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
But in the world-cities, besides a minority which has history and
livingly experiences, feels, and seeks to lead the nation, there arises
another minority of timeless a-historic, literary men, men not of
destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from
the pulse of blood and being, wide-awake thinking consciousnesses,
that can no longer find any “reasonable” connotation for the
nation-idea. Cosmopolitanism is a mere waking-conscious association of
intelligentsias. In it there is hatred of Destiny, and above all of
history as the expression of Destiny. Everything national belongs to
race--so much so that it is incapable of finding language for itself,
clumsy in all that demands thought, and shiftless to the point of
fatalism. _Cosmopolitanism is literature_ and remains literature, very
strong in reasons, very weak in defending them otherwise than with more
reasons, in defending them with the blood.
All the more, then, this minority of far superior intellect chooses the
intellectual weapon, and all the more is it able to do so as the world
cities are pure intellect, rootless, and by very hypothesis the common
property of the civilization. The born world-citizens, world-pacifists,
and world-reconcilers--alike in the China of the “Contending States,”
in Buddhist India, in the Hellenistic age, and in the Western world
to-day--are the _spiritual leaders of fellaheen_. _“Panem et circenses”
is only another formula for pacifism._ In the history of all Cultures
there is an anti-national element, whether we have evidences of it or
not. Pure self-directed thinking was ever alien to life, and therefore
alien to history, unwarlike, raceless. Consider our Humanism and
Classicism, the Sophists of Athens, Buddha and Lao-tze--not to mention
the passionate contempt of all nationalisms displayed by the great
champions of the ecclesiastical and the philosophical world-view.
However the cases differ amongst themselves otherwise, they are alike
in this, that the world-feeling of race; the political (and therefore
national) instinct for fact (“my country, right or wrong!”); the
resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one or
the other it has to be)--in a word, the _will_-to-power--has to retreat
and make room for a tendency of which the standard-bearers are most
often men without original impulse, but all the more set upon their
logic; men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen
who believe that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might
of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason. It begins with the
everlastingly fearful who withdraw themselves out of actuality into
cells and study-chambers and spiritual communities, and proclaim the
nullity of the world’s doings, and it ends in every Culture with the
apostles of world-peace. Every people has such (historically speaking)
waste-products. Even their heads constitute physiognomically a group
by themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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