Life as morphology or reading Spengler

In this article we discuss what could be the basic elements of our conception of life, how it is possible to reflect and to change the basic way we view or feel life and the different elements that compose our perception in the life sense, mainly culture and language

This article is based upon the reading of “The Decline of the West”, some episodes are literally copied and therefore are not my direct reflection

The meaning of morphology

To begin with, Spengler in his book ‘The Decline of the West’ (Der Untergang des Abendlandes), offers us an opportunity to look at history in an organic way, a view that Spengler relates to Goethe. Our modern materialistic view of the world today is so different from this organic morphology in its essence and notion, that it is almost impossible for the common person to comprehend, only due to habit. Our modern problem or difficulty would be to try to put aside our rational materialistic point of view when getting to be aware of this text, which is a thing discussed in itself by Spengler, its this which is the essential exercise of his book. It could be look upon as a key, a method to extract knowledge and value.

The World-picture is a form of higher world-conscientiousness, it is the world feeling of a culture, being expressed by that culture’s language and symbols, in the wider sense of it, something more than words and icons. Culture embodies an idea as a totality of visible tangible expressions, such as arts and sciences.
One can accept the contemporary idea that every system and epistemology contains its self verification, therefore a certain comparison between cultures, world-feelings etc’ would have no significance. In this method of thinking there’s only expression and usefulness rather than the outdated good, bad and true. Facts, but not truths. This is also one of the difficulties of understanding what Spengler wants to express. Judging it can only be done to its internal structure but not externally, its method of verification is different and sometimes unnecessary.

There are no eternal truths. Every philosophy is the expression of its own and only its own time… no two ages possess the same philosophic intentions.

Perception and sensation are related to the outer world while feelings and notions are related to the inner life. Both are perceived as facts.
While the Kantian view holds that the soul and world are respectfully subject and object, here the case is of Human consciousness is the fact of opposition itself, both factors are always present together and appear as a unity. This structure of consciousness is not capable of further analysis.

A phenomenon is not only a fact for the understanding but also an expression of the spiritual, not and 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.

Time, future, history, death , actuality, direction have different meanings in the context of different culture. Spengler is staying away from moralistic and relativistic judgement, he is rather speaking in terms of value -expression and form. This point of view is Aesthetic in its nature and therefore touches materialistic reality only in specific places. It does not overlap it.

The definition of morphology is all modes of comprehending the world may be. The systematic is the one dealing with the extended, mechanical, nature-laws and casual relations. The physiognomic is the one dealing with organic, history, life, direction and destiny. Instead of having a mystical feeling about it try to think about art, such as of Dante, he non-scientifically described a World-feeling that influenced the Destiny (non-casual-but-organic) of the west. Art can describe a non-actual ‘reality’ which affects actuality by the power of ideas, of perspective, soul and world feeling.

The notion of becoming, the awakening of the soul

Goethean becoming lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law and measurement. every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated.

If we are to look at history as a process of growth, maturity would mean that on the base of our experience and development we are re-defining our world and our place within it. At childhood we see the world only as an a reference to our Ego. As soon as the Ego starts separating itself from the world, through understanding of facts (ipso facto) and definition between object and subject (which is symbolized also in numbers), emerges the significant from the mere impressions, separates the outside world from the inner-world. That is the birth of the waking life, there arises the soul, conscious of its loneliness, together with the root-feeling of longing (Sehnsucht). It is this that urges “becoming” towards its goal, the motives of fulfillment and actualizing every inward possibility, that unfolds the idea of individual being. The child’s longing becomes in the consciousnesses to a feeling of constant direction and before in front of the mature spirit stands the enigma of time – queer, tempting, insoluble. The words “past” and “future” have acquired a fateful meaning.

This is where dread forms, as all becoming is moving towards a having-become wherein it ends. The past implies a passing and the frontier of the world itself as a thing-become, our dead of the moment when the possible is actualized. The deep world-fear of the child never leaves the higher-man, the believer, the poet, the artist. Thus the world-fear is assuredly the most creative of all prime feelings, the ripest and deepest forms and images are belonging not only to the conscious inward life but also of the external culture which reflects this life. it is present in every art-work, every inward philosophy, every deed.

Certain world views are lacking the spirituality of the problem of dread and longing: purely intellectual, sophists, sensualists, Darwinians are able to evade it by setting up a scientific world view between itself and the alien. The word “time” is similar with becoming, direction and experience. “Space” is similar with become, extension and knowledge. Longing is always the basis of the dread, becomes the dread and not vice-versa. While the concept of time cannot be subject of the intellect, space is its servant, to put it in other words : time is our being itself, space is its form and expression, the duality of mind and body.

The intellect defends itself against the alien powers of the world, extension and space, it finds means with the powerful form of defense : casual and systematic knowledge, delimitation by label and number. Here we find the connection between materialism, knowledge and nihilism against lack of courage and strength, lack of spirituality. There is no certainty in Destiny unlike physical, casual time, it is a mystery, though not a mystical one.

Science reaches as far as the notions of truth and falsity have validity, i.e. the collection, ordering and sifting of material… The principle of Form and the principle of Law are the basic elements in picturing the world… It is only the quantitative that is capable of being casually defined, grasped through figure or being captured in a law or formula.

The world-fear through an intellectual form-language transforms the mysterious to the comprehensible, through symbolization of extension of space and things. These are visible in science, art, architecture and religious ideas. Classical Teleology (explanation of a phenomenon by its goal or purpose) is seen as a misdirected attempt to deal mechanically with the living content of scientific knowledge. Knowledge always contains the living in the form of the person who knows and therefore cannot stand by its own. One may ask : How does a purpose or goal is conceived ? but that question might not be answerable, that is where reason stops working.

Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson.
Goethe

Systematical perception	Morphology
Causality	Organic growth
cause and effect	youth, growth, maturity, decay
facts, objects, analysis	facts as the expression of the spiritual, symbols, cannot be conveyed by reason
everything-known, things become, irreversibility	picture of life, things becoming, extension
Being (Aristotle, Kant)	possibility of change in a thing that has being, that exists (Plato, Goethe)
Future	Destiny
world as history	world as nature

A comparison of Classical, Faustian and Magian feeling

	Classical	Faustian	Magian
Actuality	non-historic	historic	non-actual
world-feeling	plastic and tangible, sensuous, perception based	spacial and infinite, abstract, force, pure, imperceptible, unlimited space, will	world-cavern, light against darkness
limits of world feeling	άρρητος – inexpressible άλογος – A-logos, unreasoning, speechless	irrational	the other, alien, darkness
meaning of numbers	magnitude / proportion	function / relation	limit
result	consistency	transformation, variability of the constituents
math	small things, concrete individual instances	classes and possibilities, functions, operations, equations, curves	divinity through sacred numbers and geometry
external word reference	ego	soul	spirit
expression	visible, measurable, numerable	unrestrained, strong-willed, far ranging
order	cosmos, harmonic order	order	divine order
Morale	counsel, contemplative	reformative expression of will	potent for salvation
a-priori	ἀρχή – boundless, becomes something after being split up by the senses	Kant’s a-priori	god

It is important to mention that although some cultures share the same concepts, their meaning is different when put into context, for example infinite space is defined differently by the theory of its limit.

The concepts that go without saying to certain cultures, simply do no exist for other ones, they are not even capable of being presented to them. As language reflects culture, it is the solid base of a world feeling, the connection of the mind to the world, the character of our notions. The Greek culture did not posses a word for space in our sense. Members of the Magian cultures even this day do not recognize the meaning of Western space and infinite abstraction, function, the same goes for the Western who will no recognize the non-actual world feeling even if existed in early Christianity which was no yet Faustian in nature.

The meaning of numbers

Spengler treats numbers as a symbol of casual necessity, the notion of mechanical demarcation. A representation of demarcation. It is used to cognize nature through specification of object, properties, relations and differentia, unities and pluralities. Numbers contain their abstract validity within themselves. Their application to the actuality of conscious experience is a problem in itself, which is always posed anew and never gets solved (see the article in bottom: being and becoming). In our basic being there is always a basic assumption or notion which is then the basis for development of our world-description, think about the Euclidean Greek culture, the assumption that the cosmos is contained. In the classical world in was Pythagoras to conceive number scientifically as the the principal of world order, in that way he founded a religion.

The object of mathematics can be defined. Pythagoras had a different object that the one of Descartes, the classical mathematics and western are different in their objective. The classics notion of a line as “length without breadth”. The classical knew only a limited and tangible units, only “natural” (positive and whole) numbers which is just a undistinguished part in the midst of the hyper complex western system.

Within the Greek spirit there is no room for irrational numbers, they are un-realizable, They did not connect to their daily reality. The notion of number is different than a magnitude. When the Greek mind encountered irrational numbers which was alien to their spirit, those numbers were feared as a secret, its origin too dangerous to be unveiled. Read the legend of Hippasus, the Pythagorean cult which prosecuted to alien notions of other people to their death.

Therefore the Classical is full with metaphysical fear concerning the collapse of the sense-comprehensible notion. Mystical as it may sound to you, this fear is, and was, justified because it is the ending of that culture with its specific notion of the world, their knowledge and art might seem present to us in museums or history lessons, but the key of understanding these is forever lost, the Greek cosmos is collapsed into unknown primitive abyss. The same numbers we ‘know’ today, for the Greeks held high ethical significance of its limitations with its contract between measure and immeasurable. This is only one of the ways context can change the significance of an allegedly ‘known’ object.

Time – the boundaries of mind & soul

Time is a psychological phenomenon in its essence. For us, time comprises the past, present and future. The past is the facts, the undo-able, our memory, sense of history. The present is the lack of duration, the flow, constant changing. The future is the unknown.
Time is contained only within the duration of our lives, in which the subject goes through a defined process of growth, its own time correspondences only partially with the universe time.

The element of direction is inherit in all “becoming” is felt owing to its inexorable irreversibly to be something alien and hostile. it is something beyond comprehensions, this transformation of future into past.

Science cannot explain time as a concept, the questions about the nature of time scientifically remains unanswered (see link to article in the end). For a primitive man time can have no meaning, it is a discovery that is made only by thinking (an notion of direction that thought provides). We measure time according to the rhythm and frequency of the universe (planetary or quantum).

The principle of reasonable order that we bear within ourselves, and would impress as the seal of our powers upon everything that we touch.
Goethe

Time does not answer fully to science and philosophy because mechanically it is something not open for description, an eye that cannot see itself.
A system consists of truths, history rests on facts, Nature stands beyond all time, its mark is extension, it is without directional quality.

In the waking consciousness, becoming and become struggle for control of the world picture (Classical: Plato and Aristoteles Western :Kant and Goethe). Organic and mechanic, of life and death.

Makrokosmos

In symbolism we find meaning that is sometimes not possible to define by means of reason (in that sense refer to J.G.Jung). The soul and the world are considered Poles of actuality. Actuality – the world in relation to a soul, for every individual the projected of the directed upon the domain of the Extended, the proper mirroring itself on the alien. One’s actuality then signifies oneself, by acts both creative and unconscious . There is for every individual an actual singular world. Macrocosm is this idea, actuality as the sum total of all symbols in relation to one soul. Language and therefore culture contain groups of similar Macrocosms, relation between different cultures (symbolically) is strictly limited.

Death is closely related to space, man is the only being that knows death, and with death birth. The awakening of inner life begins with the acknowledgement of death, a corpse with no life is only space and matter, with it comes the acknowledgment of the alien extended world and the contrast of the inner life of the individual being. Higher thought originates as meditation upon death, every religion, every scientific investigation, every philosophy proceeds from it. Against our sensation there is more than resistance and impression – also expression. Expression is the form of contemplation, the third dimension, which every culture perceives differently, the world built out of different elements (nature as a function of the particular culture).

Soul image & Life feeling

Every culture contains the elements of the soul which are deities of an inner mythology. God is the power present in the universe which takes many shapes. In Western culture is represented in the word ‘Will’, it referenced in all cultures the the power that moves all that is with the domain of the soul. In science as substitution for religion we have double myth of concepts : physics and psychology. The concepts : Force, mass, will, passion rest not on objective experience but on a life-feeling. Darwinism is a shallow formulation of that feeling : Nature is responsible for the order of things. Nature affects selection, produces and destroys, The world feeling in essence did not change. The Classical gods are bodies among other bodies, they are subjected to a higher order. The Faustian, will in its soul-image, is a man with character and depth, personality, the relation of living is doing. mankind as an active fighting progressing whole , active fighting and victorious being. Every ordered complexity of a chaotic world is possible only in its mind.

In the Greek tragedy we find suffering as present motive (the way to knowledge), the grandeur of human endurance, the attitude, not the hero, the will-less patient whose somatic existence is gratuitously , without a reason, destroyed. The Faustian hero is the doer whose will surges and breaks against the resistance of alien power or daemons his own breast. The mode of existence of the two type are utterly different. The Western is opposite to the Classical in its effect, It does not deliver us from dead-weight pressure of events, but evokes active dynamic elements in us, stings us, stimulates us. It awakens the primary feeling of an energetic human being, the fierceness and the joy of tension, danger, violent deed, victory, crime the triumph of overcoming and destroying, that is the Shakespearean effect. The opposite of the three unities (place, time, action) have been achieved, again something that would not imagined possible for the Classical soul.

For Classical soul (for example of the Attic culture / Athens) every citizen belonged to the culture, the distinction of deep and shallow which is so decisively important for us, did not exist at all. For us popular and shallow are synonymous – in art as in science, but for the classical man it was not so.

One of the characteristics of Faustian culture that is has turned away from the things that the man in the street can understand. It is not only art but also science that works in the same way : symbols, will-to-infinity and directional energy, specific notions that can only acquired through long study, its nature to go to depth does not allow it to be available for everyone. The property of actuality is transferred from contents to space – the space trough which alone things are. Exploring space, the unknown, takes courage, discipleship and preparation, something that the common man does not posses. While the Classical man define anything outside his polis alien (barbaric), the Western is limitless, space and his will are open to exploration, nothing is home. The Soul-myth is called Will, Force and Deed, ego habeo factum.

Nietzsche formulated the dynamic atheism on the basis that “god is dead”, and a Classical philosopher would have expressed the static and Euclidian by saying that the “gods who dwell in the holy places are dead”, the one indicating that boundless space has / the other that countless bodies have, become godless. But dead space and dead things are the “facts” of physics. The atheist is unable to experience any difference between the Nautre-picture of physics and that of religion. Language with a fine feeling, distinguishes wisdom and intelligence – the early and the later, the rural and the megalopolitan condition of the soul.

Western morale

All cultures have their own morals, but the Western implies something different. Western is characterized in the way that Everyone demands something of the rest, “thou shalt”. That was not the case of other cultures (inc. the Classical). Western Moral is then a claim to general and permanent validity. That is only the expression of direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. He who thinks or teaches “otherwise”, is sinful, a back-slider, a fore, and he is fought down without mercy. Therefore we have the problem Western liberalism, its root in contradiction: we can’t promote tolerance while fighting the non-tolerant, and to think other cultures should promote Western values is just Imperialism in disguise.

One tolerates something either because it seems to have some relation to what according to one’s experience is the divine or else because one is no longer capable of such experience and is indifferent

Buddha suggests ‘take or leave’ and Epicurus offers advice, although both are high morale, neither contains the will-element. Promoting every morale for “mankind” means also attacking the non- compliant rest of “mankind”. These notions come to mind a-priori, not consciously. Morale is an expression of a world-feeling, a characteristic, a style of thought. There are as many morals as cultures and it is self contained within that culture, every culture has its own standards and there is no general moral of humanity. It is a datum, fundamentally unalterable, an inward necessity. The world (as we might well know from observing what is not human) is blind to morals, and so are the primitive and infant from of existence, and there is also the case “moralinfrei”, transcendence.

The care for those who are with us, which was typical of the Classical age (A body among bodies), does not belong to the Western, it pervades the feeling of our time. Between the morale one has and the one he thinks one has, there is a relation which is very obscure and very unsteady. psychology cannot help with this one, the text of conviction is never a test of its reality, for man is rarely conscious of his own believes. The Spanish Grandezza, French grandeur, Hellenic ἀρετή (arete), these have completely different aims.

Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. It is the beginning of Civilization (which is culture at a certain stage) it remolds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them, practices them in a different way. It creates no more, just reinterpretation, here negativeness find place because of the character of inheritance of big actualities. Apollonian soul began to end with Socrates being the spiritual father of the Stoa leading to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the old Classical went through Transvaluation. The same case goes for Brahman life, Vendata and Buddha, ethical socialism (in the current shape of liberal democracy).

Rousseau is the ancestor of this socialism, standing side by side with Socrates and Buddha, as representative spokesman of a great Civilization. “Return to the state of Nature” and rejection of all great culture-forms and all significant conventions and practical rationalism, are all evidence. Each of the three buried a millennium of spiritual depth. Receiving the gospel, the city intelligentsia whose “pure” reason and lack of spirituality (organic notion), was tired from late culture and longed to be free it and its authoritative form, with no connection to its symbolic forms. Culture was annihilated by dialectic. Rousseau was a nihilist and so Socrates and Buddha. It is a condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in its full. Culture man lives inwards, Civilization man outwards in space and amongst bodies and “facts”. That which one feels as Destiny the other understands as linkage of causes and effects, and therefore he is a materialist.

Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a “natural law ” is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men conceive of the State as an “order of society” which not only can be but must be altered – then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture-landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using up.

This is a diagnose of a nihilistic mind set – in the sense of production of value, of cultural sustainability. Morale becomes a problem for us, because we no longer accept what was obvious for Kant or for Plato, The categorical Imperative which for Kant was a basic instinct. Zeno and Schopenhauer tried to squeeze this into form, what was no longer anchored into instinct, the civilized ethics are no longer the reflection of Life but the reflection of Knowledge upon life. The need of a practical morale for the governance of a Life that can no longer govern itself. Instead of world-systems with formal ethics which occupied a very modest place, we get “moral philosophy” with metaphysics as background. The enthusiasm of epistemology gave its way to hard practical need. Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type. In Spengler’s eyes these can be looked upon as a spiritual extinction, the dying of a culture.

The Nihilism of the West comes in form in art in the act of shattering of the ideals of yesterday. Ibsen, Nietzsche, Marx or Wagner, all contributed for the destruction of old ideal of religion, art and political forms. The old ideals become irrelevant.

It is life, not the individual that is consciousness.

In the case of Socialism (or “world-improvement”), its supporters regard it as the form of the future and its opponents see it a sign of downfall, both can be equally right. As a Faustian ideal its being completely misunderstood, treated as the sum of one’s rights instead of one’s duties, an abolition instead of an intensification of the Kantian Imperative.
The trivial and superficial tendency towards ideals of “welfare”, “freedom”, “humanity”, the doctrine of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” are mere negation of the Faustian ethic. Notice the big difference from the classical ethics in which happiness was the actual sum and substance of it.

In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism in not a system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will to power. any other reading of it is illusory. The Stoic takes the world as he find it, but the Socialist wants to organize and recast it in form and substance, to fill it with his own spirit, the Stoic adapts himself, the Socialist commands. He would have the whole world take the shape he desires.

The idea of the Critique of Pure Reason is transferred into the ethical field. The ultimate meaning of the Categorical Imperative which expresses in political, social and economic matters is to become by you will the law for all. the tyrannical tendency is not absent from even the shallowest phenomena of the time.

On this specific topic Spengler is criticizing Nietzsche. In regards to what should be destroyed and what should be transvalued : Nietzsche’s criticism of decadence is unanswerable, but there is no concrete suggestion for transvaluation, at least not (only) the superman.
From Rousseau onward, the Faustian man has nothing to hope for (pertaining the grand style of life). The northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities. There is only form without content left, everything is mannerism.

And then Spengler comes to a very gloomy point which might become something very constructive in the end, but will take courage:
It is the illusion of meaning, and object, Ibsen called it the lie of life, even in the highest phenomena, all the hectic zeal is the despairing self-deception of a soul that may not and can not rest. This is a tragic situation, the inversion of the Hamlet motive. The will of the soul needs an object for its longing, as long as the object of longing is form and not content, it is nihilism. Modern Ethics, socialism, politics, economy, are form with no content, mechanical and not organic, because it forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implication, to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity of its own existence.

Modern interpretation of Existentialism (such as Camus) might try to reverse the will’s longing for an object with the object being longing, that idea expresses itself in post-modernism and in Camu’s myth of Sisyphus.

The fate of democracy

Our mass is “in-form”, a collectivity of obedience, as an object for a subject. Freedom is, as always, purely negative. It consists in the repudiation of tradition, dynasty, Caliphate; but the executive power passes, at once and undiminished, from these institutions to new forces – party leaders, dictators, presidents, prophets and their adherents – towards which the multitude continues to be unconditionally the passive object. By games and presents; by threats and blows; but, above all, by money.

The greater became the wealth which was capable of concentration in the hands of individuals, the more the fight for political power developed into a question of money.

It would be wrong to speak about corruption. It is not a matter of degeneracy, it is the democratic ethos itself that is foredoomed of necessity to take such forms when it reaches maturity. Under the bombardment of the media, hardly anyone can attain to this inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has accomplished its task so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.

What is the truth ? For the multitude that which it continually reads and hears.

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect. But just because the illusion that actuality can allows itself to be improved by the ideas of any Zeno or Marx has fled away; because men have learned that in the realm of reality one power-will can be overthrown only by another.

Politics and trade in developed form – the art of achieving material success over an opponent by means of intellectual superiority – are both a replacement of war by other means.

Nature Knowledge

The final aim of Natural Science is to discover the motions underlying all changes, and the motive forces thereof; that is, to resolve itself into Mechanics
Helmholtz, lecture, 1869

The resolution into mechanics means to reference of all qualitative impression to fixed quantitative base-values. That is the extended, phenomenon of space, change of place, motion. It is the tendency of all Western mechanics towards an intellectual conquest by measurement.
There is another ‘picture’, of spirit, which is consistent in the highest degree, no practical results and discoveries can prove anything as to the “truth” of the theory, the picture, θεωρία (image, vision, nature law becomes formula).

Modern physics allows us to work with Nature as with a machine, through form, name and numbers, as such it has exact defined end. History is made up from the destinies and incidents in the lives of men and physics, being points of object, methods and results, are an expression and actualization of culture. Culture is an organic and evolving element, its results (also physics) are a symbol, discoveries are of mythic nature.

Language can give form to an yet unexpressed idea, without form the idea itself is of mythical nature. Every idea, for example ‘force’ has two expressions, form and content, the form is physics, the content is mythic or religious, the fact of extended space, which is life and consciousnesses itself, every possibility and direction.
The mythic is permanent and in essence not changing, that is what we share as humans, but it take many forms of expression, in art in culture, specific for every culture. Its relevance and application comes through unpractical and practical use, art and physics for example, both an expression of the same.

Numbers and formulas by themselves are useless and meaningless unless one is able mentally to connect the letters with particular words and symbolism. Every physical observation is so constituted that it proves the basis of a certain number of imaged presupposition. Again the idea of the picture, θεωρία, theory, its nature appear to be closer to the Greek word even today, because some of our assumptions are still Greek in nature, still human in nature, too human – which means that the world can only take a human form for us, organic and mechanic, spiritual or physical, faith and knowledge are both human to the same degree. We should consider that fact of faith being older than knowledge, resulting in the term myth, which connects to a spiritual need that might be or not be realized by knowledge or facts. In a way faith dominates all condition of knowing, the form and expression of the spiritual can always alter (it is theories and not pure numbers that support all natural sciences, see the comparison of Western with Greek).
We can never set up “the Truth” in the place of “anthropomorphic” conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist at all. Every idea that is possible at all is a mirror of the being of its author.

Force is the mechanical nature picture of western man what will is to his soul-picture and infinite godhead in his world-picture. The primary ideas of this physics stood firm long before the first physicist was born, for they lay in the earliest religious world-consciousness of our culture. Every proof is set forth in a Western language and every experiment conducted by a western mind presupposes itself. in every problem, the enunciation contains the proof in germ. The method of science is science itself.

Experience means to us an activity of the intellect, which does not resignedly confine itself to receiving, acknowledging and arranging momentary and purely present impressions, but seeks them out and calls them up in order to overcome them in their sensuous presence and to bring them into an unbounded unity in which their sensuous discreteness is dissolved. Experience in our sense possesses the tendency from particular to infinite. And for that very reason it is in contradiction with the feeling of the classical science. What for us is the way to acquire experience is for the Greek the way to lose it. And therefor they he kept from the drastic method of experiment.

Our (Western) exact natural science is the imperative, the Classical is θεωρία (theory) in the literal sense, the result of passive contemplatives.

the most important things for us to learn is that for both Western and Greek science, the object of analysis is not the world, but rather our perception of the world, because that is what the word is for us. Different cultures come up with different sciences only because every culture has its own perception, and therefore its own world and its own investigations. Every culture, every language has the power to create a whole universe, science and world-feeling, through knowledge, contemplation and creativity.

Why questions of time cannot be explained rationally ?

It can be that time only exists within the living organism, meaning not experienced but experience itself (the Kantian notion). It means that the universe is lacking time and order, it is only the human consciousness that provide us with an illusion or notion of time and therefore causality. This notion, although living in a post-Kantian time, is still hard to grasp. It is still the basic of our modern world perspective.

Direction becomes a mystery is the shape of time. Becoming is it’s organic name, or life, the present, in which the realization of the possible takes place. fulfillment is the name for a lively expression of an idea.

where there are no facts, sentiment rules

The problem of motion

While life looks on space as something functionally belonging to itself, intellect looks upon life as something in space. Since motion always contains time or direction, the organic element is present and does not subject itself to dissection (as expressed in Zeno’s paradoxes). Consciousness cannot direct intellect to analyse itself is the essence of every paradox (not separating organics and mechanics).

From to intellect point of view, life is in reverse, history is eternally becoming and therefore its direction is the future, the words: space, the extended, the known is become and therefore belongs to the past. Destiny carries aim, cause and effect is turned into past. It is the intellect, existing within organic life, looking at the past as a mechanical chain of cause-and-effect. In this way history becomes a length, a quantity. It is a problematic process because history as a process of life should be experienced forward and not backward, otherwise we are looking at something which is not living history. It is not possible to live backward only forward.

The form world of physics extends just as far as the cognate form-world of number and notion extend. The is not an cannot be the slightest relation of any sort between mathematical number and time, yet denied by the fact of motion in the picture of the world-around. Being and motion are incompatible, motion is only “apparent”, as direction an illusion of our cognition, a consequence of splitting time to past, present and future. Past in the known, present is duration (timelessness), and future is possibility and prediction. It is the unsolvable problem of the Eleatics (pre-Socratic, Parmenides) , but also for modern science (see article in link below, being and becoming).

The words “time” and “destiny” touches life in its deepest depths, although physics, the observing reason, must separate them. The livingly-experienced is mentally emancipated from the act of the observers and therefore from the become, dead, inorganic, rigid, object which is open to mathematical treatment. In other words rational analysis can only refer to a duration, timelessness, frozen, inorganic state. Movement is a property of the Organic living, becoming.

Physics is the complete and simple description of motions
Kirchhoff

Although that was indeed the subject of physics, it was always about the motion of the picture and not the motion in the picture. In physics, motion is the metaphysical something that which gives rise to the consciousness of a succession. For the organic motion and direction also contain properties of aging and change of coincidences.

The Greek physics are therefore static, the totality of world impressions are present-focus for the lack of historic consciousness. Western history is dynamic, of constant change, not fixed cosmology, going towards entropy.
In the Classical science the Eleatics did not think about Nature as motion and had the logical view that thinking is a being, considered known and extended identical, knowledge and becoming therefore irreconcilable. This view cannot be refuted. The Apollonian soul was superior to logical difficulties. For the Faustian West nature is necessarily visible only in the form of a contrapuntal dynamic casualty.

Relation to music & art

Music is a symbolic expression of a world feeling. Arts are living units, therefore incapable of being dissected, not open for rational analysis. Style is inaccessible to art-reason, it is a destiny. The full range of meaning of an artwork is accessible only for an individual of that epoch, and that culture, meaning its almost impossible to grasp the essence of the Classical or Magian from the Western point of view, museum descriptions of art are then only a lesson in casual history of events.

The last of the Faustian arts died in Tristan. this work is the giant keystone of Western music. The intensity and force of expression and range of it was all caught in the music, never have been thought to possible to catch. Ostensibly a return to the elemental, to nature, as against contemplation-painting and abstract music, this art really signifies a concession to the barbarism of the megalopolis, the beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality and refinement. As a step, it is necessarily the last step. An artificial art has no further organic future, it is the mark of the end. It is the actualization of all its inward possibilities, the fulfilled mission with the course of its culture. Within the framework of Western culture every art after Wagner is a pursuit of illusions of artistic progress. In contemporary culture art does not have such high degree of meaning, it does not have the power to make a revolution, art in contemporary culture in fun, is pop culture, sellout, panem et circenses. We advance technically but not meaningfully, width with no depth, we cannot generate new authentic value which will make us non-(descending)-western. But we do have a very wide variety of expressions, mannerism.

When looking for the relation between the world-feeling and its expression in music one can apply the same terms that related to numbers – classical magnitude and proportion compared with western relation and function. therefore we find in classical art form the proportion ordering the parts, enlargement and reduction of scale. in the domain of western function the idea of transformation of groups plays a critical role in modern composition theory and allow certain expression.

There is a strong link between the advances is math and the development of music theory and application, Fermat, Descartes, Newton and Leibniz are closely related to Carissimi, Viadana, Monteverde, Corelli, Handel and Bach.

Art can revert from Macrocosm to Microcosm and represent man himself, in an immense aggregate of symbols, the essence of man and the signification of his being. While the Apollonian Euclidean felt the empirical visible body as the complete expression of its own way of being, the Faustian, wandering far away, found expression not in person (σῶμα) but in personality, character.

The idea of an invisible God is the highest expression of human transcendence. Where the boundaries of the light world are, lies the beyond. Music is the only art whose means lie outside the light world. Hence it can take us beyond the tyranny of light… The development of language brought about the emancipation of understanding from sensation… detached from sensation is called thought.

Death, Salvation, Fulfillment

Walking consciousness is synonym with the existence of oppositions. This absurd state of constant unresolved tension, rest and movement, duration and change, become and becoming, is beyond understanding. The will to know breaks down on the problem of motion, though it remains the center of gravity of higher thought.

We do not just live, we also know about living. Death appears, only through language, as the great enigma of the light world. Only then life becomes the short span between birth and death. To death, as the common lot of every human being born into the light, adhere the ideas of guilt and punishment, of existence as penance of a new life beyond the world of this light, and of a salvation that makes an end of the death-fear. In the knowledge death is originated that world outlook which we possess as being men and not beats.

Spengler does not believe in an ultimate aim of mankind, and goes against the life of no goal. Instead, his view is that man can act only historically (in Destiny, organically). While the basic human existence is zoological outside Culture, language, value and meaning, it is only the man of culture that could have a destiny to fulfill, A full march towards self-fulfillment. Before this, after this, outside this, man is historyless.

In the history of higher men, one find the struggle to prevail, even unconsciously, for the actualization of the spiritual, a translation of an idea into a living historical form. Outside the cultural growth, all that remains is the struggle for mere power for animal advantage per se, zoological up and down.

Is this the end ? whats next ?

One can overcome fear by means of understanding itself. One can gain power by finding the courage to explore the unknown. That is what the will-for-power is for the man of high-culture.

In order to continue where Spengler left off we would have to see Spengler’s views as limited by his own tradition, he himself promoted that idea. Because of how human rationality works, through language, we will be always able to create value and a have a meaningful existence, though materialism and nihilism seems our biggest threat. While Spengler’s ideas are useful as a way of looking at the past, they will only allow a way towards the future if one can find a creative way to transcend above them, find a way towards a new paradigm.

Links :

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Being and Becoming in Modern Physics :
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-bebecome/