The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

II

Nature and History[^[77]] are the opposite extreme terms of man’s range of possibilities, whereby he is enabled to order the actualities about him as a picture of the world. An actuality is Nature in so far as it assigns things-becoming their place as things-become, and History in so far as it orders things-become with reference to their becoming. An actuality as an evocation of mind is contemplated, and as an assurance of the senses is critically comprehended, the first being exemplified in the worlds of Plato, Rembrandt, Goethe and Beethoven, the second in the worlds of Parmenides, Descartes, Kant and Newton. Cognition in the strict sense of the word is that act of experience of which the completed issue is called “Nature.” The cognized and “Nature” are one and the same. The symbol of mathematical number has shown us that the aggregate of things cognized is the same as the world of things mechanically defined, things correct once and for all, things brought under law. Nature is the sum of the law-imposed necessities. There are only laws of Nature. No physicist who understands his duty would wish to transcend these limits. His task is to establish an ordered code which not only includes all the laws that he can find in the picture of Nature that is proper to himself but, further, represents that picture exhaustively and without remainder.

Contemplation or vision (Anschauen), on the other hand—I may recall Goethe’s words: “vision is to be carefully distinguished from seeing”—, is that act of experience which is itself history because it is itself a fulfilling. That which has been lived is that which has happened, and it is history. (Erlebtes ist Geschehenes, ist Geschichte.)

Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated. It carries the hall-mark of Direction (“Time”), of irreversibility. That which has happened is thenceforth counted with the become and not with the becoming, with the stiffened and not the living, and belongs beyond recall to the past. Our feeling of world-fear has its sources here. Everything cognized, on the contrary, is timeless, neither past nor future but simply “there,” and consequently permanently valid, as indeed the very constitution of natural law requires that it should be. Law and the domain of law are anti-historical. They exclude incident and casuality. The laws of nature are forms of rigorous and therefore inorganic necessity. It becomes easy to see why mathematics, as the ordering of things-become by number, is always and exclusively associated with laws and causality.

Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only the lifeless and so much of the living as can be dissociated from livingness. Pure becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of being bounded. It lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measure. No deep and pure historical research seeks for conformities with causal laws—or, if it does so, it does not understand its own essence.

At the same time, history as positively treated is not pure becoming: it is an image, a world-form radiated from the waking consciousness of the historian, in which the becoming dominates the become. The possibility of extracting results of any sort by scientific methods depends upon the proportion of things-become present in the subject treated, and by hypothesis there is in this case a defect of them; the higher the proportion is, the more mechanical, reasonable, causal, history is made to appear. Even Goethe’s “living nature,” utterly unmathematical world-picture as it was, contained enough of the dead and stiffened to allow him to treat at least his foreground scientifically. But when this content of things-become dwindles to very little, then history becomes approximately pure becoming, and contemplation and vision become an experience which can only be rendered in forms of art. That which Dante saw before his spiritual eyes as the destiny of the world, he could not possibly have arrived at by ways of science, any more than Goethe could have attained by these ways to what he saw in the great moments of his “Faust” studies, any more than Plotinus and Giordano Bruno could have distilled their visions from researches. This contrast lies at the root of all dispute regarding the inner form of history. In the presence of the same object or corpus of facts, every observer according to his own disposition has a different impression of the whole, and this impression, intangible and incommunicable, underlies his judgment and gives it its personal colour. The degree in which things-become are taken in differs from man to man, which is quite enough in itself to show that they can never agree as to task or method. Each accuses the other of a deficiency of “clear thinking,” and yet the something that is expressed by this phrase is something not built with hands, not implying superiority or a priority of degree but necessary difference of kind. The same applies to all natural sciences.

Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that at bottom the wish to write history scientifically involves a contradiction. True science reaches just as far as the notions of truth and falsity have validity: this applies to mathematics and it applies also to the science of historical spade-work, viz., the collection, ordering and sifting of material. But real historical vision (which only begins at this point) belongs to the domain of significances, in which the crucial words are not “correct” and “erroneous,” but “deep” and “shallow.” The true physicist is not deep, but keen: it is only when he leaves the domain of working hypotheses and brushes against the final things that he can be deep, but at this stage he is already a metaphysician. Nature is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. Old Leopold von Ranke is credited with the remark that, after all, Scott’s “Quentin Durward” was the true history-writing. And so it is: the advantage of a good history book is that it enables the reader to be his own Scott.

On the other hand, within the very realm of numbers and exact knowledge there is that which Goethe called “living Nature,” an immediate vision of pure becoming and self-shaping, in fact, history as above defined. Goethe’s world was, in the first instance, an organism, an existence, and it is easy therefore to see why his researches, even when superficially of a physical kind, do not make numbers, or laws, or causality captured in formulæ, or dissection of any sort their object, but are morphology in the highest sense of the word; and why his work neither uses nor needs to use the specifically Western and un-Classical means of causal treatment, metrical experiment. His treatment of the Earth’s crust is invariably geology, and never mineralogy, which he called the science of something dead.

Let it be said, once more, that there are no exact boundaries set between the two kinds of world-notion. However great the contrast between becoming and the become, the fact remains that they are jointly present in every kind of understanding. He who looks at the becoming and fulfilling in them, experiences History; he who dissects them as become and fulfilled cognizes Nature.

In every man, in every Culture, in every culture-phase, there is found an inherent disposition, an inherent inclination and vocation to prefer one of the two forms as an ideal of understanding the world. Western man is in a high degree historically disposed,[^[78]] Classical man far from being so. We follow up what is given us with an eye to past and future, whereas Classical man knew only the point-present and an ambiance of myth. We have before us a symbol of becoming in every bar of our music from Palestrina to Wagner, and the Greeks a symbol of the pure present in every one of their statues. The rhythm of a body is based upon a simultaneous relation of the parts, that of a fugue in the succession of elements in time.