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 goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is
not size, but the presence of a soul. Not only in primitive conditions,
such as those of central Africa, but in Late conditions too--China,
India, and industrialized Europe and America--we find very large
settlements that are nevertheless not to be called cities. They are
centres of landscape; they do not inwardly form worlds in themselves.
They have no soul. Every primitive population lives wholly as peasant
and son of the soil--the being “City” does not exist for it. That which
in externals develops from the village is not the city, but the market,
a mere meeting-point of rural life-interests. Here there can be no
question of a separate existence. The inhabitant of a market may be a
craftsman or a tradesman, but he lives and thinks as a peasant. We have
to go back and sense accurately what it means when out of a primitive
Egyptian or Chinese or Germanic village--a little spot in a wide
land--a city comes into being. It is quite possibly not differentiated
in any outward feature, but spiritually it is _a place from which
the countryside is henceforth regarded, felt, and experienced as
“environs,”_ as something different and subordinate. From now on
there are two lives, that of the inside and that of the outside, and
the peasant understands this just as clearly as the townsman. The
village smith and the smith in the city, the village headman and the
burgomaster, live in two different worlds. The man of the land and the
man of the city are different essences. First of all they feel the
difference, then they are dominated by it, and at last they cease to
understand each other at all. To-day a Brandenburg peasant is closer
to a Sicilian peasant than he is to a Berliner. From the moment of
this specific attunement, the City comes into being, and it is this
attunement which underlies, as something that goes without saying, the
entire waking-consciousness of every Culture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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