Read Online Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Leonard Peikoff
Tags: United States, History, German, Germany, Political, American, Europe, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), Modern fiction, Philosophy, Politics, Modern, International Relations, General & Literary Fiction, History & Surveys, National Socialism, History & Surveys - Modern
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denied the very existence of entities. Their “dynamic” universe was a resurrection of the ancient theory of Heraclitus: reality is a stream of change without entities or of action without anything that acts; it is a wild, chaotic flux, which the orderly “Enlightenment mind” cannot grasp.
Opposed most of all to analysis, to the “dissection” of reality performed by man’s conceptual faculty, to the distinctions made by man’s intellect, the romanticists praised wholes, so-called “organic” wholes. (The source of this particular notion is Kant’s Critique of Judgment.) The whole, they declared, is not the sum of its parts; it is a thing which consumes and transcends its constituents, obliterating their separate identities in the process.
The master “organic” whole, these men commonly held, is reality itself, variously called the Absolute, God, etc. Typically, it was construed as a kind of cosmic craving, an all-encompassing impulse or process of striving, called simply the “Will.” (This theory developed from Kant’s idea that the demands of the will are the key to the universe.) The advocates of such a view are known as “voluntarists,” because of their claim that will is the essence of reality, and that the physical world is merely will’s superficial manifestation.
Voluntarism is a frontal assault on reason. The theory implies that reality as such—and man, too, as part of it—is inherently irrational and even insane. In Schopenhauer’s version, for instance, the World-Will is described as blind, insatiable, and absolutely senseless. As a result, its offshoot, the world of appearances in which we live, is a nightmare universe condemning man to ceaseless agony. The only escape, Schopenhauer says, is the denial of one’s will to live, followed by the oblivion of Nirvana. In Nietzsche’s version, what rules man (and, he suggests, reality) is an equally blind and senseless will, the “will to power”—which is, Nietzsche says, not to be denied but exultantly affirmed. To affirm it, he holds, one must reject the mind and act instead on the spontaneous, drunken outpourings of the orgiastic “Dionysian” element in man (raw passion). “Why? You ask, why?” declares Zarathustra, in a remark that encapsulates the romanticism in Nietzsche and the unreason in romanticism. “I am not one of those whom one may ask about their why.” 8
The philosophers’ flight into a world of Will, or of the past, or of the East, did not prevent their followers, especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century, from applying the romanticist viewpoint to the issues and concerns of life on earth.
An education stressing the intellect, such men charged, places too great a burden on the child and thwarts his emotional development. An education teaching facts and objectivity improperly emphasizes external factors at the expense of the child’s “inner experience.” What Germany needs, they concluded, is a new kind of institution: not cold, cognition-centered “learning-schools,” but feeling-centered “Lebensschulen” (life-schools). Encouraged by liberal progressives and conservative nationalists alike, the romanticist educators proceeded gradually to supply this need—first in the empire, then in the Republic. (Thus the schools were ready for the Nazi educators, when their time came.)
Modern science and its product, the Industrial Revolution—the advocates of romanticism charged—thwart the emotional development of everyone, whether child or adult. Individualism, they said, is “atomistic,” capitalism is “materialistic,” urban life is artificial, factories are ugly, labor-saving machinery is soulless and a source of misery. By contrast, medieval peasants, in one commentator’s words, “were supposed to have been happy, natural, uncitified, and uncultured, literally in contact with the earth (a supposedly most beneficial tie)....” “I will destroy [the present] order of things,
Opposed most of all to analysis, to the “dissection” of reality performed by man’s conceptual faculty, to the distinctions made by man’s intellect, the romanticists praised wholes, so-called “organic” wholes. (The source of this particular notion is Kant’s Critique of Judgment.) The whole, they declared, is not the sum of its parts; it is a thing which consumes and transcends its constituents, obliterating their separate identities in the process.
The master “organic” whole, these men commonly held, is reality itself, variously called the Absolute, God, etc. Typically, it was construed as a kind of cosmic craving, an all-encompassing impulse or process of striving, called simply the “Will.” (This theory developed from Kant’s idea that the demands of the will are the key to the universe.) The advocates of such a view are known as “voluntarists,” because of their claim that will is the essence of reality, and that the physical world is merely will’s superficial manifestation.
Voluntarism is a frontal assault on reason. The theory implies that reality as such—and man, too, as part of it—is inherently irrational and even insane. In Schopenhauer’s version, for instance, the World-Will is described as blind, insatiable, and absolutely senseless. As a result, its offshoot, the world of appearances in which we live, is a nightmare universe condemning man to ceaseless agony. The only escape, Schopenhauer says, is the denial of one’s will to live, followed by the oblivion of Nirvana. In Nietzsche’s version, what rules man (and, he suggests, reality) is an equally blind and senseless will, the “will to power”—which is, Nietzsche says, not to be denied but exultantly affirmed. To affirm it, he holds, one must reject the mind and act instead on the spontaneous, drunken outpourings of the orgiastic “Dionysian” element in man (raw passion). “Why? You ask, why?” declares Zarathustra, in a remark that encapsulates the romanticism in Nietzsche and the unreason in romanticism. “I am not one of those whom one may ask about their why.” 8
The philosophers’ flight into a world of Will, or of the past, or of the East, did not prevent their followers, especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century, from applying the romanticist viewpoint to the issues and concerns of life on earth.
An education stressing the intellect, such men charged, places too great a burden on the child and thwarts his emotional development. An education teaching facts and objectivity improperly emphasizes external factors at the expense of the child’s “inner experience.” What Germany needs, they concluded, is a new kind of institution: not cold, cognition-centered “learning-schools,” but feeling-centered “Lebensschulen” (life-schools). Encouraged by liberal progressives and conservative nationalists alike, the romanticist educators proceeded gradually to supply this need—first in the empire, then in the Republic. (Thus the schools were ready for the Nazi educators, when their time came.)
Modern science and its product, the Industrial Revolution—the advocates of romanticism charged—thwart the emotional development of everyone, whether child or adult. Individualism, they said, is “atomistic,” capitalism is “materialistic,” urban life is artificial, factories are ugly, labor-saving machinery is soulless and a source of misery. By contrast, medieval peasants, in one commentator’s words, “were supposed to have been happy, natural, uncitified, and uncultured, literally in contact with the earth (a supposedly most beneficial tie)....” “I will destroy [the present] order of things,
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