Ominous Parallels (6 page)

Voluntarism is a frontal assault on reason. The theory implies that reality as such—and man, too, as part of it—is inherently irrational and even insane. In Schopenhauer’s version, for instance, the World-Will is described as blind, insatiable, and absolutely senseless. As a result, its offshoot, the world of appearances in which we live, is a nightmare universe condemning man to ceaseless agony. The only escape, Schopenhauer says, is the denial of one’s will to live, followed by the oblivion of Nirvana. In Nietzsche’s version, what rules man (and, he suggests, reality) is an equally blind and senseless will, the “will to power”—which is, Nietzsche says, not to be denied but exultantly affirmed. To affirm it, he holds, one must reject the mind and act instead on the spontaneous, drunken outpourings of the orgiastic “Dionysian” element in man (raw passion). “Why? You ask, why?” declares Zarathustra, in a remark that encapsulates the romanticism in Nietzsche and the unreason in romanticism. “I am not one of those whom one may ask about their why.”
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The philosophers’ flight into a world of Will, or of the past, or of the East, did not prevent their followers, especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century, from applying the romanticist viewpoint to the issues and concerns of life on earth.

An education stressing the intellect, such men charged, places too great a burden on the child and thwarts his emotional development. An education teaching facts and objectivity improperly emphasizes external factors at the expense of the child’s “inner experience.” What Germany needs, they concluded, is a new kind of institution: not cold, cognition-centered “learning-schools,” but feeling-centered “Lebensschulen” (life-schools). Encouraged by liberal progressives and conservative nationalists alike, the romanticist educators proceeded gradually to supply this need—first in the empire, then in the Republic. (Thus the schools were ready for the Nazi educators, when their time came.)

Modern science and its product, the Industrial Revolution—the advocates of romanticism charged—thwart the emotional development of everyone, whether child or adult. Individualism, they said, is “atomistic,” capitalism is “materialistic,” urban life is artificial, factories are ugly, labor-saving machinery is soulless and a source of misery. By contrast, medieval peasants, in one commentator’s words, “were supposed to have been happy, natural, uncitified, and uncultured, literally in contact with the earth (a supposedly most beneficial tie)....” “I will destroy [the present] order of things, which wastes man’s powers in service of dead matter ... ,” concluded Wagner.
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Like Hegel, and generally under his influence, the romanticists concerned with politics characteristically found an “organic”
social
whole to exalt: Germany. Selfless service to the Volk (the people), most of them said, is the essence of virtue. Such service, they usually added, requires obedience to a dictator soon to appear in Germany, a “hero” who can divine the will of the Volk and mercilessly smash any nation or group (such as the Jews) that stands in its way.

A well-known German historian has remarked that the romanticist element in German thought would appear to Western eyes as “a
queer mixture of mysticism and brutality
.”
¹⁰
The formulation errs only in the adjective “queer.” The mixture’s two ingredients have a magnetic affinity for each other: the first makes possible and leads to the second (and not only in Germany).

By the time of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s intellectuals—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike—bad reached a philosophical consensus. If we are to solve our country’s problems, they said to one another and to the public, we must follow the right approach to knowledge. The right approach, as they conceived it, was eloquently described by Walther Rathenau, who was not a fulminating nationalist or racist, but an admired liberal commentator, a practical man (government minister, diplomat, industrialist), and a Jew.

The most profound error of the social thought of our day is found in the belief that one can demand of scientific knowledge impulses to will and ideal goals. Understanding will never be able to tell us what to believe, what to hope for, what to live for, and what to offer up sacrifices for. Instinct and feeling, illumination and intuitive vision—these are the things that lead us into the realm of forces that determine the meaning of our existence.
¹¹

Rathenau and his colleagues did not know the full nature of the “realm of forces” into which they were delivering the country. They did not know who ruled that kind of realm. They did not foresee the consequences of the “instinct and feeling” they were begging for. They found out.

In 1922, the “instinct and feeling” confronted Rathenau in practical reality. He was assassinated by a gang of anti-Semitic nationalists. A decade later the same fate befell the Weimar Republic.

Pervaded by attacks on every idea and method essential to the function of the reasoning mind, the cultural atmosphere of the Weimar Republic was an invaluable asset to the Nazis. They made full use of it, taking from their surroundings whatever epistemological doctrines they needed in order to implement their irrationalist approach, assured in advance of a receptive mass audience.

Of these doctrines, two in particular were emphasized by the Nazis, the combination becoming a characteristic leitmotif of theirs. One of the doctrines is age-old; the other is an offshoot of romanticism. The first is
dogmatism
(the advocacy of faith in immutable revelations) ; the second is
pragmatism.

The concept of faith does not pertain to the content of a man’s ideas, but to the method by which they are to be accepted. “Faith” designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof. It is obvious, therefore, why Nazi (and Fascist) leaders insist on faith from their followers. “Faith,” writes Hitler,

is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward.
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In the West, the stronghold of the demand for faith, the institution which issues that demand in the most sophisticated manner, is the Catholic Church. Hitler, accordingly, admired the Church. He admired not its teachings but its methods—“its knowledge of human nature,” its hierarchical organization, its discipline, “its uncommonly clever tactics.” One of its cleverest tactics, he believed, is its unyielding dogmatism.

Faith, he explains in
Mein Kampf.
must be “unconditional.” It cannot in any essential way be made dependent on arguments, proofs, reasons. Its content must be offered to the masses in the form of rigid dogmas, “dogmas as such.” Once a doctrine has been announced publicly, therefore, there can be no changes in it, no debates, no discussion. “For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure?”

“I have followed [the Church],” Hitler told Rauschning,

in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it.
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Dogma, whether Nazi or otherwise, requires an authority able to give it the stamp of an official imprimatur. The Nazi authority is obvious. “Just as the Roman Catholic considers the Pope infallible in all matters concerning religion and morals,” writes Goering,

so do we National Socialists
believe
with the same inner conviction that for us the Leader is in all political and other matters concerning the national and social interests of the people simply infallible. [Hitler’s authority derives from] something mystical, inexpressible, almost incomprehensible which this unique man possesses, and he who cannot feel it instinctively will not be able to grasp it at all.
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Given their commitment to the method of faith (and their tendency to imitate the Catholic Church), it is not astonishing that some Nazis went all the way in this issue. A tendency never given the status of official ideology yet fairly prominent in the movement was voiced in a demand made by several of its leading figures (though Hitler himself regarded it as impractical until the Nazis won the war): the demand that Nazism itself be turned into a full-fledged religion. These voices urged a state religion supplanting the older creeds, with its own symbols, its own rituals, and its own zealots avid to convert Christians into fanatic Hitler-believers, as, once, ancient missionaries had converted pagans into fanatic Christians. “Adolf Hitler,” exclaimed one such believer (the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs), “is the true Holy Ghost!”
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The Nazis did not survive long enough to complete this development. To the end, they could not decide whether to retain Christianity, construing Nazism merely as its latest, truest version (“positive Christianity,” this wing often called it)—or to concoct a distinctively Nazi creed out of a hodgepodge of elements drawn from pagan Teutonic mythology and romanticist metaphysics. In either case, however, whether advanced as a form of or successor to Christianity, what Nazism did unfailingly demand of its followers was the essence of the religious mentality: an attitude of awed, submissive, faithful adoration. “We believe on this earth
solely
in Adolf Hitler ... ,” intoned Dr. Robert Ley to a reverent audience of 15,000 Hitler Youths. “We believe that God has sent us Adolf Hitler.”
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Seventeen centuries earlier, Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers, had explained that religion by its nature requires the subversion of reason, the belief in the irrational
because
it is irrational. He had delivered a ringing anti-reason manifesto, declaring, in regard to the dogma of God’s self-sacrifice on the cross: “It is believable, because it is absurd; it is certain, because it is impossible.”

If Tertullian’s is the correct view of religion, the Nazis were evidently qualified to enter the field. The absurdity of their dogma matched anything offered by the medievals.

The other half of the Nazis’ epistemological leitmotif, the concomitant of the Nazi dogmatism, is the Nazi pragmatism. To grasp the relationship between these two halves, one must first grasp the nature of pragmatism, including its philosophic roots.

Those who regard the intellect as cut off from reality tend to regard the man of intellect as an impractical theoretician, who is impotent to act or achieve goals in the real world. According to this viewpoint, a fundamental dichotomy cuts through human life: thought versus action, intelligence versus achievement, knowing versus doing. “The know-it-alls,” states Hitler, “are the enemies of action.”
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In elaborating this idea the Nazis repeat most of the voluntarist commonplaces of the later romanticists. The essence of human nature, they say, is “will,” which they regard as man’s means of access to reality and as the ultimate source of human action. “Will” in this context means a set of blind, irrational (and allegedly innate) drives that crave an outlet—and Nazism means giving them one. It means (according to a party slogan) “the triumph of the will,” through a life of blind, irrational action, action unmediated and untouched by the operation of intelligence.

The voluntarist worship of mindless action may be desig- nated by the term “activism.” Activism is the form of irrationalism which extols direct physical action, based on will or instinct or faith, while repudiating the intellect and its products, such as abstractions, theory, programs, philosophy. In a very literal sense, activism is irrationalism—in action. “We approach the realities of the world only in strong emotion and in action ... ,” says Hitler.

Men misuse their intelligence. It is not the seat of a special dignity of mankind, but merely an instrument in the struggle for life. Man is here to act. Only as a being in action does he fulfill his natural vocation. Contemplative natures, retrospective like all intellectuals, are dead persons who miss the meaning of life.

Professor L.G. Tirala, a philosophically trained Nazi ideologist, sees beyond the obvious romanticist sources of this attitude. He traces the Nazi activism to the two-world philosophy of Kant (which in turn he ascribes to Kant’s “Aryan” nature). Kant’s view, he writes, is: