Nationalism and Culture (28 page)

No book will conquer the conqueror or persuade him, but one must speak out against the poisonous admiration of him. Schelling speaks of "an almost divine right of the conqueror"; but he has against him the highwaymen, who in this matter may make the same claim for themselves in the face of an Alexander or a Caesar, and who, moreover, have on their side, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who had the robbers he conquered in Dalmatia enlisted as soldiers.

And Holderlin, the unhappy poet who in his Hyperion flung such frightful truths into the faces of the Germans, wrote these pregnant words:

You attribute to the state quite too much power. It cannot demand what it cannot compel. What comes as the gift of love or of intellect cannot be compelled. That, it may let alone, or it may take its laws and set it in the pillory! By Heaven! He knows not what a sin he commits who seeks to make the state a school for morals. The state has always made a hell out of that which man wanted it to make into a heaven. The state is the rough husk on the kernel of life, and it is nothing else. It is the wall around the garden of human fruits and flowers. But what is the use of a wall around a garden if the soil lies dry? The only thing that assists vegetation is rain from heaven.

Such ideas were almost universal among the men to whom Germany owes the rebirth of its intellectual life, although, because of the sad disorganization of German affairs and the unrestrained caprice of the typical German petty despotism, it was not always and everywhere set forth with the same vigor and consistency as in England and France. We do find, however, in all these men a strong leaning toward world-citizenship. Their minds were not limited by national ideas, but embraced the whole of mankind. Herder's Ideen zur Philosofhie der Geschichte der Menschheit and his ingenious Brieje zur Bejorderung der Humanit'dt ("Letters for the Advancement of Humanity") are splendid evidence of this spirit, which was striking deep into the best minds until it was restricted for a time by the so-called "wars of liberation" j the intellectual precipitate from the ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel j and the Romantics' concept of the state.

Lessing revealed in his letters to Gleim his utter lack of the prescribed patriotic sentiment: "It is true that perhaps even in me the patriot is not completely smothered, although the reputation of a zealous patriot is, according to my way of thinking, the last for which I should be at all greedy; that patriot, that is, who would teach me to forget that I ought to be a citizen of the world." In another place he says: "I have no conception at all of the love of the Fatherland (I am sorry that I must, perhaps to my shame, confess it), and it seems to me at best a heroic weakness which I am right glad to be without."

Schiller also, whom the staunch German of today noisily hails as the great herald of national interests (in support of which he usually-cites a quotation from Wilhelm Tell, scornfully styled by Friedrich I\' as "a piece for Jews and revolutionaries"; and the well-known saying from the Jungjrau von Orleans: "The nation is contemptible that will not gladly risk everything for its honor!" which, torn from its context, is made to convey a totally different meaning from that intended)—Schiller also declares, with the assurance of the citizen of the world:

We moderns have at our command an interest that was not known to the Greeks or the Romans and which patriotic interest.does not measure up

to by far. The latter is important, anyhow, only for immature nations, for the youth of the world. It is a quite different interest to represent forcefully to man every noteworthy event that has happened to men. It is a pitiful, petty ideal to write for one nation; to a man of philosophical mind this limitation is utterly intolerable. He cannot rest content with such a changeable, accidental, and arbitrary form of humanity, with a fragment (and what else is the most important nation?). He can warm himself to enthusiasm for the nation only so far as the nation, or national event, is an important condition for the progress of the race.

Of Goethe, who had asserted of himself: "The sense and significance of my writings and my life is the triumph of the purely human," and whose lack of patriotic sentiment at the time of the "wars of liberation" has not yet been forgotten, nothing more need be said.

The industrious heralds of the Third Reich today proclaim in thunderous tones that liberalism is "an un-German product" and, like Herr Moeller van den Bruck, keep repeating with gramophonic persistence: "Liberalism is the freedom to have no convictions and at the same time to claim that even this is a conviction." One can only reply that this "un-German product" was once the common intellectual property of those who made Germany into a cultural community again after political and social barbarism had smothered the intellectual life of the country for centuries. It was out of that "lack of conviction" that Germany was born anew.

In his essay. Some Ideas for an Attemft to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State, Wilhelm von Humboldt presented a social-philosophical summary of what moved the re-founders of German literature and poesy most deeply. This ingenious work was written in 1792 under the immediate influence of the revolutionary events in France, though only separate extracts appeared in print at that time in various German periodicals; it was not published as a whole until 1851, after the death of the author. Concerning the purpose of his effort Humboldt wrote, in June of 1792, to the intellectually sympathetic Georg Forster: "I have tried to combat the lust to govern and have everywhere drawn more closely the limits of the activity of the state."

Humboldt attacked first of all the baseless idea that the state could give to men anything which it had not first received from men. Especially repugnant to him was the idea that the state was called to uplift the moral qualities of man, a delusion' which later, under the influence of Hegel, befogged the best minds In Germany. As a sworn opponent of any uniformity of thought Humboldt rejected fundamentally any standardizing of moral concepts and boldly declared: "The highest and final purpose of every human being is the development of his powers in their personal peculiarity." Freedom, therefore, seems to him the only guar-

antee of man's cultural and intellectual advance and the unfolding of his best moral and social possibilities. He wished to protect men against the dead gear-work of the political machine into whose unfeeling grasp we have fallen j hence his opposition to everything that is mechanical and forced; that is susceptible of no intellectual vitalizing. For he holds that automatic consistency stifles every breath of life.

But really, freedom is the necessary condition without which the most soulful undertaking can produce no wholesome effects of this sort. A thing which man has not chosen for himself, a thing in which he is merely constrained and guided can never become a part of his nature; it always remains alien to him; he does not really carry it out with human vigor, merely with mechanical skill.

Therefore Humboldt wanted to see the activity of the state restricted to the actually indispensable and to intrust to it only those fields that were concerned with the personal safety of the individual and of society as a whole. Whatever went beyond this seemed to him evil and a forcible invasion of the rights of the personality, which could only work out injuriously. Prussia gave him in this regard the most instructive example; for in no other country had state guardianship assumed such monstrous forms as there, where under the arbitrary dominion of soulless despots the scepter had become a corporal's baton in civil affairs. This went so far that under Friedrich Wilhelm even the actors in the royal theater in Berlin were subjected to military discipline and a peculiar special order was put in force "according to which the artists, of whatever rank or sex, were to be treated for any violation of the regulations like soldiers or rebels." *

The same spirit which saw in the abject debasement of man to a lifeless machine the highest wisdom of all statecraft and lauded the blindest dead obedience as the highest virtue, celebrates in Germany today its shameless resurrection, poisoning the heart of youth, deadening its conscience and throwing to the dogs its humanity.

In France also the great renewers of intellectual life before the revolution were inspired in many ways by the ideas of political radicalism in England. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and many others went to school to the English. Of course, the adopted ideas took on among the Frenchmen a special coloration, which can be in large part attributed to the peculiar social conditions in the country, which differed essentially from those prevailing in England. With the exception of Diderot and Condorcet most of the political innovators in France were closer to a democracy in their line of thought than to genuine liberalism and, despite their sharp attacks on absolutism, contributed materially to

^ Eduard V'rehse, Geschichte des freussischen Hofes. Hamburg, 185 I.

Strengthen the power of the state by feeding that blind faith in the omnipotence of legislative bodies and written laws which was to be so disastrous in its consequences.

With Voltaire, who was concerned chiefly about the most widely conceived "freedom"of thought," the question of the form of government played a rather subordinate part. An enlightened monarch surrounded by the intellectual elite of the country would have satisfied his demands completely. Voltaire was, it is true, a combative spirit, always ready in individual instances to enter the lists against traditional prejudice and perpetrated injustice; but a revolutionary in the proper sense he was not. Nothing lay further from his thought than a social upheaval, although he is counted among the most important of the minds that made the intellectual preparation for the great revolution in France. Least of all was he the supporter of any definite political system; therefore he could not exert the influence of Rousseau or Montesquieu on the social-political structure of the approaching revolution.

The same holds good for Diderot, who was certainly the most comprehensive mind of his time, and just for that reason the least adapted for a political party program. And yet Diderot went much farther than any of his contemporaries in his social-critical conclusions. In him is found the purest embodiment of the liberal mind in France. An enthusiastic adherent of the rising natural science, he revolted against that artificial thinking which, with innate hostility, blocked the way to a natural arrangement of the forms of social life. Consequently, freedom seemed to him the beginning and the end of all things; freedom was, however, for Diderot "the possibility of an action's beginning quite of itself, independent of everything past," as he so cleverly defined it in his "Conversation with d'Alembert." The whole of nature, in his view, existed to demonstrate the occurrence of phenomena of themselves. Without freedom, the history of humanity would have had no meaning at all, for it was freedom that effected every reconstruction of society and cleared the way for every original thought.

With such a conception the French thinker could not fail to arrive at conclusions similar to those reached later by William Godwin. He did not, like Godwin, assemble his ideas in a special work; but strewn all through his writings are clear evidences that his utterance to d'Alembert was not just a chance remark, of the deeper meaning of which he was himself unaware. No. It was the innermost core of his own being that compelled him to speak thus. Whichever of his works we pick up, we find in it the expression of a genuinely free mind that had never committed itself to any dogma and had, therefore, never surrendered its unlimited power of development. Let one read his Pensees sur Vinter-prelation de la Nature^ and one feels at once that this wonderful hymn to nature and

all life could have been written only by a man who had freed himself from every inner bondage. It was this innermost essential core of Diderot's personality which called forth from the pen of Goethe, to whom Diderot was closely related intellectually, the well-known words in his letter to Zelter: "Diderot is Diderot, a unique individual j whoever carps at him and his concerns is a Philistine, and there are legions of them. But men do not know enough to accept gratefully from God, or from nature, or from their own kind, what is above price."

The libertarian character of Diderot's thought finds most striking expression in his shorter writings, such as Entretiens (Pun pere avec ses enjantSy which contains much material from Diderot's own youth j and very particularly the Supplement au voyage de Bougainville and the poem, Les Eleutheromanes ou abdication d^un roi de la jeve."^

Also in numerous articles in the monumental Encyclopedia, which owed its completion entirely to the tenacious energy of Diderot (to it, he alone made over a thousand contributions), the fundamental ideas of his philosophy are often clearly revealed, although the publisher had to employ all his cunning to deceive the watchful eyes of the royal censorship. Thus, in the article, "Authority," which he contributed, he declares that "Nature gave no man the right to rule over others" j and traces every instance of power to forcible subjugation, which endures just so long as the masters are stronger than the slaves and disappears as soon as the situation is reversed. In which case the previously down-trodden have the same right their former masters enjoyed of subjecting them in turn to the arbitrary whim of their tyranny.

Montesquieu, like Voltaire, was strongly influenced by the English constitution and the ideas which had brought it to its existing structure. But, in contrast to Locke and his successors, he did not take as his basis the principle of natural right, the weak points of which did not escape him; rather he tried to explain the origin of the state historically. In this

^ This poem owes its origin to a happy event. In a little company of men and women Diderot was chosen as so-called "Twelfth Night King," and, as chance would have it, for three successive years the baked-in bean turned up in his piece of the cake. The first time, following Rabelais, he laid down for his subjects the single law: "Each of you be happy in his own way!" In the third year, however, he sets forth in the poem, "Les Eleutheromanes," how he had grown tired of his kingship and resigned the crown and, in doing so expresses most beautifully his love of freedom. The following verses best show this: