Oswald Spengler. The Decline of the West. An abridged edition by
Helmut Werner. English abridged edition prepared by Arthur Helps
from the translation by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York:
oxford University Press c199 [1926, 1928, 1932]. xxxx,415, xvix
EVERY CULTURE POSSESSES ITS OWN ETHIC [176]
WESTERN mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an
immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of
the rest. We say "thou shalt" in the conviction that
so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or
arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the
efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable.
That, and nothing short of it, is<,/i> for us, morale.
In the ethics of the West everything is direction, claim to
power, will to affect the distant. here Luther is completely at
one with Nietzsche, Popes with Darwinians, Socialists with
jesuits; for one and all, the beginning of morale is a claim to
general and permanent validity...
...
The moral imperative as the form of morale is Faustian and only
Faustian. It is quite wrong to associate Christianity with the
moral imperative. It was not Christianity that transformed
Faustian man, but Faustian man who transformed Christianity--and
he not only made it a new religious but also gave it a new moral
direction. The "it" became "I," the passion-
charged centre of the world, the foundation of the great
Sacrament of personal contrition. Will-to-power even in
ethics, the passionate striving to set up a proper morale as a
universal truth, and to enforce it upon humanity, to reinterpret
or overcome or destroy everything otherwise constituted--nothing
is more characteristically our own than this is. And in virtue
of it the Gothic springtime proceeded to a profound--and never
yet appreciated--inward transformation of the morale of
Jesus. A quite spiritual morale welling from Magian [he uses
this term for culture of the Near-East] feeling--a morale or
conduct recommended as potent for salvation, a morale the
knowledge of which was communicated as a special act of grace--
was recast as a morale of imperative command....
...
Every Classical ethic that we know or can conceive of
constitutes man an individual static entity, a body among bodies,
and all Western valuations relate to him as a centre of effect in
an infinite generality...
Sections from Spengler, The Decline of the West:
Introduction: Civilization
Introduction: Imperialism
Architecture and Divinities
Imitation and Ornament
The History of Style as an Organism
Arts as Symbol of the Higher Order
Popular and Esoteric
Will to Power
Impressionism
Morale of Dawning Civilizations
The History of Style as an Organism
Pergamum and Bayreuth: the End of Art
Classical Behaviour Drama and Faustian Character Drama
Every Culture Possesses its own Ethic
Every Science is Dependent upon Religion
Atheism
Origin and Landscape: the Group of the Higher Cultures
Cities
Reformation
Science
Second Religiousness
The State
Politics
Conclusion

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