The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

V

So long as the man of a Culture that is approaching its fulfilment still continues to live straight before him naturally and unquestioningly, his life has a settled conduct. This is the instinctive morale, which may disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms but which he himself does not controvert, because he has it. As soon as Life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities—which are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem. Culture-morale is that which a man has, Civilization-morale that which he looks for. The one is too deep to be exhaustible by logical means, the other is a function of logic. As late as Plato and as late as Kant ethics are still mere dialectics, a game with concepts, or the rounding-off of a metaphysical system, something that at bottom would not be thought really necessary. The Categorical Imperative is merely an abstract statement of what, for Kant, was not in question at all. But with Zeno and with Schopenhauer this is no longer so. It had become necessary to discover, to invent or to squeeze into form, as a rule of being, that which was no longer anchored in instinct; and at this point therefore begin the civilized ethics that are no longer the reflection of Life but the reflection of Knowledge upon Life. One feels that there is something artificial, soulless, half-true in all these considered systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition, vanishes before the one need that has suddenly made itself felt, the need of a practical morale for the governance of a Life that can no longer govern itself. Up to Kant, up to Aristotle, up to the Yoga and Vedanta doctrines, philosophy had been a sequence of grand world-systems in which formal ethics occupied a very modest place. But now it became “moral philosophy” with a metaphysic as background. The enthusiasm of epistemology had to give way to hard practical needs. Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type.

To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Æschylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities[actualities] is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s. This exchange is a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilization. Every ethic is a formulation of a soul’s view of its destiny—heroic or practical, grand or commonplace, manly or old-manly. I distinguish, therefore, between a tragic and a plebeian morale. The tragic morale of a Culture knows and grasps the heaviness of being, but it draws therefrom the feeling of pride that enables the burden to be borne. So Æschylus, Shakespeare, the thinkers of the Brahman philosophy felt it; so Dante and German Catholicism. It is heard in the stern battle-hymn of Lutheranism “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,” and it echoes still in the Marseillaise. The plebeian morale of Epicurus and the Stoa, the sects of Buddha’s day and the 19th Century made rather battle-plans for the outmanœuvring of destiny. What Æschylus did in grand, the Stoa did in little—no more fullness, but poverty, coldness and emptiness of life—and all that Roman bigness achieved was to intensify this same intellectual chill and void. And there is the same relation between the ethical passion of the great Baroque masters—Shakespeare, Bach, Kant, Goethe—the manly will to inward mastery of natural things that it felt to be far below itself, and modern Europe’s state-provision, humanity-ideals, world-peace, “greatest happiness of greatest number,” etc., which express the will to an outward clearance from the path of things that are on the same level. This, no less than the other, is a manifestation of the will-to-power, as against the Classical endurance of the inevitable, but the fact remains that material bigness is not the same as metaphysical majesty of achievement. The former lacks depth, lacks that which former men had called God. The Faustian world-feeling of deed, which had been efficient in every great man from the Hohenstaufen and the Welf to Frederick the Great, Goethe and Napoleon, smoothes itself down to a philosophy of work. Whether such a philosophy attacks or defends work does not affect its inward value. The Culture-idea of Deed and the Civilization-idea of Work are related as the attitude of Æschylus’s Prometheus and that of Diogenes. The one suffers and bears, the other lolls. It was deeds of science that Galileo, Kepler and Newton performed, but it is scientific work that the modern physicist carries out. And, in spite of all the great words from Schopenhauer to Shaw, it is the plebeian morale of every day and “sound human reason” that is the basis of all our expositions and discussions of Life.