Morphology and Form as Rank
"Secondly, in respect to form, one must free oneself from the idea of development with which our age is entirely saturated – no less than by psychological and moral approaches.
A form is, and no development increases or decreases it. History of development is thus not history of form, at most it might be its dynamic commentary. Development knows beginning and end, birth and death, from which form is removed. Just as the form of man was before birth and will be after death, a historical form is profoundly independent of time and of the circumstances from which it seems to emerge. Its means are higher, its fertility is direct. History does not bring forth forms, rather it changes with the form. It is the tradition a victorious power bestows upon itself. This is how Roman families traced their origins to the demigods, and this is how a new history of the form of the worker will have to be written.
It is important to state all this because nowadays every interpretation of ourtimes is imbued with optimistic or pessimistic tendencies, depending on whether a certain development is seen as final, or still underway.
By contrast, we designated the stance of a new human type ‘Heroic Realism’, who knows the work of attack just as well as that of lost positions, but for whom it is of lesser importance whether the weather gets better or worse. There are things that are more important and closer than beginning and end, life and death. The most authentic commitment is the highest ever reached; let us mention for example the dead of the world war whose significance is not diminished in the least by the fact that they fell precisely at this time and no other. They fell just as much for the future as in the spirit of tradition. This is a distinction which, in moments of metamorphosis through death, fuses into a higher meaning.
It is in this sense that the youth must educate itself. The outline of a form cannot promise anything; it can at most provide a symbol for the fact that life, today as much as ever, possesses rank and for him who knows how to live, it is well worth living.
This requires, of course, a unique consciousness of rank, which can be neither inherited nor adopted, a consciousness that is quite possible precisely for the very simple life and which must be recognized as the hallmark of a new aristocracy.
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Comparative morphology, as it is practised today, does not therefore enable any valid forecast. It is rather a museum affair, an occupation for collectors, romantics, and pleasure-seekers on a grand scale. The diversity of bygone times and distant places intrudes as a colourful and seductive orchestra with which a weakened life is unable to score anything other than its own weakness. This inadequacy does not, however, become more adequate through the self-criticism of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This attitude resembles that of the general grown old with linear tactics who does not recognize defeat because it was achieved against the rules of the art.
But there are no rules of art in this sense. A new age decides what shall count as art, and what as measure. What distinguishes two ages is not greater or lesser value, but otherness as such. This means that introducing here the question of value is to resort to rules that are out of place. That one knew in some period how to paint pictures, for instance, can be considered as reference only where this remains the ambition of insufficient faculties: there one lives on overdrawn credit. It is more important to seek out the places where our time grants us credit."
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