ABSTRACT
THE STATE* A fathomless secret of the cosmic flowings that we call Life is their separation into two sexes. Already in the earth-bound existence-streams of the plant world they are trying to part from one another, as the symbol of the flower tells us - into a something that is this existence and a something that keeps it going. Animals are free, little worlds in a big world - the cosmic - closed off as microcosms and set up against the macrocosm. And, more and more decisively as the animal kingdom unfolds its history, the dual direction of dual being, of the masculine and the feminine, manifests itself.The feminine stands closer to the Cosmic. It is rooted deeper in the earth and it is immediately involved in the grand cyclic rhythms of Nature. The masculine is freer, more animal, more mobile - as to sensation and understanding as well as otherwise-more awake and more tense.The male livingly experiences Destiny, and he comprehends Causality, the causal logic of the Become. The female, on the contrary, is herself Destiny and Time and the organic logic of the Becoming, and for that very reason the principle of Causality is for ever alien to her. Whenever Man has tried to give Destiny any tangible form, he has felt it as of feminine form, and he has called it Moirai, Parcae, N orns.1 The supreme deity is never itself Destiny, but always either its representative or its master - just as man represents or controls woman. Primevally, too, woman is the seeress, and not because she knows the future, but because she is the future. The priest merely interprets the oracle; the woman is the oracle itself, and it is Time that speaks through her.The man makes History, the woman is History. Here, strangely clear yet enigmatic still, we have a dual significance of all living
happenings - on the one hand we sense cosmic flow as such, and on the other hand the chain and train of successive individuals brings us back to the microcosms themselves as the recipients, containers, and preservers of the flowing. It is this ‘second’ history that is characteristically masculine - political, social, more conscious, freer, and more agitated than the other. It reaches back deep into the animal world, and receives highest symbolic and world-historical expression in the life-courses of the great Cultures. Feminine, on the contrary, is the primary, the eternal, the maternal, the plantlike (for the plant ever has something female in it), the cultureless history o f the generation-sequence, which never alters, but uniformly and stilly passes through the being of all animal and hum an species, through all the short-lived individual Cultures. In retrospect, it is synonymous with Life itself. This history, too, is not without its battles and its tragedies. Woman in childbed wins through to her victory. The Aztecs - the Romans of the Mexican Culture - honoured the woman in labour as a battling warrior, and if she died, she was interred with the same formulae as the fallen hero. Policy for Woman is eternally the conquest of the Man, through whom she can become m other of children, through whom she can become History and Destiny and Future. The target of her profound shyness, her tactical finesse, is ever the father of her son. The man, on the contrary, whose centre of gravity lies essentially in the other kind of History, wants that son as his son, as inheritor and carrier of his blood and historical tradition.Here, in man and in woman, the two kinds o f History are fighting for power. Woman is strong and wholly what she is, and she experiences the Man and the Sons only in relation to herself and her ordained role. In the masculine being, on the contrary, there is a certain contradiction; he is this man, and he is something else besides, which woman neither understands nor admits, which she feels as robbery and violence upon that which to her is holiest. This secret and fundamental war of the sexes has gone on ever since there were sexes, and will continue - silent, bitter, unforgiving, pitiless - while they continue. In it, too, there are policies, battles, alliances, treaties, treasons. Race-feeling of love and hate, which originate in depths of world-yearning and primary instincts of directedness, prevail between the sexes - and with a still more uncanny potency than in the other History that takes place between man and man. There are love-lyrics and war-lyrics, love-dances and weapon-dances, there are two kinds of tragedy - Othello2 and Macbeth.3 But nothing in the political world
even begins to compare with the abysses of a Clytaemnestra’s4 or a Kriemhild’s5 vengeance.And so woman despises that other History - m an’s politics - which she never comprehends, and of which all that she sees is that it takes her sons from her. What for her is a trium phant battle that annihilates the victories of a thousand childbeds? Man’s history sacrifices woman’s history to itself, and no doubt there is a female heroism too, that proudly brings the sons to the sacrifice . . . but nevertheless there was and is and ever will be a secret politic of the woman - of the female of the animal world even - that seeks to draw away her male from his kind of history and to weave him body and soul into her own plantlike history of generic succession - that is, into herself. And yet all that is accomplished in the man-history is accomplished under the battle-cries of hearth and home, wives and children, race and the like, and its very object is the covering and upholding of this history of birth and death. The conflict of man and man is ever on account of the blood, of woman. Woman, as Time, is that fo r which there is history at a l l . . .Thus history has two meanings, neither to be blasphemed. It is cosmic or politic, it is being or it preserves being. There are two sorts of Destiny, two sorts of war, two sorts of tragedy -p u b lic and priva te . Nothing can eliminate this duality from the world. It is radical, founded in the essence of the animal that is both microcosm and participant in the cosmic. It appears at all significant conjunctures in the form of a conflict of duties, which exists only for the man, not for the woman, and in the course of a higher Culture it is never overcome, but only deepened. There are public life and private life, public law and private law, communal cults and domestic cults. As Estate, Being is ‘in form’ for the one history; as race, breed, it is in flow as itself the other history. This is the old German distinction between the ‘sword side’ and the ‘spindle side’ of blood-relationships. The double significance of directional Time finds its highest expression in the ideas of the State and the Family. [Spengler notes: And not until women cease to have race enough to have or to want children, not until they cease to be history, does it become possible for them to make or to copy the history of men. Conversely, it is deeply significant that we are in the habit of calling thinkers, doctrinaires, and humanity-enthusiasts of anti-political tendency ‘old women’. They wish to imitate the other history, the history of woman, although they - cannot.]
