Key ideas: Previously published as part of Peikoff's 1982 book The Ominous Parallels. “The non-modern (and non-old-fashioned) aspect of Leonard Peikoff’s book is the breadth of his vision and the stunning scale of his philosophic integration. He does not share the concrete-bound, college-induced myopia of those alleged philosophers who study the various meanings of the word “but” (the contemporary empiricists)—nor does he share the foggy stumbling presents the history of Germany’s philosophy, in telling essentials. . . . Then he presents the practical results—the way in which philosophic ideas direct the course and shape the particular events of the history of [the Weimar Republic], as reflected in politics, economics, art, literature, education, etc. This last is the cardinal achievement of Dr. Peikoff s book.” (Ayn Rand)
Here is the theory:
It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole . . . that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual. . . .
This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture. . . . The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call—to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness—idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.
These statements were made in our century by the leader of a major Western nation. His countrymen regarded his viewpoint as uncontroversial. His political program implemented it faithfully.
The statements were made by Adolf Hitler. He was explaining the moral philosophy of Nazism.
And here is the ultimate practice (as described by William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich):
The gas chambers themselves [at Auschwitz] and the adjoining crematoria, viewed from a short distance, were not sinister-looking places at all; it was impossible to make them out for what they were. Over them were well-kept lawns with flower borders; the signs at the entrances merely said BATHS. The unsuspecting Jews thought they were simply being taken to the baths for the delousing which was customary at all camps. And taken to the accompaniment of sweet music! …
To such music, recalling as it did happier and more frivolous times, the men, women and children were led into the ‘bath houses,’ where they were told to undress preparatory to taking a ‘shower.’ Sometimes they were even given towels. Once they were inside the ‘shower-room’—and perhaps this was the first moment that they may have suspected something was amiss, for as many as two thousand of them were packed into the chamber like sardines, making it difficult to take a bath—the massive door was slid shut, locked and hermetically sealed. Up above where the well-groomed lawn and flower beds almost concealed the mushroom-shaped lids of vents that ran up from the hall of death, orderlies stood ready to drop into them the amethyst- blue crystals of hydrogen cyanide. . . .
“Surviving prisoners watching from blocks nearby remembered how for a time the signal for the orderlies to pour the crystals down the vents was given by a Sergeant Moll. ‘Na, gib ihnen schon zu fressen’ (‘All right, give ’em something to chew on’), he would laugh and the crystals would be poured through the openings, which were then sealed.
The Nazis were not a tribe of prehistoric savages. Their crimes were the official, legal acts and policies of modern Germany—an educated, industrialized, civilized Western European nation, a nation renowned throughout the world for the luster of its intellectual and cultural achievements. By reason of its long line of famous artists and thinkers, Germany has been called “the land of poets and philosophers.”
But its education offered the country no protection against the Sergeant Molls in its ranks. The German university students were among the earliest groups to back Hitler. The intellectuals were among his regime’s most ardent supporters. Professors with distinguished academic credentials, eager to pronounce their benediction on the Führer’s cause, put their scholarship to work full time; they turned out a library of admiring volumes, adorned with obscure allusions and learned references. …
The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. The essence of the political system which Hitler intended to establish in Germany was clear.
In 1933, when Hitler did establish the system he had promised, he did not find it necessary to forbid foreign travel. Until World War II, those Germans who wished to flee the country could do so. The overwhelming majority did not. They were satisfied to remain.
If the term “statism” designates concentration of power in the state at the expense of individual liberty, then Nazism in politics was a form of statism.
Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective —society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.—is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it—or its representative, the state—deems this desirable.
Fascism, said one of its leading spokesmen, Alfredo Rocco, stresses
the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals, in behalf of society. . . . For Liberalism [i.e., individualism], the individual is the end and society the means; nor is it conceivable that the individual, considered in the dignity of an ultimate finality, be lowered to mere instrumentality. For Fascism, society is the end, individuals the means, and its whole life consists in using individuals as instruments for its social ends.
But the Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument. Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, socialism. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. “Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.
“To be a socialist,” says Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.” …
An evil of such magnitude cannot be a product of superficial factors. In order to make it, and its German popularity, intelligible, one must penetrate to its deepest, most hidden roots. One must grasp its nature and its causes in terms of fundamentals.
Unfortunately, this has not been the approach of most observers. As a rule, commentators have attempted to explain Nazism by the opposite method: by the newspaper headlines or the practical crises of the moment.
It has been said, for instance, that the Germans embraced Nazism because they lost World War I. Austria lost that war also, but this did not cause it to turn Nazi (it went under only when invaded by Hitler in 1938). Italy, on the other hand, one of the victorious powers at the Versailles Conference of 1919, went Fascist in 1922. …
There are the Aryan racists in reverse, who say that the cause of Nazism is the “innate depravity” of the Germans. This evades the fact that “depravity” is a moral concept, which implies that man is not predetermined but has free choice. It also evades the fact that regimes similar to Hitler’s, regimes differing only in the degree of brutality they perpetrated, have appeared in our century across the globe—not only in Italy, Japan, Argentina, and the like, but also, in the form of communism, in Russia, China, and their satellites. …
We dare not brush aside unexplained a horror such as Nazism. If we are to avoid a fate like that of Germany, we must find out what made such a fate possible. We must find out what, at root, is required to turn a country, Germany or any other, into a Nazi dictatorship; and then we must uproot that root. …
In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible? …
Something made so many Germans so vulnerable to a takeover. Something armed the criminals and disarmed the country.
Observe in this connection that the Nazis, correctly, regarded the power of propaganda as an indispensable tool.
The Nazis could not have won the support of the German masses but for the systematic preaching of a complex array of theories, doctrines, opinions, notions, beliefs. And not one of their central beliefs was original. They found those beliefs, widespread and waiting, in the culture; they seized upon them and broadcast them at top volume, thrusting them with a new intensity back into the streets of Germany. And the men in the streets heard and recognized and sympathized with and embraced those beliefs, and voted for their exponents.
The Germans would not have recognized or embraced those beliefs in the nineteenth century, when the West was still being influenced by the remnants of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, when the doctrines of the rights of man and the autonomy of the individual were paramount. But by the twentieth century such doctrines, and the convictions on which they depended, were paramount no longer.
Germany was ideologically ripe for Hitler. The intellectual groundwork had been prepared. The country’s ideas—a certain special category of ideas— were ready.
Metaphysics identifies the nature of the universe as a whole. It tells men what kind of world they live in, and whether there is a supernatural dimension beyond it. It tells men whether they live in a world of solid entities, natural laws, absolute facts, or in a world of illusory fragments, unpredictable miracles, and ceaseless flux. It tells men whether the things they perceive by their senses and mind form a comprehensible reality, with which they can deal, or some kind of unreal appearance, which leaves them staring and helpless.
Epistemology identifies the proper means of acquiring knowledge. It tells men which mental processes to employ as methods of cognition, and which to reject as invalid or deceptive. Above all, epistemology tells men whether reason is their faculty of gaining knowledge, and if so how it works— or whether there is a means of knowledge other than reason, such as faith, or the instinct of society, or the feelings of the dictator.
Ethics defines a code of values to guide human actions. It tells men the proper purpose of man’s life, and the means of achieving it; it provides the standard by which men are to judge good and evil, right and wrong, the desirable and the undesirable. Ethics tells a man, for instance, to pursue his own fulfillment—or to sacrifice himself for the sake of something else, such as God or his neighbor.
Politics is not the start, but the product of a philosophic system. By their nature, political questions cannot be raised or judged except on the basis of some view of existence, of values, and of man’s proper means of knowledge.
The root cause of Nazism lies in a power that most people ignore, disparage—and underestimate. The cause is not the events hailed or cursed in headlines and street rallies, but the esoteric writings of the professors who, decades or centuries earlier, laid the foundation for those events. The symbol of the cause is not the munitions plants or union halls or bank vaults of Germany, but its ivory towers. What came out of the towers in this regard is only coils of obscure, virtually indecipherable jargon. But that jargon is fatal.
“[The Nazi] death camps,” notes a writer in The New York Times, “were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.’s.”
What had those Ph.D.’s been taught to think in their schools and universities—and where did such ideas come from?
If we view the West’s philosophic development in terms of essentials, three fateful turning points stand out, three major philosophers who, above all others, are responsible for generating the disease of collectivism and transmitting it to the dictators of our century.
The three are: Plato—Kant—Hegel. (The antidote to them is: Aristotle.)
Plato is the father of collectivism in the West. He is the first thinker to formulate a systematic view of reality, with a collectivist politics as its culmination. In essence, Plato’s metaphysics holds that the universe consists of two opposed dimensions: true reality—a perfect, immutable, supernatural realm, nonmaterial, nonspatial, nontemporal, nonperceivable—and the material world in which we live. The material world, Plato holds, is only an imperfect appearance of true reality, a semireal reflection or projection of it.
The content of true reality, according to Plato, is a set of universals or Forms—in effect, a set of disembodied abstractions representing that which is in common among various groups of particulars in this world. Thus for Plato abstractions are supernatural existents. They are nonmaterial entities in another dimension, independent of man’s mind and of any of their material embodiments. … The Forms, Plato tells us repeatedly, are what is really real. The particulars they subsume—the concretes that make up this world—are not; they have only a shadowy, dreamlike half-reality.
Momentous conclusions about man are implicit in this metaphysics (and were later made explicit by a long line of Platonists): since individual men are merely particular instances of the universal “man,” they are not ultimately real. What is real about men is only the Form which they share in common and reflect.
To common sense, there appear to be many separate, individual men, each independent of the others, each fully real in his own right. To Platonism, this is a deception; all the seemingly individual men are really the same one Form, in various reflections or manifestations.
Thus, all men ultimately comprise one unity, and no earthly man is an autonomous entity—just as, if a man were reflected in a multifaceted mirror, the many reflections would not be autonomous entities.
What follows in regard to human action, according to Plato, is a life of self-sacrificial service. When men gather in society, says Plato, the unit of reality, and the standard of value, is the “community as a whole.” Each man therefore must strive, as far as he can, to wipe out his individuality (his personal desires, ambitions, etc.) and merge himself into the community, becoming one with it and living only to serve its welfare. On this view, the collective is not an aggregate, but an entity. Society (the state) is regarded as a living organism (this is the so-called “organic theory of the state”), and the individual becomes merely a cell of this organism’s body, with no more rights or privileges than belong to any such cell.
“The first and highest form of the state and of the government and of the law,” Plato writes, is a condition
in which the private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have become common, and in some way see and hear and act in common, and all men express praise and blame and feel joy and sorrow on the same occasions, and whatever laws there are unite the city to the utmost. . . .
As for those individualistic terms “mine” and “not mine,” “another’s” and “not another’s”: “The best ordered state will be the one in which the largest number of persons use these terms in the same sense, and which accordingly most nearly resembles a single person.”
The advocacy of the omnipotent state follows from the above as a matter of course. The function and authority of the state, according to Plato, should be unlimited. … The program of government domination of the individual is thoroughly worked out. In Plato’s Republic and Laws one can read the details, which are the first blueprint of the totalitarian ideal.
The blueprint includes the view that the state should be ruled by a special elite: the philosophers. Their title to absolute power, Plato explains, is their special wisdom, a wisdom which derives from their insight into true reality, and especially into its supreme, governing principle: the so-called “Form of the Good.” Without a grasp of this Form, according to Plato, no man can understand the universe or know how to conduct his life.
But to grasp this crucial principle, Plato continues—and here one can begin to see the relevance of epistemology to politics—the mind is inadequate. The Form of the Good cannot be known by the use of reason; it cannot be reached by a process of logic; it transcends human concepts and human language; it cannot be defined, described, or discussed. It can be grasped, after years of an ascetic preparation, only by an ineffable mystic experience—a kind of sudden, incommunicable revelation or intuition, which is reserved to the philosophical elite.
The mass of men, by contrast, are entangled in the personal concerns of this life. They are enslaved to the lower world revealed to them by their senses. They are incapable of achieving mystic contact with a supernatural principle. They are fit only to obey orders.
Such, in its essentials, is the view of reality, of man, and of the state which one of the most influential philosophers of all time infused into the stream of Western culture. ….
If mankind has not perished from such constitutions, if it has not collapsed permanently into the swamp of statism, but has fought its way up through tortured centuries of brief rises and long-drawn-out falls—like a man fighting paralysis by the power of an inexhaustible vitality—it is because that power had been provided by a giant whose philosophic system is, on virtually every fundamental issue, the opposite of Plato’s. The great spokesman for man and for this earth is Aristotle.
Aristotle is the champion of this world, the champion of nature, as against the supernaturalism of Plato. Denying Plato’s World of Forms, Aristotle maintains that there is only one reality: the world of particulars in which we live, the world men perceive by means of their physical senses. Universals, he holds, are merely aspects of existing entities, isolated in thought by a process of selective attention; they have no existence apart from particulars.
Reality is comprised, not of Platonic abstractions, but of concrete, individual entities, each with a definite nature, each obeying the laws inherent in its nature. …
In such a universe, knowledge cannot be acquired by special revelations from another dimension; there is no place for ineffable intuitions of the beyond. Repudiating the mystical elements in Plato’s epistemology, Aristotle is the father of logic and the champion of reason as man’s only means of knowledge. Knowledge, he holds, must be based on and derived from the data of sense experience; it must be formulated in terms of objectively defined concepts; it must be validated by a process of logic.
For Plato, the good life is essentially one of renunciation and selflessness: man should flee from the pleasures of this world in the name of fidelity to a higher dimension, just as he should negate his own individuality in the name of union with the collective. But for Aristotle, the good life is one of personal self-fulfillment. Man should enjoy the values of this world. Using his mind to the fullest, each man should work to achieve his own happiness here on earth. And in the process he should be conscious of his own value. Pride, writes Aristotle—a rational pride in oneself and in one’s moral character—is, when it is earned, the “crown of the virtues.”
A proud man does not negate his own identity. He does not sink selflessly into the community. He is not a promising subject for the Platonic state.
The Renaissance represented a rebirth of the Aristotelian spirit. The results of that spirit are written across the next two centuries, which men describe, properly, as the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment. The results include the rise of modern science; the rise of an individualist political philosophy (the work of John Locke and others); the consequent spread of freedom across the civilized world; and the birth of the freest country in history, the United States of America.
The great corollary of these results, the product of men who were armed with the knowledge of the scientists and who were free at last to act, was the Industrial Revolution, which turned poverty into abundance and transformed the face of the West. The Aristotelianism released by Aquinas and the Renaissance was sweeping away the dogmas and the shackles of the past. Reason, freedom, and production were replacing faith, force, and poverty. The age-old foundations of statism were being challenged and undercut.
The tragedy of the West, however, lies in the fact that the seeds of Platonism had been firmly embedded in philosophy almost from its beginning, and had been growing steadily through the post-Renaissance period. Thus, while the revolutionary achievements inspired by Aristotelianism were reshaping the life of the West, an intellectual counterrevolution was at work, gradually gathering momentum. A succession of thinkers was striving to reverse the Aristotelian trend and to resurrect the basic principles of Platonism,
The climax of this development came in the late eighteenth century. The man who consummated the successful anti-Aristotelian revolution—the man who, more than any other, put an end to the Enlightenment and opened the door to its opposite—was a German philosopher, the most influential German philosopher in history: Immanuel Kant.
The climax of this development came in the late eighteenth century. The man who consummated the successful anti-Aristotelian revolution—the man who, more than any other, put an end to the Enlightenment and opened the door to its opposite—was a German philosopher, the most influential German philosopher in history: Immanuel Kant.
One of Kant’s major goals was to save religion (including the essence of religious morality) from the onslaughts of science. His system represents a massive effort to raise the principles of Platonism, in a somewhat altered form, once again to a position of commanding authority over Western culture.
Kant places his primary emphasis on epistemological issues. His method of attack is to wage a campaign against the human mind. Man’s mind, he holds, is unable to acquire any knowledge of reality.
In any process of cognition, according to Kant, whether it be sense experience or abstract thought, the mind automatically alters and distorts the evidence confronting it…. The world that men perceive, therefore—the world of orderly, spatiotemporal, material entities—is essentially a creation of man’s consciousness. What men perceive is not reality “as it is,” but merely reality as it appears to man, given the special structure of the human mind.
Thus for Kant, as for Plato, the universe consists of two opposed dimensions: true reality, a supersensible realm of “things in themselves” (in Kant’s terminology), and a world of appearances which is not ultimately real, the material world men perceive by means of their physical senses. …
In a word, reason having been silenced, the way is cleared once more for an orgy of mystic fantasy. (The name of this orgy, the philosophic term for the nineteenth-century intellectuals’ revolt against reason and the Enlightenment, is: romanticism<.) “I have,” writes Kant, “therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”
Kant also found it necessary to deny happiness, in order to make room for duty. The essence of moral virtue, he says, is selflessness—selfless, lifelong obedience to duty, without any expectation of reward, and regardless of how much it might make one suffer.
Kant’s attack on reason, this world, and man’s happiness was the decisive turning point As the main line of modern philosophy rapidly absorbed his basic tenets, the last elements of the Aristotelian approach were abandoned, particularly in Germany. …
It is Kant who made possible the sudden mushrooming of the Platonic collectivism in the modern world, and especially in Germany.
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. …
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.”
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. … 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. …
“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.”
The above are the kinds of political ideas which Hegel, more than any other man, injected into the mind of early nineteenth-century Germany…. The aspiring dictators of the twentieth century and their intellectual defenders moved with alacrity to embrace such commonplaces and to cash in on them. …
In one respect, Hegel’s share of the responsibility has been widely recognized: the similarity between his politics and that of Hitler is hard to escape. But Hegel’s politics is not a primary. It is an expression of his fundamental philosophy, which is the culmination of a long historical development.
Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.
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.
Statism and the advocacy of reason are philosophical opposites. They cannot coexist—neither in a philosophic system nor in a nation.
If men uphold reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude that men should deal with one another as free agents, settling their disputes by an appeal to the mind, i.e., by a process of voluntary, rational persuasion.
If men reject reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude the opposite: that men have no way to deal with one another at all—no way except physical force, wielded by an elite endowed with an allegedly superior, mystic means of cognition.
t is not an accident that Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the whole tradition of German nationalism from Luther on, advocated a variety of anti-senses, anti-logic, anti-intellect doctrines. The statism all these figures upheld or fostered is a result; the root lies in their view of knowledge, i.e., of man’s mind.
The aspiring dictator … knows that he cannot demand unthinking obedience from men, or gain their consent to the permanent rule of brutality, until he has first persuaded his future subjects to ditch their brains and their independent, self-assertive judgment. … In some terms, these men have grasped that their political goals cannot be achieved until the proper epistemological base is established.
Hitler grasped it, too.
“We are now at the end of the Age of Reason,” Hitler declared to Hermann Rauschning. “The intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life.” …
“At a mass meeting,” said Hitler to Rauschning,
thought is eliminated. And because this is the state of mind I require, because it secures to me the best sounding-board for my speeches, I order everyone to attend the meetings, where they become part of the mass whether they like it or not, ‘intellectuals’ and bourgeois as well as workers. I mingle the people. I speak to them only as the mass.
“The masses are like an animal that obeys its instincts. They do not reach conclusions by reasoning.”
Reason is the faculty that identifies, in conceptual terms, the material provided by man’s senses. “Irrationalism” is the doctrine that reason is not a valid means of knowledge or a proper guide to action. “Mysticism” is the doctrine that man has a nonsensory, nonrational means of knowledge. Irrationalism and mysticism together constitute the essence of the Nazi epistemology. …
“People set us down as enemies of the intelligence,” declared Hitler. “We are. But in a much deeper sense than these conceited dolts of bourgeois scientists ever dream of.” …
In the field of epistemology, the Nazis were merely repeating and cashing in on the slogans of a nineteenth-century intellectual movement, one which pervaded every country of Europe, but which had its center and greatest influence in Germany. This movement—the defiant rejection of the Enlightenment spirit—is called romanticism.
Progressively abandoning their Aristotelian heritage, the philosophers of the Enlightenment had reached a state of formal bankruptcy in the skepticism of David Hume. Hume claimed that neither the senses nor reason can yield reliable knowledge. He concluded that man is a helpless creature caught in an unintelligible universe. Meanwhile a variety of lesser figures (such as Rousseau, the admirer of the “noble savage”) were foreshadowing the era to come. They were suggesting that reason had had its chance but had failed, and that something else, something opposite, holds the key to reality and the future. …
The romanticists held (following Kant) that reason is a faculty restricted to a surface world of appearances and incapable of penetrating to true reality. …
Like Hegel, and generally under his influence, the romanticists concerned with politics characteristically found an “organic” social whole to exalt: Germany. Selfless service to the Volk (the people), most of them said, is the essence of virtue. Such service, they usually added, requires obedience to a dictator soon to appear in Germany, a “hero” who can divine the will of the Volk and mercilessly smash any nation or group (such as the Jews) that stands in its way. …
By the time of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s intellectuals— Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike—had reached a philosophical consensus. If we are to solve our country’s problems, they said to one another and to the public, we must follow the right approach to knowledge. The right approach, as they conceived it, was eloquently described by Walther Rathenau, who was not a fulminating nationalist or racist, but an admired liberal commentator, a practical man (government minister, diplomat, industrialist), and a Jew.
The most profound error of the social thought of our day is found in the belief that one can demand of scientific knowledge impulses to will and ideal goals. Understanding will never be able to tell us what to believe, what to hope for, what to live for, and what to offer up sacrifices for. Instinct and feeling, illumination and intuitive vision—these are the things that lead us into the realm of forces that determine the meaning of our existence.
Rathenau and his colleagues did not know the full nature of the “realm of forces” into which they were delivering the country. They did not know who ruled that kind of realm. They did not foresee the consequences of the “instinct and feeling” they were begging for. They found out.
In 1922, the “instinct and feeling” confronted Rathenau in practical reality. He was assassinated by a gang of anti-Semitic nationalists. A decade later the same fate befell the Weimar Republic.
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.”
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.
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. …
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. …
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.
Epistemology had done its work.
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. . . .”
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!’”
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.
…
The Nazi party did attract a great many thugs, crooks, and drifters into its ranks. But such men are an inconsequential minority in any country; they were not the reason for Hitler’s rise. The reason was the millions of non- thugs in the land of poets and philosophers, the decent, law-abiding Germans who found hope and inspiration in Hitler, the legions of unhappy, abstemious, duty-bound men and women who condemned what they saw as the selfishness of the Weimar Republic, and who were eager to take part in the new moral crusade that Hitler promised to lead. The reason was the “good Germans”—above all, their concept of “the good.”
The major Greek philosophers did not urge self-sacrifice on men, but self- realization. Socrates, Aristotle, even Plato to some extent, taught that man is a value; that his purpose in life should be the achievement of his own well- being; and that this requires among other conditions the fullest exercise of his intellect. Since reason is the “most authoritative element” in man, writes Aristotle—the most eloquent exponent of the Greek egoism—“therefore the man who loves [reason] and gratifies it is most of all a lover of self. . . . In this sense, then, as has been said, a man should be a lover of self. . . .”
“And all that you [God] asked of me was to deny my own will and accept yours,” said Augustine, and the centuries of churchmen thereafter. Deny your will, echoes the German mystic Meister Eckhart, in a voice which carried to Luther and to Kant among many others. Practice the “virtue above all virtues,” obedience. “You will never hear an obedient person saying: ‘I want it so and so; I must have this or that.’ You will hear only of utter denial of self. . . . Begin, therefore, first with self and forget yourself!”
Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice.
Kant did not preach Nazism. But, on a fundamental level and for the first time, he flung at Western man its precondition: “Du bist nichts” (“You are nothing”).
“Dein Volk ist alles” (“Your people is everything”) soon followed. Most nineteenth-century philosophers accepted every essential of Kant’s philosophy and morality, except the idea of an unknowable dimension. They proceeded to name a surrogate for the noumenal self, an ego-swallowing, duty-imposing, sacrifice-demanding power to replace it. Following the trend of the Christian development since the Renaissance, the power they named was: the neighbor (or society, or mankind).
The result was a new moral creed, which swept the romanticist circles of Europe from the time of the first post-Kantians, and which continues to rule Western intellectuals to the present day. The man who named the creed is the philosopher Auguste Comte. The name he coined is altruism.
The medieval adoration of God, says Comte, must now be transmuted into the adoration of a new divinity, the “goddess” Humanity. Sacrifice for the sake of the Lord is outdated; it must give way fully to sacrifice for the sake of others. And this time, Comte says, man must really be selfless; he must renounce not only the element of egoism approved by the Enlightenment, but also the “exorbitant selfishness” that characterized the medieval pursuit of salvation. The new creed, in short, is Christianity secularized—and, thanks to Kant, with the Greek element removed.
“Altruism” is the view that man must place others above self as the fundamental rule of life, and that his greatest virtue is self-sacrifice in their behalf. (Altruists do not necessarily agree on which others, whether mankind as a whole or only part of it.) “Altruism” does not mean kindness, benevolence, sympathy, or the like, all of which are possible to egoists; the term means “otherism”; it means that the welfare of others must become the highest value and ruling purpose of every man’s existence. …
During the Weimar years, there were many opponents of Hitler eager to pit their version of the country’s ethics against his, men who demanded sacrifice not for the sake of the race, but of some other group. None of them challenged the basic premise of the German ethics: the duty of men to live for others, the right of those others to be lived for. From the outset, therefore, the opponents of Nazism were disarmed: since they equated selflessness with virtue, they could not avoid conceding that Nazism, however misguided, was a form of moral idealism. …
Modern altruists took over from the medievals the principle of self-sacrifice, then dislodged God from the position of supreme collector, replacing him with “other men.” Hegel’s approach pushes this trend a step further, demanding not only service to others, but also obedience to them. Others (the group) become at once the highest value and the source of values, the recipient of the individual’s sacrifices and the definer of his duties, the ultimate beneficiary and the unchallengeable moral authority together, thus taking over fully the ethical role once reserved to the divine.
As to the men who do have a conscience, the men who refuse to carry out Hitler’s commands, there is, according to the Nazis, only one proper method by which to deal with them … The method is: compulsion, violence, ravishment, i.e., physical force, in any of its degrees from fist-backed threat to wholesale extermination. …
There are only two fundamental methods by which men can deal with one another: by reason or by force, by intellectual persuasion or by physical coercion, by directing to an opponent’s brain an argument—or a bullet. Since the Nazis dismiss reason out of hand, their only recourse is to embrace the second of these methods. The Nazi ethics completes the job of brute-worship: altruism gives to the use of force a moral sanction, making it not only an unavoidable practical recourse, but also a positive virtue, an expression of militant righteousness.
A man is morally the property of others—of those others it is his duty to serve—argue Fichte, Hegel, and the rest, explicitly or by implication. As such, a man has no moral right to refuse to make the requisite sacrifices for others If he attempts it, he is depriving men of what is properly theirs, he is violating men’s rights, their right to his service—and it is, therefore, an assertion of morality if others intervene forcibly and compel him to fulfill his obligations. “Social justice” in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil.
Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships. (The religious advocates of self-sacrifice accept the same viewpoint, but name God, not the group, as the entity whose wishes must be enforced.)
At root, it is a dual Nazi advocacy: of unreason and of human sacrifice, which unleashes the rule of brutality. It unleashes brutality at home and abroad, in dictatorship domestically and in war internationally.
The pattern is not distinctive to the Nazis. The same cause has produced the same effect throughout Western history, no matter how varied the forms of each—whether men call their particular brand of unreason “ecstatic union with the Good” or “Divine revelation” or “dialectic logic” or “Aryan instinct”; whether they demand sacrifice in the name of the Forms or of God or of the economic class or of the master nation; whether the tyrannized subjects submit to a philosopher king or a medieval inquisitor or the dictatorship of the proletariat or the gauleiters and the Gestapo; whether the subjects are commanded to emulate the militarist conditions of Sparta, or are commanded to launch a Crusade against the infidel, or the next war of “people’s liberation,” or the next war for lebensraum and racial purification.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 intellectuals of the West today (as at the time of Hitler) 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.” 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.
Because philosophy deals with broad abstractions, most people regard the subject as detached from life. They regard philosophy as they would a political-party platform—as a set of floating generalities unrelated to action, generalities which are part ritualistic piety, part rationalization or cover-up, and part rhetorical hot air. …
People cannot explain the developments in the fields that do interest them because they do not know the source of those developments. In every field, the source is the choices men make, which rest ultimately on their basic choices. Knowingly or not, those choices flow from men’s basic ideas and values. The science of basic ideas is philosophy.
If a man is skeptical about the role of philosophy in life, let him put aside philosophy books. Let him leave the cloistered ivory tower of theory and plunge into the sprawling realms of practice. Let him observe the concretes of his society’s cultural life—its politics, its economics, its education, its youth movements, its art and religion and science. In every area, let him discover the main developments and then ask: why?
In every area, the actors themselves will provide the answer. They seldom provide it in the form of philosophical speeches. Frequently they offer moral declarations. Predominantly, however, they offer passing references, vague implications, and casual asides—which seem casual, except that the actors cannot avoid making them and counting on them. The references are the tip of the iceberg: they reveal the basic premises motivating a given development.
When a man discovers that those references, in every area, reveal the same fundamentals at work, when he sees the same broad abstractions setting the terms for every action, issue, alternative, and turning point, then he will know the power that integrates the concretes of human life and moves human history.
To understand the state of a society, one must discover the extent to which a given philosophy penetrates its spirit and institutions. On this basis, one can then explain a society’s collapse—or, if it still has a chance, forecast its future.
This is what can make intelligible the fact of Hitler’s rise.
“The worker,” said August Bebel (a revered prewar party leader), “has little interest in a state in which political liberty is merely the goal. . . . What good is mere political liberty to him if he is hungry?”
The Social Democrats have been condemned as ineffectual by virtually all commentators on the Weimar Republic. The standard explanation is that the party leaders’ moral character or experience or strategy was inadequate. In fact, the root of the party’s deficiency was not personal or tactical; it was ideological. In their Marxist ideals, the Social Democrats were heirs to Germany’s central, collectivist tradition. In their republican methods, they were clinging to remnants of an opposite (and in Germany weak and peripheral) tradition: the Enlightenment world view. The result was a party incapable by its nature of providing a nation with decisive leadership, a party impaled from the outset on a fundamental contradiction. …
What socialism was to the leftists, nationalism was to the conservatives: it was their ideology, their political ideal, their common bond. “Nationalism” in this context means the belief in the superiority of the “German soul” over “Western decadence,” and, as corollary, the belief in the historic mission of the Fatherland, its mission to guide (or rule) the world’s lesser peoples. …
Whether they invoked religion or not, however, the conservatives characteristically reviled “the rational Republic.” This was not meant as sarcasm; in their opinion the Republic was rational. On this subject, all were prepared to agree with Luther. “There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason,” Luther had said. “Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed.”
Faithful to its dominant nineteenth-century ideas, Germany, alone among the major Western nations, had never entered the era of classic liberalism; in varying forms and degrees the German states had characteristically been regulated economies. Then, in the Prussian-dominated empire, Bismarck and his successors had entrenched many new controls, including the policy of awarding special favors from the Reich government—subsidies, protective tariffs, and the like—to the country’s big landowners and industrialists. In addition, to placate the rising labor movement, Bismarck in the 1880s had created in Germany the world’s first welfare state, complete with programs for compulsory health insurance, workmen’s compensation, and old-age and disability insurance.
The debate on the Constitution began on February 24, 1919. The final draft was approved by a vote of 262 to 75 on July 31 and took effect as the country’s fundamental law on August 14. …
The Weimar Constitution is not a traditional Western charter of liberty. It is a distinctively twentieth-century document.
Article 7 alone, for instance, confers on the federal government unlimited power to legislate on twenty subjects, including: “The press . . . Public health . . . Labour laws . . . Expropriation . . . banking and exchanges . . . Traffic in foodstuffs and articles of general consumption or satisfying daily wants . . . Industry and mining . . . Insurance . . . Railways . . . Theatres and cinemas.” In subsequent articles, the state is assigned further powers. Some of these are: the power to lay down “general principles” concerning “The rights and duties of religious bodies . . . Public education, including the universities . . . housing and the distribution of the population . . .”; the power to preserve “the purity and health and the social furtherance of the family . . .”; and the task of supervising “the whole of the educational system.”
Having established its basic approach to government, the Constitution, striking a more traditional note, goes on to guarantee the protection of man’s “fundamental rights.” It promises to protect the freedoms of expression, association, movement, emigration, the ownership of property, the inviolability of a man’s home, and several other rights. In every essential case, however, the document makes its priorities clear: it reserves to the government unlimited power, at its discretion, to attach conditions to the exercise of these rights. The promise of freedom of movement, for instance, concludes with the words: “Restrictions can be imposed by federal law only.” The promise of the secrecy of correspondence concludes: “Exceptions may be admitted by federal law only.” There is to be “no censorship”—except in the case of movies or “for the purpose of combating base and pornographic publications. . . .” The education of their children is “the natural right of the parents”—but “the state has to watch over their activities in this direction.” “Personal freedom is inviolable,” sums up Article 114, which continues directly: “No restraint or deprivation of personal liberty by the public power is admissible, unless authorised by law.”
The most famous statement of this kind is Article 48, which was invoked by the German government in 1930 to justify the establishment of a presidential dictatorship. “If public order and security are seriously disturbed or endangered… ,” the article says, without further definition, the president “may take all necessary steps . . . he may suspend for the time being, either wholly or in part, the fundamental rights” recognized elsewhere.
The Founding Fathers of the United States accepted the concept of inalienable rights. The public power, they said in essence, shall make no law abridging the freedom of the individual.
The Founding Fathers of the Weimar Republic rejected this approach as rigid and antisocial. The public power, their document says, shall make no law abridging the freedom of the individual—except when it judges this to be in the public interest.
“I learned a great deal in the years since. I learned that the concept of individual rights is far, far from self-evident, that most of the world does not grasp it” (The Lessons of Vietnam, Ayn Rand)
Even today, the most of the world does not grasp it.…
The essence of Weimar economics is stated in Article 151 of the Constitution. “The organisation of economic life,” it says,
must accord with the principles of justice and aim at securing for all conditions of existence worthy of human beings. Within these limits the individual is to be secured the enjoyment of economic freedom.
Legal compulsion is admissible only as far as necessary for the realisation of threatened rights or to serve overriding claims of the common weal.
“Property is guaranteed,” says Article 153, but “Property entails responsibilities. It should be put to such uses as to promote at the same time the common good.” Property, therefore, may be expropriated “in the public interest.” For the same reason, “the distribution and the use of land are under state supervision. . . .” In addition, the government may “convert into social property such private economic undertakings as are suitable for socialisation,” or it may demand the merger of such undertakings “in the interests of collectivism.” …
The German Republic has been called “the freest republic in history.” It is often described as an experiment in freedom which tragically failed. If so, it was a special kind of experiment, one that proved to be a pacesetter for the rest of the world.
The country’s republicans did not wish to choose between freedom and altruism. They thought that they could have both. “Every German,” says Article 163, “is under a moral obligation, without prejudice to his personal liberty, to exercise his mental and physical powers in such a way as the welfare of the community requires.” In fact, however, it is either-or, and the moderates did have to choose; and they wrote their priorities all over their founding document.
The transition from document to reality did not take long.
The Great Inflation was not the product merely of a practical miscalculation. Its fundamental cause did not lie in the realm of finance, but of philosophy—especially, epistemology. In essence, the inflation was an expression in the economic sphere of the basic spirit of Weimar German culture. There is a limit to how long a nation’s thinkers can extol the contradictory, the irrational, the defiantly absurd; one day, in every field, they achieve it. In November 1923, the German government was finally forced to act. It introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, which was redeemable in dollars, and refrained thereafter from papering the country with it.
This kind of response, however, though economically appropriate, was too little and too late.> The basic cause of the disaster, untouched, continued to act. And the signs for the nation’s political future were already growing ominous….
Several weeks later, at the height of the inflation, another group of Germans was heard from. They, too, believed in the supremacy of “society,” though not of a republican form of government: “[This is a] robbers’ state! . . . [W]e will no longer submit to a State which is built on the swindling idea of the majority. We want a dictatorship. . . .”
On the morning of November 9, 1923, in the city of Munich, the leader of this group decided to act. Adolf Hitler staged the Beer Hall Putsch.
It was too little and too soon.
The German right characteristically denounced socialism, while supporting the welfare state, demanding government supervision of the economy, and preaching the duty of property-owners to serve their country. The German left characteristically denounced nationalism, while extolling the feats of imperial Germany, cursing the Allied victors of the war, and urging the rebirth of a powerful Fatherland. (Even the Communists soon began to substitute “nation” for “proletariat” in their manifestos.)
The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.
The Nazis took over the essence of each side in the German debate and proudly offered the synthesis as one unified viewpoint. The synthesis is: national socialism.…
The bottom wanted the top cut down; the top wanted the bottom put down; the middle were capable of both feelings, depending on the direction in which they were looking.
The Nazis promised everything to everybody.
As to any contradictions that might be involved in this kind of campaign, Hitler was unconcerned about them. …
The Nazi party, said Hitler, “is convinced that our nation can only achieve permanent health from within on the principle: The Common Interest Before Self” (Point 24). [from Hitler’s manifesto 25 Points]
Point 18, the climax in this area, is a mere two sentences; they reveal what “the public good,’’ once it has consumed property and liberty, demands in regard to life: “We demand a ruthless struggle against those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Common criminals against the nation, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race.”
A criminal, according to the Nazi philosophy, is not a man who violates individual rights; he is a man who injures “the common interest.”..
The general outlines of the answer, they felt, were clear enough, implicit in the commonly accepted code: “usurers, profiteers, etc.”
Within twenty-five years, that “etc.” was to subsume millions of lives. …
He [Hitler] would not hear of limiting self-sacrifice to the realm of material production, while allowing self-assertion to dominate the realm of men’s spiritual concerns. He indignantly dismissed the dichotomy between economic freedom and political freedom; he was against both equally and for the same reason. Men, he said, must be prepared to give up everything for others: they must give up soul and body; ideas and wealth; life itself.
If art is the barometer of a culture, literature, the most explicit of the arts, may be taken as the barometer of art.
The two preeminent figures of Weimar literature were Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann. …
As a social determinist, Hauptmann preached that the individual is a pawn of the group; in his own political behavior, he acted accordingly. He never abandoned his fundamental commitment to collectivism …
Mann, a disciple of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner, began his career as a German chauvinist-authoritarian, explicitly opposed to reason and to the values of Western civilization. Gradually, however, he made his peace with the Republic and became a convert to democratic socialism (he went into exile when Hitler took power). …
The Magic Mountain is an important symptom—of a uniquely twentieth-century condition.
As the caliber of these statements indicates, Mann, despite the abundance of abstract talk in the book, does not take ideas seriously.
In the sequence on Pieter Peeperkorn, he all but says so openly.
In the sequence on Pieter Peeperkorn, he all but says so openly. Peeperkorn is an old Dutchman described as self-indulgent, nonintellectual, and almost completely inarticulate. It is, he tells Castorp, “our sacred duty to feel. . . . For feeling, young man, is godlike.” This incoherent creature is presented by Mann as a stammering, often farcical figure and at the same time as a majestic presence, who wins Castorp’s admiration, completely overshadowing “pedagogues” like Naphta and Settembrini, because he has a power transcending “the realm of the Great Confusion” (i.e., intellectual debates). “[S]omehow or other,” Castorp tells Settembrini, “he has the right to laugh at us all. . . .” He is, Castorp concludes, an example of “the mystery of personality, something above either cleverness or stupidity. . . .”
Thomas Mann, the major philosophical novelist of Weimar Germany, is no thinker. The out-of-focus flow of non-events in the book is matched only by the similar flow of non-thoughts, i.e., of pseudogeneralities purporting to have cosmic significance and amounting only to a high-school bull session with delusions of grandeur.
The key to the meaning of The Magic Mountain is that it has no meaning: it commits itself to nothing, neither idea nor value… Beneath the surface—beneath the murky half- hints, the numbing details, the indecipherable symbols (which posturing literati have a field day pretending to decode)—the book is a vacuum, which says nothing and stands for nothing.
Except by implication. Implicit in its approach and style— in its well- bred decadence, its sly flirtation with death and disease, its “ironic” cynicism, its logorrheic emptiness, its weary, muted disdain for all viewpoints—is a viewpoint broadcast to the book’s readers: the futility of man, of human effort, of human intelligence. To a country and in a decade swept by hysteria, perishing from uncertainty, torn by political crisis, financial collapse, violence in the streets, and terror of the future—to that country, in that decade, its leading philosophical novelist offered as his contribution to sanity and freedom the smiling assurance that there are no answers, no absolutes, no values, no hope. …
Thomas Mann, says Laqueur, was “one of the main pillars of the Republic.” If so, anyone could bring the structure crashing down with a single boot.
In academic philosophy, amid a variety of routine movements unknown to the public, one development stands out as both self-consciously new and fairly popular (especially among college students): the Existentialism of Martin Heidegger, whose major work, Sein und Zeit, appeared in 1927. Existence, Heidegger declared to his enthusiastic young following, is unintelligible, reason is invalid, and man is a helpless “Dasein”; he is a creature engulfed by “das Nichts” (nothingness), in terror of the supreme fact of his life: death, and doomed by nature to “angst,” “care,” estrangement, futility. …
As to human action, according to Heidegger, it must be unreasoned, feeling-dictated, willful. On May 27, 1933, he practiced this idea on a grand scale: in a formal, voluntary proclamation, he declared to the country that the age of science and of academic freedom was over, and that hereafter it was the duty of intellectuals to think in the service of the Nazi state.
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 moderns.
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. …
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.
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 moderns 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. …
A mass revolt against a specific set of fundamental ideas can be explained only by an acceptance of opposite ideas. The late-nineteenth-century German intellectuals absorbed.
The late-nineteenth-century German intellectuals absorbed what all their deepest thinkers had taught them; they caught the essence of the message: reality is out, reason is out, the pursuit of values is out, man is out; and then they looked at the world around them, the Western world still shaped by the premises of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.
The intellectuals saw pyramiding scientific and technological discoveries. They saw value- glorifying art animated by an inspired vision of man. They saw purposeful innovators in every field creating unprecedented achievements, men who did not find reason impotent, but who were smilingly confident of their power to achieve their goals. They saw the “bourgeoisie” and the workers and every social class, excepting only themselves and the remnants of the feudal aristocracy, reveling in the luxuries of an industrial civilization, producing goods and happiness, seeking more of both, refusing to sacrifice the treasures which, for the first time in history, masses of men were able to acquire.
The intellectuals saw it, and they knew they had to choose. They had to challenge the anti-mind doctrines they had been taught, or the minds of those who had not yet been indoctrinated. Their alternative was to demolish the view of life bred into their feelings, or the glowing aftermath of the world of the Enlightenment, a world which was, to them, an alien planet and a reproach. They chose according to their fundamentals and their guilt. They became nihilists.
Such men could not create an authentically innovative culture, not while believing that reality is unknowable and that man is helpless. All they could do, aside from resurrecting the irrationalism of the past, was to find their “creative” outlet in destroying what they saw around them. Their goal and product was a cultural wasteland, reflecting the kinds of ideas they felt they could live with. ….
The basic liberator (in both cases) was Kant’s philosophy. No earlier system could have done it.
Kant denies this world, not in the name of a glowing super-reality, but, in effect, of nothing, of a realm which is, by his own statement, unknowable to man and inconceivable. He rejects the human mind because of its very nature, while using the same kind of argument against every other possible form of cognition. He regards men, all men, as devoid of worth because they seek values, any values, in any realm.
Kant is the first major philosopher to turn against reality, reason, values, and man as such, not in the name of something allegedly higher, but in the name of pure destruction. He is not an otherworldly thinker, but an antiworldly one. He is the father of nihilism. …
The German intellectuals translated Kant’s system into cultural terms in the only way it could be done. They created a culture in which the new consists of negation and obliteration.
Thus the “new” novels, whose newness consists in having no plots and no heroes, novels featuring characters without characterization and written in language without syntax using words without referents; and thus the poems “free” of rhyme, the verse “free” of meter, the plays without action, theater without the “theatrical illusion,” education without cognition, physics without law, mathematics without consistency, art without beauty, atonal music, nonobjective painting, unconscious psychology—philosophy without metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, or thought. …
Such was the kind of choice offered to Germany by its intellectual leaders: the hatred of every human value in the name of avant-garde novelty, or in the name of feudal reaction. The rejection of nature by the Oriental method, or by the medieval method. The denunciation of the mind as an obstacle to “self-expression,” or to social obedience. Man as a primordial, Freudian brute versus man as a primordial, Wagnerian brute.
Ideas as futile versus the intellect as arid. Life as horror versus life as war. Cynical pessimism on one side versus cynical pessimism on the other side. The open nihilism of Brecht or of Ernst Jünger.
The Great Depression merely forced the issue, which had been implicit all along in the Germans’ philosophy. Economic catastrophe in Germany was an effect, the last link in a long chain of ideas and events—and a catalyst, which gave Hitler a real opportunity for the final cashing in. The catalyst worked because the nation was already ripe for Hitler’s kind of cashing in.
If a man long addicted to a toxic drug suffers sudden convulsions and then dies from them, one might validly say that the convulsions were the cause of the death, so long as one remembers the cause of the cause. The same is true of a country addicted to a toxic ideology. …
The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era’s dominant ideas. In times of crisis, these men need the guidance of some kind of theory; but, being unfamiliar with the field of ideas, they do not know that alternatives to the popular theories are possible. They know only what they have always been taught.
One German observer noted in these youths a “strange connection” between “revolutionary mutiny against authority” and “blind discipline toward the ‘Führer.’” In fact, the students were mutinying against the Republic not because it stood for overbearing authority in their eyes, but because it stood for freedom. They regarded even some shaky fragments of an individualist way of life as selfish materialism. What they wanted was service to a social cause they could accept as noble, and when they found the cause’s spokesman they were ready to bow obediently.
The Weimar students practiced everything they had learned. Believing that objectivity is impossible, they did not try to reason about political questions. Believing that a man is nothing in the face of the community, they did not concern themselves with an opponent’s individual rights. Committed to action based on feeling, they responded to disagreement by unstopping their fury.
The students launched violent mass demonstrations on campus. They invaded the classes of unpopular professors. They gathered in jeering mobs outside lecture halls. They rushed hotly into head-smashing brawls and they coolly instigated bloody riots, both of which soon became routine at the German universities. …
The student rebels defended their actions by claiming that the universities must serve the people, and therefore must be transformed into agents of revolution. The rebels dismissed the view that a university should uphold freedom of thought; they rejected free thought; fundamentally, they rejected it on the grounds that thought as such is a waste of time.
The universities could not survive the assault for long. They bowed to the rebels’ demands. They ceased being centers of learning during the Weimar years. The agent of enslavement had not been Hitler, but their own students.
On August 9, 1932, the government decreed the death penalty for those convicted of political murder. The next night a band of Nazis invaded the home of a Communist worker in the Silesian village of Potempa and stamped him to death, kicking his larynx to pieces. When the killers were arrested, tried, and sentenced in accordance with the new law, Hitler responded with threats and demonstrations. On September 2, the government gave its answer: the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. (The killers were freed by Hitler the next year.)
The civilized men in the country did not know what to do. In the words of one historian, the moderates voiced desperate “appeals to reason. . . . [But] their techniques were distinctly out of tune with the wild emotionalism that seemed to have gripped a large part of the nation.”
The civility cherished by the civilized men had finally been defeated by their ideas, although they did not know that this was the cause. After years of preaching contradictions and of evading principles with an anti- ideological shrug, these men were astonished to see the nation conclude that man cannot live by principles, that reason is no guide to action, and that anything goes. After years of institutionalizing interest-group warfare, which they had justified as sacrifice or collective service, these men were astonished to see hostile gangs take to the streets and demand one another’s sacrifice. After years of undercutting the mind by preaching the primacy of gentle feeling (whether “progressive” or religious or skeptical), these men were astonished to find that irrational feeling is no counter to “wild emotionalism.”
After years of spreading or condoning or subsidizing the cult and culture of nihilism, the civilized men were astonished to find that they had nothing more to say, and that there was no one left to listen.
The moderates were helpless. The authorities were helpless. The killers were taking over.
On January 30, 1933, after due attention to every requirement of German law and of the Weimar Constitution, the Nazi rule was made official.
The Germans had believed that Nazism was a practical solution to the depression. Even before the war they began to find out otherwise; after 1939 they learned still more. But disaster as such does not change a country’s mind or its ideas. …
Was every group terrorized, enslaved, and ruthlessly milked dry? The Germans were willing to endure these conditions. “Selflessness in the sense that oneself does not matter, the feeling of being expendable, was no longer the expression of individual idealism but a mass phenomenon,” writes Hannah Arendt.
The Germans remembered their age-old vision of national greatness, defined by discipline, obedience, and self-abnegation. They remembered Kant’s idea that “the principle of one’s own happiness is the most objectionable of all” and that self-love is “the very source of evil.” They grasped that now they had their historic chance, the chance to suppress the “evil” and to make the vision a reality—and they seized the chance and they acted on it.
At last, the Germans were practicing in full the philosophy they had been taught.
The men, women, and children who were to become the looted corpses or the living skeletons of the Nazi concentration-camp system were seized in Germany, then across Europe, by the hundreds and thousands, then by the millions. They were seized from homes, offices, factories, farms, schools, and even at random from fields and streets.
The transportation of the prisoners to the camps followed a certain pattern. According to Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of Buchenwald and a brilliant observer of camp life, the nature of the trip was part of a definite plan.
The newly arrested prisoners were taunted, screamed at, slapped, gouged, kicked, whipped, bayoneted, and/or shot. Some were killed immediately. Some were ordered to stare into lights, or to kneel, for hours. Some were forced to hit or beat other prisoners. Some were forced to curse themselves, their loved ones, and their most precious values. Under threat of instant death, none dared utter a murmur of protest or make a gesture of self-defense or move a step to help a wife or husband lying in plain sight, bleeding and dying.
The “tortures became less and less violent,” Bettelheim reports, “to the degree that prisoners stopped resisting and complied immediately with any SS order, even the most outrageous.” Longtime prisoners, he adds, who often happened to be returning to camp on the same train with newcomers, “were left alone by the SS as soon as they made their status known as prisoners already initiated.”
At the end of the trip, the victims were stripped of clothes, hair, name, and—sometimes—left for hours in silence to wait for the unknown.
In other transports there were no SS orders or beatings. Prisoners were herded into freight cars, crammed naked against one another, driven back and forth senselessly, sometimes for days, then deposited in extermination centers and turned over to trained torturers, or fed directly into gas chambers. …
They were followed every moment by the threat of beatings, torture, murder. The threat extended even to the latrines. Men were occasionally pushed from their seats into mounds of excrement; some suffocated to death as the guards watched. …
Every aspect of the prisoner’s life in the camps was controlled by the SS men. Everything was forbidden to him except what was ordered or specially authorized. Any form of independent action was punished. A man needed permission to possess even the most insignificant object (such as a scrap of extra cloth to protect him from the cold). He needed permission to eat, to speak, to wash, to defecate. …
The unpredictability was a torture by itself even apart from all the rest. A group of Czechs at one camp were given special privileges and comforts, then thrown into quarries and subjected to the worst living conditions, “then back again into good quarters and easy work, and after a few months back into the quarries with little food, etc. Soon they all died.”….
The prisoner in the concentration camps soon learned that his function was not compliance with delimited, goal-directed orders, however harsh or brutal. He learned that what his torturers demanded of him was not his achievement of specific objectives, or his understanding, or any kind of initiative, but a single trait: unconditional obedience.
The best theoretical interpreter of the concentration camps is Hannah Arendt. The camps, she states, are the culmination of the central totalitarian motive. Fundamentally, she holds, the camps are “laboratories,” laboratories in “total domination.”
The camps, Miss Arendt writes,
serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scientifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not. . . .
Under normal circumstances this can never be accomplished, because spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not only with human freedom but with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping alive. It is only in the concentration camps that such an experiment is at all possible. . . .
The end result of the experiment, she writes, is “ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments. . . .” …
In many of the camps, prisoners were interned for lengthy periods; death was put off, perhaps indefinitely. In the special “extermination camps,” a brief, violent trauma was inflicted on the prisoners, after which they were slaughtered immediately in vast groups. In either case, the essential goal of the camp system was not death as such; it was not the physical destruction of the victim that the Nazis primarily sought, but his psychological destruction, i.e., the collapse of his capacity to function independently. …
The young SS men on duty in the camps also received a certain kind of “reinforcement” or processing. They, too, though in somewhat different form, had to be trained to give up their independence and autonomy. They had to be turned into creatures who would question nothing and carry out anything, i.e., into the unflinchingly obedient elite corps on which the whole Hitlerite system relied. The camp personnel learned obedience by doing—by doing the kinds of things normal men did not do and could not have conceived/ …
Ideological indoctrination alone, it was found, could not create a corps of full-fledged Nazis; but the daily practice of concentration-camp-scale unreason could, and did.
The camps, and all their seemingly inexplicable horrors, were aimed not only at the victims, but also at the killers. The victims had to become robots, slavishly obedient to the guards; the guards had to become robots, slavishly obedient to the Führer. In both cases, some fundamental element in men had to be destroyed by the camp experience, an element unidentified but taken for granted by most people; it is the element which, in a normal man, underlies and makes possible such attributes as independence, autonomy, self-direction, “spontaneity.”
The process began at the beginning, with the selection of prisoners who had done nothing wrong and who could not understand why they had been arrested.
Hannah Arendt was the first to identify the camps’ need of innocent inmates. She explains the policy in sociopolitical terms, as part of a deliberate Nazi (and Soviet) attempt “to kill the juridical person in man,” i.e., to destroy the concept of man’s rights. ….
The concept of rights (or of justice) is not a philosophic primary, though Miss Arendt often seems to treat it as such. What she identifies only as the attack on the “juridical person” is, in fact, part of a wider, all-embracing assault. To give a man’s soul this kind of blow is one step in the process of plunging him into a certain kind of world. All the other steps continued the process.
The salient feature of the camp world was not merely injustice, or even horror, but horror which was unintelligible to the victim.
When they arrived at the camps, many of the prisoners, dazed by their arrest and nightmare transport, did not know what was happening to them or even where they were. As a rule the Nazis told them nothing and answered no questions. The guards’ manner was that of a response to the self-evident: they behaved as if the prisoners were creatures with no faculty of intelligence, or as if the prisoners had now entered a realm in which such a faculty was irrelevant.
In the larger society, the Nazis counted heavily on the power of ideology: there is no other way to rule an entire country. The dissemination of ideology, however—any ideology, even the Nazi one—implicitly underscores the importance of ideas, of individual choice and judgment, of the listener’s mind. In the camps no such implication was to be permitted.
No attempt was made to present the Nazi viewpoint to the prisoners. There were no self-justifying speeches, no summaries of Mein Kampf, no propaganda, no proselytizing. “Education [in the camps],” declared Himmler, “consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis.”
The SS did not want the prisoners’ intellectual acceptance of Nazism and rebuffed any overtures from would-be converts. When certain prisoners sought to make their peace with the Gestapo, Bettelheim reports, the Gestapo’s response was to insist that prisoners refrain from expressing any of their feelings, even pro-Nazi ones. “Free consent,” observes Miss Arendt, “is as much an obstacle to total domination as free opposition.” …
Neither, the inmates soon learned, did individuality have any place. When a prisoner entered the camp, he brought with him the knowledge achieved by civilized Western man: it was self-evident to him that he (like all men) was a separate entity with a unique identity. The camps proceeded methodically to flout this self-evidency.
Characteristically, the guards did not know or seek to know anything about any particular inmate beyond his group membership. Often they failed or deliberately refused to recognize any difference at all between one prisoner and another. An eerie egalitarianism prevailed: to the SS the things being manipulated by screams, kicks, and guns were not separate human entities, each with his own appearance, character, life; they were indistinguishable cells of an undifferentiated mass, faceless units made of agony, filth, and groveling, each equal to and interchangeable with hundreds or millions of other such units.
Personal responsibility was not recognized in the camps. If a prisoner took an action regarded as punishable, he was not treated as the culprit. Instead, so far as possible, every member of the group to which he belonged (including himself) was punished for the action, regardless of any member’s own behavior or knowledge of the incident; all were punished equally, ruthlessly, and as a group. …
It was not enough for the prisoners to bury and forget their individuality; as some of the prisoners grasped at the time, it was intended that they become in their own eyes objects of loathing.
At the outset [writes one survivor] the living places, the ditches, the mud, the piles of excrement behind the blocks, had appalled me with their horrible filth. . . . and then I saw the light! I saw that it was not a question of disorder or lack of organization but that, on the contrary, a very thoroughly considered conscious idea was in the back of the camp’s existence. They had condemned us to die in our own filth, to drown in mud, in our own excrement. They wished to abase us, to destroy our human dignity, to efface every vestige of humanity, to return us to the level of wild animals, to fill us with horror and contempt toward ourselves and our fellows.
“Who are you to perceive?”
The base of human knowledge is the evidence provided by the senses, which are man’s primary means of contact with reality. The camps did not restrict their concern to the higher reaches of cognition and evaluation; they went all the way, down to the root.
The concomitant of the conditions declaring: “Who are you to understand?” and “Who are you to judge?” was the brazen campaign declaring: “Who are you to perceive?”
“Don’t dare to notice”—the prisoners were ordered—don’t look at what is going on around you, avert your eyes and ears, don’t be conscious. To violate this rule, Bettelheim states, was dangerous. “For example, if an SS man was killing off a prisoner and other prisoners dared to look at what was going on in front of their eyes he would instantly go after them, too.”
To avoid such reprisals the prisoner had to learn to suppress any outward signs of perceptiveness (as he had to suppress any signs of individuality); or else he had really to comply with the rule, to train himself in the art and practice of nonperception. Sometimes (if he could not help knowing a forbidden fact) “this passive compliance—not to see or not to know—was not enough; in order to survive one had to actively pretend not to observe, not to know what the SS required one not to know.”
Obedience was turning the young Nazis into monsters, monsters of obedience
The guards’ defiance of all sense created in them a profound feeling of instability and helplessness and, as a result, a profound feeling of dependence on their superiors. Thus obedience in the camps became a self- reinforcing trait: it was gradually stripping the SS of their capacity to judge or to protest. Obedience was turning the young Nazis into monsters, monsters of obedience. According to Bettelheim, the higher a man stood in the hierarchy, the more fully he embodied this state. Bettelheim gives the example of Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, who
so laid aside his personal existence that he ended a mere executor of official demands. While his physical death came later, he became a living corpse from the time he assumed command of Auschwitz. . . . [H]e had to divest himself so entirely of self respect and self love, of feeling and personality, that for all practical purposes he was little more than a machine functioning only as his superiors flicked the buttons of command.The power-lusters of the death factories did not pursue their quest with impunity. The opponents of man’s rights, trampling on the rights of others, were underscoring their own rightlessness. The crusaders against the individual, crushing the “self respect and self love” of their enemies, were losing their own in the process. The authors and rulers of a brain-wrecking dimension, learning to accept and adapt to it, were making themselves brainless. …
It was a world of A and non-A
The prisoners could not believe a world in which the whim of the SS set all the terms of human existence, replacing reality as the basic absolute and frame of reference. They could not believe a world which seemed, in Miss Arendt’s words, “to give permanence to the process of dying itself,” as if “some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death. . . .” They had to struggle even to take in the kind of events they witnessed or heard about, such as major surgery being performed on prisoners by trained doctors, “without the slightest reason,” a survivor writes, and without anesthesia; or, as another reports, an inmate being thrown for punishment into “a large kettle of boiling water, intended for preparing coffee for the camp. The [victim] was scalded to death, but the coffee was prepared from the water all the same”; or youngsters being picked out at random, “seized by their feet and dashed against tree trunks”; or flames “leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. [The Nazis] were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load—little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it—saw it with my own eyes. . . . Was I awake? I could not believe it.”
“It seemed to me, I’m in another world. . . . It was so unbelievable that many of the prisoners had hallucinations . . .” (survivor of Auschwitz). “I lived as in a dream, waiting for someone to awaken me” (survivor of Auschwitz). “This can’t be true; such things just don’t happen” (prisoners at Buchenwald, according to Bettelheim).
Aside from the actual murders, this was the most lethal feature of the camps: that most prisoners could not accept the reality of what they saw, they could not reconcile the horror with life as they had once known it, and yet they could not deny the evidence of their senses. To such men, the camps lost all connection to life on earth and acquired a kind of metaphysical aura, the aura of being not human institutions in Europe, but “another world,” an impossible world, like a second, supernatural dimension of existence inconceivable in itself yet wiping out the first. The concentration camp seemed to its inmates to be a dimension which is at the same time a foolish nightmare and true reality; a dimension which cannot be, yet cannot be escaped; a dimension which is not, but which also, terrifyingly, is. It was a world of A and non-A.
By the nature of what went on behind the barbed-wire fences, the concentration camps to most inmates represented in essence, a universe which violates the basic law of existence, the Law of Identity.
The specific element in man which the camps attacked was the conditions of the mind’s ability to function
The specific element in man which the camps attacked was the conditions of the mind’s ability to function. The target was not primarily the physical conditions, but the root of man’s capacity of independence, i.e., the mind’s essential inner conditions: its grasp of existence, its confidence in reason, its commitment to values and to its own value.
The Nazis in the camps were not attacking ideas explicitly, but they were attacking ideas. They were attacking the essence of what men need and get from three sciences, as these had developed in a more rational age: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics. They were using fists, guns, and the instruments of brute physical torture in order to frustrate man’s most abstract, delicate, spiritual requirements: his philosophical requirements.
The concentration camps are an unprecedented testament to the need of theory, a certain kind of theory, in human life. They are a testament that works in reverse; they reveal the need by means of starving it.
The experimental findings of the Nazi “laboratories” can be reduced to a single statement: total domination over man requires philosophical disarmament—after which, nothing much, and little human, is left of the victim. …
In essence, what the Nazis wanted for themselves from the camps was the same unlimited unreason that they imposed on the prisoners. They expected it to wreck the prisoners, while making the rulers omnipotent. For both purposes, what they needed was a certain kind of universe: a universe of non-fact, non-thing, non-identity.
It was the universe that had been hinted at, elaborated, cherished, fought for, and made respectable by a long line of champions. It was the theory and the dream created by all the anti-Aristotelians of Western history.
The philosophers had only been fantasizing their noumenal dimension. The Nazis took it straight and tried to make it come true, here, in Europe, on earth….
We are told insistently to remember the Holocaust. Eloquent, horrifying books describe the facts to us in every detail. The truth about a monstrous, historic evil virtually screams out from hundreds of thousands of pages. But few, including the authors, seem to hear the scream.
The commentators do not say that the camps are the final, perfect embodiment of all the fundamental ideas which made Hitler possible, and that the way to avenge the victims is to fight those ideas. Most commentators do not know the category of issues necessary to reach or even consider such a conclusion. …
It is true that we must remember the Holocaust. But what we must remember above everything else, and eradicate, is its cause.