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Table of Contents

Introductory Note I

The Argument (Introduction and Summary) Page 1

History - as - Intuition (Spengler)

<table><tr><td>Introduction</td><td>" 31</td></tr><tr><td>Metaphysics</td><td>" 35</td></tr><tr><td>The Development of the Culture</td><td>" 45</td></tr><tr><td>The Souls of the Culture</td><td>" 62</td></tr><tr><td>Politics, Economics, The Machine</td><td>" 90</td></tr><tr><td>Conclusions</td><td>" 112</td></tr></table>

History -as-an- Empirical-Science (Toynbee)

<table><tr><td>Introduction</td><td>" 132</td></tr><tr><td>Metaphysic</td><td>" 136</td></tr><tr><td>The Nature and Genesis of Civilizations</td><td>" 145</td></tr><tr><td>The Growth of Civilizations</td><td>" 165</td></tr><tr><td>The Breakdown of Civilizations</td><td>" 183</td></tr><tr><td>Schism in the Body Social</td><td>" 198</td></tr><tr><td>Schism in the Soul</td><td>" 212</td></tr><tr><td>Conclusions</td><td>" 234</td></tr></table>

History and Man's Experience of Morality (Kant)

<table><tr><td>The Problem of Freedom and Necessity in the Philosophies preceding Kant</td><td>Page 260</td></tr><tr><td>Metaphysic</td><td>" 272</td></tr><tr><td>Moral Philosophy</td><td>" 277</td></tr><tr><td>The Philosophy of History Derived from the Categorical Imperative</td><td>289</td></tr><tr><td>The Philosophy of History Conceived as a Teleological System</td><td>Page 300</td></tr></table>

The Sense of Responsibility

<table><tr><td>Introduction</td><td>Page 323</td></tr><tr><td>Freedom and Necessity Reconciled - A Clue from Poetry</td><td>" 330</td></tr></table>

Appendix

<table><tr><td>Introduction</td><td>Page 349</td></tr><tr><td>Assertional Logic</td><td>" 352</td></tr><tr><td>Pre-Assertional Logic</td><td>" 366</td></tr><tr><td>The Theory of Systems</td><td>" 371</td></tr></table>

Bibliography

Page 384

## Introductory Note.

An introduction to an undergraduate honor thesis may seem presumptuous, but I believe that its inordinate length and unorthodox method require an explanation. As a general reason, the length is due to the fact that I did not realize the implications of the subject when I started to work on the thesis. As it grew, I have made several efforts to cut it down, such as omitting the chapters I had written on Hegel and Schweitzer. Since this still did not succeed in reducing this thesis to a more manageable size I have pointed out, at the end of this introductory note, those portions which I believe to be the nucleus of my analysis and which may be considered my honor thesis.

The methodology results from my dissatisfaction with the critical treatments of Spengler, and to a lesser degree, of Toynbee. I had the impression that merely analytical criticism of Spengler falsifies the real essence of his philosophy. Just as in the case of Nietzsche, part of Spengler's impact resides in the poetic imaginativeness of his descriptions. I have therefore made a conscious effort in my expository passages to capture as much as possible of Spengler's style. This has entailed rather lengthy quotations and in one or two places close reliance on the text. To present Spengler's philosophy as fairly as possible I have kept such clauses as "Spengler argues", "according to Spengler" etc. to a minimum. The expository passages are to be understood as containing Spengler's arguments. My comments are concentrated in discussions at the end of each section. My basic analysis is to be found in my "Conclusions" on the Chapter, "History - as - Intuition".

-II-

I have followed essentially the same methodology with
Toynbee. Here too purely analytical criticism falsifies the
stately empirical approach. I have discussed each of Toynbee's
main headings at sufficient length to indicate his method, though,
except for a very few instances, I have omitted all his illustra-
tions. Again, all my comments are contained in an introductory
paragraph and in a concluding section to each heading. Again,
my fundamental criticisms are to be found under the title "Con-
clusions" at the end of the Chapter "History-as-an-Empirical
Science".

In each case the expository passages are preceded by a
discussion of the author's metaphysical assumptions, to explain
their structuring effect on the subsequent philosophy.

Since many excellent treatments of Kant's philosophy
exist, my discussion of his philosophy is orthodox. My last
Chapter is intended to explain the general position from which
I approached the philosophy of history. Needless to say, this
is a still tentative view-point.

The Appendix was written after listening to a seminar
paper by a logical positivist, in order to clarify my own thought
on the meaning of "meaning, and also to indicate what criteria of
validity logic offers to philosophy. It is based on a course with
Prof. Henry Scheffer and also personal consultations. The philo-
sophical interpretation of the logical systems is my own.

Though this analysis was written as a unit, the reader

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with necessity. The British sceptics, particularly Hume, submitted these notions to rigorous criticism and denied necessity as well as purposiveness. They argued that perception involves the impact of empirical entities on a wax-like mind, whose sensations of pleasure are largely passive, whose concept of necessity describe a constant conjunction and to which freedom is meaningless.¹ The limits of thought can not be established by thought, however. Hume's scepticism caused him to abandon philosophy while still a young man and Descartes was forced to invoke God as a guarantor of external reality with the aid of the very faculty the accuracy of which he had seriously questioned.²

Kant realized that only an inward experience can transcend the inexorability of completed action. He "limited knowledge to made room for belief." He affirmed that the reality that is subject to the laws of causality is given by sensuous experience and exhausted in the phenomenal world. But beyond that man has a transcendental experience of freedom which elevates him above the realm of necessity into a higher world-order which conditions all appearances. Freedom is an inward state, an attitude that accompanies all action. This disproves Hume's assertion that nothing can be definitely known, since one can always imagine the opposite of any thought. Our experience of freedom testifies to a fact of existence which no thought-process can deny and for the

1. See post. Ch. "History and Man's Experience of Morality."

2. See post. for full discussion Ch. "History and Man's Experience of Morality."

demonstration of which Descartes' cogito ergo sum was not really
necessary. Whatever conception one may form about the inevit-
ability of actions, their accomplishment occurred with an inward
conjunction of choice. Freedom is the causality that motivates
man," he conceives a man having no freedom is impossible except
as a man deprived of life," says Tolstoy.

"What is the solution to the paradox of irrevocable action accomplished with the conviction of choice? How can we reconcile the experience of freedom with our knowledge that our intentions so frequently issue forth into totally incommensurate consequences? "What is the meaning of a causality that accomplishes itself under the mode of freedom?

The philosophy of history has addressed itself to these problems. It testifies to humanity's yearning to understand the fatedness of life, to a mystic drive for an absolute, to an attempt to give meaning to the basic questions of existence. For this reason the philosophy of history is indissolubly connected with metaphysics; it is indeed metaphysics of a very high order. The next

1. See post Ch. History and Man's Experience of Morality.

2. For this reason I have avoided the usual classification of philosophies of history into cyclical and progress theories. It seems to me, that a classification in terms of metaphysical assumptions presents wider possibilities. Moreover, the philosophers discussed do not lend themselves well to such a classification. Toynbee combines the cyclical and the progress concepts. Spengler is a cyclical philosopher in the sense of his tradition. Kant has a theory of progress, achieved by conflict which in its implications is very similar to Toynbee. (See post Ch. History and Man's Experience of Morality).

demonstration of which Descartes' cogito ergo sum was not really
i
necessary. Whatever conception one may form about the inevit-
ability of actions, their accomplishment occurred with an inward
conviction of choice. Freedom is the causality that motivates
man." To conceive a man having no freedom is impossible except
as a man deprived of life," says Tolstoy.

What is the solution to the paradox of irrevocable action
accomplished with the conviction of choice? How can we reconcile
the experience of freedom with our knowledge that our intentions
so frequently issue forth into totally incommensurate consequences?
What is the meaning of a causality that accomplishes itself under
the mode of freedom?

The philosophy of history has addressed itself to these problems. It testifies to humanity's yearning to understand the fatedness of life, to a mystic drive for an absolute, to an attempt to give meaning to the basic questions of existence. For this reason the philosophy of history is indissolubly connected with meta-physics; it is indeed metaphysics of a very high order. The next

1. See post Ch. History and Men's Experience of Morality.

2. For this reason I have avoided the usual classification of philosophies of history into cyclical and progress theories. It seems to me, that a classification in terms of metaphysical assumptions presents wider possibilities. Moreover, the philosophers discussed do not lend themselves well to such a classification. Toynbee combines the cyclical and the progress concepts. Spengler is a cyclical philosopher in Vico's tradition. Kant has a theory of progress, achieved by conflict which in its implications is very similar to Toynbee. (See post Ch. History and Man's Experience of Morality).

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section will examine whether history can in fact give an
answer to these problems.

2. Is There a Meaning to History?

1

History, according to Popper, has no meaning. It is
the chronicle of international crime and mass murder and takes
no account of the tears and suffering of mankind. It is up
to us, however, he states at a later point, to give meaning
to history by assisting the open society to triumph in its
eternal struggle with the closed society.

2

Aside from the inner contradiction of this argument, -
for if history has no meaning, the eternal conflict between
freedom and rationality against mysticism, historicism and
tyranny can not be its motif - the passage illustrates the
difficulty, and confusion, inherent in the word "meaning."
It implies: 1. History has no meaning.

2. History has a meaning, but that meaning is
unacceptable to Popper.

3. History has no meaning, but if freedom and rationality triumph, it will suddenly acquire content.

These implications contain the dilemma of the problem
of the meaning of history. Is history an open book, a set of
theorems that contains in itself all the aspirations of man-
kind, as well as the key to the world's purpose? Or does

1. Popper - The Open Society and its Enemies Vol. 2 p. 256.

2. Popper - Op.cit. Vol. 2 p. 264.

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history reveal a series of meaningless incidents, a challenge
for our nomative concepts, only through conformity to which
it can obtain significance? Is meaning, in short, an attri-
bute of reality or a metaphysical construction attendant on
our recognition of significance?

The logical positivists accept the former alternative.
Meaning results from verifying statements with empirical facts.
The researches of anthropologist have, however, dispelled the
hope that the meaning of assertions could be given a firmer
basis by making the physical world their criterion. It has been
demonstrated that each culture and to a certain extent each
individual constructs his own image of "reality", and that
"facts" are in no manner as absolute and unshakeable as assumed.
The history of modern physics moreover, has been a continuous
process of dissolving external reality and laying bare such
mysterious and incompatible prime data as energy that works
under the aspect of mass, as light that is demonstrably a wave,
but equally certainly contains all its physical properties in
an elemental particle, the photon.

Moreover, on this theory, as classical logic has well
realized, not only all value judgments, but all quality judg-
ments are meaningless. The difference between affirming an
object's worth, or its color, is a difference in achieving a

1. For full discussion of the concept of "meaning" see
   *Post Appendix A "The Concept of Meaning."*

-7-

consensus, but not of empirical verifiability.

Traditional logic, at any rate, was better aware of this problem. In its concepts each proposition had as its subject ultimate reality. A judgment, of which the proposition constitutes the expression in words, is the act of distinguishing a particular element, the predicate, in the being of a subject that could not be thought of unless it contained some other than the predicated character. The distinguishing characteristic of a judgment is its truth or falsity. However, and this is the cardinal point, only true judgments matter, for unless a man says what he does not really think he is affirming the truth of his assertion. All propositions, therefore, besides affirming or denying the predicate of a subject imply existence. Reality is thus implied by, not requisite for judgments.

The existential import theory of propositions presented too many difficulties, however. Though logicians could always argue that statements about square circles did not imply existence since they involved mutually exclusive terms, or contrast logical construction which only have a mode of being with real existence, the reconciliation of definitional reality and all possible judgments proved impossible.

1. Joseph - Introduction to logic - p. 166.

2. Russell - Principles of Mathematics - p. 449.

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1. Sentential logic abandoned the concept of the existential import of propositions. Its logical primitive is a sentence, which exhibits but a grouping together of symbols which in their general characteristics represent but empirical entities. Only by being brought into relation with other physical objects, facts, do these sentences acquire meaning. Since a determination of truth and falsity obviously does not precede every statement, sentential logic was forced to invoke another predicate of propositions, truth-weight. This, however, is a purely psychological relation.

But even this theory stumbled on the problem of just what constituted a fact and on the difficulty of reconciling truth-value and weight. Russell, in his later writings, and Prof. Scheffer, have achieved a formulation which attempts to give the greatest possibility of determining the essence of meaning. Statements become replies to pure hypotheses which, moreover have to be endorsed by the proper criterion. The statement "Scott is the author of Waverly" is the affirmative answer, empirically endorsed, to the questions:

1. Did at least one man write Waverly?

2. Did only one man write Waverly?

3. Was this man Scott?

1. Based on Reichenbach "Experience and Prediction."

2. Prof. Scheffer has not published his theory. (See Preface).

The range of meaningful propositions is, however, not
exhausted by the empirical realm. Proper criteria can be
obtained for value theorems or esthetic judgments. This
theory recognizes the variability of metaphysical assumptions
as a condition of meaning. Meaning becomes the function of
three factors: the logical expressed in the most precise
formulation of the hypothesis, the psychological inherent in
the act of judging, the philosophical expressed in the endorse-
ment. Universality depends on the consensus which this as-
cription of meaning enjoys and not in the first instance on
its empirical verifiability.

Thus meaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical
context. Just as every man in a certain sense creates his
picture of the world, just as the scientist can find in nature
only what he puts in it in the formulation of his hypothesis,
just as every question determines at least the range of answers,
so history does not exhibit the same portent to everybody but
yields only the meanings inherent in the nature of our query.
Therefore, too, the philosophy of history is inseparable
from metaphysics, and involves a deep awareness of the mysteries

1. The endorsement in turn is composed of a metaphysical (the criterion) and an epistemological (the assertion, not the judgment of truth and falsity) element. See post - Appendix - The Concept of Meaning.

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and possibilities not only of nature but of human nature.
In the reaction of the various thinkers to the problems of
human necessity and human freedom, in their capacity to ex-
perience depths inaccessible to reason alone, lies the answer
to the meaning of history. Therefore Popper's statement that
history presents merely a chronicle of crime and murder,
with no awareness of the heartbreak of humanity, reveals his
normative concepts but does not represent a necessary attri-
bute of events. That other levels of meaning exist, is
shown by Dostojevski and Schwalitzer, Homer and Shakespeare
to whom history was a deeply felt experience of transcen-
dental import.

Who is right then? Is history the self-realization of
the spirit of freedom as Hegel held? Or does it represent
the growth and decline of organic cultures, their essence a
mystery, their moving force longing and their manifestation
power as Spengler argued? Is there a deeper purpose in all
this emergence and decay of civilizations, a realization of
salvation by faith as Toynbee implies? Does history amount
to no more than eternal recurrence, the stage for the Man who
surpasses himself of Nietzsche or does it reveal the drama of
a divine plan, gradually unfolding and culminating in universal

1. See on this point, Alfred Weber. Farewell to European History.

-11-

1
peace, as Kant asserts?

If meaning is the metaphysical context that ascribes
significance does this preclude differentia by which to judge
validity? These criteria exist, but they are not as obvious
as the logical positivists assumed.

Though the questions delimit the range of answers, we
can require the answers to be relevant to the problem. Though
each culture, and perhaps each individual interprets his data
in an intensely personal way, we can insist that the data be
adhered to. We can analyse internal consistency. On another
level we can judge the adequacy of the thinker's philosophical
assumptions by their scope, by their grasp of the totality of
life, instead of just its appearances. Newton sitting under
the apple tree might have correctly concluded that apples fall
when ripe. It is not a question of right or wrong, therefore,
but of depth and shallowness. It does not suffice to show
logically deduced theorems, as an absolute test of validity.
There must also exist a relation to the pervasiveness of an
inward experience which transcends phenomenal reality. For

1. Kent did not ascribe the self-realization of peace to a divine plan, but to a natural unfolding. The implication, just as in Spinoza, is however of a divine order in the cosmos.

2. See post: Appendix A. The Concepts of Meaning.

3. This, however, involves utilization of another set of assumptions. See post Appendix A - The Concepts of Meaning.

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though man is a thinking being, it does not follow that his
being exhausts itself in thinking. The ultimate mysteries
of life are perhaps not approachable by dissection, but may
require the poet's view who grasps the unity of life, which
is greater than any, however painstaking analysis of its
manifestations.

The Philosophy of History exhibits therefore, in its
metaphysical assumptions an attitude towards the basic
problems of existence. They reveal whether life is approached
with reverence and humility or with the assertive tool of a
reason that admits no reality outside itself. The resolution
of the dilemma of historical events serving as the condition
for a transcendental experience or reality exhausting itself
in phenomenal appearances discloses the ethical predispositions
of a personality, not a property of historical data.

1. See post Ch: The Sense of Responsibility.

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The Philosophy of History as a Reflection of Basic Attitudes

Birth is the beginning of death, life the process of mortality. Everything existing is modified by time, history exhibits the unfolding of growth, fulfillment and outward decay. Man strives for knowledge and having attained it can not bear it. All of literature contains an expression of this dilemma and of mankind's lament at the shortness of their lot. Hamlet becomes paralysed by knowledge, Achilles purchases it at the price of his death. Thus is the appearance of life but not necessarily its meaning.

The magic attitude towards life seeks to escape the transitoriness of its existence by conjuring its data. It attempts to find in history the necessary realization of its purposeful concepts, to be classified as attributes of events. But purpose represents the emanation of a metaphysical context not a necessary deduction from phenomena. No ethical value can be ascribed to the mere survival which history exhibits. For this reason the magic attitude develops a philosophy of eternal recurrence, as a condition for its cognition. Death becomes the result of fulfillment, life exhibits merely mortality, history represents a machine continually re-producing new manifestations of power. Values are, at best, a mode of causality. The mystery of life is limited by classifiable data; it exhausts itself in the riddle

of the first cause. The fact of occurrence reveals the only
criterion of inward fitness.

The prayerful attitude, on the other hand, experiences
life as a vision of reconciliation as one views a vast plain
from a mountain top when the haze obscures the country-
side and everything merges in a total impression of peace
and harmony. The inevitability exhibited to retrospection
attains a deeper meaning through a transcendental exper-
ience. The recognition of necessity becomes the condition
for the attainment of inward liberation. Resignation as to
the purposes of the universe serves as the first step to-
wards ethical activity and the realization ensues that the
meaning of history is not confined to its mere manifestations
and that no causal analysis can absolve Man from giving his
own content to his own existence.

The philosophies of Spengler, Toynbee and Kant contain
expressions of these attitudes in the quest for the appre-
hension of the meaning of history.

Spengler asserted that progress was not a category of
meaning for history. Life contains the problem of motion,

1. See discussion of Ch III "Toynbee."

2. See post - Ch - "The Sense of Responsibility." See also Schweitzer "The Philosophy of Civilization."

which results from the irrevocability of our actions and pre-
vents us in the eternal flux of things to ever observe that
which is in the act of observing itself, to ever causally
determine the inner connectedness of events. This directed-
ness of life is the source of the dual qualities of world-
longing and world-dread that arises from our consciousness
of mortality and our loneliness in a world in which we can
never grasp the total inner meaning of others. The riddle
of time opens up for Man, not to be classified as a category
of Reason as Kant attempted. Space is a conception, but
time represents a denotation for something inconceivable.
It expresses itself in the eternal becoming that is the
essence of Man and that attains pure being - pure space -
only at the moment of his death. Causality applies to the
stiff-forms of being; Destiny, fate dominate becoming.
Destiny answers the question of when causality of how. All
of life is permeated by an inner destiny that can never be
defined, history discloses a majestic unfolding that one
can only intuitively perceive, never causally classify. Exist-
ence constitutes a mystic relationship to the extended, es-
pecially accessible to the artist and the great statesman,
the mystery and the essence of which each culture perceives
in a different fashion.

And what does Spengler see with this intuitive vision?

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"A boundless mass of human Beings, flowing in a stream without banks; up-stream a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally unsolvable riddle, down-stream a future even so dark and timeless" - such is Spengler's view of human history. Over this surface there suddenly emerge the forms of the great cultures, organic beings with their own inner necessity and their deep logic of becoming. They go through all the stages of organic life, youth, maturity, decline and old age. Their youth is a period of infinite yearning in which every action is an augury of things to come and in which art, philosophy and politics unconsciously embody the cosmic best. In the gradual maturity of growth the mystery of life is dissipated, its problems answered, the questions thought through, the great form lost. Irrevocably over the bodies of a humanity that can no longer but accept, Caesarism approaches embodying itself in all the traditional trappings of life. Humanity flows into cities and amidst bread and circuses, amidst a repetition of cataclysmic wars the civilization petrifies and dies.

Therewith disappears not only its outward power, but also its inner meaning, of which each culture constructs its own

1. Spengler - The Decline of the West - Volume 1. p.105.

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life-symbol. Thus the Greek Gods died with the Classical soul and so the Western World has started on its slow but certain decline.

Spengler grasped the essential mystery of life that Kant found in the experience of freedom. He realized that every event represents not only an effect, but also an in-ward experience, the key to results incommensurable with our intentions. He affirmed that there are certain ultimate goals, which no hypothesis can prove, and no sophistry ever deny, expressed in such words as hope, love, beauty, luck, fear. These are the symbols that are veiled in mystery and no definition can get in touch with what feel when we utter these words. He knew that intuitive perception (the German erfuchlen) contains the key to some mysteries, just as causality reveals the solution to others.

Yet what does Spengler experience in history? An endless unfolding of a cosmic beat that expresses itself in the sole alternatives of subject and object, a vast succession of catastrophic upheavals of which power is not only the manifestation but the exclusive aim; a stimulus of blood that not only pulses through veins but must be shed and will be shed. He feels in short only what history also demonstrates phenomenally; he has not experienced the mysteries and thereby derived a level of transcendence, he has solved them and

-18-

1

will see in that solution history's only meaning.

"...Everything is determined," the devil tells Ivan Karamazoff "and humanity is settled forever. But as, owing to man's inveterate stupidity this can not come about for at least a thousand years, everyone who recognizes the truth even now may legitimately order his life as he pleases, on the new principles. In that sense 'all things are lawful' for him. What's more, even if this period never comes to pass, since there is anyway no God and no immortality, the new man may well become the man-god......"

This discloses the true implications of Spengler's position, the dilemma of which is expressed in this striking phrase: "In the world of history the Roman caused the Galilean to be crucified - that was his Destiny. In the other world (of Causality and morality) Rome was cast for perdition and the Cross became the pledge of Redemption - that was the Will of God." But the Cross on the hills of Jerusalem has long disappeared, the temple is in ruins, and the Roman legions are not even a memory. Yet on roadsides all over the world, in the souls of whole civilizations the Cross still stands. Is that all that is implied by destiny then, this death and that Cross?

1. This analysis holds true only if one interprets Spengler's philosophy as embodying norms of activity. Though this is the usual analysis it is by no means a necessary one. See post Ch. "Spengler". Ch: "The Sense of Responsibility."

2. Dostojewski - The Brothers Karamazoff - The Modern Library
Ed. p. 789.

3. Spengler - op.cit. Vol II. p. 116.

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Spengler had a vision of the world-as-experience but his conclusions do not fill its vastness. His poetic imagination became fascinated by the mere analysis of power-phenomena. His approach through intuitive perception reveals no more than the empirical analysis of Toynbee. The narrow confinement of meaning to the specific souls of each Culture seems arbitrary. There is meaning not only in the aspirations and symbols long dead, but in those that have been continued as the matrix for other civilizations. Though Spengler would reply that no Culture ever understands another in just its original connotation, he has failed to do justice to the impact the adoption of any alien form must of necessity exert on its user. The continuity of certain aspects of ethical, aesthetic and political problemation is as significant, as its cyclical fluctuation and should have been especially accessible to a vision of history-as-inward experience. Though Spengler's insights are challenging and his predictions perhaps correct, they do not exhaust the meaning of history.

Toynbee probed for this deeper meaning but looked for

1. For interdependence of two philosophers - see post.
   Ch: Toynbee.

2. See post. Ch. "Spengler."

empirical verification into history instead of into himself.
Accepting almost completely Spengler's methodology of com-
paring civilizations in their political occurrences, es
well as in their esthetic and theological manifestations,
he attempted to solve one problem to which Spengler never
addressed himself: What causes the emergence, out of form-
less humanity, of the genus culture?

Toynbee finds the answer in the doctrine of challenge
and response. Life presents a series of problems each a
challenge to undergo an ordeal. The initial successful re-
action constitutes the civilization's birth. Its growth is
not determined by an organic necessity but accomplishes it-
self through the response to successive challenges. Each
solution does not lead to an equilibrium but creates an over-
balance which in turn becomes a new challenge. Progress
ceases when societies fail to react to new stimuli.

A civilization grows through the leadership of a
creative minority which directs the majority, by mimesis,
a social drill, in the absence of direct inspiration. Yet
in every civilization mimesis eventually breaks down and the
creative minority becomes a dominant minority substituting force
for charm. The progressive differentiation of a civilization in-
to a dominant minority and an internal proletariat, which is in,
but not of, a given society, with creativity and meaning stunted,

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diverts energies into other - worldly pursuits, culminating in a transcendental knowledge of the unity of mankind through a universal church. By this act of faith the internal proletariat rescues the values of the collapsing society, which it embodies in the new civilization erected by the victorious external proletariat on the ruins of the old. The decay of civilizations has as its outward manifestations a universal state, in which the internal schism occurs, a period of contending states and a final apocalyp- tic emergence of a higher religion as the embodiment of the meaning of history.

Toynbee's theory of Challenge-and-Response is very similar to Hegel's dialectic. It consequently does not represent a negation of determinism but a description of its operation. The analysis of response almost exclusively in terms of challenges leads to a more refinement of the Environment theory. Since Toynbee attempts to verify theological assumptions by an empirical method, success becomes the only criterion of moral fitness. Survival reveals God's sanction to the elect. History's purpose is identical with man's aspirations.

The unsatisfactoriness of Toynbee's philosophy derives from his method. Though his conclusions give an intimation of transcendental experience, they are not supported by

1. In the Concept of Transfiguration.

-22-

his data. The attempt to find a causal realization of a
divine purpose in the manifestations of political power
results in such inconsistencies as the assertion that the
miracle of Christianity will save the West, despite the
collapse of every other civilization, and despite the
fact that in Toynbee's scheme universal churches appear
as concomitants of disintegration.

An inward experience cannot be proved by empirical
data, however. A philosophy of history without a profound
metaphysics will forever juxtapose surface data and can
never satisfy the totality of man's desire for meaning.

Spengler had a vision but did not press its implica-
tions. Yet his intuition of History-as-an Experience has
pointed the way to the solution of the enigma posed by
the experience of freedom and the knowledge of necessity.
Kant realized that the phenomenal world is explored in vain
for a proof of those ideas, "the possibilities of which no
human intelligence will ever fathom, but the truth of which
no sophistry, will ever wrest from the conviction of even the
commonest man." An analysis of historical phenomena reveals
but the inevitability inherent in completed action. Freedom,

1. Kant - Critique of Practical Reason. p. 231 (Kant's
Theory of Ethics) translated by T. K. Abbott.

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on the other hand, testifies to an act of self-transcendence
which overcomes the inexorability of events by infusing
them with its spirituality. The ultimate meaning of his-
tory-as of life- we can find only within ourselves.

What is the content of this transcendental experience?
This is not easy to express. When Socrates in "the Republic"
is asked to explain the "idea of the Good" he replies that
it can not be defined. Man can attain its vision only by
analogy, by studying those objects which contain some portion
of the ultimate reality, such as beauty, astronomy, mathematics.
Reflection may then lead to a sudden illumination which will
reveal the transcendental condition of all knowledge.

1. Dostojevski has been called "the great criminal." Yet Dostojevski's insight into the depths, his very ability to do so without flinching, rested on a saintly recognition of this transcendence, on an apprehension of the unity of mankind, expressed in the concept of love as the mystical bond of the universe.

2. "If you love everything" says Father Zosima "you will perceive the divine mystery of things" and "What grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with

1. Thomas Mann - Introduction to Short Novels of Dostojevski.

2. Dostojevski - The Brothers Karamasoff - p.383.

-24-

Other mysterious worlds. If that feeling is lost, the
heavenly growth will die away in you."

And "the Idiot" expresses the longing for a final
culmination of all destinies: "What difference can it make
if the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the
moment of sensation, when remembered and examined in the
healthy state, proves to be in the highest degree harmony
and beauty; and gives an unheard of and undreamed of feel-
ing of completion, of balance, of satisfaction and exult-
ant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life?"

There exist two levels of historical analysis then;
the empirical which classifies historical data by its pheno-
mental appearance and will perforce discover a cyclical
pattern and the ethical which views history as a key to
action. The doctrine of immanent necessity represents the
outsider's view of history, the conception of a person who
has not experienced the accomplishment of the event. No
representation of inevitability can, however, absolve the
individual from giving his own meaning to his own existence.
Necessity describes the past but freedom rules the future.
Purposes reveal a task to be achieved, an expression of
a soul, not an attribute of historical events. The ethical

basis of conduct depends on the transcendental experience
implied by Plato, Kant or Dostojevski.

Does this mean that mysticism contains the only key
to history, with reason but an obstacle to the ultimate de-
termination of the meaning of life? Kant has already answer-
ed the question. Morality derives from a mystic relation-
ship to the Infinite, a personal experience which elevates
man above the realm of necessity. This transcendental ex-
perience, however, enables reason to give rules of general
applicability. The categorical imperative is not a law in
the ordinary sense but a guide to an action postulated by
the experience of freedom. ² Kant's philosophy of history
is an emanation of this transcendence, a corollary to demon-
strate the kingdom of ends, where each man is both subject
and legislator, the highest concept achieved by the Western
mind of the dignity of the individual. ³

What is the relationship then of morality to a phil-
osophy of history? The magic attitude can find no such rela-
tion and must have recourse in the "man-god," and a determin-
istic psychology. Viewing the succession of growth and decay,

1. Kant does not really say this. But his postulation of God, freedom and immortality imply it. For the categorical imperative can only serve as a necessity of thought to a certain attitude. See post, "History and Man's Experience of Morality."

2. Indissolubly connected with a concept of limits see post; The Sense of Responsibility."

3. Only in the "Eternal Peace," not in the "idea for a Universal History," see post.

-26-

the wars, the destruction of values, one is tempted to agree with Hegel "only by consoling ourselves that it would not be otherwise can we accept these enormities." Life does seem just a process of dying, power does seem the criterion of values Trasymechus' question does appear unanswerable.

Yet out of this unfolding of seeming inevitability, there appears to emerge a feeling of humility, a recognition by man of his limits. "Know thyself" - was the motto of the oracle of Delphi. This was not meant psycho-analytically but implied: "Know that you are a man and not God." From the acceptance of limits derives the feeling of reverence which sees history not merely as an ordeal, or mankind as a tool but as a deep fulfillment. This feeling of humility, this acknowledgement that one is Man and not God, has as its full implication the concept of tolerance, the very basis for the dignity of the moral personality of the individual.

2

And yet a last dilemma emerges. Even though our contemplation of history may yield as its deepest meaning a

1. Hegel. The Philosophy of History. p. 35.

2. See post C1: The Sense of Responsibility.

-27-

feeling of limits as the basis of the ultimate moral per-
sonality of man, we are still faced with the fact that
no civilization has yet been permanent, no longing com-
pletely fulfilled, no answer ever gone unchallenged. It
is a difficult question and one must not reply dogmatically.

It is not easy to define what degree of perman-
ence what hope of apocalyptic fulfillment a value or an
attitude requires. Perhaps the experience of living
officers a clue. We know we must die and yet live with a
sense of eternit)', We can never prove that our action,
even a second ago, was really freely willed and yet
entertain no doubt of our freedom as each new situation
arises. Despite the limits of our life, we know that
our actions are irrevocable and that even inactivity
posits an absolute relation. We can live this dilemma
only by a measure of acceptance and despite the know-
ledge of the transitoriness of our lot, with a mode
of permanence.

This acceptance is not a kismetic resignation
but an active recognition of limits, which enables man
to face and transcend the majesty of the flow of history
and the directness of life. This is the profounder

1. For full development see post "The Sense of Responsibility."

## INTRODUCTION

Spengler denied that history worked towards purposes ascertainable by rational analysis. Progress is a causality imposed by the intellect, man's reaction to the dual qualities of world-longing and world-fear that are the result of his relation as a microcosm towards a macrocosm, his knowledge of limits, the certainty of death.

History, on the other hand, contains the problem of motion, the enigma of the ever-unique experience, the dilemma that forces man not only to observe the movement in a scene, but at the same time to participate in that movement. This impossibility of ever observing that which is in the process of observing itself, leads to the inner experience of a destiny idea, that is lived with absolute certainty by every man of the early culture and the beat of which is ever decreasing in the late Megalopolitan. Destiny represents eternal becoming, the intuitive answer to the question of when, the source and resolution of all of man's hope, the ultimate realization of inevitability.

Causality governs the become, with space as its representation. Becoming and being, Space and Time, Wisdom and Intellect, Freedom and Necessity constitute the true polarities of life, giving rise to man's interpretation of existence either under the aspect of the World-as-History or the World-as-Nature.

The ordering of history into ancient, medieval and modern, the Darwinian theory of evolution, the concept of

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infinite human progress become equally meaningless. Instead,
there emerge the shapes of the great cultures, as the carriers
of all of the meaning of humanity. Each is a product of the
soil in which it grew, awakening in a moment when the fear of
death and the longing for life synthesised into a picture of
the world from which emerges the Grand Myth, the symbol of all
the problems and all the potentialities inherent in the culture.
The inward representation of this image is the culture's soul.
Each culture has a determinate life-span before returning to
the biological ages that spawned it in the shape of civiliza-
tion, a state of absolute finishedness with the problems answered,
the style lost. Philosophy of history to Spengler is not a ques-
tion of industriously adding epochs to epochs, nor of the more
scientific collection of data. Data provides but the raw-
material, the condition for the higher experience, the physiog-
nomic tact, which illuminates the meaning of the symbols, and
explains the stages of development. The morphology of history
is Spengler's task, one eminently fit for a Faustian (Western)
1
Thinker. Cultures are compared in terms of their inner mean-
ing. Their contemporary epochs reveal functions of identical
stages in development.

Becoming and become, destiny and causality emerge as
man's problems at every stage and permeate all his creations,
art, the state, religion, economics and natural-science. And

1. See post.

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at the end of the road, while Caesarism rules in the Megalopolis
and man's dilemmas are thought through to steel-bright sharp-
ness, occurs a moment of realization that after all, the analy-
sis had not led to its goal, that man holds in his hand nothing
but the early myth in another shape. At this point the second
Religiousness comes over mankind and ideation in the grand
style ceases in all fields of activities. The civilization
petrifies, the period of fellah-existence as objects to a des-
tiny that is no longer experienced commences.

Since destiny is the representation of the will-to-live,
dependent on the self-assurance of its exponent, an analysis
of the elements of political success ensues, not in a norma-
tive framework of purposive realization but as an answer to
the pragmatic problem of prevailing.

1

Prof. von Beckrall rejects Spengler's philosophy as a
metaphysical creation, not in the first instance based on em-
pirically verified observations. This misses the essence of
an inductive method. Not the existence, but the adequacy of
metaphysical concepts, not their exclusive foundation in part-
icular observations, but their applicability to the pervasive-
ness of experience must be the subject of analysis.

2

3

We must further decide how far Spengler is a follower
of Hegel's despite his attacks on the ascription of rational

1. Schmoller's *Jahrbuch fuer Gesetzgebung* Vol. 47, p. 33

2. See Appendix "A" - The Concept of Meaning.

3. See ante Ch. I - Introduction. Post Appendix A- The Possibility of Meaning.

purposes to history and what was his relation to Darwin, the
object of his ridicule and yet the chronicler in the biolog-
ical world of Spengler's political realm.

And so the last question emerges: Is it possible to
describe the mere components of political success without im-
parting into the evaluation of its elements normative concepts?
Is it possible to utilize necessity as a guide to conduct, not
merely as the description of completed action? The solution to
these problems can not be found in phenomena but only in a
personality, expressed philosophically by its metaphysical as-
sumptions.

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## 2. METAPHYSICS.

"Regard the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the setting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you - a feeling of enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind, dream-like, earthbound existence. The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig do not stir themselves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free - he dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will.

"Servitude and Freedom - this in the last and deepest analysis is the differentia by which we distinguish vegetable and animal existence. Yet only the plant is entirely and wholly what it is; in the being of the animal there is something dual. A vegetable is only a vegetable; an animal is a vegetable and something else besides. A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force his way into God - all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality and loneliness."

So begins Volume 2 of Spengler's Decline of the West and therein is to be found the essence of his metaphysical doctrine. Everything existing contains something cosmic, the periodicity of the seasons, the rhythm of birth, life and decay.

1. Spengler - The Decline of the West - Vol.II p 3.

But animals do not merely exist. They represent a unit that has separated itself from the All, and can define its position in a world-around that is felt by it as environment. They are microcosm in a macrocosm.

The cosmic has rhythm, tact, the grand harmony that binds together lovers or crowds in moments of absolute wordless understanding, the pulse that unites a sequence of generations into a meaningful whole. This is Destiny, the symbol of the blood, of sex, of duration. This answers the question of when and whither, and represents the only method of approaching the problem of time. It is felt by the great artist in his moment of contemplation, it is embodied by the statesman in action and is lived by the man of the Spring-time culture. It constitutes the essence of tragedy, the problem of "too late", when a moment of the present is irrevocably consigned to the past.

The microcosm contains tension and polarity, the loneliness of the individual in a world of strange significances, in which the total inner meaning of others remains an eternal riddle. Rhythm and tension, longing and fear, characterize the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm. Organisms contain consciousness, (Dasein-Being). Animals represent Waking-Being (Waking-Consciousness, Wachsein). Only in sleep everything existing reverts to mere Being.

For Man waking-being is confined to the realm of the eye. The sounds of the night, the odor of flowers all stimulate

-37-

a "whither" in the world of light. Of the world of scent, man knows little, of the nature of the butterfly, whose crystalline eyes focus a picture of myriad possibilities, nothing. Thus night has always been felt as akin to death and the idea of an invisible God constitutes the highest manifestation of human transcendence.

This has made the depth-experience the most significant concept in man's life. The awareness of the I depends on the recognition of the Thou, of the existence of the other in the environment. Just as the notion of Destiny is tied up with the rhythm of becoming and the felt pulse of the organic, so waking consciousness comes to the full awareness of space, extended only through the experience of death. At that moment, man first realizes his immense loneliness in the universe, the episodic nature of his existence. The animal lives in a pure present and dies without knowledge of the fact, but for man life is a short span between birth and death.

The enigma of Time first appears, the realization of limits, of the transitoriness of existence. Therefore the first manifestation of higher thought occurs as a meditation upon death.

Man rebels at the thought of the episodic nature of life, at its mystery and his loneliness in the universe. The enigmatic which ever threatens the existence of primitive man begins to be mastered by the act of naming objects, which serves as a limitation and an assertion of supremacy. The wish to

-38-

transcend mortality develops into the process of conjuring the
world, achieved under the aspect of cult by the religious soul
and under that of technique in an age the numina of which are
expressed in theory.

In primitive societies the enigmatic in conquered by
religion, which requires forms, the knowledge of which is re-
stricted and whose rites must be exact. As a function of the
soul's depth experience, religion contains the grand myth of
each culture, the actualization of its prime symbol, expressed
in the upward-striving forceful God of the Gothic, the spirit
of God hovering in the cave-world of the Magian soul, the stat-
uesque body of the Apollinian.

The reactions, which originally were total tend to be-
come permeated by an understanding of significances. Under-
standing separated from sensation is called thought. Profane
causality appears, supplanting the holy causality of religion,
in order to withdraw from the world of becoming the data which
it then dissects. Yet natural science is neither new nor self-
contained, but a consequence of the religious world-picture
that preceded it, all its theories merely an analysis - and
even a rebuttal presupposes an object - of the lived metaphysics
of the culture's youth. No matter how far natural science ad-
vances, at its edge, in the inexplicable residue, ever hovers
God as everything beyond the possibility of causal analysis.

1. For explanation of term see post. Chapter "The Souls of Each Culture".

-39-

The insolvable dilemma of time emerges: each act is unique, yet science must postulate on endless comparability of phenomena. The world reveals a process of eternal becoming, but causality can operate only on the become. The realm of becoming knows only singularly occurring facts, the world of pure being operates with eternal truths. The conflict of rhythm against tension, destiny against causality permeates existence and history.

Two pictures of the world are possible: the World-as-History in which the become is ordered with reference to the becoming or the World-as-Nature in which the opposite occurs. The World-as-History presents a dynamic process of growth with the will-to-live the only criterion of success, the only source of motivation. In this world of facts only subjects and objects exist. To live for abstractions involves suffering a destiny instead of being one. Its chroniclers are those individuals whose physiognomic tact enables them to apprehend the totality of events in a poetic unity, with a clear realization of the insufficiency of a causal analysis. Its representatives are the great statesmen who embody the meaning of the occurrences, the men of blood who feel the cosmic beat and actualize it. "I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know", Napoleon stated at the beginning of the Russian campaign. "As soon as I shall have reached it an atom will suffice to shatter me. Till then not all the forces in the world will prevail against me."

1. Spengler - op. cit. - Vol I. p. 144.

-40-

Yet the World-as-Nature, too, has its triumphs. Its linkages represent man's attempt at attaining mastery over his destiny. It can achieve in its highest form liberation and freedom from the world-born fear which is the lot of waking consciousness, the Ego's loneliness in the face of impassable boundaries. It is ever the task of religion to fight against the powers of the blood, to withdraw from the world into ascetism, to realize the necessity of tension and in the end finally to love it. "Morality is a planned causality of conduct" of eternal validity and by definition applicable even if man did not exist. The saint must realize, however, that his victories are not of this world. If he wants temporal success the logic of events forces him to use political weapons. The meeting of Pilate and Christ constitutes Spengler's poetic representation of this dilemma. The Roman asked "What is truth?" And in that question expressed the self-confidence of the State, the pride of eminent fitness, the entire meaning of history. And the answer, not indeed spoken but implicit in the actions of the prisoner was: "What is actuality?"

This contains the final differentia between the two form-worlds, between becoming and being, destiny and causality, history and nature. Becoming with waking consciousness as its

1. Spengler - op. cit. - Vol II. p. 270.

2. See Kant's definition of the categorical imperative as applied to all rational being, not only to Man.

3. Spengler - op. cit. - Vol II. p. 216.

-41-

subject, or a waking-being that attempts to dominate destiny
are the essence of the antinomy, the real alternatives of
life. The politician despises the thinker and dreamer - and
rightly. For the believer all worldly ambition is sham and
deception - he too is right. "A ruler who attempts to improve
religion in the direction of practical, worldly purposes is
a fool. A sociologist-preacher who tries to bring peace, for-
giveness, righteousness and peace into the world of actuality
is a fool also. No faith has yet altered the world and no
1
fact can rebut a faith ..... Let a man be either a hero or
2
a saint, for between lies, not wisdom, but banality."

Spengler resolved the dilemma of our experience of free-
dom and our knowledge of necessity into a postulate of alterna-
tives. The opposition of becoming and being, the tension be-
tween Destiny and Causality, constitutes the metaphysical basis
of Spengler's philosophy of history. The actualization of the
immanent pulse achieves its highest form as long as its direc-
tion is taken for granted. Waking-consciousness achieves a
gradual dominance only by reducing the lived experience of the
cosmic beat. Finally man is adrift in a world whose purpose
is no longer his own. The Culture turns into a Civilization,
petrifies and dies.

1. Spengler - op. cit. - Vol II. p. 216.

2. Spengler - op. cit. - Vol II. p. 274.

-42-

The imaginativeness of this philosophy can not hide its inner complexities, however. The opposition of becoming and being, Destiny and Causality, Necessity and Freedom seems to reduce existence to a mere vegetating. But necessity explains only past actions. Its actualization in conduct requires a waking-consciousness, which moreover operates with the inner conviction of choice. If the Cultures are distinguished by their struggle for the actualization of an idea, then the specificity of history resides in an element of purposiveness, not in an inexorable destiny. The World-as-History and the World-as-Nature are, after all, merely metaphysical abstractions for the apprehension of events, not objective modes of real occurrences.

Spengler implies that the man-of-fact lives a destiny and thereby achieves his triumphs. But, again, this does not seem to prove the dominance of becoming over being, of History over Waking-consciousness. The recognition of the immanence depends on waking-consciousness. Instinct is no guide to political conduct. Effective leadership is always forced-what-ever its motives - to represent itself as the carrier of ideas, embodying purposes. All truly great achievements in history resulted from the actualization of principles, not from the clever evaluation of political conditions. Only plants are pure pragmatists. The Causality which motivates man is an

1. Spengler op. cit., Vol. I., p. 54.

2. See post Ch. "History and Man's Experience of Morality for full Discussion."

3. One may, of course, define all actuality as necessary and then all events become functions of an inexorability. - See post Conclusions.

-43-

experience of freedom, not derived from the physical world but
from a personal, mystic relationship to the Infinite.

Conversely the man-of-truths, the saint, represents not
merely waking-consciousness. "To restrain blood, one must have
blood" says Spengler and thereby refutes himself. What gives
the majesty to Christ's thought and the driving force to Mohammed
is not their logical consistency but their pertinency to the
very basis of human longing. Why was Hus burned and why did
Luther split the church? What is the real meaning of the
triumph of Christianity? Because the time was ripe, Spengler
would answer. Because at the time, the coming of the Messiah,
the end of the world, the longing for the brotherhood of man
had obliterated the Classical world-feeling and thus each man
expressed in conversion his own religiousness. Yet does this
not mean that self-contained being is no more possible than all-
pervasive becoming? Christ may have been like a child in a
strange, remote world. Perhaps the sentry under the Cross heard
His anguished cry that God had forsaken him. Yet is not,
as Spengler asserts, the sentry who represented the facts of
history but the man on the Cross.

It might be maintained, of course, that if Christ had
never existed, something like his beliefs would have triumphed
in the form of the mystery cults. It is in the "something",

1. See post. Ch. The Sense of Responsibility.

2. Spengler - op. cit. - Vol. II. p. 272.

3. Spengler - Vol. II op. cit. p. 215.

-44-

however, wherein lies the difference between necessity and
freedom, between a tendency and the creative act. No activity,
no society is without its motivations that are given in common
experience and understood without affirmation. But equally
common experience will not suffice to predict individual be-
havior. Every event is not only an effect but an inner exper-
ience. Yet the inner experience is not separated from the
effect. Destiny may condition causality but equally the truths
of waking-consciousness became the "facts" of history.

And so we find that there is no real opposition between
being and waking-being, only two connected modes of human exist-
ence, the organic and the purposive, nothing but our original
question in a different form: "What is this necessity that ac-
complishes itself under the mode of freedom?"

1. W. Y. Elliott - The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics - p.

-45-

The Development of the Culture.

Spengler saw in his metaphysical antinomy the key to
the growth and decay of cultures, the essence of their soul-
image, the basis of politics. Historical development consti-
tutes an organic process, its distinguishing characteristic
the gradual assertion of the power of waking consciousness.
The demarcation which distinguishes the relative predominance
of the two possible world views is, that between culture and
civilization, the former an expression of the eternal rhythm,
the latter a manifestation of a continuously decreasing cosmic
beat.

Spengler envisioned existence as a biological process
which attains meaning only with the emergence of the Cultures.
Primitive humanity was engaged in a constant struggle for mere
survival. The marginal nature of life left no room for profound
ideation, only for a transitory religiosity dependent on its
supposed power of conjuring the lancing, enigmatic dangers.

Suddenly at approximately 3000 B.C. - there emerged the
forms of the great cultures, organic beings with their own inner
conception of destiny. They brought about so fundamental a
change that Spengler postulates a transformation in the human
constitution. Henceforth man constructs his world-image, his
depth-experience no longer with reference to himself alone, but
as part of an experienced whole. The degree of inter-relation-
ship of this experience and its lived significance character-
izes common membership in a culture.

-46-

Each Culture constitutes an organic being with growth, maturity, old age and death. They awaken in a moment of infinite longing, when the fear of death, the end of the world, the dark mystery of the universe oppress everybody's heart. Such was the time when at the birth of Christ, the Magian soul attained life, when the world was full of tales of a Messiah and the Classical soul was dissipating itself in Neo-platonism and the oriental mystery cults. Such was the moment when in the years 900-1000, the end of the world seemed near and out of the confused groping of the Merovingian and Carolingian period (-Charlemagne as a "ray from Baghdad")- the upward-striving soul of the Western (Paustian) culture emerged. At these moments, in the higher minds of the young culture, the environment suddenly coalesces into a meaningful picture. All the problems and possibilities of the future history are already immanent in the formations of those early years, in the construction of its Grand Myth.

Each culture begins with a great renunciation, the refusal to take over the symbols of the preceding civilization, the selection of its own appropriate representations. Even if outward manifestations of other cultures are adopted, the very selectivity and the content ascribed will be unique, solitary and essentially incommunicable to outsiders. The myth of each culture contains its image of the world, the essence of its longing, the possibility of its nature-knowledge, the basis of

1. See post.

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its religion. All of the later history reveals a process of actualizing this idea and a fight against the forces that tend to dissolve it from within (waking-consciousness) and the material dangers of the environment. Since the birth occurs in a moment of oppressive tension, all early manifestations of human endeavor are in their essence religious. Natural science emerges only as a concomitant of the gradual self-assertion of waking-consciousness. Spengler considers both manifestations of the same phenomena. "World-knowing for the man of the higher culture is a need seen as a duty of expressing his essence."

The Culture grows in a landscape and remains tied to it for the remainder of its existence. In the biological period that precedes the historical era a peasantry develops that is close to the soil, and feels the rhythm of the cosmic beat. Out of the anonymous countryside develops at the beginning of each culture a feudal order whose essence is expressed in a customary ethic of which the frame of reference is not good and evil but good and bad and whose stigma attaches to vulgarity not sin. This aristocracy represents the world of facts and of the meaning of what is about to happen. The peasantry is history, the aristocracy makes history.

A priesthood, too, appears born out of the world-fear

1. Spengler - op. cit. - Vol I - p. 99.

2. See post. The Faustian Soul.

-48-

of the early period, the mediator between man and the other
that is felt as enigmatic. The style and influence of that
priesthood depends on the symbol of the culture and its depth
experience. The Faustian man, a lonely ego in a world of in-
finite extent, whose God as the manifestation of omnipotent
force is all pervasive, buffeted on all sides by the terrible
fear of the devil requires a powerful priesthood and the pos-
sibility of understanding forgiveness. The Appollinian soul,
in all essentials almost the exact opposite of the Faustian,
with its feeling for pure presence, against the background of
a Golden Age, its passionate denial of infinity, of necessity
felt the existence of a strong priesthood as a danger and none
developed. The Magian cave-world, in which the divine pneuma
hovers uneasily over man who might ever fall to the forces of
evil and whose salvation consists in the consensus of the
believers produces a type of nation that is a church.

The existence of the Spring-time culture represents a
lived metaphysics, each of its manifestations a tentative grop-
ing towards the knowledge it will have during its noon. But
soon the harmony of the countryside begins to be disturbed by
the emergence of towns. Initially merely market-places-though
primitive peasantry ever regards even technical mastery of
nature with mixed awe and terror (f.e. blacksmiths) - they
develop into places from which the countryside is henceforth

-49-

felt as environs. This is the age when scholasticism appears,
a presumption for the permanence of the world.

The growth of the city involves the emancipation of the
intellect. The liberated waking-consciousness begins the pro-
cess of dominating the organic factor, until with the complete
destruction of the great focus, a shapeless Caesarism rules all
problemat ion. Formerly knowledge was faith supported but with
the growing assurance of its powers it becomes faith controverted.
The countryside fights a losing battle against the city which
represents the focus of events - in the political field against
democracy, in the spiritual against nationalism, in the econ-
omic against money. The spirit of the city is critical and
practical. Life which used to be lived out of the self-evidence
of its meaning develops into a calculation of utilitarian pur-
poses. The great tradition itself becomes questionable.

Spengler finds the same tendencies in the religious
field. The political requirements of a growing culture had in-
volved faith in the affairs of the world-of-facts. The ascetic
spirit, that sees the purpose of religion in the negation of the
life of this world, in the restraining of the blood, that opposes
the timeless love of God to the love of the sexes, rouses it-
self to a final effort. Reformation stands at the end, not at
the beginning of a religious development. But where the early

1. Spengler - op. cit. - Vol II. p. 91.

2. Note similarity of this concept to Plato's disintegration of the Republic, which begins with an assertion of a questioning selfishness.

3. Spengler - op. cit. - Vol II. p. 97.

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religion originated from the countryside, expressed the optimism of infinite longing and represented the pulse of eternal becoming, the Reformation is the product of the city, cold, brilliant, austere. The bliss of the young Culture, the peace typified by the smiling Mary is irrevocably lost. Religious fervor rises once more but it expresses now the hard intelligence, the "pedantic ecstacy" of the Neo-Phythagoresans, Islam and the Puritans. It holds on to its creation, a product of the deep inwardness of the city, with a sort of terror lest it prove unreal and is therefore impatient, pitiless, unforgiving. The lived metaphysic of the early period has in the Independent been replaced by a common devotion to a concept, a set of abstract and critical judgments on the faith that is no longer experienced. Life becomes a comprehended mechanics out of which all Puritans develop predestination as a technical guarantee for the triumph of the elect. Another fifty years and rational criticism alone remains supreme.

This leads to the age of the Megalopolis, the world-as-city, the acme of a temporarily triumphant waking-consciousness. The countryside has long reverted to its biological state. It gazes on the strange creation of human art with uncomprehending hatred. Such is the feeling of Dostojevski towards St.

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 301.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 301.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 302.

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Petersburg, which he felt "could vanish one day with the morn-
ing mist". 1 All the thought and decisions of life are concen-
trated in the Cosmopolis. The spirit of the city is coldly
practical. Philosophy frees itself from its dependence on
religion and submits the whole universe including religion, to
epistemological criticism. "In the period of growth life re-
vealed itself, the city-period has life as an object". 2 It is
symbolized by the deep spirituality of Pascal against the shallow
utilitarianism of Mill. Life is no longer lived as something
self-evident but becomes a problem of maximum happiness. Each
culture develops at this stage its own mode of spiritual ex-
tinction.

The Appollinian soul, its ideal pure body, with the
opposition of Ent and Non-Ent, its tragedy of the senseless
incident buffeting man by the blind threads of Tyche, with
the hero's only possibility consisting of the grand gesture
develops Stoicism, a purging of the soul of whatever is alien
to it, so that it emerges in its pure statuesque bodiliness.

The Western will-to-power, its expression ever a com-
manding imperative, completes the materialization of its soul,
by the mechanistic solution of Socialism.

Philosophy in the great style is finished. No great
thinkers developed in the Classical after the Stoics, and
Western thought has been stated in its final form by Kant.

1. Spengler op. cit. p. 195.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol I. p. 365.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol I. p. 341.

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All the 19th century accomplished was the mechanization of his concepts in the spirit of a utilitarian will-to-life. Formerly profound thinking was associated with mathematics, now it becomes socio-political. The metaphysics of the Baroque develops into the critique of society of Hegel, Schoppenhauer and Nietzsche. Dimly man yearns for a return to Nature. It is not the landscape of early Gothic, however, but the conceptual definition of Rousseau, the natural relation of Marx. Kant had a vision of the world as appearance or phenomena, but to Schoppenhauer it is merely a brain-phenomenon with utilitarian connotations. The change from the tragic view to the plebeian, from the felt intuition of Goethe, from the inward necessity of Shakespeare, to the frog-perspective of Marx is complete. "Poets build but no longer sing, shapes are called into being not to be but to prove something." The Darwinian theory of evolution, which imports the Manchester School theories into the world of destiny and replaces the inward harmony of the Gothic with the mechanistic conception of Aims called progress is the necessary product of that period. But every deeper thinker of the 19th Century is Socialistic defined by Spengler as the imposition of one's views on behalf of all "with attention directed towards that welfare of mankind that Goethe and Kant never spent a moment's thought on." Frances of

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 393.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 368.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 156.

4. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 370.

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Assissi and the Saints of the Culture's youth could think of renouncing, the Socialist conceives only of distributing temporal possession.

Art, too, has become formless. The early religious self-assurance, the great style which represented a rhythm of self-implementation is becoming ever less well defined, the self-consciousness ever greater. To Michelangelo, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Bach and Beethoven the great style was an aid, the schools of art produced a high average. It liberated the artist from struggling with form, enabling him to pour the essence of his soul into the creation. But with Wagner and Pergamos the style is felt as a hindrance. Everything becomes huge, ever more esoteric and abstract in the Western, ever more ornate and hovering in the Appollinian Culture. Finally the great style is lost and instead of ideas there are continually new art-problems coaxed out of an inwardly meaningless creativeness. Instead of a school, the only criterion is taste.

Natural-science had begun by dissecting the religious world picture, both a product of man's astonishment at the motion of his universe, both an attempt to dominate the inexorability of fate. The intellect ever thinks that it has mastered truths of eternal applicability but it can not rest until every question has been answered and no riddle remains.

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Yet since nature is what man constructs for himself out of his depth experience, that which we are observing lives with us in the process of observation. ¹ Moreover, every scientific result is the consequence of a method and the method presupposes a belief in its conclusiveness. "Descartes meant to doubt everything but certainly not the value of his doubting." ² No Western thinker would question the efficacy of empirical observation, just as no Magian scientist needs to invoke the aid of a miracle to explain phenomena not amenable to causal analysis. Thus there came into existence the Western science of dynamics with an assertive mastery over nature and the Magian alchemy which tends to wheedle its results from a substance which in the final analysis represents only a different mode of the immanently divine.

But after a period of easy optimism when both critical philosophy and scientific research reign supreme the old enigmas re-appear. That which had brought natural-science to a maximum of inner fulfillment suddenly operates as a solvent. Each culture discovers that the ultimate questions are unanswerable causally; the problem of motion remains unresolved. Force as the source or the cause of motion represents the Western dilemma, the perfect form of substance, the causality of its movement the Classical. The hypothesis grow progressively

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 388.

2. Spengler op. cit., Vol. II. p. 12.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 417.

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more abstract and inclusive the various fields of knowledge converge ever closer. In a moment of painful clarity it becomes apparent that amidst all the abstruseness, the ever sharper definition of conceptual quantities, which moreover like the concept of Force determine the structure of the experiment a priori, there emerges nothing but the myths of the spring-time in modern form. Then in the grey light of the beginning civilization man realizes that the tension created by his waking-consciousness has become too great, that the quest for knowledge is without end and his tired soul plunges into the peace of the Second Religiousness.

Yet where the early religion was the grand symbolism of an emerging soul, the citizen of the metropolis with the cosmic beat in him ever decreasing clings desperately to his cults, his Theosophy, his religious fads. In the Springtime reason was felt as a support of faith, in the maturity faith was conceived as subject to critical analysis and an enlightened waking-consciousness sought to find its own position towards-life (Weltanschauung), but now faith alone is the criterion. The flight from reason prevails, the belief that there is some mystic constitution of actuality as to which formal proofs are barren.

As the Culture turns itself into a civilization and the

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 425.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 310.

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masses of the world-city seek to find release from the polar-
ities in their soul in Panem et circenses, in nigger-dances and
1
sports, Caesarism emerges in the political organization re-
placing democracy which has become an empty shell and ending
the dictatorship of money which is by now the real master of
2
political life. It represents the eventual triumph of the blood,
of being, over the strained waking-consciousness of the Megapolis.
Pure power, the coursing rhythm of ever-becoming re-assert them-
selves and despite traditional trappings, even because of them,
a formless force permeates all aspects of political life.

Nothing, according to Spengler, can save the dying
civilization. The sterility of all late man ensues, a meta-
physical turn towards death. 3 The tragic symbolism which in
Shakespeare could lift an incident into a destiny has in Ibsen
become the problemation of social events. Woman, whom the man
of the Spring-time culture conceives as the mother of his child-
ren constitutes for the Cosmopolitan a companion for life, an
object for the blending of dispositions. No attempt, however
frantic can arrest the decline in population. Neither the
marriage laws of Augustus, nor the wholesale adoptions, nor
the incessant implantation of barbarians, availed to check this
process in the Hellenic world. 4

1. See post Chapter: Politics, Economics, the Machine.

2. See post Chapter: Politics, Economics, the Machine.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 105.

4. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 106.

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"When reasons have to be put forward in a question of life, life itself has become problematical." The animal element, the strained waking-consciousness has eaten up the plant side and the drive into the future which binds together a sequence of generations into a purposeful organism is at an end. The population returns to a fellah-type state such as the Egyptians at the time of the Romans and the Chinese and Indians today. Here all growth has ceased and the biological sequence of generations with millenia for time-span re-emerges. Waking-consciousness has succeeded in stiffening the becoming, in petrifying the great symbolism. As in the living Culture the estate and race are in antithesis as the impersonal and the personal, so in the fellah-state the opposition is between the mass and the caste as the formal against the formless. The intellectuality, subtlety and dignity of this form world may be considerable attested by the heights from which an Indian Brahmin looks down on a Westerner. But history has ceased for the Civilization. It has become an object for Cultures and peoples who will to be a destiny and the period of contending States has left it physically and morally exhausted.

"And so high history lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the eternal peasant re-appear,

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 106.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol II. p. 108.

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begetting children and burying in Mother Earth - a busy, not in-
adequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors pass-
ingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities,
empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a history-
less mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth,
with petty thrifts and petty fortunes and endure. Masses are
trampled on in the conflict of the conquerors who contend for
the power and the spoil of this world, but the survivors fill
up the gap with primitive fertility and suffer on. And while
in high places there is the eternal alternation of victory and
defeat, those in the depth pray, pray with that mighty piety of
the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts forever.
There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss
of grey-haired monks and hermits is become actual-and there
alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering
which the historical man in the thousand years of his develop-
ment has never known. Only with the end of grand History does
holy, still being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimless-
ness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rota-
tion of the earth, and the alternance of land and sea, of ice
and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may
lament it - but it is there".
1

Spengler rejected the theory, that history revealed the

1. Spengler, op. cit. Vol. II. p. 435.

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causal working out of rational plans. He substituted a mor-
phology of history, the world-as-experience, evoked by images
of compelling power and great inward beauty. Cultures are or-
ganisms, their life-span, extent and death implicit in the very
problems of their youth. The soul of each Culture, a function
of its depth experience, constructs an image of the world which
binds it to the soil in which it grow, sets the limits for the
possibilities of its natural-science and religion, determines
the problems that must be answered. Gradually the tensions
created by the dominance of waking-being becomes too great, the
form is lost, the Culture transforms itself into a Civilization.
Slowly, it stiffens and dies, returning to the biological ages
that spawned it, its inner meaning fulfilled, no longer the
master but the object of destiny.

Yet the brilliance of this picture and its in many ways
psychological depth, cannot overcome the difficulties inherent
in the underlying metaphysical assumptions which frequently fail
to meet our twin tests of consistency and relevancy. They fall
short of the former because Spengler never makes clear what
exactly he means by Destiny or the experience of Time. In the
biological ages which precede the Culture and in the fellah state
that follow waking-consciousness is at a minimum. Does this en-
during mankind represent the essence of the Destiny-experience?
The life of the Culture constitutes a process of actualizing

1. See post. Appendix A, Concepts of Meaning p.

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1. the possible, all its manifestation profound symbols of its view of the world. Yet the soul of the culture, its depth experience, is given symbolic expression by making consciousness. It appears that everything which gives deeper meaning to the culture and lifts it above the level of primitive societies results from an aware purposiveness, not a purely organic destiny.
2. "The Culture had bound all forces in a strict form. Now they were released - and Nature broke forth", seems an admission that the creative aspect of growth reveals the construction of waking consciousness.

3. Each Culture not only goes through similar phases of youth, maturity, age and decline but its political and artistic embodiment at each stage is identical. This too is difficult to accept. If each soul constitutes a counter-concept to the world and its life-span represents the gradual realization of its immanence, one would expect the historical development to differ according to the vision of its environment and the idea attempted to be actualized. Though everything organic has its periods of youth, growth and decay, these phenomena do not embody themselves in identical form. "Western History was willed and Classical history happened" means nothing if we postulate the necessity of a political development that has the same political organization at each stage.

1. Spengler's definition of the soul - Vol I. p. 54.

2. Spengler Vol II. op. cit. p. 418.

3. Or morpologous as Spengler call functional inter-relationship.

4. Spengler op. cit. Vol I. p. 125.

5. Spengler op.cit. Vol II. p. 296.

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As a matter of fact, Spengler is hard put to find un-
iformity, even between the Classical and Western Cultures, re-
sulting in the definition of the Athenian poli as the Classical
equivalent of dynastic feeling. But granting Spengler's thesis
of identical political institutionalization two conclusions
seem inescapable. To begin with, reality as an emanation of
the Ego may not present totally different aspects to each cul-
ture, but contain a modicum of continuity of problemation. In
this sense significance attaches not only to the newly adopted
symbols, not only to the "Great renunciation" but also to the
taking over of symbols and institutions and their recurrence at
similar stages of development.

1

Furthermore, Spengler's empirical data is confined al-
most exclusively to the Appollinian, Magian and Faustian cul-
tures, with contemporary periods in other cultures frequently
merely postulated. The very possibility of making an analysis
of the "soul" of a culture implies a degree of inner correla-
tion. The divergences between the cultures may merely hide an
underlying unity, expressing itself in a continuity of problem-
ation. These problems emerge more clearly in Spengler's elabor-
ation of the souls of the Culture.

1. On test of relevancy - see post - Ch. II The Concepts of Meaning.

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1

The Souls of the Culture - The Appollinian Soul - Image.

Spengler - in obvious reliance on Kant - calls his
philosophy a Copernican revolution freeing the study of history
from theoretical misconceptions that had prevented the full
realization of its implications. Just as Copernicus liberated
natural science by treating the earth as accidental instead of
normative, so Spengler conceived his morphology as an analysis
of functional rather than temporal interrelationships. History
represents the self-realization of the souls of cultures their
differences consequences of varying world-views. "Contempor-
ary" means identical stages of an organic development.

Yet what is the soul? Spengler finds his answer in
the belief of every philosopher or scientist in the existence
of something subject to rational analysis. "The question of
whether the forms of thought are ever approachable by thought,"
which to the layman might appear dubious, is nevertheless held
as an article of faith by every psychologist. The barrenness
of technical psychology results from the impossibility of con-
ceptually dissecting the inwardly certain, of importing defini-
tional notions into the world of becoming. No system can offer
analytical criterion for such realities as jealousy, regret or
artistic intention.

1. In order to maintain the unity of Spengler's development, I have placed all my comments, post at the end of the section Magian soul.

2. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 94.

3. Spengler op. cit. Vol. II. p. 311.

4. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 299.

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Spengler's metaphysical antinomies reappear. Causality can serve for the apprehension of phenomena only insofar as nature is conceived as eternally possible. The soul, however, not a phenomena, but an image derived from the primary and continuing experience of life and death. Every free moving being must understand the world around it as a condition for survival. The knowledge of the macrocosm as a technical and empirical mastery is the World-as-Nature. But beyond the environment, man divines the presence of a "something other" in both himself and others, which by virtue of its physiognomically impressive powers evokes the desire to know and is anxiously pondered. Thus the notion of the soul arises, as an image of everything in man which can never be causally known, as a counterworld to nature, as a mode of visualizing what will always be inaccessible by the light-world of the eye.

The soul's representation reflects Spengler's metaphysical scheme. Its image is a myth pondered religiously by the spirituality that still sees God in nature and analyzed conceptually as soon as Nature comes to be observed critically. Just as Time constitutes a counter-concept to Space, so the notion of a soul is the inverse of the picture of the world. "Every psychology becomes a counter-physics." This prevents an exact science of the soul, of universal applicability, since such an analysis is a function of the depth experience of its

1. Spengler op. cit. - Vol. I. p. 301.

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culture. The Apollinian constructed its inner world as a group of excellent parts. The Western thinker conceives his image as forces of thinking, feeling, willing. The Magian psychologist views his soul as an airy substance (nepesh, ruach) in conjunction with a bodily substance, both deriving reality only from an infusion of the divine pneuma.

Spengler defines the image of the soul as the possible and the World as the actual. Thus life is the process of actualizing the possible, the history of each culture constituting a ripening and deepening of its soul-picture. This accounts for the profound symbolism of all manifestations of activity of Cultures, and the complete lack of inner meaning of every creation of both the primitive and fellah state.

Since the waking-consciousness arrives at self-knowledge through the experience and fear of death, the rites of burial, the disposal of the bodies serve as profound indications of the depth-experience of the different cultures. Because all art is an expression of world-longing and all natural science an analysis of the religious world-picture, the grand symbolism of the culture includes all their manifestations, with the proviso that the maturity and decline will see a diminution of the cosmic beat, its emanations over more uncertain and inconclusive until the inevitable approach of the fellah state at the

1. Spengler op. cit. - Vol. I. p. 54.

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end of the Civilization.

The Classical or Appollinian soul conceived of exist-
ence as exhausting itself in a pure present against the back-
ground of the Golden Age. Its passionate denial of infinity
came to expression at its inception in the great refusal to take
over the form-world and architectural style of the Minoan world.
Suddenly, about 1100 B.C., with the emergence of the Mycennean
culture great architecture ceased. The barrow for the burial
of the dead - is supplanted by the burning of the corpses. Wood
replaces stone as building-material despite an abundance of
quarries in Hellas. Existence consists of a denial of infinity,
an emphasis on pure being. Thucydides states in his "History
of the Peloponesian War" that before the year 400, his time,
not much of importance had happened in Greece.

Life, in the Appollinian world constituted a spiritual
static. The Greek word for personality is persona which does
not express the concept of character but describes the public
mien, the "gesture" of its carrier. The ideal of the Classical
was Cosmos, the perfectly defined, absolute Ent, in opposition
to which space was felt, not as a challenge, but as Non-Ent,
Chaos, the not-yet-formed. The self asserting Ego of the West-
ern culture, or its forceful, all-pervasive God would have been
equally alien to the Appollinian world-feeling. Man as a body

1. Spengler op. cit. Vol. I. p. 316.