Source: TW
Looking at the difference between the “Apollonian” Classical world and the “Faustian” later Western culture, a major difference is performance and artifice. Look at the Jungian concept of “persona” which is like a mask – this would’ve been incomprehensible to Hellenes. To scions of the Faustian West, the persona is so important that the person to whom it belongs becomes confused whether they are the persona or the character underneath.
With the Hellenes a subject and his expression were unified, such a confusion of identity unheard of. This is probably yet another case where Spengler was right to describe the Hellenic civilization as “everything simple” but I don’t take it in the negative way he meant it. Or again, Nietzsche said that to the Greeks “only appearances mattered” – apparent character IS character.
So we have a situation where character and expression got a good deal more complicated and even deceptive over time. The Faustian is a performative type, much more inclined to put on airs, and to do so often enough that even he becomes confused about the truth of it.
To the Hellenes, if there were a performance, it was always made explicit, and it was done in an exception to the everyday life. Their theater tragedies and dramas and comedies were like this – the masks and personas adopted there purposefully set apart from ordinary life.
It’s strange but it also explains some of the problems we Westerners face and also some of the gap in comprehension that we face in trying to understand previous civilizations. I have speculated that at some future age, America may be home to yet another high culture…. And I think judging from the first hints of it, as it’s still in its dreaming phase before awakening, show a spirit closer to the Hellenic – more public, more of a cult of the local, less artifice in distinction between men (when expressed in its purest form that is). But of course, as I’ve also said, America of today is also in many ways uber-Faustian, in that it was the place that the Faustian spirit was able to completely stretch out without preexisting impedimenta … our wilderness rolled out the red carpet for its civilized phase … But “civilization is a whim of circumstance” and “barbarism triumphs in the end” said Robert E. Howard in Beyond the Black River and I doubt but little that the true spirit of America will again reveal itself once the Faustian tide goes back out to sea a bit in centuries to come.