Neues Europa: Political Philosophers in Germany, 1943

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.

Tuesday, 17 December 2024

Political Philosophers in Germany, 1943

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