Ominous Parallels (7 page)

“The essence of the world is richer and deeper than the world of appearance.” The world of activity and action is subject to different laws from the world of appearance.... [T]his primacy of action, of the world of action—in the case of Kant, especially the world of ethical action—arises from a primary predisposition of the Aryan race which does not derive from the quibbling, hairsplitting intellect [“klülglerischen Verstand”]. All Teutonic men of science have acknowledged this truth more or less consciously in a primacy of action over pure thinking.
The deed is all, the thought nothing
!
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Unreservedly accepting such a viewpoint, Nazis and Fascists alike frequently state that it is a matter of indifference whether the doctrines fed to the masses are true or false, right or wrong, sane or absurd. Leaders in both movements are content, even proud, publicly to describe their own ideologies as “myths” (a term popularized by the French romanticist Georges Sorel). A “myth,” in the Sorelian-Fascist-Nazi sense, is not a deliberate falsehood; it is an ideology concocted for purposes of action, without reference to such issues as truth or falsehood. It is addressed not-to man’s capacity for reason, but to a mob’s lust for faith, not to the fact-seeking intellect, but to the feeling-ridden, action-craving “will.” “We have created our myth,” states Mussolini. “The myth is a faith, it is a passion.... Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation!” Ours, writes Rosenberg in his best-known book,
The Myth of the Twentieth Century,
is “the myth of the blood, the belief that it is by the blood that the divine mission of man is to be defended....”
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The advocacy of “myth” is one form of a more general epistemological position that had come to dominate much of the philosophic world by the latter part of the nineteenth century. Thinkers for decades had been saturated with the Kantian view that facts “in themselves” are unknowable, and with the voluntarist view that action has primacy over thought. As a result, a growing chorus—helped along by Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche, among others—began to suggest that men should dispense with any concern for facts or reality. Ideas, it was increasingly claimed,
all
ideas, are merely subjective tools designed to serve human purposes; if, therefore, an idea leads in action to desirable consequences, i.e., to the sorts of consequences desired by its advocates, it should be accepted as true on that ground alone, without reference to the (unknowable) facts of reality.

This new approach reached its climax and found its enduring name in America, in the writings of William James. James called it: pragmatism. “Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need”—this, says James, is what the pragmatist dispenses with.
“‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.”
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Both Fascist and Nazi leaders embraced the new approach to truth eagerly—in their advocacy of “myth,” and in other, even more explicit forms.
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The standard by which ideas are to be judged, Hitler says repeatedly, is not “abstract” considerations of logic or fidelity to fact. The standard is: usefulness to the Volk. “Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge,” he writes in
Mein
Kampf, “must serve this purpose [”the existence and reproduction of our race and our people“]. And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or rejected according to its utility. Then no theory will stiffen into a dead doctrine....”
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What of the non-pragmatist concern for the truth, the
objective
truth, of an idea? “[M]any apparent [Nazi] absurdities, exaggerations or eccentricities,” writes one student of the movement,

must be ascribed neither to ignorance nor stupidity or even vindictiveness; they arise from a primary and more or less conscious disregard of objective truth. For the only function of cognition in political, and even philosophical matters as they see it is to equip the fighting nation and the leaders who mould it with the most effective weapons possible.

“There is no such thing as truth,” explains Hitler, “either in the moral or in the scientific sense.” Or as Goebbels puts the point: “Important is not what is right but what wins.”
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The corollary of such an attitude is unceasing intellectual flux; pragmatism leads to
relativism.
An idea, the pragmatist holds, must be judged as true or false according to its utility in a particular situation. What works today, in one situation, need not work tomorrow, in another. Thus truth is mutable. There are no “rigid” principles, not in any field. There are no absolutes.

“The needs of a state,” says Hitler, “. . . are the sole determining factor. What may be necessary today need not be so tomorrow. This is not a question of theoretical suppositions, but of practical decisions dictated by existing circumstances. Therefore, I may—nay, must—change or repudiate under changed conditions tomorrow what I consider correct today.”

The masses, Hitler told Rauschning, are ignorant; they have succumbed to the illusion that some ideas are absolutes. “The initiates know that there is nothing fixed, that everything is continually changing.” (This is the Heraclitean doctrine, widely promulgated by the romanticists.)

“I tell you,” declared Goering, dismissing a criticism of Hitler’s economic policies, “if the Fuhrer wishes it then two times two are five.”
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It is instructive to note that Goering’s statement can be taken interchangeably as an expression of pragmatism or of dogmatism.

In their
dogmatist
capacity, the Nazis demand blind faith in a creed allegedly revealed to the Führer by God. In their pragmatist capacity, they stress action, expediency, and change more than God and faith. Not infrequently, these two epistemological elements come into clashing contradiction in the Nazi formulations. Nazism is the revealed truth—there is no truth. Nazi pronouncements are immutable—there are no absolutes. The creed is sacred—it is a convenient myth for practical purposes. And so on.

Observe that the Nazis give no evidence of being disturbed by this clash.

One of the reasons is that the clash was somewhat concealed, since the two elements were to an extent addressed to different audiences. The first was aimed primarily at the mass public, the second at the inner elite. “The masses,” Hitler explained to Rauschning, “need something for the imagination, they need fixed, permanent doctrines.”
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This, however, is not a full explanation, inasmuch as the Nazis propagated large doses of each element side by side, both publicly and privately.

A deeper reason is that the Nazis boastfully rejected Aristotelian logic, with its demand for intellectual consistency, and were therefore untroubled by any contradictions.

But the overriding reason lies in the fact that the clash is trivial: in fundamental terms, dogmatism and pragmatism are philosophically interchangeable. They are two variants of the same irrationalism, conducting the same assault on the human mind and on reality.

The dogmatist rejects the intellect in the name of revelations from another dimension. The pragmatist rejects the intellect in the name of a flux of expedient myths. The dogmatist rejects reality, the reality men live in and perceive, avowing instead his allegiance to God. The pragmatist agrees, merely replacing God by “the people” (or the state, or the party). In both cases and in both respects, it is only the rejection that is essential-in fact, in philosophy, or to the Nazis.

What the Nazi leaders primarily sought to achieve by means of their philosophy was obedience, the blind obedience of their followers and countrymen to the Führer. Judged by this criterion, the theory of dogmatism and the theory of pragmatism—singly or in combination—are unbeatable.

One cannot seriously oppose a doctrine, or an order, except by reference to facts that one has observed and grasped. Qua dogmatist, the Nazi is eager to brush aside such facts in favor of faith in the supernatural—as revealed to and by the Führer. Qua pragmatist, the Nazi denies facts, any facts, on principle, substituting “social utility” as his guide to truth—such utility to be determined by the embodiment and voice of society: the Führer. In both capacities, the Nazi is philosophically primed to hear, and heed, the same message, the one message the party leadership addressed urgently to every mind within range, the message expressed by Goebbels as follows : “Hear nothing that we do not wish you to hear. See nothing that we do not wish you to see. Believe nothing that we do not wish you to believe. Think nothing that we do not wish you to think.”
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In essence, it made no difference to the Nazi leaders whether a man obeyed them for dogmatist or for pragmatist reasons, because of his commitment to God in Heaven or to the Volk on earth. What mattered was
that he obeyed.
But the Nazis preferred a man to obey for both reasons together. Dogmatism gave the Fuhrer’s words the aura of supernatural authority; pragmatism gave him all the “flexibility” he could want. The combination made it possible to claim that, when the Führer speaks, his statement is a holy truth to be revered—until he contradicts it, whereupon his new statement is to be revered; etc. Thus the Führer unites the infallibility of God’s representative with the nihilism of a Machiavellian skeptic, and a new phenomenon, new at least in its brazen openness, enters the world scene: the absolute of the moment, or the immutable which never stands still, issued by an omniscience that ceaselessly changes its mind.

After many centuries of religion and one century of romanticism, most Germans were sufficiently trained in unreason. They were ready to accept the above kind of combination or at minimum one of its elements. These men were epistemologically ripe. They were willing or eager to regard Hitler, not reality, as their fundamental frame of reference. Dr. Hans Frank, Nazi Minister of Justice and President of the German Bar Association, speaks eloquently for this mentality. “Formerly, we were in the habit of saying:
this is right or wrong;
to-day, we must put the question accordingly:
What would the ‘Führer’ say?”

Do abstract epistemological theories play a role in human life? What happens to men who learn, in church and in school, from early childhood on up, not to say “this is right or wrong”? During the war Hans Frank was Governor General of occupied Poland. He was personally responsible for the massacre of thousands of Polish intellectuals and participated in the slaughter of three and a half million Polish Jews. When a Nazi leader in Czechoslovakia hung posters proclaiming the execution of seven Czechs, Dr. Frank declared boastfully: “If I wished to order that one should hang up posters about every seven Poles shot, there would not be enough forests in Poland with which to make the paper for these posters.”
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Implicit in dogmatism and in pragmatism is a third theory—part metaphysical, part epistemological—that is fundamental to the Nazi viewpoint:
subjectivism.

In metaphysics, “subjectivism” is the view that reality (the “object”) is dependent on human consciousness (the “subject”). In epistemology, as a result, subjectivists hold that a man need not concern himself with the facts of reality; instead, to arrive at knowledge or truth, he need merely turn his attention inward, consulting the appropriate contents of consciousness, the ones with the power to make reality conform to their dictates. According to the most widespread form of subjectivism, the elements which possess this power are
feelings.

In essence, subjectivism is the doctrine that feelings are the creator of facts, and therefore men’s primary tool of cognition. If men feel it, declares the subjectivist, that makes it so.
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The alternative to subjectivism is the advocacy of objectivity—an attitude which rests on the view that reality exists independent of human consciousness; that the role of the subject is not to create the object, but to perceive it; and that knowledge of reality can be acquired only by directing one’s attention outward to the facts.

Objectivity, according to the Nazis, is a crime. It is the antonym of “instinct,” and therefore a crime against the Fatherland. What Germany requires of its citizens, Hitler says repeatedly, and what Nazism offers is not dispassionate thought or even-handed judgment of fact, but unbridled nationalist emotion, emotion based on will and clinging to faith (dogmatism) or “myth” (pragmatism)—emotion that concedes nothing to any antagonist, no matter what the caliber of his arguments. “Anyone who wants to win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart,” writes Hitler. “Its name is not objectivity (read weakness), but will and power.” “As for me,” states Goering, “I am
subjective,
I commit myself to
my people
and acknowledge nothing else on earth. I thank my Maker for having created me without what they call a ‘sense of objectivity.”’ “We are not objective,” says Hans Schemm, the Nazi educator, “we are German.”
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