The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

I

Following out this train of thought to the end, we come into the presence of an opposition in which we perceive the key—the only key—wherewith to approach, and (so far as the word has any meaning at all) to solve, one of the oldest and gravest of man’s riddles. This is the opposition of the Destiny Idea and the Causality Principle—an opposition which, it is safe to say, has never hitherto been recognized for what it is, the necessary foundation of world-building.

Anyone who understands at all what is meant by saying that the soul is the idea of an existence, will also divine a near relationship between it and the sure sense of a destiny and must regard Life itself (our name for the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished) as directed, irrevocable in every line, fate-laden. Primitive man feels this dimly and anxiously, while for the man of a higher Culture it is definite enough to become his vision of the world—though this vision is communicable only through religion and art, never through notions and proofs.

Every higher language possesses a number of words such as luck, doom, conjuncture, vocation, about which there is, as it were, a veil. No hypothesis, no science, can ever get into touch with that which we feel when we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound of these words. They are symbols, not notions. In them is the centre of gravity of that world-picture that I have called the World-as-history as opposed to the World-as-nature. The Destiny-idea demands life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect. There is an organic logic, an instinctive, dream-sure logic of all existence as opposed to the logic of the inorganic, the logic of understanding and of things understood—a logic of direction as against a logic of extension—and no systematist, no Aristotle or Kant, has known how to deal with it. They are on their own ground when they tell us about “judgment,” “perception,” “awareness,” and “recollection,” but as to what is in the words “hope,” “happiness,” “despair,” “repentance,” “devotion,” and “consolation” they are silent. He who expects here, in the domain of the living, to find reasons and consequences, or imagines that an inward certainty as to the meaning of life is the same thing as “Fatalism” or “Predestination,” simply knows nothing of the matters in question, confusing experience lived with experience acquired or acquirable. Causality is the reasonable, the law-bound, the describable, the badge of our whole waking and reasoning existence. But destiny is the word for an inner certainty that is not describable. We bring out that which is in the causal by means of a physical or an epistemological system, through numbers, by reasoned classification; but the idea of destiny can be imparted only by the artist working through media like portraiture, tragedy and music. The one requires us to distinguish and in distinguishing to dissect and destroy, whereas the other is creative through and through, and thus destiny is related to life and causality to death.

In the Destiny-idea the soul reveals its world-longing, its desire to rise into the light, to accomplish and actualize its vocation. To no man is it entirely alien, and not before one has become the unanchored “late” man of the megalopolis is original vision quite overpowered by matter-of-fact feeling and mechanizing thought. Even then, in some intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness, shattering in a moment all the causality of the world’s surface. For the world as a system of causal connexions is not only a “late” but also a highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high Cultures are capable of possessing it—or perhaps we should say, devising it—with conviction. The notion of causality is coterminous with the notion of law: the only laws that are, are causal laws. But just as there lies in the causal, according to Kant, a necessity of the thinking consciousness and the basic form of its relation to the essence of things, so also, designated by the words destiny, dispensation, vocation, there is a something that is an inevitable necessity of life. Real history is heavy with fate but free of laws. One can divine the future (there is, indeed, a certain insight that can penetrate its secrets deeply) but one cannot reckon it. The physiognomic flair which enables one to read a whole life in a face or to sum up whole peoples from the picture of an epoch—and to do so without deliberate effort or “system”—is utterly remote from all “cause and effect.”

He who comprehends the light-world that is before his eyes not physiognomically but systematically, and makes it intellectually his own by the methods of causal experience, must necessarily in the end come to believe that every living thing can be understood by reference to cause and effect—that there is no secret and no inner directedness. He, on the other hand, who as Goethe did—and for that matter as everyone does in nine out of ten of his waking moments—lets the impressions of the world about him work merely upon his senses, absorbs these impressions as a whole, feels the become in its becoming. The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere ceasing to think. Suddenly, Time is no more a riddle, a notion, a “form” or “dimension” but becomes an inner certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its irreversibility, its livingness, is disclosed the very meaning of the historical world-picture. Destiny and Causality are related as Time and Space.

In the two possible world-forms then—History and Nature, the physiognomy of all becoming and the system of all things become—destiny or causality prevails. Between them there is all the difference between a feeling of life and a method of knowledge. Each of them is the starting-point of a complete and self-contained, but not of a unique world. Yet, after all, just as the become is founded upon a becoming, so the knowledge of cause and effect is founded upon the sure feeling of a destiny. Causality is—so to say—destiny become, destiny made inorganic and modelled in reason-forms. Destiny itself (passed over in silence by Kant and every other builder of rational world-systems because with their armoury of abstractions they could not touch life) stands beyond and outside all comprehended Nature. Nevertheless, being itself the original, it alone gives the stiff dead principle of cause-and-effect the opportunity to figure in the later scenes of a culture-drama, alive and historical, as the incarnation of a tyrannical thinking. The existence of the Classical soul is the condition for the appearance of Democritus’s method, the existence of the Faustian soul for that of Newton’s. We may well imagine that either of these Cultures might have failed to produce a natural science of its own, but we cannot imagine the systems without their cultural foundations.

Here again we see how becoming and the become, direction and extension, include one another and are subordinated each to the other, according as we are in the historical or in the “natural” focus. If history is that kind of world-order in which all the become is fitted to the becoming, then the products of scientific work must inter alia be so handled; and, in fact, for the historical eye there is only a history of physics. It was Destiny that the discoveries of oxygen, Neptune, gravitation and spectrum analysis happened as and when they did. It was Destiny that the phlogiston theory, the undulatory theory of light, the kinetic theory of gases could arise at all, seeing that they were elucidations of results and, as such, highly personal to their respective authors, and that other theories (“correct” or “erroneous”) might equally well have been developed instead. And it is again Destiny and the result of strong personality when one theory vanishes and another becomes the lodestar of the physicist’s world. Even the born physicist speaks of the “fate” of a problem or the “history” of a discovery.

Conversely, if “Nature” is that constitution of things in which the becoming should logically be incorporated in the thing-become, and living direction in rigid extension, history may best be treated as a chapter of epistemology; and so indeed Kant would have treated it if he had remembered to include it at all in his system of knowledge. Significantly enough, he did not; for him as for every born systematist Nature is The World, and when he discusses time without noticing that it has direction and is irreversible, we see that he is dealing with the Nature-world and has no inkling of the possibility of another, the history-world. Perhaps, for Kant, this other world was actually impossible.

Now, Causality has nothing whatever to do with Time. To the world of to-day, made up of Kantians who know not how Kantian they are, this must seem an outrageous paradox. And yet every formula of Western physics exhibits the “how” and the “how long” as distinct in essence. As soon as the question is pressed home, causality restricts its answer rigidly to the statement that something happens—and not when it happens. The “effect” must of necessity be put with the “cause.” The distance between them belongs to a different order, it lies within the act of understanding itself (which is an element of life) and not within the thing or things understood. It is of the essence of the extended that it overcomes directedness, and of Space that it contradicts Time, and yet the latter, as the more fundamental, precedes and underlies the former. Destiny claims the same precedence; we begin with the idea of Destiny, and only later, when our waking-consciousness looks fearfully for a spell that will bind in the sense-world and overcome the death that cannot be evaded, do we conceive causality as an anti-Fate, and make it create another world to protect us from and console us for this. And as the web of cause and effect gradually spreads over the visible surfaces there is formed a convincing picture of timeless duration—essentially, Being, but Being endowed with attributes by the sheer force of pure thought. This tendency underlies the feeling, well known in all mature Cultures, that “Knowledge is Power,” the power that is meant being power over Destiny. The abstract savant, the natural-science researcher, the thinker in systems, whose whole intellectual existence bases itself on the causality principle, are “late” manifestations of an unconscious hatred of the powers of incomprehensible Destiny. “Pure Reason” denies all possibilities that are outside itself. Here strict thought and great art are eternally in conflict. The one keeps its feet, and the other lets itself go. A man like Kant must always feel himself as superior to a Beethoven as the adult is to the child, but this will not prevent a Beethoven from regarding the “Critique of Pure Reason” as a pitiable sort of philosophy. Teleology, that nonsense of all nonsenses within science, is a misdirected attempt to deal mechanically with the living content of scientific knowledge (for knowledge implies someone to know, and though the substance of thought may be “Nature” the act of thought is history), and so with life itself as an inverted causality. Teleology is a caricature of the Destiny-idea which transforms the vocation of Dante into the aim of the savant. It is the deepest and most characteristic tendency both of Darwinism—the megalopolitan-intellectual product of the most abstract of all Civilizations—and of the materialist conception of history which springs from the same root as Darwinism and, like it, kills all that is organic and fateful. Thus the morphological element of the Causal is a Principle, and the morphological element of Destiny is an Idea, an idea that is incapable of being “cognized,” described or defined, and can only be felt and inwardly lived. This idea is something of which one is either entirely ignorant or else—like the man of the spring and every truly significant man of the late seasons, believer, lover, artist, poet—entirely certain.

Thus Destiny is seen to be the true existence-mode of the prime phenomenon, that in which the living idea of becoming unfolds itself immediately to the intuitive vision. And therefore the Destiny-idea dominates the whole world-picture of history, while causality, which is the existence-mode of objects and stamps out of the world of sensations a set of well-distinguished and well-defined things, properties and relations, dominates and penetrates, as the form of the understanding, the Nature-world that is the understanding’s “alter ego.”

But inquiry into the degree of validity of causal connexions within a presentation of nature, or (what is henceforth the same thing for us) into the destinies involved in that presentation, becomes far more difficult still when we come to realize that for primitive man or for the child no comprehensive causally-ordered world exists at all as yet and that we ourselves, though “late” men with a consciousness disciplined by powerful speech-sharpened thought, can do no more, even in moments of the most strained attention (the only ones, really, in which we are exactly in the physical focus), than assert that the causal order which we see in such a moment is continuously present in the actuality around us. Even waking, we take in the actual, “the living garment of the Deity,” physiognomically, and we do so involuntarily and by virtue of a power of experience that is rooted in the deep sources of life.

A systematic delineation, on the contrary, is the expression of an understanding emancipated from perception, and by means of it we bring the mental picture of all times and all men into conformity with the moment’s picture of Nature as ordered by ourselves. But the mode of this ordering, which has a history that we cannot interfere with in the smallest degree, is not the working of a cause, but a destiny.