Read Online Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff - Free Book Online Page B
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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which wastes man’s powers in service of dead matter ... ,” concluded Wagner. 9
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.
A well-known German historian has remarked that the romanticist element in German thought would appear to Western eyes as “a queer mixture of mysticism and brutality .” 10 The formulation errs only in the adjective “queer.” The mixture’s two ingredients have a magnetic affinity for each other: the first makes possible and leads to the second (and not only in Germany).
By the time of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s intellectuals—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike—bad 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. 11
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.
Pervaded by attacks on every idea and method essential to the function of the reasoning mind, the cultural atmosphere of the Weimar Republic was an invaluable asset to the Nazis. They made full use of it, taking from their surroundings whatever epistemological doctrines they needed in order to implement their irrationalist approach, assured in advance of a receptive mass audience.
Of these doctrines, two in particular were emphasized by the Nazis, the combination becoming a characteristic leitmotif of theirs. One of the doctrines is age-old; the other is an offshoot of romanticism. The first is dogmatism (the advocacy of faith in immutable revelations) ; the second is pragmatism.
The concept of faith does not pertain to the content of a man’s ideas, but to the method by which they are to be accepted. “Faith” designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof. It is obvious, therefore, why Nazi (and Fascist) leaders insist on faith from their followers. “Faith,” writes Hitler,
is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward. 12
In the West, the stronghold of the demand for faith, the institution which issues that demand in the most sophisticated manner, is the Catholic
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.
A well-known German historian has remarked that the romanticist element in German thought would appear to Western eyes as “a queer mixture of mysticism and brutality .” 10 The formulation errs only in the adjective “queer.” The mixture’s two ingredients have a magnetic affinity for each other: the first makes possible and leads to the second (and not only in Germany).
By the time of the Weimar Republic, Germany’s intellectuals—Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike—bad 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. 11
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.
Pervaded by attacks on every idea and method essential to the function of the reasoning mind, the cultural atmosphere of the Weimar Republic was an invaluable asset to the Nazis. They made full use of it, taking from their surroundings whatever epistemological doctrines they needed in order to implement their irrationalist approach, assured in advance of a receptive mass audience.
Of these doctrines, two in particular were emphasized by the Nazis, the combination becoming a characteristic leitmotif of theirs. One of the doctrines is age-old; the other is an offshoot of romanticism. The first is dogmatism (the advocacy of faith in immutable revelations) ; the second is pragmatism.
The concept of faith does not pertain to the content of a man’s ideas, but to the method by which they are to be accepted. “Faith” designates blind acceptance of a certain ideational content, acceptance induced by feeling in the absence of evidence or proof. It is obvious, therefore, why Nazi (and Fascist) leaders insist on faith from their followers. “Faith,” writes Hitler,
is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward. 12
In the West, the stronghold of the demand for faith, the institution which issues that demand in the most sophisticated manner, is the Catholic
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