The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actualitySpengler, Oswald
Philosophy
The decline of the West, Volume 1 : $b Form and actuality
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
But this longing which wells out of the bliss of the inner life is also,
in the intimate essence of every soul, a _dread_ as well. As all
becoming moves towards a having-become wherein it _ends_, so the prime
feeling of becoming—the longing—touches the prime feeling of having-
become, the dread. In the present we feel a trickling-away, the past
implies a passing. Here is the root of our eternal dread of the
irrevocable, the attained, the final—our dread of mortality, of the
world itself as a thing-become, where death is set as a frontier like
birth—our dread in the moment when the possible is actualized, the life
is inwardly fulfilled and consciousness stands at its _goal_. It is the
deep world-fear of the child—which never leaves the higher man, the
believer, the poet, the artist—that makes him so infinitely lonely in
the presence of the alien powers that loom, threatening in the dawn,
behind the screen of sense-phenomena. The element of direction, too,
which is inherent in all “becoming,” is felt owing to its inexorable
_irreversibility_ to be something alien and hostile, and the human will-
to-understanding ever seeks to bind the inscrutable by the spell of a
name. It is something beyond comprehension, this transformation of
future into past, and thus time, in its contrast with space, has always
a queer, baffling, oppressive ambiguity from which no serious man can
wholly protect himself.
This world-fear is assuredly the most _creative_ of all prime feelings.
Man owes to it the ripest and deepest forms and images, not only of his
conscious inward life, but also of the infinitely-varied external
culture which reflects this life. Like a secret melody that not every
ear can perceive, it runs through the form-language of every true art-
work, every inward philosophy, every important deed, and, although those
who can perceive it in that domain are the very few, it lies at the root
of the great problems of mathematics. Only the spiritually dead man of
the autumnal cities—Hammurabi’s Babylon, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Islamic
Baghdad, Paris and Berlin to-day—only the pure intellectual, the
sophist, the sensualist, the Darwinian, loses it or is able to evade it
by setting up a secretless “scientific world-view” between himself and
the alien. As the longing attaches itself to that impalpable something
whose thousand-formed elusive manifestations are comprised in, rather
than denoted by, the word “time,” so the other prime feeling, dread,
finds its expression in the intellectual, understandable, outlinable
symbols of _extension_; and thus we find that every Culture is aware
(each in its own special way) of an opposition of time and space, of
direction and extension, the former underlying the latter as becoming
precedes having-become. It is the longing that underlies the dread,
_becomes_ the dread, and not vice versa. The one is not subject to the
intellect, the other is its servant. The rôle of the one is purely to
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