The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

IV

It follows from the meaning that we have attached to the Culture as a prime phenomenon and to destiny as the organic logic of existence, that each Culture must necessarily possess its own destiny-idea. Indeed, this conclusion is implicit from the first in the feeling that every great Culture is nothing but the actualizing and form of a single, singularly-constituted (einzigartig) soul. And what cannot be felt by one sort of men exactly as it is felt by another (since the life of each is the expression of the idea proper to himself) and still less transcribed, what is named by us “conjuncture,” “accident,” “Providence” or “Fate,” by Classical man “Nemesis,” “Ananke,” “Tyche” or “Fatum,” by the Arab “Kismet,” by everyone in some way of his own, is just that of which each unique and unreproduceable soul-constitution, quite clear to those who share in it, is a rendering.

The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call Euclidean. Thus it is the sense-actual person of Œdipus, his “empirical ego,” nay, his σῶμα that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Œdipus complains that Creon has misused his “body”[^[121]] and that the oracle applied to his “body.”[^[122]] Æschylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the “royal body, leader of fleets.”[^[123]] It is this same word σῶμα that the mathematicians employ more than once for the “bodies” with which they deal. But the destiny of King Lear is of the “analytical” type—to use here also the term suggested by the corresponding number-world—and consists in dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges; spiritual threads weave themselves into the action, incorporeal and transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the secondary tragedy of Gloster’s house. Lear is at the last a mere name, the axis of something unbounded. This conception of destiny is the “infinitesimal” conception. It stretches out into infinite time and infinite space. It touches the bodily, Euclidean existence not at all, but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the fool and the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of suffering. Sophocles, too, wrote a Laocoön drama; and we may be certain that there was nothing of pure soul-agony in it. Antigone goes below ground in the body, because she has buried her brother’s body. Think of Ajax and Philoctetes, and then of the Prince of Homburg and Goethe’s Tasso—is not the difference between magnitude and relation traceable right into the depths of artistic creation?

This brings us to another connexion of high symbolic significance. The drama of the West is ordinarily designated Character-Drama. That of the Greeks, on the other hand, is best described as Situation-Drama, and in the antithesis we can perceive what it is that Western, and what it is that Classical, man respectively feel as the basic life-form that is imperilled by the onsets of tragedy and fate. If in lieu of “direction” we say “irreversibility,” if we let ourselves sink into the terrible meaning of those words “too late” wherewith we resign a fleeting bit of the present to the eternal past, we find the deep foundation of every tragic crisis. It is Time that is the tragic, and it is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to Time that one Culture is differentiated from another; and consequently “tragedy” of the grand order has only developed in the Culture which has most passionately affirmed, and in that which has most passionately denied, Time. The sentiment of the ahistoric soul gives us a Classical tragedy of the moment, and that of the ultrahistorical soul puts before us Western tragedy that deals with the development of a whole life. Our tragedy arises from the feeling of an inexorable Logic of becoming, while the Greek feels the illogical, blind Casual of the moment—the life of Lear matures inwardly towards a catastrophe, and that of Œdipus stumbles without warning upon a situation. And now one may perceive how it is that synchronously with Western drama there rose and fell a mighty portrait-art (culminating in Rembrandt), a kind of historical and biographical art which (because it was so) was sternly discountenanced in Classical Greece at the apogee of Attic drama. Consider the veto on likeness-statuary in votive offerings[^[124]] and note how—from Demetrius of Alopeke (about 400)[^[125]]—a timid art of “ideal” portraiture began to venture forth when, and only when, grand tragedy had been thrown into the background by the light society-pieces of the “Middle Comedy.”[^[126]] Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in the theatre of Dionysus; all bring to expression, in significantly strict form, somatic attitudes and positions. Physiognomically they are dumb, corporeal and of necessity nude—character-heads of definite individuals came only with the Hellenistic age. Once more we are reminded of the contrast between the Greek number-world, with its computations of tangible results, and the other, our own, in which the relations between groups of functions or equations or, generally, formula-elements of the same order are investigated morphologically, and the character of these relations fixed as such in express laws.