XVI
In concluding this Introduction, I may be permitted to add a personal note. In 1911, I proposed to myself to put together some broad considerations on the political phenomena of the day and their possible developments. At that time the World-War appeared to me both as imminent and also as the inevitable outward manifestation of the historical crisis, and my endeavour was to comprehend it from an examination of the spirit of the preceding centuries—not years. In the course of this originally small task,[[39]] the conviction forced itself on me that for an effective understanding of the epoch the area to be taken into the foundation-plan must be very greatly enlarged, and that in an investigation of this sort, if the results were to be fundamentally conclusive and necessary results, it was impossible to restrict one’s self to a single epoch and its political actualities, or to confine one’s self to a pragmatical framework, or even to do without purely metaphysical and highly transcendental methods of treatment. It became evident that a political problem could not be comprehended by means of politics themselves and that, frequently, important factors at work in the depths could only be grasped through their artistic manifestations or even distantly seen in the form of scientific or purely philosophical ideas. Even the politico-social analysis of the last decades of the 19th century—a period of tense quiet between two immense and outstanding events: the one which, expressed in the Revolution and Napoleon, had fixed the picture of West-European actuality for a century and another of at least equal significance that was visibly and ever more rapidly approaching—was found in the last resort to be impossible without bringing in all the great problems of Being in all their aspects. For, in the historical as in the natural world-picture, there is found nothing, however small, that does not embody in itself the entire sum of fundamental tendencies. And thus the original theme came to be immensely widened. A vast number of unexpected (and in the main entirely novel) questions and interrelations presented themselves. And finally it became perfectly clear that no single fragment of history could be thoroughly illuminated unless and until the secret of world-history itself, to wit the story of higher mankind as an organism of regular structure, had been cleared up. And hitherto this has not been done, even in the least degree.
From this moment on, relations and connexions—previously often suspected, sometimes touched on but never comprehended—presented themselves in ever-increasing volume. The forms of the arts linked themselves to the forms of war and state-policy. Deep relations were revealed between political and mathematical aspects of the same Culture, between religious and technical conceptions, between mathematics, music and sculpture, between economics and cognition-forms. Clearly and unmistakably there appeared the fundamental dependence of the most modern physical and chemical theories on the mythological concepts of our Germanic ancestors, the style-congruence of tragedy and power-technics and up-to-date finance, and the fact (bizarre at first but soon self-evident) that oil-painting perspective, printing, the credit system, longrange weapons, and contrapuntal music in one case, and the nude statue, the city-state and coin-currency (discovered by the Greeks) in another were identical expressions of one and the same spiritual principle. And, beyond and above all, there stood out the fact that these great groups of morphological relations, each one of which symbolically represents a particular sort of mankind in the whole picture of world-history, are strictly symmetrical in structure. It is this perspective that first opens out for us the true style of history. Belonging itself as symbol and expression to one time and therefore inwardly possible and necessary only for present-day Western man, it can but be compared—distantly—to certain ideas of ultra-modern mathematics in the domain of the Theory of Groups. These were thoughts that had occupied me for many years, though dark and undefined until enabled by this method to emerge in tangible form.
Thereafter I saw the present—the approaching World-War—in a quite other light. It was no longer a momentary constellation of casual facts due to national sentiments, personal influences, or economic tendencies endowed with an appearance of unity and necessity by some historian’s scheme of political or social cause-and-effect, but the type of a historical change of phase occurring within a great historical organism of definable compass at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago. The mark of the great crisis is its innumerable passionate questionings and probings. In our own case there were books and ideas by the thousand; but, scattered, disconnected, limited by the horizons of specialisms as they were, they incited, depressed and confounded but could not free. Hence, though these questions are seen, their identity is missed. Consider those art-problems that (though never comprehended in their depths) were evinced in the disputes between form and content, line and space, drawing and colour, in the notion of style, in the idea of Impressionism and the music of Wagner. Consider the decline of art and the failing authority of science; the grave problems arising out of the victory of the megalopolis over the country-side, such as childlessness and land-depopulation; the place in society of a fluctuating Fourth Estate; the crisis in materialism, in Socialism, in parliamentary government; the position of the individual vis-à-vis the State; the problem of private property with its pendant the problem of marriage. Consider at the same time one fact taken from what is apparently an entirely different field, the voluminous work that was being done in the domain of folk-psychology on the origins of myths, arts, religions and thought—and done, moreover, no longer from an ideal but from a strictly morphological standpoint. It is my belief that every one of these questions was really aimed in the same direction as every other, viz., towards that one Riddle of History that had never yet emerged with sufficient distinctness in the human consciousness. The tasks before men were not, as supposed, infinitely numerous—they were one and the same task. Everyone had an inkling that this was so, but no one from his own narrow standpoint had seen the single and comprehensive solution. And yet it had been in the air since Nietzsche, and Nietzsche himself had gripped all the decisive problems although, being a romantic, he had not dared to look strict reality in the face.
But herein precisely lies the inward necessity of the stock-taking doctrine, so to call it. It had to come, and it could only come at this time. Our scepticism is not an attack upon, but rather the verification of, our stock of thoughts and works. It confirms all that has been sought and achieved for generations past, in that it integrates all the truly living tendencies which it finds in the special spheres, no matter what their aim may be.
Above all, there discovered itself the opposition of History and Nature through which alone it is possible to grasp the essence of the former. As I have already said, man as an element and representative of the World is a member, not only of nature, but also of history—which is a second Cosmos different in structure and complexion, entirely neglected by Metaphysics in favour of the first. I was originally brought to reflect on this fundamental question of our world-consciousness through noticing how present-day historians as they fumble round tangible events, things-become, believe themselves to have already grasped History, the happening, the becoming itself. This is a prejudice common to all who proceed by reason and cognition, as against intuitive perception.[[40]] And it had long ago been a source of perplexity to the great Eleatics with their doctrine that through cognition there could be no becoming, but only a being (or having-become). In other words, History was seen as Nature (in the objective sense of the physicist) and treated accordingly, and it is to this that we must ascribe the baneful mistake of applying the principles of causality, of law, of system—that is, the structure of rigid being—to the picture of happenings. It was assumed that a human culture existed just as electricity or gravitation existed, and that it was capable of analysis in much the same way as these. The habits of the scientific researcher were eagerly taken as a model, and if, from time to time, some student asked what Gothic, or Islam, or the Polis was, no one inquired why such symbols of something living inevitably appeared just then, and there, in that form, and for that space of time. Historians were content, whenever they met one of the innumerable similarities between widely discrete historical phenomena, simply to register it, adding some clever remarks as to the marvels of coincidence, dubbing Rhodes the “Venice of Antiquity” and Napoleon the “modern Alexander,” or the like; yet it was just these cases, in which the destiny-problem came to the fore as the true problem of history (viz., the problem of time), that needed to be treated with all possible seriousness and scientifically regulated physiognomic in order to find out what strangely-constituted necessity, so completely alien to the causal, was at work. That every phenomenon ipso facto propounds a metaphysical riddle, that the time of its occurrence is never irrelevant; that it still remained to be discovered what kind of a living interdependence (apart from the inorganic, natural-law interdependence) subsists within the world-picture, which radiates from nothing less than the whole man and not merely (as Kant thought) from the cognizing part of him; that a phenomenon is not only a fact for the understanding but also an expression of the spiritual, not only an object but a symbol as well, be it one of the highest creations of religion or art or a mere trifle of everyday life—all this was, philosophically, something new.
And thus in the end I came to see the solution clearly before me in immense outlines, possessed of full inward necessity, a solution derived from one single principle that though discoverable had never been discovered, that from my youth had haunted and attracted me, tormenting me with the sense that it was there and must be attacked and yet defying me to seize it. Thus, from an almost accidental occasion of beginning, there has arisen the present work, which is put forward as the provisional expression of a new world-picture. The book is laden, as I know, with all the defects of a first attempt, incomplete, and certainly not free from inconsistencies. Nevertheless I am convinced that it contains the incontrovertible formulation of an idea which, once enunciated clearly, will (I repeat) be accepted without dispute.
If, then, the narrower theme is an analysis of the Decline of that West-European Culture which is now spread over the entire globe, yet the object in view is the development of a philosophy and of the operative method peculiar to it, which is now to be tried, viz., the method of comparative morphology in world-history. The work falls naturally into two parts. The first, “Form and Actuality,” starts from the form-language of the great Cultures, attempts to penetrate to the deepest roots of their origin and so provides itself with the basis for a science of Symbolic. The second part, “World-historical Perspectives,” starts from the facts of actual life, and from the historical practice of higher mankind seeks to obtain a quintessence of historical experience that we can set to work upon the formation of our own future.
The accompanying tables[[41]] present a general view of what has resulted from the investigation. They may at the same time give some notion both of the fruitfulness and of the scope of the new methods.
CHAPTER II
THE MEANING OF NUMBERS
CHAPTER II
THE MEANING OF NUMBERS
It is necessary to begin by drawing attention to certain basic terms which, as used in this work, carry strict and in some cases novel connotations. Though the metaphysical content of these terms would gradually become evident in following the course of the reasoning, nevertheless, the exact significance to be attached to them ought to be made clear beyond misunderstanding from the very outset.
The popular distinction—current also in philosophy—between “being” and “becoming” seems to miss the essential point in the contrast it is meant to express. An endless becoming—“action,” “actuality”—will always be thought of also as a condition (as it is, for example, in physical notions such as uniform velocity and the condition of motion, and in the basic hypothesis of the kinetic theory of gases) and therefore ranked in the category of “being.” On the other hand, out of the results that we do in fact obtain by and in consciousness, we may, with Goethe, distinguish as final elements “becoming” and “the become” (Das Werden, das Gewordne). In all cases, though the atom of human-ness may lie beyond the grasp of our powers of abstract conception, the very clear and definite feeling of this contrast—fundamental and diffused throughout consciousness—is the most elemental something that we reach. It necessarily follows therefore that “the become” is always founded on a “becoming” and not the other way round.
I distinguish further, by the words “proper” and “alien” (das Eigne, das Fremde), those two basic facts of consciousness which for all men in the waking (not in the dreaming) state are established with an immediate inward certainty, without the necessity or possibility of more precise definition. The element called “alien” is always related in some way to the basic fact expressed by the word “perception,” i.e., the outer world, the life of sensation. Great thinkers have bent all their powers of image-forming to the task of expressing this relation, more and more rigorously, by the aid of half-intuitive dichotomies such as “phenomena and things-in-themselves,” “world-as-will and world-as-idea,” “ego and non-ego,” although human powers of exact knowing are surely inadequate for the task.
Similarly, the element “proper” is involved with the basic fact known as feeling, i.e., the inner life, in some intimate and invariable way that equally defies analysis by the methods of abstract thought.
I distinguish, again, “soul” and “world.” The existence of this opposition is identical with the fact of purely human waking consciousness (Wachsein). There are degrees of clearness and sharpness in the opposition and therefore grades of the consciousness, of the spirituality, of life. These grades range from the feeling-knowledge that, unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an inward light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of those moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less and less often as a Culture grows older) right to the extremity of waking and reasoning sharpness that we find, for instance, in the thought of Kant and Napoleon, for whom soul and world have become subject and object. This elementary structure of consciousness, as a fact of immediate inner knowledge, is not susceptible of conceptual subdivision. Nor, indeed, are the two factors distinguishable at all except verbally and more or less artificially, since they are always associated, always intertwined, and present themselves as a unit, a totality. The epistemological starting-point of the born idealist and the born realist alike, the assumption that soul is to world (or world to soul, as the case may be) as foundation is to building, as primary to derivative, as “cause” to “effect,” has no basis whatever in the pure fact of consciousness, and when a philosophic system lays stress on the one or the other, it only thereby informs us as to the personality of the philosopher, a fact of purely biographical significance.
Thus, by regarding waking-consciousness structurally as a tension of contraries, and applying to it the notions of “becoming” and “the thing-become,” we find for the word Life a perfectly definite meaning that is closely allied to that of “becoming.” We may describe becomings and the things-become as the form in which respectively the facts and the results of life exist in the waking consciousness. To man in the waking state his proper life, progressive and constantly self-fulfilling, is presented through the element of Becoming in his consciousness—this fact we call “the present”—and it possesses that mysterious property of Direction which in all the higher languages men have sought to impound and—vainly—to rationalize by means of the enigmatic word time. It follows necessarily from the above that there is a fundamental connexion between the become (the hard-set) and Death.
If, now, we designate the Soul—that is, the Soul as it is felt, not as it is reasonably pictured—as the possible and the World on the other hand as the actual (the meaning of these expressions is unmistakable to man’s inner sense), we see life as the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished. With respect to the property of Direction, the possible is called the Future and the actualized the Past. The actualizing itself, the centre-of-gravity and the centre-of-meaning of life, we call the Present. “Soul” is the still-to-be-accomplished, “World” the accomplished, “life” the accomplishing. In this way we are enabled to assign to expressions like moment, duration, development, life-content, vocation, scope, aim, fullness and emptiness of life, the definite meanings which we shall need for all that follows and especially for the understanding of historical phenomena.
Lastly, the words History and Nature are here employed, as the reader will have observed already, in a quite definite and hitherto unusual sense. These words comprise possible modes of understanding, of comprehending the totality of knowledge—becoming as well as things-become, life as well as things-lived—as a homogeneous, spiritualized, well-ordered world-picture fashioned out of an indivisible mass-impression in this way or in that according as the becoming or the become, direction (“time”) or extension (“space”) is the dominant factor. And it is not a question of one factor being alternative to the other. The possibilities that we have of possessing an “outer world” that reflects and attests our proper existence are infinitely numerous and exceedingly heterogeneous, and the purely organic and the purely mechanical world-view (in the precise literal sense of that familiar term[[42]]) are only the extreme members of the series. Primitive man (so far as we can imagine his waking-consciousness) and the child (as we can remember) cannot fully see or grasp these possibilities. One condition of this higher world-consciousness is the possession of language, meaning thereby not mere human utterance but a culture-language, and such is non-existent for primitive man and existent but not accessible in the case of the child. In other words, neither possesses any clear and distinct notion of the world. They have an inkling but no real knowledge of history and nature, being too intimately incorporated with the ensemble of these. They have no Culture.
And therewith that important word is given a positive meaning of the highest significance which henceforward will be assumed in using it. In the same way as we have elected to distinguish the Soul as the possible and the World as the actual, we can now differentiate between possible and actual culture, i.e., culture as an idea in the (general or individual) existence and culture as the body of that idea, as the total of its visible, tangible and comprehensible expressions—acts and opinions, religion and state, arts and sciences, peoples and cities, economic and social forms, speech, laws, customs, characters, facial lines and costumes. Higher history, intimately related to life and to becoming, is the actualizing of possible Culture.[[43]]
We must not omit to add that these basic determinations of meaning are largely incommunicable by specification, definition or proof, and in their deeper import must be reached by feeling, experience and intuition. There is a distinction, rarely appreciated as it should be, between experience as lived and experience as learned (zwischen Erleben und Erkennen), between the immediate certainty given by the various kinds of intuition—such as illumination, inspiration, artistic flair, experience of life, the power of “sizing men up” (Goethe’s “exact percipient fancy”)—and the product of rational procedure and technical experiment.
The first are imparted by means of analogy, picture, symbol, the second by formula, law, scheme. The become is experienced by learning—indeed, as we shall see, the having-become is for the human mind identical with the completed act of cognition. A becoming, on the other hand, can only be experienced by living, felt with a deep wordless understanding. It is on this that what we call “knowledge of men” is based; in fact the understanding of history implies a superlative knowledge of men. The eye which can see into the depths of an alien soul—owes nothing to the cognition-methods investigated in the “Critique of Pure Reason,” yet the purer the historical picture is, the less accessible it becomes to any other eye. The mechanism of a pure nature-picture, such as the world of Newton and Kant, is cognized, grasped, dissected in laws and equations and finally reduced to system: the organism of a pure history-picture, like the world of Plotinus, Dante and Giordano Bruno, is intuitively seen, inwardly experienced, grasped as a form or symbol and finally rendered in poetical and artistic conceptions. Goethe’s “living nature” is a historical world-picture.[[44]]