Chapter IV: The Problem of World-History (1)

II
THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY

I

Following out this train of thought to the end, we come into the presence of an opposition in which we perceive the key—the only key— wherewith to approach, and (so far as the word has any meaning at all) to solve, one of the oldest and gravest of man’s riddles. This is the opposition of the _Destiny Idea_ and the _Causality Principle_—an opposition which, it is safe to say, has never hitherto been recognized for what it is, the necessary foundation of world-building.

Anyone who understands at all what is meant by saying that the soul is the _idea of an existence_, will also divine a near relationship between it and the _sure sense of a destiny_ and must regard Life itself (our name for the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished) as directed, irrevocable in every line, fate-laden. Primitive man feels this dimly and anxiously, while for the man of a higher Culture it is definite enough to become his vision of the world— though this vision is communicable only through religion and art, never through notions and proofs.

Every higher language possesses a number of words such as luck, doom, conjuncture, vocation, about which there is, as it were, a veil. No hypothesis, no science, can ever get into touch with that which we feel when we let ourselves sink into the meaning and sound of these words. They are symbols, not notions. In them is the centre of gravity of that world-picture that I have called the World-as-history as opposed to the World-as-nature. The Destiny-idea demands life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect. There is an _organic logic_, an instinctive, dream-sure logic of all existence as opposed to the _logic of the inorganic_, the logic of understanding and of things understood—a logic of direction as against a logic of extension—and no systematist, no Aristotle or Kant, has known how to deal with it. They are on their own ground when they tell us about “judgment,” “perception,” “awareness,” and “recollection,” but as to what is in the words “hope,” “happiness,” “despair,” “repentance,” “devotion,” and “consolation” they are silent. He who expects here, in the domain of the living, to find reasons and consequences, or imagines that an inward certainty as to the meaning of life is the same thing as “Fatalism” or “Predestination,” simply knows nothing of the matters in question, confusing experience lived with experience acquired or acquirable. Causality is the reasonable, the law- bound, the describable, the badge of our whole waking and reasoning existence. But destiny is the word for an inner certainty that is _not_ describable. We bring out that which is in the causal by means of a physical or an epistemological system, through numbers, by reasoned classification; but the idea of destiny can be imparted only by the artist working through media like portraiture, tragedy and music. The one requires us to _distinguish_ and in distinguishing to dissect and destroy, whereas the other is _creative_ through and through, and thus destiny is related to life and causality to death.

In the Destiny-idea the soul reveals its world-longing, its desire to rise into the light, to accomplish and actualize its vocation. To no man is it entirely alien, and not before one has become the unanchored “late” man of the megalopolis is original vision quite overpowered by matter-of-fact feeling and mechanizing thought. Even then, in some intense hour, the lost vision comes back to one with terrible clearness, shattering in a moment all the causality of the world’s surface. For the world as a system of causal connexions is not only a “late” but also a highly rarefied conception and only the energetic intellects of high Cultures are capable of possessing it—or perhaps we should say, devising it—with conviction. The notion of causality is coterminous with the notion of law: the only laws that are, are causal laws. But just as there lies in the causal, according to Kant, a _necessity of the thinking consciousness_ and the _basic form of its relation to the essence of things_, so also, designated by the words destiny, dispensation, vocation, there is a something that is an inevitable _necessity of life_. Real history is heavy with fate but free of laws. One can divine the future (there is, indeed, a certain insight that can penetrate its secrets deeply) but one cannot reckon it. The physiognomic flair which enables one to read a whole life in a face or to sum up whole peoples from the picture of an epoch—and to do so without deliberate effort or “system”—is utterly remote from all “cause and effect.”

He who comprehends the light-world that is before his eyes not physiognomically but systematically, and makes it intellectually his own by the methods of _causal_ experience, must necessarily in the end come to believe that every living thing can be understood by reference to cause and effect—that there is no secret and no inner directedness. He, on the other hand, who as Goethe did—and for that matter as everyone does in nine out of ten of his waking moments—lets the impressions of the world about him work merely upon his senses, absorbs these impressions as a whole, feels the become in its becoming. The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere _ceasing to think_. Suddenly, Time is no more a riddle, a notion, a “form” or “dimension” but becomes an inner certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its _irreversibility_, its livingness, is disclosed the very meaning of the historical world-picture. _Destiny and Causality are related as Time and Space._

In the two possible world-forms then—History and Nature, the physiognomy of all becoming and the system of all things become—destiny _or_ causality prevails. Between them there is all the difference between a feeling of life and a method of knowledge. Each of them is the starting- point of a complete and self-contained, but not _of a unique_ world. Yet, after all, just as the become is founded upon a becoming, so the _knowledge_ of cause and effect is founded upon the sure _feeling_ of a destiny. Causality is—so to say—destiny become, destiny made inorganic and modelled in reason-forms. Destiny itself (passed over in silence by Kant and every other builder of rational world-systems because with their armoury of _abstractions_ they could not touch _life_) stands beyond and outside all comprehended Nature. Nevertheless, being itself the original, it alone gives the stiff dead principle of cause-and- effect the opportunity to figure in the later scenes of a culture-drama, alive and historical, as the incarnation of a tyrannical thinking. The existence of the Classical soul is the _condition_ for the appearance of Democritus’s method, the existence of the Faustian soul for that of Newton’s. We may well imagine that either of these Cultures might have failed to produce a natural science of its own, but we cannot imagine the systems without their cultural foundations.

Here again we see how becoming and the become, direction and extension, include one another and are subordinated each to the other, according as we are in the historical or in the “natural” focus. If history is that kind of world-order in which all the become is fitted to the becoming, then the products of scientific work must _inter alia_ be so handled; and, in fact, for the historical eye there is only a _history_ of physics. It was Destiny that the discoveries of oxygen, Neptune, gravitation and spectrum analysis happened as and when they did. It was Destiny that the phlogiston theory, the undulatory theory of light, the kinetic theory of gases could arise at all, seeing that they were elucidations of results and, as such, highly personal to their respective authors, and that other theories (“correct” or “erroneous”) might equally well have been developed instead. And it is again Destiny and the result of strong personality when one theory vanishes and another becomes the lodestar of the physicist’s world. Even the born physicist speaks of the “fate” of a problem or the “history” of a discovery.

Conversely, if “Nature” is that constitution of things in which the becoming should logically be incorporated in the thing-become, and living direction in rigid extension, history may best be treated as a chapter of epistemology; and so indeed Kant would have treated it if he had remembered to include it at all in his system of knowledge. Significantly enough, he did not; for him as for every born systematist Nature is _The_ World, and when he discusses time without noticing that it has direction and is irreversible, we see that he is dealing with the Nature-world and has no inkling of the possibility of another, the history-world. Perhaps, for Kant, this other world _was_ actually impossible.

Now, _Causality has nothing whatever to do with Time_. To the world of to-day, made up of Kantians who know not how Kantian they are, this must seem an outrageous paradox. And yet every formula of Western physics exhibits the “how” and the “how long” as distinct in essence. As soon as the question is pressed home, causality restricts its answer rigidly to the statement _that_ something happens—and not _when_ it happens. The “effect” must of necessity be put with the “cause.” The _distance_ between them belongs to a different order, it lies within the act of understanding itself (which is an element of life) and not within the thing or things understood. It is of the essence of the extended that it overcomes directedness, and of Space that it contradicts Time, _and yet the latter, as the more fundamental, precedes and underlies the former_. Destiny claims the same precedence; we begin with the idea of Destiny, and only later, when our waking-consciousness looks fearfully for a spell that will bind in the sense-world and overcome the death that cannot be evaded, do we conceive causality as an anti-Fate, and make it _create another world to protect us from and console us for this_. And as the web of cause and effect gradually spreads over the visible surfaces there is formed a convincing picture of timeless duration— essentially, Being, but Being endowed with attributes by the sheer force of pure thought. This tendency underlies the feeling, well known in all mature Cultures, that “Knowledge is Power,” the power that is meant being power over Destiny. The abstract savant, the natural-science researcher, the thinker in systems, whose whole intellectual existence bases itself on the causality principle, are “late” manifestations of an unconscious _hatred_ of the powers of incomprehensible Destiny. “Pure Reason” denies all possibilities that are outside itself. Here strict thought and great art are eternally in conflict. The one keeps its feet, and the other lets itself go. A man like Kant must always feel himself as superior to a Beethoven as the adult is to the child, but this will not prevent a Beethoven from regarding the “Critique of Pure Reason” as a pitiable sort of philosophy. _Teleology_, that nonsense of all nonsenses within science, is a misdirected attempt to deal mechanically with the _living_ content of scientific knowledge (for knowledge implies someone to know, and though the substance of thought may be “Nature” the _act_ of thought is history), and so with life itself as an inverted causality. Teleology is a caricature of the Destiny-idea which transforms the _vocation_ of Dante into the _aim_ of the savant. It is the deepest and most characteristic tendency both of Darwinism—the megalopolitan-intellectual product of the most abstract of all Civilizations—and of the materialist conception of history which springs from the same root as Darwinism and, like it, kills all that is organic and fateful. Thus the morphological element of the Causal is a _Principle_, and the morphological element of Destiny is an _Idea_, an idea that is incapable of being “cognized,” described or defined, and can only be felt and inwardly lived. This idea is something of which one is either entirely ignorant or else—like the man of the spring and every truly significant man of the late seasons, believer, lover, artist, poet—entirely certain.

Thus Destiny is seen to be the true _existence-mode of the prime phenomenon_, that in which the living idea of becoming unfolds itself immediately to the intuitive vision. And therefore the Destiny-idea dominates the whole world-picture of history, while causality, which is the existence-mode of _objects_ and stamps out of the world of sensations a set of well-distinguished and well-defined _things_, _properties_ and _relations_, dominates and penetrates, as the form of the understanding, the Nature-world that is the understanding’s “alter ego.”

But inquiry into the degree of validity of causal connexions within a presentation of nature, or (what is henceforth the same thing for us) into the destinies involved in that presentation, becomes far more difficult still when we come to realize that for primitive man or for the child no comprehensive causally-ordered world exists at all as yet and that we ourselves, though “late” men with a consciousness disciplined by powerful speech-sharpened thought, can do no more, even in moments of the most strained attention (the only ones, really, in which we are exactly in the physical focus), than _assert_ that the causal order which we see in such a moment is continuously present in the actuality around us. Even waking, we take in the actual, “the living garment of the Deity,” _physiognomically_, and we do so involuntarily and by virtue of a power of experience that is rooted in the deep sources of life.

A _systematic_ delineation, on the contrary, is the expression of an understanding emancipated from perception, and by means of it we bring the mental picture of all times and all men into conformity with the moment’s picture of Nature as ordered by ourselves. But the mode of this ordering, which has a history that we cannot interfere with in the smallest degree, is not the working of a cause, but a destiny.

II

The way to the problem of Time, then, begins in the primitive wistfulness and passes through its clearer issue the Destiny-idea. We have now to try to outline, briefly, the content of that problem, so far as it affects the subject of this book.

The _word_ Time is a sort of charm to summon up that intensely personal something designated earlier as the “proper,” which with an inner certainty we oppose to the “alien” something that is borne in upon each of us amongst and within the crowding impressions of the sense-life. “The Proper,” “Destiny” and “Time” are interchangeable words.

The problem of Time, like that of Destiny, has been completely misunderstood by all thinkers who have confined themselves to the systematic of the Become. In Kant’s celebrated theory there is not one word about its character of directedness. Not only so, but the omission has never even been noticed. But what _is_ time as a length, time without direction? Everything living, we can only repeat, has “life,” direction, impulse, will, a movement-quality (Bewegtheit) that is most intimately allied to yearning and has not the smallest element in common with the “motion” (Bewegung) of the physicists. The living is indivisible and irreversible, once and uniquely occurring, and its course is entirely indeterminable by mechanics. For all such qualities belong to the essence of Destiny, and “Time”—that which we actually feel at the sound of the word, which is clearer in music than in language, and in poetry than in prose—has this _organic_ essence, while Space has not. Hence, Kant and the rest notwithstanding, it is impossible to bring Time _with Space_ under one general Critique. Space is a _conception_, but time is a _word_ to indicate something inconceivable, a sound- symbol, and to use it as a notion, scientifically, is utterly to misconceive its nature. Even the word direction—which unfortunately cannot be replaced by another—is liable to mislead owing to its visual content. The vector-notion in physics is a case in point.

For primitive man the word “time” can have no meaning. He simply lives, without any necessity of specifying an opposition to something else. He _has_ time, but he _knows_ nothing of it. All of us are conscious, as being aware, of space only, and not of time. Space “is,” (i.e. exists, in and with our sense-world)—as a self-extension while we are living the ordinary life of dream, impulse, intuition and conduct, and as space in the strict sense in the moments of strained attention. “Time,” on the contrary, is a _discovery_, which is only made by thinking. We create it as an idea or notion and do not begin till much later to suspect that _we ourselves are Time_, inasmuch as we live.[102] And only the higher Cultures, whose world-conceptions have reached the mechanical-Nature stage, are capable of deriving from their consciousness of a well- ordered measurable and comprehensible Spatial, the projected image of time, the _phantom_ time,[103] which satisfies their need of comprehending, measuring and causally ordering all. And this impulse—a sign of the sophistication of existence that makes its appearance quite early in every Culture—fashions, outside and beyond the real life- feeling, that which is called time in all higher languages and has become for the town-intellect a completely _inorganic magnitude_, as deceptive as it is current. But, if the characteristics, or rather the characteristic, of extension—limit and causality—is really wizard’s gear wherewith our proper soul attempts to conjure and bind alien powers— Goethe speaks somewhere of the “principle of reasonable order that we bear within ourselves and could impress as the seal of our power upon everything that we touch”—if all law is a fetter which our world-dread hurries to fix upon the incrowding sensuous, a deep necessity of self- preservation, so also the invention of a time that is knowable and spatially representable within causality is a later act of this same self-preservation, an attempt to bind by the force of _notion_ the tormenting inward riddle that is doubly tormenting to the intellect that has attained power only to find itself defied. Always a subtle hatred underlies the intellectual process by which anything is forced into the domain and form-world of measure and law. The living is _killed_ by being introduced into space, for space is dead and makes dead. With birth is given death, with the fulfilment the end. Something _dies_ within the woman when she conceives—hence comes that eternal hatred of the sexes, child of world-fear. The man destroys, in a very deep sense, when he begets—by bodily act in the sensuous world, by “knowing” in the intellectual. Even in Luther[104] the word “know” has the secondary genital sense. And with the “knowledge” of life—which remains alien to the lower animals—the knowledge of death has gained that power which dominates man’s whole waking consciousness. By a _picture_ of time the actual is changed into the transitory.[105]

The mere creation of the _name_ Time was an unparalleled deliverance. To name anything by a name is to win power over it. This is the essence of primitive man’s art of magic—the evil powers are constrained by naming them, and the enemy is weakened or killed by coupling certain magic procedures with his name.[106]

And there is something of this primitive expression of world-fear in the way in which all systematic philosophies use mere names as a last resort for getting rid of the Incomprehensible, the Almighty that is all too mighty for the intellect. We name something or other the “Absolute,” and we feel ourselves at once its superior. Philosophy, the _love_ of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible. What is named, comprehended, measured is _ipso facto_ overpowered, made inert and taboo.[107] Once more, “knowledge is power.” Herein lies one root of the difference between the idealist’s and the realist’s attitude towards the Unapproachable; it is expressed by the two meanings of the German word _Scheu_—respect and abhorrence.[108] The idealist contemplates, the realist would subject, mechanize, render innocuous. Plato and Goethe accept the secret in humility, Aristotle and Kant would open it up and destroy it. The most deeply significant example of this realism is in its treatment of the Time problem. The dread mystery of Time, life itself, must be spellbound and, by the magic of comprehensibility, neutralized.

All that has been said about time in “scientific” philosophy, psychology and physics—the supposed answer to a question that had better never have been asked, namely what _is_ time?—touches, not at any point the secret itself, but only a spatially-formed _representative_ phantom. The livingness and directedness and fated course of real Time is replaced by a figure which, be it never so intimately absorbed, is only a _line_, measurable, divisible, reversible, and not a portrait of that which is incapable of being portrayed; by a “time” that can be mathematically expressed in such forms as √_t_, _t_², -_t_, from which the assumption of a time of zero magnitude or of negative times is, to say the least, _not_ excluded.[109] Obviously this is something quite outside the domain of Life, Destiny, and living _historical_ Time; it is a purely conceptual time-system that is remote even from the sensuous life. One has only to substitute, in any philosophical or physical treatise that one pleases, this word “Destiny” for the word “time” and one will instantly see how understanding loses its way when language has emancipated it from sensation, and how impossible the group “time and space” is. What is not experienced and felt, what is merely _thought_, necessarily takes a _spatial_ form, and this explains why no systematic philosopher has been able to make anything out of the mystery-clouded, far-echoing sound symbols “Past” and “Future.” In Kant’s utterances concerning time they do not even occur, and in fact one cannot see any relation which could connect them with what is said there. But only this spatial form enables time and space to be brought into functional interdependence as magnitudes _of the same_ order, as four-dimensional vector analysis[110] conspicuously shows. As early as 1813 Lagrange frankly described mechanics as a four-dimensional geometry, and even Newton’s cautious conception of “tempus absolutum sive duratio” is not exempt from this _intellectually inevitable_ transformation of the living into mere extension. In the older philosophy I have found one, and only one, profound and reverent presentation of Time; it is in Augustine—“If no one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not.”[111]

When philosophers of the present-day West “hedge”—as they all do—by saying that things _are_ in time as in space and that “outside” them nothing is “conceivable,” they are merely putting another kind of space (Räumlichkeit) beside the ordinary one, just as one might, if one chose, call hope and electricity the two forces of the universe. It ought not, surely, to have escaped Kant when he spoke of the “two forms” of perception, that whereas it is easy enough to come to a scientific understanding about space (though not to “explain” it, in the ordinary sense of the word, for that is beyond human powers), treatment of time on the same lines breaks down utterly. The reader of the “Critique of Pure Reason” and the “Prolegomena” will observe that Kant gives a well- considered proof for the connexion of space and geometry but carefully avoids doing the same for time and arithmetic. There he did not go beyond enunciation, and constant reassertion of analogy between the two conceptions lured him over a gap that would have been fatal to his system. _Vis-à-vis_ the Where and the How, the When forms a world of its own as distinct as is metaphysics from physics. Space, object, number, notion, causality are so intimately akin that it is impossible—as countless mistaken systems prove—to treat the one independently of the other. Mechanics is a copy of the logic of its day and vice versa. The picture of thought as psychology builds it up and the picture of the space-world as contemporary physics describes it are reflections of one another. Conceptions and things, reasons and causes, conclusions and processes coincide so nicely, as received by the consciousness, that the abstract thinker himself has again and again succumbed to the temptation of setting forth the thought-“process” graphically and schematically— witness Aristotle’s and Kant’s tabulated categories. “Where there is no scheme, there is no philosophy” is the objection of principle— unacknowledged though it may be—that all professional philosophers have against the “intuitives,” to whom inwardly they feel themselves far superior. That is why Kant crossly describes the Platonic style of thinking “as the art of spending good words in babble” (die Kunst, wortreich zu schwatzen), and why even to-day the lecture-room philosopher has not a word to say about Goethe’s philosophy. Every logical operation is capable of being _drawn_, every system a _geometrical_ method of handling thoughts. And therefore Time either finds no place in the system at all, or is made its victim.

This is the refutation of that widely-spread misunderstanding which connects time with arithmetic and space with geometry by superficial analogies, an error to which Kant ought never to have succumbed—though it is hardly surprising that Schopenhauer, with his incapacity for understanding mathematics, did so. Because the living act of numbering is somehow or other related to time, number and time are constantly confused. But numbering is not number, any more than drawing is a drawing. Numbering and drawing are a becoming, numbers and figures are things become. Kant and the rest have in mind now the living act (numbering) and now the result thereof (the relations of the finished figure); but the one belongs to the domain of Life and Time, the other to that of Extension and Causality. _That_ I calculate is the business of organic, _what_ I calculate the business of inorganic, logic. Mathematics as a whole—in common language, arithmetic and geometry— answers the _How?_ and the _What?_—that is, the problem of the Natural order of things. In opposition to this problem stands that of the _When?_ of things, the specifically historical problem of destiny, future and past; and all these things are comprised in the word _Chronology_, which simple mankind understands fully and unequivocally.

Between arithmetic and geometry there is no opposition.[112] Every kind of number, as has been sufficiently shown in an earlier chapter, belongs entirely to the realm of the extended and the become, whether as a Euclidean magnitude or as an analytical function; and to which heading should we have to assign the cyclometric[113] functions, the Binomial Theorem, the Riemann surfaces, the Theory of Groups? Kant’s scheme was refuted by Euler and d’Alembert before he even set it up, and only the unfamiliarity of his successors with the mathematics of their time—what a contrast to Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz, who evolved the mathematics of _their_ time from the depths of their own philosophy!—made it possible for mathematical notions of a relation between time and arithmetic to be passed on like an heirloom, almost uncriticized.

But between Becoming and any part whatsoever of mathematics there is not the slightest contact. Newton indeed was profoundly convinced (and he was no mean philosopher) that in the principles of his Calculus of Fluxions[114] he had grasped the problem of Becoming, and therefore of Time—in a far subtler form, by the way, than Kant’s. But even Newton’s view could not be upheld, even though it may find advocates to this day. Since Weierstrass proved that continuous functions exist which either cannot be differentiated at all or are capable only of partial differentiation, this most deep-searching of all efforts to close with the Time-problem mathematically has been abandoned.

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Footnote 102:

The sensuous life and the intellectual life too are Time; it is only
sensuous _experience_ and intellectual _experience_, the “world,” that
is spatial nature. (As to the nearer affinity of the Feminine to Time,
see Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq.)

Footnote 103:

The expression “space of time” (Zeitraum) which is common to many
languages, is evidence of our inability to represent direction
otherwise than by extension.

Footnote 104:

I.e., the translated Bible.—_Tr._

Footnote 105:

See Vol. II, pp. 19 et seq.

Footnote 106:

See p. 80 of this volume, and Vol. II, pp. 166, 328.

Footnote 107:

See Vol. II, p. 137.

Footnote 108:

The nearest English equivalent is perhaps the word “fear.” “Fearful”
would correspond exactly but for the fact that in the second sense the
word is objective instead of subjective. The word “shy” itself bears
the second meaning in such trivial words as gun-shy, work-shy.—_Tr._

Footnote 109:

The Relativity theory, a working hypothesis which is on the way to
overthrowing Newton’s mechanics—which means at bottom his view of the
problem of motion—admits cases in which the words “earlier” and
“later” may be inverted. The mathematical foundation of this theory by
Minkowski uses _imaginary_ time units for measurement.

Footnote 110:

The dimensions are _x_, _y_, _z_ (in respect of space) and _t_ (in
respect of time), and all four appear to be regarded as perfectly
equivalent in transformations. [The English reader may be referred to
A. Einstein, “Theory of Relativity,” Ch. XI and appendices I, II.—
_Tr._]

Footnote 111:

Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicari velim, nescio.
(_Conf._ XI, 14.)

Footnote 112:

Save in elementary mathematics. (It may be remarked that most
philosophers since Schopenhauer have approached these questions with
the prepossessions of elementary mathematics.)

Footnote 113:

The “inverse circular functions” of English text-books.—_Tr._

Footnote 114:

The Newtonian form of the differential calculus was distinct from the
Leibnizian, which is now in general use. Without going into
unnecessary detail, the characteristic of Newton’s method was that it
was meant not for the calculation of quadratures and tangents (which
had occupied his predecessors), nor as an organ of functional theory
as such (as the differential calculus became much later), but quite
definitely as a method of dealing with _rate of change_ in pure
mechanics, with the “flowing” or “fluxion” of a dependent variable
under the influence of a variable which for Newton was the “fluent,”
and which we call the argument of a function.—_Tr._

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III

_Time is a counter-conception (Gegenbegriff) to Space_, arising out of Space, just as the notion (as distinct from the fact) of Life arises only in opposition to thought, and the notion (as distinct from the fact) of birth and generation only in opposition to death.[115] This is implicit in the very essence of all awareness. Just as any sense- impression is only remarked when it detaches itself from another, so any kind of understanding that is genuine critical activity[116] is only made possible through the setting-up of a new concept as anti-pole to one already present, or through the divorce (if we may call it so) of a pair of inwardly-polar concepts which as long as they are mere constituents, possess no actuality.[117] It has long been presumed—and rightly, beyond a doubt—that all root-words, whether they express things or properties, have come into being by pairs; but even later, even to- day, the connotation that every new word receives is a reflection of some other. And so, guided by language, the understanding, incapable of fitting a sure inward subjective certainty of Destiny into its form- world, created “time” out of space as its opposite. But for this we should possess neither the word nor its connotation. And so far is this process of word-formation carried that the particular style of extension possessed by the Classical world led to a specifically Classical notion of time, differing from the time-notions of India, China and the West exactly as Classical space differs from the space of these Cultures.[118]

For this reason, the notion of an art-form—which again is a “counter- concept”—has only arisen when men became aware that their art-creations had a connotation (Gehalt) at all, that is, when the expression-language of the art, along with its effects, had ceased to be something perfectly natural and taken-for-granted, as it still was in the time of the Pyramid-Builders, in that of the Mycenæan strongholds and in that of the early Gothic cathedrals. Men become suddenly aware of the existence of “works,” and then for the first time the understanding eye is able to distinguish a causal side and a destiny side in every living art.

In every work that displays the _whole_ man and the _whole_ meaning of the existence, fear and longing lie close together, but they are and they remain different. To the fear, to the Causal, belongs the whole “taboo” side of art—its stock of motives, developed in strict schools and long craft-training, carefully protected and piously transmitted; all of it that is comprehensible, learnable, _numerical_; all the _logic_ of colour, line, structure, order, which constitutes the mother- tongue of every worthy artist and every great epoch. But the other side, opposed to the “taboo” as the directed is to the extended and as the development-destiny within a form-language to its syllogisms, comes out in genius (namely, in that which is wholly personal _to the individual artists_, their imaginative powers, creative passion, depth and richness, as against all mere mastery of form) and, beyond even genius, in that superabundance of creativeness in the race which conditions the rise and fall of whole arts. This is the “totem” side, and owing to it— notwithstanding all the æsthetics ever penned—there is no timeless and solely-true way of art, but only a _history_ of art, marked like everything that lives with the sign of irreversibility.[119]

And this is why architecture of the grand style—which is the only one of the arts that handles the alien and fear-instilling itself, the immediate Extended, the stone—is naturally _the_ early art in all Cultures, and only step by step yields its primacy to the special arts of the city with their more mundane forms—the statue, the picture, the musical composition. Of all the great artists of the West, it was probably Michelangelo who suffered most acutely under the constant nightmare of world-fear, and it was he also who, alone among the Renaissance masters, never freed himself from the architectural. He even painted as though his surfaces were stone, become, stiff, _hateful_. His work was a bitter wrestle with the powers of the cosmos which faced him and challenged him in the form of material, whereas in the yearning Leonardo’s colour we see, as it were, a glad materialization of the spiritual. But in every large architectural problem an implacable causal logic, not to say mathematic, comes to expression—in the Classical orders of columns a Euclidean relation of _beam_ and _load_, in the “analytically” disposed thrust-system of Gothic vaulting the dynamic relation of _force_ and _mass_. Cottage-building traditions—which are to be traced in the one and in the other, which are the necessary background even of Egyptian architecture, which in fact develop in every early period and are regularly lost in every later—contain the whole sum of this logic of the extended. But the symbolism of direction and destiny is beyond all the “technique” of the great arts and hardly approachable by way of æsthetics. It lies—to take some instances—in the contrast that is always felt (but never, either by Lessing or by Hebbel, elucidated) between Classical and Western tragedy; in the succession of scenes of old Egyptian relief and generally in the _serial_ arrangement of Egyptian statues, sphinxes, temple-halls; in the choice, as distinct from the treatment, of materials (hardest diorite to affirm, and softest wood to deny, the future); in the occurrence, and not in the grammar, of the individual arts, e.g., the victory of arabesque over the Early Christian picture, the retreat of oil-painting before chamber music in the Baroque; in the utter diversity of intention in Egyptian, Chinese and Classical statuary. All these are not matters of “can” but of “must,” and therefore it is not mathematics and abstract thought, but the great arts in their kinship with the contemporary religions, that give the key to the problem of Time, a problem that can hardly be solved within the domain of history[120] alone.

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Footnote 115:

See Vol. II, pp. 13, 19.

Footnote 116:

See Vol. II, p. 16.

Footnote 117:

The original reads: “(So ist jede Art von Verstehen ... nur dadurch
möglich ...) dass ein Begriffspaar von innerem Gegensatz
gewissermassen durch Auseinandertreten erst Wirklichkeit erhält.”—
_Tr._

Footnote 118:

At this point the German text repeats the paragraph which in this
edition begins at “But inquiry” (p. 121) and ends at the close of
section I (p. 121).—_Tr._

Footnote 119:

See Vol. II, pp. 137, 159.

Footnote 120:

Here the author presumably means history in the ordinary acceptation
of the word.—_Tr._

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IV

It follows from the meaning that we have attached to the Culture as a prime phenomenon and to destiny as the organic logic of existence, that each Culture must necessarily possess its own destiny-idea. Indeed, this conclusion is implicit from the first in the feeling that every great Culture is nothing but the actualizing and form of a single, singularly- constituted (einzigartig) soul. And what cannot be felt by one sort of men exactly as it is felt by another (since the life of each is the expression of the idea _proper_ to himself) and still less transcribed, what is named by us “conjuncture,” “accident,” “Providence” or “Fate,” by Classical man “Nemesis,” “Ananke,” “Tyche” or “Fatum,” by the Arab “Kismet,” by everyone in some way of his own, is just that of which each unique and unreproduceable soul-constitution, quite clear to those who share in it, is a rendering.

The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call Euclidean. Thus it is the sense-actual person of Œdipus, his “empirical ego,” nay, his σῶμα that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. Œdipus complains that Creon has misused his “body”[121] and that the oracle applied to his “body.”[122] Æschylus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the “royal body, leader of fleets.”[123] It is this same word σῶμα that the mathematicians employ more than once for the “bodies” with which they deal. But the destiny of King Lear is of the “analytical” type—to use here also the term suggested by the corresponding number-world—and consists in dark inner relationships. The idea of fatherhood emerges; spiritual threads weave themselves into the action, incorporeal and transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the secondary tragedy of Gloster’s house. Lear is at the last a mere name, the axis of something unbounded. _This_ conception of destiny is the “infinitesimal” conception. It stretches out into infinite time and infinite space. It touches the bodily, Euclidean existence not at all, but affects only the Soul. Consider the mad King between the fool and the outcast in the storm on the heath, and then look at the Laocoön group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollinian way of suffering. Sophocles, too, wrote a Laocoön drama; and we may be certain that there was nothing of _pure soul-agony_ in it. Antigone goes below ground in the body, because she has buried her brother’s body. Think of Ajax and Philoctetes, and then of the Prince of Homburg and Goethe’s Tasso—is not the difference between magnitude and relation traceable right into the depths of artistic creation?

This brings us to another connexion of high symbolic significance. The drama of the West is ordinarily designated _Character-Drama_. That of the Greeks, on the other hand, is best described as _Situation-Drama_, and in the antithesis we can perceive what it is that Western, and what it is that Classical, man respectively feel as the basic life-form that is imperilled by the onsets of tragedy and fate. If in lieu of “direction” we say “irreversibility,” if we let ourselves sink into the terrible meaning of those words “too late” wherewith we resign a fleeting bit of the present to the _eternal_ past, we find the deep foundation of every tragic crisis. It is Time that is the tragic, and it is by the meaning that it intuitively attaches to Time that one Culture is differentiated from another; and consequently “tragedy” of the grand order has only developed in the Culture which has most passionately affirmed, and in that which has most passionately denied, Time. The sentiment of the ahistoric soul gives us a Classical tragedy of the moment, and that of the ultrahistorical soul puts before us Western tragedy that deals with the _development of a whole life_. Our tragedy arises from the feeling of an _inexorable_ Logic of becoming, while the Greek feels the _illogical, blind Casual of the moment_—the life of Lear matures inwardly towards a catastrophe, and that of Œdipus stumbles without warning upon a situation. And now one may perceive how it is that synchronously with Western drama there rose and fell a mighty portrait-art (culminating in Rembrandt), a kind of historical and biographical art which (_because_ it was so) was sternly discountenanced in Classical Greece at the apogee of Attic drama. Consider the veto on likeness-statuary in votive offerings[124] and note how—from Demetrius of Alopeke (about 400)[125]—a timid art of “ideal” portraiture began to venture forth when, and only when, grand tragedy had been thrown into the background by the light society-pieces of the “Middle Comedy.”[126] Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in the theatre of Dionysus; all bring to expression, in significantly strict form, _somatic_ attitudes and positions. Physiognomically they are _dumb_, corporeal and _of necessity_ nude—character-heads of definite individuals came only with the Hellenistic age. Once more we are reminded of the contrast between the Greek number-world, with its computations of tangible results, and the other, our own, in which the relations between groups of functions or equations or, generally, formula-elements of the same order are investigated morphologically, and the character of these relations fixed _as such_ in express laws.

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Footnote 121:

_Œd. Rex._, 642. κακῶς εἴληφα τοὐμὸν σῶμα σὺν τέχνῃ κακῇ. (Cf. Rudolf
Hirsch, _Die Person_ (1914), p. 9.)

Footnote 122:

_Œd. Col._, 355. μαντεῖα ... ἃ τοῦδ’ ἐχρήσθη σώματος.

Footnote 123:

_Choëphoræ_, 710. ἐπὶ ναυάρχῳ σώματι ... τῷ βασιλείῳ.

Footnote 124:

Phidias, and through him his patron Pericles, were attacked for
alleged introduction of portraits upon the shield of Athene Parthenos.
In Western religious art, on the contrary, portraiture was, as
everyone knows, a habitual practice. Every Madonna, for instance, is
more or less of a portrait.

With this may be compared again the growing resistance of Byzantine
art, as it matured, to portraiture in sacred surroundings, evidenced
for instance in the history of the _nimbus_ or halo—which was removed
from the insignia of the Prince to become the badge of the Saint—in
the legend of the miraculous effacement of Justinian’s pompous
inscription on Hagia Sophia, and in the banishment of the human patron
from the celestial part of the church to the earthly.—_Tr._

Footnote 125:

Who was criticized as “no god-maker but a man-maker” and as one who
spoilt the _beauty_ of his work by aiming at _likeness_.

Cresilas, the sculptor from whom the only existing portrait of
Pericles is derived, was a little earlier; in him, however, the
“ideal” was still the supreme aim.—_Tr._

Footnote 126:

The writers immediately succeeding Aristophanes.—_Tr._

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V

In the capacity of experientially living history and the way in which history, particularly the history of personal becoming, is lived, one man differs very greatly from another.

Every Culture possesses a wholly individual way of looking at and comprehending the world-as-Nature; or (what comes to the same thing) it _has_ its own peculiar “Nature” which no other sort of man can possess in exactly the same form. But in a far greater degree still, every Culture—including the individuals comprising it (who are separated only by minor distinctions)—possesses a specific and peculiar sort of history—and it is in the picture of this and the style of this that the general and the personal, the inner and the outer, the world-historical and the biographical becoming, are immediately perceived, felt and lived. Thus the autobiographical tendency of Western man—revealed even in Gothic times in the symbol of auricular confession[127]—is utterly alien to Classical man; while his intense historical awareness is in complete contrast to the almost dreamy unconsciousness of the Indian. And when Magian man—primitive Christian or ripe scholar of Islam—uses the words “world-history,” what is it that he sees before him?

But it is difficult enough to form an exact idea even of the “Nature” proper to another kind of man, although in this domain things specifically cognizable are causally ordered and unified in a communicable system. And it is quite impossible for us to penetrate completely a historical world-aspect of “becoming” formed by a soul that is quite differently constituted from our own. Here there must always be an intractable residue, greater or smaller in proportion to our historical instinct, physiognomic tact and knowledge of men. All the same, the solution of this very problem is the condition-precedent of all really deep understanding of the world. The historical environment of another is a part of his _essence_, and no such other can be understood without the knowledge of his time-sense, his destiny-idea and the style and degree of acuity of his inner life. In so far therefore as these things are not directly confessed, we have to extract them from the symbolism of the alien Culture. And as it is thus and only thus that we can approach the incomprehensible, the style of an alien Culture, and the great time-symbols belonging thereto acquire an immeasurable importance.

As an example of these hitherto almost uncomprehended signs we may take the _clock_, a creation of highly developed Cultures that becomes more and more mysterious as one examines it. Classical man managed to do without the clock, and his abstention was more or less deliberate. To the Augustan period, and far beyond it, the time of day was estimated by the length of one’s shadow,[128] although sun-dials and water-clocks, designed in conformity with a strict time-reckoning and imposed by a deep sense of past and future, had been in regular use in both the older Cultures of Egypt and Babylonia.[129] Classical man’s existence— Euclidean, relationless, point-formed—was wholly contained in the instant. Nothing must remind him of past or future. For the true Classical, archæology did not exist, nor did its _spiritual inversion_, _astrology_. The Oracle and the Sibyl, like the Etruscan-Roman “haruspices” and “augurs,” did not foretell any distant future but merely gave indications on particular questions of immediate bearing. No time-reckoning entered intimately into everyday life (for the Olympiad sequence was a mere literary expedient) and what really matters is not the goodness or badness of a calendar but the questions: “who uses it?” and “does the life of the nation run by it?” In Classical cities nothing suggested duration, or old times or times to come—there was no pious preservation of ruins, no work conceived for the benefit of future generations; in them we do not find that durable[130] material was deliberately chosen. The Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenæan stone- technique and built in wood or clay, though Mycenæan and Egyptian work was before him and the country produced first-class building-stone. The Doric style is a timber style—even in Pausanias’s day some wooden columns still lingered in the Heræum of Olympia. The real organ of history is “memory” in the sense which is always postulated in this book, viz., that which preserves as a constant present the image of one’s personal past and of a national and a world-historical past[131] as well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super- personal becoming. That organ was not present in the make-up of a Classical soul. There was no “Time” in it. Immediately behind his proper present, the Classical historian sees a background that is already destitute of temporal and therefore of inward order. For Thucydides the Persian Wars, for Tacitus the agitation of the Gracchi, were already in this vague background;[132] and the great families of Rome had traditions that were pure romance—witness Cæsar’s slayer, Brutus, with his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide ancestor. Cæsar’s reform of the calendar may almost be regarded as a deed of emancipation from the Classical life-feeling. But it must not be forgotten that Cæsar also imagined a renunciation of Rome and a transformation of the City-State into an empire which was to be dynastic—marked with the badge of duration—and to have its centre of gravity in Alexandria, which in fact is the birthplace of his calendar. His assassination seems to us a last outburst of the antiduration feeling that was incarnate in the _Polis_ and the _Urbs Roma_.

Even then Classical mankind was still living every hour and every day for itself; and this is equally true whether we take the individual Greek or Roman, or the city, or the nation, or the whole Culture. The hot-blooded pageantry, palace-orgies, circus-battles of Nero or Caligula—Tacitus is a true Roman in describing only these and ignoring the smooth progress of life in the distant provinces—are final and flamboyant expressions of the Euclidean world-feeling that deified the body and the present.

The Indians also have no sort of time-reckoning (the absence of it in their case expressing their Nirvana) and no clocks, and _therefore_ no history, no life memories, no care. What the conspicuously historical West calls “Indian history” achieved itself without the smallest consciousness of what it was doing.[133] The millennium of the Indian Culture between the Vedas and Buddha seems like the stirrings of a sleeper; here life was _actually_ a dream. From all this our Western Culture is unimaginably remote. And, indeed, man has never—not even in the “contemporary” China of the Chóu period with its highly-developed sense of eras and epochs[134]—been so awake and aware, so deeply sensible of time and conscious of direction and fate and movement as he has been in the West. _Western history was willed and Indian history happened._ In Classical existence years, in Indian centuries scarcely counted, but here the hour, the minute, yea the second, is of importance. Of the tragic tension of a historical crisis like that of August, 1914, when even moments seem overpowering, neither a Greek nor an Indian could have had any idea.[135] Such crises, too, a deep-feeling man of the West can experience _within himself_, as a true Greek could never do. Over our country-side, day and night from thousands of belfries, ring the bells[136] that join future to past and fuse the point-moments of the Classical present into a grand relation. The epoch which marks the birth of our Culture—the time of the Saxon Emperors— marks also the discovery of the wheel-clock.[137] Without exact time- measurement, without a _chronology of becoming_ to correspond with his imperative need of archæology (the preservation, excavation and collection of _things-become_), Western man is unthinkable. The Baroque age intensified the Gothic symbol of the belfry to the point of grotesqueness, and produced the pocket watch that constantly accompanies the individual.[138]

Another symbol, as deeply significant and as little understood as the symbol of the clock, is that of the funeral customs which all great Cultures have consecrated by ritual and by art. The grand style in India begins with tomb-temples, in the Classical world with funerary urns, in Egypt with pyramids, in early Christianity with catacombs and sarcophagi. In the dawn, innumerable equally-possible forms still cross one another chaotically and obscurely, dependent on clan-custom and external necessities and conveniences. But every Culture promptly elevates one or another of them to the highest degree of symbolism. Classical man, obedient to his deep unconscious life-feeling, picked upon burning, an act of annihilation in which the Euclidean, the here- and-now, type of existence was powerfully expressed. He _willed_ to have no history, no duration, neither past nor future, neither preservation nor dissolution, and therefore he _destroyed_ that which no longer possessed a present, the _body_ of a Pericles, a Cæsar, a Sophocles, a Phidias. And the soul passed to join the vague crowd to which the living members of the clan paid (but soon ceased to pay) the homage of ancestor-worship and soul-feast, and which in its _formlessness_ presents an utter contrast to the ancestor-_series_, the _genealogical tree_, that is eternalized with all the marks of historical order in the family-vault of the West. In this (with one striking exception, the Vedic dawn in India) no other Culture parallels the Classical.[139] And be it noted that the Doric-Homeric spring, and above all the “Iliad,” invested this act of burning with all the vivid feeling of a _new-born_ symbol; for those very warriors whose deeds probably formed the nucleus of the epic were in fact buried almost in the Egyptian manner in the graves of Mycenæ, Tiryns, Orchomenos and other places. And when in Imperial times the sarcophagus or “flesh-consumer”[140] began to supersede the vase of ashes, it was again, as in the time when the Homeric urn superseded the shaft-grave of Mycenæ, a _changed sense of Time_ that underlay the change of rite.

The Egyptians, who preserved their past in memorials of stone and hieroglyph so purposefully that we, four thousand years after them, can determine the order of their kings’ reigns, so thoroughly eternalized their bodies that today the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, recognizable in every lineament, a symbol of grim triumph—while of Dorian kings not even the names have survived. For our own part, we know the exact birthdays and deathdays of almost every great man since Dante, and, moreover, we see nothing strange in the fact. Yet in the time of Aristotle, the very zenith of Classical education, it was no longer known with certainty if Leucippus, the founder of Atomism and a contemporary of Pericles—i.e., hardly a century before—had ever existed at all; much as though for us the existence of Giordano Bruno was a matter of doubt[141] and the Renaissance had become pure saga.