Ominous Parallels Read online

  “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 so
le 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.9

  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....”

  For this reason, the worst corrupters of morality are those philosophers who offer “boasting eulogies ... of the advantages of happiness,” and hold that morality is a means to its achievement. Many false ethical theories have been advanced, in Kant’s view, but “the principle of one’s own happiness is the most objectionable of all. This is not merely because it is false... Rather, it is because this principle supports morality with incentives which undermine it and destroy all its sublimity....”10

  Most of Kant’s predecessors had assumed that men are motivated by the desire for happiness. Kant concedes this assumption. All men, he holds, “crave happiness first and unconditionally,” and do so “by a necessity of nature.” Nevertheless, he insists, morality has nothing to do with nature. The ground of moral obligation “must not be sought in the nature of man or in the circumstances in which he is placed....” Regardless of nature, therefore, the “real end” of a creature such as man is not “its preservation, its welfare—in a word, its happiness....”

  This does not mean that morality is based on divine decree. Philosophy, writes Kant, must “show its purity as the absolute sustainer” of moral laws, “even though it is supported by nothing in either heaven or earth.”11

  Moral laws, according to Kant, are a set of orders issued to man by a nonheavenly, nonearthly entity (which I shall discuss shortly), a set of unconditional commandments or “categorical imperatives”—to be sharply contrasted with mere “counsels of prudence.” The latter are rules advising one how best to achieve one’s own welfare; such rules have for Kant no moral significance. By contrast, a categorical imperative pronounces an action “as good in itself,” no matter what the result, and thus “commands absolutely and without any incentives....”

  Unconditional obedience to such imperatives, “the submission of my will to a law without the intervention of other influences on my mind,” is man’s noblest virtue, the “far more worthy purpose of [men’s] existence ... the supreme condition to which the private purposes of men must for the most part defer.”

  The name for such obedience is duty. “[T]he necessity of my actions from pure respect for the practical [i.e., moral] law constitutes duty. To duty every other motive must give place... .”12

  Kant draws a fundamental distinction between actions motivated by incentive or desire, actions which a man personally wants to perform to attain some end—these he calls actions from “inclination”—and actions motivated by reverence for duty. The former, he holds, are by their nature devoid of moral worth, which belongs exclusively to the latter. It is not enough that a man do the right thing, that his acts be “in accord with” duty; the moral man must act from duty; he must do his duty simply because it is his duty.

  In theory, Kant states, a man deserves moral credit for an action done from duty, even if his inclinations also favor it—but only insofar as the latter are incidental and play no role in his motivation. But in practice, Kant maintains, whenever the two coincide no one can know that he has escaped the influence of inclination. For all practical purposes, therefore, a moral man must have no private stake in the outcome of his actions, no personal motive, no expectation of profit or gain of any kind.

  Even then, however, he cannot be sure that no fragment of desire is “secretly” moving him. The far clearer case, the one case in which a man can at least come close to knowing that he is moral, occurs when the man’s desires clash with his duty and he acts in defiance of his desires. Kant illustrates:

  [I]t is a duty to preserve one’s life, and moreover everyone has a direct inclination to do so. But for that reason the often anxious care which most men take of it has no intrinsic worth, and the maxim of doing so has no moral import. They preserve their lives according to duty, but not from duty. But if adversities and hopeless sorrow completely take away the relish for life, if an unfortunate man, strong in soul, is indignant rather than despondent or dejected over his fate and wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it and from neither inclination nor fear but from duty—then his maxim has a moral import.13

  This is the sort of motivation that should govern a man in telling the truth, keeping his promises, developing his talents, etc. It should also govern him in the performance of another virtue: service to others. The latter is not a fundamental virtue, in Kant’s view, merely one among many of equal importance. It is, however, one of man’s duties and should be performed as such. There are, Kant says, “many persons so sympathetically constituted that without any motive of vanity or selfishness they find an inner satisfaction in spreading joy....” In Kant’s opinion, however,

  that kind of action has no true moral worth.... But assume that the mind of that friend to mankind was clouded by a sorrow of his own which extinguished all sympathy with the lot of others.... And now suppose him to tear himself, unsolicited by inclination, out of this dead insensibility and to perform this action only from duty and without any inclination—then for the first time his action has genuine moral worth.14

  Kant acknowledges that the dutiful actions he counsels are �
�actions whose feasibility might be seriously doubted by those who base everything on experience. . . .”15 For him, however, this is not a problem.

  Experience, according to Kant, acquaints human beings only with the phenomenal realm, the world of things as they appear to man given the distorting structure of his cognitive faculties. It does not reveal reality, the noumenal realm, the world of things in themselves, which is unknowable. In developing this dichotomy, Kant is more consistent than any of his skeptical predecessors. He applies it not only to the object of cognition, but also to the subject. A man’s self, he maintains, like everything else, is a part of reality—it, too, is something in itself—and if reality is unknowable, then so is a man’s sell. A man is able, Kant concludes, to know only his phenomenal ego, his self as it appears to him (in introspection) ; he cannot know his noumenal ego, his “ego as it is in itself.”

  Man is, therefore, a creature in metaphysical conflict. He is so to speak a metaphysical biped, with one (unreal) foot in the phenomenal world and one (unknowable) foot in the noumenal world.

  It is the noumenal foot that is the source of morality, the creator of man’s duties, the entity which issues categorical imperatives and demands unconditional obedience. Man’s earthly reason, Kant explains, is unable to provide a basis for morality; man’s earthly will is ruled by the law of the pursuit of happiness. But when, in thought, we “transport ourselves” into “an order of things altogether different,” we find the solution to these problems. We find that man can be “subject to certain laws,” yet can be “independent as a thing or a being in itself.” We find that man’s true reason is replete with moral commandments, and that his true will is free, free to acknowledge the supreme authority of those commandments and to obey them.

  Thus man on earth is obligated to heed the categorical imperatives of morality. He is obligated, whatever the resistance of his desires, because he himself—bis real self, himself in itself—is their author. “[T]he intelligible [noumenal] world is (and must be conceived as) directly legislative for my will, which belongs wholly to the intelligible world.... Therefore I must regard the laws of the intelligible world as imperatives for me, and actions in accord with this principle as duties.”16