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
optical_ analysis of things-become on the basis of sculptural-Classical
bounds. They used deeply-thought-out (and for us hardly understandable)
methods of integration, but these possess only a superficial resemblance
even to Leibniz’s definite-integral method. They employed geometrical
loci and co-ordinates, but these are always specified lengths and units
of measurement and never, as in Fermat and above all in Descartes,
unspecified spatial relations, values of points in terms of their
positions in space. With these methods also should be classed the
exhaustion-method of Archimedes,[57] given by him in his recently
discovered letter to Eratosthenes on such subjects as the quadrature of
the parabola section by means of inscribed rectangles (instead of
through similar polygons). But the very subtlety and extreme
complication of his methods, which are grounded in certain of Plato’s
geometrical ideas, make us realize, in spite of superficial analogies,
what an enormous difference separates him from Pascal. Apart altogether
from the idea of Riemann’s integral, what sharper contrast could there
be to these ideas than the so-called quadratures of to-day? The name
itself is now no more than an unfortunate survival, the “surface” is
indicated by a bounding function, and the _drawing_ as such, has
vanished. Nowhere else did the two mathematical minds approach each
other more closely than in this instance, and nowhere is it more evident
that the gulf between the two souls thus expressing themselves is
impassable.
In the cubic style of their early architecture the Egyptians, so to say,
concealed pure numbers, fearful of stumbling upon their secret, and for
the Hellenes too they were the key to the meaning of the become, the
stiffened, the mortal. The stone statue and the scientific system deny
life. Mathematical number, the formal principle of an extension-world of
which the phenomenal existence is only the derivative and servant of
waking human consciousness, bears the hall-mark of causal necessity and
so is linked with _death_ as chronological number is with becoming, with
_life_, with the necessity of destiny. This connexion of strict
mathematical form with the _end_ of organic being, with the phenomenon
of its organic remainder the corpse, we shall see more and more clearly
to be the origin of all great art. We have already noticed the
development of early ornament on funerary equipments and receptacles.
_Numbers are symbols of the mortal._ Stiff forms are the negation of
life, formulas and laws spread rigidity over the face of nature, numbers
make dead—and the “Mothers” of Faust II sit enthroned, majestic and
withdrawn, in
“The realms of Image unconfined.
... Formation, transformation,
Eternal play of the eternal mind
With semblances of all things in creation
For ever and for ever sweeping round.”[58]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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