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
_Finally, speech and truth exclude one another._[182] And in fact this
is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical
“judge of men,” who is all race and knows how to take the being that
is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker
behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind
the prayer the heart, and behind the common good-tone the more intimate
levels of social importance--and that instantaneously, immediately,
and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything
cosmic--that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom _one_
language at any rate carries conviction. A priest who is also a
diplomat cannot be genuinely a priest. An ethical philosopher of the
Kant stamp is never a “judge of men.”
The man who lies in his verbal utterances betrays himself, without
observing it, in his demeanour. One who uses demeanour to dissimulate
with betrays himself in his tone. It is precisely because rigid speech
separates means and intent that it never carries it off with the keen
appraiser. The adept reads between the lines and understands a man
as soon as he sees his walk or his handwriting. The deeper and more
intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with
signs and linkages through waking-consciousness. A real comradeship
makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent
altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got
beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening
in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a
word’s being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and
feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state
of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far
beyond the collective existence of the higher animal-world, deep in
the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliverance from the
waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.
V
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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