Read Nationalism and Culture Online
Authors: Rudolf Rocker
Tags: #General, #History, #Sociology, #Social Science, #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Culture, #Multicultural Education, #Nationalism and nationality, #Education, #Nationalism, #Nationalism & Patriotism
Nationalism and Culture (33 page)
That Napoleon could never quite attain the last aim of his internal policy, that all his apparatus of government was wrecked again and again on men, was probably the bitterest pang of his power-loving soul.
the great tragedy of his monstrous life, which even at St. Helena still burned within him. But the mad idea he pursued did not die with him. It is even today the basis of the will to power, which appears wherever the love of men has died and sacrifices pulsating life to the shadowy, pale, phantom forms of tyrannical lust. For all power is loveless, is inhuman in the nature of its being. It changes the hearts of the powerful into wolf-dens of hate and cold contempt for humanity, chokes all human emotion, and causes the despot to see his fellow man only as an abstract number to be used in calculating the execution of his plans.
Napoleon hated freedom on principle, as does every tyrant who has become clearly aware of the nature of power. But he also knew the price he had to pay for this, knew very well that to master mankind he must smother the man hidden in himself. It is significant that he says of himself: "I love power as an artist, as a violinist loves his violin. I love it in order to coax from it tones, melodies, harmonies." It is significant that this same man, who almost as a child was already evolving in his brain plans for power, uttered in early youth the ominous words: "I find that love is detrimental to society and to the personal happiness of man. If the gods were to free the world from love, it would be the greatest of blessings."
This feeling never left him, and when in later years he looked back on the separate phases of his life, there remained for him only this comfortless knowledge:
There are only two levers which move men, fear and self-interest. Love is a stupid illusion, be assured of it. Friendship is an empty word. I love no one, not even my brothers—possibly Joseph a little, from habit and because he is older than I. And I love Duroc; but why? Because his character pleases me. He is earnest and resolute, and I believe the fellow has never shed a tear. I, for my part, know that I have no true friends.
How empty this heart must have been which through all the years pursued a phantom and was animated by only one desire—to rule. To this madness he sacrificed the bodies and souls of men after having first attempted to make their spirits fit into the dead mechanism of a political machine. But at last it was made clear to him that the age of the automatons had not yet arrived. Only a man whose soul was a desert could say: "A man like me cares nothing for the lives of millions of men."
Napoleon asserted that he despised men, and his uncritical admirers have rated this almost as a merit. He may in individual cases have found justification enough for it; for it is by no means the men of highest worth who crowd around the powerful. But if the matter is pursued more deeply one gets the impression that his demonstratively displayed contempt of men is to a large part pretense, intended to impress his contemporaries
and posterity with the brilliance of his own achievements. For this apparent misanthrope was a first-class actor to whom the judgment of posterity was not a matter of indifference, who left no means untried to influence the opinion of future generations, who did not even shrink from the falsification of well-known facts in order to achieve this end.
It was not inner disgust which separated him from men, but his unfathomable egotism, which knew no scruples nor shrank from any lies, from any villainy, any dishonor—not from the meanest of crimes—in order to make himself dominant. Emerson rightly remarks: "Bonaparte was in a quite unusual degree devoid of every high-hearted emotion. . . . He did not even possess the merit of common truthfulness and honesty." And in another place in his essay on Napoleon he says: "His whole existence was an experiment under the best possible conditions to show of what intellect divorced from conscience is capable." Only as issuing from the disconsolate inner state of a man in whom his own greed for glory had utterly destroyed all social feeling are these words of Napoleon understandable: "The savage, like the civilized man, needs a lord and master, a sorcerer who keeps his fancy in check, subjects him to strict discipline, chains him, prevents his biting at the wrong time, clubs him, leads him to the chase. Obedience is his destiny j he deserves nothing better and has no rights."
But this heartless cynic, who in his youth had intoxicated himself with the Contrat Social^ recognized to the uttermost the whole disastrous significance of this new religion on which in the last analysis his rule was founded. Thus, in one of those unguarded moments of complete truthfulness so rare with him, he allowed himself to be enticed into the statement: "Your Rousseau is a madman who has led us to this condition!" And on another occasion, somewhat pensively: "The future will show whether it had not been better for the world's peace if neither Rousseau nor I had ever lived."
THE AUTHORITY PRINCIPLE IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. KANT AS THE ADVOCATE OF ABSOLUTE STATE POWER. KANT'S MORAL LAW. KANT'S CONCEPT OF SOCIETY. THE IDEA OF THE "ETERNAL PEACE" AND THE INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE OF STATES. KANT AND HERDER. FICHTE AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE INHERENT EVIL IN MAN. FICHTE AND MACHIA-VELLI. THE "SELF-CONTAINED COMMERCIAL STATE." FICHTE AND STATE SOCIALISM. FICHTES ADDRESSES TO THE GERMAN NATION. FICHTE AND NATIONAL EDUCATION. THE IDEA OF THE "HISTORIC MISSION OF THE GERMANS." HEGEL'S INFLUENCE ON HIS TIME. HEGEL'S DIALECTIC. THINKING IN CATEGORIES. HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. HEGEL AND THE STATE. THE BELIEF IN FATE. HEGEL AND PROTESTANTISM. THE PRUSSIAN STATE PHILOSOPHER. HEGEL AND SOCIALISM.
IN sharp contrast with German literature and poetry stands German philosophy. Although it has not lacked occasional glimpses of light, German classical philosophy has never been a domain of freedom. Its best-known representatives have often flirted with freedom, but no real union ever resulted. One gains the impression that when life's brutal realities became too clearly felt, a few concessions, not too binding, were made to the awakened conscience in order to restore the disturbed equilibrium. In fact, the main trend of German philosophy was to organize bondage into a system and make of servitude a virtue which was consecrated by the famous "inner freedom."
What does Kant mean when he reduces his famous moral law to the formula: "Act so"tKat the maxims of thy will could at all times serve as principles for general legislation".^ Is not this to reduce man's ethical feeling to the pitiful concept of the law of a government.? Coming from a man who was firmly convinced that man was inherently evil, this is not surprising. Only a man with this conviction could make the assertion:
Man is an animal which, when living among others of its kind, needs a master. For he surely abuses his freedom in the presence of his equals, and ahhough as a reasonable being he desires a law, his beastly selfish nature leads him to exempt himself whenever he can. Hence he needs a master who will break his individual will and compel him to obey a generally accepted rule whereby everyone can be free.
This is in fact but another form of the ancient and terrible dogma of original sin with its unavoidable conclusion. It is just this which prejudices all freer spirits against Kant. Thus Goethe wrote to Herder: "After using a full generation for the cleansing of his philosophic mantle of various foul prejudices, Kant has only defiled it again with the stain of innate evil, in order that Christians, too, may be persuaded to kiss its hem."
Even Schiller, who was strongly influenced by Kant, could not reconcile himself to the kernel of his ethics. To the poet and idealist who believed firmly in the good in man, the stern duty-concept of Kant, who had really no understanding of the significance of social instincts, must, indeed, have seemed repellent. It was with this in mind he wrote Goethe that with Kant there always remained something which, "as with Luther, reminds one of a monk, who although he has left his cloister still cannot quite rid himself of its traces."
Kant has often been called a republican and a democrat. These terms are very vague and prove nothing, for more than once in history they have been made to serve as a cloak for the most brutal forces. This curious republican was a stern advocate of unlimited state power, to rebel against which was in his eyes a capital crime—even when the executive instruments of the state acted contrary to the law and allowed themselves to be led into the most tyrannical acts. Thus Kant expressly declares in his Theory of the Law:
The origin of the supreme power is for the people who are subject to it, in a practical sense, undiscoverable; that is, the subject, in view of the obedience he owes to it, should not speculate concerning its origin, as if of a doubtful law {jus cont rover sum). For since the people, in order to judge concerning the supreme state power {summum imperium), must he regarded as already united under a general lawgiving will, it cannot and dare not judge otherwise than as the existing head of the state (summum imperians) desires. Whether originally a real agreement among them (pactum subject'tonis civilts) preceded it as fact, or whether the power came first and the law afterwards, are for the people who are now already under the law quite immaterial speculations. They would, however, prove dangerous to the state; for should the subject who now has discovered the final origin of the dominant authority rebel against it, he could quite legally he punished, exterminated, or declared outlaw and expelled from the state. A law which is so sacred, so inviolable, that merely to question it practically and thus to suspend its operation even for a moment, constitutes a crime, is represented as emanating, not from man, but from a supreme, blameless lawgiver. This is the meaning of the sentence, "All authority comes from God," which states, not the historical foundation of civil constitutions, but an idea, as a practical principle of reason: the existing power is to be obeyed, be its origin what it may.
When one compares thoroughly the reactionary concept of Kant with the ideas of the liberal school of thought in England which goes back to Locke, one realizes the shamefully reactionary aspect of this view, so daringly put forth at a time when beyond the German frontier the old regime was falling to ruins. Kant had already in his essay. What is Enlightenment? published in 1784, supported the despotism of Frederick
II and praised the obedience of the subjects as the first maxim of political morality. His doctrine of the law, however, he develops in his later works —a proof that in this regard his ideas never changed. The "democrat" Kant was even ready to advocate slavery and to justify it as useful under certain conditions. He maintained that slavery was applicable to men who in consequence of their crimes had forfeited their civil rights. Such a man can, in the opinion of our philosopher, "be made simply a tool of another [of the state or of another citizen]."
The conservative point of view concerning the state and the respect of the subject for it, was virtually in Kant's blood. When in 1794 he received a reprimand from the royal government on account of an alleged disparagement of the Bible and Christian doctrine, he did not content himself with giving Frederick William II a written promise to refrain in the future from all oral and written expression concerning the Christian religion. Under the miserable conditions then existing in Prussia such an act was not only explicable, but also justifiable. But among the documents he left there were found these characteristic lines which had reference to the promise given to the king: "Recantation and denial of one's inmost convictions is contemptible, but silence in a case like the present one is the duty of a subject."
Kant, whose quiet Philistine existence never diverged from the prescribed paths of state guardianship, was not of a social nature, and could only with difficulty surmount his inborn aversion for any form of communion. But since he could not deny the necessity of associations, he accepted them as one accepts any necessary evil. Consequently, society appeared to him as a forced union held together solely by duty towards the state. Kant really hated every voluntary union, just as every good deed done for its own sake was repugnant to him. He knew nothing else but the stark, implacable "Thou shalt!"
One with such tendencies was hardly the proper man to formulate the fundamentals of a great social ethics, which is inherently the product of social communal life, finding its expression in every individual, and continually vitalized anew and confirmed by the community. Just as little was Kant capable of revealing to mankind great theoretical social insight. Everything which he produced in this field had been surpassed by the great enlightenment in France and England long before it saw the light of day in Germany.
That Kant, on account of his essay On Eternal Peacey and an earlier dissertation, A View of General History in the Light of World-citizenship, has lately been acclaimed as the intellectual father of the so-called "League of Nations," was to be expected in a generation which has long forgotten Lessing, Herder and Jean Paul} and only proves that the alleged "representatives of the German spirit" have also in this respect learned nothing. What Kant in reality strove for was no union of peoples, but a league of states, which for this very reason could never have accomplished the task he had planned for it. The experiences we have lately had with the international convention at Geneva have opened the eyes of all who are willing to see.
This was quite clearly perceived by Herder when, following in Lessing's footsteps, he declared himself against Kant's proposals and showed that an understanding among the nations can only be achieved by organic—meaning cultural—means, and never by mechanical means, that is, by the activity of "political machines." Herder explains that the forced organization which constitutes the state maintains itself primarily by continually creating external interests which run contrary to the interests of other states j and for this reason it is ill-suited to function as a mediator and adjuster. Therefore, he substituted for the idea of the international league of states advocated by Kant, his "association of all thinking men on all continents," proceeding from the correct view that mutual agreement between the human groups of the different countries is not achievable by dictation from above, but only from below upwards by the will of the people themselves. By this "all the prejudices of state interests, of native religion, and most foolish prejudice of all, of rank and class, are mitigated, confined, and made harmless." But, "such victories over prejudice are"—Herder maintains—"achieved from within outward, not from without inward."
