By Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lehmann
During
year 1943 Dr. Gerhard Lehmann published a book entitled Contemporary German
Philosophy (Lehmann, 1943). It is a very interesting book citing and commenting
the investigations of, among others, Franz Brentano, Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber,
Rudolf Carnap, Max Scheler, Oswald Spengler, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and
Carl Gustav Jung. Chapter IV of the third part deals with political
philosophers. After noticing that many of the ideas exposed in this chapter
deserve further exploration and deepening by the interested friends of
knowledge, I present the first English translation of this material. I made all
possible efforts
to keep the original meaning intact.
Chapter IV of part III of the
book Die Deutsche Philosophie Der Gegenwart from Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lehmann
(Lehmann, 1943).
The
political philosophy of the present, with which we are now dealing solely and
ultimately, differs
so substantially from the directions of contemporary thought that it is
necessary to assume these differences.
It has assumptions which, if not denied by the ‘unpolitical’ philosophy, are
considered too narrow and merely factual, historically coincidental. On the
contrary, it itself criticizes most sharply the prerequisites of traditional
philosophy. It is historically concrete, insofar as it gives expression to
the ideological decisions and objectives of our time, and no earlier one, even
if it has dug itself deeply into tradition. Precisely this seems to lead to a
narrowing of problems, to a renunciation of timeless truths, finalities, at least
to the separation of certain areas in which, although (as in mathematics, logic)
such truths are recognized, they are recognized only as formal, not as
politically relevant. As a ‘political’ philosophy, it seems from the outset
to exclude something like a philosophy of nature, of consciousness, of religion,
but which nevertheless belongs in the systematic approach of a philosophy as a
doctrine of the ‘whole world’. Thus, it seems to concede to ‘unpolitical’
philosophy not only a realm of formal knowledge, but also a larger realm of
substantive objectivities, from which, however, it is itself, as philosophy,
unable to detach itself.
These and more gross objections,
which relate primarily to the established route and to the attachment to a
politically determined worldview, could be completely reversed if only that was
our task to describe and present the political philosophy of the present in its
specificity. But this task, however important it is, remains subordinate. The
most urgent demand of the present is neither merely to ‘describe’ nor merely to
‘understand’, but to re-enact and participate. Anyone who believes they can
avoid this gains no access to contemporary political philosophy; this does not,
of course, mean that re- enactment and participation as such are already sufficient
to achieve the peculiar way of reflecting that belongs to every philosophy. To be
sure, one thing would already be made clear by the description: that political
philosophy by no means restricts or narrows itself territorially in its
systematic claims, but on the contrary takes up all the positions of traditional
philosophizing insofar as these can be politically legitimized. Whereby this
claim to totality is rooted in the essence of the political just as much as
criticism of any detached philosophy of objects and problems.
Then there must be serious
misunderstandings that already distort the image of political philosophy.
And on closer inspection, it is
easy to see that it is the relationship between philosophy and politics, the
philosophical concept of the political itself, from which they arise. There is a
history of political thought, rich in constructive designs, intellectual
planning, revolutionary and conservative ideas. Should philosophy have taken no
notice of this? On the contrary. All accounts of the history of philosophy
are filled with reports on state-philosophical, socio- philosophical,
cultural-philosophical thoughts of the past. But that is precisely what is
characteristic: the political appears here as an application area of philosophy;
its concept appears as a variation, fulfillment of meaning of the philosophical
concept. What philosophy itself is, and how it makes it possible to influence
practical action and political objectives, is not considered in advance: the
philosophical basic problems certainly include the question of the nature of
philosophy. And in dealing with this question, political factors, one thinks
of Plato first and foremost, play no small role.
Nevertheless, in determining the
essence of philosophy within the traditional history of philosophy (which by no
means coincides with its real ‘history’, but is ‘historiography’), political reflection
negates itself in the idea of a ‘politics’ to be based on philosophy, so to
speak: it places concrete communal action in the service of realizing timeless
truths, ethical demands, religious salvific teachings, ‘ascetic ideals’. This
turn from the temporal to the timeless, from the historical to the absolute, is
certainly not accidental, although we do not find it in all thinkers who were
also politicians, and certainly not in all politicians who were also
philosophers. At the very least, it is no coincidence that the selection
process, the precipitate of which precisely forms the philosophical tradition
and historiography, brought only such ‘ascetic’ thinkers to recognition.
Where philosophy did not grant
religious, theological authorities a right which undoubtedly belonged to them in
long eras of Western intellectual life, it made itself the highest authority.
Political cognition, which is supposed to have something specific within a specific
sphere of action as its ‘object’, had to be oriented towards philosophical
cognition, which is directed at the universal. It had to measure, judge, condemn
or, in democratic-humanitarian eras, approvingly evaluate itself by it. The
possibility that the political itself contains sources of cognition which are
not only unreachable for philosophical insight, but which are even binding and
obligating in this unreachability had to be rejected by tradition as an
absurdity. In fact, it is easy to demonstrate that politics as
‘cognition’ (not as experience which first has to be cognized)
is merely a ‘case’ of possible cognition and as such cannot claim to determine
‘the’ cognition in its possibility, conceptual structure, essential structure.
If one wanted to deny this, one would still have to presuppose it as correct in
the act of denial and thus acknowledge it. Or does a ‘politically’ justified
relativism have any advantage over any other?
However, like all seeming
self-evident truths, this one too is only a ‘self- evident’ subreption and
tautology. It is no surprise that dogmatists who breed cultures of problems pass
by such a fundamental problem: after all, it is their own will to power those
risks foundering here. With all their might they want to support the traditional
concept of truth, from which the idea of the philosophia perennis always
followed and follows. This is the inertia of self-preservation, which does
not want its beloved activities and pursuits to be challenged. Even if genuine
philosophizing were first and foremost to develop from this challenge.
Things are different
for the historian. For him, the turn to political philosophy in contemporary
thinking, initially only understood as a turning away from the handed down,
supposedly ‘unpolitical’ way of thinking, is at least prepared by the fact of
that ‘nationalization’ of philosophy, which can be dated very early
chronologically, but which only becomes clear in its real, and that means
political, problematic in the 19th century. Philosophizing, formerly no less
rich in national differences,
now for the first time becomes expressly, and indeed with reference to the common
philosophical tradition, appropriated to the respective polis. The blanket of
supranational, European, Christian- Western commonalities becomes thinner and
thinner; all countries stake their claims to an autogenous philosophy, an
independent tradition. On closer inspection, the facts of the nationalization in
philosophy do not turn out to be so simple a consequence of the intensification
of national self-consciousness. Is this nationalization, as has already been
suggested, almost everywhere under the sign of a reception of German philosophy:
of German idealism, Kant, Hegel?
German philosophy is the connecting, the common, thought text
on which the different
countries only differently
imposes their own traditional elements.
That one defends oneself against Germany’s cultural hegemony, requites the
reception of ‘German’ ideas with political enmity, arises on the one hand from
the historical situation, on the other hand from the general law of the
inevitable loss of power of any realpolitik ally uncovered, purely ideal-
factor-based hegemony.
Nevertheless, this political state
of affairs,
precisely because German philosophy has overriding philosophical significance,
does not yet seem to effect
a real politicization of thought. But German philosophy itself abandons German
classical philosophy, even before it begins to gain acceptance abroad.
For ‘contemporary philosophy’ (the
concept of which then begins to catch on), German idealism becomes non-binding
as past thought. Thus arises the familiar fact to every historian that a history
of 19th century philosophy encompassing individual countries must of necessity
incorporate political (national) differences
into its approach, because our own philosophy has withdrawn from its national
(and that means, in this case: from its international) validity.
What thus appears as an emergency
remedy becomes recognizable in its central significance when one decides to
search now also for political motives in the thought formation of German
idealist philosophy itself. In earlier contexts we have attempted to outline the
internal relationships of 19th century German philosophy to politics: in the
German movement from Herder to Hegel, in the philosophy of Restoration, in Young
Hegelianism and the radical movement, but also later in the struggle for the
autonomy of science, for the ‘scientific’ representation of philosophy, in the
dissolution and substitution of metaphysics by a social science, sociology,
which even where it does not enter into a connection with socialism, is
determined by political presuppositions and aims. This is not to be repeated
here. In any case, it is clear that there can be no
question here of ‘external’ relationships to politics, but that politics and
philosophy are connected in the most intimate ideal manner.
Indeed, seen in this way, contemporary political philosophy could be regarded
precisely as a continuation and above all a raising to consciousness of the
connections elaborated in the 19th century.
Certainly, this view is justified.
But it is not enough. Contemporary political thought differs
very essentially from that of the previous century. And it is precisely for
this: that only today is a political philosophy possible, i.e. a philosophy that
relates not merely to political contents, objects, but has as it were
incorporated the political into its structure, it is of the greatest importance
for this difference.
In the 19th century the concept of
politics is conceived, if not throughout at least by most theorists dealing with
it, first, statically, related to the state, and second, regionally, related to a
specific area of culture, of social life, of values and value-setting. Of course,
the statism of 19th century ‘politics’ is by no means merely an extension of the
state doctrines of the old authoritarian state: the German movement of the Wars
of Liberation, which was a popular movement; idealist philosophy, which places
itself at least initially in the service of the German unification movement;
German liberalism of neo- humanist provenance, and it too with the claim to
procure right and representation for the ‘people’ vis-à-vis the state, all this
lies in between. Even in Dahlmann’s Politics (1835), ‘traced back to the basis
and measure of given conditions’, the concept of the political is in a certain
sense a national one, and not at all colored by the state, even if, quite
neo-humanistically, the ‘great common work of mankind’ as a ‘higher order’
superior to any individual state and all states together is placed first and made
the measure of the political: the life of individual states merely accomplishes
the ‘preparatory work’ for this ‘common work’.
Hardly any more examples are needed
for the later state-centering of the political. Almost every textbook on
‘politics’ in the second half of the century can serve as an example. Of course,
the greatest example, Hegel’s philosophy of law with its deification of the
state, which is declared to be the manifest (revealed!) ethical ‘spirit’,
substantial, self-thinking and knowing will, still belongs to the idealist
movement itself. It is here that the reversal of the national into the state
concept becomes most obvious; as is well known, in the second edition of the
‘Encyclopedia’ (1827) Hegel replaced the word ‘people’ from the first edition
(1817) with ‘state’: but the change of word alone does not account for it, what
matters is the change of meaning, and that becomes most visible in the
Philosophy of Law.
One thing, however, cannot be said
of Hegel, the Organicists, the Restoration philosophers and of course also the
‘radicals’: that they would have bounded the political region. Of course,
politics was a state doctrine. For Hegel, the state was the earthly God. Of
course it was not the absolute spirit itself. It was the last synthesis of
‘objective’ spirit. But for that reason it was not separated from the Absolute:
Hegel’s metaphysics of spirit knows no such separations. The moment when on the
one hand the absolute spirit, i.e. the Absolute itself as the central unity of
meaning disappeared, and on the other hand philosophy dropped anchor in the
harbour of the individual sciences, legitimating itself ‘epistemologically’, the
‘repetition’ of the philosophy of objective spirit (in Dilthey and the
‘human-scientific’ philosophy of neo-idealism) had to lead to that separation of
the political which is so characteristic for the last third of the previous
century. Economy, law, state, politics, culture, religion, science, etc., all of
them became ‘fields’ which one sought to trace back to individual sciences, each
already of a finished character. The typological elaboration of this
human-scientific approach still belongs, for example, to the requisites of
present-day ‘cultural psychology’. We are only
interested here in the fact that the turn to political philosophy in the present
means a re-centralization of the political itself.
Of course, this is not to be
understood simply in terms of the history of concepts: that one has now decided
to give the concept of ‘politics’ a new content, no longer to relate it to the
state, to a particular cultural value, to a particular field of ‘objective
spirit’, but to the national community, to the whole of the polis. It is to be
understood historically and therefore itself politically. Contemporary
political philosophy is of course in this respect itself the expression of that
reorganization of our social and state structure, effected
for the first time by National Socialism as a national-political movement.
How far academic philosophy still
stood apart from the recent past and was only seeking ways and detours to
appropriate the present in an understanding way is well known. Much more
important is likely to be the other thing: that what takes on ideological form
in National Socialism breaks out as problematic from within, so to speak, in the
development of contemporary philosophy. If this coincidence did not exist, if
rather it was simply the case that National Socialism had ‘influenced’ philosophy
and that the latter was only trying to follow the impulses it had received, then
‘political’ philosophy in the present would certainly be an important
contemporary factor, but not really a section of modern philosophy history. And
National Socialism itself, would it not be historically rootless in ideological
terms if it could not refer to intellectual-historical prerequisites which must
also have influenced the development of contemporary philosophy in another form?
The history of the ideas of
National Socialism points first and foremost to a movement which was already
politically global: the populist movement of the Bismarck era, in which, first of
all, the concept of race, in its then imperfectly fixed scientific form, is linked
to national demands and aspirations, which had to remain unsatisfactory in the
small German, national-liberal (which here should not mean party, but structure)
Second Reich.
And thereby, only thereby, it
refers back to the literature and philosophy of that time: to H. St.
Chamberlain’s, rather aesthetically than politically determined, neo-idealist
philosophy of culture, which stands in transparent relationship to R. Wagner’s
mythological irrationalism; to Nietzsche’s cultural critique, revaluation
doctrine and realistic philosophy, which in a certain respect forms the
counterpole not only to Chamberlain, but also to neo- idealism in general at
that time; to Lagarde’s conservative yet not merely ‘conservative’ program of
renewal, which very energetically frees the political from the clutches of the
‘state’, subordinates mechanical ties in the state to an organic structure in
the people, anti-socialist, aristocratic, as it finds powerful expression above
all as an educational program in the German Writings (1880).
This and much else belongs to
the history of ideas of National Socialism, without it making sense to stamp
these men as ‘precursors’ of the National Socialist movement; for what is
essential is missing everywhere: the political synthesis of nationalism and
socialism. This is to be referred exclusively to
the work of the Leader himself as idea and deed.
Alongside this line of intellectual
history, and today more clearly distinguishable from it than a few years ago,
runs that other one, leading right into the crisis period, characterized above
all by Möller van den Bruck’s continuation of Lagarde’s nationalist-conservative
critique and Oswald Spengler’s philosophy of culture. If the ideal synthesis
given by van den Bruck in The Third Reich (1923) was conceived as an antithesis
to Spengler’s seemingly fatalistic (but compared to his models Gobineau and
Nietzsche, far from matching in visionary power) doctrine of the decline of
culture, and was also effective
as such, it cannot be overlooked that Spengler had far more concentrically and
unliterarily anticipated van den Bruck’s political approach in his unforgettable
writing Prussianism and Socialism (1919). Here lies what they have in common.
What separates them lies in the fact that in van den Bruck’s idea of the Reich
the universalism of our idealist tradition is alive and brought to bear as an
historical potency, whereas Spengler, mostly perceived as a naturalist, demands
a radical turning away from any universalistic emotional and contemplative
outlook.
If one compares this with the
development of contemporary philosophy into political philosophy itself, it is
of course not enough to point to that series of thinkers, determined overall by
neo-idealism, whom we got to know as representatives of a national and also
nationalist sentiment!. For although there is a relationship here to politics or
to a nationalist worldview, the political problematic does not arise directly
from the philosophical. As long as the concept of philosophy in its traditional
definiteness remains unchallenged, the relationship to the political is a
discourse that concerns only the mentality of the speaker, not the matter
itself. It is also historically readily apparent that the roots of contemporary
political philosophy must be sought in the same critical contemporary situation
into which the National Socialist movement itself enters in order to overcome
it: those are the postwar and transitional years which accelerate the decay of
the old philosophy and compel a radical reflection on the essence of philosophy.
Apparently, what remains concealed
from traditionally universalist thought is the problem that here cannot
meaningfully even be posed: the problem of human existence and existentiality,
as well as that to which the dynamic pressing towards the political in our time
testifies most strongly. We pointed out two roots and forms of modern ‘philosophy
of existence’: idealist (Kierkegaard) and realistic (Nietzsche). But it should
be clear that one cannot simply place them side by side. Perhaps in retrospect.
But not when one looks to the present. Almost everything that takes place in
German academic philosophy since the turn of the century takes place in the
idealist sphere. And (idealist) philosophy of existence is initially only a
self-contradictory attempt, based on idealist premises themselves, to draw
boundaries and demolish systematic seeming assurances. It is entirely no
coincidence that the social, indeed in the narrower sense sociological
problematic stands in the foreground here.
We have elaborated this! and here
need only point back to the fact that for Heidegger, for example, essential to
the Being of existence is ‘being-with others’, that the world of existence is
precisely not ‘world’ pure and simple but is with-world: ‘being-in’ is
‘being-with’ and inwardly objective being-in- itself is ‘being there with’. Or
that for Jaspers empirical existence is protected from the contingency of its
merely individual (self-willed) existence through the ‘experience’ of
communication: this is neither simply community nor conscious community, but
rather the lived ‘revelation’ of the existential ground of community.
As insistently as one political
moment here presses forward: community, in a form deviating from neo-idealism
(e.g. Eucken’s ‘socialism’, Natorp’s ‘social idealism’), by community no longer
being thought of as idea, image of action, ethical model, but being
ontologically or metaphysically tied to the enactment of ‘possible’ existence
(which of course does not exclude ethical content as such), so much the other
political moment retreats: that which Humboldt called power, energy, Nietzsche
will to power. For as with idealism in all its nuances, with neo-idealistic
philosophy of culture and also still with Spengler’s culture-morphological turn
towards the realistic, community for idealist philosophy of existence is, one
might almost say more than ever, subordinated to a universal system of
reference. And directly subordinated at that. In place of the Humanum, Spirit,
Being, the ‘All-encompassing’ has entered. But that does not improve matters.
For this ontologization or transcending of the political leads, as an immediate
one, directly to individualism, whether one admits it or not. Just as,
politically seen, every religious-metaphysical approach, and that is the
approach derived from Kierkegaard adopted by idealist philosophy of existence,
is individualistic.
It would have to be hopeless to
want to correct something there. Nietzsche could have shown the way. But of
course, not the Zarathustra-Nietzsche with his transcendental surrogates. And he
is the one who, despite Baeumler’s radical revaluation of the traditional
Nietzsche image, is still taken seriously alone in philosophy today. The other
Nietzsche still applies without exception as a ‘naturalist’.
The correction in contemporary
thinking came from another side. In a short piece on the ‘Concept of the
Political’ (1927 as an essay, in book form 1931, revised 1933) Carl Schmitt, the
Berlin professor of constitutional law, had introduced that initially formal
(‘categorial’) factor which at one stroke transforms the universal community
into a political one: the ‘distinction’ between friend and foe. Since Schmitt’s
attempted conceptual definition of the political has become significant for
contemporary political philosophy, both because of its content and because of
the criticism it provoked, it must be examined somewhat more closely.
The numerous other historical,
legal, and directly topical, contemporary historical works of Schmitt
(Dictatorship 1921, Political Theology 1922, Constitutional Doctrine 1928,
Guardian of the Constitution 1931, State, Movement, People 1933, Legal-Scientific
Thinking 1934, Leviathan 1938, Positions and Concepts 1940, etc.) can be
disregarded here. They are of great interest, rich in thought and illuminating
of the situation. Schmitt did not become known solely through them. In the
notorious trial Prussia v. Reich of 1932 he represented the Reich before the
State Court and refuted with great skill the legally masked arguments of the
former Braun-Severing government (When the Reich President appoints a
provisional state government, he acts as ‘guardian of the constitution by virtue
of the essentially political decision placed under his political discretion,’ it
said in the concluding speech of October 17).
Emerging from an argument with
(Anglo-American) pluralist state theory (primarily J. Laski’s), Schmitt’s thesis
is characterized by three moments: by the rejection of liberal-pluralist lines
of thought coordinating the state with other groups, grasping the political as a
partial sphere of the ‘social’ (‘associative’); by the emphasis on the totality
of the political unity (‘community’); by the existential determination of the
friend-enemy antithesis, which as a political one always presupposes an extreme
‘intensity’ of a connection or separation or the real possibility of physical
annihilation of the enemy (war).
The state is neither a special kind
of society nor the ‘product of a federalism of social associations’ (umbrella
association). A ‘pluralistic’, i.e. dominated by a plurality of different
parties, state is of course not unpolitical, but politically disempowered. It is
a political entity without the power of overriding political unity that would
relativize contrasts between parties. Schmitt’s fight was directed against the
pluralist state in this sense: the method of political will formation in the
multi-party state is ‘daily compromise’, its danger ‘open or latent civil war.’
The pluralist system must lead to the politicization of all domestic
institutions; it is based on the ‘primacy of domestic politics’.
By contrast, the political unity or
community, whose ‘possibility’ belongs to the essential determination of the
political (thus also remains a presupposition in the pluralist system), is a
unity going beyond the merely social-associative, something ‘specifically different’
from social groupings. Such an overriding unity is the community insofar as it
has the power, by its own decision and at its own risk, to make the ‘distinction
between friend and foe.’ It is existentially political as this power. Schmitt
thus closely ties the determination of the friend-enemy antithesis to the
concept of political totality. No obligatory (authoritative) friend-enemy
distinction without political unity; no political community without power over
life and death.
This certainly does not facilitate
understanding of the starting point. If it looks as if Schmitt teaches not only
a superordination of the political over the social, but also a fundamental
determination of all social (human) contents by political categories, this is at
least questionable. The friend-enemy antithesis is coordinated with other
antitheses; it is supposed to be just as original as the antithesis between good
and evil, beautiful, and ugly, useful, and harmful. That would be a regional
characterization. Furthermore, the political grouping is supposed to derive from
the social one: ‘connection’ and ‘separation’ are only supposed to become
political from a certain point on. The antitheses of confessional, economic,
moral nature exist; the political is no ‘corresponding subject area’ to them,
but a ‘phenomenon’ that occurs when they reach a certain intensity. Political
are ‘groupings determined by the eventuality.’ The ‘eventuality’ is thus the
measure of intensity. It is at the same time the situation within which that
intensification (of the initially non-political antitheses) manifests itself.
The eventuality is the existential
threat. Only where there is a totality of people who ‘at least potentially’,
i.e. ‘really possibly’ must fight for their existence, only there does the
category enemy (or friend) apply. This real possibility must always be thought
through to the end as the ultimate consequence whenever political concepts are
thought. It is not merely war, but already the friend-enemy grouping itself that
‘includes the real possibility of physical killing’.
The existential struggle includes
the existential decision. That it lies with the community and only with it shows
that Schmitt’s concept of existence is in any case not meant
individualistically. But then the formal framework of the friend-enemy
distinction is too narrow. In fact, Schmitt seeks ‘to take the words friend and
enemy ... in their concrete, existential sense, not as symbolic or allegorical
phrases’, i.e. to distinguish the enemy from the opponent, antagonist,
competitor, in general from the private ‘enemy’. Enemy is always a ‘totality of
people struggling for their existence, which faces a similarly total opponent’.
The friend-enemy distinction thus requires a further ‘distinction’ in order to
qualify it as political. Existence cannot be individual (‘spiritual’) existence
of the individual, but only national existence.
It is clear that, failing to
recognize this complicated state of affairs,
one will reject this doctrine of the political as inadequate, indeed as
liberalist. This is the case with Otto Koellreutter, who has repeatedly argued
with Schmitt (People and State in the Constitutional Crisis 1932, German
Constitutional Law 1935, etc.). According to Koellreutter, Schmitt does not
orient the essence of the political towards a community. He constructs the type
of ‘formal-political human being who becomes a political beast of prey without
actual political substance’. He sees the essence of the political in foreign
policy (‘primacy of foreign policy’) and considers war to be the actual
political condition. These are distortions of the wording of Schmitt’s thesis.
Nevertheless, a real contrast is
concealed behind this, and what matters is to determine Koellreutter’s own
conception. It is ‘substantialist’ in the sense that Koellreutter asks primarily
for the substance of the political and finds it in the community or people. ‘All
political affairs
are community regulations,’ the political sphere is the ‘sphere of community
life’, community understood as a spiritual phenomenon held together by living
ideas, although the ‘earthly possibility of shaping’ these ideas also belongs to
the definition or limitation of the political. While Schmitt only determines the
‘dualism of our sphere of life’ (private - public sphere), Koellreutter wants to
specify inner and outer political criteria of the political, define it not
abstractly or formally but concretely. Politically inward, equalization of the
polarity between individuals and community is the political task; outwardly, the
‘last principle’ is not struggle but likewise ‘equalization and unification’.
The essence of the political is
concretely defined by its ties to the national order of life of the people. The
state-centrism present at least in part in Schmitt, Koellreutter would like to
eliminate completely and see the people as the ‘primary’, which ‘feels and
shapes itself politically in the state as a whole’. He is also eager to assert
the connection between right and authority, respectively the fundamental difference
between authority and power, allegedly overlooked by Schmitt. From here a clarification
of the concepts of ‘total’ (power) state and ‘authoritarian’ state emerges: the
authoritarian state knows genuine representation; its authority is to be
understood as the ‘spiritual connection of the people with the state as a
whole’. The total state, the consistent implementation of national democratic
power state ideology, on the other hand consists in the nationalization of all
areas of life and in ‘dictatorship borne by intense instruments of power’.
Decisive is that Koellreutter seeks
to separate right and power sharply, to detach legal value and political value
from one another, to distinguish the norm idea of ‘just right’ and the
‘objective sphere’ of law from positive law: only the authoritarian state can
accomplish the transposition of just law into positivity and the legitimation of
state power. Consistently in Koellreutter, this recourse to natural law
justification of politics combines with its moralization: the justification of
state authority lies ‘in the ethical realm, namely that of an autonomous
political ethics which flows only from the idea of the whole of people and
state’.
These approaches to political
philosophy are no more philosophically developed in Koellreutter than in
Schmitt. Only in Kurt Schilling (The State 1935, History of the Philosophy of
State and Law 1937) is such a development, referring to Koellreutter, attempted,
systematically on the one hand, incorporating the philosophical tradition on the
other. In a number of works that cannot be dealt with here (Aristotle’s
Conception of Philosophy 1928, Hegel’s Science of Reality and Its Sources 1929,
Nature and Truth 1934, Kant 1942), Schilling had forged his own approach to
tradition and also outlined the prerequisites for an interpretation of existence
and doctrine of life approximating existential philosophy. These prerequisites
form the basis of the theory of the state; for the state ‘is not an end in
itself...rather, it is merely a means for preserving life in time, and it would
receive its meaning only from the way in which it is able to exercise its
function of preserving life’.
Everything living is individual,
the ‘temporal form of connecting past and future into the unity of existence’.
Its ‘systematic nature’ consists in spontaneously representing itself as a
temporal whole in each case by anticipating its own future or asserting itself
against disturbances. Human life differs
from this general form of life by the emergence of a new means: consciousness
(as cognition, memory, utilization of experience, self- responsibility,
self-determination), and a new mode of association: genuine socialization in
language and tradition (although consciousness is supposed to be the ‘more
original existential concept’ vis-à-vis community).
If one asks how the state arises
from here, Schilling gives the answer: ‘The birth hour of the state can only lie
where a general task is also consciously undertaken by a group of people and
made the basis of their existence’. The state is ‘the place where life alone is
confronted with the task of determining its actions on the basis of a more
comprehensive consciousness of the whole’. (But this more comprehensive
consciousness is not collective consciousness: consciousness and will are never
pervasive, but always bound to the individual as ‘mine’).
The state or political community
(political existence is ‘simply human’ existence) has its essence in human unity
of will: this is ‘sovereign’, i.e. decisive over the whole sphere of life, and
‘open’ with regard to purposes. Individuals are bound ‘in consciousness of their
indissoluble community’ not to individual temporal aims, but to any possible
aim. Like Koellreutter, Schilling also comes close here to natural law thinking:
the state must be ‘treated in analogy to an existential contract’ as the
superior existential unity of will, whereby an ‘existential’ contract should be
one (like the marriage contract) containing the obligation not to specific
individual services, but to a ‘common goal setting in every situation in life’.
The elaboration of these thoughts
up to the concept of the constitutional state, constitution and form of
government need not be pursued here. Only one point is important, because it is
decisive for the historicity of the state: the possibility of a ‘decay’ of
political consciousness, grounded in decay potential of life itself. If life,
which ‘consists only in establishing, never in a concrete established task’,
persists in an already realized condition and leaves the ‘position of the newly
arriving future unoccupied’, it outlives itself, finds no more future and
‘decays’. Against this decay potential of life the state is a protective
measure, originally meant to stop the ‘natural’ decay of life. But it can
itself decay by ceasing to realize its ‘formative power’ in the ‘acknowledging
consciousness and free will of individuals’, by degenerating into police state
or dictatorship.
The individual then withdraws from
his political ties. In place of the political form of life steps the ‘form of
life of enjoyment’, the unpolitical existence. The individual and his
self-interest become the ‘ultimate unconditional value’. To this ‘reversal of
the structure of life’ Schilling also counts the isolation of the individual in
religion, especially in Christianity. ‘It is always concerned (Christianity)
with the salvation or ruin of the individual soul between birth and death’. From
this follows the statelessness of the medieval empire as well as the
statelessness of the Roman empire in the post-Scipionic era. ‘Middle Ages’
acquires the ‘full meaning of a time lying between other times in which the
state has been the actual form of human existence’.
If one accepts this conclusion, the
concept of the political is narrowed down in a no longer tenable way. It becomes
impossible to understand the whole man in his historicity politically. The same
results from the use of a concept that makes the difference
between ‘doctrine of life’ and political philosophy very clear: the
pre-political. Since one can only speak of state when ‘the subordination of the
will of a group under the commanding will has already occurred’ (constitution),
both the process of ‘subjugation’ and the first constitutive power are
‘pre-political’. This means a narrowing down of the political to the currently
stately which reverses Carl Schmitt’s significant step from state to the category
of the political and leaves the whole field of ‘social doctrine’ free.
The difficulty
here is apparently only to be solved by a doctrine of man which is not simply
doctrine of life, but political anthropology. ‘That the task is increasingly
falling to anthropological research to administer and continue the philosophical
heritage is already suggested by developments since Schopenhauer’ (August
Vetter). In fact, the ‘undeniably existing change in philosophical cognition’ is
to be understood as a change of accent: the ‘commemorative metaphysics’ of
antiquity and the ‘expectant metaphysics’ of modern times are replaced, as
Vetter puts it (The Philosophical Foundations of the Human Image 1942), by the
‘knowledge of man attitude’ of the present, even if one sees in it anything but
a restoration of ‘psychology’. The horizon of ‘philosophical anthropology’
remains a theological one (‘care’ as meaning of existence remains the subject of
‘pastoral care’) until the step from man in general to the concrete political
community has been taken.
It must be left to the subsequent
presentation to demonstrate the attempts themselves that point towards a
political anthropology. Here only the point of transition is to be indicated,
the reversal from the traditional spiritualist- dualist anthropology to the
political one, because in it not only an already several times emphasized turn
in contemporary thinking emerges, but also a very specific problematic of matter
in political philosophy: the problem of the structure of action in the political
field. We tie on to a work that has been described as a ‘work of weight’ (Nicolai
Hartmann) and whose ‘masterly guidance’ has been praised: Arnold Gehlen’s ‘Man,
His Nature and His Place in the World’.
This is still not political but
defective theological thinking that voices itself here. Four years later, when
Gehlen had obtained a chair in Königsberg, Feuerbach’s step from theology to
anthropology had been re-enacted, albeit not so thoroughly that Gehlen had
completely stripped ‘spirit’, about whose ‘reality’ he had already inquired
earlier (Real and Unreal Spirit 1931), of its extra-biological, metaphysical
functions. He just no longer speaks of it. But the question What is man? still finds
here the answer: a ‘world-open’ being that creates a ‘culture’ for itself as a
‘second nature’, a being of ‘self- disclosure’ that objectifies the environment
by ‘putting’ things there, Scheler’s answer, then, who distinguished man and
animal not gradually but in principle.
Yet it would be wrong to apply a
systematic standard to Gehlen’s anthropology, which does not want to be a system
of philosophy or even part of one. The significance of the work lies in the close
cooperation with the special sciences, in the meaningful, ingenious grouping of
our knowledge about man, not least in the working up of the results and
viewpoints of Anglo- American pragmatism, instrumentalism, behaviourism, a task
already undertaken before him by Eduard Baumgarten (Pragmatism 1938, Kant’s
Doctrine of the Value of the Person 1941). That Gehlen ties in with Herder,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche in the process is more important than his connections
with Dilthey and Scheler (He dealt especially with Schopenhauer’s ‘results’ in
anthropology as well as philosophy of religion in 1938).
What the numerous drafts of a
philosophical anthropology from Eucken to Häberlin lack is not so much the
material from individual sciences as the right, immediately centrality-leading
approach that avoids all speculative detours and roundabout ways. That is different
with Gehlen. He is not concerned with interpreting the essence of man, compiling
it from real or supposed basic properties, but with beginning with a precise
question: the question of the structure of human action. Not the alternative
spirit or animal is important. Rather, anthropology has ‘to adhere to a
structural special law which is the same in all human peculiarities and which
must be understood on the basis of the blueprint of a being that acts’.
One ‘acts’. He acts differently
than the animal. The animal produces accomplishments that look like actions but
are not actions. It is just ‘instinctive actions’.
Does man act consciously? Is
consciousness the specific difference
between man and animal? Gehlen does not ask that way; he turns the conventional
question around: Not action is to be understood from consciousness, but
consciousness from action. To give it away at once: The function of
consciousness is not a positive but a negative one. Consciousness is
‘inhibition’ of drives by counter-drives. Consciousness is a ‘relief system.’ Of
course it is also a ‘guidance system.’ But as such it proves itself only from
the structure of action, not before itself, before introspection,
self-knowledge.
The action differs
from instinctive action by the characteristic of ‘non- establishment’, by an
‘unfinishedness’ that belongs in the biological blueprint of man. Man on the one
hand is non-adapted, a deficient being, weaponless, instinctless, unspecialized;
on the other hand he is ‘flooded with stimuli’, has a surplus of ‘drives’ to
process, is placed in a ‘surprise field’ that forces him to caution and
providence (planning). So in order not to perish he must distance himself from
his drives. Needs must be inhibited, bracketed, deferred: A gap (hiatus) between
drive and action opens up, which is so to speak the place and origin of the
‘soul’ as ‘inner outside world’, as a world of images, epitome of what has not
yet become action. The fact that biologically this distancing is a source of
danger shows itself in the possibility of autoeroticism (in the widest sense):
discharging energies inward instead of outward, thus destroying them.
The inhibition of needs is one
thing, their ‘forming’ is another. Man is a being that must keep and lead
himself in discipline, and as such, not according to his substance, a being with
a will.
He creates for himself ‘a
supporting and invisible skeleton of spiritual life, which keeps the commitment
to action in shape and in turn is kept in shape by it’, character as ‘a system
of meaningful drives, enduring interests, needs, resulting needs, etc.
distributed throughout the world’.
It is not necessary in our context
to further elaborate on this.
Gehlen’s anthropology, rich in
detailed discussions (on perceptual structure, the connection between perception
and movement, the roots of language, imagination, silent thinking, fantasy and
‘primordial fantasy,’ etc.) as well as in perspectives on other
(epistemological, developmental historical, ethical) questions, wants to be an
‘elementary’ anthropology. As such, it is essentially a structural theory of
action. But action is not a free-floating construct. The community belongs to the
action, in which the ‘active mastery of life’ takes place and can only take
place. The ‘leadership system’ belongs to the shaping of action, as the form in
which the community itself ‘establishes’ itself, holds itself in existence. To
address this, Gehlen thinks, would ‘far exceed the structure of an elementary
anthropology’.
However, this reservation is
inadmissible. Either the community belongs to the prerequisites of the act of
will and then it also belongs to the ‘elements’ of elementary anthropology. Or
it only results from the actions in their relationship and intertwining: then
elementary anthropology is individualistic and essentially unpolitical. In
addition, the difference
between community as a field of action and community ideology as a system of
action or leadership is not thematized. The ‘three achievements’ of the
‘leadership systems,’ outlined at the end of the work: ‘concluding world
orientation,’ ‘shaping of action,’ ‘overcoming the limits of human
powerlessness,’ are residues of Dilthey’s objective mind and his school;
Dilthey’s structural psychology, too, proceeded from the ‘achievements’ of the
soul. Gehlen is quite right not to incorporate religion and worldview into
elementary anthropology in this sense.
But with the field of action it is
different.
It belongs to the structure of action and is not a complexion of any elements.
It is (as a field of power) the factor that qualifies actions as political. To
disregard it means to remain in the vestibule of political anthropology. What is
characteristic here is not only Gehlen’s struggle against the traditional
body-soul-spirit trinity, but also his tendency towards sociological analysis (Wilfredo
Pareto and his ‘new science’ 1941) that is indicative of his effort
to emphasize the community’s share in the structure of action. Indeed, in a
lecture on Schelling’s interpretation of Descartes (Descartes in Schelling’s
Judgment 1937), he provides the cue for overcoming personalism of consciousness:
the word of the ‘open person’ as the ‘idea of a person of objectively
indeterminate, not comprehensible in self-consciousness boundary’, which is
better suited than any other to mark the transition from the individual acting
subject to the collective subject of the community. Nevertheless, it is no
coincidence that the outline of his elementary anthropology as a contribution to
‘pre-political’ ontology could be misunderstood.
Every further step would lead us
into political anthropology and anticipate the fundamental problems of the
thinkers to be dealt with immediately. Only one point still needs to be pointed
out, because it does not come up again later: the relationship of a structural
theory of action to political realism, as it is increasingly embodied for us
today in Clausewitz’s classic theory of war or in its philosophical
prerequisites, which still have to be gradually elaborated. At the same time,
the basis of Carl Schmitt’s investigations into the concept of the political is
reached again. It is the merit of W. M. Schering, in several works (The
Systematics in Clausewitz’s Philosophy of War 1935, Clausewitz’s Doctrine of End
and Means 1936, Philosophy of Defense 1939, Mind and Deed, Selection from
Clausewitz’s Works 1941), to have recognized Clausewitz not only as a ‘realistic
supplement to the exclusively considered contemporary idealistic line from
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel’ and as a forerunner of Nietzsche, but also to have
brought to light the ‘doctrine of acting man’ underlying the doctrine of war
(1832).
In doing so, Clausewitz’s thoughts
combine for him with a philosophy of action of his own, which starts from the
juxtaposition of acting and observing man (Watching or Acting? 1937) and
culminates in the crucial insight that action is a source of knowledge. ‘The
actor is concentrated on what he wants to do’; he is pure thinking will. The
observer deals with processes, sequences, events, to which he ‘imputes his own
trains of thought’. The demand to take the ‘standpoint of the actor’ corresponds
to the other to fundamentally distinguish action and event. The difference
is an ontic one, that being or that positing of actual existence which is first
realized as a ‘vital-ethical unity’ (unity of life and striving in the
community) through action.
The dynamically conceived worldview
thus substitutes for the means-end context the structure of action of decision
and achievement. The decision relieves action of the given reality; the
achievement realizes action in a reality that is no longer ‘the same’ as the
reality in which the decision arose. The ‘bond of actions’ differs
from the ‘chain of events’; whereby achievement is not merely the realization of
the decision, but fusion of action and event. In any case, Schering defends
himself against dividing reality into a real-causal and an unreal-purposive one.
He compares the relationship between will and action to inhaling and exhaling:
‘In inhaling, the will absorbs reality into itself, it fills itself with the
atmosphere of living reality, so to speak, then the reversal takes place, and
the will breathes itself out into the actions. The reversal is the moment when
the will responds to stimulus and danger’.
That the political factor in
action, community, and field of action, stands out more strongly in Schering than
in Gehlen, already follows from the approach. For war (and defense) is community
action, and the philosophy of war (and defence) is community philosophy.
Community is not to be explained relationally, from relationships between
individuals, but to be a bipolar, ‘organic’ and ‘organizational’ unity. He
describes the principle of community action: that the community contracts as it
were in the face of a threat in order to give birth to itself anew
in actu, as the ‘law of self-finding
force’.
In the impossibility of any
individualistic solution to the problem of action, we can in fact see the
impetus for political philosophy: the problem of action, posed by philosophical
anthropology, must be solved by political philosophy. To be sure, it only forms
the initial problem: the path leads from here to the more comprehensive and
deeper problem of the existence of the people. The thinkers whom we select and
deal within the following (of course the circle of philosophers belonging here
is much larger, especially if one wanted to particularly emphasize the relations
to racial biology and psychology, whereby researchers like Kolbenheyer and
Claus, Grunsky and H.F.K. Günther would have to be addressed), are very different
in conceptual formation and assumptions. But it is no coincidence that the
existence of the people forms the central theme for all. To understand the
concept of the people as a political concept and the political as a form of
existence of the people, both are important at this point in the historical and
conceptual movement today. What in National Socialist ideology has a symbolic
meaning as blood precisely for the community bond already predetermined by the
racial soul, refers in philosophical theory to the concept of the limited
community on the one hand, to that of existence in the polis on the other. The
danger of depoliticizing the concept of the people, a danger not because it
could not also still be meaningfully treated in objective form, but because any
such treatment (in folk doctrine, folklore, ‘folk sociology,’ etc.), if held to
be sufficient,
blocks access to the political from the people, is just as great here as the
other danger of missing the existential dynamics of the political in and with
the concept of community. This is all the more
necessary to indicate, as the impression should not be given that the thinkers
to be dealt with have conclusively and definitively formulated what we,
especially today as a task for the future, may rightly call ‘National Socialist
philosophy’ in the deepest sense.
Alfred
Rosenberg.
The spiritual form of National
Socialism, shaped by the Führer, has undoubtedly found its most concise
expression in the work of Alfred Rosenberg; here it has also received the
presentation that comes closest to actual philosophical, i.e.
conceptual-systematic presentation.
Figure 1a. Alfred Rosenberg and
Reich Commissar Erich Koch visit St. Sophia Cathedral. Kyiv, Ukraine, April
1942.
Figure 1b. Alfred Rosenberg in
Chotitza, near Zaporizhia, Ukraine.
We therefore start from Alfred
Rosenberg’s ‘Myth of the Twentieth Century’ (1930). This book is a book of
struggle. It wants to revolutionize, overthrow false tables of values; it wants
to shake up and point the way forward. It is a highly personal book, brave and
passionate. It is not a text about National Socialism, Rosenberg expressly
emphasizes that he does not set out program points of the movement but wants to
make a personal confession, but a vivid expression of the National Socialist
movement itself. It has nothing to do with ‘literature’. Nor with academic
philosophy.
But if we understand National
Socialist philosophy to mean the attempt to make visible the ultimate
ideological prerequisites and motivations, the intellectual and
intellectual-historical roots on which the ‘essential structure of National
Socialism’ is based, then this work arose from drafts of 1917; Rosenberg (born
1893 in Reval) was still a student at the Technical University in Moscow at that
time. In 1922 its content is thematized as ‘Philosophy of Germanic Art’, in 1925
it is given the title ‘Race and Honour’. In 1928 it receives the final form as
‘Myth of the 20th Century, an evaluation of the spiritual-intellectual struggles
of our time’. About this, as about the spiritual physiognomy of the man, an
essay from the anniversary year 1943 by Alfred Baeumler: ‘Alfred Rosenberg and
the Myth of the 20th Century’, informs us, already in 1942 the ‘Myth’ had
reached a circulation of one million. This first presentation of Rosenberg’s
philosophy, created from a related intellectual attitude, should be referred to
all the more as it contains crucial insights and formulations that are
indispensable for the study of the work (such as the definition that the myth of
blood itself has as its subject the ‘primal ground of all mythological imagery’,
not a new mythology or religion).
‘The Myth’ does not stand without
tradition and reference in the philosophy of the present, but rather has a
well-characterized ‘location’: if it is not that of a school, it is that on
which the greatest German thinkers stand. In Rosenberg first it will become
clear to us how much National Socialist philosophy is particularly obliged and
committed to Kant. And if Rosenberg owes nothing worth mentioning to any
contemporary systematist, he has nevertheless not arrived at philosophy without
guidance: it is the philosophical work of H. St. Chamberlain, which is to be
continued and completed in the ‘Myth’.
A political attitude, active,
purposeful, disciplined, and ready to decide, necessarily contrasts with that
philosophical contemplation which accepts ultimate contexts of meaning as they
illuminate for it, and which refrains from any willful access. That the two
attitudes do not have to exclude each other, indeed that they can and must
complement each other, is most clearly evident in Rosenberg’s ‘Myth’. And also
the nature of the man becomes clearest from the combination of these two
‘attitudes’: ‘But the greatest and most gladdening thing amidst today’s chaos is
a mythical, delicately powerful awakening, is the fact that we have again begun
to dream our own primal dreams’. To experience a myth, to create a human type,
to build state and life out of it, this is the combination of philosophy and
politics, pre-thought in Plato’s Republic, as Rosenberg also seeks to realize.
Figure 2a. Kiew, Ukraine, 1942.
Alfred Meyer, Erich Koch and Alfred Rosenberg.
Figure 2b. Alfred Rosenberg
speaks to the French National Assembly, 1940.
From here, the basic idea of the
work can be most easily clarified. We live in a soulless, desecrated world, ripe
for decline, if we cannot succeed in gaining a foothold in life again. What has
become brittle, and dead cannot help us to do so. With our intellect we cannot
create a new faith, found a religion, not even build up a philosophy; for the
intellect, which no longer recognizes any inner ties, is itself a symptom of
decay. We also cannot wait to see if a new meaning enters our life, what is to
emerge must emerge through ourselves and not be carried in from outside. We
cannot wait because our plight is that of our people, and because every moment
of idle expectation can bring about the complete collapse of this people. For it
is not insignificant what worldview a people has and where it sees its values: ‘A
people as a people is lost, is as such actually dead, when reviewing its history
and examining its will to the future it no longer finds any unity. No matter what
forms the past may have taken: once a nation comes to genuinely and really deny
the parables of its first awakening, it has thereby denied the very roots of its
being and evolution and condemned itself to infertility.’. If we stand at such a
point of ideological failure, which is always also a political failure, no
appeal to ‘eternal’ truths and ‘absolute’ cognitions will help us. For that is
precisely the tragedy of ‘mythless times’, that these words have lost their
meaning and become abstractions. Completely soberly and without any illusion we
must ask ourselves whether there is still something that empowers us to act: we
are looking for a fact, an ultimate given, something real that can become a
parable for us. Rosenberg calls this ultimate given race.
Whatever may be meant by it, in any case race is something
real, visible, shaped, withdrawn from any construction.
However race may be conceptually defined, what is decisive is the radical
reversal of perspective and turning away from an observation based on ideas,
free meanings, cultures, and values ‘in themselves’ to a realistic observation
of history as racial history. If we do not know what race is, we do know that it
influences the life of groups, peoples, and cultures: anthropology, biology,
sociology are in complete agreement on this; only on the manner of influence, its
scope and dependence on other social determinants there are differences
of opinion. But then one should first of all dare to write history with a view
to the racial constituents and their relocations; then one should examine the
fates of cultures under the influence of foreign blood infusion, no one will
doubt the grandeur and necessity of this task.
Racial history as a critique of
‘world history’, this is the theme of Rosenberg’s book. Following Gobineau and
Chamberlain, this theme is treated not ‘objectively’, in the pseudo-scientific
sense and so to speak for fun, but subjectively with the seriousness of one
interested in the fate of his own race. Four years before the appearance of the
‘Myth’, Rosenberg in particular presented the yield of Chamberlain’s research on
race in a monograph on this thinker (Houston Stewart Chamberlain as a herald and
founder of a German future): there are three scientific deeds of Chamberlain’s
that every German, every European without exception should commemorate over and
over again, the ‘conception that with Germanicism a new creative man of a definite
race took the destiny of the world into his own hand, the constructive idea that
an epoch inserts itself between ancient Hellas and ancient Rome and matures a
sediment of humanity that we now generally call the chaos of peoples, and the
presentation of the rise of the Jew together with a description of his
appearance in Western history’. By deepening Chamberlain’s historical picture,
Rosenberg at the same time contrasts it most sharply with modern cultural
philosophy: racial history as a critique of the ‘objective mind’, that is one
consequence. Racial history as a critique of the morphological view of history,
that is the other.
Spengler had also fought idealism
in cultural philosophy. But what he substituted for it, the morphological view
of history, suffered
from the same error of a merely culturally immanent observation. Since the word
‘development’, Rosenberg thus criticizes this view of history, ‘had in time
nevertheless become suspect, new interpreters of history invented the so- called
theory of cultural circles. A new term which is just as devoid of content...,
because the creators of cultural circles were spoken of just as little as they
were in the works of the popes of evolution of the 19th century. Such an Indian,
Persian, Chinese or Roman cultural circle one fine day occupied an area and,
thanks to this magical contact, caused a complete change in the same human
beings who previously, untouched by it, practiced certain customs’. This
precisely hits the point which, as we saw earlier, forced Spengler himself to
further develop his theory of culture. But what did this further development
look like? It proceeded along the lines of an extreme individualism and led
again to a history ‘of’ man, a bloodless abstraction that Spengler had
previously rejected with utter determination.
Both contradict that ‘organic’
concept of truth which Rosenberg seems to share with Spengler. We will soon
ascertain what this community means and what it does not mean. Rosenberg by no
means refuses to grant immanent cultural observation the right due to it. ‘These
teachers of the shapes of history’, it says, continuing the Spengler criticism,
‘quite rightly represent causality and fate as two non-coinciding ideas. They
furthermore renounce, likewise, agreeing with the Germanic nature, openly and
plainly the Semitic fatalism which recognizes all events as unalterable. But
they now locate the idea of fate in the so-called cultural circles which can
certainly be historically verified without, however, and here the dangerous error
arises, examining the racial-organic origin of these cultural circles and their
demise’. And that is what matters: to advance from the immanent cultural laws to
the cultural carrier, who does not live by the grace of a ‘cultural soul’ and is
also no vagabonding beast, but in his soulness unseals the culture-creative
powers of blood and race. From the cultural soul to the racial soul, that is the
upshot of Rosenberg’s critique.
And that leads us to the concept of
race. Race is something real, irreducible; but it
is not a mere aggregate of somatic ‘characteristics’.
As the concrete form of man it belongs to the phenomenal manifestations;
‘race’ includes ‘soul’, and soul includes race.
‘Soul’, formulates Rosenberg, ‘means race seen from within. And conversely, race
is the outside of a soul’. Race is the formal principle of the soul: every soul
has ‘its own inner and outer architectonics, its characteristic phenomenal form
and gesture of lifestyle, and only its own relation between the forces of will
and reason’, race is at the same time the material principle of culture, which,
as Rosenberg acknowledges, has its own form; for what is given form in culture,
what carries and sustains the edifice of culture, is racial substance. Culture is
‘the consciousness-form of the vegetative-vital of a race’. If this substance is
weakened or poisoned by miscegenation, the downfall of culture is inevitable. We
asked whether in times of cultural decline there is still something that
empowers action, and we arrived at an ultimate given, a ‘final, unreachable
phenomenon behind which we are no longer permitted to search and inquire’: race.
It is now understandable in what way the development of racial consciousness is
able to break through the circle of the cycle of cultures: theoretically
speaking, ‘racial consciousness’ is not a function of culture, not cultural
consciousness, but in an analogous way a prerequisite of possible cultural
consciousness, just as race itself is a prerequisite of possible culture. Times
with an unchallenged racial substance need no racial consciousness, because for
them the values of the race are objectified in the culture itself. Where racial
consciousness needs to be awakened, there the unity of culture has already
become problematic and cultural consciousness has been lost. There indeed, reflection
on the racial soul is the last path still open.
But what kind of reflection is it?
It is a conscious correction, orientation, and breeding, the bringing out not of
a new faith, but of that motive on which the innate faith ignites itself anew,
‘to give to the will, erratically flickering today, a motive corresponding to its
primal ground’, that is the cultural-political task Rosenberg sets himself.
Reason and will are to be brought back into accordance ‘with the direction of
the psychic-racial current of Germanicism’, and, as Rosenberg adds, ‘if possible
with the current of that Nordic tradition which has come down to us from Hellas
and Rome still unadulterated’. So by ‘myth’ is to
be understood a motivation of our will intelligible to our nature, representable
in imagery, but no longer conceptually penetrable.
‘The values of character, the lines of spiritual life, the colours of the
symbols run alongside each other, intertwine, and yet yield one human being. But
only then in full- blooded abundance when they themselves are consequences,
births from a centre lying beyond what can be empirically researched’. This
incomprehensible summation of all the directions of the I, the people, indeed
any community, constitutes its ‘myth’.
Now by what is our will ‘addressed’
and brought to self-unfolding? Is there a primal motive intelligible only to the
Nordic human being? Rosenberg calls it honour and shows that German history in
the end is nothing but the struggle for the preservation of this value. Honour
is a value. But not one, among others. There is no universally valid hierarchy
of values into which we would have to classify the value of honour. There is ‘no
equal validity side by side of different,
necessarily mutually exclusive, supreme values’. Honour as the supreme value is
not a value ‘in itself,’ but an index of a life system experienceable only by
the Nordic human being. What is racially and mentally related can be integrated,
the alien must be separated out, not because it is ‘false’ or ‘bad’ in itself,
but because it is foreign to the species and destroys the inner structure of our
being. It is the tragedy of German destiny that alien life systems were able to
gain a foothold on German soil because the German also remained loyal where
hostile powers forced their way into his existence, because he was magnanimous
and generous enough to ‘always assume the same code of honour’. This applies
especially to Christianity with love as the supreme value, love in the sense of
humility, mercy, submissiveness, and asceticism. Rosenberg speaks here of the
‘Roman’ system and shows that it represents a fusion of Syro-Etruscan magical
beings with Jewish elements (creation from nothing). This Roman system has
reshaped the Germanic divine figures, falsified Germanic mores, and most severely
endangered the organic development of a Germanic-Nordic culture: all the great
deeds of this culture have arisen despite Christianity and have been wrested
from the Church.
In this critique of Christianity
running along Nietzsche’s lines, however, one must not overlook that for
Rosenberg there is also an indigenous Germanic Christianity. Just as the figure
of Jesus basically has nothing to do with the Roman system, so too the value of
love embodied by Jesus finds a place in Germanic religiosity. Only here it has a
different
character than in the Christianity of the Church. In German mysticism,
especially in Master Eckhart, world-transcending love becomes the power to
become one with God and thus acquires a heroic character. In general, German
mysticism is the ‘finest ramification’ of the German nature; honour, personality,
freedom, nobility, the German fundamental values, experience in Eckhart their
ultimate metaphysical foundation: they are not external qualities, ‘but timeless
and spaceless essences forming that ‘fortress’ from which genuine will and
genuine reason undertake their sorties into ‘the world’. Either to conquer it,
or to use it as an expedient for the realization of souls’.
From the presentation of German
mysticism it becomes clearest what Rosenberg’s own philosophy aims at: an
irrationalism of ‘life’ which combines faith in the power of blood with the view
of reality as realization of God in and through us. The life of a race, of a
people, ‘is no philosophy logically developing itself, also no process unwinding
itself according to laws of nature, but the formation of a mystical synthesis
...’. In order not to misunderstand the meaning of this statement, two of
Rosenberg’s presuppositions must be specially considered: his criticism and his
concept of polarity.
Rosenberg takes over Kant’s
criticism initially in the theoretical respect: the purpose of the critique of
reason is to bring to consciousness for us the formal prerequisites of any
possible experience; the world, given as a causal unrelated juxtaposition of
images in space and sensations in time, is endowed by the intellect with a
causal connection, by reason with a unity of the manifold by positing guiding
ideas. This is the ‘formal basis of all life’. About the ‘inner
nature and manner of the use of the mental and rational faculties’, however,
nothing is thereby settled. Rosenberg also follows Kant in calling ‘any
philosophy going beyond a formal critique of reason’ confession, no longer
cognition. And he follows Kant even more so in the practical respect: freedom as
self-obligation, autonomous personality, moral autonomy are basic components of
the Germanic concept of honour. ‘Everyone has made the law for himself. That he
created this law is the freedom of his personality. This insight agrees exactly
with the teaching of Master Eckhart’.
But also the concept of polarity
dominating the philosophical sections of the ‘Myth’ is developed from Kant. ‘The
fundamental fact of the Nordic- European mind is the consciously or
unconsciously undertaken separation of two worlds, the world of freedom and the
world of nature. In Immanuel Kant this primal phenomenon of the method of
thinking of our life attains the clearest consciousness and must nevermore
vanish from our eyes’. But as a primal phenomenon it is an ultimately
metaphysical contrast: ‘I’ and ‘universe’ stand ‘as two final polar
conditionalities opposite each other, and the centre of gravity which a soul
places on the one or the other (with subconscious recognition of its own
opposite) helps determine the nature, color and rhythm of worldview and life’.
And encompassed by this primal contrast polarities confront us everywhere in
nature and spirit: good and evil, true and false, divine and satanic, ‘out of
the ever-existent contrariety of yes and no, all life, all creative arises’.
Every abstract monism founders on the ‘twofold nature of all being’. We can see
spirit only in the mirror of body, body only in the mirror of spirit.
This is an attempt to connect the
two peaks of German worldview, Kant, and Goethe. If through the problem of
polarity Rosenberg comes close to romantic metaphysics, it is all the more
important to highlight his difference
especially from the neo-romantic hermeneutic metaphysics of the present. Like
Klages, Rosenberg also teaches the difference
in essence between consciousness and bodily soul: here (in the soul) an
uninterrupted stream of images, there (in consciousness) an intermittence of
acts. As the ‘consciousness-form of the vegetative-vital of the race’, culture
too is integrated into this contrast. According to Rosenberg, national cultures
are the ‘great ‘spiritual pulses’ amidst the eternally flooding life and death
and becoming’. The fact too would belong here that Rosenberg finds in the races
the ‘rhythm of life’ and sees in the rule of intellect the end of a culture.
Already here, however, the difference
begins: even if Klages attributes an anti-vital direction to reason and will, is
this really a metaphysical cognition, is it not rather a confession that belongs
to a system of life other than the Germanic one? The reversal from
‘nature-sighted’ existence to the broken, life-destroying one is only possible
on Semitic-Oriental soil; it is alien to the Germanic nature. ‘One can see right
at the starting point how close and at the same time how alien our racially
psychic world view and the new psycho-cosmogony stand in relation to each
other’.
In fact, this psycho-cosmogony is
opposed to a political-national worldview, and it is one of Rosenberg’s most
important achievements that on the basis of historical material he attempts to
refute the chthonic world interpretation of Bachofen and the Romantics, i.e. the
glorification of the feminine principle, the nocturnal side of nature, the dark
powers of earth and underworld. Here, as in his attitude toward cultural
morphology, as well as in his attitude toward metaphysical universalism, which
supposedly considers itself superior to individualism but in truth is its ‘twin
brother’, it is ultimately Rosenberg’s criticism that protects him from
metaphysical aberrations. To be sure, enough open questions remain for Rosenberg
too. But no claim is made to provide a systematic philosophy. Rosenberg’s
‘Myth’ is the avowal of a new and yet old, powerful, responsible, in the deepest
sense ‘political’ feeling of life, of a worldview that organically connects
action, emotion and comprehension. In this sense Rosenberg himself speaks of an
‘organic’ philosophy.
Ernst
Krieck
Figure 3a. Prof. Dr. Ernst Krieck.
Figure 3b. Prof. Dr. Ernst Krieck.
In the first post-war years,
pedagogics flourished. Condemned to impotence from an external political point of
view, torn inside by party, class, religious contradictions, economically a prey
of international financial powers, the Weimar Republic sought to secure its
achievements, at least in cultural and political terms.
Long-cherished wishes of the
working class, elementary school teachers, all kinds of school reformers,
scientific educators and even philosophers were to be realized. That they were
mutually exclusive was self-evident, and found expression in noisy worldview
debates, school struggles, educational experiments. But the ‘old’ school with
its educational monopolies, class differences,
its formalistic method, was fought by everyone. Agreement could be found in the
negative. In the positive, disagreement remained.
At that time, the name Ernst Krieck
became a concept for the young generation. Ernst Krieck
was born in 1882 in Vögisheim (Baden Black Forest). He
attended high school in Müllheim and teacher training college in Karlsruhe. In
1900 he entered the Baden elementary school service; in 1904 he was transferred
to Mannheim. Since 1910 he began a literary activity, starting with his
inaugural work on ‘Personality and Culture’, which from the outset pursued
higher than purely specialized pedagogical aims. This was shown above all by a
1917 book on the ‘German Idea of the State’, a history of the concept of
humanity with the demand for its re, and further development, a discussion with
the philosophy of German idealism and a program of that great ‘national
self-education’ in the German state which was to become and remain the basic
theme of all of Krieck’s writings.
Soon afterwards Krieck became
acquainted with Möller van den Bruck. While the ‘German Idea of the State’
already contains the expression ‘Third Reich’, albeit still in a purely
intellectual-historical sense, as designation of the realm of ideas of the
German movement, of German national consciousness, which was destined to replace
the other two ‘realms’: the realm of the antique idea of humanity and that of
Christianity, after the collapse of 1918 this cultural- philosophical
observation was activated. In 1920 Krieck’s ‘Revolution of Science’ appeared;
science not as an instrument of politics but as a function of the will to
community, whose ideal task it is to give this will an ought, a norm, and a
goal.
In the following year (1921) Krieck
began, in the programmatic writing ‘Education and Development’, building his
theory of education which he elaborated in a number of systematic works. The
most important of these is ‘Philosophy of Education’ (1922), for which he
received an honourary doctorate from Heidelberg University. He declined a call
to the Technical University Dresden (1924); in 1928 he accepted a call to the
newly founded Pedagogical Academy Frankfurt am Main. He complied, but in 1931
was subjected to disciplinary proceedings for political reasons and transferred
as punishment (to Dortmund).
In the meantime, in two books,
‘Formation of Man’ (1925) and ‘Educational Systems of the Cultural Peoples’
(1927), the former dedicated to the Heidelberg Faculty of Philosophy, he further
developed the phenomenological approach of the ‘Philosophy of Education’ into a
theory of types supported by group sciences. A small 1930 work, ‘The Natural
Right of Corporations to Education and schooling’ (next to the study on
Education and Development most informative for the development of his thought)
leads a bit further into sociology. At that time Krieck came closest to Spann’s
universalism. The people, as the primal and perfect form of community, is
structured into associations and corporations which, unlike the people itself,
are not self- sufficient
but ‘one-sided in themselves’ and aimed in each case only at a single function
or a group of such individual functions: ‘the right of the whole takes
precedence over the right of the individual members, the right of the
higher-order member over the right of the lower-order member’.
Krieck drew the consequence of
founding education on metaphysics in his ‘Philosophy of Education’ of 1930. But
since 1932 the real political moment has been increasingly emphasized: ‘national
political’ education, and in the post-1933 writings idealism is increasingly
replaced by realism. Krieck, Professor at Frankfurt University since 1933 and
then at Heidelberg University, where he also held the rectorate, introduced his
philosophical main work, the ‘Ethnopolitical Anthropology’ (3 vols., 1936, 1937,
1938) with the words: ‘Already several times I have made an advance in the
direction taken here: with the basic chapters of the ‘Philosophy of Education’
and ‘Philosophy of Education’. Only with the upheaval have I succeeded in
breaking through’. In any case, this turn is most evident in a work on ‘Science,
Worldview, University Reform’ (1934) which stands in a similar relation to this
main work as ‘Education and Development’ does to the ‘Philosophy of Education’
of 1922. Often the smaller writings of this agile and combative researcher
contain stronger impulses than his larger attempts at systematic overall
observation do. This also applies to numerous essays in his journal ‘People in
Becoming’. which he founded in 1932 in service of the movement.
At the inauguration of the House of
German Education in Bayreuth in 1936, Krieck emphasized that the whole
announcement of a revolution in science originated from German educational
science, which in turn stood in closest connection with the National Socialist
movement. ‘Educational science was in the foreground before the renewal of
philosophy, before the renewal of medicine, before the renewal of legal science
was introduced by the National Socialist movement’. In any case, this applies to
Krieck himself: his political philosophy has emerged from pedagogy. Krieck’s
theory of education must therefore be addressed first.
In the heyday of pedagogical
‘reforms,’ pedagogical theory also flourished. At that time, lacking any
possibility of preventing the dangers of an anarchy of education, people made
all the more effort
with the ‘concepts’ of education and upbringing. After the fruitless dispute
between ‘social educators’ and ‘personality educators’, a ‘cultural pedagogy’
had taken over the leadership, claiming Kant, Dilthey and Hegel as its
foundation. It was Krieck’s merit, with his characteristic radicalism, to
pose the essential question: can pedagogical insights be derived from others, or
are they fundamental and irreducible in themselves? Is there an eidos of
education? Does pedagogy, like any other science, have a ‘fundamental idea’, and
is it possible, on the basis of this idea, to construct a pure (autonomous)
science of education?
What is new in Krieck’s approach
becomes clear when one realizes that the question here is no longer about any
kind of educational standards. For Krieck, a normative science is not a science
at all. ‘Our principles are a supplement to our existences’, with this word from
Goethe he wants to prove that there is science only ever of being, not of ought.
So what is asked about is the ‘being’ of education. What is to be understood by
this? An unconscious life function, Krieck replies, which is effective
in any community of human beings, a form of being for one another that precedes
any educational influence. ‘Pedagogy made the mistake of closely tying
educator and pupil to empirical persons and conceiving the educational process
as the reflected, i.e. technical purposive activity of the educator on the
pupil’. This mistake must be avoided in order to get at the original ‘being’ of
education.
But is not such a disregard for all
conscious educational activity necessarily an abstraction? Within the framework
of a ‘phenomenological theory of education,’ as Krieck sought to develop in
1922, such a procedure does not have a generalizing character, but is precisely
what phenomenologists call ideation: against the background of actual processes
and phenomena, their ‘idea’ is brought to intuition. Admittedly, Krieck does not
immediately attain this vision of essence, but first takes the path of
abstraction. The usual contrast between education and development, it says in
the work on ‘Education and Development’ (1921), is false: there is no
development without education; because ‘any spiritual influence belongs to
education, no matter whence and for what purpose it may originate, which
conditions and influences spiritual development’. Only in instruction is there
the pupil/educator schema; everywhere else, the educational function is
distributed among a multitude of those educated, who in turn are educators, and
of educators, who in turn are educated. All educate all, that is the consequence
of this observation. And from this it follows that in the end the community, the
people as a whole, educates itself in its members: ‘in the self-education of a
people ... the specific structure of the consciousness of people and community
takes care of the educational function’. But, and here the weakness of this
abstraction is revealed, since a collective consciousness comparable to
individual self- consciousness cannot be demonstrated, it must be demanded: ‘The
education of a people presupposes that the spirit, consciousness and will of the
people truly exist, and are not mere mythologies, metaphors and abstractions’.
It depends on the meaning of this
‘true existence’: what Krieck really demonstrates is the holistic character of
education as an original function of communal life, its non-derivability from a
sum of individual educational processes. And with that the transition from
generalization to ideation is completed. To be sure, the approach to a
phenomenology of education is still not developed here in the manner of the
phenomenological school itself, Krieck’s whole mental make-up stands too far
from this kind of analytics for that; it was much closer to him to elaborate the
historical forms of education and educational systems in a typifying
consideration.
All the same, the phenomenology
contained in the ‘Philosophy of Education’ is more than just a program: Krieck
endeavours to remove three ‘layers’ of educational events, and this
demonstration of the ‘dimensionality’ of education follows from the essence of
the idea as such. An idea is ‘living’, i.e. it is efficacious:
what enters the sphere of its formation is adapted, melted down, ‘educated’;
‘every spiritual effect
shapes human nature according to the law of its origin within its domain’. This
shaping is either from unconscious effects
(1st dimension) or from ‘spiritual effects
which, while stemming from conscious purposive activity, do not yet arise from
deliberate educational activity’ (2nd dimension), or from fully conscious
educational intention and systematic educational activity (3rd dimension). From
this an exact foundation of the specific educational process (pedagogical
planning) results, which is necessarily a mere surface phenomenon: it is based
on the ‘system of spiritual basic functions and ideas,’ on the ‘system of types
of community and life forms’, on historical life itself in the multiplicity of
its ‘individual forms’. In his ‘Philosophy of Education’ (1930), without
fundamentally abandoning the claim to an intuition of essence but also without
further pursuing essential analysis, Krieck emphasized even more strongly the
universalism of his pedagogical system: ‘Education originally proceeds from and
works into the whole, and the educational process taking place between
individual human beings and groups is always only a partial phenomenon of the
educational function and educational events of the whole’. Functional education
becomes rational education by splitting itself: such a ‘splitting of the
original educational unity’ is, for example, the division into an education of
body and soul (the gymnastic-musical educational system of the Greeks). On the
‘rational level’ there occurs a separation of the methods of vocational
training, moral discipline, and education in the narrower sense. But what is
always involved here is a spin-off,
not a disintegration: the original education continues to be effective
‘between and beneath education that has become a rational task as the carrying
function; it is not eliminated but supplemented, heightened and perfected in
technical education’.
Although Krieck here, as always,
sees in the ethnic communal organism precisely that articulating whole which
‘unites the natural and spiritual sides of life within itself, and joins and
binds all individual human beings together as members of a super-personal
unity’, such a simplifying metaphysical concept of the whole could not ‘bear the
burden of the concept’. It remains to be shown how, under the influence of the
increasingly distinct political situation of the time, Krieck is pressed toward
a revision of his universalism. This ‘revision’, if one wants to speak of such a
thing, is characterized by one word: people-becoming.
National Socialism is not simply an
expression and result of historical ‘development’. No organic thinking can
ignore the fact that through the National Socialist revolution a disintegrated
or at least decaying ‘organism’ is put back in order by a mass movement of the
greatest extent. National Socialism, says Krieck, ‘by means of its methodology
of mass arousal wants to awaken their racial consciousness, direct them toward
the great national goals and political tasks, and imprint a corresponding
attitude on mankind’.
National Socialism, he concludes
further, ‘has to expand the elemental means and methods of the mass movement,
applied on the basis of the instincts of its leaders, into a general discipline,
a system of training which awakens racial values in the whole people ...’.
‘National political’ education, i.e. education in the spirit of National
Socialism, will thus, at least for the present, be distinguished from any ethnic
education in general by the fact that it considers the mass factor, which is not
holistic: forming people out of mass, that is the task of such an education.
To form people out of mass means,
for us Germans who have always been ‘people’, to become ripe as a political
people. Indeed, from this point of departure Krieck also rejects any ‘folk
doctrine’ or ‘folk science’ that wants to examine the people ‘in itself’: ‘It
should and must not happen that a separate science of the people emerges which
then claims to be a basic science for the other sciences. Rather, only the
sciences of language, religion, law, custom, politics, economy, art, etc.
together and in interaction are to constitute ethno- political overall science’.
Just as little, of course, can there be any question of a primacy ‘of’ the
political as such: what matters is not power as such, but its meaning. And this
meaning lies in the creation of new, plastic form ‘that meets the needs of the
people and the times’.
Thus a peculiarly new concept of
political totality emerges, which is to outline the National Socialist idea of
the people: ‘The focal point of real time is the
present; therefore the present is also the focal point of real history’.
Such real history is had only by ‘the unities of human life’, life not in the
biological sense, which examines only one sector of life, namely organic life,
but in the sense of the life of a people, to which belong not only the membered
individual human beings, but ‘all necessary spheres and functions of life in
which the becoming and meaning of individual life is fulfilled’. The ‘call of
God’ goes out to this people: the leader perceives it; in the leader the whole
possesses and maintains its center; the leader passes on the call, kindles,
guides, and leads the historical movement. ‘Thus from blood and destiny history
arises; thus power arises, the motor in history’.
Krieck designates his
‘interpretation of the world and of life’, which he sharply distinguishes from
all academic philosophy and also clearly separates from neo-idealism and the
idealist tradition, as racial-ethnic-political anthropology. The ‘life’ to be
interpreted here is for him an ultimate: there is nothing before or above it
from which it could be derived. A ‘philosophy of life’? Krieck speaks of
‘universal biology’ and distinguishes the worldview (universal) concept of life
from the biological-scientific one. Life in this sense is primordial givenness,
primordial phenomenon, ‘beginning, middle and end’. But does this make the
meaning of life any clearer? Life is supposed to provide a foundation; yet it
receives its meaning only from man, from the life of a people. The fact that the
totality of the life of a people contains everything that is vital for the
growth and maturation of the integrated individual, this is Krieck’s fundamental
proposition of an ethnic worldview.
This totality is determined by
natural factors: race is the inner, soil the outer ‘constant component’ in the
life of a people. But this is only the one, the biological life-pole. The other
is the historical one. Only unities of human life have history because they know
destiny, presence, fulfilled time. Because for them alone there exist decision
and action. Thus, after such preliminaries, which do not cover the title
‘Reality’ which Krieck gave to his first volume, ‘Action and Order’, the
ethnic-political anthropology, only now begins with the second part.
Action is doing and as such is
rooted in the self-activity of all that lives. Action is human doing and has its
prerequisite in membership, the community bond of the individual. Action is
human doing in the particular form of regulating, not regulated doing (the
latter is work). As such it is historical. ‘The historical movement is the
sequence of action itself together with its effects
in the various spheres of life’. And this movement then has its dialectic in the
fact that action as history-forming means a break with the found community law
and posits new goals against an ‘exhausted order’.
Thus action emerges as political:
politics is community-forming purposive action, for which there are no
instructions for use, no technology, no ‘practical science’. Political action is
so to speak the maximal concept of action; it refers primarily not to the state
but to history, not to a sphere of life, an objective order, but to the people
as a whole and the ‘inner movement’ of the body politic (After this holistic
exposition of action Krieck then goes back to the membership types of action:
professional action in the particularization of the ‘primordial occupations’
physician, judge, teacher).
The third volume of ethnopolitical
anthropology, not coincidentally the most extensive, has ‘cognition and science’
as its subject. Krieck begins with a ‘critique of the theory of knowledge’,
which by its dismissive treatment of Kant, to come to terms with Kant today
means to distance oneself from him, can easily give a false picture of Krieck’s
real attitude toward Kant: in reality he takes over Kant’s doctrine ‘of the
active, formative character of cognition’ (and from here criticizes modern
ontology which, alongside ‘universal mechanistics’ and the dualism of nature and
spirit, is the third great obstacle on the way to ‘living totality’), as he
takes over Kant’s doctrine of intuition ‘in which reality is grasped and shaped,
not merely suffered’.
Indeed, he emphasizes that ‘the epistemological basic attitude of Kant’ retains
its validity from the standpoint of living cognizing man. Also the center of
Krieck’s doctrine of consciousness, the concept of the ‘center of consciousness’
with its ‘spontaneous power,’ is nothing other than a deformalization of the
Kantian concept of transcendental apperception.
This third volume is certainly the
most thoroughly elaborated and impressive one. However, it is composed of
components of unequal value: doctrine of
consciousness, doctrine of movement, doctrine of levels.
The doctrine of consciousness strives away from the isolated, abstract cognizing
subject and seeks to incorporate the ‘unconscious’ within itself. The ‘centre of
consciousness’ is intended to designate the point at which consciousness and
corporeality merge, but beyond that gains religious-mystical significance: the
centre of consciousness is the centre of life and as such holistic; it is the
‘place in which God’s call is heard, conscience where one’s fellow man is
perceived, spirit’. The centre of consciousness is the mover and helmsman of
cognition, the transformer of unconscious instinctual life into conscious
action.
The doctrine of movement and the
doctrine of levels are Aristotelianizing and proceed more along the lines of
traditional philosophy than can initially be expected. They interlock insofar as
it is precisely ‘movement’ which gives the levels of reality their distinct
nature. As the first ‘level of reality’ Krieck
designates the scientific-physical, as the second the scientific-biological, as
the third that of the immediate life or experiential reality.
Here movement is social and historical, on the second level of reality it is
growth and development, on the first level of reality, in the realm of the
‘isolated, abstract and highly typified’ reality of physics, it is mechanical
movement. It corresponds to Krieck’s panbiologism that on the one hand he seeks
to devalue the independence of physical objectness or to derive the physical
world of things from the reality of life, and on the other hand to biologically
define community as the third level of reality, as ‘communal life’.
As far as his position on the
formation of concepts in physics is concerned, he outlined it even more
precisely in a book complementing anthropology about ‘Nature and Natural
Science’ (1942). Nature as universal life, wholeness even in the inorganic,
typology, rhythm, polarity, the formation of reality without external teleology,
these are the fundamental concepts of German cognition of nature. They are
obscured and made unrecognizable by the Galilean- Newtonian, ‘nature-denying and
nature-destroying’ mechanistic physics. But after the ‘end of Newtonism’ and its
consequences: theory of relativity, formalism, mathematization, ontologism, they
will arise again and usher in a new epoch of German natural science (of course
Krieck does not want to relinquish the ‘technical’ categories of physics, but he
does not succeed in connecting or deriving them from his ‘pure’ cognition and
explanation of nature).
In any case, this philosophy of
movement, and with it ethnopolitical anthropology in general, runs out into a
philosophy of interpretation or meaning: ‘cognitive movement’ runs between
description and interpretation; but the meaning of cognition (and consciousness)
itself is ‘self-guidance and self-formation of life’. It is certainly no
coincidence that here Krieck comes closest to Weinhandl’s ‘analysis of form’.
After all, like the latter he appeals to Goethe and Goethe’s method of
‘archetypal science’.
Alfred
Baeumler
Alfred Baeumler is one of the
leading political thinkers of the present as a philosopher of history, educator,
and epistemologist. ‘To teach politics’, he said in his inaugural lecture in
Berlin in 1933, ‘does not mean to politicize or call for politicization from
the lectern, but to draw a picture of man that corresponds to reality. I
will replace the neo-humanist picture of man with the true picture of political
man, I will redefine the relationship between theory and practice, I will
describe the life-orders in which we really live, I will impart my insights, but
I will not dabble in politics’. Seven years later, in a speech at the Hans
Schemm House in Halle, Baeumler emphasized once again this anthropological
approach of political philosophy: ‘We must begin with ourselves as we are.
Without concerning ourselves with what kind of ‘being’ that is, we begin with
man, not with reason, not with the rational soul, not with a higher being called
spirit, but just as little with nature, with the mere living creature, but with
real man as we know him from our experience. In adhering to this approach lies
the philosophical’. This is Baeumler’s realism, his anthropologism, his
turning away from ‘imageless’ (abstract) idealism.
Baeumler was born in 1887 in Neustadt
an der Tafelfichte (Sudeten
German). He studied in Munich and received his
doctorate there in 1914 with a thesis on ‘The Problem of Universal Validity in
Kant’s Aesthetics’. After participating in the World War, he qualified as a
university lecturer in 1924 in Dresden on the basis of a work on Kant’s Critique
of Judgment (1923), which was to be continued in a study on the ‘Problem of
Irrationality in Critical Philosophy’. At the Dresden University of Technology
he became associate professor in 1928, full professor of philosophy in 1929. The
revolution brought him to Berlin in 1933: a chair of political pedagogy had been
established for him, in conjunction with a political-pedagogical institute, of
which he became director. He now had to cope with a multitude of tasks:
scholarly, organizational, and party-political. Since 1936 he has published the
journal ‘Worldview and School’. Another pedagogical journal, ‘International
Journal of Education’, has appeared under his editorship since 1935.
Baeumler’s thinking has been and
continues to be decisively determined by Kant.
Baeumler himself confesses that he owes his philosophical education to the third
critique, the ‘book of fate’ (as opposed to the Critique of Pure Reason as the
‘basic book’) of criticism. Already then it is a ‘picture’ of man that he wants
to draw: the classical character. The classical, understood as lifestyle and
humanity, was embodied by Goethe, and thought by Kant. ‘The Critique of Judgment
and Goethe, that is the thought and its existential expression’. It is clear
that this approach, even if in terms of content it initially has to do with the
history and background of the Critique of Judgement, indeed of criticism as a
whole, nevertheless necessitated a new interpretation: an interpretation from
the standpoint of the concepts of totality and individuality in Kant. ‘If the
combination of a critique of taste with a theory of knowledge of biology ... in
a book is to be more than an old man’s whim ..., the real meaning of the last
critique must be sought neither in aesthetics nor in the doctrine of the
organic, but in that higher concept which unites the objects of aesthetic and
teleological judgment under itself. This supreme concept is individuality’.
Thus, even if in terms of subject matter Baeumler’s exposition initially has to
do with the history and background of the Critique ofJudgment, it nevertheless
leads into the systematic.
Figure 4a. Prof. Dr. Alfred
Baeumler
Figure 4b. Immanuel Kant
But is not this ‘classical
character’ precisely that picture of man which Baeumler afterwards wants to
dethrone and replace with the ‘true picture of political man’? Has he himself
accomplished the turn which he describes, the turn from a past apolitical order
of life to the present? Two years after assuming the Berlin office,
Baeumler gave an analysis, in a speech on the 100th anniversary of Wilhelm von
Humboldt’s death, of the neo-humanist picture of man, culminating in the
statement that this ‘unpolitical’ picture too is a ‘political’ one, political,
that is, for the time in which it arose. No longer for our time, whose social
structure is a different
one. Humboldt’s concept of ‘Bildung’, by combining the concept of power
(Leibniz) and that of individuality (Kant), is the document of the ‘classical’
character. It fulfilled a political mission: in the reform period, the nobility
could no longer provide the political leadership; the bourgeois stratum
powerfully aspired upward. ‘In this situation of mobilization of all forces for
the formation of a new political being, everything depended on finding a basis on
which those who felt within themselves the vocation for a higher career beyond
economic life could be united and educated’. Had Humboldt established, in place
of the neo-humanist ‘university,’ a scientific polytechnic, ‘then precisely the
most important political effect
could not have occurred’.
Here one characteristic feature of
Baeumler’s nature is immediately apparent: his ability to think in concrete
historical terms. The way in which he makes the Kantian age, the philosophy of
the 19th century, his own in his personal development is no less characteristic.
Already in the introduction to his Kant book he concludes with a reference to
Hegel (‘the presentation of the Critique of Judgment will directly lead to
Hegel’s philosophy in terms of the content of the concepts’), he first deals with
Hegel, again from aesthetic points of view; then with Kierkegaard, then with
Bachofen, then with Nietzsche. These are not mere external stages of his
research; they are not just the fruitful encounters that ignite his
philosophizing; at the same time, and this is the characteristic, it is the
stream of history that fertilizes contemporary thinking. With a sure instinct,
Baeumler closes himself off
to everything that does not carry this ‘pointer to the present’; and if the
principle of history for him is not consciousness or spirit, but will or force,
this is not yet any systematic hypothesis, e.g. in the sense of that
‘irrationalism’ which he set out to describe, but simple experience of
historical effectiveness.
But there is even more that characterizes this line of development: that actual
turn from idealism to realism, which represents Baeumler’s most important
systematic decision and determines his thinking. The introduction he wrote for a
selection he edited from Hegel’s writings on social philosophy (Part I:
Philosophy of Spirit and Philosophy of Law 1927) lies right on the breakthrough
line. As Hegel, so it says here, underestimated egoism in the practical sphere,
so too in the theoretical sphere he underestimated the concept of law. Hegel, it
further says with Kierkegaard’s accents, did indeed see the struggle of
will-atoms, but he did not take this struggle seriously. In general, he ‘did not
take the particular, accidental and natural seriously enough’. ‘Inwardly’, this
too is very characteristic of Baeumler’s turn, nature is completely eliminated
in Hegel: real subjectivity has not been recognized at all in its problematic
nature. In spite of all dialectics, Hegel’s system remains dualistic like
Fichte’s: it is a system with ‘two peaks’. So Hegel the metaphysician does not
know real development either; everything is simultaneous: ‘the mood of Hegel’s
metaphysics does not express becoming but being’. The meaning of what Baeumler
calls reality has yet to be discussed.
Initially, two further points are
to be singled out from Baeumler’s history of philosophy, because they are
highlights of that ‘existential’ understanding that characterizes his historical
works: his image of Bachofen and his image of Nietzsche. He has dealt with both
thinkers several times. In a smaller work (Bachofen and Nietzsche 1929) he has
contrasted them plastically: the symbolist and the psychologist, Bachofen, the
calm observer of antiquity, the citizen who at the same time embodies the
strongest ‘anti-bourgeois power’ in the 19th century; Nietzsche, the fighter, who
recognizes his agonistic drive in the ‘heroically veracious’ existence of
antiquity, who does not want to observe antiquity but live it, enemy and
despiser of bourgeois ‘security’, whose ‘boldness as a psychologist’, however,
was only possible ‘against the background of the bourgeois system to which he
himself still belonged as a protester’ (only later did he then recognize the
essentially instrumental character of Nietzsche’s ‘psychology’: Nietzsche’s
psychology is not a disintegrating subjectivism, but a means, a weapon).
Bachofen is to be understood as a
philosopher of history, not as a ‘timeless symbolist’. Bachofen, says Baeumler
against Klages, and a Swiss work by G. Schmidt published three years after
Baeumler’s ‘Introduction’, in which all text passages are carefully checked,
gives him right in this, ‘interpreted by an anti-historical and anti-Christian
spirit, is no longer Bachofen’. However, he is a philosopher of history in that
he ‘wants to write ‘human history’, human history not as universal history, but
as history ‘from the point of view of the relationship between the sexes’. If
Bachofen starts from matriarchy, this legal concept is inessential, indeed
misleading for what he strives for and achieves: for the exploration of the
‘experience-prehistory’ of history. It is equally misguided for the
interpretation to understand the concept of matriarchy as a glorification of the
female principle per se: ‘The deepest source of ‘matriarchy’ is not the
abstraction of the mother in her quasi a posteriori relationship to the children
of her womb, but the original relationship of mother and son. Only as mother’s
son is Bachofen to be understood; but also only as his mother’s son’. This
thoroughly shifts the accents of the (idealist) interpretation by Klages: ‘The
idealist’s alternative, the question of the a
priority of day or night, is meaningless for
Bachofen. The day is born from the night, as the son from the womb of the
mother.’ And from here the meaning of the somewhat hidden basic thesis in the
book immediately follows: that the mythical and the revolutionary imply each
other. ‘The man who wants to understand myths must have a penetrating feeling
for the power of the past, just as the man who wants to understand a revolution
and revolutionaries must have the strongest consciousness of the future’. As the
future belongs to the past, so the revolutionary belongs to the mythical.
But myth is rooted in the people,
not in the individual: the mythological thinking of the Heidelberg Romantics, to
which Bachofen’s philosophy of history refers back, is at the same time a
völkisch thinking. It is the breakthrough of a new sense of life, a view of
reality alien to the 18th century. The concept of the people of the Heidelberg
Romantics, its stages of development are clearly outlined in the Bachofen
introduction, is not idealistic like Herder’s, Hegel’s, the Jena Romantics’; it
is ‘naturalistic’ in the sense that the people is understood as a second and
higher nature, as physis in a sense not yet biologically or even physically
objectified.
Reference has already been made to
Baeumler’s Nietzsche research. In addition to a 1931 monograph (Nietzsche as
Philosopher and Politician), an ‘introduction’ is also to be included which
Baeumler wrote for a Nietzsche edition he edited (1930). Here the focus is
entirely on Nietzsche’s personality, while the other presentation is more
concerned with the content of his teaching. The key
to Nietzsche’s personality is Dionysus, not a Greek god, but himself a
hieroglyph, behind which an experience is hidden.
Dionysus, pseudonym for Antichrist, earliest formula for the will to power, is
‘a symbol of the ultimate and highest intensification
of life, where preservation no longer applies, but waste’.
Dionysus means ‘that unity of pleasure and pain that the living thing feels when
in the supreme moment of its existence it becomes creative in a victoriously
destructive way’. But the Dionysian is not unambiguous; Dionysus has two faces:
Dionysus philosophos has entered into Wagner’s music, and this corrupts his figure;
philosophy and music, the two powers between whose tension Nietzsche’s life
unfolds, are forced together into the ‘impossible concept of the tragic-musical
myth’. To undo this impossible combination, to separate the philosophical and
the musical, is the effort
Nietzsche undertakes. ‘When life goes astray, when it has combined with a music
hostile to life, then the will must become the advocate of life’. But Baeumler
digs even deeper: the musical and the philosophical lines themselves are only
the reflection of two ‘lines’ whose intertwining determines human destiny at all:
the lines of death and life. How ‘can music become the servant of philosophy’,
how can death be made subservient to life? That is Nietzsche’s problem, for
which ‘Zarathustra’ (in contrast to ‘The Birth of Tragedy’) then gives the
‘existential Dionysian’ solution.
What then is the actual content of
Nietzsche’s ‘Heraclitean’ philosophy? The shortest formula for this is that of a
heroic realism, theoretically developed ‘as it were from a transcendental
aesthetics of the body’. It is precisely from here that the conception of the
‘Will to power’ gains its meaning: the will to power is not a subjective
phenomenon, not an effort
or excitement of the will; Nietzsche has done away with previous philosophy of
consciousness. The will to power is something objective, the ‘unity of force’
(instead of the unity of consciousness), well-ordered existence as life reality.
With consciousness, responsibility also falls away; if one realizes this
clearly, an alternative sharply emphasized by Baeumler becomes understandable:
‘Either the doctrine of eternal recurrence or the doctrine of the will to
power’. For Nietzsche, both cannot be equally essential; for one cancels out the
other. One has to decide from which point one wants to interpret. The doctrine
of eternal recurrence is ‘moral’. It is static and ultimately devalues the,
justified by modern physics, as Baeumler seeks to demonstrate, Heraclitean
approach.
Baeumler’s thinking is not
systematic in the explicit sense, i.e. in the sense of a concept system resting
in itself. But his position on Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bachofen, Klages, the
way of his philosophical-historical interpretation contains an implicit
systematics, which is occasionally clearly emphasized by him himself. If one
follows these references, a rich complexity of problems opens up, in particular
by including the aesthetic sciences, with whose origin, history, and critique
Baeumler dealt monographically in his ‘Aesthetics’ in 1933. Aesthetics has the
special feature that it ‘is not kindled by the phenomenon of art, but by the
phenomenon of the beautiful’, metaphysics of the beautiful and theory of art
gape apart so much that the philosophical fundamental problem of ‘being as form’
is precisely corrupted by the so-called ‘aesthetics’. Plato and Plotinus
absolutize beauty; the image becomes the manifestation of the idea, and
aesthetic subjectivism leads to the system of imageless idealism, which leaves
reality behind. Baeumler’s struggle is directed against this ‘system’. His efforts
for Dionysus and Zarathustra, for the myth in Bachofen, for the concept of style
in art (‘the phenomenon of art cannot be derived from experiences and from
expressive efforts’,
it says in the Aesthetics 1933, ‘Art can only arise from the will to immortalize
a content, and the expression of this will is style’), find their continuation in
the fact that Baeumler is the first to undertake to philosophically exploit the
pictorial content of National Socialism. Familiar with the archaic pictorial
language and what sociology previously investigated in a more positivistic sense
as ‘collective ideas’, he sets himself the task of interpreting the symbols of
our time: symbol and word, image and concept are antagonistic; the word is
eloquent, the symbol silent, the word is disempowered, the symbol has power over
us: ‘for that is the peculiarity of the images of our soul, that they demand the
stake from us’. The path of culture leads from the symbol to the word,
certainly. But where the word becomes powerless, culture unproductive, there a
regeneration can only take place from the deeper layer of wordless symbolism.
The National Socialist revolution stands under the sign of this regeneration.
‘We agree on the symbols, we do not yet agree on the word’. It would be false
romanticism to grasp the symbols of our time solely from feeling or experience;
it would be reactionary to seek the right word for the new content in the past.
‘We are not romantics, we are on the way to the word, and the way to the word is
the way to classicism’. Baeumler also defends himself against irrationalism,
against the hostility to spirit of neo-romanticism. The philosopher has the office
of interpreting the symbols towards the word, ‘the most difficult
work of the spirit is nothing other than the interpretation of symbols’.
The work is difficult
because it is a cognition of reality. The symbol does not stand as an allegory
for something subjective above reality, but it is concrete: it is the
historical-political factor of effect,
it separates and connects, it is the incarnation of that ‘real we’ which is
never found on the level of mere community of sentiment.
What is reality then?
Since the turn of the century, modern physics has been in
a foundational crisis concerning the nature of causality, the absolute
determinacy of the world, the position of the observer vis-à-vis the object, the
validity of statements about reality. Should this be just a separate matter of a
‘discipline’, or should it not rather be an expression of a historical process
that affects
all science and philosophy? Thus Baeumler finds that the foundational crisis of
physics is closely connected with the collapse of the ‘humanistic system’
(whereby ‘humanistic’ has a twofold meaning for Baeumler: a positive one
referring to the ‘altitude’, a negative one referring to the breadth or
‘extension’ of ‘man’; the former meaning refers to the ‘great form’ of the
classical character, the latter to the formlessness of undifferentiated
man ‘in general’): this system was a system of ‘absoluteness’, within which an
absolute world corresponded to the absolute spirit. The sense of the universal
causal law was rooted in this claim to absolute cognition; equivalence of
temporal phases, fundamental calculability of the future, absolute ‘security’
are the characteristics of the causally determined reality. And now the strange
thing: by giving up the absolute system of nature oriented toward
‘repeatability’, ‘recurrence of everything equal’, physics gains greater
proximity to reality. Today’s physics is ‘more realistic’ than classical
physics. The same in the realm of spirit. The humanistic system of absoluteness,
which was regarded as the system of ‘the’ theoretical man, contained the
pretension of an absolute standpoint. ‘Consciousness as the centre of a neutral
frame of reference, the free, self-determining I, autonomous man, all ideal
cases fitting the ideal cases of classical physics!’ By giving up this standpoint
of absolute objectivity and ‘innocence’ and realizing that the knower and the
known ‘are not separated by an infinite distance, but that a finite distance lies
between them, by stating that only the whole man cognizes, the man who ‘has’
consciousness, not ‘had’ by a ‘pure’ consciousness, have we arrived back at a
cheap relativism, or are we not much closer to reality?
It is the mistake of relativism to
take the concept of truth too lightly. To ‘overcome’ relativism means nothing
other than to restore the primacy of formal logic: and that is also the point at
which Baeumler’s own ‘logic’ sets in. However, it is chiefly Hegel’s speculative
logic (dialectic) vis-à-vis which Baeumler emphatically asserts the primacy of
formal logic. Self- consciousness, which is not a particular ‘mode of being’ and
does not contain any particular access to the absolute (from ‘within’), must be
conceived as the point of reflection of a thinking arising within the
circumference of our human frame of reference, a thinking that recognizes its
limits and transcends them. Thus Baeumler’s formal logic applied to cognition is
transcendental logic. But precisely applied to our human cognition, not to a fictitious
pure cognition. Moreover, it is easy to see that absolutism and relativism imply
each other. If the absolute frame of reference, the absolute truth (idea) falls,
then relativism as a world view also falls. The traditional theory of ideas,
which wants to justify reality and give it a ‘meaning’ that it has first taken
away from it and transferred to another ‘world’: that of values, spirit, this
always pathetic, priestly doctrine of two worlds becomes pointless when the
idealist scheme of interpretation is seen through. To decompose reality into
form and matter, to destroy it in order to be able to ‘construct’ it, to shape
its disfigured elements, torn from intuition, into a ‘picture of the world’ by a
subsequent act, that is the old spiritualistic approach for which the factual,
‘positive’ requires glorification through values and bestowals of meaning in
order to be ‘saved’.
If, on the other hand, one decides
to recognize reality itself as the ‘ground and measure of all forms’, not to
subordinate it as mere factuality to a ‘higher’ reality, then philosophy becomes
realistic. It becomes a ‘philosophy of reality’ which is absolutely unpathetic,
merely indicative, ‘indicative’, and leaves behind both the traditional contrast
between positivism and idealism as well as the contrast between relativism and
absolutism. For such a philosophy of reality, reality is neither ‘realization’
nor the site of realization of something unreal. Even the idea takes on a different,
human-political meaning for it. ‘The idea itself originates from reality; it is
the image that reality produces of itself through man’. There is only one
reality, whose depth is inexhaustible, unfathomable. There is an original
relationship to reality: to look at the world and take from the intuition the
guiding images for one’s own actions. There is an ‘indication’ of reality which
does not presuppose the absolute distance of the ‘pure’ consciousness from its
objects, but which is fundamentally practical, political. Here one does not
irresponsibly talk about things. Rather, the reality in which the speaker
stands, his existential situation, is indicated responsibly.
This situation is political as
such, i.e. it encompasses man as a personal unity in the community and committed
to the community. Just as there are political actions only within the framework
of a field of action, a system of action, so too our political existence is a
being placed into a fateful real coherence, through which we are connected as
personal unities with the past and the future, into a coherence of blood and
race. Race is thus the fundamental political-anthropological concept: race is
anthropological insofar as man’s racial determinacy is not an
external-accidental but an essential determination; race is political insofar as
it is the center, the deep center of those ‘actions and reactions’ which find
expression in political action and determine our attitude. Thus race is also a
fundamental concept of political pedagogy, whose structure falls within
Baeumler’s Berlin years, and whose premises, problems, tasks he seeks to clarify
in several recent works (Männerbund und Wissenschaft 1934, Politik und Erziehung
1937, Bildung und Gemeinschaft 1942). Here above all the basic lines of the
implicit systematics of his philosophizing emerge.
For ‘political pedagogy’ is not an ‘application’ of politics to education (let
alone an application of philosophy to politics), but political activity itself,
directed toward the future and placed in the service of shaping the future of
our people.
Without going into details, we
only emphasize the moments that characterize the novelty of Baeumler’s approach:
education as formative education and physical education.
The two concrete forms of
community: family and men’s association (clan and retinue) condition two different
life forms of educational influence: family education and school education. Here
as there it is the community that educates, the path from the family to the
people and the fatherland is the fateful path of every individual. Formative
education itself is not school education in the former sense determined by the
historical (neo-humanist) form of the German school, but rather its political
foundation and orientation. Formative education is education for and through the
state, education in the ‘men’s house’, as it was called in 1930, when the
bourgeois life form and its ‘societal’ educational system were still a reality
to be fought. In the meantime, this male-bond educational system has found its
place and political safeguarding in the formations of the movement.
But physical education is not only
a prerequisite for formative education, but also a basic condition for all
‘education’ as the development of individual talents and abilities. Its approach
arises from the relationship of the individual body to the collective body of
the people: ‘The body is a political issue, that is the first consequence we have
to draw from the idea of the people’. And just as the body is, so too is
character a political issue; all physical education is primarily character
education. To develop the body’s predispositions into a type is the function and
significance of the concept of race for realistic anthropology and pedagogy. In
contrast, the school is the site of education bound to the means of instruction,
an instruction that is addressed to the head and intellect, but which is
nevertheless not imparted ‘in the empty space of reason’, but rather presupposes
the racial community as a principle of life.
Baeumler describes his philosophy
as a philosophy of reality, realism. But he has also spoken of a ‘heroic
rationalism’, and it is worth pointing out lastly. This rationalism is heroic in
that it does not presuppose reason as a fixed possession but dares to struggle
for the order of the spirit. From here Baeumler’s formula of well-ordered
existence as life reality also acquires a fuller sound: from the beginning life
proceeds in rhythmic order, ‘but only man is able to present the rhythm of the
universe in self-created orders’. This ‘presentation’ is truly no mere depiction
of a reality ‘in itself’. For we ourselves live in
images, primordial images, symbols, visions, and figures. That is our reality.
But in it we do not live as disinterested observers, it only appeals to us if we
behave actively. If we dare to create order anew,
not in the security of revealed truths, but as finite, blood-bound existences,
then we have realized the vital tendency effective
in us, the ‘Will to power’, which is itself an order. It is important to
recognize that Baeumler’s philosophy of culture, in contrast to the philosophy
of culture of idealism, does not ‘sublate’ natural philosophy but only
supplements it; for that is the hallmark of his ‘rationalism’.
Prof.
Dr. Hans Heyse
The implementation and reception of
existentialist and existential-ontological issues in a völkisch worldview or in
the ideological structure of National Socialism is of not just paradigmatic but
conclusive significance for contemporary political thought, and thus at the same
time opens up new ways of philosophizing. We have characterized this in general
terms. To characterize it in particular means addressing the philosophy of Hans
Heyse, which, not to highlight it over similar but differently
oriented efforts,
but to underline its intention lying entirely in this direction, we place at the
end of our individual elaborations. It should be noted right away that for Heyse
it is a matter of a connection between idealism and philosophy of existence
which is not external but aims at a new determination of the problem of
existence through a deeper understanding of the idea, of reason, of logos as an
attitude of being, and that this determination is directed from the outset at
the idea and reality of the Reich.
Hans Heyse was born in 1891 in
Bremen. In 1919 he received his doctorate in Bern (where he had been interned
after returning from French captivity) with an ‘Introduction to the Theory of
Categories’ (1921). He then went to Berlin, where he was close to A. Riehl,
whose ‘Philosophical Criticism’ he published in final form (2nd edition) after
Riehl’s death in 1925 (together with E. Spranger). In 1925 he habilitated in
Breslau on the basis of his book ‘The Concept of Totality and Kantian
Philosophy’ (1927). In 1932 he was appointed full professor in Königsberg, where
he held the rectorate from 1933 to 1936 and published his main work in 1935:
‘Idea and Existence’. In 1936 he came to Göttingen as a full professor.
Heyse’s philosophical development
grows out of an independent confrontation, not really influenced by any school,
although initially proceeding within a neo-Kantian framework, with the basic
motives of contemporary thought. He finds his own approach in recourse to
antiquity, to the philosophies of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Already his
‘Theory of Categories’ seeks to show that Kant’s intentions need to be
radicalized. It cannot stop at the questionable nature of the ‘metaphysical
deduction’ and the unclarified relationship between thinking and intuition.
Rather thinking, which possesses its basic categories in identity, difference,
continuity, must be related to intuition in such a way that its categories prove
to be necessary and sufficient
principles for the axiomatic penetration of the space-time complex. Thus the
theory of categories passes over into a space-time axiomatics. On the other
hand, and this is significant for the later thematics, consciousness cannot be
regarded as an independent state of affairs
‘outside and apart from its contents and their relationships’, but is the
positedness of a state of affairs,
i.e. a peculiar being in states of affairs.
Consequently, the categories themselves cannot be grasped starting from
consciousness, explained as determinations of consciousness. Rather, they are
lawfulnesses that ‘equally include concept and judgment’.
The problems of logic and theory of
categories thus outlined undergo a further determination in Heyse’s work on the
concept of totality and Kantian philosophy (1927). Here he first appears as an
independent systematist; it is the system of a ‘regional logic and theory of
categories’ which stands out against the background of a new conception of Kant.
Eight years later, however, he expands this framework once more by incorporating
his own systematics into a historical survey which, in accordance with the
thesis already indicated earlier, not to understand Plato through Kant but Kant
through Plato, sees the fundamental philosophical decision of Western philosophy
in the, properly understood, Platonic theory of ideas. In particular, Plato’s
theory of the state then becomes the model for that ideological- political
synthesis which Heyse demands as the ‘unity of idea and existence’ and asserts
with passion.
Let us first address the basic
question of the book on the concept of totality.
It is states of affairs,
objectivities in general that we want to survey in ordered fashion when we try
to comprehend reality through theoretical forms. This (reminiscent of Driesch’s
‘theory of order’) starting point of Heyse’s above all means that order is not
an addition of thinking, not a shaping of form, but something inherent in the
objects themselves, ‘pervading’ them. Given this, it remains just as
self-evident that we also have to establish order in thinking. It does not just
fall into our laps. Even when we ‘perceive’ something ordered. And here,
according to Heyse, there are two paths of cognition (cognition understood as
‘illumination’ of ordered contexts): we can obtain what is common to a ‘totality
of particulars’ through abstraction or from the relation of its ‘elements’. In
the first case, we extract the common ‘characteristics’ or ‘properties’. In the
second case, we advance to the ‘generating law’ of the whole (for example, the
Linnaean system classifies plants according to common characteristics. The
‘natural’ system classifies them according to ‘systematically differentiable
relations of material characteristics’, i.e. according to developable basic
relationships and functions such as: reproduction, oxygen absorption, etc.).
Heyse distinguishes these two paths
as abstraction concept and system concept. The former leads to neglect of the
particular, only the latter leads to determination and full comprehension of the
particular. And what is general, which is obtained, can be termed
abstract-general in the first case, following Hegel, and concrete-general in the
second case. The unity of a ‘system- conceptual’ totality is an integral one;
the unity of an ‘abstraction-conceptual’ totality is, cautiously put, not yet an
integral one. With this characterization, Heyse introduces a concept into logic
that has previously encountered us mostly in other areas: precisely the concept
of totality.
The introduction of totality into
logic is closely bound up with the significance intuition has for logic according
to Heyse. We saw that for him the inner unity of thinking and intuition signifies
the principle of comprehension, of theoretical evidence, and that intuition is
the actual whole-giving moment here. The whole of reality is the actual object
of philosophical cognition; ‘pure reason’ is nothing other than the idea ‘of the
whole of objectivity’. And in the end the ‘system concept’ differs
from the ‘abstraction concept’ in that in the former the particular is grasped
completely, in the latter incompletely, fragmentarily, in that abstraction
levels the whole into the ‘general’, while system relation, on the other hand,
renders it perspicuous in its dimensionality (stratification in depth). Precisely
for that reason, abstraction is also a path to the ‘system’; the abstraction
system only does not fulfill the claim of integral systematics, it remains a
preliminary stage.
However, the emphasis on intuition
does not signify any approximation to phenomenology (Husserl’s). Our ‘finite’
reason does not recognize the whole of objectivity: ‘it approaches it
asymptotically in incessant historical work’. This reservation is still
initially along the lines of neo-Kantianism; later it signifies Heyse’s turn to
existential philosophy. And as against phenomenology, Heyse also distinguishes
himself from ontology: the deficiency of ontology is its unstructured concept of
being; ontology is based on the ‘abstraction concept’. If it is to lead further,
then it must grasp being as a developable, internally structured whole: ontology
must be transformed into logology, i.e. into a logic of system relations.
Phenomenological and ontological methods, so Heyse concludes this critique., are
not suitable for solving ‘the problem of the system concept oriented toward the
wholeness of the state of affairs’.
This can only be done by the eidological method: it relates not to ‘objectivity
in general’ but to specific objectivity, as the ‘representative’ of reality
graspable through theoretical ‘forms’.
Without probing deeper into the
problems raised here, we only emphasize one point: the idea of the ‘articulation
of being into different
spheres of being’. For from here derives the justification of the eidological
method as regional logic.
Similar to N. Hartmann, Heyse also assumes that reality is
structured differently;
it is divided into ‘regions’.
But for him, the determination of the region does not proceed from the
in-itself-existing ‘object’, but from the ‘law of form’ of the areas: region is
‘the totality of those real states of affairs
which are grasped by the methodical means of one and the same pure system
concept or system structure, respectively’. These pure system concepts, which
apply to specific objectivities, are categories in the proper sense, categories
of areas. Those forms of order, however, which apply to all system concepts are
eidological ‘basic categories’. They are ‘pre-regional’.
In his book on totality, Heyse
attempts with great astuteness to unite two tasks: to combine the idea of
totality with the notion of different
layers of reality into the unity of an ‘ontological’ theory of categories, and,
to present Kant and antiquity (Plato, Aristotle) in their inner coherence. The
one is a systematic, the other a historical-philosophical task. But
comprehension of the world of objects also belongs to the object of philosophy:
this is historical, and historical time is a moment of a whole encompassing
‘nature’ and ‘sublating’ it. Thus systematic philosophizing is also not possible
without constant reference to the history of philosophical concept formation.
With this turn (and also at other points) Heyse comes close to ‘philosophy of
life’ (Dilthey’s and Bergson’s): the historical time system becomes the
framework of that life which unites the multiplicity of regions of being; the
system concept of historical time is the ‘most adequate form of reality’ that
the modern spirit ‘only now ultimately strives to conquer’.
In the concluding sections of the
work, what determines the further development of this philosophy of totality
stands out: the existential significance of the idea (as ‘original spiritual
attitude’) in contrast to the mere ‘concept’, the false simplification, unification
of differentiations
of being into the ‘unity of a single conceptual coordinate system’ (‘univocity’
of the concept of being and of the corresponding consciousness of reality
associated with it), the misapprehension of our historical modes of existence by
tradition, whereby also modern philosophy (since the Renaissance) finds itself in
considerable ignorance concerning the ultimate existential and ideal motives of
tradition.
When Hans Heyse assumed the
rectorate in Königsberg in 1933, he gave a speech on the ‘Idea of Science and
the German University’ in which he considerably sharpened the earlier demand for
an ‘upward purification of modern life’ and gave it a new, more radical version.
‘Modern’ philosophy (and science) is the form of modern existence. But this
existence is not an integral one, but a ‘broken’ existence, ‘which as a true
existence necessarily leads to catastrophe’. The catastrophe Heyse has in mind
here is the collapse of modern culture, that crisis of existence which finds its
expression in the ‘world-historical situation’ of the world war and the German
revolution. The previous modes of existence have not only become questionable by
no longer being able to support and shape our existence, but with and in this
questionable nature it has become clear that they also did not truly shape life
earlier, that they concealed our (Germanic) fundamental values, the true
(political) life orders, ‘the basic constitution of life’ itself. What is this
basic constitution? Why can we not progress steadily and continuously, as it
seems possible only historically, in ‘upward purifying’ modernity? Why is our
consciousness of reality revolutionary, and why does the self-reflection to which
we were called in the war demand a radical dissolution of the traditional life
forms?
These are the questions Heyse seeks
to answer in his 1935 work on Idea and Existence. His answer appears as a
philosophy-of-history conception, but has a number of systematic prerequisites,
which of course relate first of all to the relation between idea and existence
itself and diverge from the prerequisites of the earlier work. The change
consists chiefly in the more decisive emphasis on the difference
between Greek philosophy, as understood on the basis of Aeschylus and Sophocles,
especially Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy, and its fundamentally
altered Christian-Western form, i.e. the Christian-Western tradition as such.
This is theologically determined; it is the universal ‘theoretical’ form of
redrawing, accepting the ultimately divinely predetermined Christian-Western
conception of being (God, soul, world): its existential meaning is thus
dissolved and replaced by the principle of faith. In general, Heyse’s concept of
existence now emerges for the first time in a more precise form, admittedly
related to Heidegger’s existential ontology but also distinguished from it. The
‘modern’ philosophies of existence and history are not revolutionary (i.e.
political); precisely ‘Western and especially modern existence-consciousness’ is
‘to be questioned in a depth and radicality that is still unfamiliar but
unavoidable’. As we shall see, the approach and justification of this critique
follow from Heyse’s own philosophy of history.
But first: What does existence,
human existence, have to do with the idea at all? Idea is not concept,
representation, norm, but ‘solely and alone the expression for reality as a
totality, for the relation of reality to its own order, for the oscillation
around its own axis’. Idea is the ‘original expression of the order of being and
existence itself’, being as a whole. Idea is ‘the form in which being as being,
human existence in the midst of being, is experienced, actualized, striven for
and willed’. This connection between idea and existence is a metaphysical one;
indeed, it itself is the actual meaning of ‘metaphysics’. For metaphysics does
not have to theoretically cognize transcendent objects, it is not ‘theory’ at
all in the modern sense. Rather, metaphysics is illumination of existence; it is
a ‘way of existing’ and has to be ‘newly effectuated
in every moment of existing from the original substance of existing’.
Then, however, there must also be
another way of existing. Idea and existence can be conceived and connected
inadequately; the order of being can be concealed, hidden. The ideas are then
ideologies, expression of ‘unreal, fragmentary sham existence’. Man has the
‘fundamental possibility’ of existing in truth or untruth, i.e. in the order of
being (cosmos) or in illusion (chaos). He can affirm
and fulfill the orders of being or violate them and perish. ‘Human existence
knows of this fundamental possibility. In affirming
it, it experiences truth of life in struggle and sacrifice. That is why the basic
constitution of life is heroic, heroic-tragic existence’. For only in
‘resoluteness’ of existing can man advance to his possibilities of being; only
in existing itself as resolute and courageous life-attitude can he ‘know’
(experience) that there are ‘metaphysical forces of being’.
So metaphysically existing means,
Heyse seeks to illustrate this by means of Greek tragedy, to be placed before
the fundamental possibilities of being, i.e. to become aware in deeper knowledge
of the order, the cosmos, the being and to live this order, or in not knowing to
miss it and bring about chaos. Precisely in this the ‘parousia’ of true, divine
being shows itself, that it destroys inauthentic, untrue existence. Cosmos and
chaos manifest themselves as metaphysics of historical existence, whereby indeed
their even more comprehensive significance is only hinted at in the work itself.
Accordingly, ‘openness’ or ‘concealment’ of the
order is to be characterized primarily as adequate or inadequate attitude of
knowledge or non-knowledge. Heyse places all the
more emphasis on this, as it is precisely here a matter of the necessary
dependence of the Aryan-European, especially the Germanic- German existence on
the deeper knowledge: he sees in this the only possibility to renew the idea of
philosophy as well as science and to connect it inwardly with the destiny of the
German and European human. But the systematic prerequisites for the connection
between idea and existence are not yet exhausted with that. If the connection
between idea and existence is to have a primarily political meaning, then the
polis, the community, or the state, must be contained in the original approach.
The ‘binding of existence to the primal law of being and life itself’ can be
understood neither from individuality nor from subjectivity alone but is
determined from an idea of its own, the idea of the ‘Reich’. The ‘Reich’
demarcates the space ‘within which the union of idea and existence, spirit and
life, is possible’. The individual, thought of only for itself, just an
abstraction, attains to true existence only in community, in the state, in that
state ‘which understands itself as ‘Reich’ on the basis of the idea of
totality’.
And this is decisive: that the idea
of the Reich contains more than a sum of ‘life circumstances’, that it signifies
more than an existential ‘situation’, that it brings the state as a concrete
historical totality (unity of spirit and power) into direct relation with ‘the
divine manifesting itself in the world law’.
In Heyse, however, these statements
do not stand in an originally speculative, metaphysical context; they want to
elucidate and designate those historical contexts that form the actual content
of his book. Just as Plato’s Politeia becomes fruitful for the concept of the
‘Reich’, just as the concept of original and ‘essentially tragic’ existence is
developed on the basis of Greek tragedy, whose principles are grasped by
Socrates-Plato as the ‘true principles of historical existence’ (whereby Heyse
sharply distinguishes himself from Nietzsche), so the theme of Western
intellectual history in general is the fate of Platonic philosophy. Through
Christianity, which proves itself to be the secularization of the new philosophy
and science, the ancient bond between idea and existence has been torn,
Christianity has replaced philosophy with faith, withdrawn truth from the
‘beholding spirit of courageous life’ in order to find it guaranteed as
‘promise’, Christianity has transformed Greek values by substituting existential
truth with revelation; above all, Christianity has coined an opposition that to
this day remained fundamental for Western concept formation: the opposition
between immanence and transcendence.
Heyse seeks to understand the
‘Western world age’ from the ‘antithetical- synthetic’ relationship between
antiquity and Christianity: by no means, as he seeks to show, is new ground
gained in the Renaissance with the overcoming of medieval patterns of thought.
On the contrary: the ‘natural system of the humanities’, the
constructivist-idealist philosophies from Descartes to Hegel, psychological
empiricism, and positivism as well, all these nuances of Western tradition
reveal as their ‘secret and hidden ground’ the ‘anti-Christian determined
understanding of being’. This even applies to Kant, even though something new is
emerging here: a turn that refers directly back to Plato and to the starting
point of the theory of ideas as transformed in the Western world age.
For Kant, whose philosophy
culminates not in his transcendentalism but in that ‘metaphysics of experience’
which in the light of the critique of practical reason proves to be ‘man’s
experience of himself as existence-shaping existence’, has, in an attitude akin
to that of the Greeks, made the ‘form of existing’ and the primal phenomenon of
limit, of ‘being-measure’, into a problem: in the
mundus intelligibilis, the noumenal world, he
recognized the reference to totality of the sensory world; both worlds stand in
a ‘founding coherence’, and the second is ‘included’ by the first as a ‘specific
mode’ (as the plane is by space). Of course, this Kantian turn does not lie so
openly on the surface that it can be found without a special interpretation.
Kant, so understood, has become effective
neither in idealism nor in neo-Kantian epistemology. In general, the politically
existential commitment of the new philosophy, which seeks to establish the idea
of the new Reich on the basis of the driving forces of the National Socialist
revolution, can be derived neither from the available ‘philosophies of
existence’ nor from the mere demand that philosophy and science must become
‘political’. Was liberal, materialistic science unpolitical? Did not
humanitarian cosmopolitanism contain the concept of the political to the
‘highest degree’? Yes, does not Christianity, in and with the transformation of
Plato’s Politeia into the Civitas Dei, the City of God, precisely accomplish
that momentous ‘Christian-theological revaluation of the Greek concept of
existence’ as something political?
It would therefore be necessary to
show wherein the difference
of the new political philosophy also conceptually consists from the political
conceptions of the ‘Western world age’. Two aspects are at any rate
characteristic for this: The genuine community of a
people, for which we struggle and want to realize,
in ‘every moment of its existence is faced with the question of being or chaos’.
This actual ‘question of existence’ is exempt for the divine state based on
promise and grace. And likewise it is exempt from that actual ‘care’ for the
‘future’ which Heyse immediately translates into the attitude of brave
resolution. The ‘Reich’ is in constant crisis of decision. This crisis has
nothing to do with existential anxiety. But it also knows no ‘priority of the
future’ and calls for no eschatology, it is the expression of a political
activism which in no way devalues the idea into an ‘ideology’ but grasps it as
Heyse grasped it from the beginning: as totality, as the principle of order of
our existence.
References
Lehmann, G.
(1943). Die Deutsche Philosophie Der Gegenwart.
Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag.
