[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Hegel on worshipping the state
While a student at Tübingen, Hegel’s favorite reading had been Rousseau. “The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man.”[88] As discussed in Chapter Two, Hegel was also engaged deeply with the latest developments of Kantian and Fichtean metaphysics and epistemology and their implications for social and political thought.
The political battle lines were clearly drawn for Hegel: If Rousseau’s account of human freedom is the correct one, then the Enlightenment account of freedom must be a fraud. Disappointed by the outcome of the Revolution in France, where it seemed like the Rousseauians had had their world-historical chance, Hegel also had nothing but disdain for England, then arguably the most developed nation of the Enlightenment: “of institutions characterized by real freedom there are nowhere fewer than in England.” The so-called liberalism of the so-called Enlightenment nations actually represented an “incredible deficiency” of rights and freedom. Only by updating the Rousseauian model dialectically and applying it to the German context could we find “real freedom.”[89]
So what is real freedom to Hegel?
“It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.”[90]
In the broader context of Hegel’s philosophy, human history is governed by the necessary working out of the Absolute. The Absolute—or God, or Universal Reason, or the Divine Idea—is the actual substance of the universe, and its developmental processes are everything that is. “God governs the world; the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World.”[91]
The State, to the extent that it participates in the Absolute, is God’s instrument for achieving his purposes. “The State,” accordingly, “is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.”[92]
Given that the individual’s ultimate purpose in life should be to achieve union with ultimate reality, it follows that the “state in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom.”[93] The consequence of this, morally, is that the individual is of less significance than the state. The individual’s empirical, day-to-day interests are of a lower moral order than the state’s universal, world-historical interests. The state has as its final end the self-realization of the Absolute, and “this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.”[94] Duty, as we have learned from Kant and Fichte, always trumps personal interests and inclinations.
Yet mere membership as a matter of duty is not enough for Hegel, given the grandeur of the state’s divine historical purpose: “One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.”[95]
In such worship, Hegel believed, we finds our real freedom. For ultimately, we individuals are but aspects of the Absolute Spirit, and in so relating to it we are relating to ourselves. “For Law is the objectivity of Spirit; volition in its true form. Only that will which obeys law, is free; for it obeys itself—it is independent and so free.”[96] Freedom is thus the individual’s absolute submission to and worship of the state.
There is of course the problem of explaining all of this to the average individual. The average individual, in the course of living day-to-day life, often finds that the laws and other manifestations of the state do not seem like real freedom. In most cases, Hegel stated, that is because the average person is ignorant of what true freedom is,[97] and no amount of explaining the higher dialectic to that person will make the laws seem like less of an infringement upon freedom.
Yet it is also true, Hegel granted, that in many cases the individual’s freedoms and interests will genuinely be set aside, overridden, and even smashed. One reason for this is that the state’s general principles are universal and necessary, and so they cannot be expected to apply perfectly to the particular and contingent. As Hegel explained, “universal law is not designed for the units of the mass. These as such may, in fact, find their interests decidedly thrust into the background.”[98]
But the problem is not merely one of applying the universal to the particular. Individuals must recognize that, from the moral perspective, they are not ends in themselves; they are tools for the achievement of higher goals.
“But though we might tolerate the idea that individuals, their desires and the gratification of them, are thus sacrificed, and their happiness given up to the empire of chance, to which it belongs; and that as a general rule, individuals come under the category of means to an ulterior end.”[99]
And again, just in case we have missed Hegel’s point: “A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole.” And again echoing Rousseau: “Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it.”[100]
Individual life is surrendered rather a lot when very special human beings come along to really shake things up and move God’s plan for the world forward. “World-historical individuals,” as Hegel called them, are those who, usually without knowing so themselves, are agents of the Absolute’s development. Such individuals are energetic and focused, and they are able to amass power and direct social forces in such a way as to achieve something of historical significance. Their achievements, however, exact a high human cost.
“A World-historical individual is not so unwise as to indulge a variety of wishes to divide his regards. He is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.”[101]
The innocent flowers should not object to their destruction. The World-historical individual is acting for the best interests of the whole. In that special individual the state is embodied, and the state is the future of the collective. Even while being destroyed, the innocent flower has worth only through—and so should glory in—his participation in that larger future.
Anticipating Nietzsche, Hegel argued that neither should the innocent flowers raise merely moral objections against the activities of the World-historical individuals. “For the History of the World occupies a higher ground than that on which morality has properly its position.” The needs of historical development are of higher standing than those of morality, and so “the conscience of individuals” should not be an obstacle to the achievement of historical destinies.[102] The trampling of morality is regrettable, but “looked at from this point, moral claims that are irrelevant, must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment.”[103]
References
[88] Hegel, in Rousseau 1755, xv.
[89] Hegel 1830-31, 454; see also 1821, §236.
[90] Hegel 1830-31, 39.
[91] Hegel 1830-31, 35-36.
[92] Hegel 1830-31, 39; also 1821, Add., 152, para. 258; p. 279.
[93] Hegel 1821, Add., 152, para. 258; p. 279.
[94] Hegel 1821, §258
[95] Hegel 1821, §272. Otto Braun, age 19, a volunteer who died in WW I, wrote in a letter to his parents: “My inmost yearning, my purest, though most secret flame, my deepest faith and my highest hope—they are still the same as ever, and they all bear one name: the State. One day to build the state like a temple, rising up pure and strong, resting in its own weight, severe and sublime, but also serene like the gods and with bright halls glistening in the dancing brilliance of the sun—this, at bottom, is the end and goal of my aspirations” (in H. Kuhn 1963, 313).
[96] Hegel 1830-31, 39.
[97] Hegel 1821, §301.
[98] Hegel 1830-31, 35.
[99] Hegel 1830-31, 33.
[100] Hegel 1821, Add., 45, para. 70; p. 241.
[101] Hegel 1830-31, 32.
[102] Hegel 1830-31, 66-67.
[103] Hegel 1830-31, 67.
Bibliography [pdf] [html]
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 5 months, 1 week ago at 7:40 am. Add a comment
[This is Section 36 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
36. Instinct, passion, and anti-reason
Hitler was fond of saying, in private, “What luck that men do not think.”
Another significant point of agreement exists between Nietzsche and the Nazis: Both agree that the great conflicts will not be solved rationally, through the processes of discussion, argument, persuasion, or diplomacy. Both Nietzsche and the Nazis are irrationalists in their view of human psychology—and this has important social and political implications.
Think about democracy for a moment. In particular, think about how much confidence in the power of reason that democracy requires. Democracy is a matter of decentralizing political power to individuals by, for example, giving each individual a vote. The assumption of democracy is that individuals have the ability to weigh and judge important matters and cast a responsible vote. The expectation is that members of democracies will have ongoing discussions and arguments about all sorts of issues, and that they will be able to assess the evidence, the arguments and counter-arguments. And they will be able to learn from their mistakes and, when appropriate, change their votes the next time around.
It is not an accident that neither Nietzsche nor the Nazis were advocates of either democracy or reason.
Hitler considered a highly-developed intellect to be a weakness and too much reliance on reason to be a sickness. Germany’s recent problems, he believed, stemmed from too much thinking. “The intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life.” What Germany required was passion, a storm of emotion arising from deeply rooted instincts and drives: “Only a storm of glowing passion can turn the destinies of nations, but this passion can only be roused by a man who carries it within himself.”[119] Consequently, German training and propaganda were not directed toward presenting facts and arguments but rather to arousing the passions of the masses. Reason, logic, and objectivity were beside the point. “We are not objective, we are German,” said Hans Schemm, the first Nazi Minister of Culture.[120]
Here again there is an important connection to Nietzsche. Nietzsche too sees an opposition between conscious reason and unconscious instinct, and he disparages those who stress rationality—those who engage in what he calls the “ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness.”[121] In his own words, it is “‘Rationality’ against instinct,”[122] and he believes that rationality is the least useful guiding power humans possess. Humans came out of a long evolutionary line that relied on drives and instincts—and those drives and instincts served us well for millennia. Yet men eventually became settled, tamed, and civilized, and they lost something crucial:
“[I]n this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ!”[123]
Note that Nietzsche says our unconscious drives are infallible, if only we can find them within ourselves again. It is our strongest, most assertive unconscious instinct that we should let rule our lives: “‘instinct’ is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far—the most intelligent.”
And on this score, Nietzsche and the Nazis are in agreement: Both are fundamentally irrationalists—they do not think much of the power of reason, and they urge themselves and others to let their strongest passions and instincts well up within them and be released upon the world.
References
[119] Hitler, quoted in Langer.
[120] Schemm, quoted in Mosse 1966 xxxi.
[121] GS 11.
[122] EH: “The Birth of Tragedy” 1.
[123] GM II:16.
[124] BGE 218.
[Bibliography]
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
Posted 5 months, 1 week ago at 2:34 pm. 1 comment
[This is Section 37 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
37. Conquest and war
Now put the above three points together: collectivism, conflict, and irrationalism. What will the social results be?
If you believe wholeheartedly and passionately that your identity is found by merging yourself with your group—and that your group is locked in a mortal, zero-sum conflict with other groups—and that reason is superficial and that passion and instinct drive the world—then how will you assert yourself in that conflict?
For much of the nineteenth century, Western liberal capitalists had begun to wonder, hopefully, whether war was a thing of the past. In their judgment, progress had been made: During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, much of the West had embraced the idea of individual rights—the idea that each individual has rights to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness. In the nineteenth century, those rights had been extended in practice to women and slavery had been eliminated. Also in the nineteenth century came the full realization of the power of the Industrial Revolution and the idea that through technology and capitalism, economic production could be increased dramatically.
As a result, the liberal capitalists of the nineteenth century came to believe that we could solve the problem of poverty and eliminate most of our conflicts over wealth. They believed that with rising wealth and education, rational people could learn to respect each others’ rights, that there was more to be gained from trade than from war, and that peace was a natural state that mankind could achieve. The horrors of war could become a thing of the past.[125]
We know from tragic twentieth-century history the National Socialists’ eagerness to use war as their primary tool for achieving their international goals. We know their praising as fundamental the martial spirit and the beauty of the warrior soul. We know of their total recasting of education of children to achieve, as Hitler wanted “a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes.”[126]
The “beast of prey” phrase is again rhetoric inspired directly by Nietzsche. On the importance and nobility of war, Nietzsche and the Nazis were in almost full agreement. Nietzsche praised war and urged its coming. He wished for a great purge that would wipe out most humans whose lives he thought worthless and an embarrassment to the human species. “All-too-many live, and all-too-long they hang on their branches. Would that a storm came to shake all this worm-eaten rot from the tree!”[127]
But he also longed for war as a means to inspire those humans who have potential to advance us toward the overman. To that end, Nietzsche believed that war is absolutely indispensable:
“War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war. For the time being, we know of no other means to imbue exhausted peoples, as strongly and surely as every great war does, with that raw energy of the battleground, that deep impersonal hatred, that murderous coldbloodedness with a good conscience, that communal, organized ardor in destroying the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one’s own existence and to that of one’s friends, that muted, earthquakelike convulsion of the soul.”[128]
And against those who believe that we have entered a more peaceful era and that perhaps war is no longer necessary, Nietzsche reminds us, in an especially chilling quotation: “The beginnings of everything great on earth [are] soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.”[129]
On this score, the Nazis were thoroughly Nietzschean. Rather than pushing for a recognition of the mutuality of human interests, as Western liberal capitalists had been doing for much of the nineteenth century—and rather than seeking reasonable and peaceful diplomatic solutions to the normal collisions of international politics—the Nazis committed fundamentally to war as their primary means of self-regeneration and dominance over the rest of the world.
References
[125] Richard Cobden in 1835: “The middle and industrious classes of England can have no interest apart from the preservation of peace. The honours, the fame, the emoluments of war belong not to them; the battle-plain is the harvest-field of the aristocracy, watered with the blood of the people.” Also John Stuart Mill: “It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it” (1909). Again Mill: “Finally, commerce first taught nations to see with good will the wealth and prosperity of one another. Before, the patriot, unless sufficiently advanced in culture to feel the world his country, wished all countries weak, poor, and ill-governed, but his own: he now sees in their wealth and progress a direct source of wealth and progress to his own country. It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it. And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race” (1909, Book III, Chapter XVII, Section 14).
[126] Hitler, 1933.
[127] Z, First Part, “On Free Death”
[128] HAH 477.
[129] GM II, 6.
[Bibliography]
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
Posted 5 months, 1 week ago at 2:31 pm. Add a comment
[This excerpt is from Chapter 2 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Epistemological solutions to Kant: Irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche
The Kantians and the Hegelians represent the pro-reason contingent in nineteenth-century German philosophy.
While the Hegelians pursued metaphysical solutions to Kant’s unbridgeable gap between subject and object, in the process altering reason into something unrecognizable to the Enlightenment, they had competition from the explicitly irrationalist wing of German philosophy. This line of development included major figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Denmark’s lonely contribution to the history of modern philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard.
The irrationalists divided over whether religion is true—Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard being theists, and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche being atheists—but all shared a contempt for reason. All condemned reason as a totally artificial and limiting faculty, one that must be abandoned in the bold quest to embrace reality. Perhaps Kant had prohibited access to reality—but he had shown only that reason could not get us there. That left other options open to us: faith, feeling, and instinct.
Schleiermacher (1768-1834) came of age in a Kant-dominated intellectual scene, and he took Kant’s cue for how religion could respond to the threat of the Enlightenment. Intellectually most active from 1799, with the publication of On Religion, Speeches to its Cultural Despisers, Schleiermacher more than anyone made happen the revival of Pietism and orthodox Protestantism over the course of the next generation. So great was Schleiermacher’s influence that, as theologian Richard Niebuhr put it, he “may justifiably be called the Kant of modern Protestantism.”[28]
As someone who came of age in the 1790s in Germany, Schleiermacher was broadly Kantian in his approach and embraced whole-heartedly the Kantian rejection of reason’s access to reality. Schleiermacher, like Kant, was deeply offended by the assault that reason, science, and naturalism had made on the true faith. Following Hamann, Schleiermacher held that feeling, especially religious feeling, is a mode of cognition, one that gives us access to noumenal reality. Except, argued Schleiermacher, these feelings are not so much directed outward as inward. One cannot grasp noumena directly, but one can phenomenologically inspect oneself, one’s deepest feelings, and therein find indirect senses of the divine ultimate.[29] As Hamann had stated, directly confronted religious feeling reveals one’s essential nature.
When one discovers one’s essential nature, the core self-feeling that one is forced to accept is that of absolute dependence. In Schleiermacher’s words, “The essence of religion is the feeling of absolute dependence. I repudiated rational thought in favour of a theology of feeling.”[30] One should strive to realize oneself by exploring and embracing this feeling of absolute dependence. This requires attacking reason, for reason gives one a feeling of independence and confidence. Limiting reason is thus the essence of religious piety—for it makes possible a fully-entered-into feeling of dependence and orientation toward that being upon which one is absolutely dependent. That being is of course God.[31]
In the next generation, Kierkegaard (“Hamann’s most brilliant and profound disciple”[32]) gave irrationality an activist twist. Educated in Germany, Kierkegaard was, like Kant, deeply worried by the beating religion had taken during the Enlightenment. So he was cheered—or at least as cheered as Kierkegaard could ever be—to learn from Kant that reason cannot reach the noumena.
The Enlightenment thinkers had said that individuals relate to reality as knowers. On the basis of their acquired knowledge, individuals then act to better themselves and their world. “Knowledge is power,” wrote Bacon. But after Kant we know that knowledge of reality is impossible. So while we still must act in the real world, we do not and cannot have the necessary knowledge upon which to base our choices. And since our entire destinies are at stake in the choices we make, we cannot choose dispassionately between options. We must choose, and choose passionately, all the while knowing that we are choosing in ignorance.
For Kierkegaard, the core lesson from Kant was that one must not try to relate to reality cognitively—what is needed is action, commitment, a leap into that which one cannot know but which one feels is essential to give meaning to one’s life. In accordance with Kierkegaard’s felt religious needs, what is needed is an irrational leap of faith. It must be a leap because after the Enlightenment it is clear that the existence of God cannot be justified rationally, and it must be irrational because the God that Kierkegaard finds compelling is absurd.
But such a leap into the absurd puts one in a crisis. It flies in the face of everything sensible, rational, and moral. So how should one deal with this crisis of both wanting and not wanting to leap into absurdity? In Fear and Trembling we find Kierkegaard’s panegyric to Abraham, a hero of the Hebrew Scriptures who in defiance of all reason and morality was willing turn off his mind and kill his son Isaac. Why? Because God ordered him too. How could that be—would a good God make such a demand of a man? That makes God incomprehensibly cruel. What about God’s promise that through Isaac the future generations of Israel would be born? The demand makes God a promise-breaker. What about the fact that it is killing an innocent? That makes God immoral. What about the immense pain that the loss of their son would cause in Abraham and Sarah? That makes God a sadist. Does Abraham rebel? No. Does he even question? No. He shuts down his mind and obeys. That, said Kierkegaard, is the essence of our cognitive relation to reality. Like Abraham, each of us must learn “to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.”
Like Abraham, we do not know and we cannot know. What we must do is jump blindly into the unknown. Kierkegaard revered Abraham as a “knight of faith” for his willingness to “crucify reason” and leap into absurdity.[33]
Schopenhauer, also of the generation after Kant and a contemporary of Hegel, disagreed violently with the cowardly attempts to return to religion after the rejection of Enlightenment reason. While Hegel populated Kant’s noumenal realm with Dialectical Spirit and Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard felt or hoped desperately that God was out there, Schopenhauer’s feelings had revealed to him that reality is Will—a deeply irrational and conflictual Will, striving always and blindly toward nothing.[34] No wonder then that reason had no chance of comprehending it: Reason’s rigid categories and neat organizational schemes are wholly inadequate for a reality that is the opposite of that. Only like can know like. Only via our own wills, our passionate feelings—especially those evoked in us by music—can we grasp the essence of reality.
But most of us are too cowardly to try, for reality is cruel and frightening. This is why we cling to reason so desperately—reason allows us to tidy things up, to make ourselves feel safe and secure, to escape from the swirling horror that, in our honest moments, we sense reality to be. Only the bravest few have the courage to pierce through the illusions of reason to the irrationality of reality. Only a few individuals of special sensitivity are willing to pierce reason’s veil and intuit passionately the seething flow.
Of course, having intuited the cruel horror of the seething flow, Schopenhauer wished for self-annihilation.[35] This was the weakness that his disciple, Nietzsche urged us to overcome.
Nietzsche began epistemologically by agreeing with Kant: “When Kant says: ‘reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature,’ this is, in regard to the concept of nature, completely true.” All of the problems of philosophy, from the decadent Socrates[36] to that “catastrophic spider” Kant,[37] are caused by their emphasis on reason. The rise of the philosophers meant the fall of man, for once reason took over, men no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ![38]
And: “how pitiful, how shadowy and fleeting, how aimless and capricious the human intellect is.” Being merely a surface phenomenon and dependent upon underlying instinctual drives, the intellect certainly is not autonomous or in control of anything.[39]
What Nietzsche meant, then, with his passionate exhortations to be true to oneself, is to break out of the artificial and constricting categories of reason. Reason is a tool of weaklings who are afraid to be naked in the face of a cruel and conflictual reality and who therefore build fantasy intellectual structures to hide in. What we need to bring out the best possible in us is “the perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts.”[40] The yea-sayer—the man of the future—will not be tempted to play word-games but will embrace conflict. He will tap into his deepest drives, his will to power, and channel all of his instinctual energies in a vital new direction.[41]
References
[28] Niebuhr, in Schleiermacher 1963, ix.
[29] Schleiermacher 1799, 18.
[30] Schleiermacher 1821-22, Section 4.
[31] Schleiermacher 1821-22, 12.
[32] Berlin 1980, 19.
[33] Kierkegaard 1843, 31.
[34] Reality, Schopenhauer wrote, is a “world of constantly needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible affliction, until they fall at last into the arms of death” (1819/1966, 349).
[35] Schopenhauer: “we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world, that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence” (1819/1966, Vol. 2, 576). As for mankind: “nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist” (1819/1966, Vol. 2, 605).
[36] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” 1.
[37] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 11.
[38] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II:16.
[39] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 478.
[40] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I:7.
[41] In Beyond Good and Evil (252), Nietzsche shares the view that the deepest battle is the Enlightenment, with its roots in English philosophy, against the Counter-Enlightenment, with its roots in German philosophy: “They are no philosophical race, these Englishmen: Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of ‘philosophy’ for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant arose, and rose; it was Locke of whom Schelling said, understandably, je méprise Locke [I despise Locke]; in their fight against the English-mechanistic doltification of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer were of one mind (with Goethe)—these two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy who strove apart toward opposite poles of the German spirit and in the process wronged each other as only brothers wrong each other.” See also Daybreak: “The whole great tendency of the Germans ran counter to the Enlightenment” (Section 197).
Bibliography [pdf] [html]
[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]
Posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:00 pm. 1 comment
[This is Section 35 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
35. Conflict of groups
A second major point of agreement between Nietzsche and the Nazis is their view of conflict. For both, conflict is the fundamental human reality. Both believe firmly that life is a matter of some individuals and groups gaining at the expense of others.
The Nazis were clear about this in theory and practice. They did not believe it possible for Aryans and Jews to live in harmony. Nor did the Nazis believe that Germany could live in harmony with the liberal capitalist nations of the West.
In the liberal capitalist nations, by contrast, many economists and politicians had come to believe that conflict and war may become a thing of the past. The productive power of the Industrial Revolution was creating great wealth and surpluses, and those surpluses were leading to increased trade between nations that was mutually beneficial. Trade was a powerful harmonizing force, leading nations to want to do business with each other rather than make war.[115]
The Nazis rejected that view and argued that recent economic history was a matter of the Jews and the capitalists advancing their interests at the expense of Germany’s.
Nietzsche shares wholly with the Nazis the general point about zero-sum conflict. In his words, “The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the few are opposite viewpoints of value.”[116] But even more strongly, he believes that this conflict is not merely a matter of historical and cultural accident but is built into the requirements of life:
“Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.”[117]
The horse eats the grass; the lion kills the horse; the man rides the horse and kills the lion. Life is an ongoing struggle between strong and weak, predator and prey. Cooperation and trade are possible, but they are superficial interludes between more fundamental animal facts about life. As Nietzsche again puts it: “‘Life always lives at the expense of other life’—he who does not grasp this has not taken even the first step toward honesty with himself.”[118]
On this key point, Nietzsche and the Nazis agree.
Given that conflict is inescapable, the next question is: How will the conflicts be resolved?
References
[115] For example, the great British politician Richard Cobden argued that commerce is “the grand panacea, which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world” (Cobden 1903, p. 36). Consider also Norman Angell, speaking to the Institute of Bankers in London on January 17, 1912, on “The Influence of Banking on International Relations”: “commercial interdependence, which is the special mark of banking as it is the mark of no other profession or trade in quite the same degree—the fact that the interest and solvency of one is bound up with the interest and solvency of many; that there must be confidence in the due fulfillment of mutual obligation, or whole sections of the edifice crumble, is surely doing a great deal to demonstrate that morality after all is not founded upon self-sacrifice, but upon enlightened self-interest, a clearer and more complete understanding of all the ties that bind us the one to the other. And such clearer understanding is bound to improve, not merely the relationship of one group to another, but the relationship of all men to all other men, to create a consciousness which must make for more efficient human co-operation, a better human society” (quoted in Keegan 1999, pp. 11-12).
[116] GM, end of First Essay note.
[117] BGE 259.
[118] WP 369.
[Bibliography]
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Posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago at 1:37 pm. Add a comment
[This is Section 32 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
32. On Judaism and Christianity: opposite or identical?
One more key difference between Nietzsche and the Nazis is important, and that is their views on Christianity. Nietzsche consistently states that Judaism and Christianity are allies, both stemming from the same source, both advocating a religious ethic that puts the weak, the sick, and the humble first. As with Judaism, Christian morality is a slave morality.
Christianity, he writes, is “a rebellion of everything that crawls on the ground against that which has height.”[100]
The Christians, he writes, “did not know how to love their god except by crucifying man.”[101] And for that great crime against humanity, Nietzsche says: “I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions.”[102]
So Christianity does not escape Nietzsche’s wrath, just as the slave morality of the Jews did not escape his wrath—and for the same reason: Christianity is an extension and purification of moral themes first developed within Judaism. In Nietzsche’s own words: “In Christianity, all of Judaism . . . attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian, the ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more—even three times more.”[103]
This identification of Christianity with Judaism also separates Nietzsche from the Nazis, for the Nazis took great pains to distinguish the Jews and the Christians, condemning Judaism and embracing a generic type of Christianity.
Early in the Nazi Party’s history, in its founding document, the 1920 Program, point 24 states the following: “The party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, without, however, allying itself to any particular denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit.”
The use of Christian themes and imagery was prominent in Nazi propaganda throughout the 1920s.
In Joseph Goebbels’s semi-autobiographical novel, the main character Michael is portrayed as a hybrid Christ-figure and German martyr. And in a 1935 interview, Goebbels was so concerned to separate Christianity from Judaism that he went as far as to deny that Jesus was a Jew.
Adolf Hitler argued that the Christians and Jews were fundamentally opposed religions[104] and himself sounded Christian moral themes explicitly in public pronouncements such as this one: “When I came to Berlin a few weeks ago … the luxury, the perversion, the iniquity, the wanton display, and the Jewish materialism disgusted me so thoroughly, that I was almost beside myself. I nearly imagined myself to be Jesus Christ when He came to His Father’s temple and found it taken by the money-changers. I can well imagine how He felt when He seized a whip and scourged them out.”[105]
References
[100] A 43.
[101] Z 2: “On Priests.”
[102] A 62.
[103] A 44.
[104] Hitler 1925, 307.
[105] Hitler, quoted in Langer, (viewed July 25, 2006). Hitler also claimed: “By warding off the Jews, I struggle for the work of the Lord” (quoted in Lilla 1997, p. 38).
[Bibliography]
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago at 8:06 pm. 2 comments
[This is Section 33 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
33. Summary of the five differences
We have five significant partings of the ways between Nietzsche and the Nazis:
1. The Nazis believe the German Aryan to be racially superior—while Nietzsche believes that the superior types can be manifested in any racial type.
2. The Nazis believe contemporary German culture to be the highest and the best hope for the world—while Nietzsche holds contemporary German culture to be degenerate and to be infecting the rest of the world.
3. The Nazis are enthusiastically anti-Semitic—while Nietzsche sees anti-Semitism to be a moral sickness.
4. The Nazis hate all things Jewish—while Nietzsche praises the Jews for their toughness, their intelligence, and their sheer survival ability.
5. And finally, the Nazis see Christianity to be radically different and much superior to Judaism—while Nietzsche believes Judaism and Christianity to be essentially the same, with Christianity being in fact a worse and more dangerous variation of Judaism.
Those five points identify important differences and lend support to those interpreters of Nietzsche who complain about simplistic identifications of Nietzsche as a proto-Nazi philosopher.[106]
But there are equally important ways in which the Nazis were right on target in seeing Nietzsche as an intellectual ally.
References
[106] E.g., Walter Kaufmann 1954, p. 14.
[Bibliography]
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago at 8:06 pm. Add a comment
[This is Section 31 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
31. On the Jews: admirable or despicable?
But how does this fit with the harsh things we know Nietzsche said about the Jews? This takes us to a fourth point of difference between Nietzsche and the Nazis.
For all of the negative things Nietzsche says about the Jews, he also respects them and gives them high praise.
Here is a representative quotation from Beyond Good and Evil: “The Jews, however, are beyond any doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe.”[96]
Here is another, from The Antichrist: “Psychologically considered, the Jewish people are a people endowed with the toughest vital energy, who, placed in impossible circumstances . . . divined a power in these instincts with which one could prevail against ‘the world.’”[97]
He again praises the Jews for having the strength to rule Europe if they chose to: “That the Jews, if they wanted it—or if they were forced into it, which seems to be what the anti-Semites want—could even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.”[98]
And in another book, Nietzsche compares the Jews favorably to the Germans—in fact, he identifies a way in which the Jews are superior to the Germans: “Europe owes the Jews no small thanks for making its people more logical, for cleaner intellectual habits—none more so than the Germans, as a lamentably deraisonnable race that even today first needs to be given a good mental drubbing.”[99]
But how can all this praise of the Jews fit with the rest of what he says about the Jews?
One important distinction here is between blaming the Jews of several millennia ago for devising the slave morality and foisting it upon the world—and between evaluating the Jews of today as inheritors of a cultural tradition that has enabled them to survive and even flourish despite great adversity. In the former case, Nietzsche assigns blame to the Jews and condemns them for subverting human greatness—but in the second case he would at the very least have to grant, however grudgingly, that the Jews have hit upon a survival strategy and kept their cultural identity for well over two thousand years. How many other cultures can make that claim? The list is extremely short. And for that the Jews deserve praise.
References
[96] BGE 251.
[97] A 24.
[98] BGE 251.
[99] GS 348.
[Bibliography]
[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]
Posted 6 months ago at 12:15 pm. Add a comment
