IN THE WINTER TIME OF THE FAUSTIAN CIVILIZATION

The concept of pseudomorphosis is one that Spengler introduces as a way of explaining what are in his eyes half-developed or only partially manifested Cultures. Specifically pseudomorphosis entails an older alien Culture so deeply ingrained in a land that a young Culture can not achieve a pure expression of itself. This leads to the young soul being cast in the old moulds, in Spengler's words. Young feelings then stiffen in senile practices, and instead of expanding creatively, it fosters hate toward the other older Culture.

In the aftermath of the catastrophes of World War II (the Holocaust, Hiroshima), look-alikes in art provided some comfort regarding our species – they were the bread and butter of a discourse on art as the product of an essential, atemporal, human nature (Cycladic statuary and Brancusi, Sufi calligraphy and Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie, etc). Historians rightly protested against the disregard for context that undergirds this arch-formalist take on art, but the phenomenon of look-alikes is still a puzzle and should not be just tucked away. What are we to do with pseudomorphosis, defined by Erwin Panofsky, who coined the term, as "The emergence of a form A, morphologically analogous to, or even identical with, a form B, yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view"?

FOR WHILE HE STRIVES AND CREATES SECRETLY HE KNOWS THE ACTUAL GOAL WILL NEVER BE REACHED