A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned a priori by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean … And this ignorabimus is in conformity also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxima of daily use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all the great names, it has been thinkers—who are personalities—and not systems, which are mutable, that have taken effect upon life.
For the sake of the machine, human life becomes precious. Work becomes the great word of ethical thinking: in the 18th Century ‘it loses its derogatory implication in all languages. The machine words and forces the man to co-operate. The entire Culture reaches a degree of activity such that the earth trembles under it … And these machines become in their forms less and ever less human, more ascetic, mystic, esoteric-Man has felt the machine to be devilish, and rightly. It signifies in the eyes of the believer the deposition of God. It delivers sacred Causality over to man and by him, with a sort of foreseeing omniscience, is set in motion, silent and irresistible…
A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic onflow in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history … Ever in History it is life and life only—race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power—and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favor of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life—decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its rights would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness.
Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama of a high Culture—that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities—closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-encircling cosmic flow…
For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development—the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarium that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step—our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing…
What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is ‘in condition’, well-nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so … It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently—this is the time when the banal assertion that hunger and love are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of ‘happiness of the greatest number’, of comfort and ease, of ‘panem et circenses’; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself….
I could go on and on, do as I have done time and again—quote and quote until a veritable handbook accumulates. Almost twenty-five years since I made the first reading! And the magic is still there. For those who pride themselves on being always in the van, all that I have quoted, as well as all that lies between the quotes, is now old hat. What matter? For me Oswald Spengler is still alive and kicking. He enriched and uplifted me. As did Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, Elie Faure.
Perhaps I am somewhat of a juggler, since I am able to balance such incongruous ponderables as The Decline of the West and the Too Teh Ching. The one is made of granite or porphyry and weighs a ton; the other is light as a feather and runs through my fingers like water. In eternity, where they meet and have their being, they cancel one another out. An exile like Hermann Hesse understands this sort of juggling perfectly. In the book called Siddhartha he presents two Buddhas, the known and the unknown. Each perfect in his way.
They are opposites—in the sense of Systematic and Physiognomic. They do not destroy one another. They meet and part. Buddha is one of those names which grazes the meaning of consciousness. The real Buddhas are without name. In short, the known and the unknown balance perfectly. Jugglers understand … When I think of it now, how remarkably this Untergang music corresponded with my underground life! Strange, too, that virtually the only person with whom I could then speak of Spengler was Osiecki.
It must have been in Joe’s restaurant, during one of my promenades nocturnes, that we met again. He had not lost that weird gnomic grin—the teeth all loose and rattling louder than ever. As far as actualities went he was still off the beam. But he could take in the Spenglerian music with the same ease and understanding as he did the music of Dohnanyi for whom he had conceived a passion. To while away the long, weary nights he had taken to reading in bed. All that related to number, engineering, architecture (in Spengler) he had swallowed like pre-digested food. And money, I should add. Of this subject he had an uncanny knowledge.
Strange to what ends the unfit develop their faculties! Listening to Osiecki, I used to think how sweet it would be to be locked up in the bug-house with him—and Oswald Spengler. What marvelous discussions we would have held! Out in the cold world all this grand music went to waste. If critics and scholars were interested in the Spenglerian view of things it was not at all in the way we were. For them it was but another bone to gnaw at. A juicer bone than usual, perhaps, but a bone nevertheless. To us it was life, the elixir of life. We got drunk on it every time we met. And of course we developed our own mutual morphological sign language. With each other we could cover huge tracts of thought in jig time, because of this code language. As soon as a stranger entered the discussion we got bogged down. To him our talk was not only unintelligible, it was sheer nonsense.
With Mona I developed another kind of language. By dint of listening to my monologues she soon picked up the glittering tag ends, all the (to her) fantastic terminology—definitions, meanings, and, so to speak, morphological excreta. She often read a page or two while sitting on the stool. Just sufficient to emerge with a mouthful of phrases and outlandish references. In short, she had learned to bounce the ball back to me, which was pleasant and (for me) stimulating. All I ever required of a listener, when wound up, was a semblance of understanding. Long practice had developed in me the art of instructing my listener in the fundamentals, of giving him just enough of a stance to permit me to wash over him like a fountain. Thus at one and the same time I instructed or informed him—and mystified him. When I sensed that he felt himself on firm ground I would sweep the ground away from him. (Does not the Zen master endeavor to rob his disciple of every foothold he has ever had—in order to supply him with one that is really no foothold?)
With Mona this was infuriating. Naturally. But then I would have the delicious opportunity of reconciling my contradictory statements; this meant expansion, elaboration, distillation, condensation. In this wise I stumbled on some remarkable conclusions, not only about Spengier’s dicta but about thought in general, about the thought process itself. Only the Chinese, it seemed to me, had understood and appreciated the game of thought. Passionate as I was about Spengler, the truth of his utterances never seemed so important to me as the wonderful play of his thought … Today I think what a pity it is that, as a frontispiece to this phenomenal work, there is not reproduced the horoscope of the author. A clue of this sort is absolutely requisite to an understanding of the character and nature of this intellectual giant. When one thinks of the significance with which Spengler weights the phrase—man as intellectual nomad—one begins to realize that, in pursuing his high task, he came close to being a modern Moses. How much more frightful is this wilderness in which our intellectual nomad is forced to
