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
From the maternal care the way leads to the paternal, and there we meet
with the highest of all the time-symbols that have come into existence
within a Culture, the State. The meaning of the child to the mother is
the future, the continuation, namely, of her own life, and mother-love
is, as it were, a welding of two discontinuous individual existences;
likewise, the meaning of the state to the man is comradeship in arms for
the protection of hearth and home, wife and child, and for the insurance
for the whole people of its future and its efficacy. The state is the
inward form of a nation, its “form” in the athletic sense, and history,
in the high meaning, is the State conceived as kinesis and not as kinema
(nicht als Bewegtes sondern als Bewegung gedacht). _The Woman as Mother
is, and the Man as Warrior and Politician makes, History._[149]
And here again the history of higher Cultures shows us three examples of
state-formations in which the element of care is conspicuous: the
Egyptian administration even of the Old Kingdom (from 3000 B.C.); the
Chinese state of the Chóu dynasty (1169-256 B.C.), of the organization
of which the Chóu Li gives such a picture that, later on, no one dared
to believe in the authenticity of the book; and the states of the West,
behind whose characteristic eye-to-the-future there is an unsurpassably
intense Will to the future.[150] And on the other hand we have in two
examples—the Classical and the Indian world—a picture of utterly care-
less submission to the moment and its incidents. Different in themselves
as are Stoicism and Buddhism (the old-age dispositions of these two
worlds), they are at one in their negation of the historical feeling of
care, their contempt of zeal, of organizing power, and of the duty-
sense; and therefore neither in Indian courts nor in Classical market-
places was there a thought for the morrow, personal or collective. The
_carpe diem_ of Apollinian man applies also to the Apollinian state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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