The mass-man would never have accepted authority external to himself had not his surroundings violently forced him to do so. As to-day, his surroundings do not so force him, the everlasting mass-man, true to his character, ceases to appeal to other authority and feels himself lord of his own existence. On the contrary the select man, the excellent man is urged, by interior necessity, to appeal from himself to some standard beyond himself, superior to himself, whose service he freely accepts.... Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline — the noble life.
For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set
on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one
sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life
stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines
statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless
an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply
the term mass to this kind of man- not so much because of his
multitude as because of his inertia.
As one advances in life, one realises more and more that the
majority of men are incapable of any other effort
than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to external
compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have
come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort
stand out isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience.
These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active
and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an
incessant course of training. Training = askesis. These are the
ascetics. ~José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses.
Such is not my opinion. We are civilized, not Gothic or Rococo, people; we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a late life, to which the parallel is to be found not in Pericles's Athens but in Caesar's Rome. Of great painting
or great music there can no longer be, for Western people, any question. Their
architectural possibilities have been exhausted these hundred years. Only extensive possibilities are left to them. Yet, for a sound and vigorous generation
that is filled with unlimited hopes, I fail to see that it is any disadvantage to discover betimes that some of these hopes must come to nothing. And if the hopes thus doomed should be those most dear, well, a man who is worth anything will not be dismayed. It is true that the issue may be a tragic one for some individuals who in their decisive years are overpowered by the conviction that in the spheres of architecture, drama, painting, there is nothing left for them to conquer. What matter if they do go under! It has been the convention hitherto to admit no limits of any sort in these matters, and to believe that each period had its own task to do in each sphere. Tasks therefore were found by hook or by crook, leaving it to be settled posthumously whether or not
the artist's faith was justified and his life-work necessary. Now, nobody but
a pure romantic would take this way out. Such a pride is not the pride of a Roman.
What are we to think of the individual who, standing before an exhausted quarry, would rather be told that a new vein will be struck to-morrow — the bait offered by the radically false and mannerized art of the moment —
than be shown a rich and virgin clay-bed near by? The lesson, I think, would
be of benefit to the coming generations, as showing them what is possible —
and therefore necessary — and what is excluded from the inward potentialities of their time. Hitherto an incredible total of intellect and power has been squandered in false directions. The West-European, however historically he may think and feel, is at a certain stage of life invariably uncertain of his own direction; he gropes and feels his way and, if unlucky in environment, he loses it. But now at last the work of centuries enables him to view the disposition of his own life in relation to the general culture-scheme and to test his own
powers and purposes. And I can only hope that men of the new generation may be moved by this book to devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better they could not do.
~The decline of the West Vol1 ~Oswald Spengler
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