THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST
[DER UNTERGANG DES
ABENDLANDES]
BY
OSWALD SPENGLER
VOLUME ONE
FORM AND ACTUALITY
[GESTALT UND WIRKLICHKEIT]
VOLUME TWO
PERSPECTIVES OF
WORLD-HISTORY
[WELTHISTORISCHE PERSPEKTIVEN]
THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST
PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY
BY
OSWALD SPENGLER
_AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
WITH NOTES BY_
CHARLES FRANCIS ATKINSON
VOLUME TWO
MCMXXVIII: ALFRED A KNOPF: NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT 1928 BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
_Originally published as
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
Welthistorische Perspektiven_
_Copyright 1922 by
C. H. Becksche, Verlagsbuchhandlung,
München_
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
In the annotations to this volume I have followed the same course
as in the first--namely, that of giving primary references to the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ as being the most considerable work of the
kind that is really widely distributed in both the English-speaking
fields, though occasionally special encyclopaedias or other works
are referred to. Owing to the more definitely historical character
of this volume, as compared with its predecessor, and particularly
its stressing of a history that scarcely figures as yet in a regular
education--the “Magian”--such references are necessarily more numerous.
Even so, more might perhaps have been inserted with advantage. The
Translator’s notes have no pretension to be critical in themselves,
though here and there an argument is pointed with an additional
example, or an obvious criticism anticipated. In each domain they will
no doubt be resented by an expert, but the same expert will, it is
hoped, find them useful for domains not his own.
In the first volume of the English version, references to the second
were necessarily given according to the pagination of the German. A
comparative table of English and German page numbers has therefore
been inserted. A list of corrigenda to Vol. I is also issued with this
volume.
C. F. A.
_London, July 1928_
TABLE OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH PAGES
German English German English
VOL. II VOL. II VOL. II VOL. II
11 9 166 138
13 10 180 149
16 13 182 151
18 14 207 173
19 15 212 176
20 16 227 189
25 23 231 192
27 25 238 196
31 27 240 199
33 29 241 200
34 30 243 202
36 32 244 203
38 33 253 209
41 35 269 220
42 36 275 225
51 43 293 240
58 48 294 241
68 60 296 242
80 68 298 243
101 87 304 248
104 89 305 249
109 92 306 249
110 93 307 250
116 98 314 255
117 99 315 256
122 103 316 257
135 115 318 258
137 116 323 265
138 118 324 265
142 120 327 268
159 133 328 268
German English German English
VOL. II VOL. II VOL. II VOL. II
334 273 403 327
342 279 421 340
343 280 427 345
345 281 441 355
346 282 482 388
350 286 488 392
354 288 521 416
357 291 529 422
358 292 539 430
359 293 562 449
360 293 577 460
362 295 589 471
363 296 603 481
365 297 607 484
368 299 610 486
369 300 616 490
370 301 618 492
373 303 624 499
376 306 625 500
378 307 626 501
382 310 627 501
385 313 631 504
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II
Translator’s Note v
References from Volume I vii
Chapter I. Origin and Landscape. (A) The Cosmic and The Microcosm 1
Plant and animal, p. 3. Being and waking-being, p. 6. Feeling,
understanding, thinking, p. 9. The motion problem, p. 14.
Mass-soul, p. 18.
Chapter II. Origin and Landscape. (B) The Group of the Higher
Cultures 21
History-picture and nature-picture, p. 23. Human and world history,
p. 28. Two ages: primitive and high Cultures, p. 33. Survey of
the high Cultures, p. 39. Historyless mankind, p. 48.
Chapter III. Origin and Landscape. (C) The Relations between the
Cultures 53
“Influence,” p. 55. Roman law, p. 60. Magian law, p. 67. Western
law, p. 75.
Chapter IV. Cities and Peoples. (A) The Soul of the City 85
Mycenæ and Crete, p. 87. The peasant, p. 89. World-history is
urban history, p. 90. Figure of the city, p. 92. City and
intellect, p. 96. Spirit of the world-city, p. 99. Sterility and
disintegration, p. 103.
Chapter V. Cities and Peoples. (B) Peoples, Races, Tongues 111
Streams of being and linkages of waking-being, p. 114.
Expression-language and communication-language, p. 115. Totem
and Taboo, p. 116. Speech and speaking, p. 117. The house as
race-expression, p. 120. Castle and cathedral, p. 122. Race, p.
124. Blood and soil, p. 127. Speech, p. 131. Means and meaning,
p. 134. Word, grammar, p. 137. Language-history, p. 145. Script,
p. 149. Morphology of the Culture-languages, p. 152.
Chapter VI. Cities and Peoples. (C) Primitives, Culture-Peoples,
Fellaheen 157
People-names, languages, races, p. 159. Migrations, p. 161. People
and soul, p. 165. The Persians, p. 166. Morphology of peoples, p.
169. People and nation, p. 170. Classical, Arabian, and Western
nations, p. 173.
Chapter VII. Problems of the Arabian Culture. (A) Historic
Pseudomorphoses 187
“Pseudomorphosis,” p. 189. Actium, p. 191. Russia, p. 192. Arabian
chivalry, p. 196. Syncretism, p. 200. Jews, Chaldeans, Persians
of the pre-Culture, p. 204. Mission, p. 209. Jesus, p. 212.
Paul, p. 220. John, Marcion, p. 225. The pagan and Christian
cult-churches, p. 228.
Chapter VIII. Problems of the Arabian Culture. (B) The
Magian Soul 231
Dualism of the World-cavern, p. 233. Time-feeling (era,
world-history, grace), p. 238. Consensus, p. 242. The “Word” as
substance, the Koran, p. 244. Secret Torah, commentary, p. 246.
The group of the Magian religions, p. 248. The Christological
controversy, p. 255. Being as extension (mission), p. 258.
Chapter IX. Problems of the Arabian Culture. (C) Pythagoras,
Mohammed, Cromwell 263
Essence of religion, p. 265. Myth and cult, p. 268. Moral as
sacrifice, p. 271. Morphology of religious history, p. 275. The
pre-Culture: Franks, Russians, p. 277. Egyptian early period, p.
279. Classical, p. 281. China, p. 285. Gothic (Mary and Devil,
baptism and contrition), p. 288. Reformation, p. 295. Science, p.
300. Rationalism, p. 305. “Second Religiousness,” p. 310. Roman
and Chinese emperor-worship, p. 313. Jewry, p. 315.
Chapter X. The State. (A) The Problem of the Estates: Nobility and
Priesthood 325
Man and woman, p. 327. Stock and estate, p. 329. Peasantry and
society, p. 331. Estate, caste, calling, p. 332. Nobility and
priesthood as symbols of Time and Space, p. 335. Training and
shaping, customary-ethic and moral, p. 340. Property, power, and
booty, p. 343. Priest and savant, p. 345. Economics and science,
money and intellect, p. 347. History of the estates, early
period, p. 348. The Third Estate, City-Freedom, _Bourgeoisie_,
p. 354.
Chapter XI. The State. (B) State and History 359
Movement and thing-moved; Being “in form,” p. 361. Right and might,
p. 363. Estate and State, p. 366. The feudal State, p. 371. From
feudal union to Estate-State, p. 375. Polis and Dynasty, p. 376.
The Absolute State, Fronde, and Tyrannis, p. 385. Wallenstein,
p. 389. Cabinet politics, p. 391. From First Tyrannis to Second,
p. 394. The bourgeois revolution, p. 398. Intellect and money,
p. 400. Formless powers (Napoleonism), p. 404. Emancipation
of money, p. 410. “Constitution,” p. 412. From Napoleonism to
Cæsarism (period of the “Contending States”), p. 416. The great
wars, p. 419. Age of the Romans, p. 422. From Caliphate to
Sultanate, p. 423. Egypt, p. 427. The present, p. 428. Cæsarism,
p. 431.
Chapter XII. The State. (C) Philosophy of Politics 437
Life is politics, p. 439. The political instinct, p. 441. The
statesman, p. 442. Creation of tradition, p. 444. Physiognomic
(diplomatic) pulse, p. 445. Estate and party, p. 448. The
_bourgeoisie_ as primary party (liberalism), p. 449. From Estate,
through party, to the magnate’s following, p. 452. Theory, from
Rousseau to Marx, p. 453. Intellect and money (democracy), p.
455. The press, p. 460. Self-annihilation of democracy through
money, p. 464.
Chapter XIII. The Form-world of Economic Life. (A) Money 467
National economics, p. 469. Political and economic sides of life,
p. 471. Productive and acquisitive economy (agriculture and
trade), p. 473. Politics and trade (power and spoil), p. 475.
Primitive economy, and economic style of the high Cultures,
p. 476. Estate and economic class, p. 477. The cityless land,
thinking in goods, p. 480. The city, thinking in money, p.
481. World-economics, mobilization of goods by money, p. 484.
The Classical idea of money, the coin, p. 486. The slave as
money, p. 487. Faustian thinking in money, the book-value, p.
489. Double-entry book-keeping, p. 490. The coin in the West,
p. 490. Money and work, p. 492. Capitalism, p. 493. Economic
organization, p. 494. Extinction of money-thought; Diocletian;
the economic thought of the Russian, p. 495.
Chapter XIV. The Form-world of Economic Life. (B) The Machine 497
Spirit of technics, p. 499. Primitive technics and style of
the high Cultures, p. 500. Classical technics, p. 501. The
will-to-power over nature, the inventor, p. 501. Intoxication of
modern discovery, p. 502. The man as slave of the machine, p.
504. Entrepreneurs, workers, engineers, p. 504. Struggle between
money and industry, p. 505. Last battle of money and politics,
victory of the blood, p. 507.
Index TO FOLLOW 507
CHAPTER I
ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE
(A)
THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM
I[1]
Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close
in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in
upon you--a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind
dreamlike earth-bound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows,
this bush, that twig, do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays
with them. Only the little gnat is free--he dances still in the evening
light, he moves whither he will.
A plant is nothing on its own account. It forms a part of the landscape
in which a chance made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the
closing of every flower--these are not cause and effect, not danger and
willed answer to danger. They are a single process of nature, which is
accomplishing itself near, with, and in the plant. The individual is
not free to look out for itself, will for itself, or choose for itself.
An animal, on the contrary, can choose. It is emancipated from the
servitude of all the rest of the world. This midget swarm that dances
on and on, that solitary bird still flying through the evening, the
fox approaching furtively the nest--these are _little worlds of their
own within another great world_. An animalcule in a drop of water, too
tiny to be perceived by the human eye, though it lasts but a second and
has but a corner of this drop as its field--nevertheless is _free and
independent in the face of the universe_. The giant oak, upon one of
whose leaves the droplet hangs, is not.
Servitude and freedom--this is in last and deepest analysis the
differentia by which we distinguish vegetable and animal existence. Yet
only the plant is wholly and entirely what it is; in the being of the
animal there is something dual. A vegetable is only a vegetable; an
animal is a vegetable and something more besides. A herd that huddles
together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings
weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into
his God--all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom
into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into
individuality and loneliness.
The seeds of a flowering plant show, under the microscope, two
sheath-leaves which form and protect the young plant that is presently
to turn towards the light, with its organs of the life-cycle and of
reproduction, and in addition a third, which contains the future root
and tells us that the plant is destined irrevocably to become once
again part of a landscape. In the higher animals, on the contrary,
we observe that the fertilized egg forms, in the first hours of its
individualized existence, an outer sheath by which the inner containers
of the cyclic and reproductive components--i.e., the plant element in
the animal body--are enclosed and shut off from the mother body and
_all the rest of the world_. This outer sheath symbolizes the essential
character of animal existence and distinguishes the two kinds in which
the Living has appeared on this earth.
There are noble names for them, found and bequeathed by the Classical
world. The plant is something _cosmic_, and the animal is additionally
_a microcosm in relation to a macrocosm_. When, and not until, the unit
has thus separated itself from the All and can define its position with
respect to the All, it becomes thereby a microcosm. Even the planets
in their great cycles are in servitude, and it is only these tiny
worlds that move freely relative to a great one which appears in their
consciousness as their world-around (environment). Only through this
individualism of the microcosm does that which the light offers to its
eyes--our eyes--acquire meaning as “body,” and even to planets we are
from some inner motive reluctant to concede the property of bodiliness.
All that is cosmic bears the hall-mark of _periodicity_; it has “beat”
(rhythm, tact). All that is microcosmic possesses _polarity_; it
possesses “tension.”
We speak of tense alertness and tense thought, but all wakeful states
are in their essence tensions. Sense and object, I and thou, cause
and effect, thing and property--each of these is a tension between
discretes, and when the state pregnantly called “_détente_” appears,
then at once fatigue, and presently sleep, set in for the microcosmic
side of life. A human being asleep, discharged of all tensions, is
leading only a plantlike existence.
Cosmic beat, on the other hand, is everything that can be paraphrased
in terms like direction, time, rhythm, destiny, longing--from the
hoof-beats of a team of thoroughbreds and the deep tread of proud
marching soldiers to the silent fellowship of two lovers, the sensed
tact that makes the dignity of a social assembly, and that keen quick
judgment of a “judge of men” which I have already, earlier in this
work,[2] called physiognomic tact.
This beat of cosmic cycles goes on notwithstanding the freedom of
microcosmic movement in space, and from time to time breaks down the
tension of the waking individual’s being into the _one_ grand felt
harmony. If we have ever followed the flight of a bird in the high
air--how, always in the same way, it rises, turns, glides, loses itself
in the distance--we must have felt the plantlike certainty of the
“it” and the “we” in this ensemble of motion, which needs no bridge
of reason to unite your sense of it with mine. This is the meaning
of war-dances and love-dances amongst men and beasts. In this wise a
regiment mounting to the assault under fire is forged into a unity, in
this wise does the crowd collect at some exciting occasion and become a
body, capable of thinking and acting pitifully, blindly, and strangely
for a moment ere it falls apart again. In such cases the microcosmic
wall is obliterated. _It_ jostles and threatens, _it_ pushes and pulls,
_it_ flees, swerves, and sways. Limbs intertwine, feet rush, _one_ cry
comes from every mouth, _one_ destiny overlies all. Out of a sum of
little single worlds comes suddenly a complete whole.
The perception of cosmic beat we call “feel (_Fühlen_),” that of
microcosmic tensions “feeling (_Empfinden_).” The ambiguity of the
word “_Sinnlichkeit_” has obscured this clear difference between the
general and plantlike side and the specifically animal side of life. If
we say for the one race- or sex-life, and for the other sense-life, a
deep connexion reveals itself between them. The former ever bears the
mark of periodicity, beat, even to the extent of harmony with the great
cycles of the stars, of relation between female nature and the moon,
of this life generally to night, spring, warmth. The latter consists
in tensions, polarities of light and object illuminated, of cognition
and that which is cognized, of wound and the weapon that has caused it.
Each of these sides of life has, in the more highly developed genera,
taken shape in special organs, and the higher the development, the
clearer the emphasis on each side. We possess _two cyclic organs of
the cosmic existence_, the blood system and the sex-organ, _and two
differentiating organs of microcosmic mobility_, senses and nerves.
We have to assume that in its origin the _whole_ body has been both a
cyclic and a tactual organ.
The blood is for us the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds
without pause, from generation to death, from the mother body in
and out of the body of the child, in the waking state and in sleep,
never-ending. The blood of the ancestors flows through the chain of the
generations and binds them in a great linkage of destiny, beat, and
time. Originally this was accomplished only by a process of division,
redivision, and ever new division of the cycles, until finally a
specific organ of sexual generation appeared and made _one moment_ into
a symbol of duration. And how thereafter creatures begat and conceived,
how the plantlike in them drove them to reproduce themselves for the
maintenance beyond themselves of the eternal cycle, how the _one_
great pulse-beat operates through all the detached souls, filling,
driving, checking, and often destroying--that is the deepest of all
life’s secrets, the secret that all religious mysteries and all great
poems seek to penetrate, the secret whose tragedy stirred Goethe in his
“_Selige Sehnsucht_” and “_Wahlverwandtschaften_,” where the child has
to die because, brought into existence out of discordant cycles of the
blood, it is the fruit of a cosmic sin.
To these cosmic organs the microcosm as such adds (in the degree to
which it possesses freedom of movement _vis-à-vis_ the macrocosm) the
organ “sense,” which is originally touch-sense and nothing else.
Even now, at our own high level of development, we use the word
“touch” quite generally of contacts by eye, by ear, and even by the
understanding, for it is the simplest expression of the mobility of a
living creature that needs constantly to be establishing its relation
to its world-around. But to “establish” here means to fix _place_, and
thus all senses, however sophisticated and remote from the primitive
they may seem, are essentially _positive senses_; there are no others.
Sensation of all kinds distinguishes proper and alien. And for the
positional definition of the alien with respect to the proper the scent
of the hound serves just as much as the hearing of the stag and the eye
of the eagle. Colour, brightness, tones, odours, all conceivable modes
of sensation, imply detachment, distance, extension.
Like the cosmic cycle of the blood, the differentiating activity
of sense is originally a unity. The active sense is always an
understanding sense also. In these simple relations seeking and finding
are one--that which we most appositely call “touch.” It is only later,
in a stage wherein considerable demands are made upon developed senses,
that sensation and understanding of sensation cease to be identical
and the latter begins to detach itself more and more clearly from the
former. In the outer sheath the critical organ separates itself from
the sense-organ (as the sex-organ does from that of blood-circulation).
But our use of words like “keen,” “sensitive,” “insight,” “poking
our nose,” and “flair,” not to mention the terminology of logic, all
taken from the visual world, shows well enough that we regard all
understanding as derived from sensation, and that even in the case of
man the two still work hand in hand.
We see a dog lying indifferent and then in a moment tense, listening,
and scenting--what he merely senses he is seeking to understand as
well. He is able, too, to reflect--that is a state in which the
understanding is almost alone at work and playing upon mat sensations.
The older languages very clearly expressed this graduation, sharply
distinguishing each degree as an activity of a specific kind by means
of a specific label--e.g., hear, listen, listen for (_lauschen_);
smell, scent, sniff; see, spy, observe. In such series as these
the reason-content becomes more and more important relative to the
sensation-content.
Finally, however, a supreme sense develops among the rest. A
something in the All, which for ever remains inaccessible to our
will-to-understand, evokes for itself a bodily organ. The eye comes
into existence--and in and with the eye, as its opposite pole, light.
Abstract thinking about light may lead (and has led) to an ideal
light representable by an ensemble picture of waves and rays, but the
significance of this development in actuality was that thenceforward
life was embraced and taken in _through the light-world of the eye_.
This is the supreme marvel that makes everything human what it is.
Only with this light-world of the eye do distances come into being as
colours and brightnesses; only in this world are night and day and
things and motions visible in the extension of illumined space, and the
universe of infinitely remote stars circling above the earth, and that
light-horizon of the individual life which stretches so far beyond the
environs of the body.
In the world of this light--not the light which science has deduced
indirectly by the aid of mental concepts, themselves derived from
visions (“theory” in the Greek sense)--it comes to pass that seeing,
human herds wander upon the face of this little earth-star, and that
circumstances of light--the full southern flood over Egypt and Mexico,
the greyness of the north--contribute to the determination of their
entire life. It is for his _eye_ that man develops the magic of his
architecture, wherein the constructional elements given by touch are
restated in relations generated by light. Religion, art, thought, have
all arisen for light’s sake, and all differentiations reduce to the
one point of whether it is the bodily eye or the mind’s eye that is
addressed.
And with this there emerges in all clarity yet another distinction,
which is normally obscured by the use of the ambiguous word
“consciousness (_Bewusstsein_).” I distinguish _being_ or “being there”
(_Dasein_) from _waking-being_ or waking-consciousness (_Wachsein_).[3]
Being possesses beat and direction, while waking-consciousness
is tension and extension. In being a destiny rules, while
waking-consciousness distinguishes causes and effects. The prime
question is for the one “when and wherefore?” for the other “where and
how?”
A plant leads an existence that is without waking-consciousness. In
sleep all creatures become plants, the tension of polarity to the
world-around is extinguished, and the beat of life goes on. A plant
knows only a relation to the when and the wherefore. The upthrust of
the first green shoots out of the wintry earth, the swelling of the
buds, the whole mighty process of blooming, scent, colour glory, and
ripening--all this is desire to fulfil a destiny, constant yearning
towards a “when?”
“Where?” on the other hand can have no meaning for a plant existence.
It is the question with which awakening man daily orients himself
afresh with respect to the world. For it is only the pulse-beat
of Being that endures throughout the generations, whereas
waking-consciousness begins anew for each microcosm. And herein lies
the distinction between procreation and birth, the first being a pledge
of duration, the second a beginning. A plant, therefore, is bred, but
it is not born. It “is there,” but no awakening, no birthday, expands a
sense-world around it.
II
With this we are brought face to face with man. In man’s
waking-consciousness nothing disturbs the now pure lordship of the eye.
The sounds of the night, the wind, the panting of beasts, the odour of
flowers, all stimulate in him _a “whither” and a “whence” in the world
of light_. Of the world of scent, in which even our closest comrade the
dog still co-ordinates his visual impressions, we have no conception
whatever. We know nothing of the world of the butterfly, whose
crystalline eye projects no synthetic picture, or of those animals
which, while certainly not destitute of senses, are blind. _The only
space that remains to us is visual space_, and in it places have been
found for the relics of other sense-worlds (such as sounds, scents,
heat and cold) as _properties and effects of light-things_--it is a
seen fire that warmth comes from, it is a seen rose in illumined space
that gives off the scent and we speak of a certain tone as violin-tone.
As to the stars, our conscious relations with them are limited to
seeing them--over our heads they shine, describing their visible
path.[4] But of these sense-worlds there is no doubt that animals and
even primitive men still have sensations that are wholly different
from ours; some of these sensations we are able to figure to ourselves
indirectly by the aid of scientific hypotheses, but the rest now escape
us altogether.
This impoverishment of the sensual implies, however, an immeasurable
deepening. Human waking-consciousness is no longer a mere tension
between body and environment. It is now life _in_ a self-contained
light-world. The body moves _in_ the space that is seen. The
depth-experience[5] is a mighty out-thrust _into the visible distance_
from a light-centre[6]--the point which we call “I.” “I” is a
light-concept. From this point onward the life of an “I” becomes
essentially a life in the sun, and night is akin to death. And out of
it, too, there arises a new feeling of fear which absorbs all others
within itself--_fear before the invisible_, fear of that which one
hears or feels, suspects, or observes in its effects without seeing.
Animals indeed experience fear in other forms, but man finds these
forms puzzling, and even uneasiness in the presence of stillness to
which primitive men and children are subject (and which they seek
to dispel by noise and loud talking) is disappearing in the higher
types of mankind. It is fear of the invisible that is the essence
and hall-mark of human religiousness. Gods are surmised, imagined,
envisaged light-actualities, and the idea of an “invisible” god is the
highest expression of human transcendence. Where the bounds of the
light-world are, there lies the beyond, and salvation is emancipation
from the spell of the light-world and its facts.
In precisely this resides the ineffable charm and the very real power
of emancipation that music possesses for us men. For music is the only
art whose means lie outside the light-world that has so long become
coextensive with our total world, and music alone, therefore, can take
us right out of this world, break up the steely tyranny of light, and
let us fondly imagine that we are on the verge of reaching the soul’s
final secret--an illusion due to the fact that our waking consciousness
is now so dominated by one sense only, so thoroughly adapted to the
eye-world, that it is incapable of forming, out of the impressions it
receives, a world of the ear.[7]
Man’s thought, then, is visual thought, our concepts are derived from
vision, and the whole fabric of our logic is a light-world in the
imagination.
This narrowing and consequent deepening, which has led to all our
sense-impressions being adapted to and ordered with those of sight,
has led also to the replacement of the innumerable methods of
thought-communication known to animals by the one single medium of
language, which is a bridge _in the light-world_ between two persons
present to one another’s bodily or imaginative eyes. The other modes of
speaking of which vestiges remain at all have long been absorbed into
language in the form of mimicry, gesture, or emphasis. The difference
between purely human speech and general animal utterance is that words
and word-linkages constitute a domain of inward light-ideas, which has
been built up under the sovereignty of the eyes. Every word-meaning
has a light-value, even in the case of words like “melody,” “taste,”
“cold,” or of perfectly abstract designations.
Even among the higher animals, the habit of reciprocal understanding
by means of a sense-link has brought about a marked difference between
_mere_ sensation and _understanding_ sensation. If we distinguish
in this wise _sense-impressions_ and _sense-judgments_ (e.g.,
scent-judgment, taste-judgment, or aural-judgment), we find that
very often, even in ants and bees, let alone birds of prey, horses,
and dogs, the centre of gravity has palpably shifted towards the
judgment side of waking-being. But it is only under the influence
of language that there is set up within the waking-consciousness a
definite _opposition_ between sensation and understanding, a tension
that in animals is quite unthinkable and even in man can hardly have
been at first anything more than a rarely actualized possibility. The
development of language, then, brought along with it a determination
of fundamental significance--_the emancipation of understanding from
sensation_.
More and more often there appears, in lieu of the simple comprehension
of the gross intake, a comprehension of the significances of the
component sense-impressions, which have hardly been noticed as such
before.[8] Finally these impressions themselves are discarded and
replaced by the felt connotations of familiar word-sounds. The word,
originally the name of a visual thing, changes imperceptibly into the
label of a mental thing, the “concept.” We are far from being able
to fix exact meanings to such names--that we can do only with wholly
new names. We never use a word twice with identical connotation,
and no one ever understands exactly as another does. But mutual
comprehension is possible, in spite of this, because of the common
world-outlook that has been induced in both, with and by the use of
a common language; in an ambiance common to the lives and activities
of both, mere word-sounds suffice to evoke cognate ideas. It is this
mode of comprehending by means of sounds at once derived and detached
(abstract) from actual seeing which, however rarely we can find it
definitely evidenced at the primitive level, does in fact sharply
separate the generic-animal kind of waking-consciousness from the
purely human kind which supervenes. Just so, at an earlier stage, the
appearance of waking-consciousness as such fixed a frontier between the
general plantlike and the specifically animal existence.
_Understanding detached from sensation is called thought._ Thought has
introduced a permanent disunity into the human waking-consciousness.
From early times it has rated understanding and sensibility as “higher”
and “lower” soul-power. It has created the fateful opposition between
the light-world of the eye, described as a figment and an illusion,
and the world-imagined (“_vorgestellte_,” “set before” oneself),
in which the concepts, with their faint but ineffaceable tinge of
light-coloration, live and do business. And henceforth for man, so long
as he “thinks,” this is the true world, the world-in-itself. At the
outset the ego was waking-being as such (in so far, that is, as, having
sight, it felt itself as the centre of a light-world); now it becomes
“spirit”--namely, pure understanding, which “cognizes” itself as such
and very soon comes to regard not only the world _around_ itself, but
even the remaining component of life, its own body, as qualitatively
_below itself_. This is evidenced not only in the upright carriage of
man, but in the thoroughly intellectualized formation of his head, in
which the eyes, the brow, and the temples become more and more the
vehicles of expression.[9]
Clearly, then, thought, when it became independent, discovered a
new mode of activity for itself. To the practical thought which is
directed upon the constitution of the light-things in the world-around,
with reference to this or that practical end, there is added the
theoretical, penetrating, subtilizing thought which sets itself to
establish the constitution of these things “in themselves,” the
_natura rerum_. From that which is seen, the light is abstracted,
the depth-experience of the eye intensifies itself in a grand and
unmistakable course of development into a depth-experience within the
tinted realm of word-connotations. Man begins to believe that it is
not impossible for his inner eye to see right through into the things
that actually are. Concept follows upon concept, and at last there is
a mighty thought-architecture made up of buildings that stand out with
full clarity under the inner light.
The development of theoretical thought within the human
waking-consciousness gives rise to a kind of activity that makes
inevitable a fresh conflict--that between Being (existence) and
Waking-Being (waking-consciousness). The animal microcosm, in which
existence and consciousness are joined in a self-evident unity of
living, knows of consciousness _only as the servant_ of existence. The
animal “lives” simply and does not reflect upon life. Owing, however,
to the unconditional monarchy of the eye, life is presented as the life
of a visible entity in the light; understanding, then, when it becomes
interlocked with speech, promptly forms a _concept_ of thought and with
it a _counter-concept_[10] of life, and in the end it distinguishes
life as it is from that which might be. Instead of straight,
uncomplicated living, we have the antithesis represented in the phrase
“thought and action.” That which is not possible at all in the beasts
becomes in every man not merely a possibility, but a fact and in the
end an alternative. The entire history of mature humanity with all its
phenomena has been formed by it, and the higher the form that a Culture
takes, the more fully this opposition dominates the significant moments
of its conscious being.
The plantlike-cosmic, Being heavy with Destiny, blood, sex, possess an
immemorial mastery and keep it. They _are_ life. The other only serves
life. But this other wills, not to serve, but to rule; moreover, it
believes that it does rule, for one of the most determined claims put
forward by the human spirit is its claim to possess power over the
body, over “nature.” But the question is: Is not this very belief a
service to life? Why does our thought think just so? Perhaps because
the cosmic, the “it,” wills that it shall? Thought shows off its power
when it calls the body a notion, when it establishes the pitifulness
of the body and commands the voices of the blood to be silent. But in
truth the blood rules, in that silently it commands the activity of
thought to begin and to cease. There, too, is a distinction between
speech and life--Being can do without consciousness and the life of
understanding, but not vice versa. Thought rules, after all, in spite
of all, only in the “realm of thought.”
III
It only amounts to a verbal difference whether we say that thought is a
creation of man, or higher mankind a creation of thought. But thought
itself persistently credits itself with much too high a rank in the
ensemble of life, and through its ignorance of, or indifference to,
the fact that there are other modes of ascertainment besides itself,
forfeits its opportunity of surveying the whole without prejudice. In
truth, all professors of thought--and in every Culture they have been
almost the only authorized spokesmen--have taken it as self-evident
that cold abstract thought is _the_ way of approach to “last things.”
Moreover, they have assumed, also as self-evident, that the “truth”
which they reach on this line of advance is the same as the truth which
they have set before themselves as an aim, and not, as it really is,
a sort of imaginary picture which takes the place of the unknowable
secrets.
For, although man is a thinking being, it is very far from the fact
that his being consists in thinking. This is a difference that the born
subtilizer fails to grasp. The aim of thought is called “truth,” and
truths are “established”--i.e., brought out of the living impalpability
of the light-world into the form of concepts and assigned permanently
to places in a system, which means a kind of intellectual space. Truths
are absolute and eternal--i.e., they have nothing more to do with life.
But for an animal, not truths, but only facts exist. Here is the
difference between practical and theoretical understanding. Facts and
truths[11] differ as time and space, destiny and causality. A fact
addresses itself to the whole waking-consciousness, for the service
of being, and not to that side of the waking-consciousness which
imagines it can detach itself from being. Actual life, history, knows
only facts; life experience and knowledge of men deal only in facts.
The active man who does and wills and fights, daily measuring himself
against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant.
The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths.
Pilate’s famous question is that of every man of fact.
It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted
science with the problem of the _value_ of truth and knowledge--cheap
and even blasphemous though this seems to the born thinker and savant,
who regards his whole _raison d’être_ as impugned by it. Descartes
meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting.
It is one thing, however, to pose problems and quite another to believe
in solutions of them. The plant lives and knows not that it lives. The
animal lives and knows that it lives. Man is astounded by his life and
asks questions about it. But even man cannot give an answer to his own
questions, he can only _believe_ in the correctness of his answer,
and in that respect there is no difference between Aristotle and the
meanest savage.
Whence comes it, then, that secrets must be unravelled and questions
answered? Is it not from that fear which looks out of even a child’s
eyes, that terrible dowry of human waking-consciousness which compels
the understanding, free now from sensation and brooding on images, to
probe into every deep for solutions that mean release? Can a desperate
faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?
“Shuddering awe is mankind’s noblest part.” He to whom that gift has
been denied by fate must seek to discover secrets, to attack, dissect,
and destroy the awe-inspiring, and to extract a booty of knowledge
therefrom. The will-to-system is a will to kill something living, to
“establish,” stabilize, stiffen it, to bind it in the train of logic.
The intellect has _conquered_ when it has completed the business of
making rigid.
This distinction that is usually drawn between “reason” (_Vernunft_)
and “understanding” (_Verstand_) is really that between the divination
and flair belonging to our plant side, which merely _makes use_ of the
language of eye and word, and the understanding proper, belonging to
our animal side, which is _deduced from_ language. “Reason” in this
sense is that which calls ideas into life, “understanding” that which
finds truths. Truths are lifeless and can be imparted (_mitgeteilt_);
ideas belong to the living self of the author and can only be
sympathetically evoked (_mitgefühlt_). Understanding is essentially
critical, reason essentially creative.[12] The latter begets the object
of its activity, the former starts from it. In fact, understanding
criticism is first practised and developed in association with ordinary
sensations--it is in sensation-judgments that the child learns to
comprehend and to differentiate. Then, abstracted from this connexion
and henceforward busied with itself, criticism needs a substitute for
the sensation-activity that had previously served as its object. And
this cannot be given it but by an _already existing_ mode of thought,
and it is upon this that criticism now works. This, only this, and not
something building freely on nothingness, is Thought.
For quite early, before he has begun to think abstractly, primitive
man forms for himself a religious world-picture, and this is the
object upon which the understanding begins to operate critically.
Always science has grown up on a religion and under all the spiritual
prepossessions of that religion, and always it signifies nothing more
or less than an abstract melioration of these doctrines, considered
as false because less abstract. Always it carries along the kernel
of a religion in its ensemble of principles, problem-enunciations,
and methods. Every new truth that the understanding finds is nothing
but a critical judgment upon some other that was already there. The
polarity between old and new knowledge involves the consequence
that in the world of the understanding there is only the relatively
correct--namely, judgments of greater convincingness than other
judgments. Critical knowledge rests upon the belief that the
understanding of to-day is better than that of yesterday. And that
which forces us to this belief, is again, life.
Can criticism then, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it
merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former.
But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long
as we hope, we call the secret a problem.
Thus, for mankind aware, there is a double problem, that of
Waking-Being and that of Being; or of Space and of Time; or of the
world-as-nature[13] and the world as history; or of pulse and tension.
The waking consciousness seeks to understand not only itself, but in
addition something that is akin to itself. Though an inner voice may
tell one that here all possibilities of knowledge are left behind,
yet, in spite of it, fear overpersuades--everyone--and one goes on
with the search, preferring even the pretence of a solution to the
alternative of looking into nothingness.
IV
Waking-consciousness consists of sensation and understanding, and
their common essence is a continuous self-adjustment in relation to
the macrocosm. To that extent waking-consciousness is identical with
ascertainment (_Feststellen_), whether we consider the touch of an
infusorian, or human thinking of the highest order. Feeling, now,
for touch with itself in this wise, the waking-consciousness first
encounters the epistemological problem. What do we mean by cognition,
or by the knowledge of cognition? And what is the relation between the
original meanings of these terms and their later formulations in words?
Waking and sleep alternate, like day and night, according to the course
of the stars, and so, too, cognition alternates with dreams. How do
these two differ?
Waking-consciousness, however--whether it be that of sensation or that
of understanding--is synonymous with the existence of oppositions,
such as that between cognition and the object cognized, or thing and
property, or object and event. Wherein consists the essence of these
oppositions? And so arises the second problem, that of _causality_.
When we give the names “cause” and “effect” to a pair of sensuous
elements, or “premiss” and “consequence” to a pair of intellectual
elements, we are fixing between them a relation of power and rank--when
one is there, the other must be there also. In these relations,
observe, time does not figure at all. We are concerned not with facts
of destiny, but with causal truths, not with a “When?” but with a
law-fixed dependence. Beyond doubt this is the understanding’s most
promising line of activity. Mankind perhaps owes to discoveries of
this order his happiest moments; and thus he proceeds, from these
oppositions in the near and present things of everyday life that strike
him immediately, forward in an endless series of conclusions to the
first and final causes in the structure of nature that he calls God and
the meaning of the world. He assembles, orders, and reviews his system,
his dogma of law-governed connexions, and he finds in it a refuge from
the unforeseen. He who can demonstrate, fears no longer. But wherein
consists the essence of causality? Does it lie in knowing, in the
known, or in a unity of both?
The world of tensions is necessarily in itself stiff and dead--namely,
“eternal truth,” something beyond all time, something that is a
state. The actual world of waking-consciousness, however, is full
of changes. This does not astonish an animal in the least, but it
leaves the thought of the thinker powerless, for rest and movement,
duration and change, become and becoming,[14] are oppositions denoting
something that in its very nature “passeth all understanding” and
_must_ therefore (from the point of view of the understanding) contain
an absurdity. For is that a fact at all which proves to be incapable
of distillation from the sense-world in the form of a truth? On the
other hand, though the world is cognized as timeless, a time element
nevertheless adheres to it--tensions appear as beat, and direction
associates itself with extension. And so all that is problematical for
the understanding consciousness somehow gathers itself together in one
last and gravest problem, _the problem of motion_. And on that problem
free and abstract thought breaks down, and we begin to discern that the
microcosmic is after all as dependent as ever upon the cosmic, just as
the individualness of a being from its first moment is constituted not
by a body, but by the sheath of a body. Life can exist without thought,
but thought is only one mode of life. High as may be the objectives
that thought sets before itself, in actuality life makes use of thought
for _its_ ends and gives it a living objective quite apart from the
solution of abstract problems. For thought the solutions of problems
are correct or erroneous--for life they are valuable or valueless, and
if the will-to-know breaks down on the motion problem, it may well be
because life’s purpose has at that point been achieved. In spite of
this, and indeed because of this, the motion problem remains the centre
of gravity of all higher thought. All mythology and all natural science
has arisen out of man’s wonder in the presence of the mystery of motion.
The problem of motion touches, at once and immediately, the secrets
of existence, which are alien to the waking-consciousness and yet
inexorably press upon it. In posing motion as a problem we affirm
our will to comprehend the incomprehensible, the when and wherefore,
Destiny, blood, all that our intuitive processes touch in our depths.
Born to see, we strive to set it before our eyes in the light, so that
we may in the literal sense grasp it, assure ourselves of it as of
something tangible.
For this is the decisive fact, of which the observer is
unconscious--his whole effort of seeking is aimed not at life, but
at the seeing of life, and not at death, but at the seeing of death.
We try to grasp the cosmic as it appears in the macrocosm to the
microcosm, _as the life of a body in the light-world_ between birth
and death, generation and dissolution, and with that differentiation
of body and soul that follows of deepest necessity from our ability to
experience[15] the inward-proper as a sensuous alien.
That we do not merely live but _know_ about “living” is a consequence
of our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life,
not death. Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of
dying, for to feel death and to die would be identical. But animals,
even though they hear the death-cry, see the dead body, and scent
putrefaction, behold death without comprehending it. Only when
understanding has become, through language, detached from visual
awareness and pure, does death appear to man as the great enigma of the
light-world about him.
Then, and only then, life becomes the short span of time between birth
and death, and it is in relation to death that that other great mystery
of generation arises also. Only then does the diffuse animal fear
of everything become the definite human fear of death. It is _this_
that makes the love of man and woman, the love of mother and child,
the tree of the generations, the family, the people, and so at last
world-history itself the infinitely deep facts and problems of destiny
that they are. To death, as the common lot of every human being born
into the light, adhere the ideas of guilt and punishment, of existence
as a penance, of a new life beyond the world of this light, and of a
salvation that makes an end of the death-fear. In the knowledge of
death is originated that world-outlook which we possess as being men
and not beasts.
V
There are born destiny-men and causality-men. A whole world
separates the purely living man--peasant and warrior, statesman
and general, man of the world and man of business, everyone who
wills to prosper, to rule, to fight, and to dare, the organizer or
entrepreneur, the adventurer or bravo or gambler--from the man who
is destined either by the power of his mind or the defect of his
blood to be an “intellectual”--the saint, priest, savant, idealist,
or ideologue. Being and waking-being, pulse and tension, motives
and ideas, cyclic organs and touch-organs--there has rarely been a
man of any significance in whom the one side or the other has not
markedly predominated. All that motives and urges, the eye for men
and situations, the belief in his star which every born man of action
possesses and which is something wholly different from belief in the
correctness of a standpoint, the voices of the blood that speak in
moments of decision, and the immovably quiet conviction that justifies
any aim and any means--all these are denied to the critical, meditative
man. Even the footfall of the fact-man sounds different from, sounds
more planted than, that of the thinker, in whom the pure microcosmic
can acquire no firm relation with earth.
Destiny has made the man so or so--subtle and fact-shy, or active and
contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole
man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without
(and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries
to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those
ethico-politico-social reform-projects which demonstrate, unanswerably,
how things ought to be and how to set about making them so--theories
that without exception rest upon the hypothesis that all men are as
rich in ideas and as poor in motives as the author is (or thinks he
is). Such theories, even when they have taken the field armed with the
full authority of a religion or the prestige of a famous name, have
not in one single instance effected the slightest alteration in life.
They have merely caused us to _think_ otherwise than before about life.
And this, precisely, is the doom of the “late” ages of a Culture, the
ages of much writing and much reading--that they should perpetually
confuse the opposition of life and thought with the opposition between
thought-about-life and thought-about-thought. All world-improvers,
priests, and philosophers are unanimous in holding that life is a fit
object for the nicest meditation, but the life of the world goes its
own way and cares not in the least what is said about it. And even
when a community succeeds in living “according to rule,” all that it
achieves is, at best, a note on itself in some future history of the
world--if there is space left after the proper and only important
subject-matter has been dealt with.
For, in the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives
in the _actual_ world, the world of political, military, and economic
decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count. Here a
shrewd blow is more than a shrewd conclusion, and there is sense in the
contempt with which statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded
the “ink-slinger” and the “bookworm” who think that world-history
exists for the sake of the intellect or science or even art. Let us
say it frankly and without ambiguity: the understanding divorced from
sensation is only one, and not the decisive, side of life. A history
of Western thought may not contain the name of Napoleon, but in the
history of actuality Archimedes, for all his scientific discoveries,
was possibly less effective than that soldier who killed him at the
storming of Syracuse.
Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is
at the head and not in the train of great events. They misunderstand
completely the rôle played, for example, by the political Sophists in
Athens or by Voltaire and Rousseau in France. Often enough a statesman
does not “know” what he is doing, but that does not prevent him from
following with confidence just the one path that leads to success;
the political doctrinaire, on the contrary, always knows what should
be done, and yet his activity, once it ceases to be limited to paper,
is the least successful and therefore the least valuable in history.
These intrusions happen only too frequently in times of uncertainty,
like that of the Attic enlightenment, or the French or the German
revolutions, when the ideologue of word or pen is eager to be busy with
the actual history of the people instead of with systems. He mistakes
his place. He belongs with his principles and programs to no history
but the history of a literature. Real history passes judgment on him
not by controverting the theorist, but by leaving him and all his
thoughts to himself. A Plato or a Rousseau--not to mention the smaller
intellects--could build up abstract political structures, but for
Alexander, Scipio, Cæsar, and Napoleon, with their schemes and battles
and settlements, they were entirely without importance. The thinker
could discuss destiny if he liked; it was enough for these men to be
destiny.
Under all the plurality of microcosmic beings, we are perpetually
meeting with the formation of _inspired mass-units_, beings of
a higher order, which, whether they develop slowly or come into
existence in a moment, contain all the feelings and passions of the
individual, enigmatic in their inward character and inaccessible to
reasoning--though the connoisseur can see into and reckon upon their
reactions well enough. Here too we distinguish the generic animal
unities which are sensed, the unities profoundly dependent upon Being
and Destiny--like the way of an eagle in the air or the way of the
stormers on the breach--from the purely human associations which depend
upon the understanding and cohere on the basis of like opinions, like
purposes, or like knowledge. Unity of cosmic pulse one has without
willing to have it; unity of common ground is acquired at will. One
can join or resign from an intellectual association as one pleases,
for only one’s waking-consciousness is involved. But to a cosmic unity
one is _committed_, and committed with one’s entire being. Crowds
of this order of unity are seized by storms of enthusiasm or, as
readily, of panic. They are noisy and ecstatic at Eleusis or Lourdes,
or heroically firm like the Spartans of Thermopylæ and the last Goths
in the battle of Vesuvius.[16] They form themselves to the music of
chorales, marches, and dances, and are sensitive like human and animal
thoroughbreds to the effects of bright colours, decoration, costume,
and uniform.
These inspired aggregates are born and die. Intellectual associations
are mere sums in the mathematical sense, varying by addition
and subtraction, unless and until (as sometimes happens) a mere
coincidence of opinion strikes so impressively as to reach the blood
and so, suddenly, to create out of the sum a Being. In any political
turning-point words may become fates and opinions passions. A chance
crowd is herded together in the street and has _one_ consciousness,
_one_ sensation, _one_ language--until the short-lived soul flickers
out and everyone goes his way again. This happened every day in the
Paris of 1789, whenever the cry of “_A la lanterne!_” fell upon the ear.
These souls have their special psychology,[17] and the knowledge of
this psychology is for the public man an essential. A single soul
is the mark of every genuine order or class, be it the chivalry and
military orders of the Crusades, the Roman Senate or the Jacobin club,
polite society under Louis XIV or the Prussian country “_Adel_,”
peasantry or guilds, the masses of the big city or the folk of the
secluded valley, the peoples and tribes of the migrations or the
adherents of Mohammed and generally, of any new-founded religion
or sect, the French of the Revolution or the Germans of the Wars
of Liberation. The mightiest beings of this kind that we know are
the higher Cultures, which are born in great spiritual upheavals,
and in a thousand years of existence weld all aggregates of lower
degree--nations, classes, towns, generations--into one unit.
All grand events of history are carried by beings of the cosmic order,
by peoples, parties, armies, and classes, while the history of the
intellect runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools,
levels of education, “tendencies” and “isms.” And here again it is a
question of destiny whether such aggregates at the decisive moments
of highest effectiveness find a leader or are driven blindly on,
whether the chance headmen are men of the first order or men of no
real significance tossed up, like Robespierre or Pompey, by the surge
of events. It is the hall-mark of the statesman that he has a sure and
penetrating eye for these mass-souls that form and dissolve on the tide
of the times, their strength and their duration, their direction and
purpose. And even so, it is a question of Incident[18] whether he is
one who _can_ master them or one who is swept away by them.