Nazi Philosophers: Plato, Fichte, Nietzsche, Heidegger

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor. In April, the new Nazi government began dismissing Jewish professors from their university positions, including at least twenty German philosophy professors. On May 1, Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in a public ceremony.

On May 4, Heidegger at Freiburg University began his first lecture for his course on "The Basic Problems of Philosophy." He said that German students had a new purpose:

"It is determined to find discipline and education, to make itself ready and strong for a political and spiritual leadership conferred on it in behalf of coming generations. The question is whether or not we want to create a spiritual world. If we cannot do so, some kind of savagery or other will come over us and we will reach an end as a historical people."

On May 27, Heidegger was inaugurated as rector of Freiburg University in a ceremony with Nazi flags and many Nazi authorities in attendance. In his inaugural rectoral address, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," Heidegger spoke of the need for philosophy to exercise "spiritual leadership" in the present world-historical crisis, so that Germany could fulfil its historical mission as grounded in a new order of being. He concluded by quoting from Plato's Republic.

After his speech, the students pledged their loyalty to Hitler as the leader of the nation. All those present sang the "Horst-Wessel Lied," the anthem of the Nazi Party, as they raised their arms in the Nazi salute, and then they concluded with repeated shouts of "Seig Heil!"

Heidegger never renounced his Nazism or apologized for his active support of the Nazi Party. Even after the war, he continued to affirm the "inner truth and greatness of the movement." That such a prominent philosopher--perhaps even the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century--was a Nazi has created an emotional debate over what this might mean. Recently, a new book by Emmanuel Faye has renewed this debate, because he argues that Heidegger's philosophic ideas continue to promote Nazi-like thinking today. An recent article favorable to the book in The Chronicle of Higher Education stirred anger from Heidegger's philosophic defenders.

There are some big questions here about the relationship between philosophy and politics. Does the support of Nazism by German philosophers show the dangerous tendency of philosophers to support tyranny? If so, what traditions of philosophy are most prone to such mistakes?

Critics of Darwinian science often put the blame for Nazism on the influence of Social Darwinism. But this support for the Nazis among the German philosophers suggests that explaining Nazism as Social Darwinism can't be the whole story. Most of these Nazi philosophers were actually opponents of Darwinian science, because they feared that it promoted a morally corrupting scientific materialism. Against the materialism of modern science, they argued for a metaphysical idealism, which is evident in their interpretations of Nazi ideology.

Hermann Schwarz declared: "The German people have become what the Greeks once were, the human nation to whom the meaning of the universe is linked." Nicolai Hartmann said that Plato was right that "all value is eternal and all meaning eternal meaning." Bruno Bauch agreed with Plato's attack on sophistic relativism and affirmation of "objective values" as set by the eternal Idea of the Good.

For me, this suggests that the evils of Nazism flowed from a metaphysical tradition of idealist utopian philosophy that stretches from Plato to Fichte to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

It's hard to see this, however, if one concentrates just on Heidegger, and fails to see how Heidegger was part of a larger philosophical movement in German history. The controversy over Heidegger's Nazism and the possibility that Nazi ideology was particularly rooted in Heidegger's ideas is misconceived insofar as it ignores the historical circumstances of German philosophy that shaped Heidegger. That broader intellectual history is well studied in Hans Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Harvard University Press, 1993).

Sluga shows that most of the prominent German philosophers who stayed in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power publicly supported Hitler and Nazi ideology. 30 German philosophers joined the Nazi Party in 1933. By 1940, almost half of Germany's academic philosophers were Nazis. But since we have forgotten that history, we give too much significance to Heidegger's Nazism as if it were an isolated case. Sluga's history shows that in fact the many German philosophers who became Nazis manifested a wide range of often conflicting philosophical positions. The common assumption that the major philosophical position supporting Nazism was some kind of moral relativism (such as Nietzschean subjective value relativism) is not correct. Many, if not most, of the Nazi philosophers--for example, Nicolai Hartmann, Bruno Bauch, Hans Heyse, Hermann Schwarz and many others in the German Philosophical Society--were Kantian idealists who assumed a metaphysical order of objective eternal values, and who argued that it was the destiny of the German nation to be rooted in that eternal order of value.

This Kantian philosophical idealism of German nationalism as appealing to eternal values goes back to the founding statement of German nationalism--Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation of 1807. Fichte saw Napoleon's conquest of Germany as creating a world-historical crisis in which the metaphysical destiny of Germany to save humanity could be fulfilled only through extraordinary spiritual leadership that ground German life in an eternal order of values. He developed these four themes--crisis, nation, leadership, and order--in the context of his Kantian idealism. Sluga shows that Heidegger's Rectoral Address and all of the other writing of the Nazi philosophers turn on these same four themes.

The alliance of the German philosophers with Nazism manifests the danger in philosophers becoming corrupted by political power, a danger that goes back to Plato and his Republic in his attempt to ground political order in a metaphysical order of cosmic morality. In asserting the need for philosophers to assume "spiritual leadership" in Nazi Germany, Heidegger and the other Nazi philosophers explicitly invoked the teaching of Plato's Republic. Sluga observes: "For the Nazi philosophers, Plato became the most authoritative political thinker and the Republic the most widely read work on political theory" (175).

Heidegger told Karl Jaspers that he wanted to "lead the Leader." He even requested a meeting with Hitler himself. But Hitler was not interested, and they never met.

In Heidegger's writing, all four of the Fichtean concepts--crisis, nation, leadership, and order--assume a transcendental metaphysics, because he sees a "spiritual" meaning in the crisis, in the mission of Germany, in the leadership required, and in the fundamental order that is needed. By speaking of his "spiritual leadership" (geistige Fuhrung), Heidegger appealed to the German idealist tradition for which "spirit" (Geist) was a central theme. So although Heidegger's existential ontology was counter to the German idealist tradition, his metaphysical German nationalism evoked the idealist ideas going back to Fichte.

In the lectures of 1935 that were later published as his Introduction to Metaphysics (Doubleday Anchor, 1961), Heidegger identified Germany as "the most metaphysical of nations" that must move itself and the whole history of the West "into the primordial realm of the powers of being" (31-32) by asking "the fundamental question of metaphysics" as to the meaning of Being (35). In this way, Germany would become the most spiritual of all nations: "For all true power and beauty of the body, all sureness and boldness in combat, all authenticity and inventiveness of the understanding, are grounded in the spirit and rise or fall only through the power or impotence of the spirit. The spirit is the sustaining, dominating principle, the first and the last" (39).

According to Fichte's transcendental rationalism, the history of humanity was the history of reason. In that rational history, Germany was destined to promote true philosophy that would grasp "the eternal archetype of all spiritual life" and thus secure "the education of the perfect man" in the "perfect state." Germany would thus educate its students in the "moral world order." Heidegger and the other Nazi philosophers saw Nazism as fulfilling this Fichtean vision of the metaphysical destiny of Germany.

In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche continued the metaphysical nationalism of Fichte. The Nazis often cited this book. In his later writings, however, Nietzsche turned against the transcendental metaphysics of Fichte and Kant. But even so, I would say, the later Nietzsche followed the argument of F. A. Lange's History of Materialism in striving to overcome the degrading effects of scientific materialism through "the standpoint of the ideal" by leading Europe towards a new redemptive religion of Dionysus. He thus turned away from the anti-metaphysical Darwinism of his middle writings--Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and the first four books of The Gay Science--to return in his later writings to the religious longings and metaphysical redemption that he had sought in his youth.

So, despite the conflicts among the Nazi philosophers--between the conservative philosophy of Kantian idealism and the radical philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger--they all took for granted the metaphysical German nationalism of Fichte, which they saw as traceable back to the Greek philosophers, and particularly the political metaphysics of Plato's Republic.

The mistake of the Nazi philosophers was Plato's mistake--the mistake of thinking that political order can be grounded in an eternal metaphysical order as discovered by philosophers who then exercise spiritual leadership in politics.

To avoid this mistake, philosophers need to see that philosophy is primarily an exercise in questioning the order of nature and human existence with no hope of finding any absolute metaphysical answers, and therefore the moral and political order of human life must be grounded in ordinary human experience--human desires and needs--rather than any eternal cosmic order. The Socratic life itself--the life of continual questioning--suggests that Socrates was a philosophic skeptic rather than a Platonic idealist.

Nietzsche embraced this Socratic skepticism in his middle writings by denying any claim to metaphysical knowledge and embracing Darwinian evolution as a science of "humble truths." In this Darwinian period of Nietzsche's writing, he saw the philosopher as a "free spirit" or "free thinker" who devotes himself to ceaseless questioning and lives content with tentative answers. This led him to warn against transcendental longings and tyrannical power sanctioned by delusional appeals to metaphysical order. He endorsed liberal democracy as the best regime for such a free spirited philosopher and scientist, because such a regime would leave such people free to think and question.

Oddly enough, this conception of philosophy as perpetual questioning was apparently embraced by Heidegger, but then he tried to argue that the order of primordial questioning of Being could become the metaphysical ground of German political order. He didn't see that philosophy as questioning would throw into doubt any political claim to metaphysical order.

Understanding philosophy as skeptical questioning should have led Heidegger back to the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human, which would have led him away from the illusory metaphysical certainty of German nationalism, and which would have led him to see that Socratic philosophy is most secure in a liberal democratic regime. Instead, Heidegger asserted that Germany was the metaphysical center of Europe, with America at one end and Russia at the other, and "from a metaphysical point of view," American democracy and Russian Marxism were the same.

We might see here that Leo Strauss corrected Heidegger in seeing the danger of tyranny in Platonic political metaphysics, affirming Socratic philosophy as perpetual questioning without metaphysical certainty, and seeing that liberal democracy might provide the best conditions for such Socratic philosophizing.

But as far as I know, Strauss never recognized how this line of thought leads back to Nietzsche's middle writings as shaped by Nietzsche's insight into how a Darwinian science of evolutionary history supports Socratic philosophic skepticism.

Some of these points about Plato, Nietzsche, and Darwin have been elaborated in previous posts found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here, and here.

Atheistic Religiosity in Kantian Conservatism: Roger Scruton on Wagner's "Ring" Cycle

Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries

Tomorrow, I will see the new production of Richard Wagner's Die Walkure at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.  This is the second of the four operas in Wagner's Ring cycle.  In the spring of 2020, Lyric will have performances of all four of the operas in one week, so that audiences can sit through all 17 hours of the cycle over a few days, as Wagner originally intended.

As I have indicated in my previous posts on Wagner (here, here, here, and here), I regard Die Meistersinger as his best opera, because it shows how a free society with only a limited "night-watchman state" can foster the full range of human virtue, from the low to the high, including the virtuous cultural activities of art, science, and philosophy, and thus it provides no support for Hitler's Nazi statism.  By contrast, Wagner's Ring cycle manifests the Romantic conception of art as appealing to the Dionysian emotions of an atheistic religiosity, which was so attractive to Hitler and the Nazis.

It is this Wagnerian art of atheistic religiosity that appeals to conservative philosophers like Roger Scruton, as is evident in his book The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" (Allen Lane, 2016).  Scruton is one of the preeminent theorists of political conservatism; and like many conservatives in Great Britain and the United States, he thinks a religious attitude is essential for a healthy moral order, and therefore that traditional religious experience needs to be defended against a Darwinian science that claims to explain the place of human beings in the natural world without any reference to a transcendent realm beyond nature.  And yet--again like many other conservatives--Scruton does not believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion.  He wants to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines.  We know that God is dead, but we also know that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption.  That's the truth that Scruton sees in Wagner's Ring cycle.

Scruton traces that truth back to Kant and to the German philosophers in the nineteenth century whose thinking was shaped by Kant's idealism: "Kant begat Fichte, who begat Hegel who begat Feuerbach; and Feuerbach begat both Wagner and Marx" (16).

I cannot embrace the atheistic religiosity of Kant, Wagner, and Scruton, because this line of thinking is incoherent self-deception, and because it led to the Nazi philosophers of the 1930s.  (I have written a post on the Kantian idealism of the Nazi philosophers.)

Scruton thinks that Wagner saw the "bleak truth" that "we are here on earth without an explanation and that if there is meaning, we ourselves must supply it" (36).  "The core religious phenomenon, Wagner believed, is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. . . . religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols.  Religion conceals its legacy of truth within a doctrine.  Art reveals that truth through symbols" (40).  In other words, "Wagner sees his art as expressing and completing our religious emotions.  Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics" (41).  Religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology (56).

Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning.  And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption.  For Scruton, this is clearest in two parts of the Ring.  First, in Act 3 of Die Walkure, which begins with the famous ride of the Valkyries.  In the previous act, Siegmund has been killed, and Brunnhilde has taken his wife Sieglinde onto the saddle of her horse to save her from Wotan.  Sieglinde sees no reason to live.  But Brunnhilde tells her that she must live to save the child--the future hero Siegfried--whom she carries in her womb.  The music introduces the motif of Siegfried as hero followed by a passionate climax with the motif of Sieglinde's blessing, which is often called the "redemption motif."  This motif is not heard again until we hear it at the very end of the cycle as the last music we hear at the end of Gotterdammerung ("The Twilight of the Gods").  So, the meaning of the whole Ring cycle, it seems, is the artfully aroused emotion of redemption.

I must say that when my wife and I saw the complete Ring cycle at the Lyric Opera in April of 2005--four operas over six days--the closing music did leave us with an ecstatic feeling that might be identified as redemption.  (Well, okay, we were also feeling exhausted relief that we had finally made it through the 17 hours of Wagnerian opera!)

But then, as Scruton admits, anyone who wonders about what this really means must ask: redemption from what, to what, by whom?  The Christian will answer: redemption from our sinful human condition, to an eternal life of bliss with God, by the grace bestowed on us by Jesus Christ.  C. S. Lewis conveyed this thought in his account of his early life in Surprised by Joy.  He remembered the first time he saw a book with the title Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods with illustrations of Wagner's Ring cycle.  He became totally taken over by Wagner and Norse mythology.  He tried to write a heroic poem on the Wagnerian version of the Nibelung story.  Here he felt what he called "the stab of Joy" that would later be fulfilled in his conversion to Christianity.  Wagner's Ring cycle was a pointer to something else--to the Joy that only Christians can know.

But since Wagner and Scruton deny the truth of these Christian doctrines, this kind of redemption is not possible for them.  The only redemption that can come through Wagner's operas is the artistically induced feeling of redemption, which does not require any belief in the literal truth of Christian redemption.

I think Nietzsche was right--during the middle period of his writing career, when he freed himself from his Dionysian enchantment with Wagner--in saying that this is all a magician's trick that gives us the fake emotions of a fake redemption.  It's entertainment for atheists who want religious feelings without religious doctrines.

Scruton restates Nietzsche's objections to Wagner (296-99).  But, oddly, Scruton doesn't even attempt to refute those objections.  His only response to Nietzsche is to point out that in his last years Nietzsche revived the love for Wagner that he had had earlier in his life.  "Clearly then, his attacks on Wagner did not cure him of the enchantment, and we are left wondering how sincerely he meant them" (299).  Scruton then passes on without any further thought about what this reveals about Nietzsche's struggle with Wagner's atheistic religiosity.

In many posts (some of which can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here ), I have argued that Lou Salome (the woman who turned down Nietzsche's proposal of marriage) understood Nietzsche better than all of the other commentators on Nietzsche.  (I have also written about this in my Nietzsche chapter in Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker.) 

Salome saw that Nietzsche was deeply moved by religious longings that made Wagner's art appealing to him, that he escaped from this only in the middle period of his writing (particularly in Human, All Too Human), when he adopted a scientific view of the world, which was the most intellectually defensible position that he ever took, but then in his later writings, he returned to the religious longings that were expressed in his attempt to create a new Dionysian religion. 

In his middle period, Nietzsche understood how the need for redemption had become so strong for human beings that even those who believe themselves to be atheists are moved by the religious desire to find some transcendent satisfaction through art.  Those who might otherwise be considered atheistic free spirits enjoy music like Wagner's operas that stirs religious feelings without requiring belief in religious doctrines.  Romantic art in general shows "the magic of religious feeling" as the modern artist appeals to those who have given up religious beliefs but who still yearn for religious ecstasy through art.  (In his essay "Nietzsche on Wagner," Scruton jumps from Nietzsche's early writings to his later writings, while passing over in silence Nietzsche's middle writings.)

In his middle period, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian science of evolution according to which "everything has evolved."  By Nietzsche's Darwinian account, morality does not elevate human beings beyond the natural world, because human morality arises as a natural development of animal nature.  There is no need for a redemptive transcendence of nature to give meaning to human life, because life, even in its mortality and contingency, is inherently good in its intrinsic purposefulness without any need for cosmic purposefulness.  (I have suggested that this thought is conveyed in Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning": "Death is the mother of beauty.")

Scruton occasionally comes close to saying something like this, but then he insists on the need for redemption in a way that renders his thought incoherent.  Explaining Wagner's operatic art, he observes:

". . . it takes the turning points of human life and frames them as religious sacrifices--it is a 'making sacred' of those moments when we must pay the full cost of being what we are.  It is not absurd to give to these moments the name that Wagner clung to when attempting to summarize their power--Erlosung, or redemption.  He did not mean that word in its Christian sense, as invoking the promise and the purchase of a better life to come.  He meant it as a description of the religious rite itself, and hence of the moment of transcendence on the tragic stage: the moment when life is shown to be intrinsically worthwhile, exactly when it is engulfed by the ambient nothingness" (302).

But if we know that life is "intrinsically worthwhile," so that we have no need for "the promise and the purchase of a better life to come," then it makes no sense to say that life's worth depends on transcendence, if only the fake transcendence of operatic emotion.  Moreover, it's hard to see how such fake transcendence works if we know it's fake.

I suppose that Scruton would say that it's not completely fake, because the longing for transcendence in human nature is a real phenomenon of human psychology.  That's his claim in his new book On Human Nature, which I will take up in my next post.

In a previous post, I have written about Matt Ridley's The Evolution of Everything, which is in a way a modern exploration of the implications of Nietzsche's thought that "everything has evolved."

Hitler's Philosophers: Reductio ad Hitlerum?

In his book on Leo Strauss, Will Altman points out that Strauss coined the phrase reductio ad Hitlerum.  In Natural Right and History, Strauss remarked: "we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum.  A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler" (42-43).

We might wonder, as Altman suggests, why Strauss didn't identify this fallacy as a noble fallacy.  Surely, it's good that our disgust with Hitler and the Nazis is so deep that we think a view is refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.

But when we do this, we have to identify those views that were most directly responsible for the evils of Hitler's regime, and we have to understand the history of those views and their adoption by Hitler.  A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been professed in a perversely distorted form by Hitler.

I thought about that while reading Yvonne Sherratt's new book Hitler's Philosophers (Yale University Press).  She sets out to tell "the story of Hitler's philosophers," and thus "the story of how philosophy was implicated in genocide" (xvi-xvii).  Contrary to what she asserts, she is not the first person to tell this story, as should be clear by the many citations in her notes to other books on the history of philosophers connected to Hitler.  But she is the first person to tell this story as a "docudrama" in a "narrative style," which doesn't work for her, because she has little skill for narrative writing.

She claims that this is "a work of non-fiction, carefully  researched, based upon archival material, letters, photographs, paintings, verbal reports and descriptions, which have all been meticulously referenced" (xx).  In fact, her research is remarkably sloppy.  For example, she repeatedly claims that Hitler "came to regard himself as the 'philosopher Fuhrer'" or "philosopher leader" (xviii, 16, 31, 35, 63, 127).  If Hitler actually called himself the "philosopher Fuhrer," as she implies, that would be something worth knowing.  But if you look for a citation for this claim, you will find only one reference (16, 267, n. 41) to Ian Kershaw's Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, page 250.  If you then check Kershaw's book, you won't see any indication that Hitler ever called himself the "philosopher Fuhrer," although Kershaw does quote Hitler as saying: "the combination of theoretician, organizer, and leader in one person is the rarest thing that can be found on this earth; this combination makes the great man" (252). 

Here Kershaw is quoting from Mein Kampf (trans. Ralph Manheim, 1943, pp. 580-81).  In Mein Kampf, Hitler identifies the "theoretician" as the man who grasps the "ideas" that constitute the "worldview" (Weltanschauung) necessary for a political party like National Socialism that will bring a total cultural transformation (pp. 452-62).  As an example of such leadership in cultural transformation, he mentions the triumph of Christianity over paganism as "the first spiritual terror," and he suggests that National Socialism will overturn that Christian terror with a new spiritual terror to create a new cultural regime (pp. 454-55).  He also mentions Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, and Richard Wagner as examples of "great reformers" of culture (p. 213).

Sherratt claims that Martin Heidegger was identified as "Hitler's Superman" (104-107).  But she never provides any citation with evidence that Heidegger or anyone else identified him as "Hitler's Superman."  It is true, however, that Heidegger in his Rectoral Address at the University of Freiburg did speak of his "spiritual/intellectual leadership" (geistige Fuhrung) over Germany.  And he told Karl Jaspers that he wanted to "lead the Leader."  In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the need for geistige Fuhrung (p. 457); and so Heidegger could have picked up this phrase from Hitler's book.

Despite the sloppiness of her research, Sherratt does provide a comprehensive history of the connections between Hitler and German philosophy.  First, she surveys Hitler's references to German philosophers like Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.  Then she claims to find in those philosophers evidence that Hitler's reading of them was valid, because one can see in them many of the elements of Hitler's Nazism--anti-Semitism, German nationalism, militarism, racism, and eugenics.  She then surveys the history of those many philosophers in Germany who collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis--Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and many others. 

She also provides a history of Hitler's philosophical opponents who were forced to leave Germany--particularly, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt.  And she tells the remarkable story of Kurt Huber and the White Rose resistance movement.  As a professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, Huber became the only academic philosopher in Germany to resist Nazism.  He joined with a group of his students at the University--led by Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans Scholl--who wrote and distributed a series of leaflets in 1942-1943 calling for nonviolent resistance to the Nazi regime.  They were arrested and convicted of treason.  Some of them--including Huber--were executed by beheading.  (The texts of their leaflets can be found online.)

Finally, Sherratt surveys the history of how most of the Nazi philosophers managed to avoid any severe punishment after the war and to even resume their academic careers in Germany.  Heidegger was especially despicable in lying about his active support of the Nazis, and even claiming that he supported the White Rose resistance, so that he could return to the University of Freiburg and eventually regain his high position, even to the point of being praised by some academic philosophers as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.

This history is helpful to anyone who wants to make an intellectual assessment of the connection between philosophy and the evils of Nazism.  But Sherratt's own intellectual assessment of the issues raised by this history is shallow and confused.  For example, she points to Kant's anti-Semitism as showing that Hitler was correct to identify him as a forerunner to Nazism (36-41).  But then she notes that Huber read Kant very differently from how Hitler read him: "Kant, in fact, was one of Huber's main weapons in his intellectual resistance to Nazism, and Huber lectured on him as often as he could" (215).  She makes no attempt to decide whether Huber's reading of Kant was better than Hitler's.

Moreover, she never tries to identify clearly the philosophical mistake that leads philosophers like Heidegger to support evil tyranny like that of the Nazis.  She might have done this if she had carefully read Nietzsche.  As is usually the case for scholars looking at the connection between Nietzsche and Nazism, she skims over some ideas in Nietzsche's early and late writings, while giving his middle period only one sentence: "Nietzsche explored many ideas throughout his life including, in his middle period, rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy" (48).

If she had actually read Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, Sherratt might have noticed that Nietzsche identified there the philosophical mistake that can lead philosophers to support tyranny.  She might also have noticed that it was Nietzsche's adoption of Darwinian evolutionary science that allowed him to see that philosophical mistake.

Evolutionary science allowed Nietzsche to see that social order arises best as a largely spontaneous order of human cultural evolution that does not require any intelligently designed metaphysical order enforced by state coercion.  This leads Nietzsche to embrace the liberal separation of culture and the state, so that the purpose of the state is only to protect individuals from one another, and then cultural life is a realm for freedom of thought and action. 

By contrast, Nietzsche saw, philosophers like Plato and Heidegger who want the state to execute their "spiritual leadership" in enforcing their vision of metaphysical order become "tyrants of the spirit," and consequently they are easily seduced by tyrants like Hitler.  (See Human, All Too Human, 1-9, 235, 261, 438-41, 465, 472, 474.)

Unfortunately, Nietzsche moved away from the Darwinian aristocratic liberalism of his middle period to the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of his later writings.  And it was the latter that inspired Hitler and the Nazis.

Some of these points are elaborated in other posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Was Leo Strauss the German Stranger?

In my graduate seminar on Leo Strauss, we are now reading William Altman's The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lexington Books, 2011).  Our first discussion of this book was instructive.  All of our discussions in this class have been good, for which I am grateful to the students--David Bahr, Nick Blazer, Anthony Clarke, John Grove, Todd Noelle, Kate Paton, Jesse Peck, and Mike Tolhurst.

Altman's book is the most meticulous, rigorous, and stimulating work on Strauss that I have ever seen.  More than that, it's also an insightful study of the "crisis of liberalism" in the twentieth century, considered against the background of the whole history of political philosophy from Plato to the present.  The depth of Altman's thinking becomes even more impressive when one reads his other book that has just been published--Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the "Republic" (Lexington Books, 2012).

Since I am just beginning to study Altman's work, I haven't yet made up my mind about his arguments.  But I will begin--in this and in some subsequent posts--to raise some questions coming out of my seminar.

Altman's bold claim is that Leo Strauss was a Jewish Nazi. 

He calls Strauss "the German Stranger," because he compares Strauss to the Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws.  The teaching of the Athenian Stranger corresponds to the teaching of Strauss.  And just as the Athenian Stranger left Athens for Crete, where he sought to impose an anti-democratic regime of repression supported by an atheistic religion that denied Plato's teaching of dualism in the Republic, Strauss left Weimar and eventually settled in the United States, where he sought to subvert liberal democracy while secretly promoting the National Socialist atheism of those like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.  Strauss pretended to do this as a Platonist, but Strauss's Plato was not a Platonist at all.  Strauss's Plato was an atheist who denied the Theory of the Ideas as based on the dualistic separation of Being and Becoming as belonging to two worlds.  Strauss's Plato was not the true Plato, because he was actually the Athenian Stranger of the Laws.  Plato's Laws was Plato's prediction of Strauss and his Nazi program for attacking liberal democracy.

Altman's critique of Strauss depends fundamentally on his disagreement with Strauss's interpretation of Plato.  On the one hand, Altman defends the traditional interpretation of Plato as a Platonist--as one who defended a metaphysical dualism of two worlds that is compatible with Judeo-Christian dualism, and thus he rejects Strauss's reading of Plato as an atheistic monist who denied the eternal, transcendent reality of the Ideas.  On the other hand, Altman disputes the traditional interpretation of Plato as a firm opponent of democracy, because Altman sees a defense of something close to liberal democracy in the Republic, particularly in Book 8 (557c-62e).

Altman claims that under the influence of those like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt, Strauss turned against liberal democracy in favor of National Socialism, but he disguised his position as a "return to the ancients," and particularly a return to Plato, which allowed him to attack liberal democracy as a denial of ancient wisdom.

Altman's book is massive--591 pages in small print.  Our first seminar discussion was limited to the Introduction (1-28) and the chapters connecting Strauss to Heidegger (143-94) and to Schmitt (195-234).  Next week, our readings will go further into the book.  As I have indicated, a fully adequate study of Altman's arguments probably needs to include his book on Plato.

At this point, I will only offer a few scattered comments and questions, some of which come from my students.

(1)  My students are impressed by Altman's research and argumentation.  But they are not convinced that the evidence supports Altman's claim that Strauss was actually a Nazi.  My impression is that most of them are willing to concede that Strauss in the 1920s and 1930s flirted with fascist ideas.  For example, Strauss's letter to Karl Lowith of May 19, 1933, appealing to "right-wing principles . . . fascistic, authoritarian, imperial principles," provides such clear evidence for this that many Straussians now admit that Strauss was being seduced by fascist ideas at this time.  But my students are not yet persuaded that the evidence surveyed by Altman proves that Strauss was a Nazi from 1933 to the end of his life.

(2)  If Strauss really was a Nazi, how exactly did he expect to carry out his Nazi project?  Altman is not clear about this.  (Peter Minowitz has made this point in "What Was Leo Strauss?," Perspectives on Political Science, 40 (2011): 218-26, which is the first published Straussian response to Altman.)

Altman explains that "Strauss did what no mere Nazi could have done or even dreamed of doing: he boldly brought his anti-liberal project to the United States. . . . he tirelessly promulgated his 'Platonic' critique of liberal democracy in the belly of the whale" (26).  Apparently, Altman sees this as mostly a negative activity of attacking liberal democracy: "I see the German Stranger's project as primarily destructive; it was the theoretical foundation of Liberal Democracy in general that he sought to annihilate, not some new form of totalitarianism that he aimed to erect."  Altman explains: "it is altogether wrong to think that Strauss meditated the rise of National Socialism in his adoptive home: his goal was less ambitious although no less dangerous as a result.  Strauss was patient, far more so than some of his followers have proved to be.  His purpose was simply to take Germany's western enemy out of the picture: to destroy Liberal Democracy's faith in itself.  In this project, he has been remarkably successful.  In the First World War, a single man in a sealed train had eliminated Germany's eastern enemy: Strauss should be understood as the westward-bound 'Lenin of the Right' in the Second" (516).

Where's the evidence that Strauss "has been remarkably successful" in destroying "Liberal Democracy's faith in itself"?  At the very least, wouldn't Altman have to show that Strauss's leading students have been "remarkably successful" in this?  But surely Harry Jaffa and the "West-Coast Straussians" have been defending liberal democracy, and the "Midwest Straussians" like Martin Diamond have suggested that modern Madisonian liberalism might be defended as superior to premodern thought in promoting human excellence.  Is Altman suggesting that only the "East-Coast Straussians" (Bloom, Pangle, and Mansfield) detected Strauss's true teaching about the need to destroy Liberal Democracy?  But if so, shouldn't Altman explain how they have carried out this "remarkably successful" project?

Would Altman say that those Straussians (like Jaffa and Diamond) who have launched vigorous defenses of liberal democracy have been taken in by the exoteric teaching of Strauss, while ignoring the esoteric teaching that attacks liberal democracy?  Even if that were so, wouldn't that indicate that some of Strauss's most influential students did not try to destroy liberal democracy?  But how then can Altman conclude that Strauss has been "remarkably successful" in his Nazi project if so many of his students have not been advancing that project?

(3)  Is Altman suggesting that Karl Popper's argument for Plato as the original source of modern totalitarianism is at least partially true?  After all, Altman seems to say that Plato's Athenian Stranger really was a proto-Nazi.  Altman rightly draws attention to Strauss's identification of the guardians of the law in Plato's Laws as "secret police" (GS, 25; Strauss, AAPL, 89).  Would Altman say, however, that Popper failed to see the implied defense of liberal democracy in the Republic?  And yet Altman never mentions Popper (but see his Plato, 352-53).

(4)  Altman's reading of Plato's Republic as supporting democracy depends heavily on noting the parallel between the description of democracy in the Republic and Hesiod's Age of Heroes (WA, Plato, 348-58).  Altman picked up this point from Strauss, although Altman says "he doesn't draw the proper conclusions from the parallel he discovered" (294).  But doesn't this at least hint at a Straussian reading of Plato as supporting democracy?  After all, Altman praises Arlene Saxonhouse for developing this idea of Platonic democracy, and she can be identified as leaning towards Straussianism.

(5) Altman writes: "Strauss's discovery that Democracy corresponds to Hesiod's Age of Heroes is one of several great contributions he made to Platonic studies.  Weimar proves to be the Age of Heroes in Germany's history, and had there been any actual German Platonists in the early 1930s, they would have combated Thrasymachus amidst the shadows of the Cave" (13).  But isn't it true that some of the German philosophers who joined the Nazi Party were Kantians who embraced a Platonic conception of eternal values as conforming to the Idea of the Good?  I have written about this in a previous post.

I will have more to say about Altman's book in future posts, which will include a post on historicism and Darwinism.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Lou Salome: The Movie

"Lou Andreas Salome: The Audacity To Be Free" is a good movie about the life of Lou Salome (1861-1937)--the Russian philosopher, novelist, essayist, and psychoanalyst, who became a seductive muse for Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Ree, Rainer Rilke, and Sigmund Freud.  This is a German movie released in Germany in 2016 and then released this year in North America with English subtitles.  It can now be found at Amazon.

Cordula Kablitz-Post is the director of the movie and the co-author of the screenplay.  The movie shows her intelligent study of Lou's life and writings.  Four different actresses play Lou at four periods of her life.

Here is the trailer.

I have written about Nietzsche being "under Lou Salome's whip" (here and here).  She wrote the first--and perhaps most insightful--book on Nietzsche.  She saw that Nietzsche's early and late writings show his struggle with his religious longings, which he overcame only for a time in his middle writings (such as Human, All Too Human), where he showed his devotion to a philosophic and Darwinian science.  Like me, Lou thought that Nietzsche's middle writings were his best.

Nietzsche's struggle with God and with the possible consequences of the death of God is suggested in one scene (about 58 minutes into the movie), where Salome and Nietzsche are playfully swimming in a river.  As they joke about death and drowning, Lou speaks about her loss of faith in God as a young girl. Then Nietzsche says: "Living without faith takes a lot of energy. Perhaps it's even impossible. And it will be our undoing someday."

The meaning of "our undoing" from our loss of faith is suggested by the coming of Nazism to Germany in 1933.  Lou is in poor health in that year in Germany--she will die in 1937--and she is dictating her memoir to a young admirer--Ernst Pfeiffer, who will edit her memoir for publication in 1951.

We see how Nietzsche's sister--Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche--helped to break up Lou's friendship with Nietzsche.  We also hear about Elisabeth's management of the Nietzsche Archives to turn Nietzsche into the Nazi Philosopher and her scorn for Lou, who fears Nazi persecution.

In this way, the movie intimates the question of whether Nietzsche's death of God and Lou's philosophic freedom from faith lead somehow to the Nazi catastrophe.

I have written about the "Nazi philosophers" here, here., and here.

I haven't yet figured out how all of this is related to another theme of the film: the complexity of human eroticism at many levels--sexual, intellectual, and religious.  I might need to study some of Lou's other writing, such as the first two chapters of her memoir--entitled "The God Experience" and "The Experience of Love."

Do Strauss's Religious Longings Explain His Silence about Nietzsche's Darwinian Liberalism?

In reading Leo Strauss's "Three Waves of Modernity," I am reminded of my blog posts a few years ago on Strauss's religious longings, and on how those religious longings explain Strauss's attraction to Nietzsche's early and later writings, as opposed to the middle writings that show Nietzsche's embrace of Darwinian  evolutionary science.

In "Three Waves of Modernity," Strauss says that Nietzsche's critique of modern rationalism created the "third wave" of modernity that was "the deepest reason for the crisis of liberal democracy," and "the political implication of the third wave proved to be fascism" (98).

Remarkably, Strauss says nothing--neither here nor anywhere else, as far as I know--about Nietzsche's moderate support for liberal democracy in his middle writings, particularly Human, All Too Human.  This Nietzschean liberalism is a Darwinian liberalism, because in this book--and also in Dawn and the first four books of The Gay Science--Nietzsche writes as a Socratic "free spirit" who accepts a Darwinian science based on the general claim that "man has evolved," because "everything has evolved," and thus "there are no eternal facts" (HATH, sec. 2).

Strauss rejects this Darwinian Nietzsche, because Strauss prefers the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil who affirmed "the eternal basic text of homo natura" (sec. 230).  In his article on Beyond Good and Evil, Strauss stresses the importance of Nietzsche's eternalizing of human nature, his respect for the "religious instinct," and his atheistic religiosity.  Like the Nietzsche of the early and later writings, Strauss was moved by a religious longing for eternity that could not accept the Darwinian "deadly truth" that human nature is enduring but not eternal.

My elaboration of these points can be found here, here, here, and here.

Nietzsche's Darwinian liberalism would resolve the "crisis of liberal democracy" by affirming that liberalism can be grounded in evolved human nature rather than a cosmic teleology of eternal order.

What would Nietzsche's Darwinian liberal democracy look like?  Although Nietzsche is critical of modern democracy in much of his writing, Human, All Too Human shows a moderate acceptance of liberal democratic politics and institutions, while strongly rejecting socialism.  (Here I am drawing some language from my chapter on Nietzsche in Political Questions.)  He sees that in modern Europe all political parties must appeal to popular opinions because of the triumph of democracy.  He accepts the political rule of the majority of the people as long as the few "free spirits" are given their freedom to keep out of politics generally, while occasionally being allowed to speak out about public issues.

Philosophers such as Plato were enemies of democracy, Nietzsche observes, because believing they possessed absolute truth, they wanted to rule over others.  There were "tyrants of the spirit."  But free-spirited philosophers pursue scientific knowledge in a skeptical spirit.  "Free spirits" want to be free to investigate everything, but they have no desire to become tyrants.  They are "oligarchs of the spirit" (sec. 261).  "Free spirits" can live in a modern democracy, because they ask only for the freedom of speech and thought that liberal democracy can provide.

Previously, Nietzsche observes, the state claimed a transcendent religious authority to rule absolutely over the life of a people.  Now, in modern democratic states, the state has no such transcendent authority, because the government is merely an instrument of popular will (sec. 472).  Religion is a purely private matter, pursued in civil society as distinguished from the state, and therefore there is a great diversity of religious sects.

The popular distrust of central authority in a liberal democracy leads to a weakening of the state.  Increasingly, the functions of government are given over to private contractors.  This decline in the state gives "free spirits" a freedom that they would not have under a centralized illiberal state.

While Nietzsche welcomes the freedom provided by modern liberal democracy, he fears the tyranny to come from modern socialism.  Modern socialism will require "the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed" (sec. 473).  Since socialists will not be able to use traditional religious authority to support the state, they can only rule for short periods "by means of the most extreme terrorism."  Nietzsche foresees that this socialist rule by terror will only reinforce the lesson that all accumulations of state power are dangerous, and thus the reaction against socialist state terror will promote the idea of minimizing the power of the state.  We need democratic institutions, Nietzsche concludes, to combat the "lust for tyranny" (WS, sec. 289).

Thus did Nietzsche predict the rise and decline of socialist despotism in the twentieth century--both Marxist socialism and National Socialism--and the eventual revival of liberal democracy and limited government.

Nietzsche's political thinking in Human, All Too Human contradicts those German National Socialists who claimed that he was their ideological founder.  Not only does he argue in favor of individual freedom and against centralized state power and rule by terror, he also rejects nationalism as an artificial obstacle to the political and cultural unification of Europe to form "a mixed European race" that will include the Jews, whom he praises for their contributions to European culture (sec. 475).  Moreover, Nietzsche ridicules the idea of a "party member" as contrary to free thought.  "He who thinks much is not suited to be a party member:  too soon, he thinks himself through and beyond the party" (sec. 579).

In fact, some of the Nazis recognised that Nietzsche was not friendly to their cause.  Ernst Krieck, a leading Nazi intellectual, remarked: "Apart from the fact that Nietzsche was not a socialist, not a nationalist, and opposed to racial thinking, he could have been a leading National Socialist thinker!"

As long as modern democracy leaves Nietzsche's "free spirits" free to pursue their lives of endless scientific and philosophic inquiry, they are not much interested in political activity.  There is a kind of solitariness that characterizes this Nietzschean life, which is indicated by the last part of Human, All Too Human, entitled "Man Alone with Himself" (secs. 483-638).  The "man of science" is constantly questioning his beliefs, and thus he cannot be a "man of convictions" who is absolutely certain about his beliefs, which means that the scientific man cannot be a political man, because he cannot serve a political cause with unexamined enthusiasm.  Nietzsche's "free spirit" looks a lot like the Socratic philosopher as described by Strauss.

It is true, however, that some of Nietzsche's writing--his early and later writings--stirred the political enthusiasm of Nazis and other political ideologues, who looked to the "will to power" of the "Overman" to bring eternal meaning to human life.

Remarkably, its these same writings that show a spirit of atheistic religiosity that attracted Strauss.

Some of these points are developed further in my previous post on the "Nazi philosophers".

Strauss, Jonas, and Heidegger's Nazism

As I have indicated in my posts on Will Altman's German Stranger, I see his claim that Leo Strauss was a Jewish Nazi as wildly implausible.  And yet, Altman does point out the strange and disturbing refusal of Strauss to be clear and emphatic in his rejection of those like Martin Heidegger who embraced Nazism.  Strauss could have followed the example of his friend Hans Jonas, who joined the British army in World War Two to fight the Nazis, and who publicly expressed after the war his disgust with Heidegger's support of Nazism and his refusal to recant his Nazism for the rest of his life.  Strauss chose not to do this.  Why?

This contrast between Strauss and Jonas can be seen by comparing Strauss's "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," Jonas's "Heidegger and Theology," and Jonas's "Taking Leave of Heidegger" (chapter 11 of his Memoirs).  Both Strauss and Jonas were Jewish students in Germany who came under Heidegger's influence.  Both left Germany in 1933 and ended up teaching in the United States.  Both had to decide how to respond to Heidegger's joining of the Nazi Party in 1933 and what this meant for the relationship between philosophy and Nazi tyranny.

Strauss was remarkably hesitant about saying much about this in public.  His fullest account of Heidegger was in a lecture ("Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism") that was never published in his lifetime.  It was first published in 1989 in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, as edited by Thomas Pangle.  Pangle reports that the lecture seemed to have been delivered sometime in the 1950s, and that the text found in Strauss's papers was a transcript of a tape recording done by students, with some hand-written corrections by Strauss.  Altman suggests that Strauss intentionally refused to publish this during his lifetime for fear that it would reveal too much about his affinity for Heidegger's thought.

Strauss observes:

"All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger."

"The only question of importance, of course is the question whether Heidegger's teaching is true or not.  But the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence--of who is competent to judge.  Perhaps only great thinkers are really competent to judge the thought of great thinkers.  Heidegger made a distinction between philosophers and those for whom philosophy is identical with the history of philosophy.  He made a distinction, in other words, between the thinker and the scholar.  I know that I am only a scholar.  But I know also that most people who call themselves philosophers are mostly, at best, scholars. . . ."

 ". . . A famous psychologist I saw in Europe, an old man, told me that in his view it is not yet possible to form a judgment about the significance as well as the truth of Heidegger's work.  This work changed so radically in its intellectual orientation that a long time will be needed in order to understand with even tolerable adequacy what this work means.  The more I understand what Heidegger is aiming at, the more I see how much escapes me.  The most stupid thing I could do would be to close my eyes or to reject his work."

 "There is a not altogether unrespectable justification for doing so.  Heidegger became a Nazi in 1933.  This was not due to a mere error of judgment on the part of a man who lived on great heights high above the low land of politics.  Everyone who had read his first great book and did not overlook the wood for the trees could see the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger's thought and the Nazis.  What was the practical, that is to say, serious meaning of the contempt for reasonableness and the praise of resoluteness except to encourage that extremist movement?  When Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, he delivered an official speech in which he identified himself with the movement which then swept Germany.  Heidegger had not yet dared to mention that speech in the otherwise complete lists of his writings which appear from time to time on the book jackets of his recent publications.  In 1953 he published a book, Introduction to Metaphysics, consisting of lectures given in 1935, in which he spoke of the greatness and dignity of the National Socialist movement.  In the preface written in 1953 he said that all mistakes had been corrected. . . ." (29-31)

In his use of the first person singular pronoun--"I"--Strauss is emphatic in declaring that he cannot cling to the rational liberal philosophic position since it has been shown to be inadequate.  Only a great thinker could develop a defense of liberalism, but "the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger," who is a Nazi.  While Strauss confesses that as a mere scholar--and not a true philosopher--he might not fully understand Heidegger, it would be stupid for him to reject Heidegger's work.

Moreover, in contrast to many scholars who claimed that Heidegger's Nazism was a mistake in his political judgment that had no connection to his philosophizing, Strauss insists that anyone who read Being and Time carefully could see "the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger's thought and the Nazis."  Strauss thus implies that he saw that kinship from the beginning, and that the philosophizing of the "only great thinker of our time" supports Nazism.  Strauss also notes that even with the changes in Heidegger's thinking after World War Two, Heidegger saw no reason to change his mind about the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.

Jonas agreed with Strauss's assessment of Heidegger as "the most profound thinker of our time" and "the most important, original philosophical thinker of my era."  But in contrast to Strauss, Jonas stated his deep disappointment that Heidegger's philosophizing did not save him from being taken in by the Nazis:

"Given Heidegger's influence on me, his behavior was a cruel and bitter disappointment, not only in him as a person but also in the power of philosophy to arm people against such folly.  In the originality of his thought, Heidegger remains a powerful figure in intellectual history, a pathbreaker who opened up new territory.  That the most profound thinker of our time fell in with the goose-stepping brown-shirted battalions struck me as a catastrophic failure on the part of philosophy, as a disgraceful moment in world history, as the bankrupting of philosophical thought.  At the time I cherished the notion that philosophy could preserve us from such things, could fortify our minds.  I was even convinced that dealing with the most lofty and important matters ennobled human beings and improved their souls.  And now I realized that philosophy had failed to do this, hadn't protected this mind from the error of paying tribute to Hitler. . . . The behavior of all the fellow travelers, the turncoats, the quislings could be blamed on stupidity, blindness, weakness, cowardice, but that the most important, original philosophical thinker of my era fell into line was an unbelievable blow to me--personally and professionally." (Memoirs, 187)

Why did Strauss refuse to write a statement like that?

In contrast to Strauss who saw an intellectual defense of Nazism in Heidegger's Being and Time,  Jonas says he was surprised when some of his friends told him that he should have seen the early signs of Nazism in Heidegger's philosophical writing.  But once Heidegger identified himself as a Nazi, Jonas says that he broke with Heidegger's philosophy, and he refused to meet with Heidegger, until there was a brief meeting in 1969.

Jonas's public break with Heidegger came dramatically in 1964.  An international conference on hermeneutics at Drew University was organized to study the influence of Heidegger's philosophizing on the language of Protestant theology.  Heidegger himself was to give the keynote address, but when he had to withdraw because of illness, the conference organizers invited Jonas to take Heidegger's place, with the expectation that Jonas would speak for Heidegger.

Jonas's lecture--"Heidegger and Theology"--caused an uproar at the conference and around the world, because Jonas warned that these Christian theologians were making a big mistake in not recognizing that although Heidegger's language echoed the language of the Bible, Heidegger's thought was pagan in denying divine transcendence of the world and secularizing Christian language.

Jonas also warned that Heidegger's Nazism was necessarily anti-Christian:

"But as to Heidegger's being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Fuhrer and the call of German destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger's thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls--linguistically or otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution, and the sheer force of being that issues the call.  But to the believer, ever suspicious of this world, depth may mean the abyss, and force, the prince of this world.  As if the devil were not part of the voice of being!  Heidegger's own answer is, to the shame of philosophy, on record and, I hope, not forgotten." (Phenomenon of Life, 247)

In the footnote to this passage, Jonas quoted from one of Heidegger's speeches as rector at the University of Freiburg: "Not doctrines and 'ideas' be the rules of your being.  The Fuhrer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law.  Learn ever deeper to know: that from now on each and every thing demands decision, and every action, responsibility. Heil Hitler!"

Jonas also warned about the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian implications of Heidegger's claim that man is "the shepherd of being."  "Apart from the blasphemous ring which this use of the hallowed title must have to Jewish and Christian ears: it is hard to hear man hailed as the shepherd of being when he has just so dismally failed to be his brother's keeper" (Phenomenon of Life, 258). 

Jonas's lecture was the subject of a front-page article in the New York Times, which described the international controversy that Jonas had provoked among Christian theologians who wanted to appropriate Heidegger's philosophizing.  Such publicity brought invitations from German universities for Jonas to speak about this.  So he went on a lecture tour around Germany, and Heidegger told his friends that Jonas had betrayed him.

I first heard about this controversy in 1973, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago.  I audited a course in the Divinity School on Being and Time taught by a Lutheran theologian, who spent most the semester criticizing Jonas's lecture and trying to persuade us that Heidegger's philosophizing should be adopted by Christian theologians.

Strauss could have done something like this.  He could have given public lectures warning people against Heidegger's mistakes.  But he chose not to do this.

Although Jonas offered no assessment of Strauss's response to Heidegger's Nazism, Jonas did claim in his Memoirs that "Strauss had been an early supporter of Mussolini, before he turned anti-Semitic" (161). 

In 1969, Jonas decided that, with Heidegger approaching his 80th birthday, he needed to finally have a personal encounter with Heidegger to try to achieve some reconciliation.  They met for a brief conversation in Zurich.

"Actually our meeting consisted for the most part of a brief exchange of memories from our time in Marburg, while the matters that were of decisive significance to me weren't mentioned.  If I'd hoped that anything would be said about the events after 1933, about the fate of the Jews in Germany, about my mother's death, I was bitterly disappointed again.  With this meeting I put to rest my inner struggle over my relationship to Heidegger, but any clarification on his part, let alone a world of regret, was not to be.  What had come between us for good would remain shrouded in silence." (Memoirs, 193)

Later, George Anastaplo told the story of trying to arrange a meeting between Jonas and Strauss in Annapolis, Maryland, sometime after 1969.  He reported that Strauss refused to meet with Jonas because he had met with Heidegger.  Anastaplo often told this story to indicate how adamant Strauss was that no one should have any contact with Heidegger because of his Nazism.  But it seems to me that Jonas's repudiation of Heidegger's Nazism was much clearer and emphatic than Strauss's.

Moreover, unlike Strauss, in turning away from Heidegger's existentialism as a Gnostic dualism and nihilism, Jonas turned toward an alternative--an evolutionary biological naturalism in which an understanding of the psychophysical unity of human biological nature constituted a middle ground between materialism and idealism.  Jonas elaborated his philosophical biology in The Phenomenon of Life, which included his "Heidegger and Theology" essay.  In the Foreword to that book, he explained the main theme of his biological naturalism:

"Accordingly, the following investigations seek to break through the anthropocentric confines of idealist and existentialist philosophy as well as through the materialist confines of natural science.  In the mystery of the living body both poles are in fact integrated.  The great contradictions which man discovers in himself--freedom and necessity, autonomy and dependence, self and world, relation and isolation, creativity and morality--have their rudimentary traces in even the most primitive forms of life, each precariously balanced between being and not-being, and each already endowed with an internal horizon of 'transcendence.'  We shall pursue this underlying theme of all life in its development through the ascending order of organic powers and functions: metabolism, moving and desiring, sensing and perceiving, imagination, art, and mind--a progressive scale of freedom and peril, culminating in man, who may understand his uniqueness anew when he no longer sees himself in metaphysical isolation." (ix)

According to Jonas, "Heidegger never brings this question about Being--how it is, namely, that Being contains and maintains the human and what it thereby reveals about itself--into correlation with the testimony of our physical and biological evolution" (Mortality and Morality, 48).

Jonas's evolutionary biological naturalism has stimulated much of my thinking as expressed in the last paragraph of Darwinian Natural Right:  

"The idea of Darwinian natural right offers us one way of understanding our human place in nature.  We are neither mindless machines nor disembodied spirits.  We are animals.  As animals, we display the animate powers of nature for movement, desire, and awareness.  We move to satisfy our desires in the light of our awareness of the world.  We are a unique species of animal, but our distinctively human traits--such as symbolic speech, practical habituation, and conceptual thought--are elaborations of powers shared in some form with other animals.  Our powers for habituation and learning allow us to alter our natural environments, but even these powers are extensions of the behavioral flexibility shown by other animals.  So even if the natural world was not made for us, we were made for it, because we are adapted to live in it.  We have not been thrown into nature from some place far away.  We come from nature.  It is our home." (275)

Strauss comes close to this thought in this sentence from "What is Political Philosophy?":  "By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith of the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind" (54).

The New York Times articles on Jonas and Heidegger can be found here and here.

Some of my previous posts on Strauss and Jonas can be found here, here, and here.

Posts on Heidegger's Nazism can be found here and here.

Nietzsche, Nazism, and the Alt-Right: Ronald Beiner's "Dangerous Minds"

            Adolf Hitler Staring at a Bust of Friedrich Nietzsche at the Nietzsche Archives

"Hail Trump!  Hail Our People!  Hail Victory!"

This was the famous exclamation of Richard Spencer at a gathering of the Alt-Right in Washington, DC, shortly after Donald Trump's electoral victory in 2016.  Paul Gottfried coined the term "Alternative Right" in 2008.  But Spencer claims to have originated the abbreviation "Alt-Right" in that year, and he has been one of the best known leaders of the Alt-Right movement as devoted to establishing what Spencer calls the "white ethnostate" for North America and Europe.  Spencer also claims to have originated the term "ethnostate," although this seems to be a variation on what Frank Salter has called the "ethnic state."  (At the bottom of this post, I've provided links to other posts on this and related topics.)

According to Spencer, this all started with Friedrich Nietzsche.  Spencer has said: "I was red-pilled by Nietzsche."  "Red-pilled" refers to a famous scene in the movie The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves's character swallows a red pill that allows him to see that he and all of his fellow humans have been plugged into a delusional dream, and that he must free them from their dream.  So, to "red-pill" is the slang in the Alt-Right movement that refers to the moment when people see that all the ideals of liberal democracy--equality, liberty, pluralism, and peace--are delusional, and that the true reality of life is the racial and ethnic struggle for cultural dominance.  Spencer swallowed his red pill when he began reading Nietzsche as a college student at the University of Virginia, and then later as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he began to study Leo Strauss, who he saw as sympathetic with fascist thinking. 

What he learned was that liberal egalitarian modernity was an expression of Christian slave morality as opposed to the master morality of Greek-Roman civilization, and that this slave morality was responsible for the decadence of Western culture as promoting the dehumanizing degradation of what Nietzsche called "the last man"--the man who lives an ignoble life of safe and comfortable pleasures with no aspiration for heroic achievement.  To overcome this decadence of liberalism, we need a new nobility of elite Supermen who can create an illiberal culture of pagan master morality in which the strong rule over the weak.

Now we have Ronald Beiner's new book--Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)--in which he traces the intellectual history that runs from Nietzsche to Martin Heidegger to fascism and Nazism and, finally, to the recent resurgence of fascism in the Alt-Right and other illiberal authoritarian movements across Europe and Russia.

Beiner's argument for the intellectual links between Nietzsche, Heidegger, Nazism, and the newly resurgent fascist authoritarianism is persuasive.  A even more carefully detailed history of Nietzsche's place in the Third Reich is given by Steven Aschheim in Chapter 8 of his book The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany1890-1990 (University of California Press, 1992).  As Aschheim argues, it's an empirical fact of cultural history that Nietzsche was ideologically appropriated by Hitler and the Nazis as part of the official culture of the Third Reich.  But accepting this appropriation of Nietzsche by the Nazis as a fact of cultural history does not settle the question of whether their interpretation of Nietzsche was accurate or not.

Beiner rightly argues that even if the Nazi interpretation was mistaken, it was a misinterpretation that was promoted by Nietzsche himself in his most reckless writing.  Nietzsche said that the highest human being is the Dionysian artist-philosopher or Superman who exercises his will to power by tyrannically legislating new values for all of humanity.  He said that "slavery is . . . both in the cruder and in the more subtle sense, the indispensable means of spiritual discipline and breeding" (BGE, 188).  He said that the new nobility would require "merciless annihilation of everything that was degenerating and parasitical" (Ecce Homo, "Birth of Tragedy," 4).  He declared that European democracy must ultimately transform itself into "a new and sublime development of slavery," in which the "herd animal" is enslaved to the "leader animal" (Will to Power, 954, 956).  Thus, the democratization of Europe is "an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants--taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual" (BGE, 242).  This tyrannical rule of the artist-philosophers will require "conscious breeding experiments," "terrible means of compulsion," and even "the annihilation of millions of failures."  This is necessary for the "domination of the earth" by a "new, tremendous aristocracy," in which "the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be made to endure for millennia," and the "breeding of a new caste to rule over Europe" will unify it into "one will" (BGE, 208, 251; Will to Power, 764, 954, 960, 964).  "What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness. . . . The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man.  And they shall be given every possible assistance.  What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity" (The Antichrist, 2).  There is plenty here to inspire Hitler, the Nazis, and the Alt-Right.

Moreover, as Beiner indicates, Nietzsche foresaw that this would happen.  In a letter (to Malwida von Meysenbug, June 1884), he wrote: "The sort of unqualified and utterly unsuitable people who may one day come to invoke my authority is a thought that fills me with dread.  Yet that is the torment of every great teacher of mankind: he knows that, given the circumstances and the accidents, he can become a disaster as well as a blessing to mankind."  Beiner asks: "Well, if Nietzsche was so terrified about this, why didn't he simply exercise more responsibility or more prudence about how he wrote?  There's no good answer to this question" (63).

But here I see the first of two weak points in Beiner's argument.  He speaks of the "insane recklessness" and "extreme lunacy" of Nietzsche's writing that attracts people like Hitler and Spencer (63).  But while Beiner sees this in the early and late writings of Nietzsche (28-34), he passes over the middle writings--particularly, Human, All Too Human and Dawn--in silence, and so he does not notice that the writings of Nietzsche's middle period do not show the "insane recklessness" and "extreme lunacy" of his other writings.

In fact, some of the Nazi writers who read Nietzsche carefully noticed that his middle writings contradicted Nazi ideology.  For example, Heinrich Hartle's Nietzsche and National Socialism (Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus) was an official Nazi book published by the central Nazi publishing house in 1937 and 1944.  Hartle argued that the National Socialists would have to separate those ideas in Nietzsche's books that supported Nazi ideology from those that did not; and in particular, the Nazis would have to reject the teachings in Nietzsche's middle writings that supported liberal democratic individualism rather than statist collectivist authoritarianism.

In many posts over the years, I have argued that Nietzsche's middle writings show a Darwinian aristocratic liberalism that contradicts the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of his early and late writings, and it's only the latter that inspires the Nazis and the fascists.

In his middle writings, Nietzsche respects the freedom provided by liberal democracy, which includes freedom for "free spirits"--philosophers and scientists--to live their lives of intellectual inquiry without persecution, while also allowing the great multitude of people to live their lives free from tyrannical exploitation.  In contrast to his early and late writings, Nietzsche here sees liberal modernity as ennobling rather than degrading or dehumanizing.

Beiner ignores this, which leads him into what I see as the second weak point in his argument--he accepts the claim of Nietzsche in his later writings that liberalism necessarily leads to the decadence of the "last man," and he refuses to even consider the empirical evidence against this claim.

Beiner insists that life in liberal modernity is "profoundly dehumanizing" and "a profound contraction of the human spirit" (10).  In any liberal society, "the whole experience of life spirals down into unbearable shallowness and meaninglessness" (11).  He says that as a college student in Canada, he first read Nietzsche an "antidote to growing up amid the banality and conformism of suburban life in North America" (16).  The reason for all this degradation of life in Canada and all other liberal societies is that liberalism's "excessive openness and the exploding of fixed horizons" creates "horizonlessness" (25, 28).  Consequently, there is "a form of life where privileged horizons, horizons that sustain a definite understanding of the point of existence, have ceased to exist" (35).  This brings "spiritlessness" and "a total extermination and uprooting of culture," so that culture as such becomes impossible (30, 34, 144).  No one in a liberal society can escape this "spiritual void," because "everyone suffers from this horizonlessness" (38, 132).  So life becomes meaningless for everyone who lives in a liberal society.  It is therefore easy to understand the popular appeal of Nietzschean fascists and Nazis who offer what Heidegger called "spiritual renewal."

So while Beiner thinks that Nietzsche's "solutions" for the problem of liberal decadence are "all nonsense or lunacy," he also thinks that Nietzsche's "cultural diagnosis" of the problem is "not nonsense" (24).  This leads to Beiner's final conclusion at the end of his book: "I don't rule out the possibility that Nietzsche and Heidegger successfully articulate aspects of spiritual or cultural vacuity in the liberal egalitarian dispensation that defines modernity.  But what they offer by way of new dispensations to supplant spiritless modernity is far worse" (134). 

Well, if the illiberal alternatives to liberalism are far worse, then doesn't that mean that liberalism is better?  But how can liberalism be better if it only promotes "spiritual or cultural vacuity"?

And what should we say about poor Professor Beiner at the University of Toronto whose whole life has been meaningless because of the "spiritlessness" of Canadian liberal society?  Not only has he been forced to live the life of the "last man," he has learned from reading Nietzsche that he is a "last man" living a despicably degraded life, and so he must suffer from self-loathing.  Or does his capacity for self-loathing show that he is not a "last man"?

I don't believe that Beiner and all of his fellow Canadians have lived meaningless or spiritless lives, because I don't believe that a liberal society like Canada forces everyone to become Nietzsche's "last man."  I see no way to settle this disagreement between me and Beiner except by looking at the factual evidence of how people live in liberal societies to see if they live well or badly.  Amazingly, however, Beiner never offers any factual evidence to support his claim that everyone in a liberal society suffers from a meaningless or spiritless life.  In this way, his rhetorical strategy is exactly the same as other recent critics of liberalism--like Steven Smith and Patrick Dineen--who cite the claims of anti-liberal cultural critics that liberal bourgeois modernity is dehumanizing, and then assume the truth of those claims without considering any of the relevant empirical evidence.

In some of my previous posts, I have surveyed the empirical evidence that the Liberal Enlightenment has promoted human progress by fostering the good character--the moral and intellectual virtues or what Deirdre McCloskey calls the "bourgeois virtues"--that promote human happiness or flourishing.  For example, one can see the correlation between the Human Freedom Index and the World Happiness Report, which shows that liberal regimes tend to be high in both freedom and happiness, and the illiberal regimes tend to be low in both freedom and happiness.

In Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker argues for the stunning success of the Liberal Enlightenment as shown by massive factual evidence (conveyed in 73 charts of statistical data) of human progress over the past 200 years: because of liberalism today more human beings are living longer, healthier, wealthier, freer, safer, more stimulating, and generally happier lives than human beings have ever lived in any time in history.

Beiner is silent about all of this evidence for the flourishing of human life in liberal societies. 

He is also silent about the evidence of social history that denies his claim that in liberal societies, it is impossible for people to live in moral communities with "horizons that sustain a definite understanding of the point of human existence" (35).  Consider, for example, the social history of voluntary religious communities like the Amish, the Hasidic Jews, or the Mormons, who have become some of the fastest growing religious groups in the United States.  Beiner suggests that the only way to have "viable horizons" is through "legislating authoritative horizons whose only authority is the act of legislation itself" (57).  But groups like the Amish illustrate how in liberal societies moral and religious horizons arise in families and voluntary associations (churches, schools, clubs, friendships, and so on) without being coercively legislated.  In liberal societies, people can always exercise "The Benedict Option" (as Rod Dreher calls it)--they can form self-governing communities of people dedicated to some shared vision of moral or religious excellence.  The importance of such character formation for liberal political theorists is evident, for example, in texts such as John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The evidence of social history also shows that liberal societies provide the intellectual freedom of thought that cultivates the life of the mind in philosophy and science.  Beiner seems deny this by agreeing with Heidegger that part of the shallowness of life in a modern liberal society is that people are distracted from plumbing the depths of the mysterious question of Being--why is there something rather than nothing?  Thus, people do not engage in the "heroic thinking" that constitutes true philosophy (70-91).  But, in fact, Heidegger's question of Being--of why or how something comes from nothing--has become a fundamental question for modern philosophy and science--particularly in response to the scientific theory of the Big Bang as the origin of everything from nothing.

Beiner is also silent about the evidence of political history that shows the spirited heroism of liberal societies.  He speaks about the emotional appeal of Hitler's heroism (130-31), but he says nothing about the liberal heroism of Winston Churchill in leading Great Britain to resist and finally defeat Hitler.

The history of liberalism is to a large extent the history of spirited resistance to tyranny and courage in war.  The Declaration of Independence was a declaration of Lockean liberalism that was also a declaration of war.  The American Civil War under the heroic leadership of Abraham Lincoln became a test of whether people in a liberal society were courageous enough to fight and die for the emancipation of slaves and a "new birth of freedom."

In Great Britain, John Stuart Mill saw Lincoln's leadership in the war as a vindication of the moral heroism of people in a free society.  In "The Contest in America" (1862), Mill wrote:

"I cannot join with those who cry Peace, peace.  I cannot wish that this war should not have been engaged in by the North . . . . War, in a good cause, is not the greatest evil which a nation can suffer.  War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.  When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people.  A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice--is often the means of their regeneration.  A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.  As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other."

This doesn't sound like the degraded and meaningless life of the "last man."


Here are links to some of my posts that elaborate some of my points here:

Nietzsche's middle period:  here, here, here, here, here, and here

Nazi philosophers:  here and here

The Alt-Right ethnic state:  here, and here,

Leo Strauss and Nazism: here and here

Patrick Dineen and the Amish:  here and here

Rod Dreher and the Benedict Option: here

Steven Smith:  here and here

Deirdre McCloskey and the bourgeois virtues:  here, here, and here

Steven Pinker and liberal progress:  here and here

The Human Freedom Index: here

Empirical Human Progress through the Liberal Enlightenment: here

Heidegger's question of something from nothing:  here and here