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
That which is expressed by the soul of the West in its extraordinary
wealth of media—words, tones, colours, pictorial perspectives,
philosophical systems, legends, the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals
and the formulæ of functions—namely its world-feeling, is expressed by
the soul of Old Egypt (which was remote from all ambitions towards
theory and literariness) almost exclusively by the immediate language of
_Stone_. Instead of spinning word-subtleties around its form of
extension, its “space” and its “time,” instead of forming hypotheses and
number-systems and dogmas, it set up its huge symbols in the landscape
of the Nile in all silence. Stone is the great emblem of the Timeless-
Become; space and death seem bound up in it. “Men have built for the
dead,” says Bachofen in his autobiography, “before they have built for
the living, and even as a perishable wooden structure suffices for the
span of time that is given to the living, so the housing of the dead for
ever demands the solid stone of the earth. The oldest cult is associated
with the stone that marks the place of burial, the oldest temple-
building with the tomb-structure, the origins of art and decoration with
the grave-ornament. Symbol has created itself in the graves. That which
is thought and felt and silently prayed at the grave-side can be
expressed by no word, but only hinted by the boding symbol that stands
in unchanging grave repose.” The dead strive no more. They are no more
Time, but only Space—something that stays (if indeed it stays at all)
but does _not_ ripen towards a Future; and hence it is stone, the
abiding stone, that expresses how the dead is mirrored in the waking
consciousness of the living. The Faustian soul looks for an immortality
to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it
disembodies the stone in its Gothic thrust-system (contemporary, we may
note, with the “consecutives” in Church music[202]) till at last nothing
remained visible but the indwelling depth- and height-energy of this
self-extension. The Apollinian soul would have its dead burned, would
see them annihilated, and so it remained averse from stone building
throughout the early period of its Culture. The Egyptian soul saw itself
as moving down a narrow and inexorably-prescribed life-path to come at
the end before the judges of the dead (“Book of the Dead,” cap. 125).
That was its _Destiny-idea_. The Egyptian’s existence is that of the
traveller who follows one unchanging direction, and the whole form-
language of his Culture is a translation into the sensible of this one
theme. And as we have taken _endless space_ as the prime symbol of the
North and _body_ as that of the Classical, so we may take the word _way_
as most intelligibly expressing that of the Egyptians. Strangely, and
for Western thought almost incomprehensibly, the one element in
extension that they emphasize is that of direction in depth. The tomb-
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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