Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  One of the reasons is that the clash was somewhat concealed, since the two elements were to an extent addressed to different audiences. The first was aimed primarily at the mass public, the second at the inner elite. “The masses,” Hitler explained to Rauschning, “need something for the imagination, they need fixed, permanent doctrines.”25 This, however, is not a full explanation, inasmuch as the Nazis propagated large doses of each element side by side, both publicly and privately.

  A deeper reason is that the Nazis boastfully rejected Aristotelian logic, with its demand for intellectual consistency, and were therefore untroubled by any contradictions.

  But the overriding reason lies in the fact that the clash is trivial: in fundamental terms, dogmatism and pragmatism are philosophically interchangeable. They are two variants of the same irrationalism, conducting the same assault on the human mind and on reality.

  The dogmatist rejects the intellect in the name of revelations from another dimension. The pragmatist rejects the intellect in the name of a flux of expedient myths. The dogmatist rejects reality, the reality men live in and perceive, avowing instead his allegiance to God. The pragmatist agrees, merely replacing God by “the people” (or the state, or the party). In both cases and in both respects, it is only the rejection that is essential-in fact, in philosophy, or to the Nazis.

  What the Nazi leaders primarily sought to achieve by means of their philosophy was obedience, the blind obedience of their followers and countrymen to the Führer. Judged by this criterion, the theory of dogmatism and the theory of pragmatism—singly or in combination—are unbeatable.

  One cannot seriously oppose a doctrine, or an order, except by reference to facts that one has observed and grasped. Qua dogmatist, the Nazi is eager to brush aside such facts in favor of faith in the supernatural—as revealed to and by the Führer. Qua pragmatist, the Nazi denies facts, any facts, on principle, substituting “social utility” as his guide to truth—such utility to be determined by the embodiment and voice of society: the Führer. In both capacities, the Nazi is philosophically primed to hear, and heed, the same message, the one message the party leadership addressed urgently to every mind within range, the message expressed by Goebbels as follows : “Hear nothing that we do not wish you to hear. See nothing that we do not wish you to see. Believe nothing that we do not wish you to believe. Think nothing that we do not wish you to think.”26

  In essence, it made no difference to the Nazi leaders whether a man obeyed them for dogmatist or for pragmatist reasons, because of his commitment to God in Heaven or to the Volk on earth. What mattered was that he obeyed. But the Nazis preferred a man to obey for both reasons together. Dogmatism gave the Fuhrer’s words the aura of supernatural authority; pragmatism gave him all the “flexibility” he could want. The combination made it possible to claim that, when the Führer speaks, his statement is a holy truth to be revered—until he contradicts it, whereupon his new statement is to be revered; etc. Thus the Führer unites the infallibility of God’s representative with the nihilism of a Machiavellian skeptic, and a new phenomenon, new at least in its brazen openness, enters the world scene: the absolute of the moment, or the immutable which never stands still, issued by an omniscience that ceaselessly changes its mind.

  After many centuries of religion and one century of romanticism, most Germans were sufficiently trained in unreason. They were ready to accept the above kind of combination or at minimum one of its elements. These men were epistemologically ripe. They were willing or eager to regard Hitler, not reality, as their fundamental frame of reference. Dr. Hans Frank, Nazi Minister of Justice and President of the German Bar Association, speaks eloquently for this mentality. “Formerly, we were in the habit of saying: this is right or wrong; to-day, we must put the question accordingly: What would the ‘Führer’ say?”

  Do abstract epistemological theories play a role in human life? What happens to men who learn, in church and in school, from early childhood on up, not to say “this is right or wrong”? During the war Hans Frank was Governor General of occupied Poland. He was personally responsible for the massacre of thousands of Polish intellectuals and participated in the slaughter of three and a half million Polish Jews. When a Nazi leader in Czechoslovakia hung posters proclaiming the execution of seven Czechs, Dr. Frank declared boastfully: “If I wished to order that one should hang up posters about every seven Poles shot, there would not be enough forests in Poland with which to make the paper for these posters.”27

  Implicit in dogmatism and in pragmatism is a third theory—part metaphysical, part epistemological—that is fundamental to the Nazi viewpoint: subjectivism.

  In metaphysics, “subjectivism” is the view that reality (the “object”) is dependent on human consciousness (the “subject”). In epistemology, as a result, subjectivists hold that a man need not concern himself with the facts of reality; instead, to arrive at knowledge or truth, he need merely turn his attention inward, consulting the appropriate contents of consciousness, the ones with the power to make reality conform to their dictates. According to the most widespread form of subjectivism, the elements which possess this power are feelings.

  In essence, subjectivism is the doctrine that feelings are the creator of facts, and therefore men’s primary tool of cognition. If men feel it, declares the subjectivist, that makes it so.28

  The alternative to subjectivism is the advocacy of objectivity—an attitude which rests on the view that reality exists independent of human consciousness; that the role of the subject is not to create the object, but to perceive it; and that knowledge of reality can be acquired only by directing one’s attention outward to the facts.

  Objectivity, according to the Nazis, is a crime. It is the antonym of “instinct,” and therefore a crime against the Fatherland. What Germany requires of its citizens, Hitler says repeatedly, and what Nazism offers is not dispassionate thought or even-handed judgment of fact, but unbridled nationalist emotion, emotion based on will and clinging to faith (dogmatism) or “myth” (pragmatism)—emotion that concedes nothing to any antagonist, no matter what the caliber of his arguments. “Anyone who wants to win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart,” writes Hitler. “Its name is not objectivity (read weakness), but will and power.” “As for me,” states Goering, “I am subjective, I commit myself to my people and acknowledge nothing else on earth. I thank my Maker for having created me without what they call a ‘sense of objectivity.”’ “We are not objective,” says Hans Schemm, the Nazi educator, “we are German.”29

  Western leaders could hardly have conceived of such statements in the eighteenth century. In our era, they utter them boastfully. The difference is the romanticist movement.

  Although the theory of subjectivism was accepted in part by every important post-Renaissance philosopher, it did not achieve a successful sweep of the philosophic world until the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason. “Things-in-themselves,” said Kant, exist, but are unknowable; the world men perceive and deal with, the “phenomenal world,” is a human creation, a product of fundamental mechanisms inherent in the structure of human consciousness. On this view, it is the essence of the subject to create the object; and objectivity, as defined above, is impossible to man. It is impossible in principle, by the very nature of the human mind.30 If so, the romanticists concluded, we must reject the attempt to practice it. Objectivity, they said, like reason itself, is futile—and harmful. The would-be objective man, they said, is “detached,” “bloodless,” and the like, whereas man should instead be “warm,” “committed,” “vital.” He should live and function under the guidance of a flow of “spontaneous” passion, uninhibited by facts, logic, or concern for external reality.

  There are two different kinds of subjectivism, distinguished by their answers to the question: whose consciousness creates reality? Kant rejected the older of these two, which was the view that each man’s feelings create a private universe for him. Instead, Kant ushered in t
he era of social subjectivism—the view that it is not the consciousness of individuals, but of groups, that creates reality. In Kant’s system, mankind as a whole is the decisive group; what creates the phenomenal world is not the idiosyncrasies of particular indi viduals, but the mental structure common to all men.

  Later philosophers accepted Kant’s fundamental approach, but carried it a step further. If, many claimed, the mind’s structure is a brute given, which cannot be explained—as Kant had said—then there is no reason why all men should have the same mental structure. There is no reason why mankind should not be splintered into competing groups, each defined by its own distinctive type of consciousness, each vying with the others to capture and control reality.

  The first world movement thus to pluralize the Kantian position was Marxism, which propounded a social subjectivism in terms of competing economic classes. On this issue, as on many others, the Nazis follow the Marxists, but substitute race for class.

  Racial subjectivism holds that a man’s inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions—and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution. “Knowledge and truth,” one Nazi explains, “are peculiarities originating in definite forms of consciousness, and hence attuned exclusively to the specific essence of their mother-consciousness.” On this view, each race creates its own truth (and, in effect, its own universe). There is no such thing as “the truth” in any issue, the truth which corresponds to the facts. There is only truth relative to a group—truth “for us” versus truth “for them,” German truth versus British truth, “Nordic science” versus “the Liberal-Jewish science,” etc.31

  Men of different races, therefore, are separated by an unbridgeable gulf, an epistemological gulf, which makes it impossible for them to communicate or to resolve disputes peacefully. “An alien may be as critical as he wants to be,” states Carl Schmitt, “he may be intelligent in his endeavor, he may read books and write them, but he thinks and understands things differently because he belongs to a different kind, and he remains within the existential conditions of his own kind in every decisive thought.” (Schmitt was an influential political scientist and onetime communist, who ended as a leading Nazi theorist.)32

  It is useless, the Nazis add, for men of “different kind” to turn to logic to resolve their disagreements, because there is not only a different truth for each race, but also a different logic. There is not one correct method of reasoning binding on all men, they say, but many opposite methods, many logics-Aryan, British, Jewish, etc.—each deriving from the mental structure of a particular group, each valid for its own group and invalid for the others. This is the Nazi doctrine (also adapted from the Marxists) of polylogism.

  “[T]hinkers of the same races and predispositions will again and again ask the same questions and seek solutions in the same direction,” writes the philosopher Tirala, one of the most sophisticated of the Nazi polylogists.

  And, therefore, even in the field of logic, as the foundation of all sciences, differences must be acknowledged which force thinkers and men of science to take a definite position, not only to think in this or that way, but to work differently even in the realm of the purely formal.33

  In presenting this theory, Professor Tirala gives no indication of the nature of Aryan logical principles (nor does any other Nazi). His concern is to denounce, not to define. What he denounces is Aristotelian logic.

  Subjectivism, in any version or application, is incompatible with Aristotle’s laws of logic. According to Aristotle, everything is something, it is what it is independent of men’s opinions or feelings about it, A is A (the Law of Identity). According to the subjectivist, A does not have to be A, it can be whatever consciousness ordains; it can be A “for one” and non-A “for another”; it can be both A and non-A, or neither, or both-and-neither simultaneously, if that is how men feel. To the philosophical defender of subjectivism, accordingly, the basic ideological enemy is far removed from the antagonists of the moment; the enemy is Aristotle.

  Aristotle, Tirala writes, is emphatically not an Aryan. Aristotle

  was physically (according to reports) and spiritually (on the basis of his writings) to be judged a representative of the race which is not capable of producing science: his Western soul is conformable to the magical world-picture. This soul cannot understand the questioning of the Aryan spirit.34

  Aristotle, the father of logic, regarded it as man‘s method of reaching conclusions objectively, by deriving them without contradiction from the facts of reaHty—ultimately, from the evidence provided by the senses. The polylogist sweeps this view aside and turns logic into its antithesis. By rejecting the Law of Identity, he repudiates all cognitive standards, claiming the right, based on his “logic,” to endorse any contradiction he feels like, whenever he feels like it. Logic thus becomes a subjective device to “justify” anything anyone wishes. Logic, “Aryan logic,” becomes a Nazi weapon: in the beginning was the Führer, who created the principles of inference.

  In the Nazis’ attack on logic, all the major elements of their irrationalist epistemology—dogmatism, activism, pragmatism, relativism, subjectivism—blend and unite. Qua dogmatist, the Nazi holds faith to be superior to logic. Qua activist, he dismisses logic in favor of action. Qua pragmatist, he is free to endorse contradictions, provided they “work.” Qua relativist, he rejects the absolutism of the Law of Identity. And, qua subjectivist, the Nazi simply wipes out logic by giving its name to his random, “Aryan” feelings. These theories may differ somewhat. The conclusion to which they lead does not.

  Nor do these theories differ in their practical results.

  To the dogmatist who cannot persuade others to buy his revelations, there is a decisive method of silencing unbelievers : force. To the activist, the action to be taken is clear: murder. To the pragmatist, the thing that “works,” if it is massive enough, is: destruction. To the relativist, peace may have been a good thing yesterday, but there are no absolutes. To the subjectivists and racializers and polylogists, a bullet in the back is valid “for you.”

  On their own, the Nazis could not have begun to achieve what the intellectuals accomplished for them. On their own, the Nazis could not supply the thinking needed to undercut a country, not even the thinking that told men not to think. They could not supply the philosophy, not even the philosophy that told men to despise philosophy. All of this had to be originated, formulated, and spread by intellectuals—ultimately, by philosophers.

  But finding a country ready for them, the Nazis knew what to do with it. They knew how to add death-laden goose-steppers to the theory of unreason—and even what to call the combination, which was their version of the zeitgeist. Goebbels and Rosenberg called it: steel romanticism.

  These are “times when not the mind but the fist decides,” declared Hitler in Mein Kampf. The philosophers had eliminated the mind and provided him with the times he needed.

  “I need men who will not stop to think if they’re ordered to knock someone down!” Hitler told Rauschning. He had no trouble finding them.35

  Epistemology had done its work.

  4

  The Ethics of Evil

  In essence, there are two opposite approaches to morality: the pro-self approach versus the anti-self approach, or the ethics of egoism versus the ethics of self-sacrifice.

  Egoists hold that a man’s primary moral obligation is to achieve his own welfare (egoists do not necessarily agree on the nature of man’s welfare). Advocates of self-sacrifice hold that a man’s primary obligation is to serve some entity outside of himself. The first school holds that virtue consists of actions which benefit a man, which bring him a personal reward, a profit, a gain of some kind. The second holds that the essence of virtue is unrewarded duty, the renunciation of gain, self-denial. The first esteems the self and advocates selfishness, maintaining
that each man should be the beneficiary of his own actions. The second regards selfishness in any form as evil.

  “[T]he wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit,” declares Hitler in Mein Kampf; a man must “renounce putting forward his personal opinion and interests and sacrifice both....”

  Morality, writes Edgar Jung, a contemporary German rightist with the same viewpoint, consists in the “self-abandonment of the Ego for the sake of higher values.” Such an attitude, he notes, is the ethical base of collectivism, which demands of each man a life of “subservience to the Whole.” Individualism, by contrast—since it grants man the right to pursue his own happiness—rests on the opposite attitude: “Every form of individualism sets up the Ego as the highest value, thus stunting morality....”1

  The political implementation of “subservience to the Whole,” according to the Nazis, is subservience to the state—which requires of every German the opposite of self-assertion. Hence the ruling principle of Nazism, as defined by a group of Nazi youth leaders. The principle is: “We will.” “And, if anyone were still to ask: ‘What do we will?’—the answer is given by the basic idea of National Socialism: ‘Sacrifice!’ ”2

  Since the proper beneficiary of man’s sacrifices, according to Nazism, is the group (the race or nation), the essence of virtue or idealism is easy to define. It is expressed in the slogan “Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz” (“The common good comes before private good”). “This self-sacrificing will to give one’s personal labor and if necessary one’s own life for others,” writes Hitler,

  is most strongly developed in the Aryan. The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities as such, but in the extent of his willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community. In him the instinct of self-preservation has reached the noblest form, since he willingly subordinates his own ego to the life of the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it.3