Ominous Parallels (4 page)

Plato was more than a Platonist; despite his mysticism, he was also a pagan Greek. As such he exhibited a certain authentic respect for reason, a respect which was implicit in Greek philosophy no matter how explicitly irrational it became. The Kantian mysticism, however, suffers from no such pagan restraints. It flows forth triumphantly, sweeping the prostrate human mind before it. Since man can never escape the distorting agents inherent in the structure of his consciousness, says Kant, “things in themselves” are in principle unknowable. Reason is impotent to discover anything about reality; if it tries, it can only bog down in impenetrable contradictions. Logic is merely a subjective human device, devoid of reference to or basis in reality. Science, while useful as a means of ordering the data of the world of appearances, is limited to describing a surface world of man’s own creation and says nothing about things as they really are.

Must men then resign themselves to a total skepticism? No, says Kant, there is one means of piercing the barrier between man and existence. Since reason, logic, and science are denied access to reality, the door is now open for men to approach reality by a different,
nonrational
method. The door is now open to
faith.
Taking their cue from their needs, men can properly believe (for instance, in God and in an after-life), even though they cannot prove the truth of their beliefs. And no matter how powerful the rational argument against their faith, that argument can always be dismissed out-of-hand : one need merely remind its advocate that rational knowledge and rational concepts are applicable only to the world of appearances, not to reality.

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.”
4

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. Philosophers turned as a group to variants of Platonism, this time an extreme, militant Platonism, a Platonism shorn of its last vestiges of respect for reason.

It is Kant who made possible the sudden mushrooming of the Platonic collectivism in the modern world, and especially in Germany. Kant is not a full-fledged statist, but a philosopher’s political views, to the extent that they contradict the essentials of his system, have little historical significance. Kant accepts certain elements of individualism, not because of his basic approach, but in spite of it, as a legacy of the Enlightenment period in which he lived. This merely suggests that Kant did not grasp the political implications of his own metaphysics and epistemology.

His heirs, however, did. A line of German romanticist philosophers followed Kant in the nineteenth century, each claiming to be his true follower, each avid for a reality beyond this world and a means of knowledge beyond reason, each contributing his share to the growth of an impassioned collectivism that poisoned the intellectual atmosphere of Germany. The most famous of these men, the most influential, the ruling figure of nineteenth-century philosophy, was Hegel.

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.

On its basis he proceeds to erect his own version of Platonism. Like Plato and Kant, he is an idealist in metaphysics. True reality, he holds, is a nonmaterial dimension, beyond time and space and human sense-perception. In Hegel’s version, reality is a dynamic cosmic mind or thought-process, which in various contexts is referred to as the Absolute, the Spirit, the World-Reason, God, etc. According to Hegel, it is in the essential nature of this entity to undergo a constant process of evolution or development, unfolding itself in various stages. In one of these stages, the Absolute “externalizes” itself, assuming the form of a material world. Continuing its career, it takes on the appearance of a multiplicity of human beings, each seemingly distinct from the others, each seemingly an autonomous individual with his own personal thoughts and desires.

The appearance of such separate individuals represents, however, merely a comparatively low stage in the Absolute’s career. It is not the final truth about reality. It does not represent the culmination of the Absolute’s development. At that stage, i.e., at the apex or climax of reality, it turns out, in Hegel’s view, that distinctions of any kind, including the distinctions between mind and matter and between one man and another, are unreal (opposites are identical, A is non-A). It turns out that everything is one, and that the things of this world—which appear to us to be individual, self-contained entities, each real in its own right—are merely so many partial aspects of one all-inclusive, all-consuming whole: the Absolute, which alone has full reality.

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.”
⁵

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. If each man learns to suppress his identity and coalesce with his fellows, the resulting collective entity, the state, will be a truer reflection of reality, a higher manifestation of the Absolute. 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. “[A]ll the worth which the human being possesses,” writes Hegel, “all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.”
⁶

The state-organism is no mere secular entity. As a manifestation of the Absolute, it is a creature of God, and thus demands not merely obedience from its citizens but reverential worship. “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.”
⁷

The above are the kinds of political ideas which Hegel, more than any other man, injected into the mind of early nineteenth-century Germany. Perpetuated in a variety of forms by a long chain of secondary figures and derivative influences, these ideas gradually became commonplaces in Germany
and
in
other countries,
including Italy. The aspiring dictators of the twentieth century and their intellectual defenders moved with alacrity to embrace such commonplaces and to cash in on them.

Both the Fascists and the Nazis were in the forefront of this trend.

In the Fascist literature the influence of Hegel is generally acknowledged. Prominent neo-Hegelian philosophers, such as Mario Palmieri and Giovanni Gentile, upheld Fascism on a Hegelian foundation and earned a formal endorsement from Mussolini. “The world seen through Fascism,” writes Mussolini,

is not this material world which appears on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all others and standing by himself.... The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty a higher life free from the limits of time and space....
⁸

The Nazi literature is not so overtly Hegelian in its formulations. Posing as the spokesmen for a higher biological truth, the Nazis generally dropped the idealistic metaphysics of Hegel and even attacked him. Admittedly or not, however, the Nazis, like the Fascists, rely on the ideas of Hegel—not only for their basic collectivist approach but for many of the more specific political theories necessary to implement it in practice.

Hegel, for instance, seeks to undercut any individualist opponents, by proclaiming that statism represents a passion for human liberty.

A man is free, Hegel explains, when he acts as he himself wills to act. But since “the state is the true self of the individual,” what a man
really
wills, even though he may not know it, is what the state wills. Liberty, therefore, is obedience to the orders of the government. Such obedience guarantees true freedom for the real self, even if the illusory self is being sent to Auschwitz.
⁹

The masses of men, notes Hegel, do not understand the above viewpoint. The people, therefore, “does
not
know what it wills. To know what one wills, and still more to know what the absolute will, Reason, wills, is the fruit of profound apprehension and insight, precisely the things which are not popular.”
¹⁰
Hence Hegel (like Plato) is opposed to the theory of popularly elected, representative government. Instead, he calls for an authoritarian state resembling a Prussian monarchy. The monarch’s decrees, we are told, embody the true will of the people.

“And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man,” says Mussolini, “and not of the scarecrow invented by the individualistic Liberalism, then Fascism is for liberty. It is for the only kind of liberty that is serious—the liberty of the State....” “There is no freedom of the individual,” says the Nazi Otto Dietrich. “There is only freedom of peoples, nations or races; for these are the only material and historical realities through which the life of the individual exists.” “The Führer-Reich of the people,” says Huber, “is founded on the recognition that the true will of the people cannot be disclosed through parliamentary votes and plebiscites but that the will of the people in its pure and uncorrupted form can only be expressed through the Führer.”
¹¹

In his defense of monarchy, Hegel stops short of advocating complete dictatorship. In his theory of “heroes,” however, he makes little effort to conceal that this is his viewpoint. A few superior beings throughout the ages, he holds—e.g., Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon—have functioned as “agents of the World-Spirit.” These men have been endowed with a special mission: to advance the evolution of Spirit (carry out the will of God) in their era. Guided by Providence, the “world-historical hero” seizes the initiative and takes direct action; through him the Spirit, “impinging on the outer world as on a shell, bursts it in pieces....” Such individuals, Hegel concedes, often leave a trail of corpses in their wake.
Nevertheless, they are exempt from moral judgment:

For the History of the World occupies a higher ground than that on which morality has properly its position.... [M]oral claims that are irrelevant must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment. The Litany of private virtues... must not be raised against them.
¹²

Here, sanctioned by an intricate metaphysical system, is a call for a militaristic dictator to throw aside morality and “burst the world in pieces” in accordance with his concept of destiny. Issued by the most prestigious German philosopher of the nineteenth century, it is an invitation for a Führer to step forward. Philosophers cannot issue such invitations with impunity. One way or another the next representative of the Absolute is going to get the message.

“However weak the individual may be when compared with the omnipotence and will of Providence,” said Hitler in a 1937 speech,

yet at the moment when he acts as Providence would have him act he becomes immeasurably strong. Then there streams down upon him that force which has marked all greatness in the world’s history. And when I look back only on the five years which lie behind us, then I feel that I am justified in saying: That has not been the work of man alone.
¹³

Just as there are world-historical heroes, according to Hegel, so there are world-historical
peoples.
In any given era, he holds,
one
nation is the special vehicle of the World Spirit in its process of self-unfolding. That nation, he says, has “absolute right” over all the others, which are “without rights” and “count no longer in world history.” “Absolute right” includes the right to launch war.
¹⁴