There are born destiny-men and causality-men. A whole world separates the purely living man from the man who is destined either by the power of his mind or defect of his blood to be an ‘intellectual.’ Being and waking-being, pulse and tension, motives and ideas, cyclic organs and touch-organs – there has rarely been a man of any significance in whom the one side or the other has not markedly predominated. The belief in his star which every born man of action possesses and which is something wholly different from belief in the correctness of a standpoint, the voices of the blood that speak in moments of decision, and the immovably quiet conviction that justifies any aim and any means – these are all denied to the critical, meditative man. Even the footfall of the fact-man sounds different from the thinker, who can acquire no firm relation with the earth.
Destiny has made the man so or so – subtle and fact-shy, or active and contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without (and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get the ethical, political and social reform projects which demonstrate how things ‘ought to be’ – theories, resting upon hypotheses. They have taken to the field armed with the full authority of a religion or the prestige of a famous name, and have not in one single instance effected the slightest alteration in life. And this, precisely, is the doom of the ‘late’ ages of a Culture. All world-improvers, priests, and philosophers are unanimous in holding that life is a fit object for the nicest meditation, but the life of the world goes its own way and cares not in the least what is said about it.
For, in the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives in the actual world, the world of political, military and economic decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count. Here a shrewd blow is worth more than a shrewd conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded the ‘ink-slinger’ and the ‘bookworm’ who think that world-history exists for the sake of the intellect or science or even art. A history of Western thought may not contain the name of Napoleon, but in the history of actuality Archimedes, for all his scientific discoveries, was possibly less effective than that soldier who killed him at the storming of Syracuse.
Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not the train of great events. Often enough a statesman does not ‘know’ what he is doing, but that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success; the political doctrinaire, on the contrary, always knows what should be done, and yet his activity, once it ceases to be limited to paper, is the least successful and least valuable in history. He mistakes his place. He belongs with his principles and programs to not history but literature. Real history passes judgment on him not by controverting the theorist, but by leaving him and all his thoughts to himself. A Plato or Rousseau – not to mention smaller intellects – could build up abstract political structures, but for Alexander, Scipio, Caesar, and Napoleon, with their schemes and battles and settlements, they were entirely without importance.
The thinker could discuss destiny if he liked; it was enough for these men to be destiny.
Spengler, The Decline of the West
