Decline of the West, Volume 2

Free will is emancipation.

Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun.

The late ages of a Culture are the ages of much writing and reading. In the youth of a Culture, a shrewd blow is still more than a shrewd conclusion.

Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not in the train of great events.

The picture we possess is of the history of the Earth's crust.

That which distinguishes Faustian man from the man of any other culture is his irrepressible urge into the distance -- the expansion power of the Western soul.

All that remains in the post-history of a Culture is the struggle for mere power, for animal advantage per se. Unreason, biology, begins to dominate. Questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked. No more riddles.

The future will be called upon to transpose our entire legal thought into alignment with our higher physics and mathematics. Our whole social economic, and technical life is waiting to be understood, at long last, in this wise. We shall need a century and more of keenest and deepest thought to arrive at the goal. And the prerequisite is a wholly new kind of preparatory training in the jurist.

Civilization is the victory of city over country, whereby it frees itself from the grip of the ground, but to its own ultimate ruin. Rootless, dead to the cosmic, irrevocably committed to stone and to intellectualism, its language is that of becomeness and completion, rather than becoming and growth. There arises an intellectual art of playing with expression, practised by the Alexandrines and the Romantics -- by Theocritus and Brentano in lyric poetry, by Reger in Music, by Kierkegaard in religion. Finally, speech and truth exclude one another. "All forms, even those that are most felt, contain and element of untruth." - Goethe.

Even in the blackest hours of life no adult experiences fear like the fear which sometimes overpowers a child in the crisis of awakening.

Jesus's utterances, which stayed in the memory of many of the devoted, even in old age, are those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world.

When Jesus was taken before Pilate, the world of facts and the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility. In the famous question of the Roman Procurator: "What is truth?" -- the one word that is race-pure in the whole Greek Testament -- lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and war and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the pride of eminent figures. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus answers this question by that other which is decisive in all things of religion -- What is actuality?

Jehovah as the Creator-God, the Demiurge, is the "Just" and therefore the Evil. This is one of the profoundest ideas in all of religious history, and one that must for ever remain inaccessible to the pious average man.

For the Magian man, will and thought are not prime, but already effects of the deity upon him. The thoroughly Magian certainty is that everything has "a" time -- a will-less resignation, to which the spiritual "I" is unknown, and which feels the spiritual "We" that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the divine Light. The Arab word for this is Islam ( = submission). The Faustian prime-sacrament of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can overcome itself. To the Faustian, the individual ego must wage this war, not suffer it.

In the Magian world, the separation of politics and religion is theoretically impossible and nonsensical.

The only strictly scientific method that an unalterable Koran leaves open for progressive opinion is that of commentary. The only resource is reinterpretation.

That which today is a property of the god is to-morrow itself the god.

"One has merely to declare oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But if one has the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the feeling of being free." - Goethe.

Religiousness is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent.

Was it something of the secret logic of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. He needs in his intellectual boring of belief a final something attainable by thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery. The corners and pockets of his world of contemplation must be illuminated -- nothing less will give him his release.

History teaches that doubt as to belief leads to knowledge, and doubt as to knowledge back again to belief.

De omnibus dubitandum is a a proposition that is incapable of being actualized.

The only true profit of science is that of successful technique, to which theory has provided the key. Discovery of "Truths" cannot be the outcome of purely scientific understanding.

The aim of science is not to experience life but to know it. Truth is found only in the former.

In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaning -- the bringing back of the religion to the purity of its original idea as manifested in the great centuries of the beginning. Luther, like every reformer, fought the Church not because it demanded too much, but because it demanded too little. The mighty act of Luther was a purely intellectual decision. Nothing was left of that sensible content that formerly had offered even to the poorest something to grip. He completely liberated the Faustian personality -- the intermediate person of the priest, which had formerly stood between it and the Infinite, was removed. And now it was wholly alone, self-oriented, its own priest and its own judge. The holy Causality of the Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the mystic experience of inward absolution "by faith alone." This little "I," detached from the cosmos, nailed up in an individual being and (in the most terrific sense of the word) alone, needed the proximity of a powerful "Thou," and the weaker the intellect, the more urgent the need. 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.

For early-Cultural man, knowledge is faith justified, not faith controverted.

"The monasticism of Islam is the religious war," says a hadith of the Prophet.

But in Puritanism there is hidden already the seed of Rationalism, and after a few enthusiastic generations have passed, this bursts forth everywhere and makes itself supreme. This is the step from Cromwell to Hume. Rationalism signifies the belief in the data of critical understanding alone. Now a secret jealousy breeds the notion of the Irrational -- that which, as incomprehensible, is therefore valueless. Secrets are merely evidences of ignorance. The new religion, then, is in its highest potentiality, secretless, a Nature by which one is not in the least overawed but merely put into a condition of sensibility. That which once had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this "religion of the educated people," Nature and Virtue -- but this Nature is a reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge.

The wisdom of this enlightenment never interferes with comfort.

The grand intellectual myth of Energy and Mass is at the same time a vast working hypothesis. It draws the picture of nature in such a way that men can use it.

Materialism is shallow and honest. Mock-religion is shallow and dishonest. After the era of the latter, there comes the Second Religiousness. When the possibilities of physics as a critical mode of world-understanding are exhausted -- when it applies criticism to its imaginary world, which it has cleared of everyday sense-experience, and continues to do so until it has found the last and subtlest result, the form of the form, itself: namely, nothing -- the hunger of metaphysics presents itself afresh.

Caesarism consists of the unchained might of colossal facts.

Philosophy currently has much to receive and little to give.

Mutual hate and contempt always flow from the interaction of those in different Cultural phases -- a beat-difference of two currents of being manifested as an unbearable dissonance.

For the Magian democracy means something quite different: rather than landless and boundless consensus, he hears the breaking-down of all that is of other build than himself.

Hatred wells up out of the village, contempt flashes back from the castle.

War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.

Policy is war by other means.

Along with the freedom of the press comes the terrible censorship of silence.

Democracy has by its newspaper completely dispelled the book from the mental life of the people. The age of the book is flanked on either side by that of the sermon and that of the newspaper. Books are personal expression, sermon and newspaper obey an impersonal purpose. There is no need now, as there was for Baroque princes, to impose military-service liability on the subject -- one whips their souls with articles, telegrams, and pictures until they clamour for weapons and force their leaders into a conflict to which they willed to be forced. This is the end of democracy. If in the world of truth it is proof that decides all, in that of facts it is success.

Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depths.

Caesarism grows on the soil of Democracy.