The Decline of the West Again

THE Problem OF "CIVILIZATION"

Looked at in this fashion, the "Decline of the West" comprises zip less than the problem of Civilization. Nosotros have before us one of the fundamental questions of all higher history. What is culture, understood as the organico-logical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a culture?
For every Culture has its own Civilisation. In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express in an indefinite, more or less upstanding, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Civilization, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology get capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of adult humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing- becoming, death following life, rigidity post-obit expansion, intellectual age and the rock-congenital, petrifying world-city following female parent-world and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and once again.

So, for the showtime fourth dimension, we are enabled to understand the Romans every bit the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest secrets of the late-Classical menstruum. What, just this, can exist the pregnant of the fact–which can but be disputed past vain phrases–that the Romans were barbarians who did non precede only closed a great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand up between the Hellenic Culture and pettiness. An imagination directed purely to practical objects was something which is not found at all in Athens. In a word, Greek soul–Roman intellect; and this antithesis is the differentia betwene Civilisation and Civilization. Nor is it only to the Classical it applies. Again and again there appears this type of potent-minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the easily of this type lies the intellectual and material destiny of each and every "late" flow. Pure Civilization, every bit a historical process, consists in a progressive exhaustion of forms that have become inorganic or dead.

The transition from Culture to Culture was acocmplished for the Classical world in the fourth, for the Western in the nineteenth century. Course these periods onward the great intellectual decisions accept place, no longer all over the world where not a hamlet is also pocket-sized to be unimportant, but in 3 or four world-cities that accept absorbed into themselves the whole content of History, while the sometime wide landscape of the Civilization, become merely provincial, served only to feed the cities with what remains of its college mankind. World-city and province–the two basic ideas of every civilization–bring up a wholly new course-problem of History, the very problem that nosotros are living through today with hardly the remotest conception of its immensity. In place of a globe, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the remainder dries upwardly. In identify of a type-true people, built-in of and grown on the soil, there is new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly thing-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest class of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a very great step towards the inorganic, towards the cease–what does it signify?

The world-city ways cosmopolitanism in place of "home" . . . To the earth-city belongs not a folk but a mob. Its uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions representative of the culture (dignity, church, privileges, dynasties, convention in fine art and limits of knowledge in science), the neat and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new- fashioned naturalism that in relation to all matters of sex and social club goes back far to quite primitive instincts and atmospheric condition, the reappearance of theÂpanem  et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and sports stadia–all these things betoken the definite closing down of the Civilisation and the opening of a quite new phase of homo being–anti-provincial, late, futureless, but quite inevitable.

This is what has to be viewed, and not with the eyes of the partisan, the ideologue, the up-to-engagement moralist, non from this or that "standpoint," simply in a loftier, time-gratuitous perspective embracing whole millennia of historical world-forms, if we are really to encompass the bully crisis of the present.

For information technology will become manifest that, from this moment on, all bang-up conflicts of world-outlook, of politics, of art, of scientific discipline, of feeling, volition be under the influence of the same contrary cistron. What is the hallmark of a politic of Civilisation today, in contrast to a politic of Civilisation yesterday? It is, for the Classical rhetoric, and for the Western journalism, both serving that abstract which represents the power of Civilisation — coin. Information technology is the money-spirit which penetrates unremarked the historical forms of the people's beingness, frequently without destroying or even in the least disturbing these forms.

Information technology is possible to understand the Greeks without mentioning their economic relations; the Romans, on the other mitt, can only exist understood thorugh these.

THE CONCLUSION–IMPERIALISM

Considered in iteself, the Roman world-dominion was a negative miracle, being the result non of a surplus of energy on the one side–that the Romans had never had since Zama–but of a defciency of resistance on the other…
Here then, I lay it down that Imperialism, of which petrifacts such equally the Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian, may continue to exist for hundreds or thousands of years … is to be taken as the typical symbol of the finish. Imperialism is Culture unadulterated. In this phenomenal form the destiny of the Westward is now irrevocably set up. The energy of culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilizaton — man outwards….

Alexander and Napoleon were romantics; though they stood on the threshold of Culture and in its cold clear air, the 1 fancied himself an Achilles and the other read Werther. …

Let it be realized, then: That the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hitherto looked on as the highest indicate of an ascending straight line of world-history are in reality a stage of life which may be observed in every Culture that has ripened to its limit–a stage of life characterized not by Socialists, Impressionists, electrical railways, torpedoes and differential equations (for these are only body-consituentsof the time), but by a civilized spirituality which possesses not only these but also quite other artistic possibilities. That, as our town time represents a transitional phase which occurs with certainty nether particular weather, there are perfectly well-defined states (such as accept occurred more than once in the history of the past) later than the present-day state of Due west Europe, and therefore that the future of the W is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time towards our present ethics, but a single phenomenon of history, strictly express and defined as to form and duration, which covers a few centuries and tin be viewed and, in essentials, calculated from available precedents.

Architecture AND DIVINITIES

Henceforth nosotros shall designate the soul of the Classical Culture, which chose the sensuosly 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 "torso" is the Western Civilisation that blossomed forth with the birth of the Romanesque style in the Tenth century on the Northern plain between the Elbe and the Tagus.
"Space" — speaking now in the Faustian idiom — is a spiritual something, rigidly distinct class the momentary sense-present, which could not exist represented in an Apollinian linguistic communication whether Greek or Latin. The Classical… A landscape of Claude Lorrain, on the contrary, is naught merely space, every item beingness made to subserve its illustration. All bodies in it possess an atmospheric and perspective meaning purely every bit carriers of light and shade. The extreme of this disembodiment of the world in the service of space is Impressionism.

IMITATION AND Ornamentation

All art is expression-language. This expression is either ornament or imitation. Both are higher possibilities…

I. Fake

A.Earlier and more than characteristic of race
B.Born of the secret rhythm of all this catholic
C.Every live religion is an effort of the waking soul to reach the powers of the world-around. And so too is false which in its most devoted moments is wholly religious
1.Consists in an identity of inner activity betwixt the soul and body "here" and the earth effectually "there" which, … become 1.
D.Let ourselves go in common song or parade-march or trip the light fantastic
i.creates out of many units one unit of feeling and expression, a "nosotros"
E.All imitation is in the broadest sense dramatic;
one.drama in movements of brush stroke or chisel
2.melodic expletive of vocal
3.tone of recitation
4.line of poesy
5.the description
6.the dance
F.Only the living tin can be imitated
1.can be imitated only in movements
ii.belongs to time and direction
1000.Expresses something by accomplishing itself
H.Possess beginning and end

Two.Ornament – does not follow the stream of life merely rigidly faces it

A.Established motives, symbols, impressed upon it
B.Intention not to pretend but to conjure
C.The "I" overwhelms the "Thou."
D.Imitation is speaking with means that are built-in of the moment andunreproducible
Due east.employs a languages emancipated from speaking
one.stock of forms that possess duration and is not at the merc of the individual
F.Removed from Fourth dimension
1.pure extension, settled and stable
G.Expresses by presenting itself to the senses as a finished thing
one.Existence equally such, wholly independent of origin.
H.Possesses only duration

THE HISTORY OF STYLE AS AN ORGANISM

I. Spring

A.Every Jump has 2 definitely ornamental and non-imitative arts — Carolingian (between styles)
1.edifice
2.decoration
B.Dawn of culture, architecture every bit ornament comes into being suddenly and with such a force of expression that for a century mere ornament-as-such shrinks away fromit in awe.
C.Form-globe of springtime at its highest: compages is lord and ornament is vassal (ornamentation in the service of all- ruling architectural thought)
1. statuary groups of Gothic cathedrals
2. hymn strophe
iii. parallel motility of arts in church music
D. Advertizement 1000 – awakening at ane moment Romanesque arrives
a.dynamic of infinite
b.inner and outer construction placed in fixed relation
E.Gothic/Medieval

Two. Summer

A.Late period of a style – group of civic and worldly special arts devote themselves to pleasing and clever faux, go personal
B.Renaissance/Baroque

3. Autumn

A.Soul depicts its happiness, conscious of self-completion
one.return to Nature (Rousseau)
a.reveals itself in the form-world of the arts as a sensitive longing and presentiment of the end…
b.features of last decades of a Culture…
(1)Perfectly clear intellect, jouous urbanity, pain of a farewell –
B.Haydn and Mozart, Dresden shepherdesses, pictures of Watteau
C.Transition consists of
1.Classicism – sentimental regard for Ornamentation (rules, laws, types) that has long been archaic and soulless
2.Romanticism – sentimental Faux, not of life, merely of an older Imitation

Four. Winter

A.At the last when Civilization sets in, true ornament and, with it, great art every bit a whole are extinguished
one.Not architectural style, but taste
2.Methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, former forms and new, home and foreign, come and go with the fashion.
three.Pictorial and literary stock-in-trade destitute of any deeper significance, employed co-ordinate to sense of taste
B.Final or industrial course of Decoration – no longer historical, no longer in the condition of "becoming".

ARTS AS THE SYMBOL OF THE HIGHER ORDER

The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of higher mankind has plant for itself is (if we except the mathematical-scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas) that of the arts of grade…And with these arts nosotros count music….
If an art has boundaries at all — boundaries of its soul-become-form — they are historical and non technical or physiological boundaries.

…The selection of fine art-genus itself is seen to be a means of expression. What the creation of a masterpiece ways for an individual arts–the "Nighttime Watch" for Rembrandt or theÂMeistersinger for Wagner–the cosmos of a species of art, comprehended as such, means for the life-history of a Civilisation. Information technology is epochal. Apart from the merest externals, each art is an individual organism without predecessor or successor. Its theory, technique and convention all vest to its grapheme, and contain nada of eternal or universal validity. When 1 of these arts is born, when it is spent, whether information technology dies or is transmuted into another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a item Civilization–all these are questions of Course in the highest sense, just as is that other question of why individual painters and musicians unconsciously avoid certian shades and harmonies or, on the contrary, prove preferences so marked that authorship-attributions tin can be based on them.

The importance of these groups of questions has non yet been recognized past theory… A futile up-and-down form was stolidly traced out. Static times were described as "natural pauses," it was chosen "decline" when some groovy fine art in reality died, and "renaissance" where an eye really free from prepossessions would have seen another art being born in another mural to express another humanity.

And yet information technology is precisely in this problem of the finish, the impressively sudden end, of a bully fine art–the end of the Cranium drama in Euripides, of Florentine sculpture with Michaelangelo, of instrumental music in Liszt, Wagner, and Bruckner–that the organic character of these arts is most evident…

POPULAR AND ESOTERIC CHARACTER

"Every Culture has its own quite definite sort of esoteric or popular charcter that is immanent in all its doings, so far as these have symbolic importance. We discover everywhere in the Western what we detect nowhere in the Classical [ane] – the exclusive form. Whole periods – for instance, the Provencal Culture and the Rococo – are in the highest degree select and sectional, their ideas and forms having no existence except for a small class of higher men. Even the Renaissance is no exception, for though it purports to be the rebirth of that Antique which is then utterly non-exclusive and caters so bluntly for all, it is in fact, through and through, the creation of a circumvolve or of individual chosen souls, a taste that rejects popularity from the outset. On the contrary everyÂAttic burgher belonged to the Attic civilisation, which excluded nobody; and consequently, the stardom of deep and shallow, which is so decisively of import for us, did not exist at all for it. For united states, popular and shallow are synonymous – in art as in scientific discipline, simply for Classiclal man it was non so.
From Titian painting becomes more and more than esoteric. And then , too poetry. So, too, music. And the Gothic [ii] per sehad been esoteric from its very beginnings – witness Dante and Wolfram. The Masses of Okeghem and Palestrina, or of Bach for that matter, were never intelligible to the average memeber of the congregation. Ordinary people are bored by Mozart and Beethoven, and regard music mostly as something for which ane is or is not in the mood. A sure degree of interest in these matters has been induced by concert room and gallery since the age of enlightenment invented the phrase "art for all." Merely Faustian [three] fine art is non, and by very essence cannot be, "for all." If mod painting has ceased to appeal to any but a minor (and always decreasing) circumvolve of connoisseurs, it is because it has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street can understand. Information technology has transferred the property of actuality from contents to space – the space through which lone, accordingg to Kant, things are.

Consider our sciences too. Every ane 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. Indeed, nosotros may take the peckish for wide issue every bit a sufficient alphabetize by itself of the commencing and already perceptible decline of Western science. That the sever esoteric of the Bizarre historic period is felt now as a burden, is a symptom of sinking strength and of the dulling of that distance-sense confesed the limitation with humility. For united states of america, the polarity of expert and layman has all the significance of a high symbol, and when the tension of this distance is beginning to slacken, there the Faustian life is fading out."

THE Volition TO POWER

"If, in fine, we look at the whole picture – the expansion of the Copernican earth into that aspect of stellar space that nosotros possess today; the development of Columbus's discovery into a world-wide command of the earth's surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and the theater; the sublimation of the idea of habitation; the passion of our civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost incommunicable mount-peaks – we see, emerging everywhere, the prime number symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those specially Western creations of the soul-myth chosen "Will," "Forcefulness" and "Human activity" must be regarded as derivative of this prime symbol."

IMPRESSIONISM

"Impressionism," which but came into general employ in Manet's fourth dimension (and and then, originally, as a give-and-take of contempt like Baroque and Rococo), very happily summarized the special quality of the Faustian manner of fine art that has evolved from oil painting. Impression is the inverse of theeuclidean globe-feeling. It tries to get as far equally possible from the linguistic communication of plastic and as near as possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us past things that receive and reflect calorie-free is made not because the things are in that location, but a though they "in themselves" are not there. The things are not fifty-fifty bodies, but low-cal-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be unmasked past the brush-stroke. …
Impressionism is the comprehensive expression of a earth-feeling, and it must obviously therefore permeate the whole physiognomy of our "Late" Civilization. In that location is an impresionistic 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 multi-dimensional geometry. At that place is again an impressionistic physics which "sees" in lieu of bodies systems of mass-ponts–units that are evidently no more than than constant relations between variable efficients. There are impressionistic ethics, tragedy and logic, and even (in Pietism) an impressionistic Christianity.

Is Impressionism (in the current narrow sense) a creationg of the nineteenth century? Has paiting lived, after all, two centuries more? Is information technology notwithstanding existing? But we must not be deceived in the character of the new episode, that in the nineteenth century (i.due east. beyond the 1800 frontier and in "Civilization") succeeded in awakening some illusion of a great culture of painting, choosing the wordÂPlein -air to designate its special characteristic. The materialism of a Western cosmopolis blew into the ashes and rekindled this curious brief flicker–a cursory flicker of two generations, for with the generation of Manet all was eneded once again. I have characterized the noble green of Grünewald and Claude and Giorgione as the Cosmic space-colour and the transcendent chocolate-brown of Rembrandt as the colour of the Prostestant world-feeling. On the other hand, Plein-air and its new colour scale stand for irreligion. From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come up down again to the chaff of the eath. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not contemplated; in that location is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. Rousseau's tragically correct prophecy of a "return to Nature" fulfils itslef in this dying art–the senile, too, render to Nature day by solar day. The modernistic artist is a workman, not a creator…

PERGAMUM  AND BAYREUTH : THE Cease OF ART

The terminal of the Faustian arts died in Tristan. This work is the giant keystone of Western music. Painting achieved naught similar this as a finale.

…Between Wagner and Manet there is a deep relationship, which is non, indeed, obvious to everyone but which Baudelaire with his unerring flair for the decadent detected at once. For the Impressionists, the stop and the culmination of art was the conuring upwardly of a earth in space out of strokes and patches of color, and this was just what Wagner accomplished with three bars. …..

[Comparison with Alexandria] At that place, equally hither in our world-cities, we discover a pursuit of illusions of creative progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style," of "unsuspected possibilities," theoretical babble, pretentious stylish artists, weight-lifters with paper-thin dumb-bells–the "Literary Homo" in the Poet's place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism, which the fine art-trade has organized every bit a " phase of art-history," thinking and feeling and forming as industiral art. … all is pattern-work. .. the Last Act of all Cultures.

THE MORALE OF DAWNING "CIVILIZATION"

"When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase "transvaluation of all values" for the start time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at final its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the about fundamental character of every civilization [4]. For information technology is the beginning of a Civilization that it removes all the forms of the Culture that went earlier, understands them otherwise, practices them in a dissimilar mode. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein lies the negativeness common to all period of this character. It assumes that the 18-carat act of creation has already occurred, and only enters upon an inheritance of big actualities. In the tardily-Classical, we discover the same taking place inside Helenistic-Roman Stoicism, that is, the long death-struggle of the Apollinian soul. In the interval from Socrates – who was the spiritual begetter of the Stoa and in whom the starting time signs of in impoverishment and city-intellectualism became visible – to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, every beingness-ideal of the old Clasical underwent transvaluation. In the example of Bharat, the transvaluation of Brahman life was complete past the time of King Asoka (250 b.c.) As we can come across by comparing the parts of the Vedanta put into writing earlier and afterward Buddha. And ourselves? Even at present the upstanding socialism of the Faustian soul, its fundamental ethic, equally we accept seen, is being worked upon by the process of transvaluation equally that soul is walled up in the stone of the bully cities. Rousseau is the antecedent of this Socialism; he stands, like Socrates and Buddha, equally the representative spokesman of a not bad civilization. Rousseau's rejection of all peachy Culture-forms and all meaning conventions, his famous "Render to the state of Nature," his practical rationalism, are unmistakable evidences. Each of the iii buried a millennium of spiritual depth. Each proclaimed his gospel to flesh, merely information technology was to the mankind of the urban center intelligentsia, which was tired of the town and the Late civilization, and whoe "pure" (i.e. soulless) reason longed to exist gratuitous from them and their administrative form and their severity, from the symbolism with which information technology was no longer in living communion and which therefore information technology detested. The Culture was annihilated by dialectics. Socrates was a nihilist, and Buddha. At that place was an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese desouling of the homo, just as in that location is a Western. This is a matter not of mere political and economical, nor even of religious and artistic transformations, nor of whatever tangible or factual change whatever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in full.
Culture and Culture – the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the yr 1800 – on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from inside, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, bogus, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture-human lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and among 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 give-and-take valid for, and only vaid for, Culture – whether he wills it or not, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the garb of religion or not.

Merely the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a "natural police force " is set upward 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 Land as an "order of society" which not only can exist but must exist altered – and then information technology is axiomatic that something has definitely cleaved down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the mdist of the Civilization-mural, whose men information technology is uprooting, drawing into itself and using up.

So long as the man of a culture that is approaching its fulfilment still continues to follow directly onwards naturally and unquestioningly, his life has a settled comport. This is the instinctive morale, which may disguise itself in a g controversial forms, only which he himself does not controvert, because he has it. As before long every bit Life is fatigued, every bit soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities – which are intellectual worlds to themselves – and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morals turn into a problem. As late as Plato and equally late every bit Kant ehtics are still mere dialectics, a game with concepts or the rounding off of a metphysical system, something that at bottom would not be thought really necessary. The Categorical Imperative is merely an abstruse statement of what, for Kant, was non in question at all. But with Zeno and with Schopenhauer that is no longer so. It had get necessary to detect, to invent or to clasp into form, equally dominion of beingness, that which was no longer anchored in instinct; and at this point therefore begin the civilized ethics that are no longer the refleciton of Life simply the reflection of Knowlege upon Life. One feels that at that place is something artificial, soulless, one-half-true in all these considered systems that fill up the outset centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and well-nigh unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the nifty arts. All metaphysic of the loftier way, all pure intuition, vanishes before the ane need that has suddently made itself felt, the need of a practical morale for the obvernance of a Life that can no longer govern itself. Up to Kant, up to Aristotle, upward to the Yoga and Vedanta doctrines, philosophy had been a sequence of grand earth-systems in which formal ideals occupied a very pocket-sized identify. But now it became "moral philosophy" with a metaphysic every bit groundwork. The enthusiasm of epistemology had to give way to difficult practical needs. Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type."

THE GREAT STYLE, THE HISTORY OF STYLE AS AN ORGANISM

We are now able to see a great fashion sequence as an organism. Here, equally in and then many other matters, Goethe was the first to whom vision came in hisÂWinckelmann he says of Velleius Paterculus; "With his standpoint, information technology was non given to him to run across all art as a living thing that must have an inconspicuous start a tiresome growth, a brilliant moment of fulfillment and a gradual declines like very other organic being, though it is presented in a set of individuals." This judgement contains the entire morphology of fine art-history. Styles practice non follow one another like waves or pulse-beats. It is not the personality or volition or brian of the artist that makes the style, merely the style that makes the type of the artist. The style, like the Civilisation, is a prime miracle in the strict Goethian sense, be it the way of fine art or religion or thought, or the way of life itself. Information technology is, every bit "Nature" is, an ever-new experience of waking homo, his alter ego and mirror-epitome in the earth-effectually. And therefore in the general historical picture show of a Culture there can be but one mode, the style of the Culture. The error has lain in treating mere style-phases– Romanesque, Gothic, Bizarre, Rococo, Empire–every bit if they were styles on the same level equally units of quite some other order such every bit the Egyptian, the Chinese (or even a "prehistoric") style. Gothic and Baroque are only the youth and historic period of one and the same vessel of forms, the fashion of the West as ripening and ripened. Hence Ionic columns tin be equally completely combined with Doric edifice forms as late Gothic is with early on Baroque in St. Lorenz at Nürnberg, or belatedly Romanesque with the tardily Baroque in the cute upper part of the Due west choir at Mainz.
The test before art-history is to write the comparative biographies of the cracking styles, all of which as organisms of the aforementioned genus possess structurally cognate life-histories.

CLASSICAL BEHAVIOUR-DRAMA AND FAUSTIAN Graphic symbol-DRAMA

The question is now: how far is the man of this Civilisation himself fulfilling what the soul-prototype that he has created requires of him?
What will is in the soul-image, graphic symbol is in the moving picture of life as nosotros see it, the Western life that is cocky-evident to Western men. Information technology is the fundamental postulate of all our upstanding systems, differ otherwise equally they may in their metaphysical or practical precepts, that man has character. Character, which forms itself in the stream of the world–the personality, the relation of living to doing–is a Faustian impression of Human. The conception of mankind as an active, fighting, progressing whole is (and has been since Joachim of Floris and the Crusades) so necessary an idea for us that we find it hard indeed to realize that it is an exclusively Western hypothesis, living and valid just for a season. TheÂcarpe diem, the sturated being, of the Classical standpoint is the well-nigh direct contrary of that which is felt by Goethe and Kant and Pascal, by Church and Freethinker, as lone possessing value–active, fighting and victorious beingness.

This opposition, further, has produced forms of tragedy that differ from ane another radically in every respect. The Faustian character-drama and the Apollinian drama of noble gesture have in fact nothing but proper name in common. It is non enough to distinguish Classical and Western tragedy but equally 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 unmarried moment. What relation, for instance, has the entire inwards past of Oedipus or Orestes to the shattering event that of a sudden meets him on his manner? There is not the smallest trait in the past existence of Othello–that masterpiece of psychological analysis–that has not some bearing on the catastrophe. Race-hatred, the isolation of the upstart amongst the patricians, the Moor as soldier and every bit kid of Nature, the loneliness of the aging bachelor–all these things have their significance. "Psychology" in fact is the proper designation for the Western mode of fashioning meant, the word holds good for a portrait by Rembrandt as for the music of Tristan, for Stendhal'sÂJulien  Sorel as for Dante'sÂVita Nuova. The like of it is not to be institute in whatever other culture…

Of deep necessity, therefore, we Faustians understand drama every bit a maximum of action; and, of deep necessity also, the Greek understood it every bit a maximum of passivity.

EVERY CULTURE POSSESSES ITS Ain ETHIC

WESTERN mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. Nosotros say "thou shalt" in the conviction that and so-and-so in fact will, tin and must be inverse or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to requite, such orders is unshakable. That, and nothing short of information technology is, for us, morale. In the ideals of the West everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. Hither Luther is completely at 1 with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to general and permanent validity…

The moral imperative as the form of morale is Faustian and only Faustian. It is quite wrong to acquaintance Christianity with the moral imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed Faustian human, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity–and he not only fabricated it a new religion but also gave it a new moral direction. The "information technology" became "I," the passion- charged middle of the earth, the foundation of the great Sacrament of personal contrition. Volition-to-power even in ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale every bit a universal truth, and to enforce information technology upon humanity, to reinterpret or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted–nothing is more than characteristically our own than this is. And in virtue of it the Gothic springtime proceeded to a profound–and never yet appreciated–in transformation of the morale of Jesus. A quite spiritual morale welling from Magian [5] feeling–a morale or carry 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….

EVERY SCIENCE IS DEPENDENT UPON A RELIGION

Each culture has made its own gear up of images of physical processes, which are true but for itself and only live whole it is itself alive. The "Nature" of Classical human being plant its highest creative keepsake in the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of bodies, a physics of the near. [Elsewhere, he relates this to Euclidian geometry. – ed] The Arabian Culture symbolized by the arabesque and the cave-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious substances similar the "philosophical mercury," which is neither a fabric nor a property only by magic can transmute one metallic 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 vest the conceptions of affair and grade, to the Arabian (quite Spinozistically) the idea of substances with visible or hush-hush attributes, and to the Faustian the idea of forcefulness and mass.

… That which Classical man saw before him as "motion" in space he understood as … change of position of bodies; we from the way in which we experience motion, take deduced the concept of a process, a "going frontward," thereby expressing and emphasizing that chemical element of directional energy which our thought necessarily predicates the courses of Nature….

The rise of a chemic method of the Arabian style betokens a new world-consciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow fabricated an end of Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics… Similarly information technology was simply at the time of the definite emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry and mathematic alike became pure analysis. And so Robert Boyle (1626-91) devised the analytical method and with it the Western conception of the Element. That is in fact the end of genuine chemistry, its dissolution into the comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its absorption into the mechanical outlook which the Baroque Age had established through Galileo and Newton.

What we call Statics, Chemical science and Dynamics–words that every bit used in modernistic scientific discipline are merely traditional distinctions without deeper significant–are really the respective physical systems of the Apollinian, Magian and Faustian souls, each of which grew upward in its own civilisation 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 Assay, and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue.

Disbelief

Disbelief, 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 contemplative desire for real religiousness–therein resembling Romanticism, which likewise would recollect that which has irrevocably gone, namely, the Civilisation … Atheism comes non with the evening of the Culture just with the dawn of Civilization.

But, if this late form of world-feeling and globe-image which preludes our "2nd religiousness" is universally a negation of the religious in us. The structure of information technology is different in each of the Civilizations…

The spiritual in every living civilisation is religious, has organized religion, whether it be conscious of information technology or not. Information technology is not open up to a spirituality to be irreligious; at most it can play with the idea of irreligion as Medicean Florentines did. Merely the maglopolitan is irreligious; this is part of his being, a marking of his historical position. The degree of piety of which a period is capable is revealed in its mental attitude towards toleration. One tolerates something either because it seems to have some relation to what according to one's experience is the divine or else because one is no longer capable of such experience and is indifferent.

What we moderns have called "Toleration" in the classical globe is an expression of the contrary of disbelief. Plurality ofÂnumina and cults is inherent in the formulation of Classical religion. But to the Faustian soul dogma and not-visible ritual constitutes the essence. What is regarded as godless is opposition to doctrine. Here begins the spatial-spiritual conception of heresy. A Faustian faith by its very nature cannot allow any freedom of conscience; it would be in contradiction with its infinite-invasive dynamic. Even free-thinking itself is not exception to the rule. Amongst us there is not organized religion without leanings to an Inquisition of some sort….

FAUSTIAN PHYSICS AS THE DOGMA OF FORCE

The Deism of the Baroque goes together with its dynamics and its belittling geometry; its three bones principles, God, Liberty and Immortality, are in the language of mechanics the principles of inertia (Galileo), least activity (D'Alembert) and the conservation of energy (J. R. Mayer).
Western physics is by its inward grade dogmatic and not ritualistic. Its content is the dogma of Force which is identical with infinite and distance…

THE LIMITS OF Further THEORETICAL–NOT TECHNICAL–Development

…the sudden and annihilating doubt that has arisen about things that even yesterday were the unchallenged foundation of physical theory, about the significant of the energy-principle, the concepts of mass, space, absolute time, and causality-laws generally. …Information technology is a doubt affecting the very possibility of a Nature-science. To take one case lone, what a depth of unconscious Skepsis in that location is in the rapidly increasing utilize of enumerative and statistical methods, which aim only at probability of results and forgo in accelerate the absolute scientific exactitude that was a creed to the hopeful earlier generations.

ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE: THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

In the history, the genuine history, of higher men, the stake fought for and the basis of the animal struggle to prevail is ever–fifty-fifty when the driver and driven are completely unconscious of the symbolic forcefulness of their doings, purposes and fortunes–the actualization of something that is essentially spiritual, the translation of an thought into a living historical form. This applies equally to the struggle of large style-tendencies in fine art, of philosophy, of political ideals and of economic forms. Simply the post-history is void of all this. All that remains is the struggle for mere ability, for animal advantage per se.

CITIES AND PEOPLES

What makes the man of the globe-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the catholic beat in his existence is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking-consciousness go more and more than dangerous… this so, is the conclusion of the city'due south history; growing from primitive barter-centre to Culture-city and at last to globe-city, it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its regal evolution, and then the lst blossom of that growth to the spirit of civilization–and so, doomed, moves on to final self-devastation.

Only the essence of Alexandrianism and of our Romanticism is something which belongs to all urban men, without stardom. Romanticism marks the beginning of that which Goethe, with his wide vision, called world-literature–the literature of the leading world-city, against which a provincial literature, native to the soil, but negligible, struggles everywhere with difficulty to maintain itself. … Consequently in all Civilizations the "modern" cities assume a more and more uniform type…

REFORMATION

In all Cultures, Reformation has the same significant–the bringing dorsum of the religion to the purity of its original idea as this manifested itself in the great centuries of the offset. Information technology was Destiny and non intellectual necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Faustian worlds, to the budding off of new religions at this indicate. …
For Luther, like all reformers in all Cultures, was not the get-go, but the last of a 1000 succession which led from the great ascetics of the open country to the urban center-priest. Reformation is Gothic, the accomplishment and the testament thereof. Luther's chorale "Ein ' feste Burg" does non belong to the spiritual lyrism of the Baroque. There rumbles in information technology notwithstanding the splendid Latin of the Dies Irae. It is the Church building Militant'south last mighty Satan-song. Luther, like every reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church building not because information technology demanded too much, but considering it demanded too little …

The last reformers, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were urban monks, and this differentiates them profoundly from the Joachims and theBernards. Their intellectual and urbanÂaskesis is the stepping-stone from the hermitages of quiet valleys to the scholar's written report of the Baroque. The mystic experience of Luther which gave nascency to his doctrine of justification is the feel, non of a St. Bernard in the presence of wood and hills and clouds and stars, merely of a man who looks through narrow windows on the streets and house walls and gables.

The mighty human activity of Luther was a purely intellectual decision. Not for nothing has he been regarded equally the last great Schoolman of the line of Occam. He completely liberated the Faustian personality–the intermediate person of the priest, which has formerly stood between it and the Infinite, was removed. And information technology was not wholly along, cocky-oriented, its own priest and its own judge. Just the common people could only feel, not understand, the element of liberation in it all. They welcomed, enthusiastically, indeed, the tearing up of visible duties, simply they did not come up to realize that these had been replaced by intellectual duties that were still stricter. Francis of Assisi had given much and taken little, but the urban Reformation took much and, equally far as the majority of people were concerned, gave little.

The holy Causality of the Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the mystic feel of inward absolution "by faith solitary." He came very near to Bernard of Clairvaux. Both of them understood absolution every bit a divine miracle: insofar as the human changes himself, it is God changing him. The ane and the other preached: "K must believe that God has forgiven thee," only for Bernard belief was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas for Luther it sank to dubiousness and separate insistence. Herein lies the ultimate meaning of the Western priest, who from 1215 was elevated above the rest of mankind past the sacrament of ordination and its characterindelebilis: he was a mitt with which even the poorest wretch could grasp God. This visible link with the infinite, Protestantism destroyed. Strong souls could and did win it back for themselves, but for the weaker information technology was gradually lost. Bernard, although for him the inward phenomenon was successful of itself, would not deprive others of the gentler way, for the very illumination of his soul showed him the very globe of living nature, all-pervading, ever near and e'er helpful. Luther, who knew himself only and not men, gear up postulated heroism in identify of actual weakness. For him life was desperate boxing against the Devil, and that battle he chosen upon anybody to fight. And everyone who fought it fought it lonely.

Scientific discipline, PURITANISM

…Pure contemplative philosophy could take dispensed with experiment forever, just not so the Faustian symbol of the auto, which urged us to mechanical construcitons even in the twelfth century and made "perpetuum  mobile" the Promethus-idea of the Western intellect. For u.s., the first thing is every 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 manking except the Faustian…

THE SECOND RELIGIOUSNESS

…Every swell Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban countryside, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect and closes with a finale of materialism in the earth-cities. But even these last chords are strictly in the primal of the whole. In that location are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western materialisms, and each is zilch only the original stock of myth shapes, cleared of the elements of feel and contemplative vision and viewed mechanistically. The belief is conventionalities in force and matter, even if the words used past "God" and "world," "Providence" and "human being."
Unique and self-independent is the Faustian materialism, in the narrower sense of the discussion. In information technology the technical outlook upon the globe reached fulfillment. The whole world a dynamic arrangement, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its kickoff causes of beingness experimentally probed and numerically stock-still so that man can dominate it–this is what distinguishes our particular "return to Nature" from all others. That "Knowledge is Virtue" Confucius as well believed, and Buddha, and Socrates, merely "Cognition is Power" is a phrase that possess meaning merely inside the European-American Civilization. The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, evolution, progress, and put into the center of the system; the Will is anÂalbumen-process;and all these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism and what-not are elevated into the fitness-moral which is the buoy of American businessmen, British politicians and German language progress — Philistines alike — and turns out, in the last assay, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justification past faith.

The side by side stage I telephone 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 end to mean anything. (So far every bit theWesetrn Civilization is concerned, therefore, we are however many generations short of that pont.) The 2d Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism, which is the concluding political constitution of Late Civilisation… The material of the Second Religiousness is only that of the first, 18-carat, young religiousness– merely otherwise experienced and expressed. It starts with Rationalism's fading out in helplessness, and then the forms of the springtime become visible and finally the whole world of the primitive religion, which had receded earlier the thou forms of the early faith, returns to the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the pop syncretism that is to be plant in every Culture at this phase.

THE Country

At that place are streams of existence which are "in form" in the aforementioned sense in which the term is used in sports… When [players] are "in grade," the riskiest acts and moves come off easily and naturally. An art-period is in class when its tradition is 2d nature, as counterpoint was to Bach.
The word for race (or brood) education is "training" as confronting the shaping which creates communities of waking-consciousness on a basis of uniform teachings or beliefs…

THE VESTING OF AUTHORITY

The destiny question, for States that exist in reality and not merely in intellectual schemes, is not that of their ideal task or structure, only 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 issues lie, not in the working out of constitutions, just in the organization of a audio working government…

In every healthy State the letter of the written constitution is of small importance compared with the practise of the living constitution… The leader'due south responsibility is e'er to a minority that possesses the instincts of statesmanship and represents the rest of the nation in the struggle of history.

The true class-State is an expression of the general historical experience that is always a single social stratum which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading. It is always a definite minority that represents the world-historical trend of a State…

THE Suburbia

At the indicate when a Civilization is get-go to turn itself into a Civilization, the not-Manor intervenes in affairs decisively–and for the showtime time–equally an independent force….
The State, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by urban reason equally a burden. And then, in the same stage, the great forms of the bizarre arts brainstorm to exist felt as restrictive and go Classicist or Romanticist — that is, sickly or formless, German language literature from 1770 is one long defection of strong individual personalities against strict verse. The idea of the whole nation being "in training" or "in grade" for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly is no longer in condition. This holds expert in morals, in arts and in modes of thought, simply most of all in politics. Every bourgeois revolution has equally its scene the great urban center, and equally its hallmark the incomprehension of the one-time symbols, which information technology replaces by tangible interests and the peckish (or even the mere wish) of enthusiastic thinkers and world-improvers to see their conceptions actualized…

There is some other aspect, too nether which this epoch has its importance–in it for the first time abstract truths seek to intervene in the world of facts…

The mistrust felt for loftier form by the inwardly formless non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to rescue its liberty–from all course–past means of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no rules and is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up…

THE Catamenia OF THE CONTENDING STATES

With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find ourselves today [half-dozen]. It is the transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism, a general phase of development, which occupies at least ii centuries and can be shown to exist in all the Cultures…

In these weather and so much of old and great traditions a remains, so much of historical "fettle" and feel has got into the blood of the twentieth-century nations, acquires an unequalled potency. For us creative piety, or (to apply a more fundamental term) the pulse that has come down to us from beginning origins, adheres but to forms that are older than the Revolution and Napoleon, forms which grew and were non made. Every remnant of them, still tiny, that has kept itself alive in the being of whatsoever self-contained minority whatever will before long rise to incalculable values and bring about historical furnishings which no one yet imagines…

CAESARISM

Past the term "Caesarism" I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that information technology may accept, is in its inwards self a render to thorough formlessness. Information technology does not matter that Augustus in Rome, and Huang Ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and AlpArslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. the spirit of these forms was dead, and then all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all pregnant and weight. Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar…

With the formed state having finished its course, high history too lays itself down weary to slumber. Man becomes a establish again adhering to the soil, impaired and enduring. The timeless hamlet and the "eternal" peasant reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth.. Men alive from hand to mouth, with lilliputian thrifts and petty fortunes and endure…

PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS

The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which i is born. He who does not sense and understand its most surreptitious forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forrad on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who trusts to the surface–public opinion, big phrases and ideals of the day–he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their ability, not they in his. Wait non dorsum to the past for measuring-rods! At that place are times, similar our ain present and the Grecco age, in which there are ii most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they accept power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice information technology. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as private will and its organic logic as character.

…The genuine statesman is distinguished from the "mere politico"–the player who plays for the pleasure of the game, theÂarriviste on the heights of history, the seeker subsequently wealth and rank–as as well from the schoolmaster of an thought, by the fact that he dares to demand sacrifices–and obtains them, considering his feeling that he is necessary to the time and the nation is shared by thousands, transforms them to the core and renders them capable of deeds to which otherwise they cold never have risen.

…but in no other civilization has the will-to-power manifested itself in so inexorable a form as in this of ours…

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect. Just, just because the illusion that actuality tin permit itself to be improved past the ideas of any Zeno or Marx has fled away; because men have learned that in the realm of reality one power-will tin be overthrown only by some other (for that is the great man experience of Contending States periods); there wakes at terminal a deep yearning for all old and worthy tradition that still lingers alive… And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which the rationalism of the Megolopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depth. Everything in the society of dynastic tradition and old nobility that has saved itself up for the future, everything that at that place is of loftier money-disdaining ethic, everything that is intrinsically audio enough to be, in Frederick the Great's words, the servant–the hard-working, self-sacrificing, caring servant–of the State–all this becomes all of a sudden the focus of immense life-forces…

CONCLUSION

For united states of america, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this culture and at this moment of its evolution–the moment when coin is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches with tranquillity, house step–our management, willed and obligatory at in one case, is gear up for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is non worth the living. We take not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do what is necessary or to do nothing. And a task that celebrated necessity has gear up volition be accomplished with the individual or against him.

EDITOR'Due south NOTES

[1] Classical = ancient Greece at the summit of its culture

[2] Gothic = the dawn of our culture

[3] Faustian = the essential nature of Western culture

[4] Civilization = the concluding dying phase of a Culture

[5] Magian = culture of the Near-East

[6] printed in 1918 and revised in 1922

Tags: Oswald Spengler

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Source: https://www.amerika.org/politics/decline-of-the-west-oswald-spengler-2/

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