>Spengler: The morale of dawning "civilization"

>This is a continuation of the quote in the previous post.

The Decline of The West, Chapter IX
Soul-Image and Life-Feeling: Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism
The morale of dawning “civilization”

When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase ”transvaluation of all values” for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula. Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. For it is the beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practices them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein lies the negativeness common to all periods of this character. […]
There was an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese desouling of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a matter not of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic, transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever, but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in full.
Culture and Civilization – the living body of a soul and the mummy of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year 1800 – on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and ”facts”. […]
Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a ”natural law” is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or mastered; when men concieve of the State as an ”order of society” which not only can but must be altered – then it is evident that something has definitely broken down. […]
As soon as Life is fatigued, as soon as man is put on to the artifical soil of great cities – which are intellectual worlds to themselves – and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem. […] One feels that there is something artifical, soulless, half-true in these considered systems that fill the first centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the great arts. All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition, vanishes before the one need that has suddenly made itself felt, the need of a practical morale for the governance of a Life that can no longer govern itself.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *