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
From this moment on, relations and connexions—previously often
suspected, sometimes touched on but never comprehended—presented
themselves in ever-increasing volume. The forms of the arts linked
themselves to the forms of war and state-policy. Deep relations were
revealed between political and mathematical aspects of the same Culture,
between religious and technical conceptions, between mathematics, music
and sculpture, between economics and cognition-forms. Clearly and
unmistakably there appeared the fundamental dependence of the most
modern physical and chemical theories on the mythological concepts of
our Germanic ancestors, the style-congruence of tragedy and power-
technics and up-to-date finance, and the fact (bizarre at first but soon
self-evident) that oil-painting perspective, printing, the credit
system, longrange weapons, and contrapuntal music in one case, and the
nude statue, the city-state and coin-currency (discovered by the Greeks)
in another were identical expressions of one and the same spiritual
principle. And, beyond and above all, there stood out the fact that
these great _groups of morphological relations_, each one of which
symbolically represents a particular sort of mankind in the whole
picture of world-history, are strictly symmetrical in structure. It is
this perspective that first opens out for us the true style of history.
Belonging itself as symbol and expression to one time and therefore
inwardly possible and necessary only for present-day Western man, it can
but be compared—distantly—to certain ideas of ultra-modern mathematics
in the domain of the Theory of Groups. These were thoughts that had
occupied me for many years, though dark and undefined until enabled by
this method to emerge in tangible form.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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