tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3932376020575484352024-03-07T23:08:44.760-08:00Spengler Crash Coursegreenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.comBlogger33125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-77914186081544777262009-12-31T01:54:00.000-08:002009-12-31T02:01:41.712-08:00EXAMINATIONHere you can find a compressed version of the masterpiece <i>The Decline of the West</i> by Oswald Spengler in 31 chapters. If you have any questions, or would like to discuss something, please make a comment.<br /><br />When you've finished the course you can take the examination:<br /><a href="http://www.purposegames.com/game/philosophy-of-spengler-advanced-level-quiz/info">Philosophy of Spengler, advanced level </a><a href="http://www.purposegames.com/game/philosophy-of-spengler-basic-level-quiz/info">Philosophy of Spengler, basic level </a><br /><a href="http://www.purposegames.com/game/origin-of-the-high-cultures-quiz/info">Origin of the High Cultures</a> <br /><a href="http://www.purposegames.com/game/the-eight-high-cultures-quiz/info">The eight High Cultures</a> <br /><br />Good luck!greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-60269133684576099092009-12-31T01:51:00.000-08:002009-12-31T01:52:43.317-08:00THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE (B) THE MACHINE<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 499-507</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.499 <br /><br />Technique is as old as free-moving life itself. Only the plant so far as we can see into Nature is the mere theatre of technical processes. The animal, in that it moves, has a technique of movement so that it may nourish and protect itself. The original relation between a waking-microcosm and its macrocosm "Nature" consists in a touch through the senses which rises from mere sense-impressions to sense-judgment, so that already it works critically (that is, separatingly) or, what comes to the same thing, causal-analytically. The stock of what has been determined then is enlarged into a system, as complete as may be, of the most primary experiences identifying marks a spontaneous method by which one is enabled to feel at home in one's world; in the case of many animals this has led to an amazing richness of experience that no human science has transcended. But the primary waking-being is always an active one, remote from mere theory of all sorts, and thus it is in the minor technique of everyday life, and upon things in so far as they are dead that these experiences are involuntarily acquired. This is the difference between Cult and Myth, for at this level there is no boundary line between religion and the profane all waking-consciousness is religion. The decisive turn in the history of the higher life occurs when the determination of Nature (in order to be guided by it) changes into a fixation that is, a purposed alteration of Nature. With this, technique becomes more or less sovereign and the instinctive prime-experience changes into a definitely "conscious" prime-knowing. Thought has emancipated itself from sensation. It is the language of words that brings about this epochal change. The liberation of speech from speaking gives rise to a stock of signs for communication-speech which are much more than identification-marks they are names bound up with a sense of meaning, whereby man has the secret of numina (deities, natureforces) in his power, and number (formul ae, simple laws), whereby the inner form of the actual is abstracted form the accidental-sensuous. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.500-501 <br /><br />By numerical experience man is enabled to switch the secret on and off, but he has not discovered it. The figure of the modern sorcerer a switchboard with levers and labels at which the workman calls mighty effects into play by the pressure of a finger without possessing the slightest notion of their essence is only the symbol of human technique in general. The picture of the light-world around us in so far as we have developed it critically, analytically, as theory, as picture is nothing but a switchboard of the kind, on which particular things are so labelled that by (so to say) pressing the appropriate button particular effects follow with certainty. The secret itself remains none the less oppressive on that account. But through this technique the waking-consciousness does, all the same, intervene masterfully in the fact-world. Life makes use of thought as an "open sesame," and at the peak of many a Civilization, in its great cities, there arrives finally the moment when technical critique becomes tired of being life's servant and makes itself tyrant. The Western Culture is even now experiencing an orgy of this unbridled thought, and on a tragic scale. Man has listened-in to the march of Nature and made notes of its indices. He begins to imitate it by means and methods that utilize the laws of the cosmic pulse. He is emboldened to play the part of God, and it is easy to understand how the earliest preparers and experts of these artificial things for it was here that art came to be, as counter-concept to nature and how in particular the guardians of the smith's art, appeared to those around them as something uncanny and were regarded with awe or horror as the case might be. The stock of such discoveries grew and grew. Often they were made and forgotten and made again, were imitated, shunned, improved. But in the e nd they constituted for whole continents a store of self-evident means fire, metal-working, instruments, arms, ploughs, boats, houses, animal-taming, and husbandry. Above all, the metals, to whose site in the earth primitive man is led by some uncannily mystical trait in him. Immemoriably old trade-routes lead to oredeposits that are kept secret, through the life of the settled countryside and over frequented seas, and along these, later, travel cults and ornaments and persistent legends of islands of tin and lands of gold. The primary trade of all is the metal trade, and with it the economics of production and of work are joined intrusively by a third alien, venturesome, free-ranging over the lands. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.501-502 <br /><br />The Classical investigator "contemplated" like Aristotle's deity, the Arabian sought as alchemist for magical means (such as the Philosophers' Stone) whereby to possess himself of Nature's treasures without effort but the Western strives to direct the world according to his will. The Faustian inventor and discoverer is a unique type. The primitive force of his will, the brilliance of his visions, the steely energy of his practical ponderings, must appear queer and incomprehensible to anyone at the standpoint of another Culture, but for us they are in the blood. Our whole Culture has a discoverer's soul. To dis-cover that which is not seen, to draw it into the light-world of the inner eye so as to master it that was its stubborn passion from the first days on. All its great inventions slowly ripened in the deeps, to emerge at last with the necessity of a Destiny. All of them were very nearly approached by the high-hearted, happy research of the early Gothic monks. Here, if anywhere, the religious origins of all technical thought are manifested. These meditative discoverers in their cells, who with prayers and fastings wrung God's secret out of him, felt that they were serving God thereby. Here is the Faust-figure, th e grand symbol of a true discovering Culture. The Scientia ixperimcntalis, as Roger Bacon was the first to call nature-research, the insistent questioning of Nature with levers and screws, began that of which the issue lies under our eyes as a countryside sprouting factory-chimneys and conveyortowers. But for all of them, too, there was the truly Faustian danger of the Devil's having a hand in the game, the risk that he was leading them in spirit to that mountain on which he promises all the power of the earth. This is the significance of the perpetuum mobile dreamed of by those strange Dominicans like Petrus Peregrinus, which would wrest the almightiness from God. Again and again they succumbed to this ambition; they forced this secret out of God in order themselves to be God. They listened for the laws of the cosmic pulse in order to overpower it. And so they created the idea of the machine as a small cosmos obeying the will of man alone. But with that they overpassed the slender border-line whereat the reverent piety of others saw the beginning of sin, and on it, from Roger Bacon to Giordano Bruno, they came to grief. Ever and ever again, true belief has regarded the machine as of the Devil. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.502-503 <br /><br />The passion of discovery declares itself as early as the Gothic architecture compare with this the deliberate form-poverty of the Doric ! and is manifest throughout our music. Book-printing appeared, and the long-range weapon. On the heels of Columbus and Copernicus come the telescope, the microscope, the chemical elements, and lastly the immense technological corpus of the early Baroque. Then followed, however, simultaneously with Rationalism, the discovery of the steam-engine, which upset everything and transformed economic life from the foundations up. Till then nature had rendered services, but now she was tied to the yoke as a slave, and her work was as though in contempt measured by a standard of horse-power. We adva nced from the muscle-force of the Negro, which was set to work in organized routines, to the organic reserves of the Earth's crust, where the life-forces of millennia lay stored as coal; and to-day we cast our eyes on inorganic nature, where water-forces are already being brought in to supplement coal. As the horse-powers run to millions and milliards, the numbers of the population increase and increase, on a scale that no other Culture ever thought possible. This growth is a product of the Machine, which insists on being used and directed, and to that end centuples the forces of each individual. For the sake of the machine, human life becomes precious. Work becomes the great word of ethical thinking; in the eighteenth century it loses its derogatory implication in all languages. The machine works and forces the man to co-operate. The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.503-504 <br /><br />And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric. They weave the earth over with an infinite web of subtle forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become ever more and more immaterial, ever less noisy. The wheels, rollers, and levers are vocal no more. All that matters withdraws itself into the interior. Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience is set in motion, silent and irresistible. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.504-505 <br /><br />Never save here has a microcosm felt itself superior to its macrocosm, but here the little life-units have by the sheer force of their intellect made the unliving dependent upon themselves. It is a triumph, so far as we can see, unparalleled. Only this our Culture has achieved i t, and perhaps only for a few centuries. But for that very reason Faustian man has become the slave of his creation. His number, and the arrangement of life as he lives it, have been driven by the machine on to a path where there is no standing still and no turning back. The peasant, the hand-worker, even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the three great figures that the Machine has bred and trained up in the cause of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer, and the factoryworker. Out of a quite small branch of manual work namely, the preparationeconomy there has grown up (in this one Culture alone) a mighty tree that casts its shadow over all the other vocations namely, the economy of the machineindustry. It forces the entrepreneur not less than the workman to obedience. Both become slaves, and not masters, of the machine, that now for the first time develops its devilish and occult power. But although the Socialistic theory of the present day has insisted upon looking only at the latter's contribution and has claimed the word "work" for him alone, it has all become possible only through the sovereign and decisive achievement of the former. The famous phrase concerning the "strong arm" that bids every wheel cease from running is a piece of wrong-headedness. To stop them yes ! but it does not need a worker to do that. To keep them running no ! The centre of this artificial and complicated realm of the Machine is the organizer and manager. The mind, not the hand, holds it together. But, for that very reason, to preserve the ever endangered structure, one figure is even more important than all the energy of enterprising master-men that make cities to grow out of the ground and alter the picture of the landscape; it is a figure that is apt to be forgotten in this conflict of politics the engineer, the priest of the machine, the man who knows it. Not merely the importance, but the very existence of the industry depends upon the existence of the hundred thousand talented, rigorously school ed brains that command the technique and develop it onward and onward. The quiet engineer it is who is the machine's master and destiny. His thought is as possibility what the machine is as actuality. There have been fears, thoroughly materialistic fears, of the exhaustion of the coal-fields. But so long as there are worthy technical path-finders, dangers of this sort have no existence. When, and only when, the crop of recruits for this army fails this army whose thought-work forms one inward unit with the work of the machine the industry must flicker out in spite of all that managerial energy and the workers can do. Suppose that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul's health more important than all the powers of this world; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of rationalism to-day, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux) then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries. The Western industry has diverted the ancient traditions of the other Cultures. The streams of economic life move towards the seats of King Coal and the great regions of raw material. Nature becomes exhausted, the globe sacrificed to Faustian thinking in energies. The working earth is the Faustian aspect of her, the aspect contemplated by the Faust of Part II, the supreme transfiguration of enterprising work and contemplating, he dies. Nothing is so utterly antipodal to the motionless satiate being of the Classical Empire. It is the engineer who is remotest from the Classical law-thought, and he will see to it that his economy has its own law, wherein forces and efficiencies will take the place of Person and Thing. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.505-506 <br /><br />But titanic, too, is the onsl aught of money upon this intellectual force. Industry, too, is earth-bound like the yeoman. It has its station, and its materials stream up out of the earth. Only high finance is wholly free, wholly intangible. Since 1789 the banks, and with them the bourses, have developed themselves on the credit-needs of an industry growing ever more enormous, as a power on their own account, and they will (as money wills in every Civilization) to be the only power. The ancient wrestle between the productive and the acquisitive economies intensifies now into a silent gigantomachy of intellects, fought out in the lists of the world-cities. This battle is the despairing struggle of technical thought to maintain its liberty against money-thought. The dictature of money marches on, tending to its material peak, in the Faustian Civilization as in every other. And now something happens that is intelligible only to one who has penetrated to the essence of money. If it were anything tangible, then its existence would be for ever but, as it is a form of thought, it fades out as soon as it has thought its economic world to finality, and has no more material upon which to feed. It thrust into the life of the yeoman's countryside and set the earth a-moving; its thought transformed every sort of handicraft; to-day it presses victoriously upon industry to make the productive work of entrepreneur and engineer and labourer alike its spoil. The machine with its human retinue, the real queen of this century, is in danger of succumbing to a stronger power. But with this, money, too, is at the end of its success, and the last conflict is at hand in which the Civilization receives its conclusive form the conflict between money and blood. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.506-507 <br /><br />The coming of Caesarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon democracy? After a long triumph of world-city economy and its interests over political creative force, the political side of life man ifests itself after all as the stronger of the two. The sword is victorious over the money, the masterwill subdues again the plunderer-will. If we call these money-powers "Capitalism," then we may designate as Socialism the will to call into life a mighty politico-economic order that transcends all class interests, a system of lofty thoughtfulness and duty-sense that keeps the whole in fine condition for the decisive battle of its history, and this battle is also the battle of money and law. The private powers of the economy want free paths for their acquisition of great resources. No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws themselves, in their interests, and to that end they make use of the tool they have made for themselves, democracy, the subsidized party. Law needs, in order to resist this onslaught, a high tradition and an ambition of strong families that finds its satisfaction not in the heaping-up of riches, but in the tasks of true rulership, above and beyond all money-advantage. A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic onflow in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history. Before the irresistible rhythm of the generation-sequence, everything built up by the waking-consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last. Ever in History it is life and life only race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favour of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its right would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness. Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama of a high Culture that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow. The bright imaginative Waking-Being submerges itself into the silent service of Being, as the Chinese and Roman empires tell us. Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes. For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Csesarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set mil be accomplished with the individual or against him. <br />Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-83626440253506572712009-12-30T10:35:00.000-08:002009-12-30T10:37:17.966-08:00THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE (A) MONEY<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 469-496</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.469 <br /><br />The standpoint from which to comprehend the economic history of great Cultures is not to be looked for on economic ground. [...] Least of all is the secure standpoint to be had on the basis of the present-day world-economics, which for the last 150 years has been mounting fantastically, perilously, and in the end almost desperately an economics, moreover, that is exclusively Western-dynamic, anything b ut common-human. That which we call national economy to-day is built up on premisses that are openly and specifically English. The industry of machines, which is unknown to all other Cultures, stands in the centre as though it were a matter of course and, without men being conscious of the fact, completely dominates the formulation of ideas and the deduction of so-called laws. Credit-money, in the special form imparted to it by the relations of world-trade and export-industry in a peasantless England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like capital, value, price, property and the definitions are then transferred without more ado to other Culture-stages and life-cycles. [...] The creators of this economic picture were David Hume and Adam Smith. Everything that has since been written about them or against them always presupposes the critical structure and methods of their systems. [...] As for Smith's greatest adversary, Marx, it matters little how loudly one protests against English capitalism when one is thoroughly imbued with its images; the protest is itself a recognition, and its only aim is, through a new kind of accounting, to confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.470 <br /><br />As this outlook is the systematic and not the historical, the timeless and universal validity of its concepts and rules is an article of faith, and its ambition is to establish the one and only correct method of applying "the" science of management. And accordingly, wherever its truths have come into contact with the facts, it has experienced a complete fiasco as was the case with the prophecies of bourgeois theorists concerning the World War, and with those of proletarian theorists on the induction of the Soviet economy. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.471 <br /><br />Economics and politics are sides of the one livingly flowing current of being, and not o f the waking-consciousness, the intellect. In each of them is manifested the pulse of the cosmic flowings that are occluded in the sequent generations of individual existences. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.471 <br /><br />Life, therefore, has a political and an economic kind of "condition" of fitness for history. They overlie, they support, they oppose each other, but the political is unconditionally the first. Life's will is to preserve itself and to prevail, or, rather, to make itself stronger in order that it may prevail. [...] Nourishment and winning-through the difference of dignity between the two sides of life is recognizable in their relation to death. There is no contrast so profound as that between hunger-death and hero-death. Economically life is in the widest sense threatened, dishonoured, and debased by hunger with which is to be included stunting of possibilities, straitened circumstances, darkness, and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. Whole peoples have lost the tense force of their race through the gnawing wretchedness of their living. Here men die of something and not for something. Politics sacrifices men for an idea, they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. War is the creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things. In war life is elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, vulgar, and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for one's life under which the higher form-world of a Culture miserably collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts begins. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.472 <br /><br />But even so economics is only a foundation, for Being that is in any way meaningful. What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is "in condition," well nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so; and the higher man climbs historically, the more conspicuously his political and religious will to inward symbolism and force of expression towers above everything in the way of form and depth that the economic life as such possesses. It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently this is the time when the banal assertion that "hunger and love" are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of "happiness of the greatest number," of comfort and ease, of "panem et circenses"; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.474-475 <br /><br />All higher economic life develops itself on and over a peasantry. Peasantry, per se, does not presuppose any basis but itself. It is, so to say, race-in-itself, plantlike and historyless, producing and using wholly for itself [...] To this producing kind of economy there is presently opposed an acquisitive kind, which makes use of the former as an object as a source of nourishment, tribute, or plunder. Politics and trade are in their beginnings quite inseparable, both being masterful, personal, warlike, both with a hunger for power and booty that produces quite another outlook upon the world an outlook not from an angle into it, but from above down on its tempting disorder[...] Primitive war is always also booty-war, and primitive trade intimately related to plunder and piracy. [...] Politics and trade in developed form the art of achieving material successes over an opponent by means of intellectual superiority are both a replacement of war by other means. Every kind of diplomacy is of a business nature, every business of a diplomatic, and both are based upon penetrative judgment of men and physiognomic tact. The adventure-spirit in gre at seafarers like the Phoenicians, Etruscans, Normans, Venetians, Hanseatics, the spirit of shrewd banking-lords like the Fugger and the Medici and of mighty financiers like Crassus and the mining and trust magnates of our own day, must possess the strategic talent of the general if its operations are to succeed. Pride in the clan-house, the paternal heritage, the family tradition, develops and counts in the economic sphere as in the political <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.475-476 <br /><br />But the genuine prince and statesman wants to rule, and the genuine merchant only wants to be wealthy, and here the acquisitive economy divides to pursue aim and means separately. One may aim at booty for the sake of power, or at power for the sake of booty. [...] He who is out for purely economic advantages as the Carthaginians were in Roman times and, in a far greater degree still, the Americans in ours is correspondingly incapable of purely political thinking. In the decisions of high politics he is ever deceived and made a tool of, as the case of Wilson shows especially when the absence of statesmanlike instinct leaves a chair vacant for moral sentiments. This is why the great economic groupings of the present day (for example, employers' and employees' unions) pile one political failure on another, unless indeed they find a real political politician as leader, and he makes use of them. Economic and political thinking, in spite of a high degree of consonance of form, are in direction (and therefore in all tactical details) basically different. [...] Only when a man has really ceased to feel his enterprise as "his own business," and its aim as the simple amassing of property, does it become possible for the captain of industry to become the statesman, the Cecil Rhodes. But, conversely, the men of the political world are exposed to the danger of their will and thought for historical tasks degenerating into mere provision for their private life-upkeep; then a nobility can become a robber-order, and we see emerging the familiar types of princes and ministers, demagogues and revolution-heroes, whose zeal exhausts itself in lazy comfortableness and the piling-up of immense riches [...] And in the maturity of democracy the politics of those who have "got there" is identical, not merely with business, but with speculative business of the dirtiest great-city sort. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.477 <br /><br />Every Culture has its own independently developed form-world. Bodily money of the Apollinian style (that is, the stamped coin) is as antithetical to relational money of the Faustian-dynamic style (that is, the booking of credit-units) as the Polis is to the State of Charles V. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.477 <br /><br />In every Culture the quantum of work grows bigger and bigger till at the beginning of every Civilization we find an intensity of economic life, of which the tensions are even excessive and dangerous, and which it is impossible to maintain for a long period. In the end a rigid, permanent-set condition is reached, a strange hotch-potch of refined-intellectual and crude-primitive factors, such as the Greeks found in Egypt and we have found in modern India and China <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.479 <br /><br />In these three economics of production, preparation, and distribution, as in everything else belonging to politics and life at large, there are the subjects and objects of leading in this case, whole groups that dispose, decide, organize, discover; and other whole groups whose function is simply to execute. [...] Nevertheless, economically there is no worker-class; that is an invention of theorists who have fixed their eyes on the position of factory-workers in England an industrial, peasantless land in a transitional phase and then extended the resultant scheme so confident ly over all the Cultures and all the ages that the politicians have taken it up and used it as a means of building themselves parties. In actuality there is an almost uncountable number of purely serving activities in workshop and counting-houses, office and cargo-deck, roads, mine-shafts, fields, and meadows. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.480-482 <br /><br />With the oncoming of Spring there begins in every Culture an economic life of settled form. [...] That which separates out from a life in which everyone is alike producer and consumer is goods, and traffic in goods is the mark of all early intercourse, whether the object be brought from the far distance or merely shifted about within the limits of the village or even the farm. [...] Exchange in these periods is a process whereby goods pass from one circle of life into another. They are valued with reference to life, according to a sliding-scale of felt relation to the moment. There is neither a conception of value nor a kind or amount of goods that constitutes a general measure - for gold and coin are goods too, whose rarity and indestructibility causes them to be highly prized. Into the rhythm and course of this barter the dealer only comes as an intervener. [...] With the soul of the town a quite other kind of life awakens. As soon as the market has become the town, it is not longer a question of mere centres for goods-streams traversing a purely peasant landscape, but of a second world within the walls, for which the merely producing life "out there" is nothing but object and means, and out of which another stream begins to circle. [...] With this goods become wares, exchange turnover, and in place of thinking in goods we have thinking in money. With this a purely extensional something, a form of limit-defining, is abstracted from the visible objects of economics just as mathematical thought abstracts something from the mechanistically conceived environment. Abstract money corresponds exactly to abstract number. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.483 <br /><br />Now gold is no longer measured against the cow, but the cow against the gold, and the result is expressed by an abstract number, the price. [...] As the seat of this thinking, the city becomes the money-market, the centre of values, and a stream of money-values begins to infuse, intellectualize, and command the stream of goods. And with this the trader, from being an organ of economic life, becomes its master. Thinking in money is always, in one way or another, trade or business thinking. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.484 <br /><br />All highly developed economy is urban economy. World-economy itself, the characteristic economy of all Civilizations, ought properly to be called world-city-economy. The destinies even of this world-economy are now decided in a few places, the "moneymarkets of the world [...] Finally, money is the form of intellectual energy in which the ruler-will, the political and social, technical and mental, creative power, the craving for a full-sized life, arc concentrated. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.485 <br /><br />What is here described as Civilization, then, is the stage of a Culture at which tradition and personality have lost their immediate effectiveness, and every idea, to be actualized, has to be put into terms of money. At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.485-486 <br /><br />The Faustian money-thinking "opens up" whole continents, the water-power of gigantic river-basins, the muscular power of the peoples of broad regions, the coal measures, the virgin forests , the laws of Nature, and transforms them all into financial energy, which is laid out in one way or in another in the shape of press, or elections, or budgets, or armies for the realization of masters' plans. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.486-490 <br /><br />As every Culture has its own mode of thinking in money, so also it has its proper money-symbol through which it brings to visible expression its principle of valuation in the economic field. [...] All that is possible is to set forth the essential opposition of Apollinian and Faustian money the one, money as magnitude, and the other, money as function. [...] Classical wealth does not consist in having possessions, but piling money [...] But when, from about Hannibal's time, this world advanced into the state of unlimited plutocracy, the naturally limited mass of precious metals and materially valuable works of art in its sphere of control became hopelessly inadequate to cover needs, and a veritable craving set in for new bodies capable of being used as money. Then it was that men's eyes fell upon the slave, who was another sort of body, but a thing and not a person and capable, therefore, of being thought of as money. From that point Classical slavery became unique of its kind in all economic history. [...] In extremest contrast to this stands the symbol of Faustian money - money as Function, the value of which lies in its effect and not its mere existence. [...] The decisive event, however, was the invention "contemporary" with that of the Classical coin about 650 of double-entry book-keeping by Fra Luca Pacioli in 1494. [...] "Double-entry book-keeping is born of the same spirit as the system of Galileo and Newton. . . . With the same means as these, it orders the phenomenon into an elegant system, and it may be called the first Cosmos built up on the basis of a mechanistic thought. Double-entry book-keeping discloses to us the Cosmos of the economic world by the same method as later the Cosmos of the ste llar universe was unveiled by the great investigation of natural philosophy. . . . Double-entry book-keeping rests on the basic principle, logically carried out, of comprehending all phenomena purely as quantities." Double-entry book-keeping is a -pure Analysis of the space of values, referred to a co-ordinate system, of which the origin is the "Firm." [...] Our economy-world is ordered by force and mass. A field of money-tensions lies in space and assigns to every object, irrespective of its specific kind, a positive or negative effect-value, which is represented by a book-entry. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.492 <br /><br />In reality, the economy of the European-American Civilization is built up on work of a kind in which distinctions go entirely according to the inner quality more so than ever in China or Egypt, let alone the Classical World. It is not for nothing that we live in a world of economic dynamism, where the works of the individual are not additive in the Euclidean way, but functionally related to one another. The purely executive work (which alone Marx takes into account) is in reality nothing but the function of an inventive, ordering, and organizing work; it is from this that the other derives its meaning, relative value, and even possibility of being done at all. The whole world-economy since the discovery of the steam-engine has been the creation of a quite small number of superior heads, without whose high-grade work everything else would never have come into being. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.493 <br /><br />The word "Capital" signifies the centre of this thought not the aggregate of values, but that which keeps them in movement as such. Capitalism comes into existence only with the world-city existence of a Civilization, and it is confined to the very small ring of those who represent this existence by their persons and intelligence; its opposite is the provincial econ omy. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.494 <br /><br />Consequently, as the Western Culture presents a maximum, so the Classical shows a minimum, of organization. [...] Sources of income were thought of only when the need of income presented itself, and then drawn upon, without any regard for the future, as the moment required even at the cost of entirely destroying them. Plunder of the treasures of one's own temples, sea-piracy against one's own city, confiscation of the wealth of one's own fellow-citizens were everyday methods of finance. If surpluses were available, they were distributed to the citizens [...] Budgets were as unknown as any other part of financial policy. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.495-496 <br /><br />But with the extinction of the Classical world-feeling in the early Imperial age, this mode of thinking in money disappeared also. Coins again became wares because men were again living the peasant life and this explains the immense outflow of gold into the farther East after Hadrian's reign, which has hithero been unaccountable. And as economic life in forms of gold-streams was extinguished in the upheaval of a young Culture, so also the slave ceased to be money, and the ebb of the gold was paralleled by that mass-emancipation of the slaves which numerous Imperial laws, from Augustus's reign onwards, tried in vain to check till under Diocletian, in whose famous maximum tariff money-economy was no longer the standpoint, the type of the Classical slave had ceased to exist.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-64982654682523779852009-12-29T15:00:00.000-08:002009-12-29T15:05:30.378-08:00THE STATE (C) PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 439-465</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.439 <br /><br />To politics as an idea we have given more thought than has been good for us, since, correspondingly, we have understood all the less about the observation of Politics as a reality. The great statesmen are accustomed to act immediately and on the basis of a sure flair for facts. This is so self-evident, to them, that it simply never enters their heads to reflect upon the basic general principles of their action supposing indeed that such exist. In all ages they have known what they had to do, and any theory of this knowledge has been foreign to both their capacities and their tastes. But the professional thinkers who have turned their attention to the faits accomplts of men have been so remote, inwardly, from these actions that they have just spun for themselves a web of abstractions for preference, abstraction-myths like justice, virtue, freedom and then applied them as criteria to past and, especially, future historical happening. Thus in the end they have forgotten that concepts are only concepts, and brought themselves to the conclusion that there is a political scien ce whereby we can form the course of the world according to an ideal recipe. [...] Here, on the contrary, the attempt will be made to give, instead of an ideological system, a physiognomy of politics as it has actually been practised in the course of general history, and not as it might or ought to have been practised. [...] The projects of world-improvers and the actuality of History have nothing to do with one another. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.440 <br /><br />Every great politician, a centre of forces in the stream of happening, has something of the noble in his feeling of self-vocation and inward obligation. On the other hand, all that is microcosmic and "intellect" is unpolitical, and so there is a something of priestliness in all program-politics and ideology. The best diplomats are the children; in their play, or when they want something, a cosmic "it" that is bound up in the individual being breaks out immediately and with the sure tread of the sleep-walker. They do not learn, but unlearn, this art of early years as they grow older hence the rarity in the world of adults of the Statesman. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.440 <br /><br />It is only in and between these being-streams that fill the field of the high Culture that high policy exists. They are only possible, therefore, in the plural. A people is, really, only in relation to peoples. But the natural, "race," relation between them is for that very reason a relation of war this is a fact that no truths avail to alter. War is the primary politics of everything that lives, and so much so that in the deeps battle and life are one, and being and will-to-battle expire together. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.441 <br /><br />In every war between life-powers the question at issue is which is to govern the whole. [...] The struggle of, not principles but men, not ideals but race-qualities, for executive power is the alpha and omega. Even revolutions are no exception, for the "sovereignty of the people" only expresses the fact that the ruling power has assumed the title of people's leader instead of that of king. The method of governing is scarcely altered thereby, and the position of the governed not at all. And even world-peace, in every case where it has existed, has been nothing but the slavery of an entire humanity under the regimen imposed by a few strong natures determined to rule. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.441-442 <br /><br />Politically gifted peoples do not exist. Those which are supposed to be so are simply peoples that are firmly in the hands of a ruling minority and in consequence feel themselves to be in good form. [...] But the courage of a troop depends on its confidence in the leadership, and confidence means involuntary abstention from criticism. It is the officer who makes cowards into heroes, or heroes into cowards, and this holds good equally for armies, peoples, classes, and parties. Political talent in a people is nothing but confidence in its leading. But that confidence has to be acquired; it will ripen only in its own good time, and success will stabilize it and make it into a tradition. What appears as a lack of the feeling of certainty in the ruled is really lack of leadership-talent in the ruling classes, which generates that sort of uninstinctivc and meddlesome criticism which by its very existence shows that a people has got "out of condition." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.442 <br /><br />How is politics done? The born statesman is above all a valuer a valuer of men, situations, and things. He has the "eye" which unhesitatingly and inflexibly embraces the round of possibilities. [...] To do the correct thing without "knowing" it, to have the hands that imperceptibly tighten or ease the bit his talent is the very opposite to that of the man of theory. [...] The born statesman stands beyond true and false. He does not confuse the logic of events with the logic of systems. "Truths" or "errors" which here amount to the same only concern him as intellectual currents, and in respect of workings. [...] He has convictions, certainly, that are dear to him, but he has them as a private person; no real politician ever felt himself tied to them when in action. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.443 <br /><br />The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! [...] But the true statesman must also be, in a large sense of the word, an educator not the representative of a moral or a doctrine, but an exemplar in doing. It is a patent fact that a religion has never yet altered the style of an existence. It penetrated the waking-consciousness, the intellectual man, it threw new light on another world, it created an immense happiness by way of humanity, resignation, and patience unto death, but over the forces of life it possessed no power. In the sphere of the living only the great personality the "it," the race, the cosmic force bound up in that personality has been creative (not shaping, but breeding and training) and has effectively modified the type of entire classes and peoples. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.444 <br /><br />Highest of all, however, is not action, but the ability to command. It is this that takes the individual up out of himself and makes him the centre of a world of action. [...] The first problem is to mak e oneself somebody; the second less obvious, but harder and greater in its ultimate effects to create a tradition, to bring on others so that one's work may be continued with one's own pulse and spirit, to release a current of like activity that does not need the original leader to maintain it in form. [...] This cosmic something, this soul of a ruling stratum, an individual can generate and leave as a heritage, and throughout history it is this that has produced the durable effects. The great statesman is rare. Whether he comes, or wins through, too soon or too late, incident determines. Great individuals often destroy more than they have built up by the gap that their death makes in the flow of happening. But the creation of tradition means the elimination of the incident. A tradition breeds a high average, with which the future can reckon no Caesar, but a Senate, no Napoleon, but an incomparable officer-corps. A strong tradition attracts talents from all quarters, and out of small gifts produces great results. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.446 <br /><br />Further, the necessary must be done opportunely namely, while it is a present wherewith the governing power can buy confidence in itself, whereas if it has to be conceded as a sacrifice, it discloses a weakness and excites contempt. Political forms are living forms whose changes inexorably follow a definite direction, and to attempt to prevent this course or to divert it towards some ideal is to confess oneself "out of condition." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.447 <br /><br />But to be politically "in form" means necessarily, amongst other things, an unconditional command of the most modern means. [...] The means of the present are, and will be for many years, parliamentary elections and the press. He may think what he pleases about them, he may respect them or despise them, but he must command them. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.447 <br /><br />Politics, lastly, is the form in which is accomplished the history of a nation within a plurality of nations. The great art is to maintain one's own nation inwardly "in form" for events outside; this is the natural relation of home and foreign politics, holding not only for Peoples and States and Estates, but for living units of every kind, down to the simplest animal swarms and down into the individual bodies. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.448-449 <br /><br />In the early politics of all Cultures the governing powers are pre-established and unquestioned. [...] The change sets in as soon as, with the great city, the Non-Estate, the bourgeoisie, takes over the leading role. [...] Politics becomes awake, not merely comprehended, but reduced to comprehensible ideas. The powers of intellect and money set themselves up against blood and tradition. In place of the organic we have the organized; in -place of the Estate, the Party. A party is not a growth of race, but an aggregate of heads, and therefore as superior to the old estates in intellect as it is poorer in instinct. But always it is the Non-Estate, the unit of protest against the essence of Estate, whose leading minority "educated" and "well-to-do" comes forward as a party with a program, consisting of aims that are not felt but defined, and of the rejection of everything that cannot be rationally grasped. At bottom, therefore, there is only one party, that of the bourgeoisie, the liberal, and it is perfectly conscious of its position as such. [...] The prime Party is that of money and mind, the liberal, the megalopolitan. Herein lies the profound justification, in all Cultures, of the ideas of Aristocracy and Democracy. Aristocracy despises the mind of the cities, Democracy despises the boor and hates the countryside. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.453 <br /><br />Politico-social theory is only one of the bases of party politics, but it is a necessary one. The proud series that runs from Rousseau to Marx has its antitype in the line of the Classical Sophists up to Plato and Zeno. [...] Whether these doctrines are "true" or "false" is we must reiterate and emphasize a question without meaning for political history. The refutation of, say, Marxism belongs to the realm of academic dissertation and public debates, in which everyone is always right and his opponent always wrong. But whether they are effective from when, and for how long, the belief that actuality can be ameliorated by a system of concepts is a real force that politics must reckon with that does matter. We of to-day find ourselves in a period of boundless confidence in the omnipotence of reason. Great general ideas of freedom, justice, humanity, progress are sacrosanct. The great theories are gospels. Their power to convince does not rest upon logical premisses, for the mass of a party possesses neither the critical energy nor the detachment seriously to test them, but upon the sacramental hypostasis in their keywords. At the same time, the spell is limited to the populations of the great cities and the period of Rationalism as the "educated man's religion." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.454-455 <br /><br />The power that these abstract ideals possess, however, scarcely extends in time beyond the two centuries that belong to party politics, and their end comes not from refutation, but from boredom which has killed Rousseau long since and will shortly kill Marx. Men finally give up, not this or that theory, but the belief in theory of any kind and with it the sentimental optimism of an eighteenth century that imagined that unsatisfactory actualities could be improved by the application of concepts. [...] For us, too let there be no mistake about it the age of theory is drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism all arose between about 1750 and 1850. That of Marx is already half a century old, and it has had no successor. Inwardly it means, with its materialist view of history, that Nationalism has reached its extreme logical conclusion; it is therefore an end-term. But, as belief in Rousseau's Rights of Man lost its force from (say) 1848, so belief in Marx lost its force from the World War. [...] Belief in program was the mark and the glory of our grandfathers in our grandsons it will be a proof of provincialism. In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found a new Hither-side that looks for secrets instead of steel-bright concepts and in the end will find them in the deeps of the "Second Religiousness." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.456 <br /><br />In the beginning of a democracy the field belongs to intellect alone. [...] But, meantime, that other democratic quantity lost no time in making its appearance and reminding men of the fact that one can make use of constitutional rights only when one has money. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.458 <br /><br />As everywhere, the elections, from being nominations of class-representatives, have become the battle-ground of party candidates, an arena ready for the intervention of money, and, from Zama onwards, of ever bigger and bigger money. "The greater became the wealth which was capable of concentration in the hands of individuals, the more the fight for political power developed into a question of money." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.460 <br /><br />the "contemporary" English-American politics have created through the press a force-field of world-wide intellectual and financial tensions in which every individual unconsciously takes up the place allotted to him, so that he must think, will, and act as a ruling pe rsonality somewhere or other in the distance thinks fit. [...] Man does not speak to man; the press and its associate, the electrical news-service, keep the waking-consciousness of whole peoples and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous intellectual Something. Money does not pass, politically, from one hand to the other. It does not turn itself into cards and wine. It is turned into force, and its quantity determines the intensity of its working influence. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.461 <br /><br />The scattered sheets of the Age of Enlightenment transformed themselves into "the Press" a term of most significant anonymity. Now the press campaign appears as the prolongation or the preparation of war by other means, and in the course of the nineteenth century the strategy of outpost fights, feints, surprises, assaults, is developed to such a degree that a war may be lost ere the first shot is fired because the Press has won it meantime. To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed. [...] Democracy has by its newspaper completely expelled the book from the mental life of the people. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.462 <br /><br />In the contests of to-day tactics consists in depriving the opponent of this weapon. [...] Here also money triumphs and forces the free spirits into its service. No tamer has his animals more under his power. Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the st reets and hurl itself upon the target indicated, terrifying and breaking windows; a hint to the press-staff and it will become quiet and go home. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.463 <br /><br />A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty. And the other side of this belated freedom it is permitted to everyone to say what he pleases, but the Press is free to take notice of what he says or not. It can condemn any "truth" to death simply by not undertaking its communication to the world a terrible censorship of silence, which is all the more potent in that the masses of newspaper readers are absolutely unaware that it exists. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.463 <br /><br />This is the end of Democracy. If in the world of truths it is -proof that decides all, in that of facts it is success. Success means that one being triumphs over the others. Life has won through, and the dreams of the world-improvers have turned out to be but the tools of master-natures. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.464 <br /><br />Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect. [...] there wakes at last a deep yearning for all old and worthy tradition that still lingers alive. Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depths. Everything in the order of dynastic tradition and old nobility that has saved itself up for the future, everything that there is of h igh money-disdaining ethic, everything that is intrinsically sound enough to be, in Frederick the Great's words, the servant the hard-working, self-sacrificing, caring servant of the State, all that I have described elsewhere in one word as Socialism in contrast to Capitalism all this becomes suddenly the focus of immense life-forces. Caesarism grows on the soil of Democracy, but its roots thread deeply into the underground of blood tradition. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.465 <br /><br />The mighty ones of the future may possess the earth as their private property for the great political form of the Culture is irremediably in ruin but it matters not, for, formless and limitless as their power may be, it has a task. And this task is the unwearying care for this world as it is, which is the very opposite of the interestedness of the money-power age, and demands high honour and conscientiousness. But for this very reason there now sets in the final battle between Democracy and Caesarism, between the leading forces of dictatorial money-economics and the purely political will-to-order of the Caesars.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-23363533796380226902009-12-28T01:42:00.000-08:002009-12-28T01:44:22.690-08:00STATE (B) STATE AND HISTORY 2(2)<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 398-435</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.400-401 <br /><br />The idea of the State had finally mastered the blood of the first Estate, and put it wholly and without reserve at the State's service. "Absolute" means that the great being-stream is as a unit in form, possesses one kind of pulse and instinct, whether the manifestations of that pulse be diplomatic or strategic flair, dignity of moral and manners, or fastidious taste in arts and thoughts. As the contradictory to this grand fact, now, Rationalism appears and spreads, that which has been described above as the community of wakingconsciousness in the educated, whose religion is criticism and whose numina are not deities but concepts. Now begins the influence of books and general theories upon politics in the China of Lao-tse as in the Athens of the Sophists and the Europe of Montesquieu and the public opinion formed by them plants itself in the path of diplomacy as a political magnitude of quite a new sort. It would be absurd to suppose that Pisistratus or Richelieu or even Cromwell determined their actions under the influence of abstract systems, but after the victory of "Enlightenment" that is what actually happens. Nevertheless the historical role of the great concepts of the Civilization is very different from the complexion that they presented in the minds of the ideologues who conceived them. The effect of a truth is always quite different from its tendency. In the world of facts, truths are simply means, effective in so far as they dominate spirits and therefore determine actions. Their historical position is determined not by whether they are deep, correct, or even merely logical, but by whether they tell. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.401-402 <br /><br />But the critical spirit is only one of the two tendencies which emerge out of the chaotic mass of the Non-Estate. Along with abstract concepts abstract Money, money divorced from the prime values of the land along with the study the counting-house, appear as political forces. The two are inwardly cognate and inseparable the old opposition between priest and noble continued, acute as ever, in the bourgeois atmosphere and the city framework. Of the two, moreover, it is the Money that, as pure fact, shows itself unconditionally superior to the ideal truths, which so far as the fact-world is concerned exist (as I have just said) only as catchwords, as means. If by "democracy" we mean the form which the Third Estate as such wishes to impart to public life as a whole, it must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing. It is the tragic comedy of the worldimprovers' and freedom-teachers' desperate fight against money that they are ipso facto assisting money to be effective. Respect for the big number expressed in the principles of equality for all, natural rights, and universal suffrage is just as much a class-ideal of the unclassed as freedom of public opinion (and more particularly freedom of the press) is so. These are ideals, but in actuality the feedom of public opinion involves the preparation of public opinion, which costs money; and the freedom of the press brings with it the question of possession of the press, which again is a matter of money; and with the franchise comes electioneering, in which he who pays the piper calls the tune. The representatives of the ideas look at one side only, while the representatives of money operate with the other. The concepts of Liberalism and Socialism are set in effective motion only by money. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.403-404 <br /><br />But it was on British soil, too, that the rationalistic catchwords had, one and all, sprung up, and their relation to the principles of the Manchester School was intimate Hume was the teacher of Adam Smith. "Liberty" self-evidently meant intellectual and trade freedom. [...] But it was in England too that money was most unhesitatingly used in politics not the bribery of individual high personages which had been customary in the Spanish or Venetian style, but the "nursing" of the democratic forces themselves. In eighteenth-century England, first the Parliamentary elections and then the decisions of the elected Commons were systematically managed by money; England, too, discovered the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread "free" opinion it generates it. Both together constitute liberalism (in the broad sense); that is, freedom from the restrictions of the soil-bound life, be these privileges, forms, or feelings freedom of the intellect for every kind of criticism, freedom of money for every kind of business. But both, too, unhesitatingly aim at the domination of a class, a domination which recognizes no overriding supremacy of the State. Mind and money, being both inorganic, want the State, not as a matured form of high symbolism to be venerated, but as an engine to serve a purpose. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.404 <br /><br />But the well-known saying of Robespierre that "the Government of the Revolution is the desp otism of freedom against tyranny" expresses more than this. It lets out the deep fear that shakes every multitude which, in the presence of grave conjunctures, feels itself "not up to form." A regiment that is shaken in its discipline will readily concede to accidental leaders of the moment powers of an extent and a kind which the legitimate command could never acquire, and which if legitimate would be utterly intolerable. But this, on a larger scale, is the position of every commencing Civilization. Nothing reveals more tellingly the decline of political form than that upspringing of formless powers which we may conveniently designate, from its most conspicuous example, Napoleonism. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.411 <br /><br />If it was an improbable piece of good luck in the destinies of the Classical peoples that Rome was the only city-state to survive the Revolution with an unimpaired constitution, it was, on the contrary, almost a miracle that in our West with its genealogical forms deep-rooted in the idea of duration violent revolution broke out at all, even in one place namely, Paris. It was not the strength, but the weakness of French Absolutism which brought the English ideas, in combination with the power of money, to the point of an explosion which gave living form to the catchwords of the "Enlightenment," which bound together virtue and terror, freedom and despotism, and which echoed still even in the minor catastrophes of 1830 and 1848 and the more recent Socialistic longing for catastrophe. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.415 <br /><br />But to-day Parliamentarism is in full decay. It was a continuation of the Bourgeois Revolution by other means, the revolution of the Third Estate of 1789 brought into legal form and joined with its opponent the Dynasty as one governmental unit. Every modern election, in fact, is a civil war carried on by ballot-box and every sort of spoken and wri tten stimulus, and every great party-leader is a sort of Napoleon. In this form, meant to remain infinitely valid, which is peculiar to the Western Culture and would be nonsensical and impossible in any other, we discern once more our characteristic tendency to infinity, historical foresight and forethought, and will to order the distant future, in this case according to bourgeois standards of the present. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.416 <br /><br />With the beginning of the twentieth century Parliamentarism (even English) is tending rapidly towards taking up itself the role that it once assigned to the kingship. It is becoming an impressive spectacle for the multitude of the Orthodox, while the centre of gravity of big policy, already de jure transferred from the Crown to the people's representatives, is passing de facto from the latter to unofficial groups and the will of unofficial personages. The World War almost completed this development. There is no way back to the old parliamentarism from the domination of Lloyd George and the Napoleonism of the French militarists. And for America, hitherto lying apart and self-contained, rather a region than a State, the parallelism of President and Congress which she derived from a theory of Montesquieu has, with her entry into world politics, become untenable, and must in times of real danger make way for formless powers such as those with which Mexico and South America have long been familiar. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.416 <br /><br />With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find ourselves to-day. It is the transition from Napoleonism to Caearism, a general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two centuries and can be shown to exist in all the Cultures. The Chinese call it Shan-Kwo, the "period of the Contending States" (480-230, corresponding to the Classical 300-50. <br /><br />Quote from : Spengler vol II p.418 <br /><br />This indeed had been manifested earlier in critical times of transition. The epoch of the Fronde, the Ming-shu, the First Tyrannis, when men were not in form, but fought about form, has always thrown up a number of great figures who grew too big for definition and limitation in terms of office. The change from Culture to Civilization, with its typical Napoleonism, does so too. But with this, which is the preface to unredeemed historical formlessness, dawns the real day of the great individual. For us this period attained almost to its climax in the World War; in the Classical World it began with Hannibal, who challenged Rome in the name of Hellenism <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.419-420 <br /><br />The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations that marks the beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists and ideologues what they like - in the world of facts it means the transition from government in the style and pulse of a strict tradition to the sic volo, sic jubeo of the unbridled personal regime. [...] None of the innumerable revolutions of this era which more and more become blind outbreaks of uprooted megalopolitan masses has ever attained, or ever had the possibility of attaining, an aim. What stands is only the historical fact of an accelerated demolition of ancient forms that leaves the path clear for Caesarism. But the same is true also of the wars, in which the armies and their tactical methods become more and more the creation, not of the epoch, but of uncontrolled individual captains, who in many cases discovered their genius very late and by accident. While in 300 there were Roman armies, in 100 there were the armies of Marius and Sulla and Caesar; and Octavian's army, which was composed of Caesar's veterans, led its general much more than it was led by him. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.420 <br /><br />Similarly, in every Culture, the technique of war hesitatingly followed the advance of craftsmanship, until at the beginning of the Civilization it suddenly takes the lead, presses all mechanical possibilities of the time relentlessly into its service, and under pressure of military necessity even opens up new domains hitherto unexploited but at the same time renders largely ineffectual the personal heroism of the thoroughbred, the ethos of the noble, and the subtle intellect of the Late Culture. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.421 <br /><br />The fundamental craving of Civilized mankind for speed, mobility, and masseffects finally combined, in the world of Europe and America, with the Faustian will to domination over Nature and produced dynamic methods of war that even to Frederick the Great would have seemed like lunacy, but to us of to-day, in close proximity to our technics of transportation and industry, are perfectly natural. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.428-429 <br /><br />For us this time of Contending States began with Napoleon and his violentarbitrary government by order. [...] If the nineteenth century has been relatively poor in great wars and revolutions and has overcome its worst crises diplomatically by means of congresses, this has been due precisely to the continuous and terrific war-preparedness which has made disputants, fearful at the eleventh hour of the consequences, postpone the definitive decision again and again, and led to the substitution of chess-moves for war. For this is the century of gigantic permanent armies and universal compulsory service. We ourselves are too near to it to see it under this terrifying aspect. In all worldhistory there is no parallel. Ever since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and latterly millions, of men have stood ready to march, and mighty fleets renewed every ten years have filled the harbours. It is a war without war[...] This is the Faustian, the dynamic, form of "the Contending States" during the first century of that period, but it ended with the explosion of the World War. For the demand of these four years has been altogether too much for the principle of universal service child of the French Revolution, revolutionary through and through, as it is in this form and for all tactical methods evolved from it. The place of the permanent armies as we know them will gradually be taken by professional forces of volunteer war-keen soldiers; and from millions we shall revert to hundreds of thousands. But ipso facto this second century will be one of actually Contending States. These armies are not substitutes for war they are for war, and they want war. Within two generations it will be they whose will prevails over that of all the comfortables put together. In these wars of theirs for the heritage of the whole world, continents will be staked, India, China, South Africa, Russia, Islam called out, new technics and tactics played and counterplayed. The great cosmopolitan foci of power will dispose at their pleasure of smaller states their territory, their economy and their men alike all that is now merely province, passive object, means to end, and its destinies are without importance to the great march of things. [...] Again and again between these catastrophes of blood and terror the cry rises up for reconciliation of the peoples and for peace on earth. [...] Esteem as we may the wish towards all this, we must have the courage to face facts as they are that is the hallmark of men of race-quality and it is by the being of these men that alone history is. Life if it would be great, is hard; it lets choose only between victory and ruin, not between war and peace, and to the victory belong the sacrifices of victory. For that which shuffles querulously and jealously by the side of the events is only literature, written or thought or lived literature mere truths that lose themselves in the moving crush of facts. History has never deigned to take n otice of these propositions. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.430 <br /><br />The history of these times is no longer an intellectual match of wits in elegant forms for pluses and minuses, from which either side can withdraw when it pleases. The alternatives now are to stand fast or to go under there is no middle course. The only moral that the logic of things permits to us now is that of the climber on the face of the crag a moment's weakness and all is over. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.431-432 <br /><br />By the term "Caesarism" I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. [...] Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar [...] At the beginning, where the Civilization is developing to full bloom (today), there stands the miracle of the Cosmopolis, the great petrifact, a symbol of the formless vast, splendid, spreading in insolence. It draws within itself the being-streams of the now impotent countryside, human masses that are wafted as dunes from one to another or flow like loose sand into the chinks of the stone. Here money and intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs. It is the most artificial, the cleverest phenomenon manifested in the light-world of human eyes uncanny, "too good to be true," standing already almost beyond the possibilities of cosmic formation. Presently, however, the idea-less facts come forward again, naked and gigantic. The eternal-cosmic pulse has finally overcome the intellectual tensions of a few centuries. In the form of democracy, money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost its preserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming the Caesar-men. Before them the money collapses. The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.432 <br /><br />Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.434 <br /><br />With world-peace the -peace of high -policies the "sword side" of being retreats and the "spindle side" rules again; henceforth there are only -private histories, private destinies, private ambitions, from top to bottom, from the miserable troubles of fellaheen to the dreary feuds of Caesars for the private possession of the world. The wars of the age of world-peace are private wars, more fearful than any State wars because they are formless. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.435 <br /><br />With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the "eternal" peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are tr ampled on in the conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts for ever. There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual and there alone.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-92091296277443305632009-12-27T14:36:00.001-08:002009-12-27T14:38:37.574-08:00THE STATE (B) STATE AND HISTORY 1(2)<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 361-398</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.361 <br /><br />Within the world-as-history, in which we are so livingly woven that our perception and our reason constantly obey our feelings, the cosmic flowings appear as that which we call actuality, real life, being-streams in bodily form. Their common badge is Direction. But they can be grasped differently according as it is the movement or the thing moved that is looked at. The former aspect we call history and the latter family or stock or estate or people, but the one is only possible and existent through the other. History exists only as the history of something. If we are referring to the history of the great Cultures, then nation is the thing moved. State, status, means condition, and we obtain our impression of the State when, as a Being in moved Form flows past us, we fix in our eyes the Form as such, as something extended and timelessly standing fast, and entirely ignore direction and Destiny. State is history regarded as at the halt, history the State regarded as on the move. The State of actuality is the physiognomy of a historical unit of being; only the planned State of the theorist is a system. A movement has form, and that which is moved is "in form," or, to use another sporting expression, when it is "going all out" it is in perfect condition. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.361-362 <br /><br />The individual class or family is the smallest, the nation the largest unit in the stream of history. Primitive peoples are subject to a movement that is not historical in the higher sense the movement may be a jog-trot or may be a charge, but it has no organic character and no profound importance. Nevertheless, these primitive peoples are in motion through and through, to such an extent, indeed, as to seem perfectly formless to the hasty observer. Fellaheen, on the contrary, are the rigid objects of a movement that conies from outside and impinges on them unmeaningly and fortuitously. The former includes the "State" of the Mycenaean period; that of the Thinite period; that of the Shang dynasty in China up to, say, the migration to Yin (1400); the Frankish realm of Charlemagne; the Visigothic Kingdom to Eurich; and Petrine Russia state-forms often ample and efficient, but still destitute of symbolism and necessity. To the latter belong the Roman, Chinese, and other Imperia, whose form has ceased to have any expressive content whatever. But between primitive and fellah lies the history of the great Culture. A people in the style of a Culture a historical people, that is is called a Nation. A nation, as a living and battling thing, possesses a State not merely as a condition of movement, but also (above all) as an idea. The State in the simplest sense of the term may be as old as free-moving life itself. Swarms and herds of even very lowly animal genera may have "constitutions" of some sort and those of the ants, of the bees, of many fish, or migrating birds, of beavers, have reached an astounding degree of perfection but the State of the grand style is as old as and no older than its two prime Estates, nobility and priesthood. These emerge with the Culture, they vanish into it, their Destinies are to a high degree identical. Culture is the being of nations in State-form. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.362 <br /><br />A people is as State, a kindred is as family, "in form" that is, as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history, public and private life, res publica and res privata. And both, moreover, are symbols of care. The woman is world-history. By conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is "in form" as marriage. The man, however, makes history, which is an unending battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is the other grand emblem of the will-to-duration. A people "in condition" is originally a band warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man, it is Care for the preservation of the whole (including the spiritual self-preservation called honour and self-respect), the thwarting of attacks, the foreseeing of dangers, and, above all, the positive aggressiveness which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.363 <br /><br />Plant-life is only plant-life in relation to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition one another. A people is only really such in relation to other peoples, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defence, hostility and war. War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat. A people shapes history inasmuch as it is "in condition" for the task of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history which gets it into this "condition," in which alone it becomes creative and an outward history, which consists in this creation. Peoples as State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They are Destiny. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.364 <br /><br />But in all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To "have the right" is an expression of power. This is a historical fact that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right, therefore, as in other things, being and wakingbeing, Destiny and Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic moral of good and evil belongs the moral distinction of right and wrong, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all philosophies but the fact-world of history knows only the success which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power of the moment in order to remain righteous then, certainly, his or its theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth, but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to another life-power that has better understood realities. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.366 <br /><br />It is clear, then, that on the heights of history two such life-forms, Estate and State, contend for supremacy, both being-streams of great inward form and symbolic force, each resolved to make its own destiny the Destiny of the whole. That if we try to understand the matter in its d epths and unreservedly put aside our everyday conceptions of people, economy, society, and politics is the meaning of the opposition between the social and the political conduct of events. Social and political ideas do not begin to be differentiated till a great Culture has dawned, or even till feudalism is declining and the lord-vassal relation represents the social, and the king-people relation the political, side. But the social powers of the early time (nobility and priesthood) not less actively than those of the later (money and mind) and the vocational groups of the craftsmen and officials and workers, too, as they were rising to their power in the growing cities sought, each for itself, to subordinate the State-ideal to its own Estate-ideal, or more usually to its estate interests. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.367 <br /><br />We are thoroughly right therefore in feeling a distinction between State-history and class-history, between political (horizontal) and social (vertical) history, war and revolution. But it is a grave error of modern doctrinaires to regard the spirit of domestic history as that of history in general. World-history is, and always will be, State-history. The inner constitution of a nation aims always at being "in condition" for the outer fight (diplomatic, military, or economic) and anyone who treats a nation's constitution as an aim and ideal in itself is merely ruining the nation's body. But, from the other point of view, it falls to the inner-political pulsesense of a ruling stratum (whether belonging to the First or to the Fourth Estate) so to manage the internal class-oppositions that the focus and ideas of the nation are not tied up in party conflict, nor treason to the country thought of as an ace of trumps. And here it becomes manifest that the State and the first Estate are cognate down to the roots akin, not merely by reason of their symbolism of Time and Care, their common relation to race and the facts of genealogical s uccession, to the family and to the primary impulses of all peasantry <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.368-369 <br /><br />It is, however, a distinction of quite another kind that holds as between the State-idea and the idea of any one of the other Estates. All these are inwardly alien to the State as such, and the State-ideals that they fashion out of their own lives have not grown up out of the spirit and the political forces of actual history hence, indeed, the conscious emphasis with which they are labelled as social. And while in Early times the situation is simply that historical facts oppose the Church-community in its efforts to actualize religious ideals, in Late periods both the business ideal of the free economic life, and the Utopian ideal of the enthusiast who would actualize this or that abstraction, also come into the field. But in the historical world there are no ideals, but only facts no truths, but only facts. There is no reason, no honesty, no equity, no final aim, but only facts, and anyone who does not realize this should write books on politics - let him not try to make politics. In the real world there are no states built according to ideals, but only states that have grown, and these are nothing but living peoples "in form." No doubt it is "the form impressed that living doth itself unfold," but the impress has been that of the blood and beat of a being, wholly instinctive and involuntary; and as to the unfolding, if it is guided by the master of politics, it takes the direction inherent in the blood; if by the idealist, that dictated by his own convictions in other words, the way to nullity. But the destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or structure, but that of their inner authority, which cannot in the long run be maintained by material means, but only by a belief of friend and foe in their effectiveness. The decisive problems lie, not in the working-out of constitutions, but in the organization of a sound working government; not in the distribution of political rights according to "just" principles (which at bottom are simply the idea that a class forms of its own legitimate claims), but in the efficient pulse of the whole (efficient in the sense that the play of muscle and sinew is efficient when an extended racehorse nears the winning-post), in that rhythm which attracts even strong genius into syntony; not, lastly, in any world-alien moral, but in the steadiness, sureness, and superiority of political leadership. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.370 <br /><br />Every State that emerges in history exists as it is but once and for a moment; the next moment it has, unperceived, become different, whatever the rigidity of its legal-constitutional crust. Therefore, words like "republic," "absolutism," "democracy," mean something different in every instance, and what turns them into catchwords is their use as definite concepts by philosophers and ideologues. A history of States is physiognomic and not systematic. Its business is not to show how "humanity" advances to the conquest of its eternal rights, to freedom and equality, to the evolving of a super-wise and super-just State, but to describe the political units that really exist in the fact-world, how they grow and flourish and fade, and how they are really nothing but actual life "in form." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.371 <br /><br />History in the high style begins in every Culture with the feudal State, which is not a State in the coming sense of the word, but an ordering of the common life with reference to an Estate. The noblest fruit of the soil, its race in the proudest sense, here builds itself up in a rank-order from the simple knighthood to the primus inter pares, the feudal Overlord amongst his Peers. This sets in simultaneously with the architecture of the great cathedrals and the P yramids the stone and the blood elevated into symbols, the one meaning, the other being. The idea of feudalism, which has dominated all Springtimes, is the transition from the primitive, purely practical and factual, relationship of potentate to those who obey him (whether they have chosen him or have been subdued by him) into the private-law (and, therefore, deeply symbolical) relation of the lord to the vassal. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.373 <br /><br />The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself not merely in the West, but in any Culture came out in the struggle between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.376 <br /><br />What this fall of Papacy and Empire meant was the victory of State over Estate. At the root of the feudal system there had been the feeling that the purpose of existence was that a "life" should be led in the light of what it meant. History was exhaustively comprised in the destinies of noble blood. But now the feeling sprang up that there was something else besides, something to which even nobility was subordinate, and which it shared with all other classes (whether of status or of vocation), something intangible, an idea. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.378 <br /><br />The combination of both elements produces the idea of Dynasty. This is so deeply rooted in the Cosmic and so closely interwoven into the factual web of historical life that the State-ideas of each and all the Cultures are modifications of this one principle, from the passionate affirmative of the Faustian to the resolute negative of the Classical Soul. The rip ening of the State-idea of a Culture is associated with the city and even the adolescence of the city. Nations, historical peoples, are town-building peoples. The capital takes the place of the castle and the palace as the centre of high history, and in it the feeling of the exercise of power, Themis, transforms itself into that of government, Dike. Here feudal unity is inwardly overcome by national, even in the consciousness of the First Estate itself, and here the bare fact of rulership elevates itself into the symbol of Sovereignty. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.385 <br /><br />With the beginning of the Late period there is a decisive turn, where city and country are in equilibrium and the powers proper to the city, money and brains, have become so strong that they feel themselves, as non-estate, an equal match for the old Estates. It is the moment when the State-idea finally rises superior to the Estates and begins to set up in their place the concept of the Nation. The State has fought and won to its rights along a line of advance from feudal union to the aristocratic State. In the latter the Estates exist only with reference to the State, instead of vice versa, but, on the other hand, the disposition of things is such that the Government only meets the governed nation when and in so far as the nation is class-ordered. Everyone belongs to the nation, but only an elite to the classes, and these alone count politically. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.386 <br /><br />In the West this struggle of the old Estates against the State-power took the form of the Fronde. In the Classical world, where there was no dynasty to represent the future and the aristocracy alone had political existence, we find that a dynastic or quasi-dynastic embodiment of the State-idea actually formed itself, and, supported by the non-privileged part of the nation, raised this latter for the first time to power. That was th e mission of the Tyrannis. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.387 <br /><br />The sixth-century Tyrannis brought the Polis-idea to its conclusions and created the constitutional concept of the Citizen, the Polites, the Civis, the sum of these, irrespective of their classprovenance, forming the soma of the city-state. When, therefore, the oligarchy contrived to win after all thanks once more to the Classical craving for the present, and the consequent fear and hatred evoked by the quasi-will-to-duration of the dynasts the concept of the citizen was there, firmly established, and the non-patrician had learned to regard himself as an estate vis-b-vis a "rest." He had become a political party the word "democracy" (in its specifically Classical sense) now acquired a really serious content and what he set himself to do was, no longer to come to the aid of the State, but to be himself the State as the nobility had been before. He began to count money and heads, for the money-census and the general franchise are alike bourgeois weapons whereas an aristocracy does not count, but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.397-398 <br /><br />But Rome was unique in all Classical history in this equilibrium of Senate and Tribunate. Everywhere else it was a matter not of swaying balance, but of sheer alternatives, namely Oligarchy or Ochlocracy. The absolute Polis and the Nation which was identical with it were accepted as given premisses, but of the inward forms none possessed stability. The victory of one party meant the abolition of all the institutions of the other, and people became accustomed to regard nothing as either venerable enough or useful enough to be exempt from the chances of the day's battle. [...] With this, the future was set for Rome. It was the one state in which political passions had persons only, and no longer institutions, as their target; the only one w hich was firmly in "form." Senatus Populusque Romanus that is, Senate and Tribunate was the form of forged bronze that no party would henceforward batter, whereas all the rest, with the narrowness of their individual power-horizons in the world of Classical states, were only able to prove once more the fact that domestic politics exist simply in order that foreign politics may be possible.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-19798901121329297442009-12-26T04:33:00.000-08:002009-12-26T04:35:32.100-08:00THE STATE (A) THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 327-358</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.327 <br /><br />A fathomless secret of the cosmic Sowings that we call Life is their separation into two sexes. Already in the earth-bound existence-streams of the plant world they are trying to part from one another, as the symbol of the flower tells us into a something that is this existence and a something that keeps it going. Animals are free, little worlds in a big world the cosmic closed off as microcosms and set up against the macrocosm. And, more and more decisively as the animal kingdom unfolds its history, the dual direction of dual being, of the masculine and the feminine, manifests itself. The feminine stands closer to the Cosmic. It is rooted deeper in the earth and it is immediately involved in the grand cyclic rhythms of Nature. The masculine is freer, more animal, more mobile as to sensation and understanding as well as otherwise more awake and more tense. The male livingly experiences Destiny, and he comprehends Causality, the causal logic of the Become. The female, on the contrary, is herself Destiny and Time and the organic logic of the Becoming, and for that very reason the principle of Causality is for ever alien to her. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.327-328 <br /><br />The man makes History, the woman is History. [...] This history, too, is not without its battles and its tragedies. Woman in childbed wins through to her victory. The Aztecs the Ro mans of the Mexican Culture honoured the woman in labour as a battling warrior, and if she died, she was interred with the same formulas as the fallen hero. Policy for Woman is eternally the conquest of the Man, through whom she can become mother of children, through whom she can become History and Destiny and Future. The target of her profound shyness, her tactical finesse, is ever the father of her son. The man, on the contrary, whose centre of gravity lies essentially in the other kind of History, wants that son as his son, as inheritor and carrier of his blood and historical tradition. Here, in man and in woman, the two kinds of History are fighting for power. Woman is strong and wholly what she is, and she experiences the Man and the Sons only in relation to herself and her ordained role. In the masculine being, on the contrary, there is a certain contradiction; he is this man, and he is something else besides, which woman neither understands nor admits, which she feels as robbery and violence upon that which to her is holiest. This secret and fundamental war of the sexes has gone on ever since there were sexes, and will continue silent, bitter, unforgiving, pitiless while they continue. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.330-331 <br /><br />There are streams of being which are "in form" in the same sense in which the term is used in sports. [...] An art-period is in form when its tradition is second nature, as counterpoint was to Bach. An army is in form when it is like the army of Napoleon at Austerlitz and the army of Moltke at Sedan. Practically everything that has been achieved in world-history, in war and in that continuation of war by intellectual means that we call politics; in all successful diplomacy, tactics, strategy; in the competition of states or social classes or parties; has been the product of living unities that found themselves "in form." The word for race- or breed-education is "training" (Zucht, Zuchtung), as against the shaping (Bildung) which creates communities of waking-conciousness on a basis of uniform teachings or beliefs. Books, for example, are shaping agents, while the constant felt pulse and harmony of milieu into which one feels oneself, lives oneself like a novice or a page of early Gothic times are training influences. The "good form" and ceremonies of a given society are sense-presentations of the beat of a given species of Being, and to master them one must have the beat of them. Hence women, as more instinctive and nearer to cosmic rhythms, adapt themselves more readily than men to the forms of a new milieu. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.333 <br /><br />But, in sum, "caste" is a word that has been at least as much abused as it has been used. There were no castes in the Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt, nor in India before Buddha, nor in China before Han times. It is only in very Late conditions that they appear, and then we find them in all Cultures. [...] The distinction between Estate and Caste is that between earliest Culture and latest Civilisation. In the rise of the prime Estates noble and priest the Culture is unfolding itself, while the castes are the expression of its definitive fellah-state. The Estate is the most living of all, Culture launched on the path of fulfilment, "the form that living must itself unfold." The caste is absolute finished-ness, the phase in which development has been succeeded by immutable fixation. [...] Within every Culture, moreover while peasantry is a piece of pure nature and growth and, therefore, a completely impersonal manifestation nobility and priesthood are the results of high breeding and forming and therefore express a thoroughly personal Culture, which, by the height of its form, rejects not merely barbarians, but presently also all who are not of their status, as a residue regarded by the nobility as the "people" and by clergy as the "laity." And this style of personality is the material that, when the fellah-age arrives, petrifies into the type of a caste, which thereafter endures unaltered for centuries. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.334 <br /><br />Later, with the cities, but younger than they, burgherdom, bourgeoisie, arises as the "Third Estate." The burgher, too, now looks with contempt upon the countryside, which lies about him dull, unaltered, and patient, and in contrast to which he feels himself more awake and freer and therefore further advanced on the road of the Culture. He despises also the primary estates, "squire and parson," as something lying intellectually below him and historically behind him. Yet, as compared with these two, the burgher is, as the boor was, a residue, a non-estate. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.335 <br /><br />It is an idea that lies at the base of these two prime Estates, and only these. [...] Every nobility is a living symbol of Time, every priesthood of Space. Destiny and sacred Causality, History and Nature, the When and the Where, race and language, sex-life and feeling-life all these attain in them to the highest possible expression. The noble lives in a world of facts, the priest in one of truths; the one has shrewdness, the other knowledge; the one is a doer, the other a thinker. Aristocratic world-feeling is essentially pulse-sense; priestly world-feeling proceeds entirely by tensions. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.336 <br /><br />Of the two, moreover, it is the nobility that is the true Estate, the sum of blood and race, being-stream in the fullest imaginable form. And therefore nobility is a higher peasantry. Even in 1250 the West had a widespread proverb: "One who ploughs in the forenoon jousts in the afternoon," and it was quite usual for a knight to marry the daughter of a peasant. In contrast to the cathedral, the castle was a development, by way of the country noble's house of Frankish times, from the peasant-dwelling. [...] In all Cultures nobility and peasantry appear in forms of family descent, and language itself connects them with the sexes, through which life propagates itself, has history, and is history. And as woman is history, the inward rank of peasant and noble families is determined by how much of race their women have in them, how far they are Destiny. And, therefore, there is deep meaning in the fact that the purer and more race-pervaded world-history is, the more the stream of its public life passes into and adapts itself to the private lives of individual great families. This, of course, is the basis of the dynastic principle, and not only that, but the basis of the idea of world-historical personality. The existence of entire states comes to depend on a few private destinies, vastly magnified. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.337 <br /><br />Of all this the priesthood (and philosophy so far as it is priesthood) is the direct negative. The Estate of pure waking-consciousness and eternal truths combats time and race and sex in every sense. Man as peasant or noble turns towards, man as priest turns away from, woman. Aristocracy runs the danger of dissipating and losing the broad being-stream of public life in the petty channels of its minor ancestors and relatives. The true priest, on the other hand, refuses in principle to recognize private life, sex, family, the "house." For the man of race death begins to be real and appalling only when it is death without heirs Icelandic sagas no less than Chinese ancestor-worship teach us this. He does not entirely die who lives on in sons and nephews. But for the true priest media vita in morte sumus; what he shall bequeath is intellectual, and rejected woman bears no part in it. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.339 <br /><br />But Civilization, the real "return to Nature," is the extinction of nobility not as physical stock (which would not matter), but as living tradition and the supplanting of destiny-pulse by causal intelligence. With this, nobility becomes no more than a prefix. And, for that very reason, Civilized history is superficial history, directed disjointedly to obvious aims, and so become formless in the cosmic, dependent on the accident of great individuals, destitute of inward sureness, line, and meaning. With Caesarism history relapses back into the historyless, the old beat of primitive life, with endless and meaningless battles for material power, such as those of the Roman soldieremperors of the third century and the corresponding "Sixteen States" of China (265-420), which differ only in unessentials from the events of beast-life in a jungle. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.340-341 <br /><br />The priest circumscribes the world-as-nature and deepens his picture of it by thinking into it. The noble lives in the world-as-history and deepens it by altering its picture. Both evolve towards the great tradition, but the evolution of the one comes of shaping and that of the other from training. This is a fundamental difference between the two Estates, and consequently only one of them is truly an Estate, and the other only appears to be such because of the completeness of the contrast. The field of effect of breed and training is the blood, and they pass on, therefore, from the fathers to the sons. Shaping (Bildung), on the other hand, presupposes talents, and consequently a true and strong priesthood is always a sum of individual gifts a community of waking-consciousness having no relation to origin in the race sense; and thus, in this respect as in others, it is a negation of Time and History. Intellectual affinity and blood-affinity ponder and probe into the depths of these contrasted expressions! Heritable priesthood is a contradiction in terms. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.342 <br /><br />The one is historical through and through, and recognizes rank-distinctions and privileges as actual and axiomatic. Honour is always class-honour there is no such thing as an "honour of humanity." The duel is not an obligation of unfree persons. Every man, be he Bedouin or Samurai or Corsican, peasant or workman, judge or bandit, has his own binding notions of honour, loyalty, courage, revenge, that do not apply to other kinds of life. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.343 <br /><br />While Priesthood is microcosmic and animal-like, Nobility is cosmic and plantlike (hence its profound connexion with the land). It is itself a plant, strongly rooted in the soil, established on the soil in this, as in so many other respects, a supreme peasantry. It is from this kind of cosmic boundness that the idea of property arises, which to the microcosm as such, freely moving in space, is wholly alien. Property is a primary feeling and not a concept; it belongs to Time and History and Destiny, and not to Space and Causality. It cannot be logically based, but it is there. "Having" begins with the plant, and propagates itself in the history of higher mankinds just to the precise extent that history contains plant-character and race. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.345 <br /><br />As the Culture rises to its height, these two primary urges trend widely apart, and hostility develops between them. The history of this hostility is almost the same thing as world-history. From the feeling of power come conquest and -politics and law; from that of spoil, trade and economy and money. Law is the property of the powerful. Their law is the law of all. Money is the strongest weapon of the acquiring: with it he subdues the world. Economics likes and intends a state that is weak and subservient to it. Politics demands that economic life shall adapt itself to and within the State Adam Smith and Friedrich List, Capitalism and Socialism. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.347 <br /><br />First, nobility and priesthood arise out of the open landscape, and figure the pure symbolism of Being and Waking-Being, Time and Space. Then out of the one under the aspect of booty, and out of the other under the aspect of research, there develop doubled types of lower symbolic force, which in the urban Late periods rise to prepotency in the shapes of economy and science. In these two beingstreams the ideas of Destiny and Causality are thought out to their limit, unrelentingly and anti-traditionally. Forces emerge which are separated by a deadly enmity from the old class-ideals of heroism and saintliness these forces are money and intellect, and they are related to those ideals as the city to the country. Henceforward property is called riches, and world-outlook knowledge a desanctified Destiny and a profane Causality. But science is in contradiction with Nobility too, for this does not prove or investigate, but is. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.348 <br /><br />Wholly outside the category of the true Estates are the calling-classes of the craftsmen, officials, artists, and labourers, whose organization in guilds (e.g., of smiths in China, of scribes in Egypt, and of singers in the Classical world) dates from pristine antiquity, and who because of their professional segregation (which sometimes goes as far as to cut off their connubium with others) actually develop into genuine tribes, as, for instance, the Falasha of Abyssinia and some of the Sudra classes named in Manu's code. Their separation is due merely to their technical accomplishments and therefore not to their being vessels of the symbolism of Time and Space. Their tradition, likewise, is limited to their techniques and does not refer to a customary-ethic or a moral of their own, such as is always found in economy and science as such. As derived from a nobility, judges and officers are classes, whereas officia ls are a profession; as derived from priesthood, scholars are a class, while artists are a profession. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.350 <br /><br />Every new Culture has potentially its nobility and its priesthood. [...] But the form in which, and the force with which, these Estates first realized themselves and then took charge of the course of history - shaped it, carried it, and even represented it in their own destinies depend upon the Prime-symbol on which each individual Culture, with its entire formlanguage, is based. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.354 <br /><br />Now supervened the city with its own soul, first emancipating itself from the soul of the countryside, then setting up as an equal to it, and finally seeking to suppress and extinguish it. But this evolution accomplished itself in kinds of life, and it also, therefore, is part of the history of the estates. The city-life as such emerges through the inhabitants of these small settlements acquiring a common soul, and becoming conscious that the life within is something different from the life outside and at once the spell of personal freedom begins to operate and to attract within the walls life-streams of more and more new kinds. There sets in a sort of passion for becoming urban and for propagating urban life. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.357 <br /><br />With the close of the Late period of every Culture the history of its estates also comes to a more or less violent end. The mere desire to live in rootless freedom prevails over the great imperative Culture-symbols, which a mankind now wholly dominated by the city no longer comprehends or tolerates. Finance sheds every trace of feeling for earth-bound immovable values, and scientific criticism every residue of piety. Another such victory also, in a measure, is the liberation of the peasant, which consists in relieving him from the pressure of servage, but hands him over to the power of money, which now proceeds to turn the land into movable property [...] This Plebs is the Third Estate in the form in which it is constitutionally recognised as a unit [...] But the Plebs, as Third Estate, as residue, is only susceptible of negative definition as meaning everyone who does not belong to the land-nobility or is not the incumbent of a great priestly office. [...] Outside politics that is, socially the plcbs, as a unit distinguished from nobility and priesthood, has no existence, but falls apart at once into special callings that are perfectly distinct in interests. It is a Party, and what it stands for as such is freedom in the urban sense of the word. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.358 <br /><br />The Third Estate, without proper inward unity, was the non-estate the protest, in estate-form, against the existence of estates; not against this or that estate, but against the symbolic view of life in general. It rejects all differences not justified by reason or practically useful. And yet it does mean something itself, and means it very distinctly the city-life as estate in contradistinction to that of the country, freedom as a condition in contrast to attachment. But, looked at from within its own field, it is by no means the unclassified residue that it appears in the eyes of the primary estates. The bourgeoisie has definite limits; it belongs to the Culture; it embraces, in the best sense, all who adhere to it, and under the name of people, populus, demos, rallies nobility and priesthood, money and mind, craftsman and wage-earner, as constituents of itself. This is the idea that Civilization finds prevailing when it comes on the scene, and this is what it destroys by its notion of the Fourth Estate, the Mass, which rejects the Culture and its matured forms, lock, stock, and barrel. It is the absolute of formlessness, persecuting with its hate every sort of form, every dist inction of rank, the orderliness of property, the orderliness of knowledge. It is the new nomadism of the Cosmopolis, for which slaves and barbarians in the Classical world, Sudras in the Indian, and in general anything and everything that is merely human, provide an undifferentiated floating something that falls apart the moment it is born, that recognizes no past and possesses no future. Thus the Fourth Estate becomes the expression of the passing of a history over into the historyless. The mass is the end, the radical nullity.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-17279298210293194402009-12-25T15:27:00.000-08:002009-12-25T15:30:05.352-08:00PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (C) PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 2(2)<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 295-323</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.295-296 <br /><br />In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaning the bringing back of the religion to the purity of its original idea as this manifested itself in the great centuries of the beginning. In no Culture is this movement missing, whether we know about it, as in the case of Egypt, or not, as in that of China. It means, further, that the city and with it the city-spirit are gradually freeing themselves from the soul of the country-side, setting up in opposition to the latter's all-power and reconsidering the feelings and thoughts of the primitive pre-urban time with reference to its present self. It was Destiny and not intellectual necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Faustian worlds, to the budding-off of new religions at this point. We know to-day that, under Charles V, Luther was within an ace of becoming the reformer of the whole undivided Church. For Luther, like all reformers in all Cultures, was not the first, but the last of a grand succession which led from the great ascetics of the open land to the city-priest. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.297 <br /><br />However widely the Reformations of the various Cultures may differ amongst themselves, the purpose is the same for all to bring the faith, which had strayed all too far into the world-as-history and time-secularism "Zeitlichkeit" back into the realm o f Nature, clean waking-consciousness, and pure causecontrolled and cause-pervaded Space; out of the world of economics ("wealth") into that of science ("poverty"), out of patrician and cavalier society (which was also that of Renaissance and Humanism) into that of spirituals and ascetics; and lastly (as significant as it is impossible) out of the political ambitions of vestmented human thoroughbreds into the realm of holy Causality that is not of this world. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.299 <br /><br />The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of the Gothic myth the cult of Mary, the veneration of the saints, the relics, the pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and witchcraft remained, for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner torture, and now that torture at last rose to its supreme horror. Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exorcism, the veritable sacrament of devil-banning. There grew up a large, purely Protestant literature about the Devil. Out of the Gothic wealth of colour, there remained black; of its arts, music, in particular organ-music. But in the place of the mythic light-world, whose helpful nearness the faith of the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out of longburied depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so stealthily that even to-day its true significance is not yet realized. The expressions "folktale" and "popular custom" are inadequate: it is a true Myth that inheres in the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house-sprites, and sweeping clouds of the disembodied, and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjurings<br />that are still practised with a pious awe. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.300 <br /><br />Intellectual creativeness of the Late period begins, not with, but after, the Reformation. Its most typical creation is free science. Even for Luther learning was still essential ly the "handmaid of theology," and Calvin had the freethinking doctor Servet burnt. The thought of the Springtimes Faustian like Egyptian, Vedic, and Orphic had felt its vocation to be the justification of faith by criticism. If criticism did not succeed, the critical method must be wrong. Knowledge was faith justified, not faith controverted. Now, however, the critical powers of the city intellect have become so great that it is no longer content to affirm, but must test. [...] Within Baroque philosophy, Western natural-science stands by itself. No other Culture possesses anything like it, and assuredly it must have been from its beginnings, not a "handmaid of theology," but the servant of the technical Will-to-Power, oriented to that end both mathematically and experimentally from its very foundations a practical mechanics. And as it is firstly technique and only secondly theory, it must be as old as Faustian man himself. Accordingly, we find technical works of an astounding energy of combination even by 1000. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.301 <br /><br />Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment for ever, but not so the Faustian symbol of the machine, which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the twelfth century and made "Perpetuum mobile" the Prometheus-idea of the Western intellect. For us the first thing is ever the working hypothesis the very kind of thought-product that is meaningless to other Cultures. It is an astounding fact (to which, however, we must accustom ourselves) that the idea of immediately exploiting in practice any knowledge of natural relations that may be acquired is alien to every sort of mankind except the Faustian (and those who, like Japanese, Jews, and Russians, have to-day come under the intellectual spell of its Civilization). The very notion of the working hypothesis implicitly contains a dynamic lay-out of the universe. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.302 <br /><br />Just as the Classical mind felt Prometheus's defiance of the gods as "hybris," so our Baroque felt the machine as diabolical. 1 The spirit of Hell had betrayed to man the secret of mastering the world-mechanism and even of himself enacting the part of God. And hence it is that all purely priestly natures, that live wholly in the world of the spirit and expect nothing of "this world" and notably the idealist philosophers, the Classicists, the Humanists, and even Nietzsche have for technique nothing but silent hostility. Every Late philosophy contains this critical protest against the uncritical intuitiveness of the Spring. But this criticism of the intellect that is sure of its own superiority affects also faith itself and evokes the one great creation in the field of religion that is the peculiarity of the Late period every Late period namely, Puritanism. Puritanism manifests itself in the army of Cromwell and his Independents, iron, Bible-firm, psalm-singing as they rode into battle; in the ranks of the Pythagoreans, who in the bitter earnest of their gospel of duty wrecked gay Sybaris and branded it for ever as the city without morals; in the armies of the early Caliphs, which subdued not only states, but souls. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.303 <br /><br />We have to emancipate ourselves from the surfaces of history and, especially, to thrust aside the artificial fences in which the methodology of Western sciences has paddocked it before we can see that Pythagoras, Mohammed, and Cromwell embody one and the same movement in three Cultures. Pythagoras was not a philosopher. According to all statements of the Pre-Socratics, he was a saint, prophet and founder of a fanatically religious society that forced its truths upon the people around it by every political and military means. The destruction of Sybaris by Croton an event which, we may be sure, has survived in historical memory only because it was the climax of a wild re ligious war was an explosion of the same hate that saw in Charles I and his gay Cavaliers not merely doctrinal error, but also worldly disposition as something that must be destroyed root and branch. A myth purified and conceptually fortified, combined with rigorous ethical precepts, imbued the Pythagoreans with the conviction that they would attain salvation before all other men. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.303-304 <br /><br />Islam was no more a religion of the desert in particular than Zwingli's faith was a religion of the high mountains in particular. It is incident, and no more, that the Puritan movement for which the Magian world was ripe proceeded from a man of Mecca and not from a Monophysite or a Jew. For in the northern Arabian desert there were the Christian states of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, and in the Sabaean South there were religious wars waged between Christians and Jews that involved the world of states from Assuan to the Sassanid Empire. [...] Mecca was a little island of ancient Arabian paganism in the midst of a world of Jews and Christians, a mere relic that had long been mined by the ideas of the great Magian religions. The little of this paganism that filtered into the Koran was later explained away by the Commentary of the Sunna and its Syro-Mesopotamian intellect. At most Islam was a new religion only to the same extent as Lutheranism was one. Actually, it was the prolongation of the great early religions. Equally, its expansion was not (as is even now imagined) a "migration of peoples" proceeding from the Arabian Peninsula, but an onslaught of enthusiastic believers, which like an avalanche bore along with it Christians, Jews, and Mazdaists and set them at once in its front rank as fanatical Moslems. It was Berbers from the homeland of St. Augustine who conquered Spain, and Persians from Irak who drove on to the Oxus. The enemy of yesterday became the front-rank comrade of tomorrow. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.305 <br /><br />But in Puritanism there is hidden already the seed of Rationalism, and after a few enthusiastic generations have passed, this bursts forth everywhere and makes itself supreme. This is the step from Cromwell to Hume. Not cities in general, not even the great cities, but a few particular cities now become the theatre of intellectual history Socratic Athens, Abbassid Baghdad, eighteenthcentury London and Paris. "Enlightenment" is the cliche of that time. The sun bursts forth but what is it that clears off the heavens of the critical consciousness to make way for that sun? <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.306-307 <br /><br />Confucius belongs to the Chinese "eighteenth century" through and through. Lao-tse (who despised him) stands at a midpoint in the Taoist movement, which manifested traits of Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism in turn, and both finally propagated a practical world-tone based upon a wholly mechanistic world-view. The word "tao" underwent in the Late period of China just the same continuous alteration of its fundamental content, and in the same mechanistic direction, as the word "Logos" in the history of Classical thought from Heraclitus to Posidonius, and as the word "Force" between Galileo's day and ours. That which once had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this "religionof educated people," Nature and Virtue but this Nature is a reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge. Confucius and Buddha, Socrates and Rousseau are at one in this. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.308-309 <br /><br />Two centuries after Puritanism the mechanistic conception of the world stands at its zenith. It is the effective religion of the time. Even those who still thought themselves to be religious in the old sense, to be "believers in God," were only mistaking the world in which their waking-consciousness was mirr oring itself. Religious truths were always in their understanding mechanistic truths, and in general it was only the habit of traditional words that imparted a colour-wash of myth to a Nature that was in reality regarded scientifically. Culture is ever synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban country-side, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect, and closes with a finale of materialism in the world-cities. But even the last chords arc strictly in the key of the whole. There are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of myth-shapes, cleared of the elements of experience and contemplative vision and viewed mechanistically. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.309 <br /><br />Unique and self-contained, again, is the Faustian materialism, in the narrower sense of the word. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached fulfilment. The whole world a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it this is what distinguishes our particular "return to Nature" from all others. [...] But the grand intellectual myth of Energy and Mass is at the same time a vast working hypothesis. It draws the picture of nature in such a way that men can use it.The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, development, progress, and put into the centre of the system; the Will is an albumen-process; and all these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism, and what not are elevated into the fitness-moral which is the beacon of American business men, British politicians, and German progress-Philistines alike and turns out, in the last analysis, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification by faith. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.310-311 <br /><br />This next phase I call the Second Religiousness. It appears in all Civilizations as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass, slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which time-periods cease to mean anything. (So far as the Western Civilization is concerned, therefore, we are still many generations short of that point.) The Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the final political constitution of Late Civilizations; it becomes visible, therefore, in the Augustan Age of the Classical and about the time of Shi-hwang-ti's time in China. In both phenomena the creative young strength of the Early Culture is lacking. But both have their greatness nevertheless. That of the Second Religiousness consists in a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness the piety that impressed Herodotus in the (Late) Egyptians and impresses West-Europeans in China, India, and Islam and that of Caesarism consists in its unchained might of colossal facts. But neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of the Roman Imperium is there anything primary and spontaneous. Nothing is built up, no idea unfolds itself it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the first, genuine, young religiousness only otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism's fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be found in every Culture at this phase. [...] But it is not the religious pastimes of educated and literature-soaked cliques, still less is it the intellect, that gives rise to the Second Religiousness. Its source is the naive belief that arises, unremarked but spontaneous, among the masses that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality (as to which formal proofs are presently regarded as barren and tiresome wordjugglery), and an equally na'ive heart-need reverently responding to the myth with a cult. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.314 <br /><br />In the end Second Religiousness issues in the fellah-religions. Here the opposition between cosmopolitan and provincial piety has vanished again, as completely as that between primitive and higher Culture. What this means the conception of the fellah people, discussed in an earlier chapter, tells us. Religion becomes entirely historyless; where formerly decades constituted an epoch, now whole centuries pass unimportantly, and the ups and downs of superficial changes only serve to show the unalterable finality of the inner state. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.315 <br /><br />The religion of Jewry, too, is a fellah-religion since the time of Jehuda ben Halevi who (like his Islamic teacher, Al Ghazali) regarded scientific philosophy with an unqualified scepticism, and in the Kuzari (1140) refused to it any role save that of handmaid of the orthodox theology. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.316 <br /><br />The Jewish Consensus, like the Persian, Islamic, and Byzantine, now advances to an urban and intellectual awareness, and thenceforward it is master of the forms of city-economics and city-science. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.317 <br /><br />But an entirely new situation was created when, from about the year 1000, the Western portion of the Consensus found itself suddenly in the field of the young Western Culture. The Jews, like the Parsees, the Byzantines, and the Moslems, had become by then civilized and cosmopolitan, whereas the German-Roman world liv ed in the townless land, and the settlements that had just come (or were coming) into existence around monasteries and market-places were still many generations short of possessing souls of their own. While the Jews were already almost fellaheen, the Western peoples were still almost primitives. The Jew could not comprehend the Gothic inwardness, the castle, the Cathedral; nor the Christian the Jew's superior, almost cynical, intelligence and his finished expertness in "money-thinking." There was mutual hate and contempt, due not to race-distinction, but to difference of phase. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.323 <br /><br />To-day this Magian nation, with its ghetto and its religion, itself is in danger of disappearing not because the metaphysics of the two Cultures come closer to one another (for that is impossible), but because the intellectualized upper stratum of each side is ceasing to be metaphysical at all. It has lost every kind of inward cohesion, and what remains is simply a cohesion for practical questions. The lead that this nation has enjoyed from its long habituation to thinking in business terms becomes ever less and less (vis-à-vis the American, it has already almost gone), and with the loss of it will go the last potent means of keeping up a Consensus that has fallen regionally into parts. In the moment when the civilized methods of the European-American world-cities shall have arrived at full maturity, the destiny ofJewry at least of the Jewry in our midst (that of Russia is another problem) will be accomplished. Islam has soil under it. It has practically absorbed the Persian, Jewish, Nestorian, and Monophysite Consensus into itself. [...] But the West-European-American part of the Jewish Consensus, which has drawn to itself and bound to its destiny most of the other parts of Jewry, has now fallen into the machinery of a young Civilization. Detached from any land-footing since, centuries ago, it saved its life by shutting itself off in the ghe tto, it is fragmented and faced with dissolution. But that is a Destiny, not in the Faustian Culture, but of the Magian.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-21318372910327702942009-12-24T14:38:00.000-08:002009-12-24T14:40:49.999-08:00PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (C) PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 1(2)<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 265-295</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.265 <br /><br />Religion may be described as the Waking-Being of a living creature in the moments when it overcomes, masters, denies, and even destroys Being. Racelife and the pulse of its drive dwindle as the eyes gaze into an extended, tense, and light-filled world, and Time yields to Space. The plantlike desire for fulfilment goes out, and from primary depths there wells up the animal fear of the fulfilment, of the ceasing of direction, of death. Not hate and love, but fear and love are the basic feelings of religion. Hate and fear differ as Time and Space, blood and eye, pulse and tension, heroism and saintliness. And love in the race-sense differs from love in the religious sense in the same way. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.266 <br /><br />The higher religion requires tense alertness against the powers of blood and being that ever lurk in the depths ready to recapture their primeval rights over the younger side of life. "Watch and pray, that ye fall not into temptation." Nevertheless, "liberation" is a fundamental word in every religion and an eternal wish of every waking-being. In this general, almost prereligious, sense, it means the desire for freedom from the anxieties and anguishes of wakingconsciousness; for relaxation of the tensions of fear-born thought and search; for the obliteration and removal of the consciousness of the Ego's loneliness in the universe, the rigid conditionedness of nature, the prospect of the immovable boundary of all Being in eld and death. Sleep, too, liberates "Death and his brother Sleep." And holy wine, intoxication, breaks the rigour of the spirit's tension, and dancing, the Dionysus art, and every other form of stupefaction and ecstasy. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.266 <br /><br />Understanding is causal only, whether deductive or inductive, whether derived from sensation or not. It is wholly impossible to distinguish being understood from being-caused both express the same thing. [...] Every kind of thinking has for every one of its domains of application a proper "system." In everyday life a causal connexion in thought is never exactly repeated. Even in modern physics working hypotheses that is, causal systems which partially exclude one another are in use side by side; for instance, the ideas of electrodynamics and those of thermodynamics. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.267 <br /><br />The understanding of causes sets free. Belief in the linkages discovered compels the world-fear to retreat. God is man's refuge from the Destiny which he can feel and livingly experience, but not think on, or figure, or name, and which sinks into abeyance for so long only for so long as the "critical" (literally, the separating) fear-born understanding can establish causes behind causes comprehensibly; that is, in order visible to the outer or inner eye. It is the desperate dilemma of the higher grade of man that his powerful will to understand is in constant contradiction with his being. It has ceased to serve his life, but is unable to rule it, and consequently in all important conjunctures there remains an insoluble element. "One has merely to declare oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But if one has the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the feeling of being free" (Goethe). <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.267-268 <br /><br />In the world-around something is established that is, fixed, spellbound. Understanding man has the secret in the hands, whether this be, as of old, sonic potent charm or, as nowadays, a mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph, even to-day, accompanies every experimental step in the realm of Nature which determines something about the purposes and powers of the god of heaven or the storm-spirits of the ground-dasmons; or about the numina of natural science (atom-nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even about the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its own image (concept, category, reason) and, in determining, fixes it in the prison of an unalterable system of causal relations. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.268 <br /><br />Experience in this inorganic, killing, preserving sense, which is something quite different from life-experience and knowledge of men, takes place in two modes theory and technique, or, in religious language, myth and cult according as the believer's intention is to open up or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high development of human understanding. [...] Religiousness is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent. "Theory" demands the gift of vision that few possess to the extent of luminous insight and many possess not at all. It is world-view, "Weltanschauung' in the most primary sense, whether what one sees in that world is the hand and the loom of powers, or (in a colder urban spirit, not fearing or loving, but inquisitive) the theatre of law-conform forces. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.269-270 <br /><br />The first, and perhaps the only, outcome of man's will-to-understanding is faith. "I believe" is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same time it is an avowal of love. [...] The highest intellectual possession, therefore, known to man as a being of speech-deduced thought, is the firm and hard-won belief in this something, withdrawn from the courses of time and destiny, which he has separated out by contemplation and labelled by name and number. But what that something is remains in the last analysis obscure. Was it the something of secret logic of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. [...] Here belief passes over into the knowledge evoked by mistrust, or, more accurately, becomes belief in that knowledge. For the latter form of the understanding is radically dependent upon the former; it is posterior, more artificial, more questionable. Further, religious theory that is, the contemplation of the believer leads to priestly practice, but scientific theory, on the contrary, liberates itself by contemplation from the technical knowledge of every day life. The firm belief that is bred by illuminations, revelations, sudden deep glimpses, can dispense with critical work. But critical knowledge presupposes the belief that its methods will lead to just that which is desired that is, not to fresh imaginings, but to the "actual." History, however, teaches that doubt as to belief leads to knowledge, and doubt as to knowledge (after a period of critical optimism) back again to belief. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.270 <br /><br />Belief, in its primitive, unclear condition, acknowledges superior sources of wisdom by which things that man's own subtlety could never unravel are more or less manifest such as prophetic words, dreams, oracles, sacred scriptures, the voice of the deity. The critical spirit, on the contrary, wants, and believes itself able, to look into everything for itself. It not only mistrusts alien truths, but even denies their possibility. Truth, for it, is only knowledge that it has proved for itself. But if pure criticism creates its means out of itself solely, it did not long go unperceived that this position assumed the reality of the result. [...] It is apt to be forgotten that critical activity must rest upon a method, and the possibility of obtaining this method in turn by the way of criticism is only apparent. For, in reality, it follows from the momentary disposition of the thought. That is, the results of criticism themselves are determined by the basic method, but this in turn is determined by the stream of being which carries and perfuses the waking-consciousness. The belief in a knowledge that needs no postulates is merely a mark of the immense naivete of rationalist periods. A theory of natural science is nothing but a historically older dogma in another shape. And the only profit from it is that which life obtains, in the shape of a successful technique, to which theory has provided the key. It has already been said that the value of a working hypothesis resides not in its "correctness" but in its usableness. But discoveries of another sort, findings of insight, "Truths" in the optimistic sense, cannot be the outcome of purely scientific understanding, since this always presupposes an existing view upon which its critical, dissecting activity can operate <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.271-272 <br /><br />In the realm of doing the waking-consciousness takes charge only when it becomes technique. Religious knowledge, too, is power man is not only ascertaining causations, but handling them. He who knows the secret relationship between microcosm and macrocosm commands it also, whether the knowledge has come to him by revelation or by eavesdropping. Thus the magician and conjuror is truly the Taboo-man. He compels the deity through sacrifice and prayer; he practises the true rites and sacraments because they are causes of inevitable results, and whosoever knows them, him they must serve. [...] From this starting-point we can understand (what the European-American world of to-day has wellnigh forgotten) the ultimate meaning of religious ethics, Moral. [...] " What shall I do to be saved?" This "what?" is the key to the understanding of all real moral. In its deeps there is ever a "wherefore" and a "why," even in the case of those few sublimate philosophers who have imagined a moral that is "for its own sake" confessing in the very phrase that deep down they feel a "wherefore," even though but a sympathetic few of their own kind can appreciate it. There is only causal moral that is, ethical technique on the background of a convinced metaphysic. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.272 <br /><br />Negation is expressed in its very phrases religious moral contains prohibitions, not precepts. Taboo, even where it ostensibly affirms, is a list of disclaimers. To liberate oneself from the world of fact, to evade the possibilities of Destiny, always to look upon the race in oneself as the lurking ene my nothing but hard system, doctrine, and exercise will give that. No action must be causal or impulsive that is, left to the blood everything must be considered according to motives and results and "carried out" according to orders. Extreme tension of awareness is required lest we fall into sin. First of all things, continence in what pertains to the blood, love, marriage. Love and hate in mankind are cosmic and evil; the love of the sexes is the very polar opposite of timeless love and fear of God, and therefore it is the prime sin, for which Adam was cast forth from paradise and burdened man with the heritage of guilt. [...] Action, the field of history, the deed, heroism, delight in battle and victory and spoil, are evil. For in them the pulse of cosmic being knocks on the door too loudly and disturbingly for contemplativeness and thought. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.273 <br /><br />That which in civilized times is called social ethics has nothing to do with religion, and its presence only goes to show the weakness and emptiness of the religiousness of the day, which has lost that force of metaphysical sureness that is the condition precedent of strong, convinced, and self-denying moral. Think for instance of the difference between Pascal and Mill. Social ethic is nothing but practical politics. It is a very Late product of the same historical world whose Springtime (in all Cultures alike) has witnessed the flowering of an ethic of high courage and knightliness in a strong stock that does not wince under the life of history and fate; an ethic of natural and acquired reactions that polite society to-day would call "the instincts of a gentleman"; an ethic of which vulgarity and not sin is the antithesis. Once again it is the Castle versus the Cathedral. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.275-276 <br /><br />Primitive man's chaotic world-around, born of his discontinuous understanding of separate moments and yet full of impressive meaning, is always something grown-up, self-complete, and closed off, often with chasms and terrors of deep metaphysical premonition. Always it contains a system, and it matters little whether this is partially abstracted from the contemplation of the light-world or remains wholly within it. Such a world-picture docs not "progress" <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.276 <br /><br />All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the "pre-" periods of the grand Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and more distinctly anticipating and pointing in a definite direction. It is just these periods, of some centuries' duration, that ought to have been accurately examined and compared amongst themselves and for themselves. In what shape does the coming phenomenon prepare itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold period, as we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which led up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture? <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.277 <br /><br />But what are the features, now, of the primitive religion of Merovingian times that foreshadow the mighty uprising of the Gothic that was at hand? That both are ostensibly the same religion, Christianity, proves nothing when we consider the entire difference in their deeps. For (we must be quite clear in our own mind on this) the primitive character of a religion does not lie in its stock of doctrines and usages, but in the specific spirituality of the mankind that adopts them and feels, speaks, and thinks with them. The student has to familiarize himself with the fact that primitive Christianity (more exactly, the early Christianity of the Western Church) has twice subsequently become the expression-vehicle of a primitive piety, and therefore itself a primitive religion namely, in the Celtic-Germanic West between 500 and 900, and in Russia up to this day. Now, how did the world mirror itself to these "converted" minds? <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.278-279 <br /><br />Primitive religions have something homeless about them, like the clouds and the wind. [...] From life of this order the high Cultures are separated by a deep soil-boundness. Here there is a mother-landscape behind all expression-forms, and just as the State, as temple and pyramid and cathedral, must fulfil their history there where their idea originated, so too the great religion of every Springtime is bound by all the roots of its being to the land over which its world-image has risen. Sacral practices and dogmas may be carried far and wide, but their inner evolution stays spellbound in the place of their birth. It is simply an impossibility that the slightest trace of evolution of Classical city-cults should be found in Gaul, or a dogmatic advance of Faustian Christianity in America. Whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard. [...] Every Culture actualizes here its prime symbol. [...] Whether the world be something set under a domed light-cavern, as it was for Jesus and his companions, or just a vanishingly small bit of a star-filled infinity, as Giordano Bruno felt it; whether the Orphics take their bodily god into themselves, or the spirit of Plotinus, soaring in ecstasy, fuses in henosis with the spirit of God, or St. Bernard in his "mystic union" becomes one with the operation of infinite deity the deep urge of the soul is governed always by the prime symbol of the particular Culture and of no other. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.280 <br /><br />But even in the towns one stratum hangs back, historically, relatively to another. Over the primitive religion of the country-side there is another popular religion, that of the small people in the underground of the towns and in the provin ces. The higher a Culture rises Middle Kingdom, Brahman period, Pre-Socratics, Pre-Confucians, Baroque the narrower becomes the circle of those who possess the final truths of their time as reality and not as mere name and sound. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.282 <br /><br />About 3000 in Egypt and Babylon two great religions began their lifecourses. In Egypt the "reformation" period at the end of the Old Kingdom saw solar monotheism firmly founded as the religion of priests and educated persons. All other gods and goddesses whom the peasantry and the humble people continued to worship in their fomer meaning are now only incarnations or servants of the one Re. [...] Exactly as in the times of Justinian<br />and Charles V, the city-spirit asserted mastery over the soul of the land; the formative power of the Springtime had come to an end <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.285 <br /><br />The Chinese religion, of which the great "Gothic" period lies between 1300 and 1100 and covers the rise of the Chou dynasty, must be treated with extreme care. In presence of the superficial profundity and pedantic enthusiasm of Chinese thinkers of the Confucius and Lao-tse type who were all born in the ancien regime period of their state-world it seems very hazardous to try to determine anything at all as to high mysticism and grand legends in the beginning. Nevertheless, such a mysticism and such legends must once have existed. But it is not from these over-rationalized philosophies of the great cities that we shall learn anything about them as little as Homer can give us in the Classical parallel, though for another reason. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.287 <br /><br />To the Chinese waking-consciousness heaven and earth were halves of the macrocosm, without opposition, each a mirror-image of the other. In this picture there was neither Magian dualism nor Faustian unity of active force. Becoming appears in the unconstrained reciprocal working of two principles, the yang and the yin, which were conceived rather as periodic than as polar. Accordingly, there are two souls in man, the kwei which corresponded with the yin, the earthly, the dark, the cold, and disintegrated with the body; and the sen, which is higher, light, and permanent. [...] All this is concentrated in the basic word "tao." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.287-288 <br /><br />When Alexander appeared on the Indus, the piety of these three Cultures Chinese, Indian, Classical had long been moulded into the historyless forms of a broad Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. But it was not long before the group of Magian religions arose in the region intermediate between the Classical and the Indian field, and it must have been at about the same time that the religious history of the Maya and Inca, now hopelessly lost to us, began. A thousand years later, when here also all was inwardly fulfilled and done with, there appeared on the unpromising soil of France, sudden and swiftly mounting, Germanic-Catholic Christianity. It was in this case as in every other; whether the whole stock of names and practices came from the East, or whether thousands of particular details were derived from primeval Germanic and Celtic feelings, the Gothic religion is something so new and unheard-of, something of which the final depths are so completely incomprehensible by anyone outside its faith, that to contrive linkages for them on the historical surface is meaningless jugglery.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-45454041672537679772009-12-23T14:11:00.001-08:002009-12-23T14:14:12.749-08:00PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (B) THE MAGIAN SOUL<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 233-261</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.233-234 <br /><br />The world, as spread out for the Magian waking-consciousness, possesses a kind of extension that may be called cavern-like, though it is difficult for Western man to pick upon any word in his vocabulary that can convey anything more than a hint of the meaning of Magian "space." For "space" has essentially unlike meanings for the perceptions of the two Cultures. The worldas-cavern is just as different from the world-as-extent of the passionate, far-thrusting Faustian as it is from the Classical world-as-sum-of-bodily-things. The Copernican system, in which the earth, as it were, loses itself, must necessarily seem crazy and frivolous to Arabian thought. The Church of the West was perfectly right when it resisted an idea so incompatible with the worldfeeling of Jesus, and the Chaldean cavern-astronomy, which was wholly natural and convincing for Persians, Jews, peoples of the Pseudomorphosis, and Islam, became accessible to the few genuine Greeks who knew of it at all only after a process of transvaluing its basic notions of space. The tension between Macrocosm and Microcosm (which is identical with the waking-consciousness) leads, in the world-picture of every Culture, to further oppositions of symbolic importance. All a man's sensations or understanding, faith or knowledge, receive their shape from a primary opposition which makes them not only activities of the individual, but also expressions of the totality. In the Classical the opposition that universa lly dominates the waking-consciousness is the opposition of matter and form; in the West it is that of force and mass. In the former the tension loses itself in the small and particular, and in the latter it discharges itself in the character of work. In the World-Cavern, on the other hand, it persists in traversing and swaying to and fro in unsure strugglings, and so becomes that "Semitic" primary-dualism which, ever the same under its thousand forms, fills the Magian world. The light shines through the cavern and battles against the darkness (John i, 5). Both are Magian substances. Up and down, heaven and earth become powers that have entity and contend with one another. But these polarities in the most primary sensations mingle with those of the refined and critical understanding, like good and evil, God and Satan. Death, for the author of the John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a Something, a death-force, that contends with a life-force for the possession of man. But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit and Soul (Hebrew Ruach and nephesh, Persian ahu and urvan, Mandaean monuhmed and gyan, Greek pneuma and psyche) which first comes out in the basic feeling of the prophetic religions, then pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms and guides the world-contemplations of the awakened Culture Philo, Paul and Plotinus, Gnostics and Mandaeans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and the Kabbalah. Ruach means originally "wind" and nephesh "breath." The nephesh is always in one way or another related to the bodily and earthly, to the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is the "upward." The ruach belongs to the divine, to the above, to the light. Its effects in man when it descends are the heroism of a Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlightenment of the judge (the Solomon passing judgment, ) and all kinds of divination and ecstasy. It is poured out. 3 From Isaiah xi, x, the Messiah becomes the incarnation of the ruach. Philo and the Islamic theology divide mankind into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the "elect," a concept thoroughly proper to the world-cavern and Kismet). <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.234-235 <br /><br />But souls are at bottom discrete entities, whereas the Pneuma is one and ever the same. The man possesses a soul, but he only participates in the spirit of the Light and the Good; the divine descends into him, thus binding all the individuals of the Below together with the one in the Above. This primary feeling, which dominates the beliefs and opinions of all Magian men, is something perfectly singular, and not only characterizes their world-view, but marks off the essence and kernel of their religiousness in all its forms from that of every other kind of man. This Culture, as has been shown, was characteristically the Culture of the middle. It could have borrowed forms and ideas from most of the others, and the fact that it did not do so, that in the face of all pressure and temptation it remained so profoundly mistress of its own inward form, attests an unbridgeable gulf of difference. Of all the wealth of Babylonian and Egyptian religion it admitted hardly more than a few names; the Classical and the Indian Cultures, or rather the Civilizations heir to them Hellenism and Buddhism distorted its expression to the point of pseudomorphosis, but its essence they never touched. All religions of the Magian Culture, from the creations of Isaiah and Zarathustra to Islam, constitute a complete inward unit of world-feeling; and, just as in the Avestan beliefs there is not to be found one trait of Brahmanism nor in early Christianity one breath of Classical feeling, but merely names and figures and outward forms, so also not a trace of this Jesus-religion could be absorbed by the Germanic-Catholic Christianity of the West, even though the stock of tenets and observances was taken over in its entirety. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.235 <br /><br />Whereas the Faustian man is an "I" that in the last resort draws its own conclusions about the Infinite; whereas the Apollinian man, as one soma among many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his spiritual kind of being, is only a part of a pneumatic "We" that, descending from above, is one and the same in all believers. As body and soul he belongs to himself alone, but something else, something alien and higher, dwells in him, making him with all his glimpses and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as the emanation of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us. All our epistemological methods, resting upon the individual judgment, are for him madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a work of the Evil One, who has confused and deceived the spirit as to its true dispositions and purposes. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.236 <br /><br />The Logos-idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian lightsensation of the Cavern, is the exact correlative of this sensation in Magian thought. It meant that from the unattainable Godhead its Spirit, its "Word," is released as carrier of the light and bringer of the good, and enters into relation with human being to uplift, pervade, and redeem it. This distinctness of three substances, which does not contradict their oneness in religious thought, was known already to the prophetic religions. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.237 <br /><br />Thus again and again we find the Logos-idea getting back to the lightsensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. The world of Magian mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling. Devils and evil spirits threaten man; angels and fairies protect him. There are amulets and talismans, mysterious lands, cities, buildings, and beings, secret letters, Solomon's Seal, the Philosophers ' Stone. And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of figures astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it, and Jesus's teachings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic is only a vision of fable intensified to an extreme of tragic power. [...] If we would obtain some inkling of how alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is a painful realization for the Christian of the West, who would be glad indeed if he could make that inner life the point of contact for his own inward piety if we would discover why nowadays only a pious Moslem has the capacity livingly to experience it, we should sink ourselves in this wonder-element of a world-image that was Jesus's worldimage. And then, and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Christianity has taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis of its world-feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts and figures much. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.238 <br /><br />The When, for the Magian Soul, issues from the Where. Here too, is no Apollinian clinging to pointlike Present, nor Faustian thrust and drive towards an infinitely distant goal. Here Being has a different pulse, and consequently Waking-being has another sense of time, which is the counter-concept to Magian space. The prime thing that the humanity of this Culture, from poor slaves and porters to the prophets and the caliphs themselves, feels as the Kismet above him is not a limitless flight of the ages that never lets a lost moment recur, but a Beginning and an End of "This Day," which is irrevocably ordained and in which the human existence takes the place assigned to it from creation itself. Not only world-space, but world-time also is cavern-like. Hence comes the thoroughly Magian certainty that everything has "a" time, from the origins of the Saviour, whose hour stood written in ancient texts, to the smal lest detail of the everyday, in which Faustian hurry would be meaningless and unimaginable. Here, too, is the basis of the Early Magian (and in particular the Chaldean) astrology, which likewise presupposes that all things are written down in the stars and that the scientifically calculable course of the planets authorized conclusions as to the course of earthly things. The Classical oracle answered the only question that could perturb Apollinian man the form, the " How?" of coming things. But the question of the Cavern is "When?" The whole of Apocalyptic, the spiritual life of Jesus, the agony of Gethsemane, and the grand movement that arose out of his death are unintelligible if we have not grasped this primary question of Magian being and the presuppositions lying behind it. It is an infallible sign of the extinction of the Classical Soul that astrology in its westward advance drove the oracle step by step before it. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.239 <br /><br />World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees himself woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives to comprehend from out of his world-feeling. The historical picture of Classical man concentrates itself upon the pure Present. Its content is no true Becoming, but a foreground Being with a conclusive background of timeless myth, rationalized as "the Golden Age." This Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups and downs, good and ill fortune, a blind "thereabouts," an eternal alteration, yet ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or "Time." The cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history consisting in a beginning and an end to the world that is also the beginning and the end of man acts of God of mighty magic and between these turns, spellbound to the limits of the Cavern and the ordained period, the battle of light and darkness, of the angels and Jazatas with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his Soul, and his Spirit are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and replace by a new creation. [...] The consequence of this is a historic outlook like that which is natural to Islam even to-day the view over a given time. "The world-view of the people falls naturally into three major parts worldbeginning, world-development, and world-catastrophe. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.240 <br /><br />But, further, for the Magian human-existence, the issue of the feeling of this sort of Time and the view of this sort of space is a quite peculiar type of piety, which likewise we may put under the sign of the Cavern a will-less resignation, to which the spiritual "I" is unknown, and which feels the spiritual "We" that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The Arab word for this is Islam (= submission) but this Islam was equally Jesus 's normal mode of feeling and that of every other personality of religious genius that appeared in this Culture. Classical piety is something perfectly different, while, as for that of our own Culture, if we could mentally abstract from the piety of St. Theresa and Luther and Pascal their Ego that Ego which wills to maintain itself against, to submit to, or even to be extinguished by the Divine Infinite there would be nothing left. The Faustian prime-sacrament of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome itself. But it is precisely the impossibility of an Ego as a free power in the face of the divine that constitutes "Islam." [...] From this basic feeling proceeds the Magian idea of Grace. This underlies<br />all sacraments of this Culture (especially the Magian proto-sacrament of Baptism) and forms a contrast of the deepest intensity with the Faustian idea of Contrition. Contrition presupposes the will of an Ego, but Grace knows of no such thing. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.243 <br /><br />The Islamic community, like that of Porphyry and that of Augustine, embraces the whole of the worldcavern, the here and the beyond, the orthodox and the good angels and spirits, and within this community the State only formed a smaller unit of the visible side, a unit, therefore, of which the operations were governed by the major whole. In the Magian world, consequently, the separation of politics and religion is theoretically impossible and nonsensical, whereas in the Faustian Culture the battle of Church and State is inherent in the very conceptions logical, necessary, unending. In the Magian, civil and ecclesiastical law are simply identical. Side by side with the Emperor of Constantinople stood the Patriarch, by the Shah was the Zarathustratema, by the Exilarch the Gaon, by the Caliph the Sheikh-ul-Islam, at once superiors and subjects. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.244 <br /><br />A Magian revelation is a mystical process in which the eternal and unformed word of God or the Godhead as Word enters into a man in order to assume through him the manifest, sensible form of sounds and especially of letters. "Koran" means "reading." Mohammed in a vision saw in the heaven treasured rolls of scripture that he (although he had never learned how to read) was able to decipher "in the name of the Lord." This is a form of revelation that in the Magian Culture is the rule and in other Cultures is not even the exception <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.248 <br /><br />With such researches to build upon, it will become possible in the future to write a history of the Magian group of religions. It forms an inseparable unit of spirit and evolution, and let no one imagine that any individual one of them can be really comprehended without reference to the rest. Their birth, unfolding, and inward confirmation occupy the period 0-500. It corresponds exactly to the rise of the Western religion from the Cluniac movement to the Reformation. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.249-250 <br /><br />In the wide realm of old-Babylonian fellahdom young peoples lived. There everything was making ready. The first premonitions of the future awoke about 700 B.C. in the prophetic religions of the Persians, Jews, and Chaldeans. [...] The second wave swelled up steeply in the Apocalyptic currents after 300. Here it was the Magian waking-consciousness that arose and built itself a metaphysic of Last Things, based already upon the prime-symbol of the coming Culture, the Cavern. Ideas of an awful End of the World, of the Last Judgment, of Resurrection, Paradise, and Hell, and with them the grand thought of a process of salvation in which earth's destiny and man's were one, burst forth everywhere we cannot say what land or people it was that created them mantled in wondrous scenes and figures and names. [...] The third upheaval came in the time of Caesar and brought to birth the great religions of Salvation. And with this the Culture rose to bright day, and what followed continuously throughout one or two centuries was an intensity of religious experience, both unsurpassable and at long last unbearable. Such a tension bordering upon the breaking point the Gothic, the Vedic, and every other Culture-soul has known, once and once only, in its young morning. [...] With the end of the second century the sounds of this exaltation die away. The flowering of epic poetry is past, and the mystical penetration and dogmatic analysis of the religious material begin. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.259 <br /><br />The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully, and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and dogma appropriate to prolonged existenc e in this World's Cavern had been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no means its only example. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.260 <br /><br />The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being that consists in extension, had been from the beginning active in extending itself. All these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully, and successfully, missionary Churches. But it was not until men had at last ceased to think of the end of the world as imminent, and dogma appropriate to prolonged existence in this World's Cavern had been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their standpoint towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all others and found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no means its only example.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-24052120941288100192009-12-22T12:27:00.000-08:002009-12-22T12:30:06.083-08:00PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (A) HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 189-230</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.189 <br /><br />In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur, water filters in, and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow mould remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in, stiffen, and crystallize out in their turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon Pseudomorphosis. By the term "historical pseud omorphosis" I propose to designate those cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous. This is the case of the Arabian Culture. Its pre-history lies entirely within the ambit of the ancient Babylonian Civiliz ation, which for two thousand years had been the prey of successive conquerors. Its "Merovingian period" is marked by the dictatorship of a small Persian clan, primitive as the Ostrogoths, whose domination of two hundred years, scarcely challenged, was founded on the infinite weariness of a fellah-world. But from 300 B.C. onwards there begins and spreads a great awakening in the young Aramaic-speaking peoples between Sinai and the Zagros range. As at the epoch of the Trojan War and at that of the Saxon emperors, a new relation of man to God, a wholly new world-feeling, penetrated all the current religions, whether these bore the name of Ahuramazda, Baal, or Yahweh, impelling everywhere to a great effort of creation. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.190 <br /><br />The Magian Culture, geographically and historically, is the midmost of the group of higher Cultures the only one which, in point both of space and of time, was in touch with practically all others. The structure of its history as a whole in our world-picture depends, therefore, entirely on our recognizing the true inner form which the outer moulds distorted. Unhappily, that is just what we do not yet know, thanks to theological and philological prepossessions, and even more to the modern tendency of over-specialization which has unreasonably subdivided stern research into a number of separate branches each distinguished from the others not merely by its materials and its methods, but by its very way of thinking and so prevented the big problems from being even seen. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.191 <br /><br />And yet here was the strongest of all proofs that the history of a literature never coincides with the history of a language. Here, in reality, was a self-contained ensemble of Magian national literature, single in spirit, but written in several languages the Classical amongst others. For a nation of Magian type has no mother tongu e. There are Talmudic, Manichasan, Nestorian, Jewish, or even Neopythagorean national literatures, but not Hellenistic or Hebrew. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.191-192 <br /><br />The Roman world of the Imperial period had a good idea of its own state. The later writers are full of complaints concerning the depopulation and spiritual emptiness of Africa, Spain, Gaul, and, above all, the mother countries Italy and Greece. But those provinces which belong to the Magian world are consistently excepted in these mournful surveys. Syria in particular is densely peopled and, like Parthian Mesopotamia, flourishes in blood and spirit. The preponderance of the young East, palpable to all, had sooner or later to find political expression also. Viewing the scene from this standpoint, we see behind the epic and pageant of Marius and Sulla, Csesar and Pompey, Antony and Octavian, this East striving ever more intensely to free itself from the historically dying West, the fellah-world waking up. [...] The Pseudomorphosis began with Actium; there it should have been Antony who won. [...] At Actium it was the unborn Arabian Culture that was opposed to iron-grey Classical Civilization; the issue lay between Principatc and Caliphate. Antony's victory would have freed the Magian soul; his defeat drew over its lands the hard sheet of Roman Imperium. A comparable event in the history of the West is the battle between Tours and Poitiers, A.D. 732. Had the Arabs won it and made "Frankistan" into a caliphate of the North-east, Arabic speech, religion, and customs would have become familiar to the ruling classes, giant cities like Granada and Kairawan would have arisen on the Loire and the Rhine, the Gothic feeling would have been forced to find expression in the long-stiffened forms of Mosque and Arabesque, and instead of the German mysticism we should have had a sort of Sufism. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.192-193 <br /><br />A second pseudomorphosis is presented to our eyes to-day in Russia. The Russian hero-tales of the Bylini culminated in the epic cycle of Prince Vladimir of Kiev (c. A.D. 1000), with his Round Table, and in the popular hero Ilya Muromyets. [...] This Muscovite period of the great Boyar families and Patriarchs, in which a constant element is the resistance of an Old Russia party to the friends of Western Culture, is followed, from the founding of Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which forced the primitive Russian soul into the alien mould, first of full Baroque, then of the Enlightenment, and then of the nineteenth century. The fate-figure in Russian history is Peter the Great, with whom we may compare the Charlemagne who deliberately and with all his might strove to impose the very thing which Charles Martel had just prevented, the rule of the Moorish-Byzantine spirit. The possibility was there of treating the Russian world in the manner of a Carolingian or that of Seleucid that is, of choosing between Old Russian and "Western" ways, and the Romanovs chose the latter. [...] The primitive tsarism of Moscow is the only form which is even to-day appropriate to the Russian world, but in Petersburg it was distorted to the dynastic form of western Europe. The pull of the sacred South of Byzantium and Jerusalem strong in every Orthodox soul, was twisted by the worldly diplomacy which set its face to the West. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.193-194 <br /><br />The contrast between Russian and Western, Jew-Christian and Late-Classical nihilisms is extreme the one kind is hatred of the alien that is poisoning the unborn Culture in the womb of the land, the other a surfeited disgust of one's own proper overgrowths. Depths of religious feeling, flashes of revelation, shuddering fear of the great awakening, metaphysical dreaming and yearning, belong to the beginning, as the pain of spiritual clarity belongs to the end of a history. In these pseudomorphoses t hey are mingled. Says Dostoyevski: "Everyone in street and market-place now speculates about the nature of Faith." So might it have been said of Edessa or Jerusalem. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.195-196 <br /><br />Here we have beginning and end clashing together. Dostoyevski is a saint, Tolstoi only a revolutionary. From Tolstoi, the true successor of Peter, and from him only, proceeds Bolshevism, which is not the contrary, but the final issue of Petrinism, the last dishonouring of the metaphysical by the social, and ifso facto a new form of the Pseudomorphosis. If the building of Petersburg was the first act of Antichrist, the self-destruction of the society formed of that Petersburg is the second, and so the peasant soul must feel it. For the Bolshevists are not the nation, or even a part of it, but the lowest stratum of this Petrine society, alien and western like the other strata, yet not recognized by these and consequently filled with the hate of the downtrodden. It is all megalopolitan and "Civilized" the social politics, the Intelligentsia, the literature that first in the romantic and then in the economic jargon champions freedoms and reforms, before an audience that itself belongs to the society. The real Russian is a disciple of Dostoyevski. Although he may not have read Dostoyevski or anyone else, nay, perhaps because he cannot read, he is himself Dostoyevski in substance; and if the Bolshevists, who see in Christ a mere social revolutionist like themselves, were not intellectually so narrowed, it would be in Dostoyevski that they would recognize their prime enemy. What gave this revolution its momentum was not the intelligentsia's hatred. It was the people itself, which, without hatred, urged only by the need of throwing off a disease, destroyed the old Westernism in one effort of upheaval, and will send the new after it in another. For what this townless people yearns for is its own life-form, its own religion, its own history. Tolstoi's Christian ity was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx. But to Dostoyevski's Christianity the next thousand years will belong. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.196 <br /><br />Outside the Pseudomorphosis, and the more vigorously in proportion as the Classical influence is weaker over the country, there spring up all the forms of a genuine feudal age. Scholasticism, mysticism, feudal fealty, minstrelsy, the crusade spirit, all existed in the first centuries of the Arabian Culture and will be found in it as soon as we know how to look for them. The legion existed in name even after Septimius Severus, but in the East, legions look for all the world like ducal retinues. Officials are nominated, but what nomination amounts to in reality is the investiture of a count with his fief. While in the West the Caesar-title fell into the hands of chieftains, the East transformed itself into an early Caliphate amazingly like the feudal state of mature Gothic. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.198 <br /><br />For this young world of the first centuries of our era our antiquarians and theologians have had no eyes. Busied as they are with the state of Late Republican and Imperial Rome, the conditions of the Middle East seem to them merely primitive and void of all significance. But the Parthian bands ''that again and again rode at the legions of Rome were a chivalry exalted by Mazdaism; in their armies there was the spirit of crusade. So, too, might it have been with Christianity if it had not been wholly bound under the power of the pseudomorphosis. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.199 <br /><br />The "Roman Army" in the East, meanwhile, was transformed in less than two centuries from an army of modern type to one of the feudal order. The Roman legion disappeared in the reorganization of the age of Severus, about A.D. 200. While in the West the army degenerated into hordes, in the East there arose, in the fourth century a genuine, if belated, knighthood <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.200-201 <br /><br />The Classical religion lived in its vast number of separate cults, which in this form were natural and self-evident to Apollinian man, essentially inaccessible to any alien. As soon as cults of this kind arise, we have a Classical Culture, and when their essence changes, in later Roman times, then the soul of this Culture is at an end. [...] The divinity is always bound to and bounded by one locality, in conformity with the static and Euclidean world-feeling. Correspondingly the relation of man to the divinity takes the shape of a local cult, in which the significances lie in the form of its ritual procedure and not in a dogma underlying them. [...] There were no communities of fellow believers. [...] In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian religion the Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no home and knows no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus, "when two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." It is selfevident that every such believer must believe that only one good and true God can be, and that the gods of the others are evil and false. The relation between this God and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret force, the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are to be effective must be exactly known in form and significance and practised accordingly. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.203 <br /><br />Much has been written on the Classical toleration. The nature of a religion may perhaps be most clearly seen in the limits of its tolerance, and there were such limits in Classical religions as in others. It was, indeed, one essential character of these religions that they were numerous, and another that th ey were religions of pure performance; for them, therefore, the question of toleration, as the word is usually understood, did not arise. But respect for the cult-formalities as such was postulated and required, and many a philosopher, even many an unwitting stranger, who infringed this law by word or deed, was made to realize the limits of Classical toleration. The reciprocal persecutions of the Magian Churches are something different from this; there it was the duty of the henotheist to his own faith that forbade him to recognize false tenets. Classical cults would have tolerated the Jesus-cult as one of their own number. But the cnlt-Ckurch was bound to attack the Jesus-Church. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.212-213 <br /><br />The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. In all the great creations of those years there is nothing which can be set beside it. Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis, and Osiris must have seemed to any man reading or listening to the still recent story of Jesus's sufferings the last journey to Jerusalem, the last anxious supper, the hours of despair in Gethsemane, and the death on the cross. [...] A strange excitement, like that which the Germanic world experienced about A.D. 1000, ran in those days through the whole Aramaean land. The Magian soul was awakened. [...] The birth of the Ego, and of the world-anxiety with which it is identical, is one of the final secrets of humanity and of mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there stands up a Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling existence and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself. Even in the blackest hours of life no adult experiences fear like the fear which sometimes overpowers a child in the crisis of awakening. Over the dawn of the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety. In this early morning of Ma gian world-feeling, timorous and hesitant and ignorant of itself, young eyes saw the end of the world at hand it is the first thought in which every Culture to this day has come to knowledge of itself. All but the shallower souls trembled before revelations, miracles, glimpses into the very fundament of things. Men now lived and thought only in apocalyptic images. Actuality became appearance. Strange and terrifying visions were told mysteriously by one to another, read out from fantastic veiled texts, and seized at once with an immediate inward certainty. These writings travelled from community to community, village to village, and it is quite impossible to assign them to any one particular religion. [...] a general Magian religiousness which filled all souls and attached itself to glimpses and visions of every conceivable origin. The Last Day was at hand. Men expected it and knew that on that day "He" of whom all these revelations spoke would appear. Prophets arose. More and more new communities and groups gathered, believing themselves to have found either a better understanding of the traditional religion, or the true religion itself. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.214-215 <br /><br />All the characters of the great prophetic religions and of the whole store of profound glimpses and visions later collected into apocalypses are seen here as foundations. Of Classical thought and feeling not a breath reached this Magian underworld. No doubt the beginnings of the new religion are lost irrevocably. But one historical figure of Mandaeanism stands forth with startling distinctness, as tragic in his purpose and his downfall as Jesus himself John the Baptist. He, almost emancipated from Judaism, and filled with the as mighty a hatred of the Jerusalem spirit as that of primitive Russia for Petersburg, preached the end of the world and the coming of the Barnasha, the Son of Man, who is no longer the longed-for national Messiah of the Jews, but the bringer of the worldcon flagration. To him came Jesus and was his disciple. He was thirty years old when the awakening came over him. Thenceforth the apocalyptic, and in particular the Mandean, thought-world filled his whole being. [...] But there was a moment in his life when an inkling, and then high certainty, came over him "Thou art thyself It!" It was a secret that he at first hardly admitted to himself, and only later imparted to his nearest friends and companions, who thereafter shared with him, in all stillness, the blessed mission, till finally they dared to reveal the truths before all the world by the momentous journey to Jerusalem. If there is anything at all that clouds the complete purity and honour of his thought, it is that doubt as to whether he has deceived himself which from time to time seizes him, and of which, later, his disciples told quite frankly. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.218 <br /><br />Amongst Jesus's friends and disciples, stunned as they were by the appalling outcome of the journey to Jerusalem, there spread after a few days the news of his resurrection and reappearance. The impression of this news on such souls and in such a time can never be more than partially echoed in the sensibilities of a Late mankind. It meant the actual fulfilment of all the Apocalyptic of that Magian Springtime the end of the present xon marked by the ascension of the redeemed Redeemer, the second Adam, the Saoshyant, Enosh, Barnasha, or whatever other name man attached to "Him," into the light-realm of the Father. And therewith the foretold future, the new world-aeon, "the Kingdom of Heaven," became immediately present. They felt themselves at the decisive point in the history of redemption. This certainty completely transformed the world-outlook of the little circles. "His" teachings, as they had flowed from his mild and noble nature his inner feeling of the relation between God and man and of the high meaning of the times, and were exhaustively comprised in and defined by the word "love" fell into the background, and their place was taken by the teaching of Him.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-77871334751120889452009-12-21T23:13:00.000-08:002009-12-21T23:16:14.389-08:00CITIES AND PEOPLES (C) PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 159-186</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.159 <br /> <br />Now at last it is possible to approach if with extreme precaution the conception "people," and to bring order into that chaos of people-forms that the historical research of the present day has only succeeded in making worse confounded than before. There is no word that has been used more freely and more utterly uncritically, yet none that calls for a stricter critique, than this. Very careful historians, even, after going to much trouble to clear! their theoretical basis (up to a point) slide back thereafter into treating peoples, raceparts, and speech-communities as completely equivalent. If they find the name of a people, it counts without more ado as the designation of a language as well. If they discover an inscription of three words, they believe they have established a racial connexion. If a few "roots" correspond, the curtain rises at once on a primitive people with a primitive habitat in the background. And the modern nationalist spirit has only enhanced this "thinking in terms of peoples." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.159-160 <br /><br />But "people" is a linkage of which one is conscious. In ordinary usage, one designates as one's "people" and with feeling that community, out of the many to which one belongs, which inwardly stands nearest to one. And then he extends the use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds. [...] A people is an aggregate of men which feels itself a unit. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.160-161 <br /><br />How many peoples may have originated in a chief's following or a band of fugitives? Such a group can change race, like the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor as Mongols; or language, like the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achaeans and Danaoi. So long as the common feeling is there, the people as such is there. We have to distinguish the destiny of a people from its name. The latter is often the only thing about which information remains to us; but can we fairly conclude from a name anything about the history, the descent, the language, or even merely the identity of those who bore it? Here again the historical researcher is to blame, in that, whatever his theory may have been, he has in practice treated the relation between name and bearer as simply as he would treat, say, the personal names of to-day. Have we any conception of the number of unexplored possibilities in this field? To begin with, the very act of name-giving is of enormous importance in early associations. For with a name the human group consciously sets itself up with a sort of sacral dignity. But, here, cult- and war-names may exist side by side; others the land or the heritage may provide; the tribal name may be exchanged for that of an eponymous hero, as with the Osmanli; lastly, an unlimited number of alien names can be applied along the frontiers of a group without more than a part of the community ever hearing them at all. If only such names as these be handed down, it becomes practically inevitable that conclusions about the bearers of them will be wrong. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.161 <br /><br />How often may a people have adopted a land-name and taken it along with them? This is the case with the modern Prussians, but also with the modern Parsees, Jews, and Turks, while the opposite is the case in Burgundy and Normandy. [...] It is not to be imagined at what results the scholars of A.D. 3000 might arrive if they worked by present-day methods on names, linguistic remains, and the noti on of original homes and migration. For example, the Teutonic Knights about 1300 drove out the heathen "Prussians," and in 1870 these people suddenly appear on their wanderings at the gates of Paris ! <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.162-163 <br /><br />Thus we come to the pet idea of modern historical thought. If a historian meets a people that has achieved something, he feels that he owes it to these people to answer the question: Whence did it come? It is a matter of dignity for a people to have come from somewhere and to have an original home. [...] It is not the alterations in themselves, but the conceptions we have formed about them, that have spoilt our outlook upon the nature of the peoples. [...] The motive, too, that is everlastingly assigned to these migrations is colourless and worthy of the century that invented it material necessity. Hunger would normally lead to efforts of quite a different sort, and it has certainly been only the last of the motives that drove men of race out of their nests <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.163-164 <br /><br />Further, we have to consider the position in the country traversed by the invaders. Its characteristics are always modified more or less, but the modifications are due not merely to the influence of the immigrants, but more and more to the nature of the settled population, which in the end becomes numerically overwhelming. Obviously, in spaces almost empty of men it is easy for the weaker simply to evade the onslaught, and as a rule he was able to do so. But in later and denser conditions, the inroad spelt dispossession for the weaker, who must either defend himself successfully or else win new lands for old. Already there is the out-thrust into space. No tribe lives without constant contacts on all sides and a mistrustful readiness to stand to arms. The hard necessity of war breeds men. Peoples grow by, and against, other peoples to inward greatn ess. Weapons become weapons against men and not beasts. And finally we have the only migration-form that counts in historic times warrior bands sweep through thoroughly populated countries, whose inhabitants remain, undisturbed and upstanding, as an essential part of the spoils of victory. And then, the victors being in a minority, completely new situations arise. Peoples of strong inward form spread themselves on top of much larger but formless populations, and the further transformations of peoples, languages, and races depend upon very complicated factors of detail. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.164 <br /><br />we know that all migrant peoples and the Persians of Cyrus, the Mamertines and the Crusaders, the Ostrogoths and the "Sea-peoples" of the Egyptian inscriptions were all peoples in this sense were, in comparison with the inhabitants of the regions they occupied, very small in numbers, just a few thousand warriors, superior to the natives only in respect of their determination to be a Destiny and not to submit to one. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.165 <br /><br />For me, the "people" is a unit of the soul. The great events of history were not really achieved by peoples; they themselves created the peoples. Every act alters the soul of the doer. Even when the event is preceded by some grouping around or under a famous name, the fact that there is a people and not merely a band behind the prestige of that name is not a condition, but a result of the event. [...] This is the one and only connotation of the word "people." Neither unity of speech nor physical descent is decisive. That which distinguishes the people from the population, raises it up out of the population, and will one day let it find its level again in the population is always the inwardly lived experience of the "we." The deeper this feeling is, the stronger is the vis viva of the people. There are energetic and tame, ephemeral and indestructible, forms of peoples. They can change speech, name, race, and land, but so long as their soul lasts, they can gather to themselves and transform human material of any and every provenance. The Roman name in Hannibal's day meant a people, in Trajan's time nothing more than a population. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.165 <br /><br />Of course, it is often quite justifiable to align peoples with races, but "race" in this connexion must not be interpreted in the present-day Darwinian sense of the word. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a people was ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin, or, if it were, could maintain that unity even for ten generations. It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance has no existence except for science never for folkconsciousness and that no people was ever yet stirred to enthusiasm for this ideal of blood-purity. In race there is nothing material, but something cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the<br />march of historical Being. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.169 <br /><br />With this are laid, at last, the foundations for a morphology of peoples. Directly its essence is seen, we see also an inward order in the historical stream of the peoples. They are neither linguistic nor political nor zoological, but spiritual, units. And this leads at once to the further distinction between peoples before, within, and after a Culture. It is a fact that has been profoundly felt in all ages that Culture-peoples are more distinct in character than the rest. Their predecessors I will call primitive peoples. These are the fugitive and heterogeneous associations that form and dissolve without ascertainable rule, till at last, in the presentiment of a still unborn Culture (as, for example, in the pre-Homeric, the pre-Christian, and the Germanic periods), phase by phase, beco ming ever more definite in type, they assemble the human material of a population into groups, though all the time little or no alteration has been occurring in the stamp of man. [...] And that which follows a Culture we may call from its best-known example, the Egyptians of post-Roman times fellah-peoples. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.169-170 <br />I regard it, therefore, as a discovery of decisive importance that the facts here set forth lead to the reverse conclusion. It will be established in all rigour that the great Cultures are entities, primary or original, that arise out of the deepest foundations of spirituality, and that the peoples under the spell of a Culture are, alike in their inward form and in their whole manifestation, its products and not its authors. [...] In each of these Cultures, Mexican and Chinese, Indian and Egyptian, there is whether our science is aware of it or not a group of great peoples of identical style, which arises at the beginning of the springtime, forming states and carrying history, and throughout the course of its evolution bears its fundamental form onward to the goal. [...] Peoples in the style of their Culture we will call Nations, the word itself distinguishing them from the forms that precede and that follow them. It is not merely a strong feeling of "we" that forges the inward unity of its most significant of all major associations; underlying the nation there is an Idea. This stream of a collective being possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time, and to History, a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land, state, and religion. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.171 <br /><br />Further, nations are the true city-building peoples. In the strongholds they arose, with the cities they ripen to the full height of their world-consciousness, and in the wor ld-cities they dissolve. Every town-formation that has character has also national character. The village, which is wholly a thing of race, does not yet possess it; the megalopolis possesses it no longer. Of this essential, which so characteristically colours the nation's public life that its slightest manifestation identifies it, we cannot exaggerate we can scarcely imagine the force, the self-sufficingness, and the loneliness. If between the souls of two Cultures the screen is impenetrable, if no Western may ever hope completely to understand the Indian or the Chinese, this is equally so, even more so, as between well-developed nations. Nations understand one another as little as individuals do so. Each understands merely a self-created picture of the other, and individuals with the insight to penetrate deeper are few and far between. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.172 <br /><br />Owing to the very depth of these experiences, it is not possible for a whole people to be uniformly and throughout a Culture-people, a nation. Amongst primitives each individual man has the same feeling of group-obligations, but the awakening of a nation into self-consciousness invariably takes place in gradations that is, pre-eminently in the particular class that is strongest of soul and holds the others spellbound by a power derived from what it has experienced. Every nation is represented in history by a minority. At the beginning of the springtime it is the nobility, which in that period of its first appearance is the fine flowering of the people, the vessel in which the national character unconscious, but felt all the more strongly in its cosmic pulse receives its destined Style. [...] With the advent of the town the burgher becomes the vessel of nationality, and (as we should expect from the growth of intellectuality) of a national consciousness that it gets from the nobility and carries through to its fulfilment. Always it is particular circles, graduated in fine shades, that in the name of the people live, feel, act, and know how to die, but these circles become larger and larger. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.174 <br /><br />A nation of the Magian type is the community of co-believers, the group of all who know the right way to salvation and are inwardly linked to one another by the ijma of this belief. Men belonged to a Classical nation by virtue of the possession of citizenship, but to a Magian nation by virtue of a sacramental act circumcision for the Jews, specific forms of baptism for the Mandaeans or the Christians. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.178-179 <br /><br />In the West, nations of Faustian style emerge, more and more distinctly, from the time of Otto the Great (936-973), and in them the primitive peoples of the Carolingian period are swiftly dissolved. [...] The people-form of this Culture is founded, like its Gothic architecture and its Infinitesimal Calculus upon a tendency to the Infinite, in the spatial as well as the temporal sense. The nation-feeling comprises, to begin with, a geographical horizon that, considering the period and its means of communication, can only be called vast, and is not paralleled in any other Culture. The fatherland as extent, as a region whose boundaries the individual has scarcely, if ever, seen and which nevertheless he will defend and die for, is something that in its symbolic depth and force men of other Cultures can never comprehend. The Magian nation does not as such possess an earthly home; the Classical possesses it only as a point-focus. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.179 <br /><br />Still stronger is the sensitivity to distance in time. Before the fatherlandidea (which is a consequence of the existence of the nation) emerged at all, this passion evolved another idea to which the Faustian nations owe that existence - the dynastic idea. Faustian peoples are historical peoples, communities that feel themselves bound together not by place or consensus, but by history; and the eminent symbol and vessel of the common Destiny is the ruling "house." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.184-185 <br /><br />At first, when the land was still without cities, it was the nobility that represented, in the highest sense of the word, the nation. The peasantry, "everlasting" and historyless, was a people before the dawn of the Culture, and in very fundamental characters it continued to be the primitive people, surviving when the form of the nation had passed away again. [...] But in the world-cities, besides a minority which has history and livingly experiences, feels, and seeks to lead the nation, there arises another minority of timeless a-historic, literary men, men not of destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from the pulse of blood and being, wideawake thinking consciousnesses, that can no longer find any "reasonable" connotation for the nation-idea. Cosmopolitanism is a mere waking-conscious association of intelligentsias. In it there is hatred of Destiny, and above all of history as the expression of Destiny.[...] The born world-citizens, world-pacifists, and world-reconcilers alike in the China of the "Contending States," in Buddhist India, in the Hellenistic age, and in the Western world to-day are the spiritual leaders of fellaheen. [...] However the cases differ amongst themselves otherwise, they are alike in this, that the world-feeling of race; the political (and therefore national) instinct for fact ("my country, right or wrong!"); the resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one or the other it has to be) in a word, the will-to-power has to retreat and make room for a tendency of which the standard-bearers are most often men without original impulse, but all the more set upon their logic; men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen who believ e that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.185-186 <br /><br />A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result of world-improving theories is consistently a formless and therefore historyless mass. All world-improvers and world-citizens stand for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. Their success means the historical abdication of the nation in favour, not of everlasting peace, but of another nation. World-peace is always a one-sided resolve. The Pax Romana had for the later soldier-emperors and Germanic band-kings only the one practical significance that it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object for the will-to-power of small warriorgroups. This peace cost the peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannae seem vanishingly small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from one conqueror's hands to another's, and it is their own blood that pays for the contest. That is their peace. When in 1401 the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at last and for ever. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed world-peace never diminishes that alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment of others that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes. "Lever doodt al s Sklav (better dead than slave)" is an old Frisian peasantsaying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-8945848178808443722009-12-20T15:27:00.000-08:002009-12-20T15:30:12.179-08:00CITIES AND PEOPLES (B) PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 2(2)<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSP ECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 137-155</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.137-138 <br /><br />Of all the signs that have come to be fixed, none has led to greater consequences than that which in its present state we call "word." It belongs, no doubt, to the purely human history of speech, but nevertheless the idea, or at any rate the conventional idea, of an "origin" of verbal language is as meaningless and barren as that of a zero-point for speech generally. [...] In actuality a pure word-speech does not exist. No one speaks without employing, in addition to the set vocabulary, quite other modes of speech, such as emphasis, rhythm, and facial play, which are much more primary than the language of the word, and with which, moreover, it has become completely intertwined. It is highly necessary, therefore, to avoid regarding the ensemble of present-day word-languages, with its extreme structural intricacy, as an inner unity with a homogeneous history. Every word-language known to us has very different sides, and each of these sides has its own Destiny within the history of the whole. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.138-139 <br /><br />There can be no doubt that the sign which made it possible for the future word-language to detach itself from the general vocal speech of the animal world was that which I call "name" a vocal image serving to denote a Something in the world-around, which was felt as a being, and by the act of naming became a numen. It is unnecessary to speculate as to how the first names came to be no human speech accessible to us at this time of day gives us the least point d'appui here. But, contrary to the view of modern research, I consider that the decisive turn came not from a change of the throat-formation or from a peculiarity of sound-formation or from any other physiological factor if any such changes ever took place at all, it would be the race side that they would affect no t even an increased capacity for self-expression by existing means, like, say, the transition from word to sentence (H. Paul), but a profound spiritual change. With the Name comes a new world-outlook. And if speech in general is the child of fear, of the unfathomable terror that wells up when the waking-consciousness is presented with the facts, that impels all creatures together in the longing to prove each other's reality and proximity then the first word, the Name, is a mighty leap upward. [...] With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man. It was the greatest turning-point in the history of the human soul. Our epistemology is accustomed to set speech and thought side by side, and it is quite right, if we take into consideration only the languages that are still accessible at the present day. But I believe that we can go much deeper than this and say that with the Name religion in the proper sense, definite religion in the midst of formless quasi-religious awe, came into being. Religion in this sense means religious thought. It is the new conception of the creative understanding emancipated from sensation. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.141 <br /><br />The second great turning-point was the use of grammar. Besides the name there was now the sentence, besides the verbal designation the verbal relation, and thereupon reflection which is a thinking in word-relations that follows from the perception of things for which word-labels exist became the decisive characteristic of man's waking-consciousness. The question whether the communication-languages already contained effective "sentences" before the appearance of the genuine "name" is a difficult one. The sentence, in the present acceptation of the word, has indeed developed within these languages according to its own conditions and with its own phases, but nevertheless it postulates the prior existence of the name. Sentences as conceptual relations become poss ible only with the intellectual change that accompanied their birth. And we must assume further that within the highly developed wordless languages one character or trait after another, in the course of continuous practical use, was transformed into verbal form and as such fell into its place in an increasingly solid structure, the prime form of our present-day languages. Thus the inner build of all verbal languages rests upon foundations of far older construction, and for its further development is not dependent upon the stock of words and its destiny. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.143 <br /><br />The last grand event in this history, which brings the formation of verbal speech more or less to a close, is the coming of the verb. This assumes at the outset a very high order of abstraction. For substantives are words whereby things sense-defined in illuminated space become evocable also in after-thought, while verbs describe types of change, which are not seen, but are extracted from the unendingly protean light-world, by noting the special characters of the individual cases, and generating concepts from them. "Falling stone" is originally a unit impression, but we first separate movement and thing moved and then isolate falling as one kind of movement from innumerable other sorts and shades thereof sinking, tottering, stumbling, slipping. We do not "see" the distinction, we "know" it. The difference between fleeing and running, or between flying and being wafted, altogether transcends the visual impression they produce and is only apprehensible by a word-trained consciousness. But now, with this verb-thinking, even life itself has become accessible to reflection. Out of the living impress made on the waking-consciousness, out of the ambiance of the becoming (which gesture-speech, being merely imitative, leaves unquestioned and unprobed) that which is life itself namely, singularity of occurrence is unconsciously eliminated, and the rest, as effect of a cause (t he wind wafts, lightning flashes, the peasant ploughs), is put, under purely extensive descriptions, into suitable places in the sign-system. One has to bury oneself completely in the solid definiteness of subject and predicate, active and passive, present and perfect, to perceive how entirely the understanding here masters the senses and unsouls actuality. In substantives one can still regard the mental thing (the idea) as a copy of the visual thing, but in the verb something inorganic has been put in place of something organic. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.144 <br /><br />The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized, from speaking, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in a verbal utterance, has particularly far-reaching consequences in the sign-system of words. Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite word-framework into which it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite content of life. Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking-Being. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.145 <br /><br />So far, then, the inner history of word-languages shows three stages. In the first there appears, within highly developed but wordless communicationlanguages, the first names units in a new sort of understanding. The world awakens as a secret, and religious thought begins. In the second stage, a complete communication-speech is gradually transformed into grammatical values. [...] This is the blossoming time of grammar, the period of which we may probably (though under all reserves) take as the two millennia preceding the birth of the Egyptian and Babylonian Culture. The third stage is marked by a rapid decay of inflexions and a simultaneous replacement of grammar by syntax. The intellectualization of man's waking-consciousness has now proceeded so far that he no longer needs the sense-props of inflexion and, discarding the old luxuriance of word-forms, communicates freely and surely by means of t he faintest nuances of idiom (particles, position of words, rhythm). By dint of speaking in words, the understanding has attained supremacy over the waking-consciousness, and to-day it is in process of liberating itself from the restrictions of sensible-verbal machinery and working towards pure mechanics of the intellect. Minds and not senses are making the contact. In this third stage of linguistic history, which as such takes place in the biological plane and therefore belongs to man as a type, the history of the higher Cultures now intervenes with an entirely new speech, the speech of the distance writing an invention of such inward forcefulness that again there is a sudden decisive turn in the destinies of the word-languages. The written language of Egypt is already by 3000 in a state of rapid grammatical decomposition; likewise the Sumerian literary languages called erne-sal (women's language). <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.146-147 <br /><br />The external history of languages is as good as lost to us in just its most important parts. Its springtime lies deep in the primitive era, in which (to repeat what has been said earlier), we have to imagine "humanity" in the form of scattered and quite small troops, lost in the wide spaces of the earth. A spiritual change came when reciprocal contacts became habitual (and eventually natural) to them, but correspondingly there can be no doubt that this contact was first sought for and then regulated, or fended off, by means of speech, and that it was the impression of an earth filled with men that first brought the waking-consciousness to the point of tense intelligent shrewdness, forcing verbal language under pressure to the surface. So that, perhaps, the birth of grammar is connected with the race hall-mark of the grand Number. Since then, no other grammatical system has ever come into existence, but only novel derivatives of what was already there. Of these authentic primitive languages and their structure and sou nd we know nothing. As far as our backward look takes us, we see only complete and developed linguistic systems, used by everyone, learned by every child, as something perfectly natural. And we find it more than difficult to imagine that once upon a time things may have been different, that perhaps a shudder of fear accompanied the hearing of such strange and enigmatic language an awe like that which in historic times has been and still is excited by script. And yet we have to reckon with the possibility that at one time, in a world of wordless communication, verbal language constituted an aristocratic privilege, a jealously preserved class-secret. [...] It is part of the thoroughbred's pride to be able to speak to one another in a way that outsiders cannot understand a language for everybody is a vernacular. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.147 <br /><br />Very various, under all these determinants, have been the destinies of the different grammars and vocabularies. The first attaches to the intellect, the second to things and places. Only grammatical systems are subject to natural inward change. The use of words, on the contrary, psychologically presupposes that, although the expression may change, inner mechanical structure is maintained (and all the more firmly) as being the basis on which denomination essentially rests . The great linguistic families are purely grammatical families. The words in them are more or less homeless and wander from one to another. It is a fundamental error in philological (especially Indogermanic) research that grammar and vocabulary are treated as a unit. All specialist vocabularies the jargon of hunter, soldier, sportsman, seaman, savant are in reality only stocks of words, and can be used within any and every grammatical system. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.148 <br /><br />It is no exaggeration to say that the more widely an Indogermanic word is distributed, the younger it is, the more likely it is to be an "alien" word. It is precisely the very oldest names that are hoarded as private possessions. Latin and Greek have only quite young words in common. Or do "telephone," "gas," "automobile," belong to the word-stock of the "primitive" people? <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.148-149 <br /><br />The Indogermanic system is certainly the youngest, and therefore the most intellectual. The languages derived from it rule the earth to-day, but did it really exist at all in 2000 as a specific grammatical edifice? As is well known, a single initial form for Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic is nowadays assumed as probable. The oldest Indian texts preserve the linguistic conditions of (probably) before 1200, the oldest Greek those of (probably) 700. But Indian personal and divine names occur in Syria and Palestine, simultaneously with the horse, at a much later date, the bearers of these names being apparently first soldiers of fortune and afterwards potentates. May it be that about 1600 these land-Vikings, these first Reiter men grown up inseparable from their horses, the terrifying originals of the Centaur-legend established themselves more or less everywhere in the Northern plains as adventurer-chiefs, bringing with them the speech and divinities of the Indian feudal age? And the same with the Aryan aristocratic ideals of breed and conduct. According to what has been said above on race, this would explain the race-ideal of Aryanspeaking regions without any necessity for "migrations" of a "primitive" folk. [...] Or was this system of about 3000 merely an unimportant dialect of a language that is lost? The Romanic language-family about A.D. 1600 dominated all the seas. About 400 B.C. the "original" language on the Tiber possessed a domain of little more than a thousand square miles. It is certain that the geographical picture of the grammatical families at about 4000 was still very variegated. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.151 <br /><br />Here, it should be observed, we have direct expression of the fact that writing is above everything a matter of status, and more particularly an ancient privilege of priesthood. The peasantry is without history and therefore without ivriting. But, even apart from this, there is in Race an unmistakable antipathy to script. It is, I think, a fact of the highest importance to graphology that the more the writer has race (breed), the more cavalierly he treats the ornamental structure of the letters, and the more ready he is to replace this by personal line-pictures. Only the Taboo-man evidences a certain respect for the proper forms of the letters and ever, if unconsciously, tries to reproduce them. It is the distinction between the man of action, who makes history, and the scholar, who merely puts it down on paper, "eternalizes" it. In all Cultures the script is in the keeping of the priesthood, in which class we have to count also the poet and the scholars. The nobility despises writing; it has people to write for it. From the remotest times this activity has had something intellectual-sacerdotal about it. Timeless truths came to be such, not at all through speech, but only when there came to be script for them. It is the opposition of castle and cathedral over again: which shall endure, deed or truth? <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.152 <br /><br />As the city lifted up its head over the countryside, as the burgher joined the noble and the priest and the urban spirit aspired to supremacy, writing, from being a herald of nobles' fame and of eternal truths, became a means of commercial and scientific intercourse. The Indian and the Classical Cultures rejected the pretension and met the working requirement by importation from abroad; it was as a humble tool of everyday use that alphabetical script slowly won their acceptance. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.1 52 <br /><br />May the attempt be made, thus early, to write a morphology of the Culturelanguages? Certainly, science has not as yet even discovered that there is such a task. Culture-languages are languages of historical men. Their Destiny accomplishes itself not in biological spaces of time, but in step with the organic evolution of strictly limited lifetimes. Culture languages are historical languages, which means, primarily, that there is no historical event and no political institution that will not have been determined in part by the spirit of the language employed in it and, conversely, that will not have its influence upon the spiritual form of that language. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.153-154 <br /><br />Every Culture at its awakening finds itself in the presence of peasant-languages, speeches of the cityless countryside, "everlasting," and almost unconcerned with the great events of history, which have gone on through late Culture and Civilization as unwritten dialects and slowly undergone imperceptible changes. On the top of this now the language of the two primary Estates raises itself as the first manifestation of a waking relation that has Culture, that is Culture. Here, in the ring of nobility and priesthood, languages become Culture-languages, and, more particularly, talk belongs with the castle, and speech to the cathedral. And thus on the very threshold of evolution the plantlike separates itself from the animal, the destiny of the living from the destiny of the dead, that of the organic side from that of the mechanical side of understanding. For the Totem side affirms and the Taboo side denies, blood and Time. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.154 <br /><br />In contrast with this, the nursery of talk is in the early castles and palaces of assize. Here the living Culture-languages have been formed. Talk is the custom of speech, its manners - "good f orm" in the intonation and idiom, fine tact in choice of words and mode of expression. All these things are a mark of race; they are learned not in the monastery cell or the scholar's study, but in polite intercourse and from living examples. [...] The clerical language on the other hand starts from concepts and conclusions. It labours to improve the dialectical capacities of the words and sentence-forms to the maximum. There sets in, consequently, an ever-increasing differentiation of scholastic and courtly, of the idiom of intellectual from that of social intercourse. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.155 <br /><br />To these two class-languages the rise of the city added a third, the language of the bourgeoisie, which is the true script-speech, reasoned and utilitarian, prose in the strictest sense of the word. It swings gently between the expression-modes of elegant society and of learning, in the one direction thinking for ever of new turns and words à la mode, in the other keeping sturdy hold on its existing stock of ideas. But in its inner essence it is of a mercantile nature. [...] With the final victory of the city the urban speech absorbs into itself that of elegance and that of learning. There arises in the upper strata of megalopolitan populations the uniform, keenly intelligent, practical koiné, the child and symbol of its Civilization, equally averse from dialect and poetry something perfectly mechanical, precise, cold, leaving as little as possible to gesture. These final homeless and rootless languages can be learned by every trader and porter Hellenistic in Carthage and on the Oxus, Chinese in Java, English in Shanghai and for their comprehension talk has no importance or meaning. And if we inquire what really created these languages, we find not the spirit of a race or of a religion, but the spirit of economics.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-28579438801169788352009-12-19T17:07:00.000-08:002009-12-19T17:12:21.410-08:00CITIES AND PEOPLES (B) PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 1(2)<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 113-137</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.113-114 <br /><br />Throughout the nineteenth century the scientific picture of history was vitiated by a notion that was either derived from, or at any rate brought to a point by, Romanticism the idea of the "People" in the moral-enthusiastic sense of the word. If, here and there, in earlier time a new religion, a new ornamentation, a new architecture, or a new script appeared, the question that it raised presented itself to the investigator thus What was the name of the people who produced the phenomenon? This enunciation of the problem is peculiar to the Western spirit and the present-day cast of that spirit; but it is so false at every point that the picture that it evokes of the course of events must necessarily be erroneous. [...] The purpose of this chapter is to demolish this romantic conception. What has inhabited the earth since the Ice Age is man, not "peoples." In the first instance, their Destiny is determined by the fact that the bodily succession of parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a landscape. Even nomadic tribes confine their movements within a limited field. Thereby the cosmic-plantlike side of life, of Being, is invested with a character of duration. This I call race. Tribes, septs, clans, families all these are designations for the fact of a blood which circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or a wide landscape. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.114 <br /><br />But these human beings possess also the microcosmic-animal side of life, in waking-consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the form in which the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation with that of another I call language, which begins by being a mere unconscious living expression that is received as a sensation, but gradually develops into a conscious technique of communication that depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching to signs. In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every language the efficient form of one great waking-consciousness that connects many individual beings. And we shall never reach the ultimate discoveries about either unless they are treated together and constantly brought into comparison with one ano ther. But, further, we shall never understand man's higher history if we ignore the fact that man, as constituent of a race and as possessor of a language, as derivative of a blood-unit and as member of an understanding-unit, has different Destinies, that of his being and that of his waking-being. That is, the origin, development, and duration of his race side and the origin, development, and duration of his language side are completely independent of one another. Race is something cosmic and psychic (Seelenhafi), periodic in some obscure way, and in its inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations. Languages, on the other hand, are causal forms, and operate through the polarity of their means. We speak of race-instincts and of the spirit of a language. But they are two distinct worlds. To Race belong the deepest meanings of the words "time" and "yearning"; to language those of the words "space" and "fear." But all this has been hidden from us, hitherto, by the overlying idea of "peoples." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.115 <br /><br />This, however, leads at once to the very significant distinction between two genera of language the language which is only an expression for the world, an inward necessity springing from the longing inherent in all life to actualize itself before witnesses, to display its own presence to itself, and the language that is meant to be understood by definite beings. There are, therefore, expression-languages and communication-languages. The former assume only a state of waking-being, the latter a connexion of waking-beings. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.116-117 <br /><br />And here at last is the key to those two strange words which were discovered by the ethnologists in two entirely different parts of the world in rather limited applications, but have since been quietly moving up into the foreground of research "totem" and "taboo." [...] Totem and Taboo describe the ultimate meanings of Being and Waking-Being, Destiny and Causality, Race and Language, Time and Space, yearning and fear, pulse and tension, politics and religion. The Totem side of life is plantlike and inheres in all being, while the Taboo side is animal and presupposes the free movement of a being in a world. Our Totem organs are those of the blood-circulation and of reproduction, our Taboo organs those of the senses and the nerves. All that is of Totem has physiognomy, all that is of Taboo has system. In the Totemistic resides the common feeling of beings that belong to the same stream of existence. It cannot be acquired and cannot be got rid of; it is a fact, the fact of all facts. That which is of Taboo, on the other hand, is the characteristic of linkages of waking-consciousness, it is learnable and acquirable, and on that very account guarded as a secret by cult-communities, philosophers' schools, and artists' guilds each of which possesses a sort of cryptic language of its own. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.117 <br /><br />On this account it is necessary to distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in itself a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with the signs. When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a language is spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its flesh that we can know. This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit, and all other languages that we have merely deciphered from texts and inscriptions, and we are right in calling these languages dead, for the human communities that were formed by them have vanished. We know the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the Egyptians. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.119 <br /><br />A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its "home," but it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in everchanging landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plantnature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has made its mark upon them - generation by generation they become more and more like the people they eradicated. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.119-120 <br /><br />Not so with language. The home of a language means merely the accidental place of its formation, and this has no relation to its inner form. Languages migrate in that they spread by carriage from tribe to tribe. Above all, they are capable of being, and are, exchanged indeed, in studying the early history of races we need not, and should not, feel the slightest hesitation about postulating such speech-changes. It is, I repeat, the form-content and not the speaking of a language that is taken over, and it is taken over (as primitives are for ever taking over ornament-motives) in order to be used with perfect sureness as elements of their own form-language. In early times the fact that a people has shown itself the stronger, or the feeling that its language possesses superior efficacy, is enough to induce others to give up their own language and with genuinely religious awe to take its language to themselves. Follow out the speech-changes of the Normans, whom we find in Normandy, England, Sicily, and Constantinople with di fferent languages in each place, and ever ready to exchange one for another. Piety towards the mother tongue the very term testifies to deep ethical forces, and accounts for the bitterness of our ever-recurring language-battles is a trait of the Late Western soul, almost unknowable for the men of other Cultures and entirely so for the primitive. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.120 <br /><br />Of all expressions of race, the purest is the House. From the moment when man, becoming sedentary, ceases to be content with mere shelter and builds himself a dwelling, this expression makes its appearance and marks off, within the race "man" (which is the element of the biological world-picture) the human races of world-history proper, which are streams of being of far greater spiritual significance. The prime form of the house is everywhere a product of feeling and of growth, never at all of knowledge. [...] One need only compare the lay-out of the old Saxon and that of the Roman house to feel that the soul of the men and the soul of the house were in each case identical. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.122 <br /><br />If we possessed in western Europe only pottery remains for the centuries between Trojan and Chlodwig, we should not have the least inkling of the event that we know as the "great Migrations." But the presence of an oval house in the Aegean region l and of another and very striking example of it in Rhodesia, and the much-discussed concordance of the Saxon peasant-house with that of the Libyan Kabyle disclose a piece of race-history. Ornaments spread when a people incorporates them in its form-language, but a house-type is only transplanted along with its race. The disappearance of an ornament means no more than a change of language, but when a house-type vanishes it means that race is extinguished. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.122-123 <br /><br />At the outset of a Culture two well-defined forms of a higher order rise up over the peasant village, as expressions of being and language of waking-being. They are the castle and the cathedral In them the distinction between Totem and Taboo, longing and fear, blood and intellect, rises to a grand symbolism. The ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chinese, the Classical, the South-Arabian, and the Western castle stands, as the home of continuing generations, very near to the peasant cottage, and both, as copies of the realities of living, breeding, and dying, lie outside all art-history. [...] The cathedral, on the other hand, is not ornamented, but is itself ornament. Its history is coincident with that of the Gothic style, and the same is true of the Doric temple and all other Early Culture buildings. So complete is the congruence, in the Western and every other Culture whose art we know at all, that it has never occurred to anyone to be astonished at the fact that strict architecture (which is simply the highest form of pure ornament) is entirely confined to religious building. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.123 <br /><br />We distinguish, then, the building that has a style and the building in which men have a style. Whereas in monastery and cathedral it is the stone that possesses form and communicates it to the men who are in its service, in farmhouse and feudal stronghold it is the full strength of the countryman's and the knight's life that forms the building forth from itself. Here the man and not the stone comes first, and here, too, there is an ornamentation; it is an ornament which is proper to man and consists in the strict nature and stable form of manners and customs. We might call this living, as distinct from rigid, style. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.124 <br /><br />The practical importance of the house as race-expression begins to be appreciated as and when one realizes the immense difficulty of approaching the kernel of race. I do not refer to its inner essence, its soul as to that, feeling speaks to us clearly enough and we all know a man of race, a "thoroughbred," when we see one. But what are the hall-marks for our sense, and above all for our eye, by which we recognize and distinguish races? This is a matter that belongs to the domain of Physiognomic just as surely as the classification of tongues belongs to that of Systematic. But how immense and how varied the material that would be required ! How much of it is irretrievably lost by destruction, and how much more by corruption ! In the most favourable cases, what we have of prehistoric men is their skeletons, and how much does a skeleton not tell us ! Very nearly everything. Prehistoric research in its naïve zeal is ready to deduce the incredible from a jaw-bone or an arm-bone. But think of one of those mass-graves of the War in northern France, in which we know that men of all races, white and coloured, peasants and townsmen, youths and men lie together. If the future had no collateral evidence as to their nature, it would certainly not be enlightened by anthropological research. In other words, immense dramas of race can pass over a land without the investigator of its grave-skeletons obtaining the least hint of the fact. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.125 <br /><br />When language is used as a differentia, it is to classify races, not according to their way of speaking, but according to the grammatical structure of the speech, which is just anatomy and system of another sort. No one as yet has perceived that the investigation of these speech-races is one of the most important tasks that research can possibly set itself. In the actuality of daily experience we all know perfectly well that the way of speaking is one of the most distinctive traits in present-day man examples are legion; each of us knows any number of them. In Alexandria the same Greek was spoken in the most dissimilar race-modes, as we can see even to-day from the script of the texts. In North America the native-born speak exactly alike, whether in English, in German, or for that matter in Indian. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.125 <br /><br />But science has completely failed to note that race is not the same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the microcosmic side of life a fresh group of characters appears, and that for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that a completely different significance must be attached to "races" when the word denotes subdivisions within the integral race "Man." With its talk of adaptation and of inheritance it sets up a soulless causal concatenation of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are expressing themselves secrets that cannot be inspected and measured, but only livingly experienced and felt from eye to eye. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.127 <br /><br />Further, there is a statistical aspect of the matter which has received far less attention than it should. For every human being alive to-day there were a million ancestors even in A.D. 1300 and ten million in A.D. 1000. This means that every German now living, without exception, is a blood-relative of every European of the age of the Crusades and that the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more intensely close as we narrow the limits of its field, so that within twenty generations or less the population of a land grows together into one single family; and this, together with the choice and voice of the blood that courses through the generations, ever driving congeners into one another's arms, dissolving and breaking marriages, evading or forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that in utter unconsciousness fulfil the will of the race. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.129 <br /><br />In reality, the race-expression of a human head can associate itself with any conceivable skull-form, the decisive element being not the bone, but the flesh, the look, the play of feature. Since the days of Romanticism we have spoken of an "Indogermanic" race. But is there such a thing as an Aryan or a Semitic skull? Can we distinguish Celtic and Prankish skulls, or even Boer and Kaffir? And if not, what may not the earth have witnessed in the way of history unknown to us, for which not the slightest evidences, but only bones, remain! <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.130 <br /><br />Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once in every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of the heavy hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from the South to the Rhine, and there it has certainly not visibly i.e., botanically changed. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.130-131 <br /><br />Race, Time, and Destiny belong together. But the moment scientific thought approaches them, the word "Time" acquires the significance of a dimension, the word "Destiny" that of causal connexion, while Race, for which even at that stage of scientific askesis we still retain a very sure feeling, becomes an incomprehensible chaos of unconnected and heterogeneous characters that (under headings of land, period, culture, stock) interpenetrate without end and without law. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.132 <br /><br />But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous. Speaking is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in contradiction to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular creatures devoid of all sense-organs can be conceived of as speechless. To be a microcosm in the macrocosm is one and the same thing as having a power to communicate oneself to another. To speak of a beginning of speech in animal history is meaningless. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.137 <br /><br />Finally, speech and truth exclude one another. And in fact this is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical "judge of men," who is all race and knows how to take the being that is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind the prayer the heart, and behind the common good-tone the more intimate levels of social importance and that instantaneously, immediately, and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything cosmic that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom one language at any rate carries conviction. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.137 <br /><br />A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a word's being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far beyond the collective existence of the higher animal-world, deep in the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliverance from the waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-41780250948804824322009-12-18T14:36:00.000-08:002009-12-18T14:38:46.835-08:00CITIES AND PEOPLES (A) THE SOUL OF THE CITY<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 87-110</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.89-90<br /><br />Primeval man is a ranging animal, a being whose waking-consciousness restlessly feels its way through life, all microcosm, under no servitude of place or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert t o drive off some element of hostile Nature. A deep transformation sets in first with agriculture for that is something artificial, with which hunter and shepherd have no touch. He who digs and ploughs is seeking not to plunder, but to alter Nature. To plant implies, not to take something, but to produce something. But with this, man himself becomes -plant namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earthboundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes the friend; earth becomes Mother Earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up. A new devoutness addresses itself in chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up along with man. And as completed expression of this life-feeling, we find everywhere the symbolic shape of the farmhouse, which in the disposition of the rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood of its inhabitants. The peasant's dwelling is the great symbol of settledness. It is itself plant, thrusts its roots deep into its "own" soil. [...] What his cottage is to the peasant, that the town is to the Cultureman. As each individual house has its kindly spirits, so each town has its tutelary god or saint. The town, too, is a plantlike being, as far removed as a peasantry is from nomadism and the purely microcosmic. Hence the development of a high form-language is linked always to a landscape. Neither an art nor a religion can alter the site of its growth; only in the Civilization with its giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage ourselves from these roots. Man as civilized, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensually. "Ubi bene, ibi patria" is valid before as well as after a Culture. [...] To-day, at the end of this Culture, the rootless intellect ranges over all landscapes and all possibilities of thought. But between these limits lies the time in which a man held a bit of soil to be something worth dying for. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.91 <br /><br />It goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is not size, but the presence of a soul. Not only in primitive conditions, such as those of central Africa, but in Late conditions too China, India, and industrialized Europe and America we find very large settlements that are nevertheless not to be called cities. They are centres of landscape; they do not inwardly form worlds in themselves. They have no soul. Every primitive population lives wholly as peasant and son of the soil the being "City" does not exist for it. That which in externals develops from the village is not the city, but the market, a mere meeting-point of rural life-interests. Here there can be no question of a separate existence. The inhabitant of a market may be a craftsman or a tradesman, but he lives and thinks as a peasant. We have to go back and sense accurately what it means when out of a primitive Egyptian or Chinese or Germanic village a little spot in a wide land a city comes into being. It is quite possibly not differentiated in any outward feature, but spiritually it is a place from which the countryside is henceforth regarded, felt, and experienced as "environs," as something different and subordinate. [...] Every springtime of a Culture is ipso facto the springtime of a new city-type and civism. The men of the pre-Culture are filled with a deep uneasiness in the presence of these types, with which they cannot get into any inward relation. On the Rhine and the Danube the Germans frequently, as at Strassburg, settled down at the gates of Roman cities that remained uninhabited. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.92-93 <br /><br />The new Soul of the City speaks a new language, which soon comes to be tantamount to the language of the Culture itself. The open land with its village-mankind is wounded; it no longer understands that language, it is nonplussed and dumb. All genuine style-history is played out in the cities. It is exclusively the city's destiny and the life-experience of urban men that speaks to the eye in the logic of visible forms. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.94 <br /><br />What do we know of the Classical cities, seeing that we do not know the lines that they presented under the Southern noon, under clouds in the morning, in the starry night? The courses of the streets, straight or crooked, broad or narrow; the houses, low or tall, bright or dark, that in all Western cities turn their facades, their faces, and in all Eastern cities turn their backs, blank wall and railing, towards the street; the spirit of squares and corners, impasses and prospects, fountains and monuments, churches or temples or mosques, amphitheatres and railway stations, bazaars and town-halls! <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.94 <br /><br />In the earliest time the landscape-figure alone dominates man's eyes. It gives form to his soul and vibrates in tune therewith. Feelings and woodland rustlings beat together; the meadows and the copses adapt themselves to its shape, to its course, even to its dress. The village, with its quiet hillocky roofs, its evening smoke, its wells, its hedges, and its beasts, lies completely fused and embedded in the landscape. The country town confirms the country, is an intensification of the picture of the country. It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.95 <br /><br />An obvious case in point is, of course, the Classical world, in which the Euclidean feeling of existence connected the city-idea with its need of minimizing extension and thus, with ever-increasing emphasis, identified the State with the stone body of the individual Polis. But, quite apart from this instance, we find in every Culture (and very soon) the type of the capital city. This, as its name pointedly indicates, is that city whose spirit, with its methods, aims, and decisions of policy and economics, dominates the land. The land with its people is for this controlling spirit a tool and an object. The land does not understand what is going on, and is not even asked. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.96 <br /><br />All effectual history begins with the primary classes, nobility and priesthood, forming themselves and elevating themselves above the peasantry as such. The opposition of greater and lesser nobility, between king and vassal, between worldly and spiritual power, is the basic form of all primitive politics, Homeric, Chinese, or Gothic, until with the coming of the City, the burgher, the Tiers tat, history changes its style. But it is exclusively in these classes as such, in their class-consciousness, that the whole meaning of history inheres. The peasant is historyless. [...] The peasant is the eternal man, independent of every Culture that ensconces itself in the cities. He precedes it, he outlives it, a dumb creature propagating himself from generation to generation, limited to soil-bound callings and aptitudes, a mystical soul, a dry, shrewd understanding that sticks to practical matters, the origin and the ever-flowing source of the blood that makes worldhistory in the cities. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.96-97 <br /><br />The city is intellect. The Megalopolis is "free" intellect. It is in resistance to the "feudal" powers of blood and tradition that the burgherdom or bourgeoisie, the intellectual class, begins to be conscious of its own separate existence. It upsets thrones and limits old rights in the name of reason and a bove all in the name of "the People," which henceforward means exclusively the people of the city. Democracy is the political form in which the townsman's outlook upon the world is demanded of the peasantry also. The urban intellect reforms the great religion of the springtime and sets up by the side of the old religion of noble and priest, the new religion of the Tiers Etat, liberal science. The city assumes the lead and control of economic history in replacing the primitive values of the land, which are for ever inseparable from the life and thought of the rustic, by the absolute idea of money as distinct from goods. The immemorial country word for exchange of goods is "barter"; even when one of the things exchanged is precious metal, the underlying idea of the process is not yet monetary i.e., it does not involve the abstraction of value from things and its fixation in metallic or fictitious quantities intended to measure things qua "commodities." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.97 <br /><br />Presently there arrived an epoch when the development of the city had reached such a point of power that it had no longer to defend itself against country and chivalry, but on the contrary had become a despotism against which the land and its basic orders of society were fighting a hopeless defensive battle in the spiritual domain against nationalism, in the political against democracy, in the economic against money. At this period the number of cities that really counted as historically dominant had already become very small. And with this there arose the profound distinction which was above all a spiritual distinction between the great city and the little city or town. The latter, very significantly called the country-town, was a part of the no longer co-efficient countryside. It was not that the difference between townsman and rustic had become lessened in such towns, but that this difference had become negligible as compared with the new difference between them and t he great city. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.98 <br /><br />With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer merely serves for the understanding of economic intercourse, but subjects the exchange of goods to its own evolution. It values things, no longer as between each other, but with reference to itself. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading cities the "money-markets" it is ignored. Money has now become a power, and, moreover, a power that is wholly intellectual and merely figured in the metal it uses, a power the reality of which resides in the waking-consciousness of the upper stratum of an economically active population, a power that makes those concerned with it just as dependent upon itself as the peasant was dependent upon the soil. [...] Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization, which is always an unconditional dictatorship of money, though taking different forms in different Cultures. But this is the reason, too, for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian's time, it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its place. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.100-101 <br /><br />And now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical, utterly land-alien product of a pure intellectual satisfaction in the appropriate, the city of the city-architect. In all Civilizations alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the symbol of soullessness. Regular rectangle-blocks astounded Herodotus in Babylon and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of "abstra ct" cities begins with Thurii, which was "planned" by Hippodamus of Miletus in 441. Priene, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the ups and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become in turn models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age. The Islamic architects laid out Baghdad from 761, and the giant city of Samarra a century later, according to plan. In the West-European and American world the lay-out of Washington in 1791 is the first big example. There can be no doubt that the world-cities of the Han period in China and the Maurya dynasty in India possessed this same geometrical pattern. Even now the world-cities of the Western Civilization are far from having reached the peak of their development. I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of to-day's and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.101-102 <br /><br />Consequently these city-bodies extended in general not in breadth, but more and more upward. The block-tenements of Rome such as the famous Insula Feliculas, rose, with a street breadth of only three to five metres [ten to seventeen feet] to heights that have never been seen in Western Europe and are seen in only a few cities in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already reached to the level of the hill-saddle. But always the splendid mass-cities harbour lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man in Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.102-103 <br /><br />What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking-consciousness become more and more dangerous. It must be remembered that in a microcosm the animal, waking side supervenes upon the vegetable side, that of being, and not vice versa. Beat and tension, blood and intellect, Destiny and Causality are to one another as the country-side in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing per se to something existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but tension. The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations, is dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension. Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension, and in every Culture these heads are the types of its final men one has only to compare them with the peasant heads, when such happen to emerge in the swirl of the great city's street-life. The advance, too, from peasant wisdom "slimness," mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals upon the sensed beat of life through the city-spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence the very word with its sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.103-104 <br /><br />And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama the sterility of civilised man. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood a s an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.105 <br /><br />The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding." It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady's who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne's who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine's who "belongs to herself" they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.105 <br /><br />At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.107 <br /><br />If the Early period is characterized by the birth of the City out of the country, and the Late by the battle between city and country, the period of Civilization is that of the victory of city over country, whereby it frees itself from the grip of the ground, but to its own ultimate ruin. Rootless, dead to the cosmic, irrevocably committed to stone and to intellectualism, it develops a form-language that reproduces every trait of its essence not the language of a becoming and growth, but that of a becomeness and completion, capable of alteration certainly, but not of evolution.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-66202254867947812982009-12-17T22:34:00.000-08:002009-12-17T22:38:13.993-08:00ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (C) THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 55-83.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.55 <br /><br />Although consideration of the Cultures themselves should logically precede that of the relations between them, modern historical thought generally reverses the order. The less it really knows of the life-courses which together make up a seeming unity of world-happenings, the more zealously it searches for life in the web of relations, and the less it understands even of these. What a wealth of psychology there is in the probings, rejections, choices, transvaluations, errors, penetrations, and welcomings! and not only between Cultures which immediately touch one another, wonder at one another, fight one another, but also as between a living Culture and the form-world of a dead one whose remains still stand visible in the landscape. And how narrow and poor, on the other hand, are the conceptions which the historians label "influence," "continuity," and "permanent effects"! <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.55 <br /><br />At bottom, this mode of treatment rests upon that idea which inspired the great Gothics long ago, the idea of a significant singleness in the history of all mankind. They saw how, on earth, men and peoples changed, but ideas stayed, and the powerful impressiveness of the picture has not worn itself out even to-day. Originally it was seen as a plan that God was working out by means of the human instrument. And it could still be regarded as such at a far later stage, in fact so long as the spell of the "ancient-mediaeval-modern" scheme lasted and its parade of permanence prevented us from noting that actuality was ever changing. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.56-57 <br /><br />The German whom Boniface converted did not transfer himself into the missionary's soul. It was a springtide quiver that passed in those days through the whole young world of the North, and what it meant was that each man found suddenly in conversion a language wherein to express his own religiousness. Just so the eyes of a child light up when we tell it the name of the object in its hand. It is not, then, microcosmic units that move, but cosmic entities that pick amongst them and appropriate them. Were it otherwise were these systems very beings that could exercise an activity (for "influence" is an organic activity) the picture of history would be quite other than what it is. Consider how every maturing man and every living Culture is continuously bathed in innumerable potential influences. Out of all these, only some few are admitted as such the great majority are not. Is choice concerned with the works, or with the men? <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.57 <br /><br />The historia n who is intent upon establishing causal series counts only the influences that are present, and the other side of the reckoning those that are not does not appear. [...] Two Cultures may touch between man and man, or the man of one Culture may be confronted by the dead form-world of another as presented in its communicable relics. In both cases the agent is the man himself. The closed-off act of A can be vivified by B only out of his own being, and to ipso it becomes B's, his inward property, his work, and part of himself. There was no movement of "Buddhism" from India to China, but an acceptance of part of the Indian Buddhists' store of images by Chinese of a certain spiritual tendency, who fashioned out a new mode of religious expression having meaning for Chinese, and only Chinese, Buddhists. What matters in all such cases is not the original meanings of the forms, but the forms themselves, as disclosing to the active sensibility and understanding of the observer potential modes of his own creativeness. Connotations are not transferable. Men of two different kinds are parted, each in his own spiritual loneliness, by an impassable gulf. Even though Indians and Chinese in those days both felt as Buddhists, they were spiritually as far apart as ever. The same words, the same rites, the same symbol but two different souls, each going its own way. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.57-58 <br /><br />Searching through all Cultures, then, one will always find that the continuation of earlier creations into a later Culture is only apparent, and that in fact the younger being has set up a few (very few) relations to the older being, always without regard to the original meanings of that which it makes its own. What becomes, then, of the "permanent conquests" of philosophy and science? We are told again and again how much of Greek philosophy still lives on to-day, but this is only a figure of speech without real content, for first Magian and then Faustian humanity, each w ith the deep wisdom of its unimpaired instincts, rejected that philosophy, or passed unregarding by it, or retained its formulas under radically new interpretations. [...] Our custom is simply to overlook as incidental "errors" such conceptions as Democritus's theory of atomic images, the very corporeal world of Plato's "ideas," and the fifty-two hollow spheres of Aristotle's universe, as though we could presume to know what the dead meant better than they knew themselves! <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.58-59 <br /><br />All round the Classical landscape there were working, or had worked, Egyptians, Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, and Phoenicians, and the works of these peoples their buildings, ornaments, art-works, cults, state-forms, scripts, and sciences were known to the Greeks in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did the Classical soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the relations that are accepted that we observe. But what of those that were not accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former category the pyramid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or cuneiform? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was not accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily? It is impossible to overpraise the wisdom (quite unconscious) that governed the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of what was chosen. Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception, but also a misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly evidenced as it is in this art of deliberate misunderstanding. The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.59 <br /><br />Truly, someone ought to have written the history of the "three Aristotles" Greek, Arabian, and Gothic who had not one conce pt or thought in common. Or the history of the transformation of Magian Christianity into Faustian ! We are told in sermon and book that this religion extended from the old Church into and over the Western field without change of essence. Actually, Magian man evolved out of the deepest depths of his dualistic worldconsciousness a language of his own religious awareness that we call "the" Christian religion. So much of this experience as was communicable words, formulas, rites was accepted by the man of the Late-Classical Civilization as a means of expression for his religious need; then it passed from man to man, even to the Germans of the Western pre-Culture, in words always the same and in sense always altering. Men would never have dared to improve upon the original meanings of the holy words it was simply that they did not know these meanings. Let's study the historical philosophy of law! <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.60-61 <br /><br />Law, in the Classical world, is law made by citizens for citizens and presupposes that the state-form is that of the Polis. It was this basic form of public life that led and self-evidently to the notion of the person as identical with the man who, added to others like him, made up the body (soma) of the State. From this formal fact of Classical world-feeling grew up the whole structure of Classical law. "Persona" then is a specifically Classical notion, possessing meaning and valency only in the Classical Culture. The individual person is a body which belongs to the stock of the Polis. [...] The man who followed the public career in Rome had necessarily to be jurist, general, administrator, and financial manager. When he gave judgment as prastor, he had behind him a wide experience of many fields other than law. A judicial class, professionally (let alone theoretically) specialized in law as its sole activity, was entirely unknown to the Classical. [...] It would give an incorrect idea to oppose Greek and Roman law to one ano ther as quantities of the same order. Roman law in its whole development is an individual city law, one amongst hundreds of such, and Greek law as a unity never existed at all. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.62 <br /><br />This jurisprudence, however, was built up by the mind of an intensely ahistorical species of man. Classical law, consequently, is law of the day and even the moment; it was in its very idea occasional legislation for particular cases, and when the case was settled, it ceased to be law. To extend its validity over subsequent cases would have been in contradiction to the Classical sense of the present. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.63 <br /><br />In the West it is conspicuously the other way about. The tendency is from the first to bring the entire living body of law into a general code, ordered for ever and exhaustively complete, containing in advance the decision of every conceivable future problem. All Western law bears the stamp of the future, all Classical the stamp of the moment. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.64 <br /><br />It is a grave error to suppose that a law that surveys all things evenly and without being influenced by political and economic interests can exist at all. [...] Every law is established by a class in the name of the generality. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.67-68 <br /><br />The first creation of "Arabian" law was the concept of the incorporeal person. Here is an element entirely absent in Classical law, and appearing quite suddenly in the "Classical" jurists (who were all Aramaeans), which cannot be estimated at its full value, or in its symbolic importance as an index of the new world-feeling, unless we realize the full extent of the field that this "Arabian" law covered. [...] Wonderfully, the law of individual citi es which is so self-evident on Classical ground is here silently transmuted into a law of creed-communities. It is Magian, magic, through and through. Always one Pneuma, one like spirit, one identical knowledge and comprehension of whole and sole truth, welds the believers of the same religion into a unit of will and action, into one juristic person. A juristic person is thus a collective entity which has intentions, resolutions, and responsibilities as an entity. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.69 <br /><br />This Arabian concept of nationality is a new and wholly decisive fact. The frontiers between "home" and "abroad" lay in the Apollinian world between every two towns, and in the Magian between every two creed-communities. What the "enemy," the peregrin, was to the Roman, the Pagan was to the Christian, the Amhaarez to the Jew. What the acquisition of Roman citizenship meant for the Gaul or the Greek in Cassar's time, Christian baptism meant for him now entry into the leading nation of the leading Culture. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.72 <br /><br />Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of practical experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested it through the intellect of chosen and enlightened men. [...] The authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that of the Arabian on the majesty of the name that they bear. But it matters very considerably indeed in a man's feelings whether he regards law as an expression of some fellow man's will or as an element of the divine dispensation. In the one case he either sees for himself that the law is right or else yields to force, but in the other he devoutly acknowledges ("Islam" = to commit, devote). <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.78-79 <br /><br />With this I reach the objective and look around me. I see three law-histories, connected merely by the elements of verbal and syntactical form, taken over by one from another, voluntarily or perforce, but never revealing to the new user the nature of the alien being which underlay them. Two of these histories are complete. The third is that in which we ourselves are standing standing, too, at a decisive point where we embark in our turn upon the big constructive task that Rome and Islam, each for itself and in its season, have accomplished before us. [...] All through our legal history runs, as basic motive, the conflict between book and life. The Western book is not an oracle or magician's text with Magian under-sense, but a piece of preserved history. It is compressed Past that wants to become Future, through us who read it and in whom its content lives anew. Faustian man does not aim, like Classical man, at bringing his life to a self-contained perfection, but at carrying on a life that emerged long before him and will draw to its end long after him. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.79-80 <br /><br />Now, legal thought is forced to attach itself to something tangible there must be something before it can abstract its concepts; it must have something from which to abstract. And it was the misfortune of Western jurisprudence that, instead of quarrying in strong, firm custom of social and economic life, it abstracted prematurely and in a hurry from Latin writings. [...] Owing to this, we have been completely cut off from touch with the fact that private law is meant to represent the social and economic existence of its period. [...] And consequently we possess a private law that rests on the shadowy foundations of the Late Classical economy. The intense embitterment which, in these beginnings of our Civilization's economy, opposes the name of Capitalism to the name of Socialism comes very largely from the fact that scholarly jurisprudence, and under its influence educated thought generally, have tied up such all-important notions as person, thing, and property to the conditions and the dispositions of Classical life. [...] The learned meaning thereby the book-learned weigh up everything to this day in scales that are essentially Classical. The man who is merely active and not trained to judgment feels himself misunderstood. He sees the contradiction between the life of the times and the law's outlook upon it, and calls for the heads of those who to gain their private ends, as he thinks have promoted this opposition. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.81 <br /><br />How was it that in 1900 the theft of electric power after grotesque discussions as to whether the matter in dispute was a corporeal thing had to be dealt with under an ad hoc statute? Why was it impossible to work the substance of patent law into the ensemble of the law about things? Why was copyright law unable conceptually to differentiate the intellectual creation, its communicable form the manuscript, and the objective product in print? Why, in contradiction with the law of things, had the artistic and the material property in a picture to be distinguished by separating acquisition of the original from acquisition of the right to reproduce it? Why is the misappropriation of a business idea or a scheme of organization unpunishable, and theft of the piece of paper on which it is set forth punishable? Because even to-day we are dominated by the Classical idea of the material thing. We live otherwise. Our instinctive experience is subject to functional concepts, such as working power, inventiveness, enterprise, such as intellectual and bodily, artistic and organizing, energies and capacities and talents. In our physics (of which the theory, advanced though it is, is but a copy of our present mode of life) the old idea of a body has in principle ceased to exist as in this very instance of electrical power. Why is our law conceptually helpless in the presence of the great facts of modern economics? Because persons, too, are known to it only as bodies? <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.82 <br /><br />It must be emphasized then and with all rigour that Classical law was a law of bodies, while ours is a law of functions. The Romans created a juristic statics; our task is juristic dynamics. For us persons are not bodies, but units of force and will; and things are not bodies, but aims, means, and creations of these units. The Classical relation between bodies was positional, but the relation between forces is called action. For a Roman the slave was a thing which produced new things. A writer like Cicero could never have conceived of "intellectual property," let alone property in a practical notion or in the potentialities of talent; for us, on the contrary, the organizer or inventor or promoter is a generative force which works upon other, executive, forces, by giving direction, aim, and means to their action. Both belong to economic life, not as possessors of things, but as carriers of energies. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.83 <br /><br />Roman law has ceased to be our source for principles of eternal validity. But the relation between Roman existence and Roman law-ideas gives it a renewed value for us. We can learn from it how we have to build up our law out of our experiences.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-82744077672554242242009-12-16T13:21:00.000-08:002009-12-16T13:27:01.023-08:00ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (B) THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 23-51.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.23-24 <br /><br />The mark of Nature is an extension that is inclusive of everything, but History is that which comes up out of the darkness of the past, presents itself to the seer, and from him sweeps onward into the future. He, as the present, is always its middle point, and it is quite impossible for him to order the facts with any meaning if he ignores their direction which is an element proper to life and not to thought. Every time, every land, every living aggregate has its own historical horizon, and it is the mark of the genuine histhistorical thinker that he actualizes the picture of history that his time demands. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.24 <br /><br />The history that is actually lived with and participated in never reaches over more than a grandfather's span neither for ancient Germans and present-day Negroes, nor for Pericles and Wallenstein. Here the horizon of living ends, and a new plane begins wherein the picture is based upon hearsay and historical tradition, a plane in which direct sympathies are adapted to a mind-picture that is both distinct and, from long use, stable. The picture so developed shows very different amplitudes for the men of the different Cultures. For us Westerners it is with this secondary picture that genuine history begins, for we live under the aspect of eternity, whereas for the Greeks and Romans it is just then that history ceases. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.26 <br /><br />I repeat, every being livingly experiences every other being and its destiny only in relation to itself. A flock of pigeons is regarded by the farmer on whose fields it settles quite otherwise than by the nature-lover in the street or the hawk in the air. [...] Put a man in a new situation, make the revolutionary a minister, the soldier a general, and at once history and the key men of history become for him something other than what they were. [...] It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to, a profound knowledge of men that the appraiser should see through glasses of his own colour. This knowledge, indeed, is exactly the component that we discern to be wanting in those generalizations that distort or altogether ignore that all-important fact, the uniqueness of the constituent event in history the worst example of this being the "materialistic" conception of history, about which we have said almost all there is to say when we have described it as physiognomic barrenness. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.28-29 <br /><br />In all other Cultures the aspects of world-history and of man-history coincide. The beginning of the world is the beginning of man, and the end of man is the end of the world. But the Faustian infinity-craving for the first time separated the two notions during the Baroque, and now it has made human history, for all its immense and still unknown span, a men episode in world-history, while the Earth of which other Cultures had seen not even the whole, but only superficial fractions as "the world" has become a little star amongst millions of solar systems. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.29-30 <br /><br />The typically Faustian separation of human history, as such, from the far wider history of the world has had the result that since the end of the Baroque our world-picture has contained several horizons dispo sed one behind the other in as many planes. For the exploration of these, individual sciences, more or less overtly historical in character, have taken shape. Astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, one after the other follow up the destinies of the starworld, the earth's crust, life, and man, and only then do we come to the "world "-history as it is still called even to-day of the higher Cultures, to which, again, are attached the histories of the several cultural elements, family history, and lastly (that highly developed speciality of the West) biography. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.31-32 <br /><br />The picture that we possess of the history of the Earth's crust and of life is at present still dominated by the ideas which civilized English thought has developed, since the Age of Enlightenment, out of the English habit of life Lyell's "phlegmatic" theory of the formation of the geological strata, and Darwin's of the origin of species, are actually but derivatives of the development of England herself. In place of the incalculable catastrophes and metamorphoses such as von Buch and Cuvier admitted, they put a methodical evolution over very long periods of time and recognize as causes only scientifically calculable and indeed mechanical utility-causes. This "English" type of causality is not only shallow, but also far too narrow. It limits possible causal connexions, in the first place, to those which work out their entire course on the earth's surface; but this immediately excludes all great cosmic relations between earthly life-phenomena and the events of the solar system and the stellar universe, and assumes the impossible postulate that the exterior face of the earth-ball is a completely insulated region of natural phenomena. And, secondly, it assumes that connexions which are not comprehensible by the means at present available to the human consciousness namely, sensation refined by instruments and thought precised by theory do not even exist. [...] T he two concepts, Goethe's form-fulfilment and Darwin's evolution, arc in as complete opposition as destiny to causality, and (be it added) as German to English thought, and German to English history. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.32-33 <br /><br />There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely "transitional" types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of to-day. [...] But the assumption of utility-causes or other visible causes for these phenomena has no support of actuality. It is a Destiny that evoked into the world life as life, the ever-sharper opposition between plant and animal, each single type, each genus, and each species. And along with this existence there is given also a definite energy of the form by virtue of which in the course of its self-fulfilment it keeps itself pure or, on the contrary, becomes dull and unclear or evasively splits into numerous varieties and finally a life-duration of this form, which (unless, again, incident intervenes to shorten it) leads naturally to a senility of the species and finally to its disappearance. As for mankind, discoveries of the Diluvial age indicate more and more pointedly that the man-forms existing then correspond to those living now; there is not the slightest tr ace of evolution towards a race of greater utilitarian "fitness. " And the continued failure to find man in the Tertiary discoveries indicates more and more clearly that the human life-form, like every other, originates in a sudden mutation (Wandlung) of which the "whence," "how," and "why" remain an impenetrable secret. If, indeed, there were evolution in the English sense of the word, there could be neither defined earth-strata nor specific animal-classes, but only a single geological mass and a chaos of living singular forms which we may suppose to have been left over from the struggle for existence. [...] So, too, we observe that swift and deep changes assert themselves in the history of the great Cultures, without assignable causes, influences, or purposes of any kind. The Gothic and the Pyramid styles come into full being as suddenly as do the Chinese imperialism of Shi-hwang-ti and the Roman of Augustus, as Hellenism and Buddhism and Islam. It is exactly the same with the events in the individual life of every person who counts at all, and he who is ignorant of this knows nothing of men and still less of children. Every being, active or contemplative, strides on to its fulfilment by epochs and we have to assume just such epochs in the history of solar systems and the world of the fixed stars. The origins of the earth, of life, of the free-moving animal are such epochs, and, therefore, mysteries that we can do no more than accept. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.33-34 <br /><br />That which we know of man divides clearly into two great ages of his being. The first is, as far as our view is concerned, limited on the one side by that profound fugue of planetary Destiny which we call the beginning of the Ice Age and about which we can (within the picture of world-history) say no more than that a cosmic change took place and on the other by the beginnings of high cultures on Nile and Euphrates, with which the whole meaning of human existence became suddenly diff erent. We discover everywhere the sharp frontier of Tertiary and Diluvial, and on the hither side of it we see man as a completely formed type, familiar with custom, myth, wit, ornament, and technique and endowed with a bodily structure that has not materially altered up to the present day. We will consider the first age as that of the primitive Culture. The only field in which this Culture endured throughout the second age (though certainly in a very "late" form) and is found alive and fairly intact to-day is north-west Africa. [...] The ethnologist-psychologist, on the contrary, delights in collecting, from all over the five continents, fragments of peoples who really have nothing in common but the negative fact of living a subordinate existence in the middle of one or another of the high Cultures, without participation in its inner life. The result is a congeries of tribes, some stationary, some inferior, and some decadent, whose respective modes of expression, moreover, are indiscriminately lumped together. But the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something strong and integral, something highly vital and effectual. Only, this Culture is so different from everything that we men of a higher Culture possess in the way of spiritual potentialities that we may question whether even those people which have carried the first age very deep into the second are good evidence, in their present modes of being and waking-being, for the condition of the old time. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.34-35 <br /><br />Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by inter tribal relations, there shot up suddenly (about 3000 B.C.) the Culture of Egypt and Babylonia. Probably for a millennium before that date both these fields had been nursing something that differed radically from every primitive Culture in kind and in intent, something having an inward unity common to all its forms of expressio n and directional in all its life. To me it seems highly probable that, if not indeed all over the earth's surface, at any rate in man's essence a change was accomplished at that time; and if so, then any primitive Culture worthy of the name that is still found living later, ever dwindling, in the midst of higher Cultures, should itself be something different from the Culture of the first Age. But, with reference to primitive Culture of any sort, that which I call the pre-Culture (and which can be shown to occur as a uniform process in the beginning of every high Culture) is something different in kind, something entirely new. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.36 <br /><br />The oldest speech that we know of belongs to the primitive Culture, and has lawless destinies of its own which cannot be deduced from those of, say, Ornament or Marriage. But the history of script belongs integrally with the expressionhistory of the several higher Cultures. That the Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, and Mexican each formed a special script in its pre-Cultural age that the Indian and the Classical on the other hand did not do so, but took over (and very late) the highly developed writing of a neighbouring Civilization that in the Arabian, again, every new religion and sect immediately formed its particular script all these are facts that stand in a deeply intimate relation to the generic form-history of these Cultures and its inner significance. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.36-37 <br /><br />My kind of thought and observation is limited to the physiognomy of the actual. [...] The existence of these two ages is a fact of historical experience; more, our experiencing of the primitive Culture consists not only in surveying, in its relics, a self-contained and closedoff thing, but also in reacting to its deeper meaning by virtue of an inward relation to it which persists in us. But the second age opens to us another a nd quite different kind of experience. It was an incident, the sense of which cannot now be scrutinized, that the type of the higher Culture appeared suddenly in the field of human history. Quite possibly, indeed, it was some sudden event in the domain of earth-history that brought forth a new and different form into phenomenal existence. But the fact that we have before us eight such Cultures, all of the same build, the same development, and the same duration, justifies us in looking at them comparatively, and therefore justifies our treating them as comparable, studying them comparatively, and obtaining from our study a knowledge which we can extend backwards over lost periods and forwards over the future provided always that a Destiny of a different order does not replace this form-world, suddenly and basically, by another. Our licence to proceed thus comes from general experience of organic being. As in the history of the Raptores or the Coniferse we cannot prophesy whether and when a new species will arise, so in that of Cultural history we cannot say whether and when a new Culture shall be. But from the moment when a new being is conceived in the womb, or a seed sinks into the earth, we do know the inner form of this new life-course; and we know that the quiet course of its development and fulfilment may be disturbed by the pressure of external powers, but never altered. This experience teaches, further, that the Civilization which at this present time has gripped the earth's whole surface is not a third age, but a stage a necessary stage of the Western Culture, distinguished from its analogues only by the forcefulness of its extension-tendency. Here experience ends, and all speculation on what new forms will govern the life of future mankind (or, for that matter, whether there will be any such new forms) all building of majestic card-houses on the foundation of "it should be, it shall be" is mere trifling far too futile, it seems to me, to justify one single life of any value being expended on it. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.37 <br /><br />The group of the high Cultures is not, as a group, an organic unit. That they have happened in just this number, at just these places and times, is, for the human eye, an incident without deeper intelligibility. The ordering of the individual Cultures, on the contrary, has stood out so distinctly that the historical technique of the Chinese, the Magian, and the Western worlds often, indeed, the mere common consent of the educated in these Cultures has been able to fashion a set of names upon which it would be impossible to improve. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.39 <br /><br />About 3000 after a long "Merovingian" period, which is still distinctly perceptible in Egypt, the two oldest Cultures began, in exceedingly limited areas on the lower Nile and the lower Euphrates. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.40 <br /><br />After 1500 three new Cultures begin first, the Indian, in the upper Punjab; then, a hundred years later, the Chinese on the middle Hwang-Ho; and then, about noo, the Classical, on the Aegean Sea. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.42 <br /><br />The Arabian Culture l is a discovery. Its unity was suspected by late Arabians, but it has so entirely escaped Western historical research that not even a satisfactory name can be found for it. Conformably to the dominant languages, the seed-time and the spring might be called the Aramaic and the later time the Arabian, but there is no really effectual name. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.43-44 <br /><br />Meantime yet another new Culture developed in Mexico. This lay so remote from the rest that no word even passed between them. All the more astonishing, therefore, is the similarity of its development to that of the Classical. [...] All these states including a world-power and more than one federation with an extent and resources far superior to those of the Greek and Roman states of Hannibal's day; with a comprehensive policy, a carefully ordered financial system, and a highly developed legislation; with administrative ideas and economic tradition such as the ministers of Charles V could never have imagined; with a wealth of literature in several languages, an intellectually brilliant and polite society in great cities to which the West could not show one single parallel all this was not broken down in some desperate war, but washed out by a handful of bandits in a few years, and so entirely that the relics of the population retained not even a memory of it all. [...] The most appalling feature of the tragedy was that it was not in the least a necessity of the Western Culture that it should happen. It was a private affair of adventurers, and at the time no one in Germany, France, or England had any idea of what was taking place. This instance shows, as no other shows, that the history of humanity has no meaning whatever and that deep significances reside only in the life-courses of the separate Cultures. Their inter-relations are unimportant and accidental. In this case the accident was so cruelly banal, so supremely absurd, that it would not be tolerated in the wildest farce. A few cannon and handguns began and ended the drama. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.48 <br /><br />A battle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan, or between the Cherusci and Chatti of Czesar's time, or what is substantially the same between ant-communities, is merely a drama of "living Nature." But when the Cherusci beat the Romans, as in the year 9, or the Aztecs the Tlascalans, it is history. [...] Primitive man has history only in the biological sense, and all prehistoric study boils down to the investigation of this sense. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.51 <br /><br />These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture, and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-33860091408474484162009-12-15T15:18:00.000-08:002009-12-15T15:20:19.290-08:00ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE (A) THE COSMIC AND TH E MICROCOSM<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest02spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 3-19.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.3 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.3-4 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.5 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.6-7 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.7-8 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.9 <br /><br />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." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.10 <br /><br />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 <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.11 <br /><br />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." <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.12 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.14 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.15-16 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.16 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.16-17 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.17 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.17 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.18 <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol II p.19 <br /><br />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.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-79207020985431499582009-12-15T15:15:00.000-08:002009-12-15T15:17:55.559-08:00FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 2(2)<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest01spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 402-428.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.402 <br /><br />It is a deeply significant fact that in Hellas of all countries star-gods, the numina of the Far, are wanting. Helios was worshipped only in half-Oriental Rhodes and Selene had no cult at all. [...] The old Roman religion, in which the Classical world-feeling was expressed with special purity, knew neither sun nor moon, neither storm nor cloud as deities. The forest stirrings and the forest solitude, the tempest and the surf, which completely dominated the Nature of Faustian man (even that of prc-Faustian Celts and Teutons) and imparted to their mythology its peculiar character, left Classical man unmoved. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.403 <br /><br />The bases of the Apollinian and the Faustian Nature-images respectively are in all contexts the two opposite symbols of individual thing and unitary space. Olympus and Hades are perfectly sense-definite places, while the kingdom of the dwarfs, elves and goblins, and Valhalla and Niflheim are all somewhere or other in the universe of space. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.404 <br /><br />The ever-increasing emphasis with which Classical polytheism somatically individualized its deities is peculiarly evident in its attitude to "strange gods." For Classical man the gods of the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and the Germans, in so far as they could be imagined as figures, were as real as his own gods. Within his world-feeling the statement that such other gods "do not exist" would have no meaning. When he came into contact with the countries of these deities he did them reverence. The gods were, like a statue or a polis, Euclidean bodies having locality. They were beings of the near and not the general space. If a man were sojourning in Babylon, for instance, and Zeus and Apollo were far away, all the more reason for -particularly honouring the local gods. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.406 <br /><br />In the first generations of the Imperial age, the antique polytheism gradually dissolved, often without any alteration of outward ritual and mythic form, into the Magian monotheism. A new soul had come up, and it lived the old forms in a new mode. The names continued, but they covered other numina. In all Late-Classical cults, those of Isis and Cybele, of Mithras and Sol and Serapis, the divinity is no longer felt as a localized and formable being. [...] Hitherto, names had been the designations of so many gods different in body and locality, now they are titles of the One whom every man has in mind. This Magian monotheism reveals itself in all the religious creations that flooded the Empire from the East the Alexandrian Isis, the Sun-god favoured by Aurelian (the Baal of Palmyra), the Mithras protected by Diocletian (whose Persian form had been completely recast in Syria), the Baalath of Carthage (Tanit, Dea Caelestis) honoured by Septimius Severus. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.408-409 <br /><br />Atheism is a subject that the psychologist and the student of religion have hitherto regarded as scarcely worth careful investigation. Much has been written and argued about it, and very roundly, by the free-thought martyr on the one hand and the religious zealot on the other. But no one has had anything to say about the species of atheism; or has treated it analytically as an individual and definite phenomenon, positive and necessary and intensely symbolic; or has realized how it is limited in time. [...] Atheism, rightly understood, is the necessary expression of a spirituality that has accomplished itself and exhausted its religious possibilities, and is declining into the inorganic. It is entirely compatible with a living wistful desire for real religiousness therein resembling Romanticism, which likewise would recall that which has irrevocably gone, namely, the Culture and it may quite well be in a man as a creation of his feeling without his being aware of it, without its ever interfering with the habits of his thought or challenging his convictions. [...] Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture but with the dawn of the Civilization. It belongs to the great city, to the "educated man" of the great city who acquires mechanistically what his forefathers the creators of the Culture had lived organically. In respect of the Classical feeling of God, Aristotle is an atheist unawares. The Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism is atheistic like the Socialism of Western and the Buddhism of Indian modernity, reverently though they may and do use the word "God." But, if this late form of world-feeling and world-image which preludes our "second religiousness" is universally a negation of the religious in us, the structure of it is different in each of the Civilizations. There is no religiousness that is without an atheistic opposition belonging uniquely to itself and directed uniquely against itself. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.410 <br /><br />The degree of piety of which a period is capable is revealed in its attitude torwards toleration. One tolerates, either because the form-language appears to be expressing something of that which in one's own lived experience is felt as divine, or else because that experience no longer contains anything so felt. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.411 <br /><br />If we turn back from Nature-feeling become form to Nature-knowledge become system, we know God or the gods as the oiigin of the images by which the intellect seeks to make the world-around comprehensible to itself. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.412-413 <br /><br />"Force" is a mythical quantity, which does not arise out of scientific experimentation but, on the contrary, defines the structure thereof a priori. It is only the Faustian conception of Nature that instead of a magnet thinks of a magnetism whose field of force includes a piece of iron, and instead of luminous bodies thinks of radiant energy, and that imagines personifications like "electricity," "temperature" and "radioactivity." That this "force" or "energy" is really a numen stiffened into a concept (and in nowise the result of scientific experience) is shown by the often overlooked fact that the basic principle known as the First Law of Thermodynamics says nothing whatever about the nature of energy, and it is properly speaking an incorrect (though psychologically most significant) assumption that the idea of the "Conservation of Energy" is fixed in it. Experimental measurement can in the nature of things only establish a number, which number we have (significantly, again) named work. But the dynamical cast of our thought demanded that this should be conceived as a difference of energy, although the absolute value of energy is only a figment and can never be rendered by a definite number. There always remains, therefore, an undefined additive constant, as we call it; in other words, we always strive to maintain the image of an energy that our inner eye has formed, although actual scientific practice is not concerned with it. This being the provenance of the force-concept, it follows that we can no more define it than we can define those other un-Classical words Will and Space. There remains always a felt and intuitively-perceived remainder which makes every personal definition an almost religious creed of its author. Every Baroque scientist in this matter has his personal inner experience which he is trying to clothe in words. Goethe, for instance, could never have defined his idea of a world-force, but to himself it was a certainty. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.417 <br /><br />But with this, it cannot be denied, the Western physics is drawing near to the limit of its possibilities. At bottom, its mission as a historical phenomenon has been to transform the Faustian Nature-feeling into an intellectual knowledge, the faith-forms of springtime into the machine-forms of exact science. And, though for the time being it will continue to quarry more and more practical and even "purely theoretical" results, results as such, whatever their kind, belong to the superficial history of a science. To its deeps belong only the history of its symbolism and its style, and it is almost too evident to be worth the saying that in those deeps the essence and nucleus of our science is in rapid disintegration. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.418-419 <br /><br />The theory of gravitation, which since Newton has been an impregnable truth, has now been recognized as a temporally limited and shaky hypothesis. The principle of the Conservation of Energy has no meaning if energy is supposed to be infinite in an infinite space. [...] Since Newton, the assumption of constant mass the counterpart of constant force has had uncontested validity. But the Quantum theory of Planck, and the conclusions of Niels Bohr therefrom as to the fine structure of atoms, which experimental experience had rendered necessary, have destroyed this assumption. Every self-contained system possesses, besides kinetic energy, an energy of radiant heat which is inseparable from it and therefore cannot be represented purely by the concept of mass. For if mass is defined by living energy it is ifso facto no longer constant with reference to thermodynamic state. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.419-420 <br /><br />But, if these are serious enough doubts, the ruthlessly cy nical hypothesis of the Relativity theory strikes to the very heart of dynamics. Supported by the experiments of A. A. Michelson, which showed that the velocity of light remains unaffected by the motion of the medium, and prepared mathematically by Lorentz and Minkowski, its specific tendency is to destroy the notion of absolute time. Astronomical discoveries (and here present-day scientists are seriously deceiving themselves) can neither establish nor refute it. "Correct" and "incorrect" are not the criteria whereby such assumptions are to be tested; the question is whether, in the chaos of involved and artificial ideas that has been produced by the innumerable hypotheses of Radioactivity and Thermodynamics, it can hold its own as a useable hypothesis or not. But however this may be, it has abolished the constancy of those "physical quantities into the definition of which time has entered, and unlike the antique statics, the Western dynamics knows only such quantities. Absolute measures of length and rigid bodies are no more. And with this the possibility of absolute quantitative delimitations and therefore the "classical" concept of mass as the constant ratio between force and acceleration fall to the ground just after the quantum of action, a product of energy and time, had been set up as a new constant. If we make it clear to ourselves that the atomic ideas of Rutherford and Bohr signify nothing but this, that the numerical results of observations have suddenly been provided with a picture of a planetary world within the atom, instead of that of atom-swarms hitherto favoured; if we observe how rapidly card-houses of hypothesis are run up nowadays, every contradiction being immediately covered up by a new hurried hypothesis; if we reflect on how little heed is paid to the fact that these images contradict one another and the "classical" Baroque mechanics alike, we cannot but realize that the great style of ideation is at an end and that, as in architecture and the arts of form, a sort of craft-art of hypothesis-building has t aken its place. Only our extreme maestria in experimental technique true child of its century hides the collapse of the symbolism. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.420-421 <br /><br />Amongst these symbols of decline, the most conspicuous is the notion of Entropy, which forms the subject of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The first law, that of the conservation of energy, is the plain formulation of the essence of dynamics not to say of the constitution of the West-European soul, to which Nature is necessarily visible only in the form of a contrapuntaldynamic causality (as against the static-plastic causality of Aristotle). The basic clement of the Faustian world-picture is not the Attitude but the Deed and, mechanically considered, the Process, and this law merely puts the mathematical character of these processes into form as variables and constants. But the Second Law goes deeper, and shows a bias in Nature-happenings which is in no wise imposed a priori by the conceptual fundamentals of dynamics. Mathematically, Entropy is represented by a quantity which is fixed by the momentary state of a self-contained system of bodies and under all physical and chemical alterations can only increase, never diminish; in the most favourable conditions it remains unchanged. [...] What has never hitherto been fully felt, and what leads me to regard the Entropy theory (1850) as the beginning of the destruction of that masterpiece of Western intelligence, the old dynamic physics, is the deep opposition of theory and actuality which is here for the first time introduced into theory itself. [...] If the Entropy theory is followed out to its conclusion, it results, firstly, that in theory all processes must be reversible which is one of the basic postulates of dynamics and is reasserted with all rigour in the law of the Conservation of Energy but, secondly, that in actuality processes of Nature in their entirety are irreversible.Difference between Mathematics and Statistics, very i mportant <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.421-422 <br /><br />The "smallest particles" of a body (an image, no more) throughout perform reversible processes, but in actual things the smallest particles are in disorder and mutually interfere; and so the irreversible process that alone is experienced by the observer is linked with increase of entropy by taking the mean probabilities of occurrences. And thus theory becomes a chapter of the Calculus of Probabilities, and in lieu of exact we have statistical methods. Evidently, the significance of this has passed unnoticed. Statistics belong, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating Life, to Destiny and Incident and not to the world of laws and timeless causality. As everyone knows, statistics serve above all to characterize political and economic, that is, historical, developments. In the "classical" mechanics of Galileo and Newton there would have been no room for them. And if, now, suddenly the contents of that field are supposed to be understood and understandable only statistically and under the aspect of Probability instead of under that of the a priori exactitude which the Baroque thinkers unanimously demanded what does it mean? It means that the object of understanding is ourselves. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.424 <br /><br />It remains now to sketch the last stage of Western science. From our standpoint of to-day, the gently-sloping route of decline is clearly visible. This too, the power of looking ahead to inevitable Destiny, is part of the historical capacity that is the peculiar endowment of the Faustian. The Classical died, as we shall die, but it died unknowing. It believed in an eternal Being and to the last it lived its days with frank satisfaction, each day spent as a gift of the gods. But we know our history. Before us there stands a last spiritual crisis that will involve all Europe and America. What its course will be, Late Hellenism tells us. The tyranny of the Reason of which we are not conscious, for we are ourselves its apex is in every Culture an epoch between man and old-man, and no more. Its most distinct expression is the cult of exact sciences, of dialectic, of demonstration, of causality. Of old the Ionic, and in our case the Baroque were its rising limb, and now the question is what form will the down-curve assume? In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of science. Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword. First, in the 18th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the 19th, its powers, and now its historical rôle is critically reviewed. But from Skepsis there is a path to "second religiousness," which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect. The individual renounces by laying aside books. The Culture renounces by ceasing to manifest itself in high scientific intellects. But science exists only in the living thought of great savant-generations, and books are nothing if they are not living and effective in men worthy of them. Scientific results are merely items of an intellectual tradition. It constitutes the death of a science that no one any longer regards it as an event, and an orgy of two centuries of exact scientific-ness brings satiety. Not the individual, the soul of the Culture itself has had enough, and it expresses this by putting into the field of the day ever smaller, narrower and more unfruitful investigators. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.425 <br /><br />But before the curtain falls, there is one more task for the historical Faustian spirit, a task not yet specified, hitherto not even imagined as possible. There has still to be written a morphology of the exact sciences, which shal l discover how all laws, concepts and theories inwardly hang together as forms and what they have meant as such in the life-course of the Faustian Culture. The re-treatment of theoretical physics, of chemistry, of mathematics as a sum of symbols this will be the definitive conquest of the mechanical world-aspect by an intuitive, once more religious, world-outlook, a last master-effort of physiognomic to break down even systematic and to absorb it, as expression and symbol, into its own domain. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.425-426 <br /><br />The separate sciences epistemology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy are approaching one another with acceleration, converging towards a complete identity of results. [...] This convergence has not yet been observed, for the reason that since Kant indeed, since Leibniz there has been no philosopher who commanded the problems of all the exact sciences. Even a century ago, physics and chemistry were foreign to one another, but to-day they cannot be handled separately witness spectrum analysis, radio-activity, radiation of heat. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.428 <br /><br />The uniting of the several scientific aspects into one will bear all the marks of the great art of counterpoint. An infinitesimal music of the boundless world-space that is the deep unresting longing of this soul, as the orderly statuesque and Euclidean Cosmos was the satisfaction of the Classical. That formulated by a logical necessity of Faustian reason as a dynamic-imperative causality, then developed into a dictatorial, hard-working, world-transforming science is the grand legacy of the Faustian soul to the souls of Cultures yet to be, a bequest of immensely transcendent forms that the heirs will possibly ignore. And then, weary after its striving, the Western science returns to its spiritual home.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-24077350104343042142009-12-13T10:56:00.000-08:002009-12-13T10:57:15.103-08:00FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 1(2)<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest01spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 377-402.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.377<br /><br />Helmholtz observed, in a lecture of 1869 that has become famous, that "the final aim of Natural Science is to discover the motions underlying all alteration, and the motive forces thereof; that is, to resolve itself into Mechanics." What this resolution into mechanics means is the reference of all qualitative impressions to fixed quantitative base-values, that is, to the extended and to change of place therein. It means, further if we bear in mind the opposition of becoming and become, form and law, image and notion the referring of the seen Nature-picture to the imagined picture of a single numerically and structurally measurable Order. The specific tendency of all Western mechanics is towards an intellectual conquest by measurement, and it is therefore obliged to look for the essence of the phenomenon in a system of constant elements that are susceptible of full and inclusive appreciation by measurement, of which Helmholtz distinguishes motion (using the word in its everyday sense) as the most important. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.377-378 <br /><br />For most people, indeed, "mechanics" appears as the selfevident synthesis of Nature-impressions. But it merely appears to be so. For what is motion? Is not the postulate that everything qualitative is reducible to the motion of unalterably-alike mass-points, essentially Faustian and not common to humanity? Archimedes, for example, did not feel himself obliged to transpose the mechanics that he saw into a mental picture of motions. Is motion generally a purely mechanical quantity? Is it a word for a visual experience or is it a notion derived from that experience? Is it the number that is found by measurement of experimentally-produced facts, or the picture that is subjected to that number, that is signified by it? <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.378-379 <br />Theoria means image, vision, and it is this that makes a Nature-law out of a figure-and-letter formula. Everything exact is in itself meaningless, and every physical observation is so constituted that it proves the basis of a certain number of imaged presuppositions; and the effect of its successful issue is to make these presuppositions more convincing than ever. Apart from these, the result consists merely of empty figures. But in fact we do not and cannot get apart from them. Even if an investigator puts on one side every hypothesis that he knows as such, as soon as he sets his thought to work on the supposedly clear task, he is not controlling but being controlled by the unconscious form of it, for in living activity he is always a man of his Culture, of his age, of his school and of his tradition. Faith and "knowledge" are only two species of inner certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it dominates all the conditions of knowing, be they never so exact. And thus it is theories and not pure numbers that are the support of all natural science. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.379 <br /><br />Every savant's experiment, be it what it may, is at the same time an instance of the kind of symbolism that rules in the savant's ideation. All Laws formulated in words are Orders that have been activated and vitalized, filled with the very essence of the one and only the one Culture. As to the "necessity" which is a postulate in all exact research, here too we have to consider two kinds of necessity, viz., a necessity within the spiritual and living (for it is Destiny that the history of every individual research-act takes its course when, where and how it does) and a necessity within the known (for which the current Western name is Causality). <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.380 <br /><br />For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved with inward certainty of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized light-rays, errant ions, flying and colliding gas-particles, magnetic fields, electric currents and waves are they not one and all Faustian visions, closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the upthrust of Gothic architecture, the Viking's voyaging into unknown seas, the longings of Columbus and Copernicus? Did not this world of forms and pictures grow up in perfect tune with the contemporary arts of perspective oil-painting and instrumental music? Are they not, in short, our passionate directedness,our passion of the third dimension, coming to symbolic expression in the imagined Nature-picture as in the soul-image?<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">"Second religiousness" - isn't it creationism? </span><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.380-381 <br /><br />It follows then that all "knowing" of Nature, even the exactest, is based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the purpose of all this imaginationmachinery) to reduce Nature, presupposes a dogma namely, the religious world-picture of the Gothic centuries. For it is from this world-picture that the physics peculiar to the Western intellect is derived. There is no science that is without unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the researcher has no control and which can be traced back to the earliest days of the awakening Culture. There is no Natural science without a precedent Religion. In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world both say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science [...] Now, the history of the higher Cultures shows that "science" is a transitory spectacle, belonging only to the autumn and winter of their life-course, and that in the cases of the Classical, the Indian, the Chinese and the Arabian thought alike a few centuries suffice for the complete exhaustion of its possibilities. Classical science faded out between the battle of Cannas and that of Actium and made way for the world-outlook of the "second religiousness." And from this it is possible<br />to foresee a date at which our Western scientific thought shall have reached the limit of its evolution. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.382 <br /><br />The "Nature" of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of bodies, a physics of the near. The Arabian Culture owned the arabesque and the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious efficient substantialities like the "philosophical mercury," which is neither a material nor a property but some thing that underlies the coloured existence of metals and can transmute one metal into another. And the outcome of Faustian man's Nature idea was a dynamic of unlimited span, a physics of the distant. To the Classical therefore belong the conceptions of matter and form, to the Arabian (quite Spinozistically) the idea of substances with visible or secret attributes, and to the Faustian the idea of force and mass. Apollinian theory is a quiet meditation, Magian a silent knowledge of Alchemy the means of Grace (even here the religious source of mechanics is to be discerned), and the Faustian is from the very outset a working hypothesis. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.383-384 <br /><br />The rise of a chemical method of the Arabian style betokens a new worldconsciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow made an end of Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics, is linked with the enigmatic name of Hermes Trismegistus, who is supposed to have lived in Alexandria at the same time as Plotinus and Diofhantus. Similarly it was just at the time of the definite emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry l was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry and mathematic alike became pure analysis. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.384 <br /><br />What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamics words that as used in modern science are merely traditional distinctions without deeper meaning are really the respective physical systems of the Apollinian, Magian and Faustian souls, each of which grew up in its own Culture and was limited as to validity to the same. Corresponding to these sciences, each to each, we have the mathematics of Euclidean geometry, Algebra and Higher Analysis, and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue. We may differentiate these three kinds of physics (bearing in mind of course that other Cultures may and in fact do give rise to other kinds) by their standpoints towards the problem of motion, and call them mechanical orderings of states, secret forces and processes respectively. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.384-385 <br /><br />Now, the tendency of human thought (which is always causally disposed) to reduce the image of Nature to the simplest possible quantitative form-units that can be got by causal reasoning, measuring and counting in a word, by mechanical differentiation leads necessarily in Classical, Western and every other pos sible physics, to an atomic theory. Of Indian and Chinese science we know hardly more than the fact they once existed, and the Arabian is so complicated that even now it seems to defy presentation. But we do know our own and the Apollinian sciences well enough to observe, here too, a deeply symbolical opposition. The Classical atoms are miniature forms, the Western minimal quanta, and quanta, too, of energy. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.387 <br /><br />Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience. In it the Culture, through the contemplative-creative power of its great physicists, reveals its inmost essence and very self. It is only a preconceived idea of criticism that extension exists in itself and independently of the form-feeling and world-feeling of the knower. The thinker, in imagining that he can cut out the factor of Life, forgets that knowing is related to the known as direction is to extension and that it is only through the living quality of direction that what is felt extends into distance and depth and becomes space. The cognized structure of the extended is a projection of the cognizing being. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.389-390 <br /><br />This puts the fundamentals of Faustian and Apollinian Nature-science in quite another light. No "Nature" is pure there is always something of history in it. If the man is ahistorical, like the Greek, so that the totality of his impressions of the world is absorbed in a pure point-formed present, his Natureimage is static, self-contained (that is, walled against past and future) in every individual moment. Time as magnitude figures in Greek physics as little as it does in Aristotle's entelechy-idea. If, on the other hand, the Man is historically constituted, the image formed is dynamic. Number, the definitive evaluation of the become, is in the case of ahistoric man Measure, and in that of the historical man Function. One mea sures only what is present and one follows up only what has a past and a future, a course. And the effect of this difference is that the inner inconsistencies of the motion-problem are covered up in Classical theories and forced into the foreground in Western. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.394-395 <br /><br />We can now say without any hesitation that the form-world of a Natural science corresponds to those of the appropriate mathematic, the appropriate religion, the appropriate art. A deep mathematician by which is meant not a master-computer but a man, any man, who feels the spirit of numbers living within him realizes that through it he "knows God." Pythagoras and Plato knew this as well as Pascal and Leibniz did so. Terentius Varro, in his examination of the old Roman religion (dedicated to Julius Cassar), distinguished with Roman seriousness between the theologia civilis, the sum of officially-recognized belief, the theologia mythica, the imagination-world of poets and artists, and the theologia physica of philosophical speculation. Applying this to the Faustian Culture, that which Thomas Aquinas and Luther, Calvin and Loyola taught belongs to the first category, Dante and Goethe belong to the second; and to the third belongs scientific physics, inasmuch as behind its formulas there are images. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.395 <br /><br />From the later days of the Renaissance onward, the notion of God has steadily approximated, in the spirit of every man of high significance, to the idea of pure endless Space. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.399 <br /><br />Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture "advances," this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, and had not the morphology of history remained to this day an almost un explored field, the supposedly universal mythopoetic power would long ago have been found to be limited to particular periods. It would have been realized that this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols like and consistent amongst themselves belongs most decidedly not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures. Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There it must be. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.399 <br /><br />It was in the Homeric age (1100-800 B.C.) and in the corresponding knightly age of Teutonism (900-1100 A.D.), that is, the epic ages, and neither before nor after them, that the great worldimage of a new religion came into being. The corresponding ages in India and Egypt are the Vedic and the Pyramid periods; one day it will be discovered that Egyptian mythology did in fact ripen into depth during the Third and Fourth Dynasties. <br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.400-401 <br /><br />The deep inward unity of this Faustian world of myth and saga and the complete congruence of its expression-symbolism has never hitherto been realized, and yet Siegfried, Baldur, Roland, Christ the King in the "Heliand," are different names for one and the same figure. Valhalla and Avalon, the Round Table and the communion of the Grail-templars, Mary, Frigga and Frau Holle mean the same. [...] The old Celtic and old Germanic myth-motives have to be treated, like the repertory of Classical forms possessed by the learned monk, and like the entire body of Christian-Eastern faith taken over by the Western Church, simply as the material out of which the Faustian soul in these centuries created a mythic architecture of its own.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-54892379094447365512009-12-12T12:15:00.000-08:002009-12-12T12:31:42.766-08:00SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING. (2) BUDDHISM, STOICISM, AND SOCIALISM<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest01spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 341-374.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.341<br /><br />We are now at last in a position to approach the phenomenon of Morale, the intellectual interpretation of Life by itself, to ascend the height from which it is possible to survey the widest and gravest of all the fields of human thought. At the same time, we shall need for this survey an objectivity such as no one has as yet set himself seriously to gain. Whatever we may take Morale to be, it is no part of Morale to provide its own analysis; and we shall get to grips with the problem, not by considering what should be our acts and aims and standards, but only by diagnosing the Western feeling in the very form of the enunciation. In this matter of morale, Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say "thou shalt" in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable. That, and nothing short of it, is, for us, morale. In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Here Luther is completely at one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with Jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general and permanent validity. It is a necessity of the Faustian soul that this should be so. He who thinks or teaches "otherwise" is sinful, a backslider, a foe, and he is fought down without mercy. You "shall," the State "shall," society "shall" this form of morale is to us self-evident; it represents the only real meaning that we can attach to the word. But it was not so either in the Classical, or in India, or in China. Buddha, for instance, gives a pattern to take or to leave, and Epicurus offers counsel. Both undeniably are forms of high morale, and neither contains the will-element. What we have entirely failed to observe is the peculiarity of moral dynamic. If we allow that Socialism (in the ethical, not the economic, sense) is that world-feeling which seeks to carry out its own views on behalf of all, then we are all without exception, willingly or no, wittingly or no, Socialists.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.342<br /><br />All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.343<br /><br />In the world as seen by the Faustian's eyes, everything is motion with an aim. He himself lives only under that condition, for to him life means struggling, overcoming, winning through.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.344<br /><br />It is quite wrong to bind up Christianity with the moral imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity and he not only made it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction. The "it" became "I," the passion-charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great Sacrament of personal contrition. Will-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted nothing is more characteristically our own than this is. And in virtue of it the Gothic springtime proceeded to a profound and never yet appreciated inward transformation of the morale of Jesus. A quiet spiritual morale welling from Magian feeling a morale or conduct recommended as potent for salvation, a morale the knowledge of which was communicated as a special act of grace was recast as a morale of imperative command.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.345<br /><br />The old riddles and perplexities now resolve themselves. There are as many morales as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer. [...] The individual may act morally or immorally, may do "good" or "evil" with respect to the primary feeling of his Culture, but the theory of his actions is not a result but a datum. Each Culture possesses its own standards, the validity of which begins and ends with it. There is no general morale of humanity.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.345-346<br /><br />We are no more capable of converting a man to a morale alien to his being than the Renaissance was capable of reviving the Classical or of making anything but a Southernized Gothic, an anti-Gothic, out of Apollinian motives. We may talk to-day of transvaluing all our values; we may, as Megalopolitans, "go back to" Buddhism or Paganism or a romantic Catholicism; we may champion as Anarchists an individualist or as Socialists a collectivist ethic but in spite of all we do, will and feel the same. A conversion to Theosophy or Freethinking or one of the present-day transitions from a supposed Christianity to a supposed Atheism (or vice versa) is an alteration of words and notions, of the religious or intellectual surface, no more. None of our "movements" have changed man.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.346<br /><br />A strict morphology of all the morales is a task for the future. Here, too, Nietzsche has taken the first and essential step towards the new standpoint. But he has failed to observe his own condition that the thinker shall place himself "beyond good and evil." He tried to be at once sceptic and prophet, moral critic and moral gospeller. It cannot be done. One cannot be a firstclass psychologist as long as one is still a Romantic.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.350<br /><br />There is a hardness in the sort of corn-passion that was practised by the German mystics, the German and Spanish military Orders, the French and English Calvinists. In the Russian, the Raskolnikov, type of charity a soul melts into the fraternity of souls, in the Faustian it arises out of it. Here too "ego habeo factum" is the formula. Personal charity is the justification before God of the Person, the individual. This is the reason why "compassion "-morale, in the everyday sense, always respected by us so far as words go, and sometimes hoped for by the thinker, is never actualized. Kant rejected it with decision, and in fact it is in profound contradiction with the Categorical Imperative, which sees the meaning of Life to lie in actions and not in surrender to soft opinions. Nietzsche's "slavemorale" is a phantom, bis master-morale is a reality.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.351<br /><br />Socialism in its highest and not its street-corner sense is, like every other Faustian ideal, exclusive. It owes its popularity only to the fact that it is completely misunderstood even by its exponents, who present it as a sum of rights instead of as one of duties, an abolition instead of an intensification of the Kantian imperative, a slackening instead of a tautening of directional energy. The trivial and superficial tendency towards ideals of "welfare," "freedom," "humanity," the doctrine of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," are mere negations of the Faustian ethic a very different matter from the tendency of Epicureanism towards the ideal of "happiness," for the condition of happiness was the actual sum and substance of the Classical ethic.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.352<br /><br />Not external life and conduct, not institutions and customs, but deepest and last things are in question here the inward finishedness (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, and of the provincial as well. For the Classical world this condition sets in with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.353<br /><br />Culture and Civilization the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture and Civilization the organism born of Mother Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and "facts." That which the one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist in the sense of the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization whether he wills it or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.353-354<br /><br />When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a "natural law" is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive of the State as an "order of society" which not only can be but must be altered l then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture-landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using up. Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and purely extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of Socialism alike rest upon them. Life is no longer to be lived as something self-evident hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone choice or to be accepted as Godwilled destiny, but is to be treated as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by "utilitarian" or "rational" criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live unconsciously, Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis sceptical, practical, artificial alone represents Civilization to-day.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.356<br /><br />Each Culture, further, has its own mode of spiritual extinction, which is that which follows of necessity from its life as a whole. And hence Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism are morphologically equivalent as end-phenomena. For even Buddhism is such. Hitherto the deeper meaning of it has always been misunderstood. It was not a Puritan movement like, for instance, Islamism and Jansenism, not a Reformation as the Dionysiac wave was for the Apollinian world, and, quite generally, not a religion like the religions of the Vedas<br />or the religion of the Apostle Paul, but a final and purely practical worldsentiment of tired megalopolitans who had a closed-off Culture behind them and no future before them. It was the basic feeling of the Indian Civilization and as such both equivalent to and "contemporary" with Stoicism and Socialism. [...] Buddhism rejects all speculation about God and the cosmic problems; only self and the conduct of actual life are important to it. And it definitely did not recognize a soul. The standpoint of the Indian psychologist of early Buddhism was that of the Western psychologist and the Western "Socialist" of to-day, who reduce the inward man to a bundle of sensations and an aggregation of electrochemical energies.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.359<br /><br />It is this extinction of living inner religiousness, which gradually tells upon even the most insignificant element in a man's being, that becomes phenomenal in the historical world-picture at the turn from the Culture to the Civilization, the Climacteric of the Culture, as I have already called it, the time of change in which a mankind loses its spiritual fruitfulness for ever, and building takes the place of begetting. Unfruitfulness understanding the word in all its direct seriousness marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great style in all things, but also quite carnally in the childlessness and "race-suicide" of the civilized and rootless strata, a phenomenon not peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored and of course not remedied in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.359<br /><br />As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual creations, the men of the "New Order" upon whom every decline-time founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the fluid megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass that has replaced the People, the Culture-folk that was sprung from the soil and peasantlike even when it lived in towns. They are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome, the newspaper-readers of our own corresponding time; the "educated" man who then and now makes a cult of intellectual mediocrity and a church of advertisement; the man of the theatres and places of amusement, of sport and "best-sellers." It is this late-appearing mass and not "mankind" that is the object of Stoic and Socialist propaganda, and one could match it with equivalent phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire, Buddhist India and Confucian China.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.360<br /><br />The expansion-element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must not confuse this hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-to-power. All it means is that creative inner life is at an end and intellectual existence can only be kept up materially, by outward effect in the space of the City.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.360<br /><br />The essential point of Christian missionarism has almost always been missed. Primitive Christianity was a Magian religion and the soul of its Founder was utterly incapable of this brutal activity without tact or depth. And it was the Hellenistic practice of Paul that against the determined opposition of the original community, as we all know introduced it into the noisy, urban, demagogic publicity of the Imperium Romanum. Slight as his Hellenistic tincture may have been, it sufficed to make him outwardly a part of the Classical Civilization. Jesus had drawn unto himself fishermen and peasants, Paul devoted himself to the marketplaces of the great cities and the megalopolitan form of propaganda.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.360-361<br /><br />It is only now, in the Western megalopolis, that the equivalent of the Paul-type emerges, to figure in Christian or anti-Christian, social or theosophical "causes," Free Thought or the making of religious fancy-ware. This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life that is, life as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead of as Destiny - is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with which men now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Alcohol-questions and Vegetarianism are treated with religious earnestness such, apparently, being the gravest problems that the "men of the NewOrder," the generations of frogperspective, are capable of tackling. Religions, as they are when they stand new-born on the threshold of the new Culture the Vedic, the Orphic, the Christianity of Jesus and the Faustian Christianity of the old Germany of chivalry would have felt it degradation even to glance at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one rises to them.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.361<br /><br />Let us, once more, review Socialism (independently of the economic movement of the same name) as the Faustian example of Civilization-ethics. Its friends regard it as the form of the future, its enemies as a sign of downfall, and both are equally right. We are all Socialists, wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or unwillingly. Even resistance to it wears its form. Similarly, and equally necessarily, all Classical men of the Late period were Stoics unawares. The whole Roman people, as a body, has a Stoic soul.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.363-364<br /><br />And here Socialism in contrast to Stoicism and Buddhism becomes tragic. It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so completely clear and sure in dealing with what should be destoyed, what transvalued, loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as he comes to discuss the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence is unanswerable, but his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air. [...] And therein lies a deep necessity; for, from Rousseau onwards, Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that had expressed itself in world-historical visions of the future visions of millennial scope nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion yearning to create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it had to give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. [...] There is something of this lie in the entire intellect of the Western Civilization, so far as this applies itself to the future of religion, of art or of philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third Kingdom.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.370<br /><br />From Schopenhauer to Shaw, everyone has been, without being aware of it, bringing the same principle into form. Everyone [...] is a derivative of the evolution-idea and of the shallow civilized and not the deep Goethian form of it at that whether he issues it with a biological or an economic imprint. There is evolution, too, in the evolution-idea itself, which is Faustian through and through, which displays (in sharpest contrast to Aristotle's timeless entelechy-idea) all our passionate urgency towards infinite future, our will and sense of aim which is so immanent in, so specific to, the Faustian spirit as to be the a -priori form rather than the discovered principle of our Nature-picture. And in the evolution of evolution we find the same change taking place as elsewhere, the turn of the Culture to the Civilization. In Goethe evolution is upright, in Darwin it is flat; in Goethe organic, in Darwin mechanical; in Goethe an experience and emblem, in Darwin a matter of cognition and law. To Goethe evolution meant inward fulfilment, to Darwin it meant "Progress."<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.374<br /><br />With this, the ethical period exhausts itself as the metaphysical had done. [...] The 20th Century, while keeping the word Socialism, has replaced an ethical philosophy that only Epigoni suppose to be capable of further development, by a praxis of economic everyday questions. The ethical disposition of the West will remain "socialistic" but its theory has ceased to be a problem. And there remains the possibility of a third and last stage of Western philosophy, that of a physiognomic scepticism. The secret of the world appears successively as a knowledge problem, a valuation problem and a form problem. Kant saw Ethics as an object of knowledge, the 19th Century saw it as an object of valuation. The Sceptic would deal with both simply as the historical expression of a Culture.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-76973244961181007032009-12-11T22:49:00.000-08:002009-12-11T22:52:23.673-08:00SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING. (1) ON THE FORM OF THE SOUL<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest01spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 299-337.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.299<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.300<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.302<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.303<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.304<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.305-306<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.309<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.312<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.315<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.315<br /><br />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<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.317-319<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.325<br /><br />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?<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.326<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.327-329<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.330-331<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.332-333<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.333-334<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.336<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.337<br /><br />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.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-83478138014800019292009-12-10T22:21:00.000-08:002009-12-10T22:23:24.952-08:00MUSIC AND PLASTIC. (2) ACT AND PORTRAIT<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest01spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 259-295.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.259-260<br /><br />For the mode of human imagining metaphysical, ethical, artistic imagining alike it is more than important, it is determinant that the individual feels himself as a body amongst bodies or, on the contrary, as a centre in endless space; that he subtilizes his ego into lone distinctness or, on the contrary, regards it as substantially part of the general consensus, that the directional character is asserted or, on the contrary, denied in the rhythm and course of his life. In all these ways the primesymbol of the great Culture comes to manifestation: this is indeed a worldfeeling, but the life-ideal conforms to it. From the Classical ideal followed unreserved acceptance of the sensuous instant, from the Western a not less passionate wrestle to overcome it. The Apollinian soul, Euclidean and pointformed, felt the empirical visible body as the complete expression of its own way of being; the Faustian, roving into all distances, found this expression not in person, but in personality, character, call it what you will. "Soul" for the real Hellene was in last analysis the form of his body and thus Aristotle defined it. "Body" for Faustian man was the vessel of the soul and thus Goethe felt it. But the result of this is that Culture and Culture differ very greatly in their selection and formation of their humane arts. While Gluck expresses the woe of Armida by a melody combined with drear gnawing tones in the instrumental accompaniment, the same is achieved in Pergamene sculptures by making every muscle speak. The Hellenistic portraiture tries to draw a spiritual type in the structure of its heads. In China the heads of the Saints of Ling-yan-si tell of a wholly personal inner life by their look and the play of the corners of the mouth.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.262-263<br /><br />But in order to grasp the significance of the portraiture of the West more specifically in contrast with that of Egypt and that of China, we have to consider the deep change in the language of the West that began in Merovingian times to foreshadow the dawn of a new life-feeling. This change extended equally over the old German and the vulgar Latin, but it affected only the tongues spoken in the countries of the coming Culture (for instance, Norwegian and Spanish, but not Rumanian). The change would be inexplicable if we were to regard merely the spirit of these languages and their "influence" of one upon another; the explanation is in the spirit of the mankind that raised a mere way of using words to the level of a symbol. Instead of sum, Gothic im, we say ich bin, I am, je suis; instead of fecisti, we say tu habes factum, tu as fait, du habes gitán; and again, daz wíp, un homme, man hat. This has hitherto been a riddle because families of languages were considered as beings, but the mystery is solved when we discover in the idiom the reflection of a soul. The Faustian soul is here beginning to remould for its own use grammatical material of the most varied provenance. The coming of this specific "I" is the first dawning of that personality-idea which was so much later to create the sacrament of Contrition and personal absolution. This "ego habeo factum," the insertion of the auxiliaries "have" and "be" between a doer and a deed, in lieu of the "feci" which expresses activated body, replaces the world of bodies by one of functions between centres of force, the static syntax by a dynamic. And this "I" and "Thou" is the key to Gothic portraiture. A Hellenistic portrait is the type of an attitude a confession it is not, either to the creator of it or to the understanding spectator. But our portraits depict something sui generis, once occurring and never recurring, a life-history expressed in a moment, a world-centre for which everything else is world-around, exactly as the grammatical subject "I" becomes the centre offeree in the Faustian sentence.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.263<br /><br />It has been shown how the experience of the extended has its origin in the living direction, time, destiny. In the perfected "being" of the all-round nude body the depth-experience has been cut away, but the "look" of a portrait leads this experience into the supersensuous infinite.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.264<br /><br />Western man lives in the consciousness of his becoming and his eyes are constantly upon past and future. The Greek lives pointwise, ahistorically, somatically. No Greek would have been capable of a genuine self-criticism. [...] Looking at the work of Phidias, of Polycletus, or of any master later than the Persian Wars, do we not see in the doming of the brow, the lips, the set of the nose, the blind eyes, the expression of entirely non-personal, plantlike, soulless vitality? And may we not ask ourselves whether this is the formlanguage that is capable even of hinting at an inner experience? Michelangelo devoted himself with all passion to the study of anatomy, but the phenomenal body that he works out is always the expression of the activity of all bones, sinews and organs of the inside; without deliberate intention, the living that is under the skin comes out in the phenomenon. It is a physiognomy, and not a system, of muscles that he calls to life. But this means at once that the personal destiny and not the material body has become the starting-point of the form-feeling.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.266<br /><br />The opposition of Apollinian and Faustian ideals of Humanity may now be stated concisely. Act and Portrait are to one another as body and space, instant and history, foreground and background, Euclidean and analytical number, proportion and relation. The Statue is rooted in the ground, Music (and the Western portrait is music, soul woven of colour-tones) invades and pervades space without limit. The fresco-painting is tied to the wall, trained on it, but the oil-painting, the "picture" on canvas or board or other table, is free from limitations of place. The Apollinian form-language reveals only the become, the Faustian shows above all a becoming. It is for this reason that child-portraits and family groups are amongst the finest and most intimately right achievements of the Western art.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.267-268<br /><br />Endless Becoming is comprehended in the idea of Motherhood, Woman as Mother is Time and is Destiny. Just as the mysterious act of depth-experience fashions, out of sensation, extension and world, so through motherhood the bodily man is made an individual member of this world, in which thereupon he has a Destiny. All symbols of Time and Distance are also symbols of maternity. Care is the root-feeling of future, and all care is motherly. It expresses itself in the formation and the idea of Family and State and in the principle of Inheritance which underlies both. Care may be either affirmed or denied one can live care-filled or care-free. Similarly, Time may be looked at in the light of eternity or in the light of the instant; and the drama of begetting and bearing, or the drama of the nursing mother with her child, may be chosen as the symbol of Life to be made apprehensible by all the means of art. India and the Classical took the first alternative, Egypt and the West the second. [...] But in the religious art of the West, the representation of Motherhood is the noblest of all tasks. As Gothic dawns, the Theotokos of the Byzantine changes into the Mater Dolorosa, the Mother of God. In German mythology she appears (doubtless from Carolingian times only) as Frigga and Frau Holle. The same feeling comes out in beautiful Minnesinger fancies like Lady Sun, Lady World, Lady Love. The whole panorama of early Gothic mankind is pervaded by something maternal, something caring and patient, and Germanic-Catholic Christianity when it had ripened into full consciousness of itself and in one impulse settled its sacraments and created its Gothic Style placed not the suffering Redeemer but the suffering Mother in the centre of its world-picture. [...] As against these types, the imagination of the Greeks conceived goddesses who are either Amazons like Athene or hetaerae like Aphrodite.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.279<br /><br />The transformation of Renaissance fresco-painting into Venetian oil-painting is a matter of spiritual history. [...] The Florentine fresco aims at actuality in individual things and produces a sum of such things in an architectonic setting. Oil-painting, on the other hand, sees and handles with ever-growing sureness extension as a whole, and treats all objects only as representatives thereof. The Faustian world-feeling created the new technique that it wanted. It rejected the drawing style, as, from Oresme's time, so-ordinate geometry rejected it. It transformed the linear perspective associated with the architectural motive into a purely aerial perspective rendered by imponderable gradations of tone.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.281<br /><br />It remains now to deal with the major characters of Western art during the phase of accomplishment. In this we may observe the deep necessity of all history at work. We have learned to understand arts as prime phenomena. We no longer look to the operations of cause and effect to give unity to the story of development. Instead, we have set up the idea of the Destiny of an art, and admitted arts to be organisms of the Culture, organisms which are born, ripen, age and for ever die.Here's something for the financial doomer.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.282<br /><br />At the culmination of every Culture we have the spectacle of a splendid group of great arts, well-ordered and linked as a unit by the unity of the prime symbol underlying them all. The Apollinian group, to which belong vase-painting, fresco relief, the architecture of ranked columns, the Attic drama and the dance, centres upon the naked statue. The Faustian group forms itself round the ideal of pure spatial infinity and its centre of gravity is instrumental music. From this centre, fine threads radiate out into all spiritual form-languages and weave our infinitesimal mathematic, our dynamic physics, the propaganda of Jesuits and the power of our famous slogan of "progress," the modern machine-technique, credit economics and the dynastic-diplomatic State all into one immense totality of spiritual expression.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.283<br /><br />Thereafter, the forms become those of final maturity, the concerto grosso, the suite, and the three-part sonata for solo instruments. Music frees itself from the relics of bodiliness inherent in the human voice and becomes absolute. The theme is no longer an image but a pregnant function, existent only in and by its own evolution, for the fugal style as Bach practised it can only be regarded as a ceaseless process of differentiation and integration.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.286<br /><br />Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a world-feeling, and it must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our "Late" Culture. There is an impressionistic mathematic, which frankly and with intent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as developed after Newton and Leibniz, and to it belong the visionary images of number-" bodies," aggregates, and the multidimensional geometry. There is again an impressionistic physics which "sees" in lieu of bodies systems of mass-points units that are evidently no more than constant relations between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy, and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity. Be the artist painter or musician, his art consists in creating with a few strokes or spots or tones an image of inexhaustible content, a microcosm meet for the eyes or ears of Faustian man; that is, in laying the actuality of infinite space under enchantment by fleeting and incorporeal indications of something objective which, so to say, forces that actuality to become phenomenal. The daring of these arts of moving the immobile has no parallel.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.286-287<br /><br />On a small scale, it continually repeats the achievements of Copernicus and Columbus. No other Culture possesses an ornament-language of such dynamical impressiveness relatively to the means it employs. Every point or stroke of colour, every scarce-audible tone releases some surprising charm and continually feeds the imagination with fresh elements of space-creating energy. In Masaccio and Piero della Francesca we have actual bodies bathed in air. Then Leonardo, the first, discovers the transitions of atmospheric light and dark, the soft edges, the outlines that merge in the depth, the domains of light and shade in which the individual figures are inseparably involved. Finally, in Rembrandt, objects dissolve into mere coloured impressions, and forms lose their specific humanness and become collocations of strokes and patches that tell as elements of a passionate depth-rhythm. Distance, so treated, comes to signify Future, for what Impressionism seizes and holds is by hypothesis a unique and never recurring instant, not a landscape in being but a fleeting moment of the history thereof.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.288<br /><br />I have said that oil-painting faded out at the end of the 17th Century, when one after another all its great masters died, and the question will naturally, therefore, be asked is Impressionism (in the current narrow sense) a creation of the 19th Century? Has painting lived, after all, two centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must not be deceived by appearances. Not only was there a dead space between Rembrandt and Delacroix or Constable for when we think of the living art of high symbolism that was Rembrandt's the purely decorative artists of the 18th Century do not count but, further, that which began with Delacroix and Constable was, notwithstanding all technical continuity, something quite different from that which had ended with Rembrandt. The new episode of painting that in the 19th Century (i.e., beyond the 1800 frontier and in "Civilization") has succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great culture of painting, has itself chosen the word Plein-air (Frcilichi) to designate its special characteristic. The very designation suffices to show the significance of the fleeting phenomenon that it is. It implies the conscious, intellectual, cold-blooded rejection of that for which a sudden wit invented the name "brown sauce," but which the great masters had, as we know, regarded as the one truly metaphysical colour. On it had been built the painting-culture of the schools, and especially the Dutch school, that had vanished irretrievably in the Rococo. This brown, the symbol of a spatial infinity, which had for Faustian mankind created a spiritual something out of a mere canvas, now came to be regarded, quite suddenly, as an offence to Nature. What had happened? Was it not simply this, that the soul for which this supernal colour was something religious, the sign of wistfulness, the whole meaning of "Living Nature," had quietly slipped away? The materialism of a Western cosmopolis blew into the ashes and rekindled this curious brief flicker a brief flicker of two generations, for with the generation of Manet all was ended again. I have (as the reader will recall) characterized the noble green of Griinewald and Claude and Giorgione as the Catholic space-colour and the transcendent brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Protestant world-feeling. On the other hand, Plein-air and its new colour scale stand for irreligion.Here's the nasty quote I've warned for.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.293-294<br /><br />What is practised as art to-day be it music after Wagner or painting after Cezanne, Leibl and Menzel is impotence and falsehood. Look where one will, can one find the great personalities that would justify the claim that there is still an art of determinate necessity? Look where one will, can one find the self-evidently necessary task that awaits such an artist? We go through all the exhibitions, the concerts, the theatres, and find only industrious cobblers and noisy fools, who delight to produce something for the market, something that will "catch on" with a public for whom art and music and drama have long ceased to be spiritual necessities. At what a level of inward and outward dignity stand to-day that which is called art and those who are called artists! In the shareholders' meeting of any limited company, or in the technical staff of any first-rate engineering works there is more intelligence, taste, character and capacity than in the whole music and painting of present-day Europe.There have always been, for one great artist, a hundred superfluities who practised art, but so long as a great tradition (and therefore great art) endured even these achieved something worthy. We can forgive this hundred for existing, for in the ensemble of the tradition they were the footing for the individual great man. But to-day we have only these superfluities, and ten thousand of them, working art "for a living" (as if that were a justification!). One thing is quite certain, that to-day every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 100. There, as here in our world-cities, we find a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style," of "unsuspected possibilities," theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells the "Literary Man" in the Poet's place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism which the; art-trade has organized as a "phase of art-history," thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. What do we possess to-day as "art"? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a faked painting, full of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia some new "style" which is in fact no style at all since everyone does as he pleases; a lying plastic that steals from Assyria, Egypt and Mexico indifferently. Yet this and only this, tie taste of the "man of the world," can be accepted as the expression and sign of the age; everything else, everything that "sticks to" old ideals, is for provincial consumption.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-132252547724550382009-12-09T10:05:00.000-08:002009-12-09T10:07:44.476-08:00MUSIC AND PLASTIC. (1) THE ARTS OF FORM<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest01spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 219-255.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.219<br /><br />The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical-scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas) that of the arts of form, of which the number is legion. And with these arts we count music in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had these been brought within the domain of arthistorical research instead of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorialplastic arts, we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that is at work in the wordless arts can never be understood until we come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as only a superficial one. To talk of the art of the eye and the art of the ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from another.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.222<br /><br />Its theory, technique and convention all belong to its character, and contain nothing of eternal or universal validity. When one of these arts is born, when it is spent, whether it dies or is transmuted into another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a particular Culture all these are questions of Form in the highest sense, just as is that other question of why individual painters and musicians unconsciously avoid certain shades and harmonies or, on the contrary, show preferences so marked that authorship-attributions can be based on them. [...] Hitherto it has been supposed without the slightest examination of the weighty questions that the supposition involves that the several "arts" specified in the conventional classification-scheme (the validity of which is assumed) are all possible at all times and places, and the absence of one or another of them in particular cases is attributed to the accidental lack of creative personalities or impelling circumstances or discriminating patrons to guide "art" on its "way."<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.222<br /><br />I have already, in the earliest pages of this work, exposed the shallowness of the notion of a linear progression of "mankind" through the stages of "ancient," "mediaeval" and "modern," a notion that has made us blind to the true history and structure of higher Cultures. The history of art is a conspicuous case in point.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.224<br /><br />All Classical building begins from the outside, all Western from the inside. The Arabian also begins with the inside, but it stays there. There is one and only one soul, the Faustian, that craves for a style which drives through walls into the limitless universe of space and makes both the exterior and the interior of the building complementary images of one and the same world-feeling. The exterior of the basilica and the domical building may be a field for ornamentation, but architecture it is not. The impression that meets the beholder as he approaches is that of something shielding, something that hides a secret. The form-language in the cavern-twilight exists for the faithful only that is the factor common to the highest examples of the style and to the simplest Mithraea and Catacombs, the prime powerful utterance of a new soul. Now, as soon as the Germanic spirit takes possession of the basilical type, there begins a wondrous mutation of all structural parts, as to both position and significance. Here in the Faustian North the outer form of the building, be it cathedral or mere dwellinghouse, begins to be brought into relation with the meaning that governs the arrangement of the interior, a meaning undisclosed in the mosque and nonexistent in the temple.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.225<br /><br />The art of the naked body standing free upon its footing and appreciable from all sides alike, existed in the Classical and the Classical only, for it was that Culture alone which quite decisively refused to transcend sense-limits in favour of space. The Egyptian statue is always meant to be seen from the front it is a variant of plane-relief. And the seemingly Classically-conceived statues of the Renaissance (we are astounded, as soon as it occurs to us to count them, to find how few of them there are) are nothing but a semi-Gothic reminiscence. Music takes the lead in Faustian art.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.226<br /><br />The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three centuries 1500-1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay of Rococo which marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this period, conformably to the persistent growth into consciousness of the will to spatial transcendence, it is instrumental music that develops into the ruling art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century, music uses the characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and the contrasts of strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means wherewith to -paint.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.227<br /><br />Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract hypothesis of "eternal art-laws." "Painting" is a mere word. Gothic glass-painting was an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of its strict symbolism just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every other art in this stage was the servant of the stone-language. Draped figures were built up as cathedrals were. [...] Similarly "music" is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere and always, even before any genuine Culture, even among the beasts. But the serious music of the Classical was nothing but a plastic for the ear. The tetrachords, chromatic and enharmonic, have a structural and not a harmonic meaning: but this is the very difference between body and space. This music was single-voiced. The few instruments that it employed were all developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic; and naturally therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument that was probably akin in tone-colour to the harpischord.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.228<br /><br />Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which, according to educated Chinese, we are never able to distinguish gay from grave. Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West without distinction is marchmusic. Such is the impression that the rhythmic dynamic of our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the Chinese soulThe [music of the] castle and the cathedral as representatives of the becoming and the become.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.229<br /><br />Along with this there came into being in castle and village a secular imitative music, that of troubadours, Minnesanger and minstrels. [...] After 1400, these forms give rise to forms of collective singing the rondeau and the ballade. All this is "art" for a public. Scenes are painted from life, scenes of love, hunting, chivalry. The point of it is in the melodic inventiveness, instead of in the symbolism of its linear progress. Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct. The cathedral is music and the castle makes music. The one begins with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the knightly singer.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.230<br /><br />Thenceforward, the great task was to extend the tone-corpus into the infinity, or rather to resolve it into an infinite space of tone. Gothic had developed the instruments into families of definite timbre. But the new-born "orchestra" no longer observes limitations imposed by the human voice, but treats it as a voice to be combined with other voices at the same moment as our mathematic proceeds from the geometrical analysis of Fermat to the purely functional analysis of Descartes.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.231<br /><br />The theme of the fugue "is," that of the new sonata-movement "becomes," and the issue of its working out is in the one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of pictures we get a cyclic succession, and the real source of this tone-language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest and most intimate kind of music the music of the strings. Certain it is that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of full illumination. Here, in chamber-music, Western art as a whole reaches its highest point. Here our prime symbol of endless space is expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses that of intense bodiliness.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.232-233<br /><br />The Gothic gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its most hidden corners. It created new men and a new world. From the idea of Catholicism to the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the knightly tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from language-building to the village maiden's bridal attire, from oil-painting to the Spielmann's song, everything is hall-marked with the stamp of one and the same symbolism. But the Renaissance, when it had mastered some arts of word and picture, had shot its bolt. It altered the ways of thought and the life-feeling of West Europe not one whit. It could penetrate as far as costume and gesture, but the roots of life it could not touch even in Italy the world-outlook of the Baroque is essentially a continuation of the Gothic.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.235<br /><br />If the Renaissance had been a "renewal" (whatever that may mean) of the Classical world-feeling then, surely, would it not have had to replace the symbol of embraced and rhythmically-ordered space by that of closed structural body. But there was never any question of this. On the contrary, the Renaissance practised wholly and exclusively an architecture of space prescribed for it by Gothic, from which it differed only in that in lieu of the Northern "Sturm und Drang" it breathed the clear equable calm of the sunny, care-free and unquestioning South. It produced no new building-idea, and the extent of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to facades and courtyards.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.239<br /><br />The background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as a fill-up and, as space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance. A development sets in that is paralleled in no other Culture, not even in the Chinese which in many other respects is so near to ours. The background as symbol of the infinite conquers the sense-perceptible foreground, and at last (herein lies the distinction between the depicting and the delineating styles) the depth-experience of the Faustian soul is captured in the kinesis of a picture. [...] Now, that a landscape painting should have a horizon has always seemed so self-evident to us that we have never asked ourselves the important question: Is there always a horizon, and if not, when not and why not? In fact, there is not a hint of it, either in Egyptian relief or in Byzantine mosaic or in vasepaintings and frescoes of the Classical age, or even in those of the Hellenistic in spite of its spatial treatment of foregrounds. This line, in the unreal vapour of which heaven and earth melt, the sum and potent symbol of the far, contains the painter's version of the "infinitesimal" principle.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.243<br /><br />With this is connected an important principle of composition. [...] The sort of perspective composition that is so self-evident to us is a particular case, and it is neither recognized nor intended in the painting of any other Culture. Egyptian art chose to represent simultaneous events in superposed ranks, thereby eliminating the third dimension from the look of the picture. The Apollinian art placed figures and groups separately, with a deliberate avoidance of space-and-time relations in the plane of representation.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.245<br /><br />The strict style in Classical painting limited its palette to yellow, red, black and white. This singular fact was observed long ago, and, since the explanation was only sought for in superficial and definitely material causes, wild hypotheses were brought forward to account for it, e.g., a supposed colour-blindness in the Greeks. [...] But why did this painting in its great days avoid blue and even blue-green, and only begin the gamut of permissible tones at greenish-yellow and bluishred? It is not that the ancient artists did not know of blue and its effect. The metopes of many temples had blue backgrounds so that they should appear deep in contrast with the triglyphs; and trade-painting used all the colours that were technically available. There are authentic blue horses in archaic Acropolis work and Etruscan tomb-painting; and a bright blue colouring of the hair was quite common. The ban upon it in the higher art was, without a doubt, imposed upon the Euclidean soul by its prime symbol. Blue and green are the colours of the heavens, the sea, the fruitful plain, the shadow of the Southern noon, the evening, the remote mountains. They are essentially atmospheric and not substantial colours. They are cold, they disembody, and they evoke impressions of expanse and distance and boundlessness. Here's some Spenglerian Gender theory.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.246<br /><br />Yellow and red are the popular colours, the colours of the crowd, of children, of women, and of savages.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.247-248<br /><br />Arabian art brought the Magian world-feeling to expression by means of the gold ground of its mosaics and pictures. Something of the uncanny wizardry of this, and by implication of its symbolic purpose, is known to us through the mosaics of Ravenna, in the work of the Early Rhenish and especially North Italian masters who were still entirely under the influence of Lombardo-Byzantine models, and last but not least in the Gothic book-illustrations of which the archetypes were the Byzantine purple codices. [...] The Magian felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the worldcavern with their spiritual substance and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours. Gold is not a colour. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours whether coloured substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment applied with the brush are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.249<br /><br />Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something that has become but something that is becoming. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.250<br /><br />At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting another symbol of highest significance, which subdued more and more the actuality of all colour the "studio-brown". [...] This brown does not repudiate its descent from the "infinitesimal" greens of Leonardo's, Schongauer's and Griinewald's backgrounds, but it possesses a mightier power over things than they, and it carries the battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails over the more primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake off its Renaissance association with architectural motives. Between it and the Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is an enduring and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end dissolve the tangible existences of the sense-world the world of moments and foregrounds into atmospheric semblances. Line disappears from the tone-picture. The Magian gold-ground had only dreamed of a mystic power that controlled and at will could thrust aside the laws governing corporeal existence within the world-cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a prospect into an infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery marks for the Western style a culmination in the process of its becoming. As contrasted with the preceding green, this colour has something Protestant in it.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.253<br /><br />I have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and future, and overpowers the assertiveness of any instantaneous element that may be represented. The other colours of distance have also this significance, and they lead to an important, considerable and distinctly bizarre extension of the Western symbolism. The Hellenes had in the end come to prefer bronze and even giltbronze to the painted marble, the better to express (by the radiance of this phenomenon against a deep blue sky) the idea of the individualness of any and every corporeal thing. Now, when the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found them black and green with the patina of many centuries. The historic spirit, with its piety and longing, fastened on to this and from that time forth our form-feeling has canonized this black and green of distance. To-day our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a bronze an ironical illustration of the fact that this whole species of art is something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of time and place? Have we not got to the point of artificially producing this patina?<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.254<br /><br />We have already in an earlier chapter discussed the wistful regard of the Faustian soul for ruins and evidences of the distant past, its proneness to the collection of antiquities and manuscripts and coins, to pilgrimages to the Forum Romanum and to Pompeii, to excavations and philological studies, which appears as early as the time of Petrarch. When would it have occurred to a Greek to bother himself with the ruins of Cnossus or Tiryns? Every Greek knew his "Iliad" but not one ever thought of digging up the hill of Troy. We, on the contrary, are moved by a secret piety to preserve the aqueducts of the Campagna, the Etruscan tombs, the ruins of Luxor and Karnak, the crumbling castles of the Rhine, the Roman Limes, Hersfeld and Paulinzella from becoming mere rubbish but we keep them as ruins, feeling in some subtle way that reconstruction would deprive them of something, indefinable in terms, that can never be reproduced. Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this reverence for the weather-beaten evidences of a once and a formerly. It cleared out of sight everything that did not speak of the present; never was the old preserved because it was old.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-393237602057548435.post-41250261526212986312009-12-08T13:41:00.000-08:002009-12-08T13:43:06.143-08:00MAKROKOSMOS. (2) APOLLINIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAGIAN SOUL<a href="http://www.archive.org/details/declineofwest01spenuoft">THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 183-216.</a><br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.183<br /><br />Henceforth we shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture, which chose the sensuously-present individual body as the ideal type of the extended, by the name (familiarized by Nietzsche) of the Apollinian. In opposition to it we have the Faustian soul, whose prime-symbol is pure and limitless space, and whose "body" is the Western Culture that blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style in the loth century in the Northern plain between the Elbe and the Tagus. The nude statue is Apollinian, the art of the fugue Faustian. Apollinian are: mechanical statics, the sensuous cult of the Olympian gods, the politically individual city-states of Greece, the doom of Oedipus and the phallus-symbol. Faustian are: Galileian dynamics, Catholic and Protestant dogmatics, the great dynasties of the Baroque with their cabinet diplomacy, the destiny of Lear and the Madonna-ideal from Dante's Beatrice to the last line of Faust II. The painting that defines the individual body by contours is Apollinian, that which forms'space by means of light and shade is Faustian this is the difference between the fresco of Polygnotus and the oil painting of Rembrandt. The Apollinian existence is that of the Greek who describes his ego as soma and who lacks all idea of an inner development and therefore all real history, inward and outward; the Faustian is an existence which is led with a deep consciousness and introspection of the ego, and a resolutely personal culture evidenced in memoirs, reflections, retrospects and prospects and conscience. And in the time of Augustus, in the countries between Nile and Tigris, Black Sea and South Arabia, there appears aloof but able to speak to us through forms borrowed, adopted and inherited the Magian soul of the Arabian Culture with its algebra, astrology and alchemy, its mosaics and arabesques, its caliphates and mosques, and the sacraments and scriptures of the Persian, Jewish, Christian, "post-Classical" and Manichasan religions.The Classical Culture<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.184-185<br /><br />The Classical Culture begins, then, with a great renunciation. A rich, pictorial, almost over-ripe art lay ready to its hand. But this could not become the expression of the young soul, and so from about uoo B.C. the harsh, narrow, and to our eyes scanty and barbaric, early-Doric geometrical style appears in opposition to the Minoan.8 For the three centuries which correspond to the flowering of our Gothic, there is no hint of an architecture, and it is only at about 650 B.C., "contemporarily" with Michelangelo's transition into the Baroque, that the Doric and Etruscan temple-type arises. All "Early" art is religious, and this symbolic Negation is not less so than the Egyptian and the Gothic Affirmation. The idea of burning the dead accords with the cult-site but not with the cult-building; and the Early Classical religion which conceals itself from us behind the solemn names of Calchas, Tiresias, Orpheus and (probably) Numa possessed for its rites simply that which is left of an architectural idea when one has subtracted the architecture, viz., the sacred precinct. The original cult-plan is thus the Etruscan templum, a sacred area merely staked off on the ground by the augurs with an impassable boundary and a propitious entrance on the East side. A "templum" was created where a rite was to be performed or where the representative of the state authority, senate or army, happened to be. It existed only for the duration of its use, and the spell was then removed. It was probably only about 700 B.C. that the Classical soul so far mastered itself as to represent this architectural Nothing in the sensible form of a built body.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.185-186<br /><br />Faustian architecture, on the contrary, begins on the grand scale simultaneously with the first stirrings of a new piety (the Cluniac reform, c. 1000) and a new thought (the Eucharistic controversy between Berengar of Tours and Lanfranc 1050), and proceeds at once to plans of gigantic intention; often enough, as in the case of Speyer, the whole community did not suffice to fill the cathedral, and often again it proved impossible to complete the projected scheme. The passionate language of this architecture is that of the poems too. Far apart as may seem the Christian hymnology of the south and the Eddas of the still heathen north, they are alike in the implicit space-endlessness of prosody, rhythmic syntax and imagery. Read the Dies Ira together with the Voluspa, which is little earlier; there is the same adamantine will to overcome and break all resistances of the visible.Spengler writes that the Classical gods were worshiped as physical bodies/statues but not that the planets were treated like gods. I find it strange since planets (bodies) as gods would fit well into his description of the Classical soul.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.187<br /><br />The plurality of separate bodies which represents Cosmos for the Classical soul, requires a similar pantheon hence the antique polytheism. The single world-volume, be it conceived as cavern or as space, demands the single god of Magian or Western Christianity. Athene or Apollo might be represented by a statue, but it is and has long been evident to our feeling that the Deity of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation can only be "manifested" in the storm of an organ fugue or the solemn progress of cantata and mass. From the rich manifold of figures in the Edda and contemporary legends of saints to Goethe our myth develops itself in steady opposition to the Classical in the one case a continuous disintegration of the divine that culminated in the early Empire in an impossible multitude of deities, in the other a process of simplification that led to the Deism of the 18th Century.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.187<br /><br />The Magian hierarchy of heaven angels, saints, persons of the Trinity has grown paler and paler, more and more disembodied, in the sphere of the Western pseudomorphosis, supported though it was by the whole weight of Church authority, and even the Devil the great adversary in the Gothic world-drama has disappeared unnoticed from among the possibilities of the Faustian world-feeling. Luther could still throw the inkpot at him, but he has been passed over in silence by perplexed Protestant theologians long ago. For the solitude of the Faustian soul agrees not at all with a duality of world powers. God himself is the All.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.188-189<br /><br />The Faustian soul looks for an immortality to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it disembodies the stone in its Gothic thrustsystem (contemporary, we may note, with the "consecutives" in Church music till at last nothing remained visible but the indwelling depth- and height-energy of this self-extension. The Apollinian soul would have its dead burned, would sec them annihilated, and so it remained averse from stone building throughout the early period of its Culture. The Egyptian soul saw itself as moving down a narrow and inexorably-prescribed life-path to come at the end before the judges of the dead ("Book of the Dead," cap. 115). That was its Destiny-idea. The Egyptian's existence is that of the traveller who follows one unchanging direction, and the whole form-language of his Culture is a<br />translation into the sensible of this one theme. And as we have taken endless space as the prime symbol of the North and body as that of the Classical, so we may take the word way as most intelligibly expressing that of the Egyptians.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.190<br /><br />There is, however, another Culture that, different as it most fundamentally is from the Egyptian, yet found a closely-related prime symbol. This is the Chinese, with its intensely directional principle of the Tao. But whereas the Egyptian treads to the end a way that is prescribed for him with an inexorable necessity, the Chinaman wanders through his world; consequently, he is conducted to his god or his ancestral tomb not by ravines of stone, between faultless smooth walls, but by friendly Nature herself. Nowhere else has the landscape become so genuinely the material of the architecture.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.191-192<br /><br />Imitation is born of the secret rhythm of all things cosmic. For the waking being the One appears as discrete and extended; there is a Here and a There, a Proper and an Alien something, a Microcosm and a Macrocosm that are polar to one another in the sense-life, and what the rhythm of imitation does is to bridge this dichotomy. Every religion is an effort of the waking soul to reach the powers of the world-around. And so too is Imitation, which in its most devoted moments is wholly religious, for it consists in an identity of inner activity between the soul and body "here" and the world-around "there" which, vibrating as one, become one. As a bird poises itself in the storm or a float gives to the swaying waves, so our limbs take up an irresistible beat at the sound of march-music. Not less contagious is the imitation of another's bearing and movements, wherein children in particular excel.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.196<br /><br />In every springtime, consequently, there are two definitely ornamental and non-imitative arts, that of building and that of decoration. In the longing and pregnant centuries before it, elemental expression belongs exclusively to Ornamentation in the narrow sense. The Carolingian period is represented only by its ornament, as its architecture, for want of the Idea, stands between the styles. And similarly, as a matter of art-history, it is immaterial that no buildings of the Mycenaean age have survived. But with the dawn of the great Culture, architecture as ornament comes into being suddenly and with such a force of expression that for a century mere decoration-as-such shrinks away from it in awe. The spaces, surfaces and edges of stone speak alone. The tomb of Chephren is the culmination of mathematical simplicity everywhere right angles, squares and rectangular pillars, nowhere adornment, inscription or desinence and it is only after some generations have passed that Relief ventures to infringe the solemn magic of those spaces and the strain begins to be eased. And the noble Romanesque of Westphalia-Saxony (Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella,<br />Paderborn), of Southern France and of the Normans (Norwich and Peterborough) managed to render the whole sense of the world with indescribable power and dignity in one line, one capital, one arch. When the form-world of the springtime is at its highest, and not before, the ordained relation is that architecture is lord and ornament is vassal. And the word "ornament" is to be taken here in the widest possible sense. Even conventionally, it covers the Classical unit-motive with its quiet poised symmetry or meander supplement, the spun surface of arabesque and the not dissimilar surface-patterning of Mayan art, and the "Thunder-pattern" and others of the early Chou period which prove once again the landscape basis of the old Chinese architecture without a doubt.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.197-198<br /><br />At the last, when Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it, great art as a whole are extinguished. The transition consists in every Culture in Classicism and Romanticism of one sort or another, the former being a sentimental regard for an Ornamentation (rules, laws, types) that has long been archaic and soulless, and the latter a sentimental Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation. In the place of architectural style we find architectural taste. Methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, old forms and new, home and foreign, come and go with the fashion. The inward necessity is no longer there, there are no longer "schools," for everyone selects what and where it pleases him to select. Art becomes craft-art (Kunstgewerbe) in all its branches architecture and music, poetry and drama and in the end we have a pictorial and literary stock-in-trade which is destitute of any deeper significance and is employed according to taste. This final or industrial form of Ornament no longer historical, no longer in the condition of "becoming" we have before us not only in the patterns of oriental carpets, Persian and Indian metal work, Chinese porcelain, but also in Egyptian (and Babylonian) art as the Greeks and Romans met it. The Minoan art of Crete is pure craft-art, a northern outlier of Egyptian post-Hyksos taste; and its "contemporary," Hellenistic-Roman art from about the time of Scipio and Hannibal, similarly subserves the habit of comfort and the play of intellect. From the richly-decorated entablature of the Forum of Nerva in Rome to the later provincial ceramics in the West, we can trace the same steady formation of an unalterable craft-art that we find in the Egyptian and the Islamic worlds, and that we have to presume in India after Buddha and in China after Confucius.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.198<br /><br />Now, Cathedral and Pyramid-temple are different in spite of their deep inward kinship, and it is precisely in these differences that we seize the mighty phenomenon of the Faustian soul, whose depth-impulse refuses to be bound in the prime symbol of a way, and from its earliest beginnings strives to transcend every optical limitation. Can anything be more alien to the Egyptian conception of the State whose tendency we may describe as a noble sobriety - than the political ambitions of the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen Emperors, who came to grief because they overleapt all political actualities and for whom the recognition of any bounds would have been a betrayal of the idea of their rulership? Here the prime symbol of infinite space, with all its indescribable power, entered the field of active political existence.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.207-208<br /><br />No one has yet perceived that Arabian art is a single phenomenon. It is an idea that can only take shape when we have ceased to be deceived by the crust which overlaid the young East with post-Classical art-exercises that, whether they were imitation-antique or chose their elements from proper or alien sources at will, were in any case long past all inward life; when we have discovered that Early Christian art, together with every really living element in "late-Roman," is in fact the springtime of the Arabian style; and when we see the epoch of Justinian I as exactly on a par with the Spanish-Venetian Baroque that ruled Europe in the great days of Charles V or Philip II, and the palaces of Byzantium and their magnificent battle-pictures and pageant-scenes the vanished glories that inspired the pens of courtly literati like Procopius on a par with the palaces of early Baroque in Madrid, Vienna and Rome and the great decorative-painting of Rubens and Tintoretto. This Arabian style embraces the entire first millennium of our era. It thus stands at a critical position in the picture of a general history of "Art," and its organic connectedness has been imperceptible under the erroneous conventions thereof.<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.211<br /><br />The architecture of the central-dome, in which the Magian world-feeling achieved its purest expression, extended beyond the limits of the Roman Empire. For the Nestorian Christianity that extended from Armenia even into China it was the only form, as it was also for the Manichseans and the Mazdaists, and it also impressed itself victoriously upon the Basilica of the West when the Pseudomorphosis began to crumble and the last cults of Syncretism to die out. In Southern France where there were Manichasan sects even as late as the Crusades the form of the East was domesticated. Under Justinian, the interpenetration of the two produced the domical basilica of Byzantium and Ravenna. The pure basilica was pushed into the Germanic West, there to be transformed by the energy of the Faustian depth-impulse into the cathedral. The domed basilica, again, spread from Byzantium and Armenia into Russia, where it came by slow degrees to be felt as an element of exterior architecture belonging to a symbolism concentrated in the roof. But in the Arabian world Islam, the heir of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity and of the Jews and the Persians, carried the development through to the end. When it turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque it only resumed possession of an old property. Islamic domical building followed Mazdaist and Nestorian along the same tracks to Shan-tung and to India. Spengler thought that at least three Cultures resulted from independent development. What if all high cultures can be traced back to one mother culture?<br /><br />Quote from: Spengler vol I p.213<br /><br />True, all Cultures (the Egyptian, the Mexican and the Chinese excepted) have grown up under the tutelage of some older Culture. Each of the formworlds shows certain alien traits. Thus, the Faustian soul of the Gothic, already predisposed to reverence by the Arabian origin of Christianity, grasped at the treasures of Late-Arabian art. An unmistakably Southern, one might even say an Arabian, Gothic wove itself over the fagades of the Burgundian and Provencal cathedrals, dominated with a magic of stone the outward language of Strassburg Minster, and fought a silent battle in statues and porches, fabricpatterns, carvings and metalwork and not Jess in the intricate figures of scholastic philosophy and in that intensely Western symbol, the Grail legend with the Nordic prime-feeling of Viking Gothic that rules the interior of the Magdeburg Cathedral, the points of Freiburg Minster and the mysticism of Meister Eckart. More than once the pointed arch threatens to burst its restraining line and to transform itself into the horseshoe arch of Moorish-Norman architecture.greenstatisticianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12312981600780323530noreply@blogger.com0