The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  These, then, are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The scientific proof that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgement (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: “Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there.”45

  James spoke these words to the Harvard YMCA in October 1895. The movement he and Charles Peirce had founded was about to be hijacked, pulled and dragged in a direction quite contrary to the one they had in mind—and which would disrupt American politics for more than a generation. But forty years later, James’s words could serve as a rallying cry, as the forces of barbarism and darkness descended on Europe, from both the West and the East.

  * * *

  * The exception, of course, was slavery. But even here, Tocqueville noted, the clash was between two competing visions of liberty rather than between opposed political ideologies or conflicting classes.

  † His impact on Ludwig Wittgenstein was decisive. Wittgenstein read The Will to Believe and The Varieties of Religious Experience with his usual laser insight. They helped him to realize that the world he had described in the Tractatus, as a matrix of logic and scientific propositions, was missing a key component: real-life experience and how language seeks to describe it, however imperfectly. The next great stage in Wittgenstein’s philosophical quest, the analysis of ordinary language, which consumed him until his death in 1951, was at least in part inspired by James.

  Twenty-nine

  WORLDS AT WAR: PLATO AND ARISTOTLE IN THE VIOLENT CENTURY

  I see more clearly than ever before that even our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable and sound as it is dangerous—from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.

  —Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

  Aristotle’s philosophy was the intellect’s Declaration of Independence.

  —Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (1961)

  You can watch it in the Bundesarchiv newsreel footage. The crowds cheering along the entire motorcade route, the crowd waving bouquets of flowers; some weep. Others shout until they are hoarse: “Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!”

  It was March 14, 1938, and the Anschluss, the absorption of the nation of Austria into the Third Reich. Without a doubt it was the most popular event in Austria’s history.1 The majority of Austrians were tired of being losers; they wanted to be part of history’s winners. The writer Karl Kraus had once predicted that fin de siècle Vienna would be “the proving ground of world destruction.” The city of Ernst Mach, Sigmund Freud, and the Vienna Circle was also the city where Adolf Hitler had spent his youth as a starving artist, nursing his resentments against those he blamed for his personal and professional failures. Now in the spring of 1938 he was returning to Vienna in triumph, surrounded by chanting, adoring crowds and a sea of arms upthrust in the Nazi salute. Hitler later said that on returning, he met a stream of love such as he had never experienced. “I can only describe him,” said one eyewitness that afternoon, “as being in a state of ecstasy.”2

  Hitler began his revenge almost at once. Even as his black limousine rolled onto the Ringstrasse on March 14, his henchman Heinrich Himmler was rounding up more than seventy-five thousand “undesirables” in Vienna, meaning Jews. Days later, hundreds of Jewish men and women were on their hands and knees, set to work cleaning Vienna’s gutters. SS men gathered around, jeering and kicking their helpless prisoners. Crowds of ordinary Viennese joined in. An American eyewitness called it “an orgy of sadism.”3 What began that week in March 1938 would finish at Dachau and Auschwitz.

  From our point of view, Germany’s Third Reich was the end product of a Hegelian nation-state taken over by a racialized Nietzschean will to power. The yearning for absolute power to do good had become the tool for doing evil. One by one, the centers of intellectual life in eastern Europe, the new homes of Aristotle, would be devoured by its advance: Vienna and Graz in 1938, Prague in 1939, Warsaw and Lublin the same year. The major figures of Logical Positivism, many of whom were Jews, had sensed what was coming and fled abroad.

  One of them was a thirty-six-year-old former high school teacher who had attended several of the circle’s meetings in the heyday of the early thirties. He had found refuge even farther away than the others who moved to America or England, in New Zealand. In fact, he was sitting at his desk in Canterbury University College in Christchurch when news of the Anschluss reached him.

  It wasn’t hard for him to visualize the scene. Before he had left Vienna two years earlier, he had seen the groups of swastika-armbanded Nazis wandering the streets. They were young Austrians, drawn to the vision of an Aryan National Socialist state the way young Rousseauians had been drawn to the French Revolution 150 years earlier. Most had been singing Nazi songs and accosting anyone they thought might be a Jew. With a studied brutal hostility, one of them had come up to him and waved a pistol.

  Where are you from? Karl Popper asked. Carinthia, the young man replied contemptuously. Popper was about to say something when the young man stuck the pistol under his nose. “What, you want to argue?” he sneered. “I don’t argue, I shoot.”4

  Now the memory came back to Popper with a startling power. How could this happen? he asked himself. The hard-won fruits of two thousand years of Western civilization had been reason, tolerance, and individual freedom. It seemed incredible that an entire generation had decided to reject all three, not just in Austria and Nazi Germany, but in Soviet Russia, where Stalin’s purges were building to their bloodstained climax.*

  How had civilization gotten so off track? The answer, Karl Popper decided, was that it had been betrayed by its intellectual leadership, both past and present. One of the betrayers was clearly Georg Friedrich Hegel, the progenitor of the all-powerful modern state. Another was Karl Marx. But Popper saw another figure lurking deeper in the shadows to whom the blame for the rise of modern totalitarianism could largely be attached.

  That figure was Plato.

  Popper knew his conclusion would be shocking to scholars and the public alike. They had been conditioned by centuries of humanist education to consider Plato as the most eloquent and sublime of ancient Greek thinkers and, along with Aristotle, one of the twin pillars of Western thought.

  From Popper’s perspective, that was precisely the problem. Plato’s spell was hardly a humanist one. In fact, Popper would assert, it had been Plato in the Republic and the Laws who first encouraged Western man “to see the individual as a pawn, as a somewhat insignificant instrument in the general development” of society toward virtue. It was Plato’s assertion of “the principle of collective unity” and in the Laws that “no one should ever be without a leader” that had spawned the succession of would-be Philosopher Rulers who had bathed history in blood, from Plato’s friend the tyrant Dion of Syracuse to Stalin and Hitler.5

  Popper set to work that same day on the book that would eventually bear the title The Open Society and Its Enemies. He spent all of World War II writing it. He confessed to friends that he considered it his “war work,” as important to saving the West as building ships or manufacturing bombs. In his mind, it was a much needed riposte to a century and a half of philosophical doctrines that had attacked the Aristotelian “open society” of democracy, tolerance, pluralism, and free inquiry and celebrated the monistic uniformity, intolerance, and regimentation of the “closed” society for the sake of the ideals of virtue and justice.

  Hegel and Marx were Popper’s principal foes.† However, the entire first volume was an extended attack on Plato. Popper targeted more than just his political and social doctrines in the Republic—pretty fair game from a more pluralist perspective, as Aristo
tle was the first to show. He also hammered at their larger metaphysical basis. At bottom Popper’s thesis was that Plato had passed on to posterity a singularly dangerous vision of history.

  Popper dubbed that vision historicism. Hegel had shared it; Marx had inherited it. During his years in Vienna, Popper had already written a book on the subject, one that grew out of his interest in the philosophy of science.6 Popper defined historicism as the doctrine that history is governed by certain evolutionary laws, the discovery of which allows us to prophesy the destiny of mankind.

  Why did Popper think Plato’s historicism was important? First, because it destroys the notion of free will. It wrecks the notion that the future depends on us and the consequences of our own individual actions—the same principle, in fact, that William James had been arguing for on the other side of the Atlantic. Second, it encourages men to think they can use these laws to build a better future for society than if men are left to themselves. They become tempted to set themselves up as a ruling elite of Platonic Philosopher Rulers based on their knowledge of where History with a capital H is going. “The tendencies of historicism appeal to those who feel a call to be active: to interfere, especially with human affairs, refusing to accept the existing state of affairs as inevitable”—or as the result of human nature.7

  “The wise shall lead and rule,” Plato had written, “and the ignorant shall follow.” Reading this passage from the Laws in the light of Aristotelian and Enlightenment-based models made it clear that Plato intended to divide society between Those Who Know and Those Who Must Obey.8 “Never,” Popper wrote, “was a man more in earnest in his hostility to the individual” than Plato. Popper pointed to another passage from the Laws, written in the context of military tactics: “The greatest principle is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader.”9 It was this same principle that, Popper argued, the Communist Party in Russia, the Fascist Party in Italy, and the Nazi Party in Germany all embraced and made their own.

  Karl Popper (1902–94): He saw in Plato the roots of the totalitarianism that was engulfing the world.

  Was Popper right? Certainly the men who led Stalinist Russia, Mussolini’s Italy, and Nazi Germany saw themselves in historicist terms, as the vanguard of the future.10 On the other hand, Popper’s underestimation of the impact of Rousseau and Nietzsche, not to mention the racial doctrines springing from Darwin and his disciples missed half the target. All the same, we don’t have to accept Popper’s assessment of the totalitarian thrust of Plato’s philosophy to agree on one point. The twentieth century’s greatest ideological conflicts do mark the violent unfolding of a Platonist versus Aristotelian view of what it means to be free and how reason and knowledge ultimately fit into our lives.

  For Aristotle, the locus of rational planning had always been the individual and his oikos, or household. In the same way, justice, or who deserves what, pertains to the individual person apart from his or her social or economic function. No notion of individual or natural right can take root without it.11

  From the very start, Plato had argued the opposite. Justice belongs to the social and economic whole, the community. Indeed, it presupposes it. That community may be perfect (as in the Republic) or imperfect, depending on whether it upholds an absolute standard of virtue or goodness. However, the same basic rule applies. To belong is to submit to a definition of virtue and justice that is common to all, whether Philosopher Ruler or Guardian or Worker, because all are part of the whole. It is those who stand outside the system—the ones Plato dubbed foreigners, or metics—who receive no justice at all. “In a sense, their very existence as the Other undermines it: a point Rousseau picked up when he said that Spartans’ hatred of foreigners sprang from their love and respect for one another.

  What had been a theoretical exercise for Plato twenty-four centuries ago, and was obscured for nearly two thousand years by the evolution of Christianity, would become a major exercise in social engineering in the modern age. After Saint Augustine, Plato’s community of justice had been expanded and redefined as Christendom. Its sources of law and order and virtue were otherworldly. They were made softer, more broadly accessible and human, by Neoplatonism, in both its medieval and its Renaissance forms. Saint Bernard’s devotion to a religion of the heart does not make him appealing to the modern humanist. Conversely, Erasmus was deeply devoted to the welfare and advance of Christendom. But no one would ever accuse either one of being a totalitarian.

  When that Neoplatonist frame fell away, however, what was left was a commitment to the community of virtue in a starkly secular form. The Other for medieval Christianity had been preeminently outsiders: the Muslim, the Jew, and the infidel. In modern Europe, the Other suddenly appeared from within the community as dangerous parasites to be exposed and removed. The Other became Robespierre’s counterrevolutionaries; then Marx’s class enemies; and finally Hitler’s useless mouths and racial degenerates, including the Jews.

  “The first question we ask,” wrote one of Lenin’s minions, “is—to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education, profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This,” he added, “is the essence of the Red Terror.”12 It was not a sentence Plato or Augustine could have written. But Robespierre could, and did. Likewise Lenin and Goebbels. The collapse of Platonized Christianity under the Enlightenment assault, along with the Neoplatonist kingship of Louis XIV, had left certain hostages to fortune. The Romantics rescued some of them. But when men sought absolutes in the political sphere again—as they were bound to do—they found them in a communitarian vision shorn of any compassion or pity.

  Karl Popper was a philosopher, not a historian. In Popper’s view, it was Hegel and not Rousseau who was the pivotal figure in turning totalitarian theory into practice. Hegel, after all, had been the original inspirer of both Marx and the celebrants of the Prussian state that Hitler took over and fulfilled. More than anything else, it was Hegel’s belief that history made society a staging ground for the realization of perfection that united the totalitarians of the Left and the Right in 1939 against everyone else.

  At the same time, Popper saw Hegel’s role running deeper. The Enlightenment of Voltaire, Hume, and Adam Smith had built its social and political vision, including the role of commerce and free markets, around Aristotle’s idea that human nature is uniform and unchanging. Its belief in natural law and the growth of civil society; in the development of natural religion; in the notion of the unity of mankind running from Aquinas to Las Casas and Humboldt and Darwin; and in Thomas Reid’s conception of a democratic common sense: All presupposed that human beings will react to things the same way at all times and in all places. This also means they want and desire the same things as human beings, above all individual freedom.

  Hegel chose to deny this.13 Instead, he insisted human nature was itself created and shaped by historical forces, just as society was. It was history as the unfolding of the Absolute that finally determined what we are and who we want to be. This is why Hegel, the ultimate historical determinist, believed there are no “lessons” to be learned from history. Human beings learn nothing from experience. Instead, experience shapes them, including their wants and desires—however much they seem “natural” at the time.

  The Athenian citizen and the medieval Crusader; the Tuareg tribesman and the white explorer; Martin Luther and John Stuart Mill: In the Hegelian view, all see the world from entirely subjective perspectives determined by their historical time and place.‡ They have nothing in common beyond their biological needs. Instead, what they do share is being part of the historical process, moving parts on the ascent to the One, even if they are unaware of it.

  In this ultimate Big Picture, the self-interested individual of bourgeois capitalism is a temporary aberration. Hegel’s nation-state could mold him into something better and more edifying than the self-interested Wal-Mart shopper whom Rousseau and the Romantics had excoriated, but around whom Western civil society had built
itself. “In the perfection of the state,” Hegel had written, “each and every element … [will reach] its free existence” as each human being is molded to fit into that final perfect community.14

  Plato had created his Republic to make men better than they are. The same conceit (it seems) had infected Pythagoras, who attempted to make the citizens of Croton live according to his theory of perfection. They thanked him by driving him from Croton and throwing his works into the sea. The medieval Church inherited the same task, while never assuming it could really change man’s basic sinful nature. In the modern secular era, however, that acceptance of a limitation faded.

  Rousseau had taken up the Platonic conceit anew: by suppressing the desire of the individual, human beings can realize their moral redemption. Hegel had given Plato’s idea of statecraft as soulcraft15 a new intellectual varnish—one that drew not only extremists on the political left and right, but more moderate men casting around for an alternative to Marxism on one side, and fascism on the other.

  This was true even of America. James Madison had said, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” By 1900, however, certain Americans were beginning to think men could become angels, with government helping them to do it.

  They called themselves Progressives, and Hegel’s influence was profound. One of them was John Dewey, the creator of modern Progressive education and student of the most prominent neo-Hegelian in America, Johns Hopkins University’s George Sylvester Morris.16 Another was Harvard’s Josiah Royce, fierce opponent of the Pragmatic theories of William James. Still another was Herbert Croly, a former James student until he found headier fodder in the writings of Hegel. Croly’s Promise of American Life, published in 1909, marked the first major breakthrough of Hegel onto the American political scene.17 It also signaled the demise of laissez-faire economics as part of American liberalism.