every Culture has its own quite definite sort of esoteric or popular character that is immanent in all its doings, so far as these have symbolic importance.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.327-329

Every high creator in Western history has in reality aimed, from first to last, at something which only the few could comprehend. [...] Consider our sciences too. Every one of them, without exception, has besides its elementary groundwork certain "higher" regions that are inaccessible to the layman symbols, these also, of our will-to-infinity and directional energy. The public for whom the last chapters of up-to-date physics have been written numbers at the utmost a thousand persons, and certain problems of modern mathematics are accessible only to a much smaller circle still for our "popular" science is without value, dctraquce, and falsified. We have not only an art for artists, but also a mathematic for mathematicians, a politic for politicians (of which the frofanum vulgus of newspaper-readers has not the smallest inkling, whereas Classical politics never got beyond the horizon of the Agora), a religion for the "religious genius" and a poetry for philosophers. [...] The conclusion to be argued from this as regards the advances of Western science in its last phase (which will cover, or quite possibly will not cover, the next two centuries) is, that in proportion as megalopolitan shallowness and triviality drive arts and sciences on to the bookstall and into the factory, the posthumous spirit of the Culture will confine itself more and more to very narrow circles; and that there, remote from advertisement, it will work in ideas and forms so abstruse that only a mere handful of superfine intelligences will be capable of attaching meanings to them.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.330-331

Here, too, is the meaning of the characteristically Faustian discovery of the telescope which, penetrating into spaces hidden from the naked eye and inaccessible to the will-to-power, widens the universe that we possess. The truly religious feeling that seizes us even to-day when we dare to look into the depths of starry space for the first time the same feeling of power that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies aim at awakening would to Sophocles appear as the impiety of all impieties. Our denial of the "vault" of heaven, then, is a resolve and not a sense-experience. The modern ideas as to the nature of starry space or, to speak more prudently, of an extension indicated by light-indices that are communicated by eye and telescope most certainly do not rest upon sure knowledge, for what we see in the telescope is small bright disks of different sizes. The photographic plate yields quite another picture not a sharper one but a different one and the construction of a consistent world-picture such as we crave depends upon connecting the two by numerous and often very daring hypotheses (e.g., of distances, magnitudes and movements) that we ourselves frame. The style of this picture corresponds to the style of our own soul.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.332-333

So also it was that the old Northern races, in whose primitive souls the Faustian was already awakening, discovered in their grey dawn the art of sailing the seas which emancipated them. The Egyptians knew the sail, butonly profited by it as a labour-saving device. They sailed, as they had done before in their oared ships, along the coast to Punt and Syria, but the idea of the high-seas voyage what it meant as a liberation, a symbol was not in them. Sailing, real sailing, is a triumph over Euclidean land. At the beginning of our 14th Century, almost coincident with each other (and with the formation-periods of oil-painting and counterpoint !) came gunpowder and the compass, that is, long-range weapons and long-range intercourse (means that the Chinese Culture too had, necessarily, discovered for itself). It was the spirit of the Vikings and the Hansa, as of those dim peoples, so unlike the Hellenes with their domestic funerary urns, who heaped up great barrows as memorials of the lonely soul on the wide plains. It was the spirit of those who sent their dead kings to sea in their burning ships, thrilling manifests of their dark yearning for the boundless. The spirit of the Norsemen drove their cockleboats in the Tenth Century that heralded the Faustian birth to the coasts of America. But to the circumnavigation of Africa, already achieved by Egyptians and Carthaginians, Classical mankind was wholly indifferent.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.333-334

The event which stands at the same cultural level as the discoveries of the Spaniards and Portuguese is that of the Hellenic colonizations of the 8th Century B.C. But, while the Spaniards and the Portuguese were possessed by the adventured-craving for uncharted distances and for everything unknown and dangerous, the Greeks went carefully, point by point, on the known tracks of the Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Etruscans, and their curiosity in no wise extended to what lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the Isthmus of Suez, easily accessible as both were to them. Athens no doubt heard of the way to the North Sea, to the Congo, to Zanzibar, to India in Nero's time the position of the southern extremity of India was known, also that of the islands of Sunda but Athens shut its eyes to these things just as it did to the astronomical knowledge of the old East. [...] Not even Hellenism, with all its proneness to technical diversions, freed itself from the oared ship which tethered the mariner to the coasts. The naval architects of Alexandria were capable of constructing giant ships of 260-ft. length, and, for that matter, the steamship was discovered in principle. But there are some discoveries that have all the pathos of a great and necessary symbol and reveal depths within, and there are others that are merely play of intellect. The steamship is for Apollinians one of the latter and for Faustians one of the former class. It is prominence or insignificance in the Macrocosm as a whole that gives discovery and the application thereof the character of depth or shallowness. The discoveries of Columbus and Vasco da Gama extended the geographical horizon without limit, and the world-sea came into the same relation with land as that of the universe of space with earth. And then first the political tension within the Faustian world-consciousness discharged itself. For the Greeks, Hellas was and remained the important part of the earth's surface, but with the discovery of America West-Europe became a province in a gigantic whole. Thenceforward the history of the Western Culture has a planetary character.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.336

Greek daughtercities were planted by the hundred along the rim of the Mediterranean, but not one of them made the slightest real attempt to conquer and penetrate the hinterlands. To settle far from the coast would have meant to lose sight of "home," while to settle in loneliness the ideal life of the trapper and prairie-man of America as it had been of Icelandic saga-heroes long before was something entirely beyond the possibilities of Classical mankind. Dramas like that of the emigration to America man by man, each on his own account, driven by deep promptings to loneliness or the Spanish Conquest, or the Californian gold-rush, dramas of uncontrollable longings for freedom, solitude, immense independence, and of giantlike contempt of all limitations whatsoever upon the home-feeling these dramas are Faustian and only Faustian. No other Culture, not even the Chinese, knows them.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.337

If, in fine, we look at it all together the expansion of the Copernican world-picture into that aspect of stellar space that we possess to-day; the development of Columbus's discovery into a worldwide command of the earth's surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and of ragedyscene; the sublimed home-feeling; the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-peaks we see, emerging everywhere the prime-symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those specially (in form, uniquely) Western creations of the soul-myth called "Will," "Force" and "Deed" must be regarded as derivatives of this prime-symbol.