Routledge Revivals: Man and Technics (1932)

A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life

Oswald Spengler

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138283701
• eBook ISBN: 9781351980944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

First published in 1932, this book, based on an address delivered in 1931, presents a concise and lucid summary of the philosophy of the author of The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler. It was his conviction that the technical age — the culture of the machine age — which man had created in virtue of his unique capacity for individual as well as racial technique, had already reached its peak, and that the future held only catastrophe. He argued it lacked progressive cultural life and instead was dominated by a lust for power and possession. The triumph of the machine led to mass regimentation rather than fewer workers and less work — spelling the doom of Western civilization.

Chapter V
The Last Act: Rise and End of the Machine Culture

Ten

THE culture of the armed hand had a long wind and got a grip on the whole genus man. The Cultures of speech and enterprise — we are at once in the plural, and several can be distinguished — in which personality and mass begin to be in spiritual opposition, in which the spirit becomes avid of power and lays violent hands on life, these Cultures embraced even at their full only a part of mankind, and they are today, after a few millennia, all extinguished and replaced. What we call "nature-peoples" and "primitives" are merely the remains of their living material, the ruins of forms that once were permeated with soul, cinders out of which the glow of becoming and departing has gone.

On this soil, from 3000 B.C. onwards, there now grew up, here and there, the high Cultures,¹ Cultures in the narrowest and grandest sense, each filling but a very small portion of the earth's space and each enduring for hardly a thousand years. The tempo is that of the final catastrophes. Every decade has significance, every year, almost, its special "look." It is world-history in the most genuine and most exacting sense. This group of passionate life-courses invented for its symbol and its " world " the city, in contrast to the village of the previous stage — the stone city in which is housed a quite artificial living, that has become divorced from mother earth and is completely anti-natural — the city of rootless thought, that draws the streams of life from the land and uses them up Into itself.¹

There arises "society"² with its hierarchy of classes, noble, priest, and burgher, as an artificial gradation of life against the background of " mere " peasantry — for the natural divisions are those of strong and weak, clever and stupid — and as the seat of a cultural evolution that is wholly intellectualized. There " luxury " and " wealth " reign. These are concepts which those who do not share them enviously misunderstand. For what is luxury but Culture in its most exacting form? Consider the Athens of Pericles, the Baghdad of Haroun-al-Raschid, the Rococo. This urban Culture is luxury through and through, in all grades and callings, artificial from top to bottom, an affair of arts, whether arts of diplomacy or living, of adornment or writing or thought. Without an economic wealth that is concentrated in a few hands, there can be no " wealth " of art, of thought, of elegance, not to speak of the luxury of possessing a world-outlook, of thinking theoretically instead of practically. Economic impoverishment at once brings spiritual and artistic impoverishment in its train.

And, in this sense, the technical processes that mature in these Cultures are also spiritual luxuries, late, sweet, and fragile fruits of an increasing artificiality and intellectuality. They begin with the building of the tomb pyramids of Egypt and the Sumerian temple-towers of Babylonia, which come into being in the third millennium B.C., deep in the South, but signify no more than the victory over big masses. Then come the enterprises of Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, and Mexican Cultures. And now, in the second millennium of our era, in the full North, there is our own Faustian Culture, which represents the victory of pure technical thought over big problems.

For these Cultures grow up, though independently of one another, yet in a series of which the sense is from South to North. The Faustian, west-European Culture is probably not the last, but certainly it is the most powerful, the most passionate, and — owing to the inward conflict between its comprehensive intellectuality and its profound spiritual disharmony — the most tragic of them all. It is possible that some belated straggler may follow it — for instance, a Culture may arise somewhere in the plains between the Vistula and the Amur — during the next millennium. But it is here, in our own, that the struggle between Nature and the Man whose historic destiny has made him pit himself against her is to all intents and purposes ended.

The Northern countryside, by the severity of the conditions of life in it — the cold, the continuous privation — has forged hard races, with intellects sharpened to the keenest, and the cold fires of an unrestrained passion for fighting, risking, thrusting forward — that which elsewhere¹ I have called the passion of the Third Dimension. There are, once more, beasts of prey whose inner forces struggle fruitlessly to break the superiority of thought, of organized artificial living, over the blood, to turn these into their servants, to elevate the destiny of the free personality to being the very meaning of the world. A will-to-power which laughs at all bounds of time and space, which indeed regards the boundless and endless as its specific target, subjects whole continents to itself, eventually embraces the world in the network of its forms of communication and intercourse, and transforms it by the force of its practical energy and the gigantic power of its technical processes.

At the beginning of every high Culture the two primary orders, nobility and priesthood — the beginnings of "society" — take shape clear of the peasant-life of the open land.¹ They are the embodiment of ideas, and, moreover, mutually exclusive ideas. The noble, warrior, adventurer lives in the world of facts, the priest, scholar, philosopher in his world of truths. The one is (or suffers) a destiny, the other thinks in causality. The one would make intellect the servant of a strong living, the other would subject his living to the service of the intellect. And nowhere has this opposition taken more irreconcilable forms than in the Faustian Culture, in which the proud blood of the beast of prey revolts for the last time against the tyranny of pure thought. From the conflict between the ideas of Empire and Papacy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to the conflict between the forces of a thoroughbred tradition — kingship, nobility, army — and the theories of a plebeian rationalism, liberalism, and socialism—from the French to the German revolution — history is one sequence of efforts to get the decision.

Eleven

THIS difference appears, in all its magnitude, in the contrast between the Vikings of the blood and the Vikings of the mind during the rise of the Faustian Culture. The first, thrusting insatiably out from the high North into the infinite, reached Spain in 796, Inner Russia in 859, Iceland in 861. In 861, too, Morocco was reached, and thence they ranged to Provence and the environs of Rome itself. In 865, by Kiev, the drive passed on to the Black Sea and Constantinople, in 880 to the Caspian, in 909 to Persia. They settled in Normandy and Iceland about 900, in Greenland about 980, and discovered North America about 1000. In 1029, from Normandy, they are in lower Italy and Sicily; in 1034, from Constantinople, they are in Greece and Asia Minor; and in 1066, from Normandy again, they conquer England.¹

With a like boldness and a like hunger for power and booty, in this case intellectual, Northern monks in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forced their way deep into the world of technical-physical problems. Here there was nothing of the idle and unpractical curiosity of the Chinese, Indian, Classical, and Arabian savants, no mere teleological speculation, no contemplative search for a picture of that which man cannot know. True, every scientific theory is a myth of the understanding about Nature's forces, and everyone is dependent, through and through, upon the religion with which it belongs.¹ But in the Faustian, and the Faustian alone, every theory is also from the outset a working hypothesis.² A working hypothesis need not be "correct," it is only required to be practical. It aims, not at embracing and unveiling the secrets of the world, but at making them serviceable to definite ends. Hence the advance in mathematical methods, due to the Englishmen Grosseteste (born 1175) and Roger Bacon (born ca. 1210), and the Germans Albertus Magnus (born 1193) and Witelo (born 1220). Hence, too, experiment, Bacon's "Scientia experimental," which is the interrogation of Nature under torture with the rack, lever, and screw;¹ "experimentum enim solum certificat," as Albertus Magnus put it. It is the stratagem of intellectual beasts of prey. They imagined that their desire was to " know God," and yet it was the forces of inorganic Nature — the invisible energy manifested in all that happens — that they strove to isolate, to seize, and to turn to account. This Faustian science, and it alone, is Dynamics, in contrast to the Statics of the Greeks and the Alchemy of the Arabs.² It is concerned, not with stuffs, but with forces. Mass itself is a function of energy. Grosseteste developed a theory of space as a function of light, Petrus Peregrinus a theory of magnetism. The Copernican theory of the earth's motion round the sun was foreshadowed in a manuscript of 1322 and formulated — more clearly and more profoundly than by Copernicus himself — by Oresme, who also anticipated the Galileian law of falling bodies and the Cartesian co-ordinate geometry. God was looked upon no longer as the Lord who rules the world from His throne, but as an infinite force (already imagined as almost impersonal) that is omnipresent in the world. It was a singular form of divine worship, this experimental investigation of secret forces by pious monks. As an old German mystic said, " In thy serving of God, God serves thee."

Man, evidently, was tired of merely having plants and animals and slaves to serve him, and robbing Nature's treasures of metal and stone, wood and yarn, of managing her water in canals and wells, of breaking her resistances with ships and roads, bridges and tunnels and dams. Now he meant, not merely to plunder her of her materials, but to enslave and harness her very forces so as to multiply his own strength. This monstrous and unparalleled idea is as old as the Faustian Culture itself. Already in the tenth century we meet with technical constructions of a wholly new sort. Already the steam engine, the steamship, and the air machine are in the thoughts of Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus. And many a monk busied himself in his cell with the idea of Perpetual Motion.¹

This last idea never thereafter let go its hold on us, for success would mean the final victory over "God or Nature" (Deus sive Natura), a small world of one's own creation moving like the great world, in virtue of its own forces and obeying the hand of man alone. To build a world oneself, to be oneself God—that is the Faustian inventor's dream, and from it has sprung all our designing and re-designing of machines to approximate as nearly as possible to the unattainable limit of perpetual motion. The booty-idea of the beast of prey is thought out to its logical end. Not this or that bit of the world, as when Prometheus stole fire, but the world itself, complete with its secret of force, is dragged away as spoil to be built into our Culture. But he who...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• I. TECHNICS AS THE TACTICS OF LIVING
• II. HERBIVORES AND BEASTS OF PREY
• III. THE ORIGIN OF MAN: HAND AND TOOL
• IV. THE SECOND STAGE: SPEECH AND ENTERPRISE
• V. THE LAST ACT: RISE AND END OF THE MACHINE CULTURE