Read Online Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff - Free Book Online

openly to a life of muscles and mindlessness, Hitler was counting on a widespread anti-reason attitude, an attitude that no political party by itself could have created or sustained. 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. a
    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 two figures who created the new era and made this viewpoint the norm in the West—the two who welded the mystic stirrings of the late eighteenth century into a powerful, self-conscious, intellectually respectable voice, and who placed that voice at the base of all later philosophy—were Kant and Hegel. Kant is the father of the romanticist movement. It is he who claimed to have proved for the first time that existence is in principle unknowable to man’s mind. Thereafter, Hegel, Kant’s chief heir, most powerfully articulated the new movement’s central ideas, in every branch of philosophy.
    But neither Kant nor Hegel is a full romanticist. Kant opened the door to the movement, but hesitated to walk firmly through. Hegel did walk through, but paid vigorous lip service to reason all the way. There were many, however, who did not hesitate and who did little to mask their views. In Germany the most influential of these men were J.G. Herder (another hero of the Nazis), Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The product of this main romanticist line was an army of lesser intellectuals and fellow travelers (generally cruder and more open than their mentors), who helped to spread the new approach to every corner of Germany.
    The romanticists held (following Kant) that reason is a faculty restricted to a surface world of appearances and incapable of penetrating to true reality. Man’s true source of knowledge, they declared (drawing explicitly the conclusion Kant had implied), is: feeling—or passion, or intuition, or faith, etc. Man in this view is not a rational being; he is in essence an emotional being, and he must seek the truth and live his life accordingly.
    Although most of the romanticists advocated some form of religion, religion is not an essential component of this philosophy. On the whole, the romanticists were more modern than that. They offered a somewhat secularized version of the earlier religious approach, stressing instinct more than revelation, the voice of the subconscious more than of the supernatural. But they never forgot their philosophic ancestors and brothers-in-spirit. While condemning the civilization of the Enlightenment, they passionately admired two cultures: the medieval and the Oriental.
    Hostile to the “cold” objectivity of the scientific method, the romanticists turned to avowedly subjective fantasies, priding themselves on their absorption in an inner world of intense feeling. Scornful of the “shallowness” of Aristotelian logic, they flaunted the fact that the universes they constructed were brimming with “depth,” i.e., with contradictions, A’s endlessly blending into non-A’s and vice versa. Contemptuous of the “static” world of the Enlightenment thinkers—a world of stable, enduring entities—the romanticists