In epistemology, the ultimate practical purpose of each element is the same. The purpose in ethics is the same, too: to wipe out the possibility of intellectual independence and thus ensure obedience to the Führer.
On what moral grounds, even in the privacy of his own mind, could a man, accepting the Nazi ethics, object to or resist any decree, no matter how brutal or monstrous, issued to him by the spokesman and embodiment of the Volk? On the grounds that the decree destroys his personal values—his goals, ambitions, happiness, life? Qua altruist, he has been trained to the view that he must learn to sacrifice for the sake of others. On the grounds that the decree visits suffering, expropriation, and death upon other men, who are innocent? Qua altruist, he has been trained to the view that they must learn to sacrifice for the sake of others. On the grounds that the decree violates his conscience, his independent moral judgment? Qua social subjectivist, he has been trained to the view that moral judgment is not his prerogative, but society’s. On the grounds that the decree violates his principles? Qua pragmatist, he has been trained to the view that whatever works, as judged by the Führer, is right. On the grounds that the decree commands an absolute evil, which must be fought to the end? Qua relativist, he has been trained to the view that there are no absolutes.
The true Nazi, the man who has been philosophically prepared by all these doctrines, understands his function. He is not to express himself, but to do his duty; not to uphold his desires, but to sacrifice them; not to raise moral questions, but to accept the answers given by others; not to cling to moral principles, but to adapt himself to the ever changing voice of the collective as it determines the purpose of his life and every means to that purpose. In the field of morality, the Nazi’s primary obligation is to renounce, to renounce his self, in the full, literal sense of the term: his values, in the name of society; his judgment, in the name of authority; his convictions, in the name of flexibility.
The Nazi metaphysics and epistemology preach mind-sacrifice, thereby removing facts and thought (-reality and reason) from the Führer’s path. The Nazi ethics completes the job: by preaching self-sacrifice, it removes morality from his path. The result is the destruction on every level of the possibility of individual self-assertion. The graduate of the Nazi epistemology asks: “Who am I to know?” His counterpart in ethics asks: “Who am I to know what is right?” Both give the same answer, the one absolute of their anti-absolutist mentality: “No man is an island. The Volk, or the Führer. knows best.” It
SS Captain Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, was asked at the Nuremberg trials what his feelings were on a certain day in August 1943, when he had personally stripped and then gassed eighty women at the Natzweiler camp. He replied : “I had no feelings in carrying out these things because I had received an order to kill the eighty inmates in the way I already told you. That, by the way, was the way I was trained.”43
If one fully understands this answer of Josef Kramer, in a manner that Kramer himself perhaps did not, if one understands “the way he was trained”—trained on the deepest of all levels, at the core of his person, i.e., trained philosophically —one need look no further for the explanation of Nazism. What other practical result could anyone expect from a man or a culture shaped to the roots by every imaginable variant of the soul-killing ideas of a century of mind-killing, ego-killing philosophy?
Most men, encountering Kant’s philosophy—and particularly his ethics—for the first time, regard it as inconceivable, as a perverted theory that no one could mean, live by, or ever attempt to translate into action. These same men usually regard Nazism—the actual practice of Nazism in Germany, in Poland, in the world—as inconceivable.
But in grammar, two negatives make a positive; and in a culture, in this case, two “inconceivables,” if seen in relation to each other, make luminous clarity.
The Nazis took the inconceivable in theory and applied it to men’s actual existence in the only way it could be done. They took the perversion in the realm of ideas and turned it into sacrificial furnaces in the realm of reality. Nothing else can explain the Nazi ideology. Nothing less can explain the Nazi practice.
He was a faithful Kantian, Adolph Eichmann told his Israeli judges. In all his bloody career, he said, he had helped some Jews only twice, and he apologized for these exceptions. “This uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous duties,” writes Hannah Arendt,
damned him in the eyes of the judges more than anything else, which was comprehensible, but in his own eyes it was precisely what justified him, as it had once silenced whatever conscience he might have had left. No exceptions—this was the proof that he had always acted against his ‘inclinations,’ whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his ‘duty.’
Most Germans, Miss Arendt observes, “must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom.... But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”44
A nation taught, in the name of morality, to reject the pursuit of values can reach no other end-of-trail. Men without values are zombies or puppets—or Nazis.
The ranks of the Nazi movement were filled with mindless activists and nonideological brawlers, but, unknown to themselves, they acted and brawled in the service of a philosophy, the one to which the party leaders always remained faithful.
The leaders, too, were anti-intellectual. They said (in private) that Nazi ideology was merely an instrument for the control of the masses, but they never relinquished the instrument or changed its nature in any essential way. In regard to ideas, they were “pragmatic,” eclectic, whim-ridden—and single-minded. Guided in part by explicit understanding of the issues, and in larger part by unidentified emotional feel, they were prepared to switch everything about their creed, except its fundamentals.
The Nazi leaders kept rewriting the theory of Aryan racism, even, during the war, going so far as to make room beside the master race for the yellow-skinned Japanese. But they never tampered with the heart of the racist theory: the worship of the group; nor did they ever make room for that which would not fit into any of the theory’s variants: the independent individual. They presented themselves to the Germans as monarchists or, when more convenient, as radicals, as conservatives or as revolutionaries—but always as advocates of power, state power, more state power. They were theists or skeptics, idealists or materialists, dogmatists or pragmatists, but in every version they were avowed enemies of reason. They demanded self-sacrifice for the sake of the Führer or the race or the poor or the unwed mothers in the winter snow, but they demanded self-sacrifice.
“Providence,” said Hitler to Rauschning,
has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.45
Here he offers, if not the proper evaluation, then at least the correct order and the essential content of the Nazi philosophy, in epistemology, in ethics, in politics.
To liberate humanity from intelligence, Hitler counted on the doctrines of irrationalism. To rid men of conscience, he counted on the morality of altruism. To free the world of freedom, he counted on the idea of collectivism.
These three theories together constitute the essence of the Nazi philosophy, which never changed from the start of the movement to its end.
It has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philosophy and as an expression of it. It has been said that the Nazis are not ideologists but power-lusters. In fact, they are power-lusters whose power depends on a specific ideology. It has been said that the Nazis are not thinkers but criminals. The truth is that they are criminals spawned by thinkers,
i.e., philosophically produced criminals—which is what gave them the kind of world-historical role denied to any plain criminal.
The intellectuals of the West today (as at the time of Hit ler) are a product of the same philosophical trend. Most of them, still reflecting some remnant of a better past, condemn the actions of Hitler, while advocating the same basic ideas that he did (though in different variants). Such men are helpless to understand Nazism or to explain its emergence or to fight it. They purport to find the roots of Nazism in anything—in any practical crisis or any crackpot ideologue buried in the interstices of German history—in anything except fundamental philosophic ideas, the ones openly championed all around us, the ones they themselves share. Then they are forced to admit that by their account the rise of Nazism is inexplicable.
One such scholar, after presenting Nazism as an outlandish version of a narrow nineteenth-century political theory (Social Darwinism), concludes as follows: “But that such a collection of ideas could capture the allegiance of millions of rational men and women will perhaps always remain something of a mystery.”46 If his account of the Nazi ideology were true, the success of Nazism would be more than “something of a mystery”; it would be wholly unintelligible.
No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy—not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams—which turned the Germans into a nation of killers.
The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.
Twice in our century Germany fought to rule and impose its culture on the rest of the world. It lost both wars. But on a deeper level it is achieving its goal nevertheless. It is on the verge of winning the philosophical war against the West, with everything this implies.
The ideas of German philosophy have long since jumped national borders and become the trend of the West. Half the countries of Europe are already enslaved by such ideas. The rest of the continent, under similar guidance, is on the point of collapse.
There is only one country which, though paralyzed at present, is still able to resist the German takeover. In all history, it is the least likely candidate for such a takeover, if it can regain its own ideas and its self-esteem in time.
The last battle of the war of the century is now taking place—in the last of the great, unconquered nations left on earth.
5
The Nation of the Enlightenment
Since the golden age of Greece, there has been only one era of reason in twenty-three centuries of Western philosophy. During the final decades of that era, the United States of America was created as an independent nation. This is the key to the country—to its nature, its development, and its uniqueness: the United States is the nation of the Enlightenment.
Thomas Aquinas’s reintroduction of Aristotelianism was the beginning—the beginning of the end of the medieval period, the beginning of the beginning of the era of reason.
The Renaissance carried Aquinas’s achievement further. The fading of the power of religion; the revolt against the authority of the church; the breakup of the feudal caste system; the widespread assimilation of the thought of pagan antiquity; the brilliant outpouring of inventions, of explorations, of man-glorifying art; the first momentous steps of modern science—all of it meant that men had finally rediscovered the reality and the promise of this earth, of man, of man’s mind.
The seventeenth century carried the advance still further, by means of two major achievements: in science, the discoveries that culminated in the Newtonian triumph; in philosophy, the creation (by Descartes, Locke, and others) of the first modern systems, the first attempts to provide Western man with a comprehensive world view incorporating the discoveries of the new science. Whatever their contradictions, these systems are united in proclaiming one crucial programmatic manifesto: let us sweep aside the errors of the past and make a fresh start; the universe is intelligible; there is nothing outside man’s power to know, if he uses the proper method of knowledge; the method is reason.
The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the buildup toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture ; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present. The desperate battle, it seemed at the time, had finally been won: science had won; ignorance, superstition, faith—i.e., religion—had lost. The promise of the earlier centuries, it seemed, had now been fulfilled. The philosophers and scientists had delivered on that promise, and men were intoxicated not merely by a program and a potential, but by the proven power and actual achievements of man’s mind.
Once again, as in the high point of classical civilization, the thinkers of the West regarded the acceptance of reason as uncontroversial. They regarded the exercise of man’s intellect not as a sin to be proscribed, or as a handmaiden to be tolerated, or even as a breathtaking discovery to be treated gingerly, but as virtue, as the norm, the to-be-expected.
It was only a brief span of decades. It did not last.
Because the systems of seventeenth-century philosophy were profoundly flawed in every fundamental branch and issue, the very thinkers who took the lead in championing reason were also (unwittingly) preparing the way for its eventual banishment from the philosophic scene. They were committing all the disastrous errors of omission and commission that would shortly open the door to Hume, and then to Kant, and then to the post-Kantian revolt against the faculty of thought. In the graph of modern man’s ascent from stagnant mindlessness, the Enlightenment is the high point and the final entry. Major existential and cultural expressions of the Enlightenment mind continued to develop into the nineteenth century and even thereafter—in science, in the rise of romantic art, in the Industrial Revolution; but as a pervasive philosophic force, the West’s commitment to reason ended with the eighteenth century.
Betrayed and abandoned at its height, the Enlightenment was a fleeting, precarious reprieve for the West, a brief respite from the reign of mysticism, a fragile oasis of man’s liberated intellect bounded on one side by the desert of the Dark and Middle Ages (and the mixed, transitional centuries leading out of them), and on the other by the jungle of post-Kantian irrationalism.
The oasis has long since disappeared, but there is still one nation to stand as its monument: the United States of America.
Almost without exception the countries of the world owe their origins to nonideological factors: to the accidents of war, the meaningless warfare of clashing tribes, or of geography, language, custom, etc. The United States is the first nation in history to be created on the basis of ideas. Its Founding Fathers were not tribal chiefs or power-lusting conquerors or a revelation-encrusted priesthood; they were thinkers, thinkers of the Enlightenment—educated, articulate, thoroughly imbued with the ideas of the period. Jeered at by traditionalists on both sides of the Atlantic, these men proposed to create a nation whose institutions would be without precedent, and to do it on the basis of a theory, an abstract theory of the nature of man and of the universe. The United States, they decided, would be the first country in history to stand for something. It would be the first nation to have an avowed philosophic meaning.
Just as men have always been influenced by some form of philosophy, yet historians properly ascribe the birth of the science—its origin as an explicit discipline—to the ancient Greeks, so with nations: they have always been influenced by some form of philosophy, yet it was not until the United States that philosophy, as an explicit system of ideas, generated the birth of a cou
ntry. The Greeks discovered philosophy. The Americans were the first to build a nation on that discovery.
Although the Enlightenment spread across Europe, introducing a liberalizing influence wherever its ideas were taken seriously (notably in England and France), there was no European country in which these ideas penetrated to the root. In Europe, the Enlightenment was in the nature of an intellectual fashion superimposed on antithetic and deeply entrenched sociopolitical structures. But the United States was a new country, a new country in a new world, and there was no such established structure to contend with. For the first and only time, the ideas of the Enlightenment became the root, the actual foundation of a nation’s political institutions.
This is the great, historic feat of the United States, the source of the uniquely American character, the cause of the country’s spectacular, unprecedented achievements.
But this is also the key to the tragedy of the United States. A nation based on a philosophy cannot permanently survive the collapse of that philosophy. When the European Enlightenment collapsed, there were no American thinkers of consequence to sustain or defend its principles.
Although it is the country created by philosophy, America has never produced a major philosopher. The Founding Fatbers were thinkers but not philosophic innovators. They took their basic ideas from European intellectuals, they assumed with the rest of their age that these ideas were now incontestable and even self-evident, and they turned their attention to the urgent task of implementing these ideas in the realm of practical affairs.
This has always been the American pattern: from its colonial beginnings to the present day, American philosophy has been nothing but a reflection of European philosophy. Judged in terms of essentials, American thought has been a wholly derivative phenomenon, a passive, faithful handmaiden to the trends and fashions of Europe.
Ominous Parallels Page 11