Ominous Parallels (8 page)

Western leaders could hardly have conceived of such statements in the eighteenth century. In our era, they utter them boastfully. The difference is the romanticist movement.

Although the theory of subjectivism was accepted in part by every important post-Renaissance philosopher, it did not achieve a successful sweep of the philosophic world until the appearance of the Critique of Pure
Reason.
“Things-in-themselves,” said Kant, exist, but are unknowable; the world men perceive and deal with, the “phenomenal world,” is a human creation, a product of fundamental mechanisms inherent in the structure of human consciousness. On this view, it is the essence of the subject to create the object; and objectivity, as defined above, is impossible to man. It is impossible in principle, by the very nature of the human mind.
³⁰
If so, the romanticists concluded, we must reject the attempt to practice it. Objectivity, they said, like reason itself, is futile—and harmful. The would-be objective man, they said, is “detached,” “bloodless,” and the like, whereas man should instead be “warm,” “committed,” “vital.” He should live and function under the guidance of a flow of “spontaneous” passion, uninhibited by facts, logic, or concern for external reality.

There are two different kinds of subjectivism, distinguished by their answers to the question:
whose
consciousness creates reality? Kant rejected the older of these two, which was the view that each man’s feelings create a private universe for him. Instead, Kant ushered in the era of
social
subjectivism—the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of
groups,
that creates reality. In Kant’s system, mankind as a whole is the decisive group; what creates the phenomenal world is not the idiosyncrasies of particular indi viduals, but the mental structure common to all men.

Later philosophers accepted Kant’s fundamental approach, but carried it a step further. If, many claimed, the mind’s structure is a brute given, which cannot be explained—as Kant had said—then there is no reason why all men should have the same mental structure. There is no reason why mankind should not be splintered into
competing
groups, each defined by its own distinctive type of consciousness, each vying with the others to capture and control reality.

The first world movement thus to pluralize the Kantian position was Marxism, which propounded a social subjectivism in terms of competing economic classes. On this issue, as on many others, the Nazis follow the Marxists, but substitute race for class.

Racial subjectivism
holds that a man’s inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions—and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution. “Knowledge and truth,” one Nazi explains, “are peculiarities originating in definite forms of consciousness, and hence attuned exclusively to the specific essence of their mother-consciousness.” On this view, each race creates its own truth (and, in effect, its own universe). There is no such thing as “the truth” in any issue, the truth which corresponds to the facts. There is only truth relative to a group—truth “for us” versus truth “for them,” German truth versus British truth, “Nordic science” versus “the Liberal-Jewish science,” etc.
³¹

Men of different races, therefore, are separated by an unbridgeable gulf, an epistemological gulf, which makes it impossible for them to communicate or to resolve disputes peacefully. “An alien may be as critical as he wants to be,” states Carl Schmitt, “he may be intelligent in his endeavor, he may read books and write them, but he thinks and understands things differently because he belongs to a
different
kind, and he remains within the existential conditions of his own kind in every decisive thought.” (Schmitt was an influential political scientist and onetime communist, who ended as a leading Nazi theorist.)
³²

It is useless, the Nazis add, for men of “different kind” to turn to logic to resolve their disagreements, because there is not only a different truth for each race, but also a different logic. There is not one correct method of reasoning binding on all men, they say, but many opposite methods,
many logics-Aryan,
British, Jewish, etc.—each deriving from the mental structure of a particular group, each valid for its own group and invalid for the others. This is the Nazi doctrine (also adapted from the Marxists) of
polylogism.

“[T]hinkers of the same races and predispositions will again and again ask the same questions and seek solutions in the same direction,” writes the philosopher Tirala, one of the most sophisticated of the Nazi polylogists.

And, therefore, even in the field of logic, as the foundation of all sciences, differences must be acknowledged which force thinkers and men of science to take a definite position, not only to think in this or that way, but to work differently even in the realm of the purely formal.
³³

In presenting this theory, Professor Tirala gives no indication of the nature of Aryan logical principles (nor does any other Nazi). His concern is to denounce, not to define. What he denounces is Aristotelian logic.

Subjectivism, in any version or application, is incompatible with Aristotle’s laws of logic. According to Aristotle, everything is something, it is what it is independent of men’s opinions or feelings about it, A is A (the Law of Identity). According to the subjectivist, A does not have to be A, it can be whatever consciousness ordains; it can be A “for one” and non-A “for another”; it can be both A and non-A, or neither, or both-and-neither simultaneously, if that is how men feel. To the philosophical defender of subjectivism, accordingly, the basic ideological enemy is far removed from the antagonists of the moment; the enemy is Aristotle.

Aristotle, Tirala writes, is emphatically not an Aryan. Aristotle

was physically (according to reports) and spiritually (on the basis of his writings) to be judged a representative of the race which is not capable of producing science: his Western soul is conformable to the magical world-picture. This soul cannot understand the questioning of the Aryan spirit.
³⁴

Aristotle, the father of logic, regarded it as man‘s method of reaching conclusions objectively, by deriving them without contradiction from the facts of reaHty—ultimately, from the evidence provided by the senses. The polylogist sweeps this view aside and turns logic into its antithesis. By rejecting the Law of Identity, he repudiates all cognitive standards, claiming the right, based on his “logic,” to endorse any contradiction he feels like, whenever he feels like it. Logic thus becomes a subjective device to “justify” anything anyone wishes. Logic, “Aryan logic,” becomes a Nazi weapon: in the beginning was the Führer, who created the principles of inference.

In the Nazis’ attack on logic, all the major elements of their irrationalist epistemology—dogmatism, activism, pragmatism, relativism, subjectivism—blend and unite. Qua dogmatist, the Nazi holds faith to be superior to logic. Qua activist, he dismisses logic in favor of action. Qua pragmatist, he is free to endorse contradictions, provided they “work.” Qua relativist, he rejects the absolutism of the Law of Identity. And, qua subjectivist, the Nazi simply wipes out logic by giving its name to his random, “Aryan” feelings. These theories may differ somewhat. The conclusion to which they lead does not.

Nor do these theories differ in their practical results.

To the dogmatist who cannot persuade others to buy his revelations, there is a decisive method of silencing unbelievers : force. To the activist, the action to be taken is clear: murder. To the pragmatist, the thing that “works,” if it is massive enough, is: destruction. To the relativist, peace may have been a good thing yesterday, but there are no absolutes. To the subjectivists and racializers and polylogists, a bullet in the back is valid “for you.”

On their own, the Nazis could not have begun to achieve what the intellectuals accomplished for them. On their own, the Nazis could not supply the thinking needed to undercut a country, not even the thinking that told men not to think. They could not supply the philosophy, not even the philosophy that told men to despise philosophy. All of this had to be originated, formulated, and spread by intellectuals—ultimately, by philosophers.

But finding a country ready for them, the Nazis knew what to do with it. They knew how to add death-laden goose-steppers to the theory of unreason—and even what to call the combination, which was their version of the zeitgeist. Goebbels and Rosenberg called it:
steel romanticism.

These are “times when not the mind but the fist decides,” declared Hitler in
Mein Kampf.
The philosophers had eliminated the mind and provided him with the times he needed.

“I need men who will not stop to think if they’re ordered to knock someone down!” Hitler told Rauschning. He had no trouble finding them.
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Epistemology had done its work.

4

The Ethics of Evil

In essence, there are two opposite approaches to morality: the pro-self approach versus the anti-self approach, or the ethics of
egoism
versus the ethics of
self-sacrifice.

Egoists hold that a man’s primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare (egoists do not necessarily agree on the nature of man’s welfare). Advocates of self-sacrifice hold that a man’s primary obligation is to serve some entity outside of himself. The first school holds that virtue consists of actions which benefit a man, which bring him a personal reward, a profit, a gain of some kind. The second holds that the essence of virtue is unrewarded duty, the renunciation of gain, self-denial. The first esteems the self and advocates selfishness, maintaining that each man should be the beneficiary of his own actions. The second regards selfishness in any form as evil.

“[T]he wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit,” declares Hitler in
Mein Kampf;
a man must “renounce putting forward his personal opinion and interests and sacrifice both....”

Morality, writes Edgar Jung, a contemporary German rightist with the same viewpoint, consists in the “self-abandonment of the Ego for the sake of higher values.” Such an attitude, he notes, is the ethical base of collectivism, which demands of each man a life of “subservience to the Whole.” Individualism, by contrast—since it grants man the right to pursue his own happiness—rests on the opposite attitude: “Every form of individualism sets up the Ego as the highest value, thus stunting morality....”
¹

The political implementation of “subservience to the Whole,” according to the Nazis, is subservience to the state—which requires of every German the opposite of self-assertion. Hence the ruling principle of Nazism, as defined by a group of Nazi youth leaders. The principle is: “We will.” “And, if anyone were still to ask:
‘What
do we will?’—the answer is given by the basic idea of National Socialism: ‘Sacrifice!’ ”
²

Since the proper beneficiary of man’s sacrifices, according to Nazism, is the group (the race or nation), the essence of virtue or idealism is easy to define. It is expressed in the slogan “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz” (“The common good comes before private good”). “This self-sacrificing will to give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s own life for others,” writes Hitler,

is most strongly developed in the Aryan. The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community. In him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.
³

“Du bist nichts; dein Volk ist alles” (“You are nothing; your people is everything”), states another Nazi slogan, summarizing the essence of the Nazi moral viewpoint.

(Because Hitler demands sacrifice in behalf of the German nation rather than for the world as a whole, some commentators have described Nazism as a form of egoism, so-called “national egoism.” This phrase is a contradiction in terms; the concept of egoism is not applicable to collectives, whether national or international. “Egoism” designates an ethical theory, and ethics defines values to guide an individual’s choices and actions. When a theory demands that the individual wipe himself out of existence, when it denies him the moral right to exhibit any personal motivation or to pursue any private goal, it makes no difference what beneficiary, collective or supernatural, the theory then goes on to sponsor. Such a theory is the opposite of egoism. )

It has been said that men are selfish by nature and that they will not obey the demand for self-sacrifice. The Germans obeyed it.

The Nazi party did attract a great many thugs, crooks, and drifters into its ranks. But such men are an inconsequential minority in any country; they were not the reason for Hitler’s rise. The reason was the millions of non-thugs in the land of poets and philosophers, the decent, law-abiding Germans who found hope and inspiration in Hitler, the legions of unhappy, abstemious, duty-bound men and women who condemned what they saw as the selfishness of the Weimar Republic, and who were eager to take part in the new moral crusade that Hitler promised to lead. The reason was the “good Germans” —above all, their concept of “the good.”

“[H]ow little the masses were driven by the famous instinct of self-preservation,” observes Hannah Arendt, a lifelong student of the totalitarian phenomenon, noting the modern Europeans’ passive, unprotesting acceptance of disaster, their “indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes....” “Compared with their nonmaterial-ism, a Christian monk looks like a man absorbed in worldly affairs.” “The fanaticism of members of totalitarian movements,” she adds, “so clearly different in quality from the greatest loyalty of members of ordinary parties, is produced by the lack of self-interest of masses who are quite prepared to sacrifice themselves.”
⁴

“[I]f the party and the NKVD now require me to confess to such things [crimes he did not commit] they must have good reasons for what they are doing,” said a former agent of the Russian secret police. “My duty as a loyal Soviet citizen is not to withhold the confession required of me.” “Do you know what I am hoping?” a girl in a Nazi breeding home told an American interviewer, her eyes shining. “I am hoping that I will have pain, much pain when my child is born. I want to feel that I am going through a real ordeal—for the Führer!” In behalf of the Nazi cause, said Adotph Eichmann, he would have sacrificed everything and everybody, even his own father; he said it proudly, to the Israeli police, “to show what an ‘idealist’ he had always been.”
⁵

The totalitarian kind of “idealism,” on which Hitler and Stalin counted, was virtually unknown during the Enlightenment or in the “bourgeois” nineteenth century. In our era, it became a cultural force, gaining armies of active defenders and millions of passive admirers, not only in Germany and Russia but around the world.

As in metaphysics and epistemology, so in ethics, which is their expression: something prepared the Germans
morally
for Hitler, and the figure at the root of modern developments is Kant. The primary force behind him in this case is not Plato, but the ethics of Christianity, which Kant carried to its climax.

The major Greek philosophers did not urge self-sacrifice on men, but self-realization. Socrates, Aristotle, even Plato to some extent, taught that man is a value; that his purpose in life should be the achievement of his own well-being; and that this requires among other conditions the fullest exercise of his intellect. Since reason is the “most authoritative element” in man, writes Aristotle—the most eloquent exponent of the Greek egoism—“therefore the man who loves [reason] and gratifies it is most of all a lover of self.... In this sense, then, as has been said, a man should be a lover of self. . . .”
⁶

Man is “sordid,” retorts Augustine, the leading Christian thinker before Aquinas; he is a “deformed and squalid” creature, “tainted with ulcers and sores.” Without God’s grace, man’s self is rotted, his mind is helpless, his body is lust-ridden, his life is hell. For such a creature, Augustine says, the moral imperative is renunciation. Man must give up the pagan reliance on reason and turn for truth to revelation—which is the virtue of faith. He must give up the prideful quest for a sense of self-value and admit his innate unworthiness, which is the virtue of humility. He must give up earthly pleasures in order to serve the Lord (and, secondarily, the needy), which is the virtue of love. Men must offer themselves to God “in sacrifice,” writes Augustine. God “did not leave any part of life which should be free and find itself room to desire the enjoyment of something else.”
⁷

“And all that you [God] asked of me was to deny my own will and accept yours,” said Augustine, and the centuries of churchmen thereafter. Deny your will, echoes the German mystic Meister Eckhart, in a voice which carried to Luther and to Kant among many others. Practice the “virtue above all virtues,” obedience. “You will never hear an obedient person saying: ‘I want it so and so; I must have this or that.’ You will hear only of utter denial of self.... Begin, therefore, first with self and forget yourself!”
⁸

Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice.

But the Christian code, thanks to the Greeks’ influence, is more than an ethics of self-sacrifice. Christianity holds out to man a personal incentive, an infinite reward which each can hope to gain as recompense for his sacrifices: the salvation of his soul, his own soul, in blissful union with God. Like the Greeks before him, the virtuous Christian should be consumed by the desire for happiness—not for the this-worldly variety, but for an eternity of joy after death. And like the Greeks he should, at least to some extent, value himself—not his arrogant reason or lustful body, but the image of God in him, his true self: his spirit. The medieval moralist was caught in a contradiction. He urged man to forget his setf—in order to save his (true) self; to do his duty, scorning personal happiness—in order to experience the latter forever; to despise his own person, mind and body—yet love his neighbor as himself.

When the medieval era drew to a close (owing to the rediscovery of Aristotle) and men turned once again to life in this world, thinkers began consciously to emulate the Greek approach to virtues and values. They began to advocate self-respect, self-realization, the cultivation cf reason, the pursuit of happiness, success on earth. But just as the seeds of mysticism were firmly embedded in modem epistemology from the outset, so was their counterpart in modern ethics. The Christian passion for self-sacrifice had pervaded the Western soul, penetrating to the root of the philosophers’ sense of good and evil.

In one respect, however, the moderns reinterpreted the Christian viewpoint. Jesus had commanded man first to love God and then as a consequence to love his neighbor. In accordance with the secular spirit of their era, modern philosophers inverted this hierarchy. Hesitantly, then confidently, then routinely, they downplayed the supernatural element in Christianity and emphasized the virtue of service to society. As God waned in the eyes of the moralists of sacrifice, the neighbor waxed.

How were men to combine the nascent Greek egoism with the ethics of sacrifice? They were advised by most thinkers to reach some kind of compromise or “harmony” between the two. The dominant idea of a proper harmony is eloquently indicated by Adam Smith, the Christian champion of laissez-faire, who was also one of the Enlightenment’s leading moralists.

It is not true, Smith writes, “that a regard to the welfare of society should be the sole virtuous motive of action, but only that in any competition it ought to cast the balance against all other motives.”

Assuming that a man is honest and industrious, says Smith, his pursuit of his self-interest “is regarded as a most respectable and even, in some degree, as an amiable and agreeable quality....” Nevertheless, Smith goes on, “it never is considered as one either of the most endearing or of the most ennobling of the virtues. It commands a certain cold esteem, but seems not entitled to any very ardent love or admiration.”

What is entitled to “ardent love”?

The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing, too, that the interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state or sovereignty of which it is only a subordinate part: he should, therefore, be equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe, to the interest of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings of which God himself is the immediate administrator and director.
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In their deepest hearts, whatever their intellectual attempts at “harmony,” the Enlightenment moralists (deists included) remain Christians, not medieval saints urging self-mortification, but modern “moderates” who are content to tolerate the self—and eager to extol its piecemeal abnegation. Man’s ego, in their eyes, is not a demon to be exorcised, but a homely stepchild to be dutifully awarded “a certain cold esteem,” before one proceeds to the realm of “ardent love or admiration,” the truly moral realm: self-sacrifice. It is as if the philosophers of the period render reluctantly unto Aristotle the things that are Aristotle‘s, but joyously unto Augustine the things that are Augustine’s—and the things of Augustine are everything of importance.

An age of moral moderates is always a period of historical transition, a prelude to an age of moral extremism, as the dominant element in the compromise progressively gains ascendancy. The collapse of the Enlightenment moralists’ precarious structure waited only for the extremist to appear.

The moralist who would not permit them to have man’s ego and eat it, too, was Kant. Kant put an end to the Enlightenment in ethics as he had done in epistemology. His method was to unleash the code of self-sacrifice in its pure form, purged of the last remnants of the Greek influence.

The motor behind Hitler was not men’s immorality or amorality; it was the Germans’ obedience to
morality
—as defined by their nation’s leading moral philosopher.

Morality, according to Kant, possesses an intrinsic dignity; moral action is an end in itself, not a means to an end. As far as morality is concerned, the consequences of an action are irrelevant. Thus virtue has nothing to do with the pursuit of rewards of any kind. The good-will heeds the laws of morality, Kant writes, “without any end or advantage to be gained by it....”