Sections from Spengler, The Decline of the West:
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 ina 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 notprecede 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 a t all in Athens. In a word, Greek soul--Roman intellect; and this antithesis is the differentia betwene Culture and Civilization. Nor is it only to the Classical it applies. Again and again there appears this type of strong-minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the hands of this type lies the intellectual and material destiny of each and every "late" period. Pure Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive exhaustion of forms that have become inorganic or dead.
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 traditionsrepresentative 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 HISTORY OF STYLE AS AN ORGANISM [107+]
I. Spring
A.Every Spring has two definitely ornamental and non- imitative arts - Carolingian (between styles [107])
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
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
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.. [204]
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
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" [104]
ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE: THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES [230- 244]
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 [250]
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 every decreasing, while the tensions of his waking- consciousness become more and more dangerous.. [252]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 Alexandrinism 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...
THE STATE [357]
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 [360]
...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...
[361]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 e=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 [362]
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 smae 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 Uquot;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...
[365] 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...
[369] 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 [375]
With this enters the age of gigantic conflicts, in which we find ourselves today [written during World War I and revised in twenties]. 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......
[377] In these conditions so much of old and great traditions a remains, so much of historical "fitness" and experience as 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 [378]
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 Rome, and Huang Ti in China, Amasis in Egypt and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. the spirit of these forms was dead, and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar...{281]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...
Conclusion [415]
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 th necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against him.
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