[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]
Kant on collectivism and war
Of the major figures in German philosophy in the modern era, Kant is perhaps the one most influenced by Enlightenment social thought.
There is a clear intellectual connection between Rousseau and Kant. Biographers often repeat Heinrich Heine’s anecdote about how Kant always took his afternoon walk at a set time, a time so regular that neighbors could set their clocks by his appearance—except on one occasion he was late for his walk because he had been so caught up in reading Rousseau’s Emile that he lost track of time. 
Kant had been raised as a Pietist, a version of Lutheranism that emphasized simplicity and eschewed external decoration. Kant therefore had no pictures or paintings hanging anywhere on the walls of his house—with one exception: over his desk in his study hung a picture of Rousseau.[37] Wrote Kant, “I learned to honor mankind from reading Rousseau.”[38]
Neo-Enlightenment thinkers attack Kant for two things: his skeptical and subjectivist epistemology and his ethic of selfless duty. Kant’s account of reason divorces it from cognitive contact with reality, thus destroying knowledge; and his account of ethics divorces morality from happiness, thus destroying the purpose of life. As discussed in Chapter Two, Kant’s powerful arguments were a mighty blow to the Enlightenment.
Politically, however, Kant is sometimes considered to be a liberal, and in the context of eighteenth-century Prussia there is some truth to that. In the context of Enlightenment liberalism, however, Kant diverged from liberalism in two major respects: his collectivism and his advocacy of war as a means to collectivist ends.
In a 1784 essay, “Idea for a Universal History With Cosmopolitan Intent,” Kant asserted that there is a necessary destiny for the human species. Nature has a plan. It is, however, “a hidden plan of nature,”[39] and as such it is one that requires special discernment by philosophers. That destiny is the full development of all of man’s natural capacities, especially man’s reason.[40]
By “man” here, Kant did not mean the individual. Nature’s goal is a collectivist one: the development of the species. Man’s capacities, Kant explained, are “to be completely developed only in the species, not in the individual.”[41] The individual is merely fodder for nature’s goal, as Kant put it in his “Review of Herder”: “nature allows us to see nothing else than that it abandons individuals to complete destruction and only maintains the type.”[4] And again, in his 1786 “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” Kant argued that the “path that for the species leads to progress from the worse to the better does not do so for the individual.”[43] The development of the individual is in conflict with the development of the species, and only the development of the species counts.
But it is also not the case that the species’ development is about happiness or fulfillment. “Nature is utterly unconcerned that man live well.”[44] The individual and even all existing individuals collectively now living are merely a stage in a process, and their suffering is of no account in the light of nature’s ultimate end. In fact, Kant argued, man should suffer, and deservedly so. Man is a sinful creature, a creature that is inclined to follow its own desires and not the demands of duty. Echoing Rousseau, Kant blamed mankind for having chosen to use reason when our instincts could have served us perfectly well.[45] And now that reason has awakened it has combined with self-interest to pursue all sorts of unnecessary and depraved desires. Thus the source of our vaunted freedom, Kant wrote, is also our original sin: “the history of freedom begins with badness, for it is man’s work.”[46]
Accordingly, Kant admonished us, “we are a long way from being able to regard ourselves as moral.”[47] Man is a creature made of “warped wood.”[48] Powerful forces are therefore needed in order to attempt to straighten our warped natures.
One of those forces is morality, a morality of strict and uncompromising duty that opposes man’s animal inclinations. A moral life is one that no rational person would “wish that it should be longer than it actually is,”[49] but one has a duty to live and develop oneself[50] and thereby the species. Inculcating this morality in man is one of nature’s forces.
Another force to straighten the warped wood is political. Man is “an animal that, if he lives among other members of his species, has need of a master.” And that is because “his selfish animal propensities induce him to except himself from [moral rules] wherever he can.” Kant then introduced his version of Rousseau’s general will. Politically, man “thus requires a master who will break his self-will and force him to obey a universally valid will.”[51]
However, strict duty and political masters are not enough. Nature has devised an additional strategy for bringing the species man to higher development. That strategy is war. As Kant wrote in his “Idea for a Universal History”: “The means that nature uses to bring about the development of all of man’s capacities is the antagonism among them in society.”[52] Thus, conflict, antagonism, and war are good. They destroy many lives, but they are nature’s way of bringing forth the higher development of man’s capacities. “At the stage of culture at which the human race still stands,” Kant stated bluntly in “Speculative Beginning,” “war is an indispensable means for bringing it to a still higher stage.”[53] Peace would be a moral disaster, so we are duty-bound not to shrink from war.[54]
Out of this self-sacrifice of individuals and the war of nations, Kant hoped, the species would become fully developed, and an international and cosmopolitan federation of states would live peacefully and harmoniously, making possible within themselves the complete moral development of their members.[55] Then, as Kant concluded in a 1794 essay entitled “The End of All Things,” men would finally be in a position to prepare themselves for the day of “judgment of forgiveness or damnation by the judge of the world.”[56] This is the hidden plan of nature; it is destined to happen; so we know what we have to look forward to.
References
[37] Höffe 1994, 17.
[38] Quoted in Beiser 1992, 43.
[39] Kant 1784/1983, 27/36.
[40] Kant 1784/1983, 18/30 and 27/36.
[41] Kant 1784/1983, 18/30.
[42] Kant 1785/1963, 53/37.
[43] Kant 1786/1983, 115/53.
[44] Kant 1784/1983, 20/31.
[45] Kant 1786/1983, 111/50.
[46] Kant 1786/1983, 115/54.
[47] Kant 1784/1983, 26/36.
[48] Kant 1784/1983, 23/33.
[49] Kant 1786/1983, 122/58.
[50] Kant 1785/1964, 398/65.
[51] Kant 1784/1983, 23/33, italics in original.
[52] Kant 1784/1983, 20/31.
[53] Kant 1786/1983, 121/58; see also 1795/1983, 363/121.
[54] Kant notes a fundamental opposition between human desire and nature’s goals: “Man wills concord; but nature better knows what is good for the species: she wills discord” (1784/1983, 21/ 32).
[55] Kant 1784/1983, 28/38.
[56] Kant 1794/1983, 328/93.
Bibliography
[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 ago at 5:17 pm. 2 comments
[This is Section 19 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
19. The Holocaust
In 1821, the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where books are burnt, in the end people are also burnt.” Heine was evoking the terrible era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in which both people and books were burned regularly. But he was also making a philosophical point about the importance of ideas: books are about ideas, and ideas matter. We humans live what we believe, and if history teaches us anything it is that people can believe an incredible variety of things about themselves and the world they live in. Books store and transmit ideas, but it is in the minds of actual human beings that ideas live and are put into practice. Burning a book has some stopping power for an idea, but the only way to eliminate an idea fully is to eliminate the individuals who believe it. Dictators know this and they have no compunction about eliminating individuals.
The Nazis were not historically unique in this way—where they were unique is in the huge scale upon which they operated and the cold-bloodedly efficient ruthlessness with which they destroyed, killed, and burned human beings.
Eleven to twelve million human beings were exterminated during the Holocaust; approximately six million of them were Jews. We have all heard the numbers and the terrible stories before, and sometimes it is hard for them not to become just abstract statistics in our minds.
But just think of one person you know who lives a real life, has dreams, works hard, loves his or her family, has a quirky sense of humor, wants to travel the world. And then imagine that person taken away in the middle of the night, herded into a cattle car, stripped naked, experimented upon without anesthesia, slowly starved, gassed, shoved into an oven and burned to cinders. That is what the Nazis did to millions of human beings.
All of the theoretical ingredients of the National Socialist program that contributed to the Holocaust were announced publicly twenty years before the Holocaust began:
That human beings are divided into collective groups that shape their identity.
That those collective groups are in a life and death competitive struggle with each other.
That any tactic is legitimate in the war of competing groups.
That human beings are not individuals with their own lives to live but are servants of the state.
That the state should have total power over both the minds and bodies of its citizens and may dispose of them as it wishes.
That citizens should obey a higher authority and be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of their group, as defined by higher authority.
Additionally, during the 1930s the Nazis had experimented with most of the practical techniques that would be used in the Holocaust. In the 1930s, basic human rights to liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness were denied to millions as a matter of official policy. Many of those deemed undesirable had been forced to leave their homes and country. Those who stayed were subject to officially tolerated vandalism, beatings, and occasional murders. Some of those deemed unfit to reproduce had been sterilized. Some of those deemed unfit to live had been euthanized. As early as 1933, concentration camps had been established north of Berlin at Oranienburg and at Dachau in the south of Germany. More camps were added as the decade progressed.
And of course the vicious anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their sympathizers among millions of Germans had been common knowledge and common practice. It is appropriate that the classically-educated Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Culture, would express it most bluntly and clearly: “Certainly the Jew is also a Man, but the Flea is also an Animal.”[42]
So I return to our early question: How could Nazism happen?
References
[42] “Sicher ist der Jude auch ein Mann, aber der Floh ist auch ein Tier.”
[Bibliography.]
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Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 3:37 pm. 1 comment
[This is Appendix 4 of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Sources for the quotations are at the end of this post.]
Appendix 4: Quotations on German militarism
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): “War itself, if it is carried on with order and with a sacred respect for the rights of citizens, has something sublime in it, and makes the disposition of the people who carry it on thus only the more sublime, the more numerous are the dangers to which they are exposed and in respect of which they behave with courage. On the other hand, a long peace generally brings about a predominant commercial spirit and, along with it, low selfishness, cowardice, and effeminacy, and debases the disposition of the people.”[202]
Kant: “Thus, at the stage of culture at which the human race still stands, war is an indispensable means for bringing it to a still higher stage.”[203]
G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) on World-historical individuals, those whom the march of history has selected to advance its ends: “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.”[204]
Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), professor of history at Berlin and the most influential German historian of the nineteenth century. Ranke was deeply religious and a strong believer in the divine mission of the German monarchical state. “[P]ositive religion, which resists the vague flight into liberalism, accords with my beliefs.” “I know nothing since the psalms where the idea of a religious monarchy has been expressed more powerfully and more nobly. It has great passages of historical truth.” As historian A. J. P. Taylor put it, speaking of Ranke and his followers, “they regarded the state, whoever conducted it, as part of the divine order of things; and they felt it their duty to acquiesce in that divine order. They never opposed; they rarely protested.”[205]
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German poet and essayist: “Not only Alsace-Lorraine but all France and all Europe as well as the whole world will belong to us.”[206]
Max Stirner (1806-1856), a Young Hegelian philosopher. While at university at Berlin, he was inspired by Hegel’s lectures and was a member of “The Free,” a discussion group that included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Ludwig Feuerbach as members. “What does right matter to me? I have no need of it … . I have the right to do what I have the power to do.”[207]
Franz Felix Kuhn (1812-1881), philologist and folklorist: “Must culture build its cathedrals upon hills of corpses, seas of tears, and the death rattle of the vanquished? Yes, it must.”[208]
Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), in a now-famous 1862 speech: “The great questions of our time will not be settled by resolutions and by majority votes—that was the mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.”
Frederick III (1831-1888), German emperor and eighth king of Prussia: “All written Constitutions are scraps of paper.”[209]
Otto von Gottberg (1831-1913), writing in the newspaper Jungdeutschland-Post in January 1913: “War is the most august and sacred of human activities.” “Let us laugh with all our lungs at the old women in trousers who are afraid of war, and therefore complain that it is cruel and hideous. No! War is beautiful.”[210]
Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), an influential professor of history at Humboldt University in Berlin from 1874 to 1896 and member of the Reichstag from 1871, was a rabid nationalist and saw war as Germany’s destiny which, guided by a benevolent God, would purge the nation of its sins and make it possible for Germany’s superiority to shine forth.
Otto Liebmann (1840-1912), philosopher at the newly-created University of Strassburg after the Franco-Prussian war. Strassburg was intended as a “fortress of the German spirit against France.” From the records of the Reichstag debates over the founding of the University of Strassburg:
“The German universities, resting on the foundation of freedom, are so peculiarly German an institution that no other nation, not even one racially akin, has risen to this institution, and it is for just this reason that a German university is one of the mightiest of all means of again reconciling with the motherland German racial comrades who have long been separated from her … You may believe, meine Herren, that Bonn university has done as much to defend the German Rhineland as have the German fortresses on the Rhein. (Hear hear! On the left).”[211]
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): “I welcome all signs that a more manly, a warlike, age is about to begin, an age which, above all, will give honor to valor once again. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength which this higher age will need one day—this age which is to carry heroism into the pursuit of knowledge and wage wars for the sake of thoughts and their consequences.”[212]
Nietzsche: “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.”[213]
Max Lehmann (1845–1929), pastor, political historian, professor at Marburg, Leipzig, and Göttingen, and member of the Prussian Academy: “Germany is the centre of God’s plans for the World.”[214]
Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849-1930), general, military historian, author of Germany and the Next War (1911): “Might is the supreme right,” and war is a “divine business,” “an indispensable factor of civilization,” and “a biological necessity of the first order.” And contrasting the French emphasis on rights of liberty and equality, Bernhardi writes of the German philosophy of duty:
“While the French people in savage revolt against spiritual and secular despotism had broken their chains and proclaimed their rights, another quite different revolution was working in Prussia—the revolution of duty. The assertion of the rights of the individual leads ultimately to individual irresponsibility and to a repudiation of the State. Immanuel Kant, the founder of critical philosophy, taught, in opposition to this view, the gospel of moral duty, and Scharnhorst grasped the idea of universal military service. By calling upon each individual to sacrifice property and life for the good of the community, he gave the clearest expression to the idea of the State, and created a sound basis on which the claim to individual rights might rest at the same time Stein laid the foundations of self-employed-government in Prussia.”[215]
Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), English-born German author and propagandist: “He who does not believe in the Divine Mission of Germany had better go hang himself, and rather today than tomorrow.”[216]
Wilhelm II (1859-1941), third German emperor and ninth king of Prussia: “Woe and death to all who shall oppose my will. Woe and death to those who do not believe in my mission.”[217]
Otto Richard Tannenberg, author of Greater Germany, the Work of the Twentieth Century, writing in 1911: “War must leave nothing to the vanquished but their eyes to weep with.”[218]
Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), theologian and Neo-Kantian professor of philosophy at Heidelberg: Struggle is a test of a culture’s vital forces, in which “the fullness of contending national spirits … unfold their highest spiritual powers.”[219]
Max Scheler (1874-1928), philosopher at the universities of Jena, Munich, and Cologne, writing on the German ideology: “It would set faith against skepticism, metaphysics against science, the organic whole against atomism, life against mechanism, heroism against calculation, true community against commercialized society, a hierarchically ordered people against the mass leveled down by egalitarianism.”[220]
Thomas Mann (1875-1955), novelist and essayist, echoing the desire to eliminate the old world of bourgeois hypocrisy, thought the war would end that “horrible world, which now no longer is, or no longer will be, after the great storm passed by. Did it not crawl with spiritual vermin as with worms?”[221]
Mann, writing during the war of his pre-war days: “We knew it, this world of peace. We suffered from this horrible world more acutely than anyone else. It stank of the ferments of decomposition. The artist was so sick of this world that he praised God for this purge and this tremendous hope.”[222]
Georg Heym (1887-1912), German Expressionist poet, on the eve of World War I:
“Everything is always the same, so boring, boring, boring. Nothing ever happens, absolutely nothing. … If someone would only begin a war, it need not be a just one.”[223]
In his diary of 1911: “Most of all I would like to be a lieutenant of the cuirassiers. But the day after I want to be a terrorist.” Later that year: “without my Jacobin hat I cannot envisage myself. Now I hope that there will at least be a war.”[224]
Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), author of Storm of Steel, after returning from World War I, in which he had been wounded three times, on how defeated Germany was by the war:
We are “a new generation, a race that has been hardened and inwardly transformed by all the darting flames and sledgehammer blows of the greatest war in history.”[225]
In war, “the true human being makes up in a drunken orgy for everything that he has been neglecting. Then his passions, too long damned up by society and its laws, become once more dominant and holy and the ultimate reason.” And again: “This war is not ended, but the chord that heralds new power. It is the anvil on which the world will be hammered into new boundaries and new communities. New forms will be filled with blood, and might will be hammered into them with a hard fist. War is a great school, and the new man will be of our cut.”[226]
Describing the warrior’s entry into battle: “Now the task is to gather oneself. Yes, perhaps it is a pity. Perhaps as well we are sacrificing ourselves for something inessential. But no on can rob us of our value. Essential is not what we are fighting for, but how we fight. Onward toward the goal, until we triumph or are left behind. The warriors’ spirit, the exposure of oneself to risk, even for the tiniest idea, weighs more heavily in the scale than all the brooding about good and evil.”[227]
Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), author of The Decline of the West: “We must go right through to the end in our misfortune; we need a chastisement compared to which the four years of war are nothing. … A dictatorship, resembling that of Napoleon, will be regarded universally as a salvation. But then blood must flow, the more the better.”[228]
Otto Braun, age 19, volunteer who died in World War I, 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.”[229]
Some commentators on Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:
R. Kevin Hill, American historian of philosophy: “associations between Kantian duty and military experience became increasingly common in late nineteenth-century Germany, especially after the Schiller and Fichte centennials.”[230]
Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), German historian, writing in 1950: “The German power-state idea, whose history began with Hegel, was to find in Hitler its worst and most fatal application and extension.”[231]
American historian William Manchester on nineteenth-century Germany: “the poetic genius of the youth of Germany was saturated with militaristic ideals, and death in battle was prized as a sacred duty on behalf of Fatherland, home, and family.”[232]
Ernst Gläser (1902-1963), German novelist expressing the prevailing spirit of 1914: “At last life had regained an ideal significance. The great virtues of humanity … fidelity, patriotism, readiness to die for an ideal … were triumphing over the trading and shopkeeping spirit … This was the providential lightning flash that would clear the air [and make way for] a new world directed by a race of noble souls who would root out all signs of degeneracy and lead humanity back to the deserted peaks of the eternal ideals … The war would cleanse mankind from all its impurities.”[233]
References
[202] Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790]. Translated by J. H. Bernard (Haffner Press, 1951), § 28.
[203] Kant, “Speculative Beginning of Human History” [1786]. In Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, translated by Ted Humphrey (Hackett, 1983), 58/121.
[204] Hegel, The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree (Prometheus, 1991), p. 32.
[205] Ranke, quoted in A. J. P. Taylor, “Ranke: The Dedicated Historian.” The Course of German History, A Survey of the Development of Germany since 1815 (Hamish Hamilton, 1945), p. 265.
[206] Heine, quoted in Darwin P. Kingsley, “Woodrow Wilson and the Doctrine of Sovereignty,” Addresses of the Empire Club of Canada. Delivered October 17, 1918. Also posted at http://www.archive.org/stream/letushavepeaceot00king/letushavepeaceot00king_djvu.txt, viewed November 1, 2009.
[207] Stirner, quoted in Kingsley 1918.
[208] Kuhn, quoted in Kingsley 1918.
[209] Frederick III, quoted in Kingsley 1918.
[210] Gottberg, quoted in Kingsley 1918.
[211] Liebmann, quoted in Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 204.
[212] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, § 290.
[213] Nietzsche, Human, All-too-Human, § 477.
[214] Lehmann, quoted in Kingsley 1918.
[215] Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War [1911], Chapter 3, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11352/11352.txt. Viewed October 15, 2009.
[216] Chamberlain, quoted in Kingsley 1918.
[217] Wilhelm II, quoted in Kingsley 1918.
[218] Tannenberg, quoted in Kingsley 1918.
[219] Troeltsch, quoted in Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline (Free Press, 1997), p. 233.
[220] Scheler, quoted in Helmut Kuhn, “German Philosophy and National Socialism,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (MacMillan, 1963), p. 313.
[221] Mann, quoted in Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (A. A. Knopf, 1972), p. 120.
[222] Mann, quoted in Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918-1933 (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), pp. 115-116.
[223] Heym, quoted in Herman 1997, p. 235.
[224] Heym, quoted in Laqueur 1974, 115.
[225] Jünger, quoted in Herman 1997, p. 243.
[226] Jünger, quoted in Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 492.
[227] Jünger, “Feuer” (1922). Excerpted in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (University of California Press, 1994), p. 20.
[228] Spengler, quoted in Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920’s (Harper & Row, 1972), p. 351.
[229] Braun, quoted in Kuhn 1963, p. 313.
[230] Hill, Nietzsche’s Critiques: the Kantian Foundations of His Thought (Oxford, 2003), p. 27; see also Köhnke, NeoKantianism, pp. 115-24.
[231] Meinecke, The German Catastrophe. Translated by Sidney B. Fay (Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 15.
[232] Manchester, The Arms of Krupp (Little, Brown, and Co., 1964), p. 63.
[233] Gläser, quoted in Craig 1978, p. 340.
[Bibliography.]
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Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 1:53 pm. 4 comments
The satirist, poet, and radical Heinrich Heine described poet Alfred de Musset as “a young man with a great future behind him.” 
“Truly, if the citizens of Koenigsberg had had any premonition of the full significance of his ideas, they would have felt a far more terrifying dread at the presence of this man than at the sight of an executioner, an executioner who merely executes people. But the good folk saw in him nothing but a professor of philosophy, and as he passed by at his customary hour, they gave him a friendly greeting and perhaps set their watches by him.
