Lo what Prophet Oswald Spengler saith: ...in Puritanism there [was] hidden already the seed of Rationalism, and after a few enthusiastic generations have passed, this bursts forth everywhere and makes itself supreme. This is the step from Cromwell to Hume. Not cities in general, not even the great cities, but a few particular cities now become the theatre of intellectual history — Socratic Athens, Abbassid Baghdad, eighteenth-century London and Paris. Enlightenment is the cliche of that time. The sun bursts forth — but what is it that clears off the heavens of the critical consciousness to make way for that sun? Rationalism signifies the belief in the data of critical understanding (that is, of the reason) alone. In the Springtime men could say Credo quia absurdum because they were certain that the comprehensible and the incomprehensible were both necessary constituents of the world — the nature which Giotto painted, in which the Mystics immersed themselves, and into which reason can penetrate, but only so far as the deity permits it to penetrate. But now a secret jealousy breeds the notion of the Irrational — that which, as incomprehensible, is therefore valueless. It may be scorned openly as superstition, or privily as metaphysic. Only critically-established understanding possesses value. And secrets are merely evidences of ignorance. The new secretless religion is in its highest potentialities called wisdom, its priests philosophers, and its adherents educated people. According to Aristotle, the old religion is indispensable only to the uneducated, and his view is Confuciuss and Gotama Buddhas, Lessings and Voltaires. Men go away from Culture back to nature, but this nature is not something livingly experienced, but something proved, something born of, and accessible only to, the intellect — a Nature that has no existence at all for a peasantry, a Nature by which one is not in the least overawed but merely put into a condition of sensibility. Natural religion, rational religion, Deism — all this is not lived metaphysics, but a comprehended mechanics, called by Confucius the Laws of Heaven and by Hellenism rvxh. Formerly philosophy was the handmaid of transcendent religiousness, but now comes sensibility, and philosophy must therefore become scientific as epistemology and critique of nature and critique of values. No doubt there was a feeling that this philosophy was, even so, nothing but a diluted dogmatism, for the idea that pure knowledge was possible itself involved a belief. Systems were woven out of phenomenally guaranteed beginnings, but in the long run the result was merely to say Force instead of God, and Conservation of Energy instead of Eternity. Under all Classical rationalism is to be found Olympus, under all Western the dogma of the sacraments. And so our Western philosophy swings to and fro between religion and technical science, and is defined thus, or thus, according as the author of the definition is a man with some relic of priesthood still in him, or is a pure expert and technician of thought. Weltanschauung is the characteristic expression for an enlightened waking-consciousness that, under the guidance of the critical understanding, looks about it in a godless light-world and, when sense-perceptions are found not to square with sound human reason, treats sense as a lying jade. That which was once myth — the actualest of the actual — is now subjected to the methods of what is called Euhemerism. The learned Euhemerus, about 300 B.C., explained the Classical divinities to the public that they had formerly served so well, and the process occurs under one form or another in every age of enlightenment. We have our Euhemeristic interpretations of Hell as a guilty conscience, the Devil as evil desire, and God as the beauty of nature, and it is the same tendency that declares itself when Attic tomb-inscriptions of about 400 invoke, not the city-goddess Athene, but a goddess Demos — a near relation, by the way, of the Jacobins Goddess of Reason — and where the baiyoviov for Socrates, vovs for other philosophers, take the place of Zeus. Confucius says heaven instead of Shang-ti, which means that he believes only in laws of nature. The collection and ordering of the canonical writings of China by the Confucians was a colossal act of Euhemerism, in which actually almost all the old religious works were literally destroyed and the residue subjected to rationalist falsification. Had it been possible, the enlighteners of our eighteenth century would no doubt have served the Gothic heritage in the same way. Confucius belongs to the Chinese eighteenth century through and through. Lao-tse (who despised him) stands at a midpoint in the Taoist movement, which manifested traits of Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism in turn, and both finally propagated a practical world-tone based upon a wholly mechanistic world-view. The word too underwent in the Late period of China just the same continuous alteration of its fundamental content, and in the same mechanistic direction, as the word Logos in the history of Classical thought from Heraclitus to Posidonius, and as the word Force between Galileos day and ours. That which once had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this religion of educated people, Nature and Virtue — but this Nature is a reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge. Confucius and Buddha, Socrates and Rousseau are at one in this. Confucius contains little of prayer or of meditation upon the life after death, and nothing at all of revelation. To busy oneself overmuch with sacrifices and rites stamps one as uneducated and unreasoning, Gotama Buddha and his contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism — both of whom came from the political world of the lower Ganges, east of the old Brahmanic Culture-field — recognized, as everyone knows, neither the idea of God nor myth and cult. Of the real teaching of Buddha little can now be ascertained — for it all appears in the colours of the later fellah-religion baptized by his name — but one of the unquestionably authentic ideas concerning conditioned arising is the derivation of Buffering from ignorance — ignorance, namely, of the Four Noble Truths. This is true rationalism. Nirvana, for them, is a purely intellectual release and corresponds exactly with the Autarkeia and Eudaimonia of the Stoics. It is that condition of the understanding and waking-consciousness for which Being no longer is. Two centuries after Puritanism the mechanistic conception of the world stands at its zenith. It is the effective religion of the time. Even those who still thought themselves to be religious in the old sense, to be believers in God, were only mistaking the world in which their waking-consciousness was mirroring itself. Religious truths were always in their understanding mechanistic truths, and in general it was only the habit of traditional words that imparted a colour-wash of myth to a Nature that was in reality regarded scientifically. Culture is ever synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban country-side, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect, and closes with a finale of materialism in the world-cities. But even the last chords are strictly in the key of the whole. There are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of myth-shapes, cleared of the elements of experience and contemplative vision and viewed mechanistically. Confucianism as reasoned out by Yang-Chu concluded in this sense. The system of Lakayata was the prolongation of the contempt for a de-souled world which had been the common characteristic of Gotama Buddha, Mahavira, and the contemporary Pietists, and which they in turn had derived from Sankhya atheism. Socrates is alike the heir of the Sophists and the ancestor of the Cynic itinerants and of Pyrrhonian skepsis. All are manifestations of the superiority of the megalopolitan intellect that has done with the irrational for good and all and despises any waking-consciousness that still knows or acknowledges mysteries. Gothic[-era] men shrank at every step before the fathomless, more awe-inspiring still as presented in dogmatic truths. But to-day even the Catholic has arrived at the point of feeling these dogmas as a successful systematic exposition of the riddle of the universe. The miracle is regarded as a physical occurrence of a higher order, and an English bishop professes his belief in the possibility of electric power and the power of prayer both originating in one homogeneous nature-system. The belief is belief in force and matter, even if the words used be God and world, Providence and man. Unique and self-contained, again, is the Faustian materialism, in the narrower sense of the word. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached fulfilment. The whole world a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed, capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically fixed so that man can dominate it — this is what distinguishes our particular return to Nature from all others. That Knowledge is Virtue Confucius also believed, and Buddha, and Socrates, but Knowledge is Power is a phrase that possesses meaning only within the European-American Civilization. Return to nature here means the elimination of all forces that stand between the practical intelligence and nature... https://archive.org/stream/Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler/Decline_Of_The_West_djvu.txt vaidilute/books/imperium/imperium-05.html#ideology
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 01:42:04 +0000
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