Spengler Man And Technics Quotes

Optimism is cowardice.

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.

Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual -- from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual -- whether this be animal or plant or man -- is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is foredoomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the "have-been" works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hybris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about "undying achievements"?

All great discoveries and inventions spring from the delight of strong men in victory. They are expressions of personality and not of the utilitarian thinking of the masses, who are merely spectators of the event, but must take its consequences whatever they may be.

A beast of prey tamed and in captivity — every zoological garden can furnish examples — is mutilated, world-sick, inwardly dead. Some of them voluntarily hunger-strike when they are captured. Herbivores give up nothing in being domesticated.

Instead he adopts the position taken by Nietzsche in regard to the spectacle of history: it lacks intrinsic meaning, and the gods are indifferent to the fate of man, forcing him to seek to overcome them and in the end replace them with the image of himself. According

In other words: what we call history is the specific form in which the cycles of nature are acted out in man-made form. A quote from Goethe comes to mind as particularly illustrative: ‘Colour is a law of nature in relation with the sense of sight.’[2] By analogy we might say with Spengler that culture is a law of nature in relation with human minds (the plural is an important qualification here).

Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in the rose-coloured optimism of Progress (which no one actually believes in), he masks it with literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But

Faced as we are with this destiny, there is only one world. Outlook that is worthy of us, that which has already been mentioned as the Choice of Achilles — better a short life, lull of deeds and glory, than a long life without content. Already the danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatever is deplorable. Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.

In reality, however, it is out of the power either of heads or hands to alter in any way the destiny of machine-technics, for this has developed out of inward spiritual necessities and is now correspondingly maturing towards its fulfilment and end. Today we stand on the summit, at the point when the fifth act is beginning. The last decisions are taking place, the tragedy is closing.

Man is a beast of prey. Acute thinkers, like Montaigne and Nietzsche, have always known this. The old fairy-tales and the proverbs of peasant and nomad folk the world over, with their lively cunning: the half-smiling penetration characteristic of the great connoisseur of men, whether statesman or general, merchant or judge, at the maturity of his rich life: the despair of the world-improver who has failed: the invective of the angered priest — in none of these is denial or even concealment of the fact as much as attempted. Only the ceremonious solemnity of idealist philosophers and other . . . theologians has wanted the courage to be open about what in their hearts they knew perfectly well. Ideals are cowardice. Yet, even from the works of these one could cull a pretty anthology of opinions that they have from time to time let slip concerning the beast in man.

This, in turn, brings us to the fundamental error of those sworn foes of Romanticism, the rationalists, who are for ever chasing the idea that what the sentence expresses is a judgment or a thought. They sit at their writing tables, surrounded by books, and research into the minutia of their own thoughts and writings. Consequently the “thought” appears to them as the object of the speaking, and (since usually they sit alone) they forget that beyond the speaking there is a hearing, beyond a question an answer, beyond an Ego a Tu. They say “speech,” but what they mean is the oration, the lecture, the discourse. Their view of the origin of speech is, therefore, false, for they look upon it as monologue.

To development belongs fulfilment — every evolution has a beginning, and every fulfilment is an end. To youth belongs age; to arising, passing; to life, death. For the animal, tied in the nature of its thinking to the present, death is known or scented as something in the future, something that does not threaten it. It only knows the fear of death in the moment of being killed. But man, whose thought is emancipated from the fetters of here and now, yesterday and tomorrow, boldly investigates the “once” of past and future, and it depends on the depth or shallowness of his nature whether he triumphs over this fear of the end or not. An old Greek legend — without which the Iliad could not have been — tells how his mother put before Achilles the choice between a long life or a short life full of deeds and fame, and how he chose the second. Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual — from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual — whether this be animal or plant or man — is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is fore-doomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the “have-been” works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hubris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about “undying achievements”?

The question of how to either play an active role in a Western tragedy entering its final act, or to lamentably perish as a passive victim of the universal mechanisation that is to be its general theme, is at the heart of the present volume by Oswald Spengler entitled Man and Technics, originally published in 1931.

The fight against Nature is hopeless and yet — it will be fought out to the bitter end.

Time does not suffer itself to be halted; there is no question of prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are bom into this time and must hravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

The soul — this enigmatic something which we feel when we hear the word used, but of which the essence baffles all science, the divine spark in this living body which in this divinely cruel, divinely indifferent world has either to rule or to submit — is the counter-pole of the light-world about us, and hence man’s thought and feeling are very ready to assume the existence of a world-soul in it. The more solitary the being and the more resolute it is in forming its own world against all other conjunctures of worlds in the en- vironment, the more definite and strong the cast of its soul. What is the opposite of the soul of a lion? The soul of a cow. For strength of individual soul the herbivores substitute numbers, the herd, the common feeling and doing of masses. But the less one needs others, the more powerful one is. A beast of prey is everyone’s foe. Never does he tolerate an equal in his den. Here we are at the root of the truly royal idea of property. Property is the domain in which one exercises unlimited power, the power that one has gained in battling, defended against one’s peers, victoriously upheld. It is not a right to mere having, but the sovereign right to do as one will with one’s own. Once this is understood, we see that there are carnivore and there are herbivore ethics. It is beyond anyone’s power to alter this. It pertains to the inward form, meaning, and tactics of all life. It is simply a fact. We can annihilate life, but we cannot alter it in kind. A beast of prey tamed and in captivity — every zoological garden can furnish examples — is mutilated, world-sick, inwardly dead. Some of them voluntarily hunger-strike when they are captured. Herbivores give up nothing in being domesticated.

Tätigkeit gibt es mit dem Dasein der Tiere, Taten erst mit dem Dasein des Menschen. Nichts ist so bezeichnend für den Unterschied als das Anzünden des Feuers. Man sieht — Ursache und Wirkung — wie Feuer entsteht. Auch viele Tiere sehen es. Aber der Mensch allein denkt — Zweck und Mittel — ein Verfahren aus, um es herzustellen. Keine zweite Tat macht so den Eindruck des Schöpferischen. Es ist die Tat des Prometheus. Eine der unheimlichsten, gewaltigsten, rätselhaftesten Erscheinungen der Natur — der Blitz, der Waldbrand, ein Vulkan — wird vom Menschen selbst ins Leben gerufen, gegen die Natur. Wie mag das auf die Seele gewirkt haben, der erste Blick in die selbst entzündete Flamme!

Künstlich, widernatürlich ist jedes Werk vom Anzünden des Feuers bis zu den Leistungen, die wir in hohen Kulturen als eigentlich künstlerische bezeichnen. Der Natur wird das Vorrecht des Schöpfertums entrissen. Der »freie Wille« schon ist ein Akt der Empörung, nicht anderes. Der schöpferische Mensch ist aus dem Verbande der Natur herausgetreten, und mit jeder neuen Schöpfung entfernt er sich weiter und feindseliger von ihr. Das ist seine »Weltgschichte«, die Geschichte einer unaufhaltsam fortschreitenden, verhängnisvollen Entzweiung zwischen Menschenwelt und Weltall, die Geschichte eines Empörers, der dem Schoße seiner Mutter entwachsen die Hand gegen sie erhebt. Die Tragödie des Menschen beginnt, denn die Natur ist stärker. Der Mensch bleibt abhängig von ihr, die trotz allem auch ihn selbst, ihr Geschöpf, umfaßt. Alle großen Kulturen sind ebenso viele Niederlagen. Ganze Rassen bleiben, innerlich zerstört, gebrochen, der Unfruchtbarkeit und geistigen Zerrüttung verfallen, als Opfer auf dem Platze. Der Kampf gegen die Natur ist hoffnungslos, und trotzdem wird er bis zum Ende geführt werden.