Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  The root cause of Nazism lies in a power that most people ignore, disparage—and underestimate. The cause is not the events hailed or cursed in headlines and street rallies, but the esoteric writings of the professors who, decades or centuries earlier, laid the foundation for those events. The symbol of the cause is not the munitions plants or union halls or bank vaults of Germany, but its ivory towers. What came out of the towers in this regard is only coils of obscure, virtually in- decipherable jargon. But that jargon is fatal.

  “[The Nazi] death camps,” notes a writer in The New York Times, “were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.’s.”10

  What had those Ph.D.’s been taught to think in their schools and universities—and where did such ideas come from?

  2

  The Totalitarian Universe

  It took centuries and a brain-stopping chain of falsehoods to bring a whole people to the state of Hitler-worship. Modern German culture, including its Nazi climax, is the result of a complex development in the history of philosophy, involving dozens of figures stretching back to the beginnings of Western thought. The same figures helped to shape every Western nation; but in other countries, to varying extents, the results were mixed, because there was also an opposite influence or antidote at work. In Germany, by the turn of our century, the cultural atmosphere was unmixed; the traces of the antidote had long since disappeared, and the intellectual establishment was monolithic.

  If we view the West’s philosophic development in terms of essentials, three fateful turning points stand out, three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century.

  The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)

  Plato is the father of collectivism in the West. He is the first thinker to formulate a systematic view of reality, with a collectivist politics as its culmination. In essence, Plato’s metaphysics holds that the universe consists of two opposed dimensions: true reality—a perfect, immutable, supernatural realm, nonmaterial, nonspatial, nontemporal, nonperceivable—and the material world in which we live. The material world, Plato holds, is only an imperfect appearance of true reality, a semireal reflection or projection of it. (Because Plato’s metaphysics holds that reality is thus fundamentally spiritual or nonmaterial in nature, it is described technically in philosophy as “idealism.”)

  The content of true reality, according to Plato, is a set of universals or Forms—in effect, a set of disembodied abstractions representing that which is in common among various groups of particulars in this world. Thus for Plato abstractions are supernatural existents. They are nonmaterial entities in another dimension, independent of man’s mind and of any of their material embodiments. The Forms, Plato tells us repeatedly, are what is really real. The particulars they subsume—the concretes that make up this world—are not; they have only a shadowy, dreamlike half-reality.

  Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were later made explicit by a long line of Platonists): since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal “man,” they are not ultimately real. What is real about men is only the Form which they share in common and reflect To common sense, there appear to be many separate, individual men, each independent of the others, each fully real in his own right. To Platonism, this is a deception; all the seemingly individual men are really the same one Form, in various reflections or manifestations. Thus, all men ultimately comprise one unity, and no earthly man is an autonomous entity—just as, if a man were reflected in a multifaceted mirror, the many reflections would not be autonomous entities.

  What follows in regard to human action, according to Plato, is a life of self-sacrificial service. When men gather in society, says Plato, the unit of reality, and the standard of value, is the “community as a whole.” Each man therefore must strive, as far as he can, to wipe out his individuality (his personal desires, ambitions, etc.) and merge himself into the community, becoming one with it and living only to serve its welfare. On this view, the collective is not an aggregate, but an entity. Society (the state) is regarded as a living organism (this is the so-called “organic theory of the state”), and the individual becomes merely a cell of this organism’s body, with no more rights or privileges than belong to any such cell.

  “The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of the law,” Plato writes, is a condition

  in which the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and blame and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions, and whatever laws there are unite the city to the utmost....

  As for those individualistic terms “mine” and “not mine,” “another‘s” and “not another’s”: “The best ordered state will be the one in which the largest number of persons use these terms in the same sense, and which accordingly most nearly resembles a single person.”1

  The advocacy of the omnipotent state follows from the above as a matter of course. The function and authority of the state, according to Plato, should be unlimited. The state should indoctrinate the citizens with government-approved ideas in government-run schools, censor all art and literature and philosophy, assign men their vocations as they come of age, regulate their economic—and in certain cases even their sexual—activities, etc. The program of government domination of the individual is thoroughly worked out. In Plato’s Republic and Laws one can read the details, which are the first blueprint of the totalitarian ideal.

  The blueprint includes the view that the state should be ruled by a special elite: the philosophers. Their title to absolute power, Plato explains, is their special wisdom, a wisdom which derives from their insight into true reality, and especially into its supreme, governing principle: the so-called “Form of the Good.” Without a grasp of this Form, according to Plato, no man can understand the universe or know how to conduct his life.

  But to grasp this crucial principle, Plato continues—and here one can begin to see the relevance of epistemology to politics—the mind is inadequate. The Form of the Good cannot be known by the use of reason; it cannot be reached by a process of logic; it transcends human concepts and human language; it cannot be defined, described, or discussed. It can be grasped, after years of an ascetic preparation, only by an ineffable mystic experience—a kind of sudden, incommunicable revelation or intuition, which is reserved to the philosophical elite. The mass of men, by contrast, are entangled in the personal concerns of this life. They are enslaved to the lower world revealed to them by their senses. They are incapable of achieving mystic contact with a supernatural principle. They are fit only to obey orders.

  Such, in its essentials, is the view of reality, of man, and of the state which one of the most influential philosophers of all time infused into the stream of Western culture. It has served ever since as the basic theoretical foundation by reference to which aspiring and actual dictators, ancient and modern, have sought to justify their political systems.

  Some of those dictators never read or even heard of Plato, but absorbed his kind of ideas indirectly, at home, in church, in the streets, or from the gutter. Some, however, did go back to the source. Plato, notes Walter Kaufmann,

  was widely read in German schools [under the Nazis], and special editions were prepared for Greek classes in the Gymnasium, gathering together allegedly fascist passages.... Instead of compiling a list of the many similar contributions to the Plato literature, it may suffice to mention that Dr. Hans F. K. Günther, from whom the Nazis admittedly received their racial theories, also devoted a whole book to Plato....

  As to Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s official ideologist, he “celebrates Plato as ‘one who wanted in the end to save his people on a racial basis, through a forcible constitution, dictatorial in every detail.’ ”2<
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  If mankind has not perished from such constitutions, if it has not collapsed permanently into the swamp of statism, but has fought its way up through tortured centuries of brief rises and long-drawn-out falls—like a man fighting paralysis by the power of an inexhaustible vitality—it is because that power had been provided by a giant whose philosophic system is, on virtually every fundamental issue, the opposite of Plato’s. The great spokesman for man and for this earth is Aristotle.

  Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature, as against the supematuralism of Plato. Denying Plato’s World of Forms, Aristotle maintains that there is only one reality: the world of particulars in which we live, the world men perceive by means of their physical senses. Universals, he holds, are merely aspects of existing entities, isolated in thought by a process of selective attention; they have no existence apart from particulars. Reality is comprised, not of Platonic abstractions, but of concrete, individual entities, each with a definite nature, each obeying the laws inherent in its nature. Aristotle’s universe is the universe of science. The physical world, in his view, is not a shadowy projection controlled by a divine dimension, but an autonomous, self-sufficient realm. It is an orderly, intelligible, natural realm, open to the mind of man.

  In such a universe, knowledge cannot be acquired by special revelations from another dimension; there is no place for ineffable intuitions of the beyond. Repudiating the mystical elements in Plato’s epistemology, Aristotle is the father of logic and the champion of reason as man’s only means of knowledge. Knowledge, he holds, must be based on and derived from the data of sense experience; it must be formulated in terms of objectively defined concepts; it must be validated by a process of logic.

  For Plato, the good life is essentially one of renunciation and selflessness: man should flee from the pleasures of this world in the name of fidelity to a higher dimension, just as he should negate his own individuality in the name of union with the collective. But for Aristotle, the good life is one of personal self-fulfillment. Man should enjoy the values of this world. Using his mind to the fullest, each man should work to achieve his own happiness here on earth. And in the process he should be conscious of his own value. Pride, writes Aristotle—a rational pride in oneself and in one’s moral character—is, when it is earned, the “crown of the virtues.”3

  A proud man does not negate his own identity. He does not sink selflessly into the community. He is not a promising subject for the Platonic state.

  Although Aristotle’s writings do include a polemic against the more extreme features of Plato’s collectivism, Aristotle himself is not a consistent advocate of political individualism. His own politics is a mixture of statist and antistatist elements. But the primary significance of Aristotle, or of any philosopher, does not lie in his politics. It lies in the fundamentals of his system: his metaphysics and epistemology.

  It has been said that, in his basic attitude toward life, every man is either Platonic or Aristotelian. The same may be said of periods of Western history. The medieval period, under the sway of such philosophers as Plotinus and Augustine, was an era dominated by Platonism. During much of this period Aristotle’s philosophy was almost unknown in the West. But, owing largely to the influence of Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle was rediscovered in the thirteenth century.

  The Renaissance represented a rebirth of the Aristotelian spirit. The results of that spirit are written across the next two centuries, which men describe, properly, as the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment. The results include the rise of modem science; the rise of an individualist political philosophy (the work of John Locke and others); the consequent spread of freedom across the civilized world; and the birth of the freest country in history, the United States of America. The great corollary of these results, the product of men who were armed with the knowledge of the scientists and who were free at last to act, was the Industrial Revolution, which turned poverty into abundance and transformed the face of the West. The Aristotelianism released by Aquinas and the Renaissance was sweeping away the dogmas and the shackles of the past. Reason, freedom, and production were replacing faith, force, and poverty. The age-old foundations of statism were being challenged and undercut.

  The tragedy of the West, however, lies in the fact that the seeds of Platonism had been firmly embedded in philosophy almost from its beginning, and had been growing steadily through the post-Renaissance period. Thus, while the revolutionary achievements inspired by Aristotelianism were reshaping the life of the West, an intellectual counterrevolution was at work, gradually gathering momentum. A succession of thinkers was striving to reverse the Aristotelian trend and to resurrect the basic principles of Platonism.

  The climax of this development came in the late eighteenth century. The man who consummated the successful anti-Aristotelian revolution—the man who, more than any other, put an end to the Enlightenment and opened the door to its opposite—was a German philosopher, the most influential German philosopher in history: Immanuel Kant.

  One of Kant’s major goals was to save religion (including the essence of religious morality) from the onslaughts of science. His system represents a massive effort to raise the principles of Platonism, in a somewhat altered form, once again to a position of commanding authority over Western culture.

  Kant places his primary emphasis on epistemological issues. His method of attack is to wage a campaign against the human mind. Man’s mind, he holds, is unable to acquire any knowledge of reality.

  In any process of cognition, according to Kant, whether it be sense experience or abstract thought, the mind automatically alters and distorts the evidence confronting it. It filters or structures the material it receives from reality, in accordance with a set of innate and subjective processing devices, whose operation it cannot escape. The world that men perceive, therefore—the world of orderly, spatiotemporal, material entities—is essentially a creation of man’s consciousness. What men perceive is not reality “as it is,” but merely reality as it appear to man, given the special structure of the human mind. Thus for Kant, as for Plato, the universe consists of two opposed dimensions: true reality, a supersensible realm of “things in themselves” (in Kant’s terminology), and a world of appearances which is not ultimately real, the material world men perceive by means of their physical senses.

  Plato was more than a Platonist; despite his mysticism, he was also a pagan Greek. As such he exhibited a certain authentic respect for reason, a respect which was implicit in Greek philosophy no matter how explicitly irrational it became. The Kantian mysticism, however, suffers from no such pagan restraints. It flows forth triumphantly, sweeping the prostrate human mind before it. Since man can never escape the distorting agents inherent in the structure of his consciousness, says Kant, “things in themselves” are in principle unknowable. Reason is impotent to discover anything about reality; if it tries, it can only bog down in impenetrable contradictions. Logic is merely a subjective human device, devoid of reference to or basis in reality. Science, while useful as a means of ordering the data of the world of appearances, is limited to describing a surface world of man’s own creation and says nothing about things as they really are.

  Must men then resign themselves to a total skepticism? No, says Kant, there is one means of piercing the barrier between man and existence. Since reason, logic, and science are denied access to reality, the door is now open for men to approach reality by a different, nonrational method. The door is now open to faith. Taking their cue from their needs, men can properly believe (for instance, in God and in an after-life), even though they cannot prove the truth of their beliefs. And no matter how powerful the rational argument against their faith, that argument can always be dismissed out-of-hand : one need merely remind its advocate that rational knowledge and rational concepts are applicable only to the world of appearances, not to reality.

  In a word, reason having been silenced, the way is cleared once more for an orgy of mystic fantasy. (The na
me of this orgy, the philosophic term for the nineteenth-century intellectuals’ revolt against reason and the Enlightenment, is: romanticism.) “I have,” writes Kant, “therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”4

  Kant also found it necessary to deny happiness, in order to make room for duty. The essence of moral virtue, he says, is selflessness—selfless, lifelong obedience to duty, without any expectation of reward, and regardless of how much it might make one suffer.

  Kant’s attack on reason, this world, and man’s happiness was the decisive turning point. As the main line of modern philosophy rapidly absorbed his basic tenets, the last elements of the Aristotelian approach were abandoned, particularly in Germany. Philosophers turned as a group to variants of Platonism, this time an extreme, militant Platonism, a Platonism shorn of its last vestiges of respect for reason.

  It is Kant who made possible the sudden mushrooming of the Platonic collectivism in the modern world, and especially in Germany. Kant is not a full-fledged statist, but a philosopher’s political views, to the extent that they contradict the essentials of his system, have little historical significance. Kant accepts certain elements of individualism, not because of his basic approach, but in spite of it, as a legacy of the Enlightenment period in which he lived. This merely suggests that Kant did not grasp the political implications of his own metaphysics and epistemology.

  His heirs, however, did. A line of German romanticist philosophers followed Kant in the nineteenth century, each claiming to be his true follower, each avid for a reality beyond this world and a means of knowledge beyond reason, each contributing his share to the growth of an impassioned collectivism that poisoned the intellectual atmosphere of Germany. The most famous of these men, the most influential, the ruling figure of nineteenth-century philosophy, was Hegel.