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
The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call
Euclidean. Thus it is the sense-actual person of Œdipus, his “empirical
ego,” nay, his σῶμα that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Œdipus
complains that Creon has misused his “body”[121] and that the oracle
applied to his “body.”[122] Æschylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the
“royal body, leader of fleets.”[123] It is this same word σῶμα that the
mathematicians employ more than once for the “bodies” with which they
deal. But the destiny of King Lear is of the “analytical” type—to use
here also the term suggested by the corresponding number-world—and
consists in dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges;
spiritual threads weave themselves into the action, incorporeal and
transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the
secondary tragedy of Gloster’s house. Lear is at the last a mere name,
the axis of something unbounded. _This_ conception of destiny is the
“infinitesimal” conception. It stretches out into infinite time and
infinite space. It touches the bodily, Euclidean existence not at all,
but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the fool and
the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön
group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of
suffering. Sophocles, too, wrote a Laocoön drama; and we may be certain
that there was nothing of _pure soul-agony_ in it. Antigone goes below
ground in the body, because she has buried her brother’s body. Think of
Ajax and Philoctetes, and then of the Prince of Homburg and Goethe’s
Tasso—is not the difference between magnitude and relation traceable
right into the depths of artistic creation?
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