Ominous Parallels Read online

  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 nonrational 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 becaus
e 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 nonsensory, nonrational 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 merging 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 t
hat 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.

  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.”8