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
When we talk of space to-day, we are all thinking more or less in the
same style, just as we are all using the same languages and word-signs,
whether we are considering mathematical space or physical space or the
space of painting or that of actuality, although all philosophizing that
insists (as it must) upon putting an _identity_ of understanding in the
place of such kinship of significance-feeling must remain somewhat
questionable. But no Hellene or Egyptian or Chinaman could re-experience
any part of those feelings of ours, and no artwork or thought-system
could possibly convey to him unequivocally what “space” means for us.
Again, the prime conceptions originated in the quite differently
constituted soul of the Greek, like ἀρχή, ὕλη, μορφἠ, comprise the whole
content of his world. But this world is differently constituted from
ours. It is, for us, alien and remote. We may take these words of Greek
and translate them by words of our own like “origin,” “matter” and
“form,” but it is mere imitation, a feeble effort to penetrate into a
world of feeling in which the finest and deepest elements, in spite of
all we can do, remain dumb; it is as though one tried to set the
Parthenon sculptures for a string quartet, or cast Voltaire’s God in
bronze. The master-traits of thought, life and world-consciousness are
as manifold and different as the features of individual men; in those
respects as in others there are distinctions of “races” and “peoples,”
and men are as unconscious of these distinctions as they are ignorant of
whether “red” and “yellow” do or do not mean the same for others as for
themselves. It is particularly the common symbolic of language that
nourishes the illusion of a homogeneous constitution of human inner-life
and an identical world-form; in this respect the great thinkers of one
and another Culture resemble the colour-blind in that each is unaware of
his own condition and smiles at the errors of the rest.
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