The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-historySpengler, Oswald
History
The decline of the West, Volume 2 : $b Perspectives of world-history
Spengler, Oswald
Civilization -- History
It is impossible, however, to delimit an exact frontier
between religious and artistic expression-languages and pure
communication-languages. This is true also (and indeed specially)
of the higher Cultures with the separate development of their
form-domains. For, on the one hand, no one can speak without putting
into his mode of speech some significant trait of emphasis that has
nothing to do with the needs of communication as such; and, on the
other hand, we all know the drama in which the poet wants to “say”
something that he could have said equally well or better in an
exhortation, and the painting whose contents are meant to instruct,
warn, or improve--the picture-series in any Greek Orthodox church,
which conforms to a strict canon and has the avowed purpose of making
the truths of religion clear to a beholder to whom the book says
nothing; or Hogarth’s substitute for sermons; or, for that matter,
even prayer, the direct address to God, which also can be replaced by
the performance before one’s eyes of cult-ritual that speaks to one
intelligibly. The theoretical controversy concerning the purpose of art
rests upon the postulate that an artistic expression-language should in
no wise be a communication-language, and the phenomenon of priesthood
is based upon the persuasion that the priest alone knows the language
in which man can communicate with God.
All currents of Being bear a historical, and all linkages of
Waking-Being a religious, stamp. What we know to be inherent in every
genuine religious or artistic form-language, and particularly in the
history of every script (for writing is verbal language for the eye),
holds good without doubt for the origin of human articulate speech
in general--indeed the prime words (of the structure of which we now
know nothing whatever) must also certainly have had a cult-colouring.
But there is a corresponding linkage on the other side between Race
and everything that we call life (as struggle for power), History (as
Destiny), or, to-day, politics. It is perhaps too fantastic to argue
something of political instinct in the search of a climbing plant for
points of attachment that shall enable it to encircle, overpower, and
choke the tree in order finally to rear itself high in the air above
the tree-top--or something of religious world-feeling in the song of
the mounting lark. But it is certain that from such things as these the
utterances of being and of waking-being, of pulse and tension, form an
uninterrupted series up to the perfected political and religious forms
of every modern Civilization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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