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
Symbols are sensible signs, final, indivisible and, above all, unsought
impressions of definite meaning. A symbol is a trait of actuality that
for the sensuously-alert man has an immediate and inwardly-sure
significance, and that is incommunicable by process of reason. The
detail of a Doric or Early-Arabic or Early-Romanesque ornament; the
forms of the cottage and the family, of intercourse, of costume and
rite; the aspect, gait and mien of a man and of whole classes of peoples
and men; the communication-and community-forms of man and beast; and
beyond all this the whole voiceless language of Nature with her woods
and pastures, flocks, clouds, stars, moonlight and thunderstorm, bloom
and decay, nearness and distance—all this is the emblematical impression
of the Cosmos upon us, who are both aware and in our reflective hours
quite capable of listening to this language. Vice versa, it is the sense
of a homogeneous understanding that raises up the family, the class, the
tribe, or finally the Culture, out of the general humanity and assembles
it as such.
Here, then, we shall not be concerned with what a world “is,” but with
what it signifies to the being that it envelops. When we wake up, at
once something extends itself between a “here” and a “there.” We live
the “here” as something proper, we experience the “there” as something
alien. There is a dualizing of soul and world as poles of actuality; and
in the latter there are both resistances which we grasp causally as
things and properties, and impulses in which we feel beings, _numina_
(“just like ourselves”) to be operative. But there is in it, further,
something which, as it were, eliminates the duality. Actuality—the world
_in relation to_ a soul—is for every individual the projection of the
Directed upon the domain of the Extended—the Proper mirroring itself on
the Alien; one’s _actuality then signifies oneself_. By an act that is
both creative and unconscious—for it is not “I” who actualize the
possible, but “it” actualizes itself through me—the bridge of symbol is
thrown between the living “here” and “there.” Suddenly, necessarily, and
completely “the” world comes into being out of the totality of received
and remembered elements: and as it is an individual who apprehends the
world, there is for each individual a singular world.
There are therefore as many worlds as there are waking beings and like-
living, like-feeling groups of beings. The supposedly single,
independent and external world that each believes to be common to all is
really an ever-new, uniquely-occurring and non-recurring experience in
the existence of each.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account