Ominous Parallels (5 page)

War among nations, in Hegel’s view, is an inevitable, and desirable, expression of the evolution of Spirit. And, since the history of the world faithfully expresses this evolution, the nation that wins the wars of a given era is obviously the one backed by the Spirit. Justice, therefore, must always be on the side of the winner. Might makes right—stripped of its jargon, this is the meaning of Hegel’s doctrine.

Hegel’s form of collectivism is
nationalism.
The nation, he holds—not mankind as a whole, or the majority, or the race, or the proletariat—is the favored group, the one which is to be the standard of value and the collector of men’s sacrifices. And of all the world’s nations, he reports, Germany is the culmination to date. It is currently the representative of the Spirit.

Religions have often divided men into the chosen and the damned, and then interpreted history as the struggle of the chosen to carry out the divine plan. Hegel’s philosophy of history amounts to this
viewpoint.
Hegel’s distinctiveness, however, lies in his definition of the chosen. The messianic group on his theory is not men of a particular religion or sect, but men of a particular nationality.

The initiators of German nationalism in the nineteenth century were not the Junkers, the
military men,
big business, or the middle classes. “All these groups,” notes Ludwig von Mises,

were at first strongly opposed to the aspirations of Pan-Germanism. But their resistance was vain because it lacked an ideological backing. There were no longer any liberal [individualistic] authors in Germany. Thus the nationalist writers and professors easily conquered. Very soon the youth came back from the universities and lower schools convinced Pan-Germans.
¹⁵

On this issue, the leading teacher of the teachers of the youth was Hegel.

The Nazis accept Hegel’s theory, with certain adaptations.

The Nazis agree that a cosmic agency has divided men into antithetic groups, the chosen and the damned, whose actions and destiny are predetermined and outside of any individual’s choice or control. They agree that the chosen have “absolute right” to smash the rest of mankind. They agree that might, being the expression of destiny, makes right. But, since they mix a certain element of biology into this framework, they often provide a different answer to the question: who chooses the chosen? It is not the World Spirit that does it, Hitler often suggests, but
nature
, using the mechanism of the “survival of the fittest.” The chosen are catapulted to a position of world dominance, and their recourse to brutality is justified, not by the Hegelian process of evolution, but by the
Darwinian.

Although the catch phrases of the Social Darwinists, in the above form, are all over
Mein Kampf
, they never attained the status of official party doctrine. Other Nazi writers remained free to denounce Darwin and Darwinism as incompatible with Nazism—as irreligious, “mechanistic,” “internationalistic.” On the whole, Nazism never decided this question. Nature and God, the Nazis sometimes say, are merely different forms in which the same reality manifests itself; so there is really no difference, after all, between natural and divine selection.

The Nazis’ predilection for biology-plus-religion culminates in their biological version of the chosen-damned dichotomy. The people chosen by God/nature, they hold, are not confined to a single nation. They are spread across the globe, marked off by a distinctive physical appearance (they are tall, long-headed, blond, etc.) and a special, innate “race soul” (which makes them truthful, energetic, persistent, the “founder of all higher humanity,” etc.). These men are the Aryans (or the Nordics)—the master race. The damned are all the other breeds, especially the Jews. The Jew, claims Hitler, is by his nature alien and cunning, a communist subversive and a capitalist exploiter; he is “the personification of the devil” and “the symbol of all evil.”
¹⁶

The Nazi collectivism, technically, is a form of racism rather than of nationalism. But the Nazis were able to combine the two doctrines easily, by the device of holding that Germany contains the purest Aryan blood.

The direct source of the Nazi racial ideas was the theoreticians of racism (e.g., Count de Gobineau and H. S. Chamberlain), a group who rose to sudden prominence in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These men accepted wholeheartedly the collectivist sentiment of the period’s intellectuals, and then sought to gain for that sentiment the appearance of scientific support—by translating collectivism into the language of the favorite science of the time, biology. The result was a mounting torrent on the following order (from Vacher de Lapouge, a nineteenth-century French Aryan-glorifier) : “The blood which one has in one’s veins at birth one keeps all one’s life. The individual is stifled by his race and is nothing. The race, the nation, is all.”
¹⁷
No amount of passion for biology (or for Darwin) could produce such an utterance. A dose of Hegel, however, could.

What the theoreticians of racism did was to
secularize
the Hegelian approach, as Karl Popper explains eloquently. Marx, he observes,

replaced Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ by matter, and by material and economic interests. In the same way, racialism substitutes for Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race. Instead of ‘Spirit,’ Blood is the self-developing essence; instead of ‘Spirit,’ Blood is the Sovereign of the world, and displays itself on the Stage of History; and instead of its ‘Spirit,’ the Blood of a nation determines its essential destiny.

The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism. It only gives it a tinge of biology and of modem evolutionism.
¹⁸

Every central doctrine of the Nazi politics, racism included, is an expression or variant of the theory of collectivism. Such doctrines cannot rise to the ascendancy, neither among the intellectuals nor in the mind of the public, except in a culture already saturated with a mystical-collectivist philosophy.

In the case of Germany, this means: saturated with the ideas of Hegel.

No philosopher could produce a cataclysm such as Nazism single-handed. A complex series of other intellectual influences—both leading to and proceeding from Hegel—was involved in preparing the climate for the rise of the Nazis. The sum of these accessory influences determined the specific form of Hegelian statism prevalent in modern Germany and picked up by the Nazis. The theoreticians of racism were merely one such influence.

There was also Martin Luther, regarded by the Nazis as a major hero, who was the greatest single power in the development of German religion and, through this means, an influence on the philosophies of both Kant and Hegel. Luther is anti-reason (“Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason”), intensely pro-German, and crudely anti-Semitic (“[F]ie on you wherever you be, you damned Jews, who dare to clasp this earnest, glorious, consoling Word of God to your maggoty, mortal, miserly belly, and are not ashamed to display your greed so openly”). He formally enlists God on the side of the state. Unconditional obedience to the government’s edicts, he holds, is a Christian virtue.

[I]n a like manner we must endure the authority of the prince. If he misuse or abuse his authority, we are not to entertain a grudge, seek revenge or punishment. Obedience is to be rendered for God’s sake, for the ruler is God’s representative. However they may tax or exact, we must obey and endure patiently.
¹⁹

There was J.G. Fichte, another Nazi
hero,
who was an early post-Kantian idealist and an important influence on subsequent German thought (including Hegel’s). Politically, Fichte, like Hegel, anticipates all the central tenets of the Nazis. He is a champion of the organic theory of the state, and an authoritarian who yearns for an elite of scholar-dictators to rule the ignorant masses. Because of his advocacy of state control of the economy, he is often regarded as the father of modern socialism. “[T]he individual life has no real existence,” he writes, “since it has no value of itself, but must and should sink to nothing; while, on the contrary, the Race alone exists, since it alone ought to be looked upon as really living.” Fichte is also one of the principal sources of the theory, and delusions, of German nationalism. “[T]o have character and to be German,” he remarks, “undoubtedly mean the same.... ”
²⁰

There was Karl Marx, the creator of modem communism and an archvillain and competitor in the Nazi eyes, who nevertheless helped pave the way for Nazism by popularizing all the fundamental principles of Hegel, including his rejection of Aristotelian logic. Marx pioneered the technique, later adapted by the racists, of secularizing Hegel’s ideas; he substitutes economic forces for the Absolute as the determiner of history, and thus replaces Hegel’s warring nations by the class struggle, and Hegel’s monarchy by the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is wrong, Marx writes, to “postulate an abstract—
isolated
—human individual.”
“My own existence
is a social activity. For this reason, what I myself produce I produce for society, and with the consciousness of acting as a social being.” In the classless society, he predicts, men will shed all concern for personal prerogatives, individual rights, private property. They will want only to blend with the whole. Then at last “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right [can] be fully left behind....”
²¹

There was Friedrich Nietzsche, the prophet of the superman and of the will to power, who was acclaimed by Hitler as one of his precursors. The extent of Nietzsche’s actual influence in regard to the rise of Nazism is debatable. He is antistatist, antiracist, and in many respects a defender of the individual. Nevertheless, he is a fervid romanticist, who revels in the post-Kantian anti-reason orgy, and there is much in his disjointed, aphoristic writings that the Nazis were able to quote with relish. A view of the universe as a realm of clashing wills, ceaseless strife, and violent conflict; a glorification of cruelty and conquest, of “the magnificent
blond ibrute,
avidly rampant for spoil and victory”;
²²
the view that a few superbeings, “beyond good and evil,” have the right to enslave the inferior masses for their own higher purposes—this is part of the Nietzschean legacy, as interpreted (with some justification) by the Nazis.

And there were many other such voices in Germany, ranging from dreamy apostles of otherworldly mysticism to mindless champions of this-worldly nationalism (many German intellectuals were both). Those best-known for the former attitude include Meister Eckhart, a medieval neo-Platonist often called the father of German mysticism; Arthur Schopenhauer, an Orientalist doom-preacher who was a major influence on men such as Nietzsche and Freud; and Friedrich Schleiermacher, a leading romanticist theologian. Those best-known for the latter attitude include Heinrich von Treitschke, an historian of the Prussian school, who helped to spread Hegel’s ideas (“The grandeur of war lies in the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the State....”); Richard Wagner, a fiercely racist disciple of Schopenhauer
(“[We must]
be brave enough to deny our intellect”); and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a literary critic and youth mentor in the Weimar Republic, who coined the term “the Third Reich” (“We have to be strong enough to live in contradictions”).
²³

All of these men and movements contributed the notes, the chords, or the screeches that fused into the Horst Wessel song. And they are merely some of the obvious voices in Germany from a chorus sustained across hundreds of years and gradually rising in volume. If the brutes finally rose from the gutters and stamped a swastika across the doctrines of the centuries; if, plucking the naked essence of those doctrines from the atmosphere, they began to preach the worship of the
all
-powerful, collectivist, militarist state, ruled by a master Führer in the name of a master race; and if, finding an avid following, they proceeded to drench the world in blood—one need not ask what made it possible.

In one respect, Hegel’s share of the responsibility has been widely recognized: the similarity between his politics and that of Hitler is hard to escape. But Hegel’s politics is not a primary. It is an expression of his fundamental philosophy, which is the culmination of a long historical development.

Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.

3

Hitler’s War Against Reason

Statism and the advocacy of reason are philosophical opposites. They cannot coexist—neither in a philosophic system nor in a nation.

If men uphold reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude that men should deal with one another as free agents, settling their disputes by an appeal to the mind, i.e., by a process of voluntary, rational persuasion. If men reject rea son, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude the opposite: that men have no way to deal with one another at all—no way except physical force, wielded by an elite endowed with an allegedly superior, mystic means of cognition.

The branch of philosophy that deals with the powers of reason as a cognitive instrument is epistemology, and this issue is the key to its relationship to politics. It is not an accident that Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the whole tradition of German nationalism from Luther on, advocated a variety of anti-senses, anti-logic, anti-intellect doctrines. The statism all these figures upheld or fostered is a result; the root lies in their view of knowledge, i.e., of man’s mind.

The aspiring dictator may not be able to identify in philosophic terms the clash between reason and his particular schemes. But he, too, is aware of it. In some (usually unverbalized) form, he knows that he cannot demand unthinking obedience from men, or gain their consent to the permanent rule of brutality, until he has first persuaded his future subjects to ditch their brains and their independent, self-assertive judgment. He knows that he can succeed only with a populace conditioned to seek neither evidence nor argument, a populace which, having shrugged aside the demands of logic, will agree with, and then endure, anything. Hence the spectacle of statists, of every variety and throughout history, both before and during their period in power, systematically attacking the mind. In some terms, these men have grasped that their political goals cannot be achieved until the proper epistemological base is established.

Hitler grasped it, too.

In one sense it is incongruous to speak of a “Nazi epistemology.” The leading Nazis were not philosophers; they presented no systematic theory of knowledge and were ignorant of most of the specific issues in the field. Nevertheless, there is a Nazi epistemology, in the sense of an unequivocal, consistent, and passionately urged position on the subject’s fundamental issue.

“We are now at the end of the Age of Reason,” Hitler declared to Hermann Rauschning. “The intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life.”

“The life of a race and of a people is ... a mystical synthesis,” writes Rosenberg, “a manifestation of the soul, which cannot be explained by the logic of reason nor by causal analysis.”

“Even the most profound, the most learned of intellects touches the surface of things only,” writes Gottfried Neesse, a young Nazi intellectual.

Everything of which we are conscious, all that is thinkable and understandable, is but thin snow on the high mountains of the unconscious, snow that will quickly melt under the storms of fate, of some intoxication, of the trembling of the soul. Life would rather hide its ultimate secrets in a small folksong heard in the village night than in fat and scholarly books. It is vain to try to plumb the depths. We will never, by ourselves, be able to learn the essential. All we can do is be moved by it.
¹

What should men appeal to for guidance once the intellect has been rejected? “We must distrust the intelligence and the conscience,” states Hitler, “and must place our trust in our instincts.” “Trust your instincts, your feelings, or whatever you like to call them,” says Hitler. The last clause indicates the latitude permitted to the Nazis on this question. They were free to advocate—and did advocate, privately and publicly—every
non
rational source of alleged knowledge that men have ever invented, including revelation, intuition, trances, magic, and astrology (the latter was a special favorite of Goebbels). What they could not advocate and were urged not to practice was a single cognitive method, the one Hitler grasped to be incompatible with Nazism: “At a mass meeting,” said Hitler to Rauschning,

thought is eliminated. And because this is the state of mind I require, because it secures to me the best sounding-board for my speeches, I order everyone to attend the meetings, where they become part of the mass whether they like it or not, ‘intellectuals’ and bourgeois as well as workers. I mingle the people. I speak to them only as the mass.

“The masses are like an animal that obeys its instincts. They do not reach conclusions by reasoning.”
²

Reason is the faculty that identifies, in conceptual terms, the material provided by man’s senses. “Irrationalism” is the doctrine that reason is not a valid means of knowledge or a proper guide to action. “Mysticism” is the doctrine that man has a
non
sensory,
non
rational means of knowledge. Irrationalism and mysticism together constitute the essence of the Nazi epistemology.

The politics of Nazism—with its racist obsessions, its anti-Semitic demonology, its gesticulating Führer transmitting directives from Providence, and its all-obliterating appeal to the power of brute force—is unprecedented in the West, not for its collectivism but for its
undisguised
irrationality. The brazenness of this revelation is matched (and made possible) only by the brazenness of the Nazi epistemology. Its distinctive feature is self-proclaimed barbarianism, i.e., undisguised, boastfully trumpeted defiance of reason.

In the Nazi leadership’s view, Rauschning (a onetime friend of Hitler’s) reports, “the more inconsistent and irrational is their doctrine, the better.... [E]verything that might have gone to the making up of a systematic, logically conceived doctrine is dismissed as a trifle, with sovereign contempt.” “To all doubts and questions,” said Rosenberg, “the new man of the first German empire has only one answer: Nevertheless, I will!” “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ ” said Hanns Johst (President of the Reich Theater Chamber), in an immortal line, “I slip back the safety-catch of my revolver. ”
³
“People set us down as enemies of the intelligence,” declared Hitler. “We are. But in a much deeper sense than these conceited dolts of bourgeois scientists ever dream of.”
⁴

The enmity extends across the board, to all the central forms and expressions of human reason—from its first, groping appearance in the life of the young child, to its major existential product in the modem world, the Industrial Revolution. The former is to be defeated by teaching children to despise their brains; the latter, by teaching the country to return to nature.

Childhood education, Hitler holds, must concentrate on “the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies,” and on the development of “instincts” or “character,” i.e., the particular emotions the Nazis wished to inculcate—while systematically downgrading any intellectual element and de-emphasizing the process of cognition. “We don’t intend to educate our children into becoming miniature scholars,” said Hans Schemm, a leading Nazi educator. “The real values resting in the German child are not awakened by stuffing a great mass of knowledge into him.... Therefore, I say: Let us have, rather, ten pounds less knowledge and ten calories more character!” In one of his utterances, Hitler leaves no doubt about the nature of such “character”: “A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth—that is what I am after.... I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men.”
⁵

So is the product of knowledge. Nazi literature heaps abuse on wealth, cities, machinery, and Germany’s preoccupation, in Hitler’s words, with “an industrialization as boundless as it was harmful.” The credo of modern society, writes the Nazi Werner Sombart in a bitter denunciation, is: “More motors, more currency, more goods! More rapid production, more rapid travel, livelier enjoyment! Prosperity! Progress! Without end, without end!”
⁶
The antonym of such progress is indicated by the second part of the Nazi slogan: “Blood and Soil.” “Soil” in this context means the life of the humble, unthinking peasant, or of state-run, racially pure agricultural communes, as against the life of the “cunning,” “mongrelized” city dweller. It means the selfless martial discipline of Germany’s Middle Ages, as against the modern desire for economic comfort and well-being. It means a mystical merg
ing with primitive nature,
as against an atmosphere of insatiable, profit-seeking production and “cold,” calculating mechanization.

Most Nazis, concerned with the need for armaments, do not urge the dismantling of industry. What they do demand is its subservience to the right kind of men, the ones whose allegiance is not to science or business but to instinct and raw nature. Such subservience, in the words of one observer, is what takes “the sting” out of industrialism for the Nazis.
⁷
The “sting,” at root, is the fact that modern industry is a product of man’s mind.

In summoning the Germans so openly to a life of muscles and mindlessness, Hitler was counting on a widespread anti-reason attitude, an attitude that no political party by itself could have created or sustained. In the field of epistemology, the Nazis were merely repeating and cashing in on the slogans of a nineteenth-century intellectual movement, one which pervaded every country of Europe, but which had its center and greatest influence in Germany. This movement—the defiant rejection of the Enlightenment spirit—is called
romanticism.
^a

Progressively abandoning their Aristotelian heritage, the philosophers of the Enlightenment had reached a state of formal bankruptcy in the skepticism of David Hume. Hume claimed that neither the senses nor reason can yield reliable knowledge. He concluded that man is a helpless creature caught in an unintelligible universe. Meanwhile a variety of lesser figures (such as Rousseau, the admirer of the “noble savage”) were foreshadowing the era to come. They were suggesting that reason had had its chance but had failed, and that something else, something opposite, holds the key to reality and the future.

The two figures who created the new era and made this viewpoint the norm in the West—the two who welded the mystic stirrings of the late eighteenth century into a powerful, self-conscious,
intellectually respectable
voice, and who placed that voice at the base of all later philosophy—were Kant and Hegel. Kant is the father of the romanticist movement. It is he who claimed to have proved for the first time that existence is in principle unknowable to man’s mind. Thereafter, Hegel, Kant’s chief heir, most powerfully articulated the new movement’s central ideas, in every branch of philosophy.

But neither Kant nor Hegel is a full romanticist. Kant opened the door to the movement, but hesitated to walk firmly through. Hegel did walk through, but paid vigorous lip service to reason all the way. There were many, however, who did not hesitate and who did little to mask their views. In Germany the most influential of these men were J.G. Herder (another hero of the Nazis), Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The product of this main romanticist line was an army of lesser intellectuals and fellow travelers (generally cruder and more open than their mentors), who helped to spread the new approach to every corner of Germany.

The romanticists held (following Kant) that reason is a faculty restricted to a surface world of appearances and incapable of penetrating to true reality. Man’s true source of knowledge, they declared (drawing explicitly the conclusion Kant had implied), is: feeling—or passion, or intuition, or faith, etc. Man in this view is not a rational being; he is in essence an emotional being, and he must seek the truth and live his life accordingly.

Although most of the romanticists advocated some form of religion, religion is not an essential component of this philosophy. On the whole, the romanticists were more modern than that. They offered a somewhat secularized version of the earlier religious approach, stressing instinct more than revelation, the voice of the subconscious more than of the supernatural. But they never forgot their philosophic ancestors and brothers-in-spirit. While condemning the civilization of the Enlightenment, they passionately admired two cultures: the medieval and the Oriental.

Hostile to the “cold” objectivity of the scientific method, the romanticists turned to avowedly subjective fantasies, priding themselves on their absorption in an inner world of intense feeling. Scornful of the “shallowness” of Aristotelian logic, they flaunted the fact that the universes they constructed were brimming with “depth,” i.e., with contradictions, A’s endlessly blending into non-A’s and vice versa. Contemptuous of the “static” world of the Enlightenment thinkers—a world of stable, enduring
entities—the
romanticists denied the very existence of entities. Their “dynamic” universe was a resurrection of the ancient theory of Heraclitus: reality is a stream of change without entities or of action without anything that acts; it is a wild, chaotic flux, which the orderly “Enlightenment mind” cannot grasp.

Opposed most of all to
analysis,
to the “dissection” of reality performed by man’s conceptual faculty, to the distinctions made by man’s intellect, the romanticists praised
wholes,
so-called “organic” wholes. (The source of this particular notion is Kant’s
Critique of Judgment.)
The whole, they declared, is not the sum of its parts; it is a thing which consumes and transcends its constituents, obliterating their separate identities in the process.

The master “organic” whole, these men commonly held, is reality itself, variously called the Absolute, God, etc. Typically, it was construed as a kind of cosmic craving, an all-encompassing impulse or process of striving, called simply the “Will.” (This theory developed from Kant’s idea that the demands of the will are the key to the universe.) The advocates of such a view are known as “voluntarists,” because of their claim that will is the essence of reality, and that the physical world is merely will’s superficial manifestation.