THE STATE (A) THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME TWO PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY pp 327-358

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.327

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.327-328

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.330-331

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.333

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.334

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.335

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.336

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.337

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.339

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.340-341

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.342

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.343

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.345

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.347

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.348

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.350

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.354

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.357

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.

Quote from: Spengler vol II p.358

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.