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
In the West, the Systematic mode of treating the world reached and
passed its culminating-point during the last century, while the great
days of Physiognomic have still to come. In a hundred years all sciences
that are still possible on this soil will be parts of a single vast
Physiognomic of all things human. This is what the “Morphology of World-
History” means. In every science, and in the aim no less than in the
content of it, man tells the story of himself. Scientific experience is
spiritual self-knowledge. It is from this standpoint, as a chapter of
Physiognomic, that we have just treated of mathematics. We were not
concerned with what this or that mathematician _intended_, nor with the
savant as such or his results as a contribution to an aggregate of
knowledge, but with the mathematician as a human being, with his work as
a part of the phenomenon of himself, with his knowledge and purposes as
a part of his expression. This alone is of importance to us here. He is
the mouthpiece of a Culture which tells us about itself through him, and
he belongs, as personality, as soul, as discoverer, thinker and creator,
to the physiognomy of that Culture.
Every mathematic, in that it brings out and makes visible to all the
idea of number that is proper to itself and inborn in its conscious
being, is, whether the expression-form be a scientific system or (as in
the case of Egypt) an architecture, the confession of a Soul. If it is
true that the intentional accomplishments of a mathematic belong only to
the surface of history, it is equally true that its unconscious element,
its number-as-such, and the style in which it builds up its self-
contained cosmos of forms are an expression of its existence, its blood.
Its life-history of ripening and withering, its deep relation to the
creative acts, the myths and the cults of the same Culture—such things
are the subject-matter of a second or historical morphology, though the
possibility of such a morphology is hardly yet admitted.
The visible foregrounds of history, therefore, have the same
significance as the outward phenomena of the individual man (his statue,
his bearing, his air, his stride, his way of speaking and writing), as
distinct from what he says or writes. In the “knowledge of men” these
things exist and matter. The body and all its elaborations—defined,
“become” and _mortal_ as they are—are an expression of the soul. But
henceforth “knowledge of men” implies also knowledge of those
superlative human organisms that I call Cultures, and of their mien,
their speech, their acts—these terms being meant as we mean them already
in the case of the individual.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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