Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  In regard to method, the basic novelty of this psychological variant of the Kantian viewpoint lies in the Freudians’ claim that their theories are a product, not of a priori philosophizing, but of scientific investigation based on clinical data. Judging by their methodological practice, scientific investigation for the Freudians consists in leaping from random observations to sweeping constructs devoid of evidential justification, rational or empirical; and then in declaring that these constructs are compatible with any factual data of any kind, and are therefore irrefutable. (For example, if one finds no sign of an Oedipus complex, it has, one is told, been “repressed”; if one finds evidence contradicting it, there has been a “reaction formation”; etc.)

  This unprecedented approach to scientific inquiry is a corollary of the basic Freudian theory: if man’s mind, as Freud says, is ruled by forces indifferent to facts, forces which are “unmoved by logical rebuttal, and unaffected though reality refutes them,”12 then science in the nineteenth-century sense—science as the rigorous, logical pursuit of objective knowledge—is impossible. The “new science”—like the new philosophy, the new theology, the new art—becomes instead a vehicle of the willful, the arbitrary, the subjective.

  Kant had made the attack on the self the essence of virtue. Here, too, Freud is a follower.

  The real root of the outrage his own doctrines provoked, Freud says with a certain pride, is their assault on “the self-love of humanity.” Whatever the “wounds” that men have suffered from earlier scientific theories, he explains, the “blow” of psychoanalysis “is probably the most wounding.” The blow, he states, is the idea that man is not “supreme in his own soul,” “that the ego is not master in its own house.”13

  These formulations, while eloquent, are too generalized to capture fully the essence of Freud’s “wound”: Freud did not originate determinism—or irrationalism, or collectivism, or the theory of Original Sin, or cynicism, or pessimism (or even the idea of the unconscious). What he did originate, relying on all these theories, is a specific, and in its details unprecedented, view of man.

  Freud offers to the world not man the dutiful, decorous nonperceiver (as in Kant); not man the defeated plaything of grand-scale forces, such as a malevolent reality or God or society or a “tragic flaw” (as in the works of countless traditional cynics and pessimists); but man the defeated plaything of the gutter; man the smutty pawn shaped by sexual aberrations and toilet training, itching to rape his mother, castrate his father, hoard his excrement; man the sordid cheat who pursues science because he is a frustrated voyeur, practices surgery because he is a sublimating sadist, and creates the David because he craves, secretly, to mold his own feces.

  Man as a loathsomely small, ordure-strewn pervert: such is the sort of “wound” that Freud infficted on the being who had once been defined, in a radiantly different age, as the “rational animal.”

  The expression “beyond freedom and dignity,” it has been said, names a distinctively modem view of man. By this standard, Freud is the preeminent modern. In relation to him, B.F. Skinner and the behaviorists, and Heidegger and Barth, and even Thomas Mann, are pikers.

  In virtually every important scholarly field, German culture during the twenties was pervaded by new developments—some explicitly disowning the “mechanistio,” “bourgeois” nineteenth century, others wearing a fig leaf of traditional elements ; some hailed as antiscience, others as new science; some widely known and popular, others academic and cloistered. The educated German could hear the voice of the “Weimar vision” everywhere.

  He could hear it from intellectual leaders such as Max Weber, one of the major influences in the popular young field of sociology, who declared that an objective social science can have nothing to do with ethics or with absolutes of any kind, but must be relativist, tentative, “value-free.” There were young innovators in the “sociology of knowledge,” such as Karl Mannheim, who held that man is moved by class interest and therefore is incapable of objective thought (except for a special elite, the intelligentsia, who transcend this law of human nature). There was the prominent sociologist Werner Sombart, a onetime Marxist who, deciding that values are inescapable and objectivity irrelevant, proceeded to belly flop into the waiting arms of mysticism, “German” socialism, and the Führer.

  Political scientists such as Carl Schmitt and Robert Michels “laid bare the irrational basis of political behavior to such an extent as to destroy any possibility for orderly democratic political organization. . . .”14 The progressive educators were telling German parents that the communication of knowledge is harmful to the process of education, which should focus instead on the child’s feelings, fantasies, and social adjustment. The highly reputable art historians associated with the Warburg Institute were pioneering the introduction of new topics into their field, such as the study of magic, astrology, and the occult. The erudite theoreticians and social commentators of the Frankfurt Institute were formulating a new, “Western” Marxism melding the socialism of Marx with the idealism of Hegel and the sex theories of Freud. The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, in the name of a scientific approach to philosophy, were launching their unprecedented assault against logic, concepts, certainty, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and even philosophy itself.

  Meanwhile, the younger physicists—typified by Werner Heisenberg, whose Uncertainty Principle was announced in 1927—were suggesting to the avant-garde that the traditional Newtonian-Einsteinian view of a universe fully accessible to man’s mind is outdated, inasmuch as the subatomic realm is ruled not by cause and effect, but ultimately by chance (a viewpoint once confined to the age of pre-physics). Even the professional mathematicians, the onetime guardians of the citadel of certainty and of logical consistency, caught the hang of the modem spirit. In 1931, they were apprised of the latest Viennese development in the field, Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, according to which logical consistency (and therefore certainty) is precisely the attribute that no system of mathematics can ever claim to possess. “There are no guarantees . . . that our cherished edifices of logic and mathematics are free of contradiction”—explained The New York Times many years later, describing “Gödel’s awesome achievement”—“and our daily assumptions to that effect are mere acts of faith.”15

  One American psychologist, summarizing Freudian theory in 1933, makes a statement applicable in principle to all of the above and to many similar developments (most of which arose independently of one another and of any Freudian influence) : “The notion of ‘reason enthroned’ disappears into myth, and the rational man collapses. . . .”16

  As to the kind of man who is left after this happens, he was free to contemplate everywhere the embodiments of his kind of soul: not only the modem novels, but the raving soliloquies of the Expressionists, the “alienated” noise of their music, the piglike snouts of their paintings, the stinking suns of their poems. There were also the semi-Expressionist melanges of the avowedly “anti-Aristotelian” dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, who was urging that playwrights destroy the “theatrical illusion,” by such means as intermixing a play’s action with the voice of an off-stage narrator, and having the actors step into and out of their roles; and there was the mass of self-consciously ugly images that had swarmed into Germany from abroad, spawned by trends such as Cubism and Surrealism and Italian Futurism. “Logic, order, truth, reason, we consign them all to the oblivion of death,” said one Surrealist manifesto. We must “cultivate the hatred of intelligence,” said the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Marinetti, an artist hailed by Mussolini as the John the Baptist of Fascism.17

  There were also the models for many of the above, the ancient models that the new artists, eager for guidance in the new methods, unearthed and strove to emulate. The artists turned not only to the medievals, but also to African primitivism, Bushman paintings, Asian mystery religions, Polynesian witchcraft, the “atavistic clairvoyance” heralded by Rudolf Steiner, and the artifacts of patients locked up in lunatic
asylums.

  Such is the kind of art, and the kind of cultural-philosophical trend, which, in a spectrum of varying forms and degrees, the new rebels created and spread throughout the country, once they got their foot in the door.

  The mind cannot know truth, said the new philosophy. The mind dare not know itself, said the new psychology. The mind cannot understand nature, said the new physics. The mind cannot reach God, said the new theology. The mind is unspiritual and unfeeling, said the new literature. The mind stifles self-expression, said the new education. The mind is banal, said the new art.

  The mind is dead, said the new culture. It cannot know reality, it cannot grasp the good, it does not move man.

  Man, said the new vision, is guilty, disoriented, futile. He is a being frozen by terror, a cipher, a monster, a filthy little psychopath. The appropriate response to such a being, said the vision’s spreaders, is pity or revulsion or an ironic yawn.

  This is a new culture and a new, modem vision.

  There have been mystical cultures in the West prior to our century (in the non-Western world, they have dominated all history). The two most enduring were those of the pre-Greek and the medieval periods. The men of these eras understood, in some terms, how to think, and as a matter of practical necessity they did think to some extent; but they were unable to identify the nature of the process of thought or the principles by which to guide it. The pre-Greek civilizations, never discovering the field of epistemology, had no explicit idea of a cognitive process which is systematic, secular, observation-based, logic-ruled; the medievals for centuries had no access to most of this knowledge. The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach. In essence, the spokesmen of these earlier times did not know what reason is, or, therefore, what it makes possible in human life.

  The Weimar culturati knew it. So do the rest of the modems.

  They know the philosophical discoveries of ancient Greece, they have seen the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the nineteenth century. They know what had been possible in every field during the more rational eras of the Western past. They know what was possible to Aristotle, to Aquinas, to Michelangelo, to Galileo, to Newton, to Jefferson, to a line of thinkers and creators, to man. The twentieth-century rejection of the mind is not implicit or uninformed; the eyes of the modernists are purposeful and open, wide open in a campaign to close all eyes.

  There is a second difference between modem culture and its mystical predecessors. In whatever terms the spokesmen of earlier eras did grasp and then reject the dictates of reason, they did it primarily as a protective measure, to preserve and propagate ideas, however otherworldly, ideas which they identified reverently as truth. They sought to protect from question or attack a cosmogonic legend, a cherished theological system, a holy faith revealing to them the nature of the gods or God, of the good and the right, of man’s destiny and salvation. When such cultures attacked man, it was on the grounds that he did not measure up to the perfection ascribed to a supernatural realm.

  Modern culture is not otherworldly. Among the Weimar intellectuals, organized religion was no longer a living power. Nor did these intellectuals regard secular philosophy as any kind of power or value. The leaders and spokesmen of modem culture, German or otherwise, do not endorse any organized set of principles. They do not accept revelation or reason. Whatever their dogmatic subsects, which surface now and then, the modern intellectuals, characteristically and philosophically, are not zealots, but relativists or skeptics. They do not seek salvation, but claim that there is none. Their countenance is not transfigured by an upward glance at truth; it is disfigured by a sneer proclaiming the futility of ideas.

  The sneer is expressed by philosophic movements which boastfully offer no message, by educators who deliberately teach no subject matter, by artists whose work eliminates recognizable content, by psychologists who hold that ideas are mere rationalizations, by novelists such as Thomas Mann, and by all the alleged valuers in all these groups, which purport to love Mankind as a whole, a love whose reality may be gauged by a single fact: the same groups extol Mankind, while vilifying men—and man.

  The moderns reject reason “disinterestedly,” with no explicit idea of anything to put in its place, no alternative means of knowledge, no formal dogma to preserve or protect. And they reject reason passionately, along with every one of its cardinal products and expressions, every achievement it took human thought centuries of struggle to rise to, define, or reach. In form, the modernists’ monolithic rejection consists of many mutually contradictory claims; in essence, their line has been consistent and unbreached.

  Man’s science, they say, requires the dismissal of values (Max Weber), his feelings require the dismissal of science (Heidegger), his society requires the dismissal of the individual (the Frankfurt Institute), his individuality requires liberation from logic (the Bauhaus)—logic is oppression, consistency is an illusion, causality is dated, free will is a myth, morality is a convention, self-esteem is immoral, heroism is laughable, individual achievement is nineteenth-century, personal ambition is selfish, freedom is antisocial, business is exploitation, wealth is swinish, health is pedestrian, happiness is superficial, sexual standards are hypocrisy, machine civilization is an obscenity, grammar is unfair, communication is impossible, law and order are boring, sanity is bourgeois, beauty is a lie, art is shit.

  Truth is unknowable, the modern relativists say. And the truth, they say, is the absurdity of life, absurdity and nothingness and crawling human lice. They say it, but they do not believe it in the way that men did once believe its equivalents. When Tertullian said that the Incarnation is an absurdity and therefore certain, it expressed the viewpoint of a religious fanatic, who worshiped what he called absurd. The modern cult of absurdity is different; the Dadaists and their ilk do not worship public urinals or Hamlet slipping on soap or Beethoven symphonies played backwards. When real Oriental mystics proclaim the primacy of Nirvana, their self-flagellating, insect-revering lives are testimony to the fact that in some terms they mean it. When twentieth-century Western Orientalists say that all is “nothingness,” they say it on a full stomach; the zero they preach through the latest microphones does not disturb their routine, their footnotes, their cocktail parties, or their royalties. When the art of savages portrayed man as a cringing monstrosity, it was a terrified attempt to placate the jealous gods of the tribe. When modem savage-emulators portray their vision of man, they do not believe the witchcraft they borrow; they do it not in terror, but with a snicker; while their counterparts in the humanities, expressing the same vision, take pride in being “flexible”: they are not disturbed if someone denies the Oedipus complex, and substitutes as the key to human nature an inferiority complex or an orgasm complex or a collective unconscious or any equivalent, so long as it is an equivalent, which leaves a single constant untouched.

  What the moderns actually believe in and seek to accomplish is not the exaltation of an absurdity above the power of science, but the sabotage of science; not the adoration of das Nichts, but the defeat of this world; not human abasement as a desperate plea to the gods, but human abasement for the sake of human abasement.

  When the leading voices of the emotionalist Republic championed “feeling,” it was not as a source of knowledge or of human happiness, but of freedom: the freedom from objectivity, method, logic, fact. It was feeling not as an alleged means to truth, but as the nullification of thought.

  In a masterly essay analyzing the modern sense of life, Ayn Rand points to the pervasive twentieth-century attacks on intelligence, success, achievement, beauty, and identifies the essence and the evil of the spirit they reveal. That essence, she writes, is “hatred of the good for being the good.”18

  The modern cultural rebellion is an eloquent testament, on an all-encompassing scale, to the truth of her identification. “Modern culture” is institutionalized hatred of the good. “The good,” in this context, includes reason,
reality, and man.

  This rebellion is not merely skepticism, which is an ancient theory denying that knowledge is possible; or pessimism, which denies that success is possible; or cynicism, which denies that virtue is possible; or decadence, which settles wearily for festering disintegration; or even sadism, which manufactures human pain. The term that captures twentieth-century culture; the term that includes all of these and every similar, value-annulling doctrine and attitude; the term that names the modern soul is: nihilism.

  “Nihilism” in this context means hatred, the hatred of values and of their root, reason. Hatred is not the same as disapproval, contempt, or anger. Hatred is loathing combined with fear, and with the desire to lash out at the hated object, to wound, to disfigure, to destroy it.

  The essence and impelling premise of the nihilist-modern is the quest for destruction, the destruction of all values, of values as such, and of the mind. It is a destruction he seeks for the sake of destruction, not as a means, but as an end.

  This is what underlies, generates, and defines “Weimar culture.”

  Contrary to the cataract of rationalizations spread by their apologists, the Weimar intellectuals were not moved by a feeling of rebellion against the stifling conformity of the German bourgeoisie or the Prussian mindlessness of the imperial establishment. Men do not rebel against mindlessness by urging the abandonment of the mind, and they do not rebel against a specific social class by lashing out at man as such.

  The roots of Weimar culture do not lie in the disgust of the younger intellectuals at the senseless slaughter of World War I or the frenzied insanity of the German inflation or any similar “practical” horror. Men do not fight against senselessness by demanding more of it, or against horror by wallowing in it, or against rot by glorifying disease, or against insanity by enshrining lunatics.

  The actuating impulse of the Weimar modems was not passion for innovation. Innovation does not consist in reversion to the prescientific era, or in movements urging “back to Kant” or back to Luther or back to astrology, Bushman paintings, and jungle dance rituals.