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
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CHAPTER V
MAKROKOSMOS
I
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE
SPACE-PROBLEM
CHAPTER V
MAKROKOSMOS
I
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE SPACE-PROBLEM
I
The notion of a world-history of physiognomic type expands itself
therefore into the wider idea of an _all-embracing symbolism_.
Historical research, in the sense that we postulate here, has simply to
investigate the picture of the once-living past and to determine its
inner form and logic, and the Destiny-idea is the furthest limit to
which it can penetrate. But this research, however comprehensive the new
orientation tends to make it, cannot be more than a fragment and a
foundation of a still wider treatment. Parallel with it, we have a
Nature-investigation that is equally fragmentary and is limited to its
own causal system of relations. But neither tragic nor technical
“motion” (if we may distinguish by these words the respective bases of
the lived and the known) exhausts the living itself. We both live and
know when we are awake, but, in addition, we live when mind and senses
are asleep. Though night may close every eye, the blood does not sleep.
We are moving in the moving (so at least we try to indicate, by a word
borrowed from science, the inexpressible that in sleep-hours we feel
with inward certainty). But it is only in the waking existence that
“here” and “there” appear as an irreducible duality. Every impulse
proper to oneself has an expression and every impulse alien to oneself
makes an impression. And thus everything of which we are conscious,
whatever the form in which it is apprehended—“soul” and “world,” or life
and actuality, or History and Nature, or law and feeling, Destiny or
God, past and future or present and eternity—has for us a deeper meaning
still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this
incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which
regards _everything whatsoever_ as having significance as a _symbol_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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