Decline
of the West
by Oswald Spengler (excerpts taken from Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West - translation by Charles
Francis Atkinson, 1932)
THE
PROBLEM OF "CIVILIZATION"
Looked at in this way, the "Decline of the
West" comprises nothing less than the problem of Civilization. We have
before us one of the fundamental questions of all higher history. What is
civilization, understood as the organico-logical
sequel, fulfilment and finale of a culture?
For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time
the two words, hitherto used to express in an indefinite, more or less ethical,
distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express
a strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the inevitable
destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the viewpoint from
which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable
of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which
a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the
thing-become succeeding the thing- becoming, death following life, rigidity
following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying
world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and
Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and
again.
So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand
the Romans as the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the
deepest secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the
meaning of the fact--which can only be disputed by vain phrases--that the
Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a great development? Unspiritual,
unphilosophical, devoid of art, clannish to the point
of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible successes, they stand between the
Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An imagination directed purely to practical
objects was something which is not found at all in
The transition from Culture to Civilization was acocmplished for the Classical world in the fourth, for the
Western in the nineteenth century. Form these periods onward the great
intellectual decisions take place, no longer all over the world where not a
hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that
have absorbed into themselves the whole content of History, while the old wide
landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, served only to feed the
cities with what remains of its higher mankind. World-city and province--the
two basic ideas of every civilization--bring up a wholly new form-problem of
History, the very problem that we are living through today with hardly the
remotest conception of its immensity. In place of a world, there is a city, a
point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest
dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there
is new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city
dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of
the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country
gentleman. This is a very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the
end--what does it signify?
The world-city means cosmopolitanism in place of
"home" . . . To the world-city belongs not a
folk but a mob. Its uncomprehending hostility to all the traditions
representative of the culture (nobility, church, privileges, dynasties,
convention in art and limits of knowledge in science), the keen and cold
intelligence that confounds the wisdom of the peasant, the new- fashioned
naturalism that in relation to all matters of sex and society goes back far to
quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappearance of the panem et circenses
in the form of wage-disputes and sports stadia--all
these things betoken the definite closing down of the Culture and the opening
of a quite new phase of human existence--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-date moralist, not from this or that
"standpoint," but in a high, time-free perspective embracing whole
millennia of historical world-forms, if we are really to comprehend the great
crisis of the present.
For it will become manifest that, from this moment
on, all great conflicts of world-outlook, of politics, of art, of science, of
feeling, will be under the influence of the same contrary factor. What is the
hallmark of a politic of Civilization today, in contrast to a politic of
Culture yesterday? It is, for the Classical rhetoric, and for the Western journalism,
both serving that abstract which represents the power of Civilization -- money.
It is the money-spirit which penetrates unremarked
the historical forms of the people's existence, often without destroying or
even in the least disturbing these forms.
It is possible to understand the Greeks without
mentioning their economic relations; the Romans, on the other hand, can only be
understood thorugh these.
THE
CONCLUSION--IMPERIALISM
Considered in iteself, the
Roman world-dominion was a negative phenomenon, being the result not 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 as 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 end. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. In this
phenomenal form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. 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 Civilization and in its cold clear air, the one
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 point 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, electric railways, torpedoes
and differential equations (for these are only body-consituents
of the time), but by a civilized spirituality which possesses not only these but
also quite other creative possibilities. That, as our town time represents a
transitional phase which occurs with certainty under particular conditions,
there are perfectly well-defined states (such as have occurred more than once
in the history of the past) later than the present-day state of West Europe,
and therefore that the future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards
and onwards for all time towards our present ideals, but a single phenomenon of
history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which covers a
few centuries and can be viewed and, in essentials, calculated from available
precedents.
ARCHITECTURE
AND DIVINITIES
Henceforth we 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 "body" is the Western Culture that blossomed forth with the
birth of the Romanesque style in the Tenth century on the Northern plain
between the
"Space" -- speaking now in the Faustian idiom -- is a spiritual
something, rigidly distinct form the momentary sense-present, which could not
be represented in an Apollinian language whether
Greek or Latin. The Classical... A landscape of Claude Lorrain,
on the contrary, is nothing but space, every detail being made to subserve its illustration. All bodies in it possess an
atmospheric and perspective meaning purely as carriers of light and shade. The
extreme of this disembodiment of the world in the service of space is
Impressionism.
IMITATION
AND ORNAMENT
All art is expression-language. This expression is
either ornament or imitation. Both are higher possibilities...
I. Imitation
A.Earlier and more characteristic of race
B.Born of the secret rhythm of all this cosmic
C.Every live 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
1.Consists in an identity of inner activity between the soul and body
"here" and the world around "there" which,
... become one.
D.Let ourselves go in common song or parade-march or
dance
1.creates out of many units one unit of feeling and expression, a
"we"
E.All imitation is in the broadest sense dramatic;
1.drama in movements of brush stroke or chisel
2.melodic curse of song
3.tone of recitation
4.line of poetry
5.the description
6.the dance
F.Only the living can be imitated
1.can be imitated only in movements
2.belongs to time and direction
G.Expresses something by accomplishing itself
H.Possess beginning and end
II.Ornament - does not follow the stream of life but 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 born of
the moment andunreproducible
E.employs a languages emancipated from speaking
1.stock of forms that possess duration and is not at the merc
of the individual
F.Removed from Time
1.pure extension, settled and stable
G.Expresses by presenting itself to the senses as a
finished thing
1.Being as such, wholly independent of origin.
H.Possesses only duration
THE
HISTORY OF STYLE AS AN ORGANISM
I. Spring
A.Every Spring has two definitely ornamental and
non-imitative arts -- Carolingian (between styles)
1.building
2.decoration
B.Dawn of 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 fromit in awe.
C.Form-world of springtime at its highest:
architecture is lord and ornament is vassal (ornament in the service of all- ruling
architectural idea)
1. statuary groups of Gothic cathedrals
2. hymn strophe
3. parallel motion of arts in church music
D. AD 1000 - awakening at one moment Romanesque arrives
a.dynamic of space
b.inner and outer construction placed in fixed relation
E.Gothic/Medieval
II. Summer
A.Late period of a style - group of civic and worldly
special arts devote themselves to pleasing and clever imitation, become
personal
B.Renaissance/Baroque
III. Autumn
A.Soul depicts its happiness, conscious of self-completion
1.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 Imitation, not of life, but of an older Imitation
IV. Winter
A.At the last when Civilization sets in, true ornament
and, with it, great art as a whole are extinguished
1.Not architectural style, but taste
2.Methods of painting and mannerisms of writing, old forms and new, home and
foreign, come and go with the fashion.
3.Pictorial and literary stock-in-trade destitute of any deeper significance,
employed according to taste
B.Final or industrial form of Ornament - 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 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...And with these
arts we count music....
If an art has boundaries at all -- boundaries of its soul-become-form -- they
are historical and not technical or physiological boundaries.
...The choice of art-genus itself is seen to be a
means of expression. What the creation of a masterpiece means for an individual
arts--the "Night Watch" for Rembrandt or the Meistersinger
for Wagner--the creation of a species of art, comprehended as such, means for
the life-history of a Culture. It is epochal. Apart from the merest externals,
each art is an individual organism without predecessor or successor. 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 certian
shades and harmonies or, on the contrary, show preferences so marked that
authorship-attributions can be based on them.
The importance of these groups of questions has not
yet been recognized by theory... A futile up-and-down course was stolidly
traced out. Static times were described as "natural pauses," it was
called "decline" when some great art in reality died, and
"renaissance" where an eye really free from prepossessions would have
seen another art being born in another landscape to express another humanity.
And yet it is precisely in this problem of the end,
the impressively sudden end, of a great art--the end of the Attic 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
find everywhere in the Western what we find nowhere in the Classical [1] - the
exclusive form. Whole periods - for instance, the Provencal Culture and the
Rococo - are in the highest degree select and exclusive, 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 so utterly non-exclusive and caters so frankly for all, it is
in fact, through and through, the creation of a circle or of individual chosen
souls, a taste that rejects popularity from the outset. On the contrary every Attic
burgher belonged to the Attic culture, which excluded nobody; and
consequently, the distinction of deep and shallow, which is so decisively
important for us, did not exist at all for it. For us, popular and shallow are
synonymous - in art as in science, but for Classiclal
man it was not so.
From Titian painting becomes more and more esoteric. So ,
too poetry. So, too, music. And the Gothic [2] 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 generally as something for which one is
or is not in the mood. A certain 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." But Faustian [3] art is not, and by very
essence cannot be, "for all." If modern painting has ceased to appeal
to any but a small (and ever decreasing) circle of connoisseurs, it is because
it has turned away from the painting of things that the man in the street can
understand. It has transferred the property of actuality from contents to space
- the space through which alone, accordingg to Kant, things are.
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. Indeed, we may take the
craving for wide effect as a sufficient index by itself of the commencing and
already perceptible decline of Western science. That the sever esoteric of the
Baroque age 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 us, 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
WILL TO POWER
"If, in fine, we look at the whole picture -
the expansion of the Copernican world into that aspect of stellar space that we
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 home; 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 Western creations of the soul-myth
called "Will," "Force" and "Deed" must be
regarded as derivative of this prime symbol."
IMPRESSIONISM
"Impressionism," which only came into
general use in Manet's time (and then, originally, as
a word of contempt like Baroque and Rococo), very happily summarized the
special quality of the Faustian way of art that has evolved from oil painting. Impression
is the inverse of the euclidean world-feeling. It
tries to get as far as possible from the language of plastic and as near as
possible to that of music. The effect that is made upon us by things that
receive and reflect light is made not because the things are there, but a
though they "in themselves" are not there. The things are not even
bodies, but light-resistances in space, and their illusive density is to be
unmasked by the brush-stroke. ...
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 impresionistic mathematic, which
frankly and with intent transcends all optical limitations. It is Analysis, as
developed after
Is Impressionism (in the current narrow sense) a creationg of the nineteenth century? Has paiting lived, after all, two centuries more? Is it still existing? But we must not be deceived in the
character of the new episode, that in the nineteenth century
(i.e. beyond the 1800 frontier and in "Civilization") succeeded in
awakening some illusion of a great culture of painting, choosing the
word Plein-air to designate its special
characteristic. 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 eneded again. I have characterized the noble
green of Grünewald and Claude and Giorgione
as the Catholic space-colour and the transcendent
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 down again to the crust of the eath. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not
contemplated; there 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, return to Nature day by day. The modern artist is a workman, not a
creator...
The last of the Faustian arts died in Tristan. This
work is the giant keystone of Western music. Painting achieved nothing like
this as a finale.
...Between Wagner and Manet
there is a deep relationship, which is not, indeed, obvious to everyone but
which Baudelaire with his unerring flair for the decadent detected at once. For
the Impressionists, the end and the culmination of art was the conuring up of a world in space out of strokes and patches
of colour, and this was just what Wagner achieved
with three bars. .....
[Comparison with
THE
MORALE OF DAWNING "CIVILIZATION"
"When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase "transvaluation of all values" for the first time, the
spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its
formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most
fundamental character of every civilization [4]. For it is
the beginning of a Civilization that it removes all the forms of the Culture
that went before, understands them otherwise, practices them in a different
way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein lies the negativeness common to
all period of this character. It assumes that the genuine act of creation has
already occurred, and merely enters upon an inheritance of big actualities. In
the late-Classical, we find 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 father of the Stoa and in whom the first signs of inward impoverishment
and city-intellectualism became visible - to Epictetus
and Marcus Aurelius, every existence-ideal of the old Clasical
underwent transvaluation. In the case of
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-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 vaid for, Civilization - whether he
wills it or not, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the
garb of religion or not.
Only the sick man feels his limbs. 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 - then it is evident that something
has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself,
the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the mdist
of the Culture-landscape, whose men it 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 straight
onwards naturally and unquestioningly, his life has a settled conduct. This is
the instinctive morale, which may disguise itself in a thousand controversial
forms, but which he himself does not controvert, because he has it. As soon as
Life is fatigued, as 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 as late as 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 abstract statement of what, for Kant, was
not in question at all. But with Zeno and with Schopenhauer that is no longer
so. It had become necessary to discover, to invent or to squeeze into form, as
rule of being, 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 but the reflection of Knowlege upon Life. One
feels that there is something artificial, soulless, half-true in all these
considered systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They
are not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank
with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition,
vanishes before the one 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, up to the Yoga and Vedanta doctrines, philosophy had
been a sequence of grand world-systems in which formal ethics occupied a very
modest place. But now it became "moral philosophy" with a metaphysic
as background. The enthusiasm of epistemology had to give way to hard 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 style sequence as an
organism. Here, as in so many other matters, Goethe was the first to whom
vision came in his Winckelmann he says of Velleius
Paterculus; "With his standpoint, it was not
given to him to see all art as a living thing that must have an inconspicuous
beginning a slow 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 sentence contains the entire morphology of art-history.
Styles do not follow one another like waves or pulse-beats. It is not the
personality or will or brian
of the artist that makes the style, but the style that makes the type of the
artist. The style, like the Culture, is a prime phenomenon in the strict Goethian sense, be it the style of art or religion or
thought, or the style of life itself. It is, as "Nature" is, an
ever-new experience of waking man, his alter ego and mirror-image in the
world-around. And therefore in the general historical picture of a Culture
there can be but one style, the style of the Culture. The error has lain in
treating mere style-phases-- Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, Empire--as if
they were styles on the same level as units of quite another order such as the
Egyptian, the Chinese (or even a "prehistoric") style. Gothic and
Baroque are simply the youth and age of one and the same vessel of forms, the
style of the West as ripening and ripened. Hence Ionic columns can be as
completely combined with Doric building forms as late Gothic is with early
Baroque in St. Lorenz at Nürnberg, or late Romanesque
with the late Baroque in the beautiful upper part of the West choir at
The test before art-history is to write the comparative biographies of the
great styles, all of which as organisms of the same genus possess structurally
cognate life-histories.
CLASSICAL
BEHAVIOUR-DRAMA AND FAUSTIAN CHARACTER-DRAMA
The question is now: how far is the man of this
Culture himself fulfilling what the soul-image that he has created requires of
him?
What will is in the soul-image, character is in the picture of life as we see
it, the Western life that is self-evident to Western men. It is the fundamental
postulate of all our ethical systems, differ otherwise as 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
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. 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? 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 as
child of Nature, the loneliness of the aging bachelor--all these things have
their significance. "Psychology" in fact is the proper designation
for the Western way of fashioning meant, the word holds good for a portrait by
Rembrandt as for the music of Tristan, for Stendhal's Julien
Sorel as for Dante's Vita Nuova.
The like of it is not to be found in any other culture...
Of deep necessity, therefore, we Faustians
understand drama as a maximum of activity; and, of deep necessity also, the
Greek understood it as a maximum of passivity.
EVERY
CULTURE POSSESSES ITS OWN ETHIC
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...
The moral imperative as the form of morale is
Faustian and only Faustian. It is quite wrong to associate 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 quite
spiritual morale welling from Magian [5] 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....
EVERY
SCIENCE IS DEPENDENT UPON A RELIGION
Each culture has made its own set of images of
physical processes, which are true only for itself and only alive whole it is
itself alive. 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. [Elsewhere, he relates this to
Euclidian geometry. - ed] The Arabian Culture symbolized by the arabesque and
the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there issued
Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious substances like the "philosophical
mercury," which is neither a material nor a property but by magic 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.
... 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, have deduced the concept of a
process, a "going forward," thereby expressing and emphasizing that
element of directional energy which our thought necessarily predicates the
courses of Nature....
The rise of a chemical method of the Arabian style
betokens a new world-consciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow made
an end of Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics... Similarly it was just at the time of the
definite emancipation of the Western mathematic by
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.
ATHEISM
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 ... Atheism comes not with the evening of the Culture
but with the dawn of Civilization.
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...
The spiritual in every living culture is religious,
has religion, whether it be conscious of it or not. It
is not open to a spirituality to be irreligious; at most it can play with the
idea of irreligion as Medicean Florentines did. But
the maglopolitan is irreligious; this is part of his
being, a mark of his historical position. The degree of piety of which a period
is capable is revealed in its 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 world is an expression of the contrary of atheism. Plurality
of numina and cults is inherent in the
conception of Classical religion. But to the Faustian soul dogma and
non-visible ritual constitutes the essence. What is regarded as godless is
opposition to doctrine. Here begins the spatial-spiritual conception of heresy.
A Faustian religion by its very nature cannot allow any freedom of conscience;
it would be in contradiction with its space-invasive dynamic. Even
free-thinking itself is not exception to the rule. Amongst
us there is not faith 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 analytical geometry; its three basic principles, God, Freedom
and Immortality, are in the language of mechanics the principles of inertia
(Galileo), least action (D'Alembert) and the
conservation of energy (J. R. Mayer).
Western physics is by its inward form dogmatic and not ritualistic. Its content
is the dogma of Force which is identical with space 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 meaning of the energy-principle, the concepts of mass, space,
absolute time, and causality-laws generally. ...It is a doubt affecting the
very possibility of a Nature-science. To take one instance alone, what a depth
of unconscious Skepsis there is in the rapidly
increasing use of enumerative and statistical methods, which aim only at
probability of results and forgo in advance 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--even when the driver and driven are completely unconscious of the
symbolic force of their doings, purposes and fortunes--the actualization of
something that is essentially spiritual, the translation of an idea into a
living historical form. This applies equally to the struggle of big
style-tendencies in art, of philosophy, of political ideals and of economic
forms. But the post-history is void of all this. All that remains is the
struggle for mere power, for animal advantage per se.
CITIES
AND PEOPLES
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... this then, is the conclusion of the city's history;
growing from primitive barter-centre to Culture-city and at last to world-city,
it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its
majestic evolution, and then the lst flower of that
growth to the spirit of civilization--and so, doomed, moves on to final
self-destruction.
But the essence of Alexandrianism
and of our Romanticism is something which belongs to all urban men, without
distinction. 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
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. 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. ...
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 country to
the city-priest. Reformation is Gothic, the accomplishment and the testament
thereof. Luther's chorale "Ein' feste Burg" does not belong to the spiritual lyrism of the Baroque. There rumbles in it still the
splendid Latin of the Dies Irae. It is the Church
Militant's last mighty Satan-song. Luther, like every reformer that had arisen
since the year 1000, fought the Church not because it demanded too much, but
because it demanded too little ...
The last reformers, the Luthers
and Savonarolas, were urban monks, and this
differentiates them profoundly from the Joachims and
the Bernards. Their intellectual and urban askesis is the stepping-stone from the hermitages of
quiet valleys to the scholar's study of the Baroque. The mystic experience of
Luther which gave birth to his doctrine of justification is the experience, not
of a St. Bernard in the presence of woods and hills and clouds and stars, but
of a man who looks through narrow windows on the streets and house walls and
gables.
The mighty act of Luther was a purely intellectual
decision. Not for nothing has he been regarded as 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 it was not wholly along,
self-oriented, its own priest and its own judge. But 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, but they did not come 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, as far as the
majority of people were concerned, gave little.
The holy Causality of the
Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the mystic experience of inward
absolution "by faith alone." He came very near to Bernard of Clairvaux.
Both of them understood absolution as a divine miracle: insofar as the man
changes himself, it is God changing him. The one and the other preached:
"Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee," but for Bernard
belief was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge, whereas for
Luther it sank to doubt and separate insistence. Herein lies
the ultimate meaning of the Western priest, who from 1215 was elevated above
the rest of mankind by the sacrament of ordination and its character indelebilis: he was a hand 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 it was gradually lost. Bernard, although for him the inward miracle was
successful of itself, would not deprive others of the gentler way, for the very
illumination of his soul showed him the very world of living nature,
all-pervading, ever near and ever helpful. Luther, who knew himself only and
not men, set postulated heroism in place of actual weakness. For him life was
desperate battle against the Devil, and that battle he called upon everyone to
fight. And everyone who fought it fought it alone.
SCIENCE,
PURITANISM
...Pure contemplative philosophy could have
dispensed with experiment forever, but not so the Faustian symbol of the
machine, which urged us to mechanical construcitons
even in the twelfth century and made "perpetuum
mobile" the Promethus-idea of the Western
intellect. For us, 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 great 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
world-cities. But even these last chords are 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. The belief is
belief in force and matter, even if the words used by "God" and
"world," "
Unique and self-contained is the Faustian materialism, in the narrower sense of
the word. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached fulfillment. 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. That "Knowledge is Virtue" Confucius
also believed, and Buddha, and Socrates, but "Knowledge is Power" is a phrase that possess meaning only within the
European-American Civilization. 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 businessmen, 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.
The 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 Wesetrn Civilization is concerned, therefore, we
are still many generations short of that pont.) The
Second Religiousness is the necessary counterpart of Caesarism,
which is the final political constitution of Late Civilization... 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.
THE
STATE
There are streams of being which are "in
form" in the same sense in which the term is used in sports... When
[players] are "in form," the riskiest acts and moves come off easily
and naturally. An art-period is in form when its tradition is second nature, as
counterpoint was to Bach.
The word for race (or breed) education is "training" as against 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, 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...
In every healthy State the letter of the written
constitution is of small importance compared with the practice of the living
constitution... The leader's responsibility is always 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 tendency of a State...
THE
BOURGEOISIE
At the point when a Culture is beginning to turn
itself into a Civilization, the non-Estate intervenes in affairs
decisively--and for the first time--as an independent force....
The State, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by urban
reason as a burden. So, in the same phase, the great forms of the baroque arts
begin to be felt as restrictive and become Classicist or Romanticist -- that
is, sickly or formless, German literature from 1770 is one long revolt of
strong individual personalities against strict poetry. The idea of the whole
nation being "in training" or "in form" for anything
becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly is no longer in condition.
This holds good in morals, in arts and in modes of thought, but most of all in
politics. Every bourgeois revolution has as its scene the great city, and as
its hallmark the incomprehension of the old symbols, which it replaces by
tangible interests and the craving (or even the mere wish) of enthusiastic
thinkers and world-improvers to see their conceptions actualized...
There is another aspect, too under 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 high form by the inwardly
formless non-Estate is so deep that everywhere and always it is ready to rescue
its freedom--from all form--by means of a dictatorship, which acknowledges no
rules and is, therefore, hostile to all that has grown up...
THE
PERIOD OF THE CONTENDING STATES
With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in
which we find ourselves today [6]. It is the transition from Napoleonism to Caesarism, a
general phase of evolution, which occupies at least two centuries and can be
shown to exist in all the Cultures...
In these conditions so much of old and great
traditions a remains, so much of historical "fitness" and experience
has got into the blood of the twentieth-century nations, acquires an unequalled
potency. For us creative piety, or (to use a more fundamental term) the pulse
that has come down to us from first origins, adheres only to forms that are
older than the Revolution and Napoleon, forms which grew and were not made. Every
remnant of them, however tiny, that has kept itself alive in
the being of any self-contained minority whatever will before long rise to
incalculable values and bring about historical effects which no one yet
imagines...
CAESARISM
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. It does not matter that Augustus in
With the formed state having finished its course,
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.. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty
thrifts and petty fortunes and endure...
PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS
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 trusts to 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! There are times, like our own present and the Grecco age, in which there are two 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 have power, whether it is to a memory
or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate
history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as
character.
...The genuine statesman is distinguished from the
"mere politician"--the player who plays for the pleasure of the game,
the arriviste on the heights of history, the seeker after wealth and
rank--as also from the schoolmaster of an idea, by the fact that he dares to
demand sacrifices--and obtains them, because 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. But, just because the illusion that
actuality can allow itself to be improved by the ideas of any Zeno or Marx has
fled away; because men have learned that in the realm of reality one power-will
can be overthrown only by another (for that is the great human experience of
Contending States periods); there wakes at last 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 order of dynastic tradition and old nobility that has saved itself up
for the future, everything that there is of high 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 this becomes suddenly the focus
of immense life-forces...
CONCLUSION
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 Caesarism
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 what is necessary or to do nothing. And a task that
historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against
him.
EDITOR'S
NOTES
[1] Classical = ancient
[2] Gothic = the dawn of our culture
[3] Faustian = the essential nature of Western
culture
[4] Civilization = the final dying phase of a
Culture
[5] Magian = culture of
the Near-East
[6] printed in 1918 and
revised in 1922