Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  Hegel is a post-Kantian Platonist. Taking full advantage of the anti-Aristotelianism sanctioned by Kant, Hegel launches an attack on the root principles of Aristotle’s philosophy: on the principles of Aristotelian logic (which even Kant had not dared to challenge directly). Reality, declares Hegel, is inherently contradictory; it is a systematic progression of colliding contradictions organized in triads of thesis, antithesis, synthesis—and men must think accordingly. They should not strive for old-fashioned, “static” consistency. They should not be “limited” by the “one-sided” Aristotelian view that every existent has a specific identity, that things are what they are, that A is A. On the contrary, they owe their ultimate allegiance to a higher principle: the principle of the “identity of opposites,” the principle that things are not what they are, that A is non-A.

  Hegel describes the above as a new conception of “reason,” and as a new, “dialectic” logic.

  On its basis he proceeds to erect his own version of Platonism. Like Plato and Kant, he is an idealist in metaphysics. True reality, he holds, is a nonmaterial dimension, beyond time and space and human sense-perception. In Hegel’s version, reality is a dynamic cosmic mind or thought-process, which in various contexts is referred to as the Absolute, the Spirit, the World-Reason, God, etc. According to Hegel, it is in the essential nature of this entity to undergo a constant process of evolution or development, unfolding itself in various stages. In one of these stages, the Absolute “externalizes” itself, assuming the form of a material world. Continuing its career, it takes on the appearance of a multiplicity of human beings, each seemingly distinct from the others, each seemingly an autonomous individual with his own personal thoughts and desires.

  The appearance of such separate individuals represents, however, merely a comparatively low stage in the Absolute’s career. It is not the final truth about reality. It does not represent the culmination of the Absolute’s development. At that stage, i.e., at the apex or climax of reality, it turns out, in Hegel’s view, that distinctions of any kind, including the distinctions between mind and matter and between one man and another, are unreal (opposites are identical, A is non-A). It turns out that everything is one, and that the things of this world—which appear to us to be individual, self-contained entities, each real in its own right—are merely so many partial aspects of one all-inclusive, all-consuming whole: the Absolute, which alone has full reality.

  The ethics and politics which Hegel derives from his fundamental philosophy can be indicated by two sentences from his Philosophy of Right: “A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it.”5

  Hegel’s collectivism and state-worship are more explicit than anything to be found in Plato’s writings. Since everything is ultimately one, the group, he holds, has primacy over the individual. If each man learns to suppress his identity and coalesce with his fellows, the resulting collective entity, the state, will be a truer reflection of reality, a higher manifestation of the Absolute. The state in this view is not an association of autonomous individuals. It is itself an individual, a mystic “person” that swallows up the citizens and transcends them, an independent, self-sustaining organism, made of human beings, with a will and purpose of its own. “[A]ll the worth which the human being possesses,” writes Hegel, “all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.”6

  The state-organism is no mere secular entity. As a manifestation of the Absolute, it is a creature of God, and thus demands not merely obedience from its citizens but reverential worship. “The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth.” “The march of God in the world, that is what the state is.” The purpose of the state, therefore, is not the protection of its citizens. The state is not a means to any human end. As an entity with supernatural credentials, it is “an absolute unmoved end in itself,” and it “has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.”7

  The above are the kinds of political ideas which Hegel, more than any other man, injected into the mind of early nineteenth-century Germany. Perpetuated in a variety of forms by a long chain of secondary figures and derivative influences, these ideas gradually became commonplaces in Germany and in other countries, including Italy. The aspiring dictators of the twentieth century and their intellectual defenders moved with alacrity to embrace such commonplaces and to cash in on them.

  Both the Fascists and the Nazis were in the forefront of this trend.

  In the Fascist literature the influence of Hegel is generally acknowledged. Prominent neo-Hegelian philosophers, such as Mario Palmieri and Giovanni Gentile, upheld Fascism on a Hegelian foundation and earned a formal endorsement from Mussolini. “The world seen through Fascism,” writes Mussolini,

  is not this material world which appears on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all others and standing by himself.... The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty a higher life free from the limits of time and space....8

  The Nazi literature is not so overtly Hegelian in its formulations. Posing as the spokesmen for a higher biological truth, the Nazis generally dropped the idealistic metaphysics of Hegel and even attacked him. Admittedly or not, however, the Nazis, like the Fascists, rely on the ideas of Hegel—not only for their basic collectivist approach but for many of the more specific political theories necessary to implement it in practice.

  Hegel, for instance, seeks to undercut any individualist opponents, by proclaiming that statism represents a passion for human liberty.

  A man is free, Hegel explains, when he acts as he himself wills to act. But since “the state is the true self of the individual,” what a man really wills, even though he may not know it, is what the state wills. Liberty, therefore, is obedience to the orders of the government. Such obedience guarantees true freedom for the real self, even if the illusory self is being sent to Auschwitz.9

  The masses of men, notes Hegel, do not understand the above viewpoint. The people, therefore, “does not know what it wills. To know what one wills, and still more to know what the absolute will, Reason, wills, is the fruit of profound apprehension and insight, precisely the things which are not popular.”10 Hence Hegel (like Plato) is opposed to the theory of popularly elected, representative government. Instead, he calls for an authoritarian state resembling a Prussian monarchy. The monarch’s decrees, we are told, embody the true will of the people.

  “And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man,” says Mussolini, “and not of the scarecrow invented by the individualistic Liberalism, then Fascism is for liberty. It is for the only kind of liberty that is serious—the liberty of the State....” “There is no freedom of the individual,” says the Nazi Otto Dietrich. “There is only freedom of peoples, nations or races; for these are the only material and historical realities through which the life of the individual exists.” “The Führer-Reich of the people,” says Huber, “is founded on the recognition that the true will of the people cannot be disclosed through parliamentary votes and plebiscites but that the will of the people in its pure and uncorrupted form can only be expressed through the Führer.”11

  In his defense of monarchy, Hegel stops short of advocating complete dictatorship. In his theory of “heroes,” however, he makes little effort to conceal that this is his viewpoint. A few superior beings throughout the ages, he holds—e.g., Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon—have functioned as “agents of the World-Spirit.” These men have been endowed with a special mission: to advance the evolution of Spirit (carry out the will of God) in their era. Guided by Providence, the “world-historical hero” seizes the initiative and takes direct action; through him the Spirit, “impinging on the out
er world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces....” Such individuals, Hegel concedes, often leave a trail of corpses in their wake. Nevertheless, they are exempt from moral judgment:

  For the History of the World occupies a higher ground than that on which morality has properly its position.... [M]oral claims that are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment. The Litany of private virtues... must not be raised against them.12

  Here, sanctioned by an intricate metaphysical system, is a call for a militaristic dictator to throw aside morality and “burst the world in pieces” in accordance with his concept of destiny. Issued by the most prestigious German philosopher of the nineteenth century, it is an invitation for a Führer to step forward. Philosophers cannot issue such invitations with impunity. One way or another the next representative of the Absolute is going to get the message.

  “However weak the individual may be when compared with the omnipotence and will of Providence,” said Hitler in a 1937 speech,

  yet at the moment when he acts as Providence would have him act he becomes immeasurably strong. Then there streams down upon him that force which has marked all greatness in the world’s history. And when I look back only on the five years which lie behind us, then I feel that I am justified in saying: That has not been the work of man alone.13

  Just as there are world-historical heroes, according to Hegel, so there are world-historical peoples. In any given era, he holds, one nation is the special vehicle of the World Spirit in its process of self-unfolding. That nation, he says, has “absolute right” over all the others, which are “without rights” and “count no longer in world history.” “Absolute right” includes the right to launch war.14

  War among nations, in Hegel’s view, is an inevitable, and desirable, expression of the evolution of Spirit. And, since the history of the world faithfully expresses this evolution, the nation that wins the wars of a given era is obviously the one backed by the Spirit. Justice, therefore, must always be on the side of the winner. Might makes right—stripped of its jargon, this is the meaning of Hegel’s doctrine.

  Hegel’s form of collectivism is nationalism. The nation, he holds—not mankind as a whole, or the majority, or the race, or the proletariat—is the favored group, the one which is to be the standard of value and the collector of men’s sacrifices. And of all the world’s nations, he reports, Germany is the culmination to date. It is currently the representative of the Spirit.

  Religions have often divided men into the chosen and the damned, and then interpreted history as the struggle of the chosen to carry out the divine plan. Hegel’s philosophy of history amounts to this viewpoint. Hegel’s distinctiveness, however, lies in his definition of the chosen. The messianic group on his theory is not men of a particular religion or sect, but men of a particular nationality.

  The initiators of German nationalism in the nineteenth century were not the Junkers, the military men, big business, or the middle classes. “All these groups,” notes Ludwig von Mises,

  were at first strongly opposed to the aspirations of Pan-Germanism. But their resistance was vain because it lacked an ideological backing. There were no longer any liberal [individualistic] authors in Germany. Thus the nationalist writers and professors easily conquered. Very soon the youth came back from the universities and lower schools convinced Pan-Germans.15

  On this issue, the leading teacher of the teachers of the youth was Hegel.

  The Nazis accept Hegel’s theory, with certain adaptations.

  The Nazis agree that a cosmic agency has divided men into antithetic groups, the chosen and the damned, whose actions and destiny are predetermined and outside of any individual’s choice or control. They agree that the chosen have “absolute right” to smash the rest of mankind. They agree that might, being the expression of destiny, makes right. But, since they mix a certain element of biology into this framework, they often provide a different answer to the question: who chooses the chosen? It is not the World Spirit that does it, Hitler often suggests, but nature, using the mechanism of the “survival of the fittest.” The chosen are catapulted to a position of world dominance, and their recourse to brutality is justified, not by the Hegelian process of evolution, but by the Darwinian.

  Although the catch phrases of the Social Darwinists, in the above form, are all over Mein Kampf, they never attained the status of official party doctrine. Other Nazi writers remained free to denounce Darwin and Darwinism as incompatible with Nazism—as irreligious, “mechanistic,” “internationalistic.” On the whole, Nazism never decided this question. Nature and God, the Nazis sometimes say, are merely different forms in which the same reality manifests itself; so there is really no difference, after all, between natural and divine selection.

  The Nazis’ predilection for biology-plus-religion culminates in their biological version of the chosen-damned dichotomy. The people chosen by God/nature, they hold, are not confined to a single nation. They are spread across the globe, marked off by a distinctive physical appearance (they are tall, long-headed, blond, etc.) and a special, innate “race soul” (which makes them truthful, energetic, persistent, the “founder of all higher humanity,” etc.). These men are the Aryans (or the Nordics)—the master race. The damned are all the other breeds, especially the Jews. The Jew, claims Hitler, is by his nature alien and cunning, a communist subversive and a capitalist exploiter; he is “the personification of the devil” and “the symbol of all evil.”16

  The Nazi collectivism, technically, is a form of racism rather than of nationalism. But the Nazis were able to combine the two doctrines easily, by the device of holding that Germany contains the purest Aryan blood.

  The direct source of the Nazi racial ideas was the theoreticians of racism (e.g., Count de Gobineau and H. S. Chamberlain), a group who rose to sudden prominence in Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century. These men accepted wholeheartedly the collectivist sentiment of the period’s intellectuals, and then sought to gain for that sentiment the appearance of scientific support—by translating collectivism into the language of the favorite science of the time, biology. The result was a mounting torrent on the following order (from Vacher de Lapouge, a nineteenth-century French Aryan-glorifier) : “The blood which one has in one’s veins at birth one keeps all one’s life. The individual is stifled by his race and is nothing. The race, the nation, is all.”17 No amount of passion for biology (or for Darwin) could produce such an utterance. A dose of Hegel, however, could.

  What the theoreticians of racism did was to secularize the Hegelian approach, as Karl Popper explains eloquently. Marx, he observes,

  replaced Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ by matter, and by material and economic interests. In the same way, racialism substitutes for Hegel’s ‘Spirit’ something material, the quasi-biological conception of Blood or Race. Instead of ‘Spirit,’ Blood is the self-developing essence; instead of ‘Spirit,’ Blood is the Sovereign of the world, and displays itself on the Stage of History; and instead of its ‘Spirit,’ the Blood of a nation determines its essential destiny.

  The transubstantiation of Hegelianism into racialism or of Spirit into Blood does not greatly alter the main tendency of Hegelianism. It only gives it a tinge of biology and of modem evolutionism.18

  Every central doctrine of the Nazi politics, racism included, is an expression or variant of the theory of collectivism. Such doctrines cannot rise to the ascendancy, neither among the intellectuals nor in the mind of the public, except in a culture already saturated with a mystical-collectivist philosophy.

  In the case of Germany, this means: saturated with the ideas of Hegel.

  No philosopher could produce a cataclysm such as Nazism single-handed. A complex series of other intellectual influences—both leading to and proceeding from Hegel—was involved in preparing the climate for the rise of the Nazis. The sum of these accessory influences determined the specific form of Hegelian statism prevalent in modern Germany and picked up by t
he Nazis. The theoreticians of racism were merely one such influence.

  There was also Martin Luther, regarded by the Nazis as a major hero, who was the greatest single power in the development of German religion and, through this means, an influence on the philosophies of both Kant and Hegel. Luther is anti-reason (“Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason”), intensely pro-German, and crudely anti-Semitic (“[F]ie on you wherever you be, you damned Jews, who dare to clasp this earnest, glorious, consoling Word of God to your maggoty, mortal, miserly belly, and are not ashamed to display your greed so openly”). He formally enlists God on the side of the state. Unconditional obedience to the government’s edicts, he holds, is a Christian virtue.

  [I]n a like manner we must endure the authority of the prince. If he misuse or abuse his authority, we are not to entertain a grudge, seek revenge or punishment. Obedience is to be rendered for God’s sake, for the ruler is God’s representative. However they may tax or exact, we must obey and endure patiently.19

  There was J.G. Fichte, another Nazi hero, who was an early post-Kantian idealist and an important influence on subsequent German thought (including Hegel’s). Politically, Fichte, like Hegel, anticipates all the central tenets of the Nazis. He is a champion of the organic theory of the state, and an authoritarian who yearns for an elite of scholar-dictators to rule the ignorant masses. Because of his advocacy of state control of the economy, he is often regarded as the father of modern socialism. “[T]he individual life has no real existence,” he writes, “since it has no value of itself, but must and should sink to nothing; while, on the contrary, the Race alone exists, since it alone ought to be looked upon as really living.” Fichte is also one of the principal sources of the theory, and delusions, of German nationalism. “[T]o have character and to be German,” he remarks, “undoubtedly mean the same.... ”20