The following is my rough translation of one of the books that Bogumil from ARPLAN said that he was going to translate at one point. This one in question is Otto Dickel’s The Resurrection of the West, which so far is reading like a Pan-Germanic Socialist critique of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (which Dickel’s book is directed against) and, to a lesser extent, Prussianism and Socialism. I have added some of my personal translator notes at the end of this post because there were a number of German terms that do not translate well into English and some historical references that are mentioned due to Dickel’s personal experiences.

If there is any important theme that I would like the Reader to pay attention to, it should be the idea that, outside of some external power, Civilizations do not necessarily perish without first losing their “Will-to-Live.” Rather than the Nietzschean “Will-to-Power,” the Will-to-Live is what compels an entire Civilization to recognize its own fallibility, overcome its own past wrongs, strive to make something of themselves, and defy what should have been its demise.

-DAH

Introduction

We are witnessing a wondrous and beautiful time. We are born into a time in which living and creating is a joy for the energetic, bold and clear-sighted ones. This book is written only for such people. Not for weaklings or the apathetic who, because of the disgust and antagonism of everyday life, have lost sight of the Weltbild¹ and the need for calmness, who are unable to separate the disappearance, the horror of the fight from the enduring, the importance of the goal. It is not meant for the degenerates who, captivated by greed and self-interest, anxiously cling to what belongs to the past. This book is written for a new generation, for the young and the old, the poor and the rich, for men and women from all walks of life and all professions, to whom their fervent hearts give them the ability to perceive and experience the mighty, sublime beauty in the raging wild waves and the surging of the floods over Europe; written for everyone who longs to understand the meaning of world events around them in order to be able to act correctly. The perception of the times is everything. The fact is that the terrible, painful convulsions in which the West is experiencing are the difficult contractions that precede the completion of its culture. The act means: removing the inhibitions and obstacles that stand in the way of this perfection.

Cultures come and go. Destiny. The aim is to talk about the fate of the West, religious, foreign and domestic. This Destiny will come true. It will prevail either with kindness or with force. There is only this either – or; nothing else. In this sense, we can be the forgers of our happiness. Either we pull ourselves together into action, we look for and find the connecting path, the only one that exists, which leads us back to the road of fate from which we strayed, or we continue to wander further through swamp and mud, through desert and rubble, until after years, perhaps after generations, after unspeakable misery, hunger and death, we reach exactly the same place that we can now easily and safely reach. It is not too late.

The Weltbild, some parts of which will be described and others suggested in the following sections, appeared in the rough outlines of my mindful observations of China and became brighter and clearer over the course of many years. At that time, I often enjoyed speaking to a Chinese interpreter who converted to Christianity about a year ago. It was then that I realized that that man lives in a completely different world. I recognized the impossibility of ever understanding him and realized that it was impossible to ever make myself clear to him. As I continued to pursue this inner experience, I learned that all the cultural creations of this particular people, their pagodas and temples, paintings and colonnades, the ancestral cults, and even the wedding customs and funeral ceremonies, are symbols of peculiar ideas which were conveyed to me by the words of that man². I arrived at the same realization when I looked into the Indian cultural world, and I found the same thing while studying the Western cultural world. I have expressed my thoughts many times. Everyone who heard me interpreted it in his own way in a polite reply. Nobody understood me. At best, I received condescending applause for my ‘interesting theory.’ Theory! Good God, what do people of understanding know about the creative experience! And so, I remained silent for two decades whilst improving my understanding of the world³.

Today, it is now possible to talk about these things, which are only visible to the insightful spirit, even in the company of those who have become enslaved to the intellectual mind. Therein lies the true and greatest significance of Spengler’s work, The Decline of the West. However, I do not necessarily agree with all of Spengler’s conclusions. There will be more opportunities to talk about this in greater detail. In the meantime, we should not dwell on what divides us, but rather what we have in common. It would be foolish of me not to want to build upon one aspect of this thinker’s masterful explanations, which is quickly become the permanent possession of scientific inquiry. This particular aspect, in spite of its contradictions, is still being overlooked by garrulous scholars and unlearned people who are unable to separate the essence from outward appearances and therefore denounce the entire work outright with the conceit and bias of single-minded men. The old truth will soon be confirmed by them: In every transitional period – and we are living in one of these periods – there have been famous experts, self-appointed judges based on their scientific outlook, who have proven the ‘nonsense’ of any newly emerging things with resounding words and pompous conclusions and who, a short time later, have shown themselves to be ridiculous and dubious. Spengler will continue to be talked about long after the names of those celebrities who are zealous against him today have been forgotten or will only be mentioned in connection with him as historical footnotes³. For Spengler has – and I am, at the same time, an opponent of his own conclusions – laid bare the foundations in which science and the leaders of the states of the coming century will build upon. A dark fate reigns over him. He deferred to the spirit of Goethe, but at the crucial moment he left the free path of the creative spirit and followed the dead track of the intellectual mind. He claims to be talking about Faust when he really meant Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. He is rooted too firmly in the soil of what has become, which he simply accepts as a symbol of Western being⁴. This accounts for why he cannot fully comprehend what the Western world is becoming. It is also why his thoughts had culminated in a strange book entitled, Prussianism and Socialism, where, even though he held all the strings in his hand, he still could not recognize the deeper meanings of the World War and the November Revolution. The World War is far from over. It persists in a different form and will continue to do so until the West has completed its fateful task, of which only a part has been fulfilled. Things are still in flux. They will not be decided by Marshal Foch’s cannons⁵, but by the great statesman who was the first to recognize that politics is neither a craft or a business, nor a matter of the calculating mind, but a matter of the creative spirit; a sublime art that is looking for its master, a means to perfect the Culture of the West.

On the Nature of Cultures

Spengler’s central argument that there is no single human culture, but various human cultures, forming the basis of scientific understandings of human consciousness. To name a few: Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Arabian, and Western, the latter of which includes the Christianized Central and Western Europe and the Americas. Cultures are comparable to living things; they emerge, grow, age and decay. Those who believe they are their Culture’s creators are in reality the instruments of the soul of their respective Culture, which is following its destined path, its intended course. Only in this original world of ideas, which form the basis for every part of humanity from the outset, does one think, feel and create. One cannot create and shape what the desire, but only what the soul of his people commands him through dark urges. The works of Culture are the expression of the fear and longing of the dream-slumbering soul, the will of the awakened soul. They are the realization of what is possible, which in themselves are symbols. This applies to religion, philosophy, science and art. There is no world religion, no world philosophy, no world mathematics, no world science or world art, but there are as many religions, philosophies, mathematics, natural sciences and art experiences as there are Cultures. They are all just different expressions of the same inscrutable species instinct. The great creations of worldly sages and natural scientists, as well as the masterpieces of architecture, painting and music, breathe the spirit of their own Culture. And only theirs. They speak a language that is incomprehensible to members of another culture. This also applies to the states. The symbol of the Egyptian state is the pyramid, that of the Greco-Roman city-state is the physically tangible individual column, the individual statue.

When the limit of possibility is reached, Culture begins to ossify, becoming a civilization. The creative power of the spirit weakens. The mind that looks at what has come into being, structures it, orders it, asserts itself powerfully and gradually becomes the sole ruler. The instinctual religious feeling eventually gives way to religious wisdom and moral teaching: new creations of philosophy are replaced by the explanation and interpretation of its great works; Art becomes imitation, artifice and ultimately a dazzling presentation that combines one’s own and what was already made into a dead, meaningless unity. The states, these master creations of the unconscious, are brought into legally established, well-thought-out constitutional forms. Often enough – in Spengler’s opinion, which I cannot always condone, – an internal decomposition occurs until foreign conquerors, the bearers of an emerging, young, but by no means higher Culture, bring about its demise. They take a lot of what they find, and they build upon it. But they always only use what is useful to them and modify it to suit their own need. The rest, the great remainder, is lost, forgotten out of inner necessity. Because no member of a cultural group is able to creatively relive, fully grasp and understand the works of another Culture, whatever beauty, truth and eternity he discovers in it, he actually interprets it from his own Weltanschauung⁶.

Anyone who has ever set foot on India’s coast, anyone who has observed the country and the people of China with open eyes not clouded by a sense of gain, knows the truth of these sentences. But one also realizes that it is not possible to predict the lifespan of current Cultures by comparing them to other earlier Cultures. One understands that India and China, although they have long since solidified into Civilization, despite all of the Europeans’ tribulations, despite all the violent, centuries-long efforts to Westernize them, remain internally untouched and unshakable. They are only externally subjugated, defeated by invading forces with superior firepower; but they are still the same ones. The people of those Asian empires still think, feel and believe like their ancestors, even if the dress is now trimmed with some new European threads⁷. What has changed are the words, not the concepts. The creative spiritual power has expired, but the power to live has not been broken. This latter would be the prerequisite for their downfall, for their death, to which Babylon and Rome once fell. Nobody knows if, nobody knows when, they will sink. Their fate will only be sealed when millions upon millions of Europeans flood those lands, slaughter the inhabitants and interbreed with the rest. Cultures and the Civilizations which emerge from them, it may be said in advance, perish through the extermination of their bearers by force of arms or through their own fault: through contempt for the most sacred law to ensure the survival of progeny. When the physical characteristics of the Civilization dissolves, then the soul, the unconscious spiritual bond and finally the strength to live are lost⁸.

That is not the case in India. That is why its inhabitants, and among them the most educated people, feel the alienness of the West. Two renderings from Indian mouths may be cited to reinforce what has been said. A Bengali voiced their complaint in India: “We have in fact transplanted the rules and laws of the University of London to India and should not be surprised if the foreign plant turns out to be a poisonous tree here. We receive a mass of undigested essence in a language which is not our own, which we cannot use to our advantage and which only secures us employment in this or that service. This undigested creature costs us our health and virility as well as the healthy, beneficial influence of our old family institutions. It makes us unfit for the competition of life, weighs down our memory and our intellect.” Elsewhere, another Bengali complains about the devastation that Westernized education is wreaking in India because it is capable of destroying the sense of appreciation for native Culture, decrying: “Speak to the average Indian who has a doctorate from the Indian university, or to a student of Ceylon⁹, about the ideal of the Mahabharata, and he will have nothing more urgent to do than to shine with his knowledge of Shakespeare. Bring up a conversation on the philosophy of religion, and it turns out that he is a clumsy Atheist of the blunt kind that was to be found in Europe a generation ago; that not only does he have no religion, but that he feels as little philosophical need and desire as does the average Englishman.” This spiritual compulsion, the alienation of the Western Weltanschauung, weighs on the Indian people, especially on their spiritual leaders, like a heavy nightmare. It rebels against him internally, more so than against the external form of English rule. Here lies the root of the zeal and hatred that smolders under the blanket, here the origin of the longing and hope for independence. There is a possibility that it will be ignited into a blazing flame. Its eerie red paints itself darkly in the sky of the Abyss, which India, not just England, as the simpletons would think, will have to suffer if it becomes reality.

Civilization only means an ossification of culture, not the beginning of the decline of the peoples who were its instruments. Japan is a prime example of this phenomenon. In these times, the West has merely provided the country the impetus for the enormous development of its national vitality. But this notion that the Japanese drew their strength from unsuitable aspects of Western Culture is a fatal error. Instead, from these adopted external forms, Japan has only constructed the scaffolding on which it soars today¹⁰. The Japanese soul lives and weaves within. It is no longer capable of producing great creations because it has long since realized what was possible. But in the rigid shell of Civilization, the Japanese have remained strong. They will continue to exist and be merry. Of course, merry in the Japanese sense, not the Western one. Once our daily writers have come to this conclusion, the catchphrase of the so-called ‘Yellow Peril’¹¹ will soon disappear. The Japanese are not world conquerors like the Westerners for this contradicts the meaning of their Culture, which, incomprehensibly, spreads out over a wide area, pushing into the distance in parallel circles, so to speak, but at the same time striving for a center.

A similar Weltgefühl¹² can also be found among the Chinese. Its best symbol is the enormous Temple of Heaven¹³ in Beijing. Not just the magnificent building with its triple towering, azure-blue roof, which is presented in words and pictures and is referred to as the Temple of Heaven. He is just a part of the whole. The Tiāntán¹⁴ is a multitude of buildings, parks, colonnades, of which the main temple, the ancestral temple, the marble colonnade, that often recurring distribution of columns and lower walls that is so incomprehensible to us and even seems pointless may be mentioned. Scattered across a wide area enclosed by walls, they appear to be lying independently of one another. And yet they all strive for the masterpiece of Chinese art, the great sacrificial altar in which. is the center of the world.

The same feeling is expressed in a different way by the pagodas, those strange, incomprehensible works of art. Layer upon layer, telling of equality and equality, which pile up on top of each other in order to master the vast Middle Kingdom¹⁵, to which the other kingdoms of Earth are attached as insignificant appendages. The pagodas are not plastered in a peak depicting Autocracy that protects the people like the in pyramids of Egypt, nor in a dome that speaks of supernatural and earthly arbitrariness like the Hagia Sophia of the magical culture. They reflect a different, alien feeling of dependence on a central point. They are a veneration in stone of age, of ancestor worship, of the consul’s teachings, on which the constitution of the mighty empire was built, despite all Manchurian and Indian influences. The constitution as it was before the Chinese revolution¹⁶ and as it will fatefully become again. Ancient China is a splendid example of how states are also creations of the soul of a Culture that uses people of its kind as tools to realize its will.

Spengler obviously observed this phenomenon and studied it in great detail. It is of great importance for our following consideration: From the creations of every Culture, from its great symbols, religion, philosophy and science, architecture, painting, sculpture and music, the fate of its state life can be deduced with certainty.

Translator Notes

¹ The term Weltbild translates to “World-Picture.” It refers of one’s perceptive sense of self-awareness of the known world and their immediate surroundings. The term itself is somewhat similar to the English term “big picture.”

² Dickel spent the opening paragraphs discussing how his own readings of Decline of the West resonated with his personal interactions with a Chinese interpreter and Christian convert. As Dickel and this Chinese came from different Cultures, it was difficult at times for these two men to understand each other on a subconscious level.

³ When Dickel tried discussing his experiences with others, presumably in the German-speaking world, they derided the notion that him and the Chinese interpreter were of two distinct Cultures. This infuriated Dickel because, at this point in Western history, much of China was subjugated by Western colonial interests, and there was an expectation that all of China would conform to the Western world. In the context of contemporary Mainland China, Dickel’s comments can be viewed as an allusion to the “Century of Humiliation.”

⁴ There is a creative, albeit obscure critique going on when Dickel discusses Spengler’s Decline of the West. When Spengler compared the rise of Western Civilization to a Faustian pact for money, power and prestige through Technology, Dickel questioned whether such a comparison accurately described the transition from Western Culture to Western Civilization. Dickel was inclined to believe that Modernity has left the Western world in an existential crisis akin to a young adult struggling to figure out what they want to do with their life like in William Meister’s Apprenticeship.

⁵ Dickel is referring to French Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, who was instrumental in the Allied counteroffensive against the German offensive that occurred in the wake of Russia abandoning the conflict due to the Russian Civil War. It was because of Foch that the Allied Powers succeeded in thwarting the German offensive of 1918 and bringing the First World War to an end later that year.

⁶ This paragraph is briefly summarizing the aspects of Decline of the West that struck a chord with Dickel and where he ultimately deviated from Spengler. Dickel disagreed with Spengler on the notion that the deaths of Civilizations are inevitable; he was of the view that any Civilization could, under the right circumstances, reinvent itself or even defy events that would have otherwise sealed their demise (if we go by Spengler’s logic).

⁷ To validate his conclusions, Dickel cited the historical experiences of the Chinese, Indians (and later, the Japanese) as examples. At the time of Resurrection of the West’s writing in 1923, China and India were still under European colonial influence. The Chinese and Indians have already been Westernized as a result, but that did not stop them from retaining their Culture and in turn their Civilization.

⁸ China and India are millennia-old Civilizations, both of which have outlasted the Ancient Romans and the Babylonians (as Dickel rightfully noted). What kept those two alive for so long is that the Chinese and Indians continued to demonstrate not a Will-to-Power (as Spengler would have us believe), but a “Will-to-Live.” That Will-to-Live was so resilient that it would later compel various Chinese and Indian political movements of the early 20th century to agitate against European colonialism and declare their independence.

⁹ The second Bengali comment is probably referring to an educational institution in what is now Sri Lanka. Based on the reference to Ceylon, I would have to assume that there was an effort to develop an educational system that would promote the values of Indian Civilization over those propagated by the British colonialists. One should consider it as an example of the “Will-to-Live” concept.

¹⁰ Dickel is alluding to the Japanese Meiji Period, which was jumpstarted by Japan’s industrialization and acceptance of Western Technologies and Ideologies into its political-economic system. It was also the same Period when Japan, in its determination to avoid becoming subjugated by the West like India or China, tried to become its own colonial empire to compete with the Europeans and, eventually the Jeffersonian Empire of Liberty emanating from the United States. This too is another example of the “Will-to-Live” concept.

¹¹ I cannot help but notice that Dickel’s conclusions there is reminiscent of those found in the works of Kita Ikki, who was arriving at very similar conclusions more than a decade prior, albeit from a Japanese perspective (as opposed to a German one). Kita also insisted that a Japan hegemony would not extend itself beyond East Asia on civilizational grounds and in the historical context of liberating East Asia from European colonialists.

¹² Weltgefühl means “World-Feeling” in German. It refers to the idea that a large body of people are bound to a shared sentiment or collective understanding of the world. A Prussian and an Austrian are both “Germans,” just as a Hong Konger and a Taiwanese are also “Chinese.” Taken to its proper conclusions, it becomes the justification for uniting entire nations into a “civilizational state,” something that was made possible in contemporary Mainland China under the CPC.

¹³ The Temple of Heaven in Beijing is a religious complex that once served as a political monument to Ancient China’s Ming and Qing Dynasties. Today, in Mainland China, it is a cultural attraction.

¹⁴ Tiāntán is the Chinese term for the Temple of Heaven.

¹⁵ A Chinese cultural term referring to China and its geopolitical importance on Earth.

¹⁶ Interestingly, Dickel is also alluding to the eventual Civil War in China that would later be fought by the Maoists and the Kuomintang years later. The revolutionary fervor that led to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in the early 20th century and would later initiate the beginnings of contemporary China by the late 20th century.

Categories: Philosophy

Tags: ARPLAN, China, Economics, Finance, India, Japan, Oswald Spengler, Pan-Germanic Socialism, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Socialist Finance, Technology