Decline of the West, Vol. I

By Oswald Spengler. Notes and excerpts:

Language, even mathematical language, fails when dealing with something eternally inaccessible. Words for these things "are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear. They evoke images, likenesses -- the only language of spiritual intercourse that man has discovered."

There are prime-words, like Will, Space, Eternity, and God, for which we have no notions but only names. Of these things we have an immediate certainty, in ineffable, incommunicable feeling.

The point at which "criticism falls silent and faith begins" is the moment that "analysis is confronted with itself." -- Goedel, i.e.

"The physicist of the inner world" tries to elucidate fictions by more fictions, notions by more notions -- to put a mechanism in place of an organism.

They felt themselves, with evident self-satisfaction, to be "dark and deep." But they understood their subject but partially, and hoped for a similar quasi-incomprehension in their audiences. "The only noteworthy thing they proved was the attractiveness of obscurity."

Schopenhauer reduced the world to Will and Idea, and it is only his ethic and not his metaphysic that decides against the Will. Nietzsche returned to the stronger formula Voluntas superior intellectu.

The primacy of Will or Reason is the basic problem of the Faustian soul.

Since its inception, the Faustian soul has been trying "in labour of many centuries to paint a self-portrait."

Will and Thought correspond to Direction and Extension, History and Nature, Destiny and Causality -- distance-becoming vs. distance-become, direction-feeling vs space-feeling, will vs. reason.

The language of the Faustian soul is spoken in a "dynamic syntax." And therefore the "entire Faustian ethic, from Thomas Aquinas to Kant, is an excelsior -- fulfillment of an 'I,' ethical work upon an 'I,' justification of an 'I' by faith and works; respect of the neighbor 'Thou' for the sake of one's "I" and its happiness; and, lastly and supremely, immortality for the 'I.'"

It is not the notion of Will, but the circumstance that we possess it while the Greeks were entirely ignorant of it, that gives it high symbolic import. Kant's formula, "Space as a priori form of perception," implies an assertion of supremacy of the soul over the alien, of tireless striving; the ego, through the form, is to rule the world. This is expressed in the mathematico-physical concept of force and function, and ultimately in the concept of vector. Plato never felt, as Kant was driven to feel, the ego as centre of a transcendent sphere of effect. The captives in his celebrated cave are really captives, the slaves and not the masters of outer impression -- recipients of light from the common sun and not themselves stars which irradiate the universe. For the Faustian soul, and never for the Classical soul, even spatial interval figures as form, and indeed as prime form thereof, for the notions of capacity and intensity rest upon it.

The search for completeness is the search for God -- the search for the original language (in the beginning was the Word). Goedel proved that we will never find it, never find Him.

"And therefore it is that about 1700 painting had to yield to instrumental music -- the only art that in the end is capable of clearly expressing what we feel about God."

In the Apollonian world, even the Gods are subordinate to blind necessity. In Homer even Zeus must take up the scales of destiny, not to settle, but to learn, the fate of Hector. But for the Faustian God is Will.

"Time is the passion of the third dimension." There is an inward connection between the invisible operations of nature and the unlimited range of the Order, between the arts of Calculus and Fugue.

Can it be that a Culture's prime-phenomenon is valid only for a season? For the Western man, activity, determination, self-control -- these are postulates that did not exist for the Stoics and Epicureans, for whom abstention from these things was an ideal. The Greeks were far from making "struggle" -- Kampf -- an ethical principle. To battle against the comfortable foregrounds of life, against the impressions of the moment, against what is near, tangible, easy; to win through to that which has generality and duration and links past and future -- these are the sums of all Faustian imperatives from earliest Gothic to Kant and Fichte: the causa sui of all our philosophy and science.

Carpe Diem is for the saturated being. For the insatiable soul, Victory is a dream, and the struggle is all.

Psychologists are merely fine students (hardly nowadays to be distinguished from the poet) of spiritual turning-points.

For Michelangelo the question of form was a religious matter, and this explains his sadness: for him it was all or nothing, and his incompletenesses left him fractured, tortured and unsatisfied. And it was this terrible vision that frightened his contemporaries. By mastering stone he was striving to master Death; never before has there been a more open expression of dread in the presence of the "become." And never has there been a comparable effort to tame it with violence.

Cultures are merely organisms which are born, ripen, age, and for ever die.

Brown is the one truly metaphysical color.

From the spheres of Beethoven and the stellar expanses of Kant, Impressionism has come down again to the crust of the earth. Its space is cognized, not experienced, seen, not contemplated; there is tunedness in it, but not Destiny. Modern art is a risky art, meticulous, cold, diseased -- an art for over-developed nerves, and scientific to the last degree. It is natural science as opposed to nature experience, head against heart, knowledge in contrast to faith.

As soon as the word comes to be used as the expression-agent of art, the waking consciousness ceases to express or to take in a thing integrally. The spoken word, when used in any artificial sense, separates hearing from understanding. Soon, motives in art are joined to word-meaning. Thus arrives allegory, or motive that signifies a word.