[This is Appendix 2 of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Sources for the quotations are at the end of this post.]
Appendix 2: Quotations on Nazi socialism and fascism
Socialism against individualism
“National socialism is the determination to create a new man. There will no longer exist any individual arbitrary will, nor realms in which the individual belongs to himself. The time of happiness as a private matter is over.”
—Adolf Hitler[137]
“The concept of personal liberties of the individual as opposed to the authority of the state had to disappear; it is not to be reconciled with the principle of the nationalistic Reich. There are no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside of the realm of the state and which must be respected by the state. The member of the people, organically connected with the whole community, has replaced the isolated individual; he is included in the totality of the political people and is drawn into the collective action. There can no longer be any question of a private sphere, free of state influence, which is sacred and untouchable before the political unity. The constitution of the nationalistic Reich is therefore not based upon a system of inborn and inalienable rights of the individual.”
—Ernst Rudolf Huber,[138] official spokesman for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, 1939
“[O]ur German language has a word which in a magnificent way denotes conduct based on this spirit: doing one’s duty [Pflichterfüllung]—which means serving the community instead of contenting oneself. We have a word for the basic disposition which underlies conduct of this kind in contrast to egoism and selfishness—idealism. By ‘idealism’ we mean only the ability of the individual to sacrifice himself for the whole, for his fellow men.”
—Adolf Hitler,[139] 1925
“The State must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit.”
—Adolf Hitler[140]
“[S]ocialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”
—Joseph Goebbels[141]
“THE COMMON INTEREST BEFORE SELF-INTEREST.”
—NSDAP Program, Point 24, 1920
“We must rouse in our people the unanimous wish for power in this sense, together with the determination to sacrifice on the altar of patriotism, not only life and property, but also private views and preferences in the interests of the common welfare.”
—Friedrich von Bernhardi,[142] 1912
Socialist economics
“To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. … the basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority … the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me? … The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil. You are, after all a representative of the bourgeoisie … your press thinks it must continuously distort my ideas. … We do not intend to nail every rich Jew to the telegraph poles on the Munich-Berlin road.”
—Adolf Hitler,[143] to R. Breiting, “bourgeois” newspaper editor, 1931
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
—Adolf Hitler,[144] 1927 speech
On “the money pigs of capitalist democracy”: “Money has made slaves of us. “Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.”
—Joseph Goebbels,[145] 1929
“The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces.”
—Joseph Goebbels,[146] 1932 pamphlet
“‘Private property’ as conceived under the liberalistic economic order … represented the right of the individual to manage and to speculate with inherited or acquired property as he pleased, without regard for the general interests … German socialism had to overcome this ‘private,’ that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community.”
—Ernst Rudolf Huber,[147] official Nazi Party spokesman, 1939
National Socialism, according to some later commentators
“Hitler was never a socialist.”
—Ian Kershaw[148]
“Bastard movements like the National Socialism (Nazism) of twentieth-century Germany and Austria …, save for the bare fact that they enforced central control of social policy, had nothing of socialism in them.”
—Margaret Cole,[149] under “Socialism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“Stalinism is a pathology of socialism, Hitlerism being the apposite example for capitalism.”
—Robert Heilbroner,[150] popular socialist author, 1980
“If there is one thing all Fascists and National Socialists agreed on, it was their hostility to capitalism.”
—Eugen Weber,[151] historian of fascism
“[A]nti-Semitism was rife in almost all varieties of socialism.”
—Sidney Hook,[152] socialist philosopher
“It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism—Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lassalle—are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism.”
—F. A. Hayek,[153] 1944
Socialism and authoritarianism
“The party is all-embracing. It rules our lives in all their breadth and depth. We must therefore develop branches of the party in which the whole of individual life will be reflected. Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is Socialism—not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes far deeper.”
—Adolf Hitler[154]
“Our present political world-view, current in Germany, is based in general on the idea that creative, culture-creating force must indeed be attributed to the state.”
—Adolf Hitler,[155] 1925
“The first foundation for the creation of authority is always provided by popularity.”
—Adolf Hitler[156]
“The advantage of … an unwritten constitution over the formal constitution is that the basic principles do not become rigid but remain in a constant, living movement. Not dead institutions but living principles determine the nature of the new constitutional order.”
—Ernst Rudolf Huber,[157] official spokesman for the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party, 1939
Against capitalism
“We German National Socialists have recognized that not international solidarity frees the peoples from the ties of international capital, but the organized national force. …The National Socialist German Workers’ Party asks you all to come … to a GIANT DEMONSTRATION against the continued cheating of our people by the Jewish agents of the international world stock-exchange capital.”
—Nazi Poster,[158] 1921
“It is not to save capitalism that we fight in Russia … It is for a revolution of our own. … If Europe were to become once more the Europe of bankers, of fat corrupt bourgeoisies … we should prefer Communism to win and destroy everything. We would rather have it all blow up than see this rottenness resplendent. Europe fights in Russia because it [i.e., Fascist Europe] is Socialist. …what interests us most in the war is the revolution to follow …The war cannot end without the triumph of Socialist revolution.”
—Leon Degrelle,[159] leading National Socialist figure, speaking on behalf of the Nazi SS in occupied Paris, 1943
“[W]e will do what we like with the bourgeoisie. … We give the orders; they do what they are told. Any resistance will be broken ruthlessly.”
—Adolf Hitler,[160] 1931
“The internal and international criminal gang will either be forced to work or simply exterminated.”
—Adolf Hitler,[161] 1931
“Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers, inside and outside Europe, succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”
—Adolf Hitler,[162] 1939
Historical roots: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau.”
—Bertrand Russell,[163] 1945
“Each member of the community gives himself to it at the instant of its constitution, just as he actually is, himself and all his forces, including all goods in his possession.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau[164]
“Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be free.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau[165]
“The political body, therefore, is also a moral being which has a will; and this general will, which tends always to the conservation and well-being of the whole and of each part of it … is, for all members of the state … the rule of what is just or unjust.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau[166]
“The State dominates the Nation because it alone represents it.”
—Adolf Hitler[167]
The state “ought to have a universal compulsory force to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited to the whole. Just as nature gives each man an absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic an absolute power over all its members.” “We grant that each person alienates, by the social compact, only that portion of his power, his goods, and liberty whose use is of consequence to the community; but we must also grant that only the sovereign is the judge of what is of consequence.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau[168]
“For us the supreme law of the constitution is: whatever serves the vital interests of the nation is legal.”
—Adolf Hitler,[169] 1931
“A citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau[170]
“I wish to give officials greater discretion. The State’s authority will be increased thereby. I wish to transform the non-political criminal police into a political instrument of the highest State authority.”
—Adolf Hitler,[171] 1931
Historical sources: Karl Marx
“[W]hen I was a worker I busied myself with socialist or, if you like, marxist [sic] literature.”
—Adolf Hitler,[172] 1931
“I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit. I don’t mean their tiresome social doctrine or the materialist conception of history, or their absurd ‘marginal utility’ theories and so on. But I have learnt from their methods. The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it. Look at the workers’ sports clubs, the industrial cells, the mass demonstrations, the propaganda leaflets written specially for the comprehension of masses; all these new methods of political struggle are essentially Marxist in origin. All that I had to do was take over these methods and adapt them to our purpose. I had only to develop logically what Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.”
— Adolf Hitler[173]
“Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.”
— Adolf Hitler[174]
“What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself. … We discern in Judaism … a universal antisocial element …
“As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible … The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.”
—Karl Marx,[175] “On the Jewish Question,” 1843
“[I]t is quite enough that the scientific knowledge of the danger of Judaism is gradually deepened and that every individual on the basis of this knowledge begins to eliminate the Jew within himself, and I am very much afraid that this beautiful thought originates from none other than a Jew [i.e., Marx].”
—Adolf Hitler[176]
“As I listened to Gottfried Feder’s first lecture about the ‘breaking of interest slavery,’ I knew at once that this was a theoretical truth which would inevitably be of immense importance for the German people. … The development of Germany was much too clear in my eyes for me not to know that the hardest battle would have to be fought, not against hostile nations, but against international capital.
“… Thus, it was the conclusions of Gottfried Feder that caused me to delve into the fundamentals of this field with which I had previously not been very familiar. I began to study again, and now for the first time really achieved an understanding of the content of … Karl Marx’s life effort. Only now did his Kapital become really intelligible to me …”
—Adolf Hitler,[177] 1925
“Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.”
—Doris Lessing[178]
“As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social idea of the movement.”
—Adolf Hitler,[179] Mein Kampf
“The Nazis were not conservatives. They were radicals, they were revolutionaries, and conservatives in Germany understood this.”
—Thomas Childers,[180] American historian of World War II
Comparing Italian Fascism and German National Socialism
“For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.”
—Alfredo Rocco,[181] founder of Fascist theory, 1925
“Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.”
—Benito Mussolini[182]
“The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of right.”
—Benito Mussolini,[183] 1932
“In Fascism the State is not a night-watchman, only occupied with the personal safety of the citizens.”
—Benito Mussolini,[184] 1929
“As regards the Liberal doctrines, the attitude of Fascism is one of absolute opposition both in the political and in the economical field.”
—Benito Mussolini,[185] 1932
“Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests as he coincides with those of the State … . It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual … Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.”
“The Fascist State, as a higher and more powerful expression of personality, is a force, but a spiritual one. It sums up all the manifestations of the moral and intellectual life of man. Its functions cannot therefore be limited to those of enforcing order and keeping the peace, as the liberal doctrine had it.”
—Benito Mussolini,[186] 1932
“We do not, however, accept a bill of rights which tends to make the individual superior to the State and to empower him to act in opposition to society.”
—Alfredo Rocco,[187] 1925
“All for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State.”
—Benito Mussolini[188]
References
[137] Quoted in Joachim C. Fest, Hitler. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, p. 533.
[138] Huber, Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches (Hamburg, 1939), in Raymond E. Murphy, et al., ed., National Socialism, reprinted in Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, selected by Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado. Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1952, p. 90.
[139] Hitler, “On Idealism and Winning the Masses Over,” in Heinz Lubasz, ed., Fascism: Three Major Regimes. John Wiley & Sons: 1973, pp. 81-82.
[140] Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim. Houghton Mifflin: 1971, p. 404.
[141] Goebbels, Michael, in Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1941, p. 233.
[142] Friedrich von Bernhardi. Germany, the Next War, translated by Allen H. Powles. New York: E. Arnold, 1912, Chapter 5, p. 113.
[143] Hitler, in interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Edouard Calic, ed., “First Interview with Hitler,” Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews. New York: John Day Co., 1971, pp. 31-35.
[144] Hitler, May 1, 1927; quoted in Toland 1976, p. 306.
[145] Goebbels, quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 87. And Goebbels 1929, in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 107.
[146] Goebbels 1932, “Those Damned Nazis” pamphlet.
[147] Huber, Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches. (Hamburg, 1939) in Raymond E. Murphy, et al., ed., National Socialism, reprinted in Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, selected by Dept. of Philosophy, University of Colorado. Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1952, p. 91.
[148] Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris. New York: Norton, 1999, p. 448.
[149] Cole, “Socialism,” Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967. Vol. 7, pp. 467-70.
[150] Heilbroner, Marxism: For and Against. New York: Norton, 1980, p. 169.
[151] Weber, Varieties of Fascism. D. Van Nostrand, 1964, p. 47.
[152] Hook, “Home Truths About Marx,” Commentary (September 1978), reprinted in Marxism and Beyond. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983, p. 117.
[153] Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. University of Chicago Press, 1944/1994, pp. 184-85.
[154] Hitler, quoted in Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction. New York: Putnam, 1940, p. 191.
[155] Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 382.
[156] Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 518.
[157] Huber, Verfassungsrecht, p. 63.
[158] Nazi poster/handbill, in Mein Kampf. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941, Appendix, p. 541.
[159] Degrelle, 1943. See Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism. D. Van Nostrand, 1964, p. 47. Degrelle was “a leading National Socialist figure, highly regarded by Hitler and by Himmler, speaking for the SS who would later publish and distribute the long speech, with the most revolutionary statements carefully italicized.”
[160] Hitler, interview with Breiting, p. 36.
[161] Hitler, interview with Breiting, p. 86.
[162] Hitler, speaking in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/genocide/hitler_speech_2.shtml
[163] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945, p. 685.
[164] Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), translated by Donald Cress. Hackett, 1987. Book 1, Section 9.
[165] Rousseau, The Social Contract , Book 1, Section 7.
[166] Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy, in Discourse on Political Economy; and, The Social Contract, translated by Christopher Betts. Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 7.
[167] Hitler, quoted in Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State (1935). Reprinted by Libertarian Review Foundation (New York, 1989), p. 10.
[168] Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book 2, Section 4.
[169] Hitler, interview with Breiting, p. 86.
[170] Rousseau, The Social Contract , Book 2, Section 4.
[171] Hitler, interview with Breiting, p. 86.
[172] Hitler, interview with Breiting, p. 58.
[173] Hitler, quoted Rauschning, p. 186.
[174] Hitler, quoted in Rauschning, p. 131.
[175] Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Robert Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader. Second edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978, pp. 48, 52.
[176] Hitler, quoted in Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, pp. 355-356; see also Praeger and Telushkin, Why the Jews? New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983, pp. 138-139.
[177] Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 213, 215.
[178] Lessing, Walking in Shade. Harper Collins, 1997, p. 262.
[179] Hitler, Main Kampf. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941, p. 737.
[180] Thomas Childers, “Lecture 5: The Nazi Breakthrough.” A History of Hitler’s Empire, 2nd ed., lecture series published by The Teaching Company, Chantilly, VA, 2001, minutes 5-6.
[181] Rocco, “The Political Doctrine of Fascism” (address delivered at Perugia, August 30, 1925), reprinted in Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, selected by Deptartment of Philosophy, University of Colorado. Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1952, p. 35.
[182] In Charles F. Delzell, ed., Mediterranean Fascism: 1919-1945. New York: Harper & Row, 1970, p. 94.
[183] Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism: Fundamental Ideas,” Enciclopedia Italiana, 1932. Reprinted in Heinz Lubasz, ed., Fascism: Three Major Regimes. John Wiley & Sons: 1973, p. 41.
[184] Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism: Fundamental Ideas,” p. 21.
[185] Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism: Fundamental Ideas,” Enciclopedia Italiana, 1932. Reprinted in Readings on Fascism and National Socialism, p. 18.
[186] Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism: Fundamental Ideas,” in Delzell, ed., 1970, pp. 93-94, 95.
[187] Rocco, “The Political Doctrine of Fascism,” p. 36.
[188] Mussolini, quoted in Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993, p. 122.
[Bibliography.]
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Posted 2 years, 5 months ago at 12:36 pm. 4 comments
[This excerpt is from Chapter 3 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition
Martin Heidegger took Hegelian philosophy and gave it a personal, phenomenological twist.
Heidegger is notorious for the obscurity of his prose and for his actions and inactions on behalf of the National Socialists during the 1930s, and he is unquestionably the leading twentieth-century philosopher for the postmodernists. Derrida and Foucault identify themselves as followers of Heidegger.[1] Rorty cites Heidegger as one of the three major influences on his thinking, the other two being Dewey and Wittgenstein.[2]
Heidegger absorbed and modified the tradition of German philosophy. Like Kant, Heidegger believed reason to be a superficial phenomenon, and he adopted the Kantian view of words and concepts as obstacles to our coming to know reality, or Being. However, like Hegel, Heidegger believed that we can get closer to Being than Kant allowed, though not by adopting Hegel’s abstracted third-person pretense of Reason. Setting aside both reason and Reason, Heidegger agreed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer that by exploring his feelings—especially his dark and anguished feelings of dread and guilt—he could approach Being. And like all good German philosophers, Heidegger agreed that when we get to the core of Being we will find conflict and contradiction at the heart of things.
So what is new? Heidegger’s distinctiveness was his use of phenomenology to get us there.
Phenomenology becomes philosophically important once we accept the Kantian conclusion that we cannot start as realists and scientists do by assuming that we are aware of an external, independent reality that is made up of objects that we are trying to understand. But, from the phenomenological standpoint, we must also realize that Kant took only a timid half-step. While Kant was willing to give up the noumenal object, he held onto the belief in an underlying, noumenal self with a specific nature available to us for our investigation. But a noumenal self underlying the flow of phenomena is just as problematic a notion as the notion of noumenal objects underlying the flow. Recognizing this, Heidegger therefore wanted to start, following Nietzsche’s occasional but undeveloped suggestions, without making the assumption of the existence of either an object or a subject.
So we start phenomenologically—that is, by simply and clearly describing the phenomena of experience and change.
On Heidegger’s account, what one finds when starting so is a sense of projection into a field of experience and change. Do not think objects, Heidegger counseled, think fields. Do not think subject, think experience. We start small and local, with Da-sein’s being projected into reality.
“Da-sein” is Heidegger’s substitute concept for “self,” “subject,” or “human being,” all of which he thought carried undesirable baggage from earlier philosophy. Heidegger explained his choice of “Da-sein” by defining it as follows: “Da-sein means being projected into Nothing.”[3] Ignoring the “Nothing” for now, it is the being projected that is Da-sein—not that, if anything, which is projected or does the projecting. The emphasis is on activity, thus avoiding assumptions that there are two things, a subject and an object, that enter into a relationship. There is simply action, the action of being out there, being thrust into.
The being projected reveals and clothes successively over time various semi-stable fields or “beings”—what we would call “objects” if we had not already shed our naïve realism.
Yet the long process of describing the phenomena of beings, Heidegger found, led him inexorably to a question—the question that has haunted all of philosophy: What is the Being of the various beings? The beings differ and change, come and go, yet for all their changeability and difference they still manifest a oneness, a commonality: They all are. What is that Being underlying or behind or common to all beings? What makes the beings Be? Or, raising the stakes to the Heideggerian Question of all questions: Why is there even Being at all? Why is there not rather Nothing?[4]
This is no ordinary question. With a question like this, Heidegger pointed out, reason quickly finds itself in trouble—the same kind of trouble that Kant had pointed out with his antinomies: reason always reaches contradictions whenever it attempts to explore deep metaphysical issues. A question such as “Why is there Being and not rather Nothing?” is therefore repugnant to reason. For Heidegger, this meant that if we are to explore the question, then reason—the “most stiff-necked adversary of thought”[5]—was an obstacle that had to be discarded.
Setting aside reason and logic
The Question is repugnant to reason, as Heidegger wrote in An Introduction to Metaphysics, because we reach logical absurdity whichever way we go in attempting to answer it.[6] If we say, on the one hand, that there is no answer to the question of why there is Being—if Being just is for no reason—then that makes Being absurd: something that cannot be explained is an absurdity to reason. But if, on the other hand, we say that Being is for a reason, then what could that reason be? We would have to say that that reason, whatever it is, is outside of Being. But outside of Being is nothing—which means that we would have to try to explain Being from nothingness, which is also absurd. So either way we go in trying to answer the Question, we are deeply into absurdity.
Logic wants at this point to forbid the Question. Logic wants to say that the absurdity shows that the question is ill-formed and so should be set aside: Logic wants instead to make the existence of reality its axiom, and to proceed from there with discovering the identities of the various existents.[7]
On the other hand, switching back to a Heideggerian perspective, the questions spawned by the Question strike very deep feelings in Da-sein. What about the Nothingness that Being would have come from? Could Being not have been? Could Being return once again to the Nothing? Such questions are compellingly awesome, and yet at the same time they fill Da-sein with a sense of disease and anxiety. So here Da-sein has a conflict: Logic and reason say that the question is contradictory and so should be set aside, but Da-sein’s feelings urge Da-sein to explore the question in a non-verbal, emotional way. So which does Da-sein choose: contradiction and feeling—or logic and reason?
Fortunately, as we have learned from Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, this contradiction and conflict is yet another sign that logic and reason are impotent. As we all know by now, we should expect to find conflict and contradiction at the heart of things—contradiction is the sign that we are on to something important.[8] So mere logic, Heidegger concluded—an “invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers”[9]—cannot and should not get in the way of probing the ultimate mystery that is Being. We must reject entirely the assumption “that in this enquiry ‘logic’ is the highest court of appeal, that reason is the means and thinking the way to an original comprehension of Nothing and its possible revelation.” Again:
“If this [contradiction] breaks the sovereignty of reason in the field of enquiry into Nothing and Being, then the fate of the rule of ‘logic’ is also decided. The very idea of ‘logic’ disintegrates in the vortex of a more original questioning.”[10]
And again, in case we have missed the point: “Authentic speaking about nothing always remains extraordinary. It cannot be vulgarized. It dissolves if it is placed in the cheap acid of merely logical intelligence.”[11] Deep feeling about Nothing trumps logic any day.
Emotions as revelatory
Having subjected reason and logic to Destruktion and then set them aside as merely one superficial way of thinking—one that the Greeks had established fatefully for all subsequent Western thought[12]—we need another route to Being and Nothing. We can try to explore language without the presuppositions of reason and logic, but even the elements of language, words, have evolved over time and become so twisted and crusted over with layers of meaning that they almost entirely hide Being from us. Their original force and contact with reality has been lost. We can therefore try to strip away from our language the encrusted layers to reveal the ur-words that had original and genuine connective force to Being, but that will require special efforts.
For Heidegger, the special effort that is required is emotional, an exploratory letting oneself go into the revelatory emotions of boredom, fear, guilt, and dread.
Boredom is a good mood to start with. When we are bored—really, really, really bored—we are no longer engaged with the ordinary, trivial, day-to-day things that occupy most of our time. When we are bored, “drifting hither and thither in the abysses of existence like a mute fog,”[13] all beings become a matter of indifference, undifferentiated from one another. Everything merges or dissolves into an un-distinguished unity.
Progress has thus been made: “This boredom reveals what-is in totality.”[14] Real boredom takes one away from one’s normal focus on particular beings and one’s cares for them and diffuses one’s awareness into a sense of Being-as-a-whole’s being revealed to one.
But this revelation also brings with it anxiety and dread. For part of the process of the dissolution of particular beings into a state of undifferentiation is the dissolution of one’s own sense of being a unique, individual being. One has the feeling of beings being dissolved into an undifferentiated Being—but at the same time one has the feeling of one’s self-identity as also slipping into a state of being nothing-in-particular—that is, of becoming nothing. This is distressing.
In dread we are ‘in suspense’ (wir schweben). Or, to put it more precisely, dread holds us in suspense because it makes what-is-in-totality slip away from us. Hence we too, as existents in the midst of what-is, slip away from ourselves along with it. For this reason it is not ‘you’ or ‘I’ that has the uncanny feeling, but ‘one.’[15]
This sense of dread that comes with a sense of the dissolution of all beings along with oneself was for Heidegger a metaphysically potent state, for in effect one gets a foretaste of one’s own death, a sense of one’s being annihilated, a sense of going into nothingness—and thus a sense of getting to the metaphysical center of Being.
One must absolutely not, therefore, give into one’s overpowering sense of distress and run away from dread and back to the safety of one’s petty, day-to-day life. One must embrace one’s dread and surrender to it, for “the dread felt by the courageous”[16] is the emotional state that prepares one for the ultimate revelation. That ultimate revelation is of the truth of Judeo-Christian and Hegelian metaphysics.
In dread we come to feel that Being and Nothing are identical. This is what all philosophy based on the Greek model had missed, and what all philosophies not based on the Greek model had been struggling toward.
“Nothing,” wrote Heidegger, “not merely provides the conceptual opposite of what-is but is also an original part of essence.”[17] Heidegger credited Hegel with having reclaimed this lost insight for the Western tradition: “‘Pure Being and pure Nothing are thus one and the same.’ This proposition of Hegel’s (‘The Science of Logic,’ I, WW III, p. 74) is correct.” Hegel of course got it from trying to resuscitate the Judeo-Christian account of creation, in which God created the world out of nothing. As Heidegger put it in re-affirming that Judeo-Christian claim, “every being, so far as it is a being, is made out of nothing.”[18]
So after abandoning reason and logic, after experiencing real boredom and terrifying dread, we unveil the final mystery of mysteries: Nothing. In the end, all is nothing and nothing is all. With Heidegger, we reach metaphysical nihilism.
Heidegger and postmodernism
Heidegger’s philosophy is the integration of the two main lines of German philosophy, the speculative metaphysical and the irrationalist epistemological. After Kant, the Continental tradition quickly and gleefully abandoned reason, putting wild speculation, clashing wills, and troubled emotion at the forefront. In Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition, we can see clearly many of the ingredients of postmodernism. Heidegger offered to his followers the following conclusions, all of which are accepted by the mainstream of postmodernism with slight modifications:
1. Conflict and contradiction are the deepest truths of reality;
2. Reason is subjective and impotent to reach truths about reality;
3. Reason’s elements—words and concepts—are obstacles that must be un-crusted, subjected to Destruktion, or otherwise unmasked;
4. Logical contradiction is neither a sign of failure nor of anything particularly significant at all;
5. Feelings, especially morbid feelings of anxiety and dread, are a deeper guide than reason;
6. The entire Western tradition of philosophy—whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Lockean, or Cartesian—based as it is on the law of non-contradiction and the subject/object distinction, is the enemy to be overcome.
This is not yet to introduce Heidegger’s strong social and political collectivism, which is also part of his inheritance from the main lines of German philosophy. Nor is it to make explicit, as Heidegger did, his strong anti-science and anti-technology views.[19] Nor is it yet to discuss his anti-humanism,[20] with his regular calls for us to be obedient to Being, to feel guilty before Being, to pay homage to Being, and even to “sacrifice man for the truth of Being”[21]—which, if we are still allowed to be logical, means sacrificing ourselves to Nothing. (Those elements in Heidegger’s philosophy will arise in Chapter Four, in the context of discussing the political background to postmodernism.)
What the postmodernists will do in the next generation is abandon the remnants of metaphysics in Heidegger’s philosophy, along with his occasional streaks of mysticism. Heidegger was still doing metaphysics, and he spoke of there being a truth out there about the world that we must seek or let find us. The postmodernists, by contrast, are anti-realists, holding that it is meaningless to speak of truths out there or of a language that could capture them. As anti-realists, accordingly, they will reject the formulation of (1) above as a metaphysical assertion, and instead reformulate its assertion of the reign of conflict and contradiction as descriptive merely of the flow of empirical phenomena; and while they will accept (3) above, they will accept it while abandoning Heidegger’s faint hope that ultimate ur-concepts connecting us to reality may be revealed at the end of the unmasking.
The postmodernists will effect a compromise between Heidegger and Nietzsche. Common to Heidegger and Nietzsche epistemologically is a contemptuous rejection of reason. Metaphysically, though, the postmodernists will drop the remnants of Heidegger’s metaphysical quest for Being, and put Nietzschean power struggles at the core of our being. And especially in the cases of Foucault and Derrida, most major postmodernists will abandon Nietzsche’s sense of the exalted potential of man and embrace Heidegger’s anti-humanism.
References
[1] Foucault 1989, 326.
[2] Rorty 1979, 368.
[3] Heidegger 1929/1975, 251.
[4] Heidegger 1953, 1.
[5] Heidegger 1949, 112.
[6] Heidegger 1953, 23, 25.
[7] E.g., Rand 1957, 1015-ff.
[8] See, for example, Heidegger 1929/1975, 245-246.
[9] Heidegger 1953, 121.
[10] Heidegger 1929/1975, 245, 253.
[11] Heidegger 1953, 26.
[12] Heidegger 1929/1975, 261.
[13] Heidegger 1929/1975, 247.
[14] Heidegger 1929/1975, 247.
[15] Heidegger 1929/1975, 249.
[16] Heidegger 1929/1975, 253.
[17] Heidegger 1929/1975, 251.
[18] Heidegger 1929/1975, 254-255.
[19] Heidegger 1949.
[20] Heidegger 1947.
[21] Heidegger 1929/1975, 263.
Bibliography [pdf] [html]
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Posted 2 years, 5 months ago at 1:53 am. 4 comments
[This is Appendix 1 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
36. Appendix 1: NSDAP Party Program
Program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party
The Program of the German Workers’ Party is a limited program. Its leaders have no intention, once its aims have been achieved, of establishing new ones, merely in order to insure the continued existence of the party by the artificial creations of discontent among the cases.
1. We demand, on the basis of the right of national self-determination, the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany.
2. We demand equality for the German nation among other nations, and the revocation of the peace treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain.
3. We demand land (colonies) to feed our people and to settle our excess population.
4. Only a racial comrade can be a citizen. Only a person of German blood, irrespective of religious denomination, can be a racial comrade. No Jew, therefore, can be a racial comrade.
5. Noncitizens shall be able to live in Germany as guests only, and must be placed under alien legislation.
6. We therefore demand that every public office, no matter of what kind, and no matter whether it be national, state, or local office, be held by none but citizens.
We oppose the corrupting parliamentary custom of making party considerations, and not character and ability, the criterion for appointments to official positions.
7. We demand that the state make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens. If it should prove impossible to feed the entire population, the members of foreign nations (noncitizens) are to be expelled from Germany.
8. Any further immigration of non-Germans is to be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who entered Germany after August 2, 1914, be forced to leave the Reich without delay.
9. All citizens are to possess equal rights and obligations.
10. It must be the first duty of every citizen to perform mental or physical work. Individual activity must not violate the general interest, but must be exercised within the framework of the community, and for the general good.
THEREFORE WE DEMAND
11. The abolition of all income unearned by work and trouble.
BREAK THE SLAVERY OF INTEREST
12. In view of the tremendous sacrifices of life and property imposed by any war on the nation, personal gain from the war must be characterized as a crime against the nation. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13. We demand the nationalization of all business enterprises that have been organized into corporations (trusts).
14. We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.
15. We demand the generous development of old age insurance.
16. We demand the creation and support of a healthy middle class, and the immediate socialization of the huge department stores and their lease, at low rates, to small tradesmen. We demand that as far as national, state, or municipal purchases are concerned, the utmost consideration be shown to small tradesmen.
17. We demand a land reform suitable to our national needs, and the creation of a law for the expropriation without compensation of land for communal purposes. We demand the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
18. We demand a ruthless battle against those who, by their activities, injure the general good. Common criminals, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished by death, regardless of faith or race.
19. We demand that Roman law, which serves a materialist world order, be replaced by German law.
20. To open the doors of higher education—and thus to leading positions—to every able and hard-working German, the state must provide for a thorough restructuring of our entire educational system. The curricula of all educational institutions are to be brought into line with the requirements of practical life. As soon as the mind begins to develop, the schools must reach civic thought (citizenship classes). We demand the education, at state expense, of particularly talented children of poor parents, regardless of the latters’ class or occupation.
21. The state must see to it that national health standards are raised. It must do so by protecting mothers and children, by prohibiting child labor, by promoting physical strength through legislation providing for compulsory gymnastic by the greatest possible support for all organizations engaged in the physical training of youth.
22. We demand the abolition of the mercenary army and the creation of a people’s army.
23. We demand legal warfare against intentional political lies and their dissemination through the press. To facilitate the creation of a German press, we demand:
(a) that all editors of, and contributors to, newspapers that appear in the German language be racial comrades;
(b) that no non-German newspaper may appear without the express permission of the government. Such papers may not be printed in the German language;
(c) that non-Germans shall be forbidden by law to hold any financial share in a German newspaper, or to influence it in any way.
We demand that the penalty for violating such a law shall be the closing of the newspapers involved, and the immediate expulsion of the non-Germans involved.
Newspapers which violate the general good are to be banned. We demand legal warfare against those tendencies in art and literature which exert an undermining influence on our national life, and the suppression of cultural events which violate this demand.
24. We demand freedom for all religious denominations, provided they do not endanger the existence of the state, or violate the moral and ethical feelings of the Germanic race.
The party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, without, however, allying itself to any particular denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can be achieved only from within, on the basis of
THE COMMON INTEREST BEFORE SELF-INTEREST
25. To implement all these points, we demand the creation of a strong central power in Germany. A central political parliament should possess unconditional authority over the entire Reich, and its organization in general.
Corporations based on estate and profession should be formed to apply the general legislation passed by that Reich in the various German states.
The leaders of the party promise to do everything that is in their power, and if need be, to risk their very lives, to translate this program into action.
Munich, February 24, 1920.
[Bibliography.]
[Return to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
Posted 2 years, 6 months ago at 8:36 pm. 4 comments
Even more strongly, Josef Goebbels hated capitalism and urged socialism. Dr. Josef Goebbels was perhaps the most brilliant and educated of all the Nazi politicians. Once the Nazis came to power he was to be one of the most powerful of the very top Nazis—perhaps number two or three after Hitler himself. But Goebbels’ commitment to National Socialist principles began much earlier. He received a wide-ranging classical education by attending five universities in Germany, eventually receiving a Ph.D. in literature and philosophy from Heidelberg University in 1921. During his graduate student days he absorbed and agreed with much of the writings of communists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Damning those he called “the money pigs of capitalist democracy,”[11] Goebbels in speeches and pamphlets regularly declaimed that “Money has made slaves of us.”[12] “Money,” he argued, “is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.” And in language that could be right out of the writings of Karl Marx, Goebbels believed fervently: “The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces.”[13] 
1. On the Nazis: I argue that they were socialists and anti-capitalist. 
2. On Nietzsche: I argue that he is an individualist only in a very limited sense and that he is much more a collectivist than he is an individualist. 
