As I work on Spengler’s political history, I want to experiment with something new. In the first year or so of the blog I wasn’t entirely sure how to structure it. This resulted in many of my older posts seeming a bit disorganised, shallow, and wide-reaching without warrant. My series on Art is particularly guilty of this as I used artistic components to illustrate some of Spengler’s broader ideas; I used holy architecture to illustrate prime symbolism without explaining its connection to art history. I explored the Renaissance specifically to prove the difference between the West and the Greco-Roman world. I would explain these things whilst intermittently discussing things from all over the first half of the book, forming my own sort of introduction to Spengler that neglected some of the ideas presented in the pages I drew from. So, starting today, for the next few weeks I will run a series that does the hundred pages Spengler invests into the art history justice, by creating a more advanced breakdown than I’ve done for any of the other subject matters of the Decline of the West.

For this post, I will draw on the three chapters in Volume 1 that Spengler devotes to art. Chapter 6 follows on from the establishment of Higher Cultures and the idea of the macrocosm. Its focus is squarely on early period art and differences of spirit between culture. Chapters 7 and 8 focus more on the form of art, equally comparing cultural art forms but focusing on late period and civilisation period art with the Renaissance as an exception. I have also drawn from Man and Technics as I personally like the clarity of Spengler’s overall definition of art, and it will form a good starting point to how he sees the subject. I will be jumping about in these chapters instead of going linearly segment by segment as I normally do in order to provide as linear a narrative about art history as I can from Spengler’s point of view.

But I think the first question anyone must ask themselves when approaching art history is “what is art?” and the more advanced “what is history?” We will see that giving art definition will naturally give history definition as a consequence. The definition of art has been asserted and debated as long as aesthetics have been a recognised medium. Mind you, the philosophy of aesthetics is only as old as the 18^th Century, which means accounts of art before that may be muddied by undefined cultural perception. Plato defines art as “imitation of nature or reality” in Republic Book X, but specifically distrusted it as being twice-removed from Truth (Forms > Reality > Art). Aristotle conversely understands art in the context of its end goal (Telos), stating that it “completes what nature cannot bring to a finish” in Physics Book II. Christian scholastics like Aquinas considered art as “right reason” aligning it with the intelligent ordering of materials according to rational intent in Summa Theologica. Kant repeated this concept when he severed art from nature in Critique of Judgement. Tolstoy, in What is Art?, defines it as a mode of communication for common sentiment. After Spengler, Heidegger asserts art is an expression of truth in The Origin of the Work of Art. Since World War 2, Art’s definition has taken a more fluid approach as post modernists rather pessimistically argued that anything can be art, according to Danto, or even worse, Dickie’s claim that anything that is given status by the art world is art.

We have a multitude of opposing attitudes here. What’s particularly important here is the post-modern attitudes. Dickie and Danto seems to think that pointing out the lines in the dirt and preaching its arbitrariness puts them in the right camp. The reality is their artistic nihilism is also another relative viewpoint they are trapped in. What Spengler does differently is he attempts to understand art more fundamentally than just categories of aesthetics alone. From Man and Technics we have a clear and grounding definition for art:

“And this soul strides forward in an ever-increasing alienation from all Nature. The weapons of the beasts of prey are natural, but the armed fist of man with its artificially made, thought-out, and selected weapon is not. Here begins “Art” as a counterconcept to “Nature.” Every technical process of man is an art and is always so described — so, for instance, archery and equitation, the art of war, the arts of building and government, of sacrificing and prophesying, of painting and versification, of scientific experiment. Every work of man is artificial, unnatural, from the lighting of a fire to the achievements that are specifically designated as “artistic” in the high Cultures. The privilege of creation has been wrested from Nature. “Free will” itself is an act of rebellion and nothing less. Creative man has stepped outside the bounds of Nature, and with every fresh creation he departs further and further from her, becomes more and more her enemy. That is his “world-history,” the history of a steadily increasing, fateful rift between man’s world and the universe — the history of a rebel that grows up to raise his hand against his mother.”[1]

Art is not limited to aesthetics, or music or material. Spengler chooses to start as fundamentally as he can before figuring out anything that rests on top of it. Without understanding the foundations, we become prone to our cultural sensibilities and make emotional definitions.

Art begins principally as a divergence from nature. He draws attention to phrases like “the art of war” to illustrate that anything technical can be considered an art. “the privilege of creation has been wrested from Nature” is our free will going against our natural impulses. This quote echoes Kant’s severance from nature, but also brings us back to the opening of Volume 2. The animal resists its plant-like tendencies. Equally, humans, a higher animal, resist the natural world through pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment which grant power over the unknown. Art is a product of that process. The difficulty of this definition however is that it is immensely broad on its own. If art is anything that comes from creative free will, then why do we recognise some arts (music, sculpture, painting etc.) and deny others (war, science, mathematics etc.)? Spengler opens chapter 7 to this problem.

Spengler is highly critical of the modern break-down of art, citing its arbitrary sectioning of forms:

“The first act of the learned pedant has always been to partition the infinitely wide domain [of Art] into provinces determined by perfectly superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow these provinces with eternal validity and immutable form-principles. Thus he separated “Music” and “Painting,” “Music” and “Drama,” “Painting” and “Sculpture.” And then he proceeded to define “the” art of Painting, “the” art of Sculpture, and so on. But in fact the technical form-language is no more than the mask of the real work.”[2]

This criticism is important, because we all tend to assume that music is distinct from painting, painting from sculpture, and sculpture from music due to particular properties of these types (sound, material, shape, dimension). Is Spengler suggesting you can blend music with sculpture? No. What he is saying, however, is how we categorise art is ultimately arbitrary. What is the line between lyric and poetry, or dance and drama, or architecture and sculpture? These are techniques of expression, but without anything to express, they’re all the same dead material. So again, how do we extract music and painting from war if our categories and distinctions are arbitrary?

The answer is to not define art as organisations of material, but to define them by cultural form.

“In the actual, tones are something extended, limited and numerable just as lines and colours are; harmony, melody, rhyme and rhythm no less so than perspective, proportion, chiaroscuro and outline. The distance separating two kinds of painting can be infinitely greater than that separating the painting and the music of a period. Considered in relation to a statue of Myron, the art of a Poussin landscape is the same as that of a contemporary chamber- cantata; that of Rembrandt as that of the organ works of Buxtehude, Pachelbel and Bach; that of Guardi as that of the Mozart opera — the inner form-language is so nearly identical that the difference between optical and acoustic means is negligible.”[3]

Art form is something organic. In the same way a person, both in body and mind, is whole and cannot function without all its organs, or be oneself without all one’s thoughts and memories, art is not something that can be picked apart and categorised in the living moment. In life it is simply felt to be. The feeling is prime here and not the material or category of art. The above quote explains a very important idea: for us to say that Rembrandt is on a timeline of painting with Polyclitus, Da Vinci, or even cave painters from the ice age, misses the fact that these artists were not mastering painting; these artists were mastering their era. They aren’t mastering something to communicate; they are channelling something deep and unconscious which derives from the common culture. When that era has passed, we look back and see only the material, the corpse and not the spirit. We look at the Renaissance and see a “re-nascience” of Greek sculpture, but the spirit of Greco-Roman statue was never revived, and as Rembrandt paints the same feeling as Bach and not Polyclitus, what inhabited Michelangelo’s David was not the Classical Doryphoros or Discobolus, but organ music and early Baroque architecture.

But let’s not digress, we can finally answer why we consider music and painting as art and not war or science or most other technical works, even when Spengler renders art and technics synonymous. The answer is that the form of a culture elects what best expresses itself to do so. Why are the Greeks known for sculpture when their music is all but left unconsidered, whilst we, in the West, take pride in our music when only a handful of our sculptures are fully appreciated? Is it because of archaeological restraints? Afterall, we do have samples of Greek music which we will study soon enough; maybe music was just not preserved as well as marble and bronze. Maybe we’re overlooking that music, especially of the Baroque, was highly elitist, reserved for a tiny subsection of society, and we are overlooking all the public decorations consisting in sculpture style. The answer to that question is that what music we do have from Greece possesses in it the same conception of art as statue, and what sculpture we have produced in the West, is an expression of the same idea that we express in our music, but the former is ranked as less aligned to express that idea than the latter. So, our mathematics and science and religion and politics do as well, to even lesser degrees that depart from eloquence. But if the right culture came along, music and sculpture and painting would be non-existent whilst other aspects of culture take over.

An example, which I will keep light until the next post: Western culture (900 AD – present) has a worldview predicated on infinite space. It is the scale of our cathedrals, the far-reaching extent of nation-states, it is our Viking desire to explore beyond horizons and our post-modern desire to break through limitations. It is our science of forces and energy, and we express this worldview, in art, primarily through music. Ethereal, bodiless, by it the organ or church choir or orchestra, it expands outwards from a central instrument like a state capitol extending its influence over the landscape. But the same tendency applies to painting. Dynamic light-effects, the impressionistic blending of shades and tones and colours, the presentation of grand horizons. These are not linear developments. They symbolize something unregistered to our cultural mindset alone, and we will see that they couldn’t be more symbolically polar to others. Sculpture, a moment frozen in a fixed position, could not embody infinite space as well as music, but when, during the Renaissance, it was being toyed with, works like Michelangelo’s David had features that would be borderline heretical to the Classical sensibility but entirely motif to ours.

Not all forms are equal however. And it would be a mistake to see all moments in the history of mankind as equal. Cave paintings are not part of a zeitgeist in the same way the Baroque is. A key tension in the listed definitions above is between the imitative character of art and the rational character of art. Plato asserts art imitates nature and the implication of post-modern philosophy is that the categories and fields we’ve established are arbitrary and free-flowing when we step back and observe definitions through time. Conversely Aquinas and Heidegger attribute art to an expression of truth and Aristotle concerns art with completing nature. The implication of Aquinas’ right reason is that we are in the image of God (truth) and create how he created: intelligently and with purpose. Spengler uses both to assert a difference between art in the primitive period and the high culture periods.

“This expression is either ornament or imitation. Both are higher possibilities and their polarity to one another is hardly perceptible in the beginnings. Of the two, imitation is definitely the earlier and the closer to the producing race. Imitation is the outcome of a physiognomic idea of a second person with whom (or which) the first is involuntarily induced into* resonance of vital rhythm (mitschwingen in Lebenstakte); whereas ornament evidences an ego conscious of its own specific character. The former is widely spread in the animal world, the latter almost peculiar to man.”[4]

Expression-language, in Spenglerian terms, speaks only for itself, presupposing only an “I”. Communication language, its counterpart, presupposes an “I” and a “thou”. The latter therefore is language proper, as I am speaking to you. The “I” and the “Thou” both need to understand the same meanings to pass them between one another. The former, however, is not designed for a recipient. It simply emanates itself whether there is a “thou” to see it or not. It is expression where art forms spring up from.

What Spengler calls “Imitation” art, is the younger type. You can consider this as parrots copying one another, the beat of music driving you to thump your feet with it; imitation is resonation, but there is no inner meaning and no guiding symbolism. It is copying for the sake of copying, a taste with no intention behind it. In the higher cultures, mimicry still exists, but is far less chaotic and bound to its opposite.

“Ornamental” art rises out of an awareness of a culture’s rhythm and expresses the symbolism of it. This is a tricky one to wrap your head around because it is not quite communication-language. Communication is conscious, a word extended from one to another. A word may be a symbol in of itself, but ornamental art is expressing the deeper, more fundamental symbolism that is not intentionally played with. We will see that religious architecture is Ornamental soon enough. No European stone-mason said to the others “let’s build a cathedral to infinite space and the indomitable will”. The theme expressed itself without needing to be said or cognised. It tows the fine line between free-flowing and crystalized meaning and is exactly what we look for when searching for symbolism in higher cultures.

The post-modern imagination of history is that the arts – as well as all other types of cultural life from politics to religion to economics – is relative. Continuous, yes, but meandering, and bound only by what it copied last and power structures that hold aesthetics in place; the entire post-modern conception of history arguably is simply aesthetics and power. But for Spengler, this only describes the “primitive” period where art was purely imitative. Before the higher cultures there was no concrete symbolic form to culture, and so like a primordial soup, arts wander and flow over the land this way and that, coming together and severing in ways too chaotic to be sensibly categorised by academics despite their best efforts. Whether its cave-paintings, Celtic knots, Mycenaean wall paintings or peasant’s huts, for Spengler they are all basically a unit spanning from the beginning of the ice age to the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Only after that are high cultures born by happenstance around the world with a unified character they are able to express in all walks of life.

To recap, art is the departure of the free will from nature to create its own abode through technical innovation, which extends not merely to technology but all cultural systems from politics, to religion, to philosophy and so on. The arts of music, painting, sculpture, writing, and so on, are arbitrary designations given to types of art seen continuing through history, but it is not art types that are art but the form they express, which live moment by moment but can, as we will see, swell into grand courses of history. Art is a language of expression. There is a less aware expression in the form of imitation, or mimicry, and there is a higher, more aware counterpart in ornamentation which possesses the symbolism of a culture’s form. The next post will continue on the idea of form in higher cultures, addressing how they are not part of one singular history, but are part of their own localised histories with their own localised forms of expression.

[1] Man and Technics, 1931, pp.23-24.

[2] The Decline of the West Vol.1, 1918, pp.220-221.

[3] The Decline of the West Vol.1, 1918, p.220

[4] The Decline of the West Vol.1, 1918, p.191.