The Decline of the West/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV
THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE
(B)
THE MACHINE
I
Technique is as old as free-moving life itself.[1] Only the plant — so far as we can see into Nature — is the mere theatre of technical processes. The animal, in that it moves, also has a technique of movement so that it may nourish and protect itself.
The original relation between a waking-microcosm and its macrocosm — “Nature” — consists in a touch through the senses[2] which rises from mere sense-impressions to sense-judgment,[3] so that already it works critically (that is, separatingly)[4] or, what comes to the same thing, causal-analytically[5] The stock ‘of what has been determined then is enlarged into a system, as complete as may be, of the most primary experiences — identifying marks[6] — a spontaneous method by which one is enabled to feel at home in one’s world, in the case of many animals this has led to an amazing richness of experience that no human science has transcended. But the primary waking-being is always an active one, remote from mere theory of all sorts, and thus it is in the minor technique of everyday life, and upon things in so far as they are dead,[7] that these experiences are involuntarily acquired. This is the difference between Cult and Myth,[8] for at this level there is no boundary line between religion and the profane — all waking-consciousness is religion.
The decisive turn in the history of the higher life occurs when the determination of Nature (an order to be guided by it) changes into a fixation — that is, a purposed alteration of Nature. With this, technique becomes more or less sovereign and the instinctive prime-experience changes into a definitely “conscious” prime-knowing. Thought has emancipated itself from sensation It is the language of words that brings about this epochal change. The liberation of speech from speaking[9] gives rise to a stock of signs for communication-speech which are much more than identification-marks — they are names bound up with a sense of meaning, whereby man has the secret of numina (deities, nature-forces) in his power, and number (formulæ, simple laws), whereby the inner form of the actual is abstracted from the accidental-sensuous.[10] Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/993 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/994 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/995 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/996 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/997 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/998 Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/999 money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic onflow in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history. Before the irresistible rhythm of the generation-sequence, everything built up by the waking-consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last. Ever in History it is Iife and life only — race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power — and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favour of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured Iife — decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its right would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness. Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama of a high Culture — that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, caries — closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow. The bright imaginative Waking-Being submerges itself into the silent service of Being, as the Chinese and Roman empires tell us. Time triumphs over Space, and it is Time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of the Culture, on this planet, in the incident of Man — a form wherein the incident life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes.
For us, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development —- the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Cæsarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step — our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against him.
Ducunt Fata volentem, nolentem trahunt