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The stone statue and the scientific system deny life. Mathematical number, the formal principle of an extension-world of which the phenomenal existen… - Oswald Spengler
" "The stone statue and the scientific system deny life. Mathematical number, the formal principle of an extension-world of which the phenomenal existence is only the derivative and servant of waking human consciousness, bears the hall-mark of causal necessity and so is linked with death as chronological number is with becoming, with life, with the necessity of destiny. This connexion of strict mathematical form with the end of organic being, with the phenomenon of its organic remainder the corpse, we shall see more and more clearly to be the origin of all great art. We have already noticed the development of early ornament on funerary equipments and receptacles. Numbers are symhols of the mortal. Stiff forms are the negation of life, formulas and laws spread rigidity over the face of nature, numbers make dead …
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About Oswald Spengler
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German historian, philosopher and political writer, most famous for his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918 and by 1926 had gone through thirty printings.
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Native Name:
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler
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Oswald Gottfried Spengler
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Additional quotes by Oswald Spengler
And then, when being is sufficiently uprooted and waking-being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama—the sterility of civilized man. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood as an essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live—he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.
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Marx wished to deprive capital of the right to private profit, but the only thing he could think of as a substitute was the worker's right to private profit. That is unsocialistic, but it is typically English. Marx became an Englishman on one other score as well: in his mind the state does not exist. He thought statelessly, in terms of "society". Like parliamentary practice in England, his economic world functions as a two-party system with nothing above the parties. Within his scheme there can be only combat and no arbitration, only victory or defeat, only the dictatorship of one of the two parties. The Communist Manifesto calls for a dictatorship of the "good" proletarian party over the "evil" capitalist party. Marx saw no alternatives.
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