Ominous Parallels Read online

  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.9

  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.12

  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.13

  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.14

  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!”15

  The Nazis did not survive long enough to complete this develo
pment. 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.”16

  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.”17

  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:

  “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 !18

  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....”19

  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.”20

  Both Fascist and Nazi leaders embraced the new approach to truth eagerly—in their advocacy of “myth,” and in other, even more explicit forms.21

  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....”22

  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.”23

  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 nece
ssary 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.”24

  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.