Soul Image of Faustian Man
An analysis of Chapter X of The Decline of The West
The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler is an experience for the man of the right. Getting through the first volume however, is a challenge. If you’ve never read Spengler before, I always suggest starting with the much shorter read, Man and Technics. Man and Technics was written much later in his career and is a more concise version of his thought. Once you’ve gone through that and want more, you have to read The Decline of the West, but beware of the middle of the book. This section gets into the weeds about how the cultures he’s identified are different from each other in the ways of mathematics and art. There’s even an entire section just on the color brown.
You must go through this. Take as much time as you need. Read when your mind is ready to receive. Once you get through it, you will arrive at Chapter X, titled Soul Image and Life Feeling, which will be the focus of this essay. Chapter X is one of the most important parts of the first volume and it unfortunately exists as an affront to modern right wing thought today. If you’re into men like BAP or Nietzsche, carry the same like for Ancient Greek Hellenism and Aesthetics, this chapter will hit you like a semi truck driven by Spengler himself. It will be total annihilation, but don’t worry he’ll still invite you over for tea to tell you how wrong you really are.
The focus of “Soul Image and Life Feeling” is morale. How both the Apollonian and Faustian intellectually think about and feel morale. After a few chapters talking about art and math, Spengler goes back to what will certain entertain: Nietzsche and the Greeks. This chapter starts innocently enough as Spengler speaks to the character of the Faustian Man who is how we can imagine and relate to. Faustian Man says “thou shalt” with conviction, aspiring to convert people to his worldview. The world must bend to this “thou shalt.” Be ordered to affirm the “thou shalt.”
“Thou shalt” is the morale of the Faustian. According to Spengler, “In the ethics of the West, everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.” In this respect he holds Nietzsche the same as Luther who is the same as Darwin, the Jesuits, and the Socialists. What Spengler is referring to is the Faustian need to say “thou shalt” or you shall or the state shall. All Faustians have this need to orient the world to their belief of how it should be. The Ancient Greek didn’t think like this. He had no intention of changing how his neighbor thought.
Nietzsche was the best example of this Faustian mentality. Nietzsche — who was supposed to be against the herd morality — can’t stay in the mindset of the Apollonian as he went after everyone who differed from what he believed to be right. Contrast this with the Greek ideal of ataraxia which can be described as indifference. Here Spengler takes Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who is supposed to be beyond good and evil, but Zarathustra is pained to see any man be different from how he would want them to be. This brings us to the first axe to face Spengler delivers.
All World Improvers are Socialists
“All world improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world improvers.” -Oswald Spengler
The characteristic of the Faustian Man is the Will to Power. He wants to be a world improver and is thus, a socialist. Yes, even Nietzsche is a socialist. It was Schopenhauer, says Spengler, who first revealed the Faustian will as movement. It’s always towards some goal, some end. It’s force and direction. This will towards something is completely absent in the Apollonian.
Faustian Man is the Overman as described by Nietzsche, if you strip away his romanticism, claims Spengler. He is driven by the Will to Power. Life to him is “struggling, overcoming, winning through.” To be able to change this nature within yourself, to make yourself something closer to the Classical Man, Spengler believed impossible. He says that even as you fight against supposed “advanced ideas,” you yourself see the attacks against — as an advance. Worse still, the Faustian is utterly intolerant compared to the Apollonian Man who strives for ataraxia. When you’re calling back to a Classical ideal, it ain’t really Classical, rather it’s your Faustian interpretation of the Classical.
The Faustian looks to the future and how he can shape it. He is strong willed, but demands toleration for his ideas while intolerant of anything that doesn’t mesh with his worldview. The Faustian Man will seek out the frontier for space to live in the way that he wants to live, if necessary. The Faustian wants to win while the Apollonian only wants to be. Through the Will to Power, the Faustian seeks to create the proper “universal truth” which he can impose on mankind. And he will stop at nothing to accomplish this.
Spengler then goes after the RETVRN right by saying that you can choose to return to Catholicism, Paganism, or even Buddhism, but no matter what you do, you will always feel the same. You’ll always be LARPing. Trying to be something you’re not. You’ll always be Faustian. None of these movements Faustian Man has made in this culture has changed the nature of the Faustian. He gives Nietzsche credit in taking the first step, finding the door needed to change, but Nietzsche fails to walk through it. Nietzsche was a romantic who tried to be both “skeptic and prophet.”
“The men of the early time, as Homer presents them to our judgment — the Odysseus’s and Ajax’s — would have cut a queer figure among the chevaliers of the Crusades.” -Oswald Spengler
The Classical Men, the heroes of the Iliad, to Spengler, were men of soft natures. They wouldn’t fit in with Faustian Men on the warpath. Spengler thinks the Greek heroes would be “queer” in comparison to “giant men” like Henry the Lion and Gregory VII.” Or men like the Teutonic Knights, Spanish Conquistadors, Frederick II, and Henry IV.
Spengler wants you to understand that Faustian Man represents Nietzsche’s master morale as a rule. The slave morale of Nietzsche he says “is a phantom.” It’s important for you as a Faustian to do as Spengler recommends: make yourself a master of politics. He quotes from both an unpublished Nietzsche essay about the need to relearn politics and from Shaw who wrote about Nietzsche’s Overman. It is the only way to pursue your Will to Power. To impose your will upon the world.
Can you escape the culture(or civilization) you’re born into?
For Spengler, the answer is a resounding no. You can’t escape the Faustian civilization. You must make your last stand. Find the place where you will meet your honorable end. That’s what it means to be great, to have race, according to Spengler. This leaves big implications for everything happening on the right today as well as the Warrior Religion Project. It’s almost as if Spengler is trying to demoralize you. Is he a fed?
It is very blaqpilling to hear Spengler say this. He does offer clues to where we’re at. Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values is a culture entering the “death struggle” of civilization just as Stoicism was a similar transvaluation for the Romans. Culture — Spengler tells us — is self-evident. But not in the way the American Constitution is “self-evident.” When something is self-evident, you don’t have to talk about it. It just is. It’s instinctive.
A society in the form of culture doesn’t talk about how their law meshes with natural law. It doesn’t talk about how some law should be rewritten or reinterpreted. Men don’t have to go about creating religions to oppose the “dogmas and cults” in their culture. A culture is, a civilization talks about what is. Life is instinctive, not contemplative. The world is as God willed it. Man lives forward, naturally, never questioning the ordering of his culture.
Maybe this is why Spengler talks about how Nietzsche found the door, but didn’t go through it. A culture man is instinctive. Life is about what he already has, not what he looks for. He sees the world through the eyes of an eagle high in the sky and not as a frog stuck in a pond, to borrow an analogy from Spengler. That which can move us to the instinctive, may move us into the next culture. But if it is as Spengler has said, impossible, it will at the very least help us be men of RACE. Faustian Men of the highest order prepared to take part in the final struggle between money and BLOOD.
Many times I have said that no one has all the answers to our predicament, our rock and a hard place. Many have partial answers, steps we can take in the right direction. Spengler is important because he shows you how it is impossible by correctly identifying what makes a culture a culture or a civilization. You should never say something is impossible however, as mankind has only grown from Apollonian Man to the Faustian Man of today. The world grown closer together, mankind more advanced than we have ever known. In all likelihood, it will continue this way. The goal is finding the door and walking through it. Becoming the man of instinct, whether Faustian or new, again.