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
direction in depth is eliminated. While the Gothic style _soars_, the
Ionic _swings_. The interior of the cathedral pulls up with primeval
force, but the temple is laid down in majestic rest. All this is equally
true as relating to the Faustian and Apollinian Deity, and likewise of
the fundamental ideas of the respective physics. To the principles of
position, material and form we have opposed those of straining movement,
force and mass, and we have defined the last-named as a constant ratio
between force and acceleration, nay, finally volatilized both in the
purely spatial elements of _capacity_ and _intensity_. It was an
obligatory consequence also of this way of conceiving actuality that the
instrumental music of the great 18th-Century masters should emerge as a
master-art—for it is the only one of the arts whose form-world is
inwardly related to the contemplative vision of pure space. In it, as
opposed to the statues of Classical temple and forum, we have bodiless
realms of tone, tone-intervals, tone-seas. The orchestra swells, breaks,
and ebbs, it depicts distances, lights, shadows, storms, driving clouds,
lightning flashes, colours etherealized and transcendent—think of the
instrumentation of Gluck and Beethoven. “Contemporary,” in our sense,
with the Canon of Polycletus, the treatise in which the great sculptor
laid down the strict rules of human body-build which remained
authoritative till beyond Lysippus, we find the strict canon (completed
by Stamitz about 1740) of the sonata-movement of four elements which
begins to relax in late-Beethoven quartets and symphonies and, finally,
in the lonely, utterly infinitesimal tone-world of the “Tristan” music,
frees itself from all earthly comprehensibleness. This prime feeling of
a loosing, Erlösung, solution, of the Soul in the Infinite, of a
liberation from all material heaviness which the highest moments of our
music always awaken, sets free also the energy of depth that is in the
Faustian soul: whereas the effect of the Classical art-work is to bind
and to bound, and the body-feeling secures, brings back the eye from
distance to a Near and Still that is saturated with beauty.
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Footnote 172:
Which, inasmuch as it has been detached from time, is able to employ
mathematical symbols. These rigid figures _signify_ for us a destiny
of yore. But their meaning is other than mathematical. Past is not a
cause, nor Fate a formula, and to anyone who handles them, as the
historical materialist handles them, mathematically, the past event as
such, as an actuality that has lived once and only once, is invisible.
Footnote 173:
That is, not merely conclusions of peaces or deathdays of persons, but
the Renaissance style, the _Polis_, the Mexican Culture and so forth—
are dates or data, facts that have been, even when we possess no
representation of them.
Footnote 174:
See Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq., 589 et seq.
Footnote 175:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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