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July 17, 2024
Kant stated bluntly in “Speculative Beginning,” “war is an indispensable means for bringing it to a still higher stage.”[173] Peace would be a moral disaster, so we are duty-bound not to shrink from war.
Not so, says Herder. Instead, each Volk is a unique “family writ large.”[181] Each possesses a distinctive culture and is itself an organic community stretching backward and forward in time. Each has its own genius, its own special traits. And, necessarily, these cultures are opposed to each other. As each fulfills its own destiny, its unique developmental path will conflict with other cultures’ developmental paths.
We can see where this is going.
Judgments of good and bad are defined culturally and internally,
There it is.
Herder thus insisted “on a strictly relativist interpretation of progress and human perfectibility.”[183] Accordingly, each culture can be judged only by its own standards. One cannot judge one culture from the perspective of another;
Herder is relevant because of his enormous influence on the nationalist movements that were shortly to take off all over central and eastern Europe.
Fichte spoke as a philosopher who had descended from abstractions to connect with practical affairs, in order to situate those practical affairs within the context of the most metaphysical.
Petersonian.
the acquirement of greater skill and the effort spent therein will result only in fresh effort and work, and it will be the very pupil who is abler than the rest who must often watch while the others sleep, and reflect while others play.”
“Education to true religion is, therefore, the final task of the new education.”
Also Petersonian.
Fichte’s program of education includes the communal separation of children, severe authoritarian top-down training, strict moral duty and selflessness, and total religious immersion. Not quite the Enlightenment model of liberal education.
as Germany sinks, the rest of Europe is seen to sink with it.”
Let's call this "Fichte's Prophecy".
“It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.”
Individul subordinated to state.
Given that the individual’s ultimate purpose in life should be to achieve union with ultimate reality, it follows that the “state in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom.”[213] The consequence of this, morally, is that the individual is of less significance than the state. The individual’s empirical, day-to-day interests are of a lower moral order than the state’s universal, world-historical interests.
Duty, as we have learned from Kant and Fichte, always trumps personal interests and inclinations.
There is of course the problem of explaining all of this to the average individual.
Individuals must recognize that, from the moral perspective, they are not ends in themselves; they are tools for the achievement of higher goals. But though we might tolerate the idea that individuals, their desires and the gratification of them, are thus sacrificed, and their happiness given up to the empire of chance, to which it belongs; and that as a general rule, individuals come under the category of means to an ulterior end.[219]
again, just in case we have missed Hegel’s point: “A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole.” And again echoing Rousseau: “Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it.”[220]
A World-historical individual is not so unwise as to indulge a variety of wishes to divide his regards. He is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else.
so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush
Ends justify means. The seedling of evil.
Even while being destroyed, the innocent flower has worth only through—and so should glory in—his participation in that larger future.
The needs of historical development are of higher standing than those of morality, and so “the conscience of individuals” should not be an obstacle to the achievement of historical destinies.
The trampling of morality is regrettable, but “looked at from this point, moral claims that are irrelevant, must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment.”[223]
Conservatives of the nineteenth century favored returning to or re-invigorating feudal institutions.
Enlightenment liberals were individualistic, the center of their political and economic gravity tending toward limited governments and free markets.
We find in the case of Kant a call for individuals to be willing to do their duty to sacrifice for the species; we find in the case of Herder a call for individuals to find their identity in their ethnicity; we find in the case of Fichte a call for education to be process of total socialization; and we find in the case of Hegel a call for total government to which the individual will surrender everything.
1. Environmentalism;
2. BLM;
3.
4. Nazism, communism.
For a school of thinkers who advocated total socialization, “socialism” seemed an appropriate label. Accordingly, many thinkers on the collectivist Right thought of themselves as true socialists. Yet “socialism” was also being used as the label for Left collectivists, so there was a lively debate between the Left and many on the Right over who had the most right to call themselves “socialist.”
The debate was not merely semantics. Both Right and Left were anti-individualist; both advocated government management of the most important aspects of society; both divided human society into groups which they took to be fundamental to individuals’ identities; both pitted those groups against each other in inescapable conflict; both favored war and violent revolution to bring about the ideal society. And both sides hated the liberals.
World War I pitted East against West in the century’s first great conflict of incompatible social systems. Leading German intellectuals on the political Right were clear about what they took the onset of war to signify. The war would destroy the decadent liberal spirit, the bland spirit of shopkeepers and traders, and make way for the ascent of social idealism.
According to classical Marxism, waiting for socialism to come to Russia meant waiting for capitalism to come to Russia, for capitalism then to develop an industrial proletariat, for the proletariat then to achieve a collective class consciousness and then revolt against the oppressor. That would take a maddeningly long time. So Marx’s theory had to be altered. Socialism in Russia could not wait to develop out of mature capitalism. The revolution would have to take Russia directly from feudalism to socialism.
by the 1930s large segments of the radical Left had come to agree with what national socialists and fascists had long argued: that socialism needs an aristocracy. Granted—the far Right and much of the far Left now agreed—socialism must be for the people. But it cannot be by the people. The people must be told what they need and how to get it; and for both the direction and impetus must come from an elite.
The year 1956 dealt two blows to that faith. The second blow came late in the year, in October, with the bloody suppression of a revolt in the Soviet-satellite state of Hungary. Strong dissatisfaction with chronic economic troubles and with being under the thumb of Moscow led to demonstrations and outbreaks of physical resistance to authority by Hungarian workers, students, and others. The Soviet response was swift and brutal: the tanks and the troops were sent in, demonstrators and their organizers were killed and executed, and the revolt was suppressed. The lesson to the Hungarians was
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The first blow, however, delivered in February of 1956, was the one that had the most devastating impact on the future of Left socialism. In a “secret speech” to the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev made a sensational revelation of the crimes of Stalin’s era. In the name of the future of socialism, Stalin had had millions of his own citizens tortured, subjected to inhuman deprivations, executed, or sent to die in Siberian labor camps. What had been dismissed as capitalist propaganda was now revealed as true by the leader of the socialist world:
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making the case for socialism was being made doubly difficult by the fact that the capitalist countries were doing well economically and, for the most part, going in the right direction morally. It is hard to argue with prosperity, and it is hard to make stick any qualms one has about capitalism’s moral status when confronted with the revelations about the horrible and very real failings of socialism in practice.
The ethical standard used in criticizing capitalism was, accordingly, Marx’s slogan in Critique of the Gotha Program: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”[268] Satisfying need was thus the fundamental criterion of morality. Yet come the 1950s it was hard to argue that capitalism fails to satisfy its people’s needs. In fact, a big part of the problem seemed to be that capitalism had satisfied its people’s needs so well that the people had become fat and complacent and not at all revolutionary. So a moral standard that made satisfying needs primary was now useless
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A new ethical standard was therefore necessary. With great fanfare, then, much of the Left changed its official ethical standard from need to equality. No longer was the primary criticism of capitalism to be that it failed to satisfy people’s needs. The primary criticism was to be that its people did not get an equal share.
In effect, in changing the ethical standard from need to equality, all of these new varieties of Left-socialism had resolved to quote Marx less and to quote Rousseau more.
As the Marxist movement splintered and mutated into new forms, Left intellectuals and activists began to look for new ways to attack capitalism. Environmental issues, alongside women’s and minorities’ issues, came to be seen as a new weapon in the arsenal against capitalism.
Rudolf Bahro’s From Red to Green,
the more epistemologically-modest theorists of the 1950s begin to ask—can we really expect the masses to abstract to the view that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin? Can the masses conceive of themselves as a harmonious international class? The intellectual capacity of the masses is much more limited, so appealing to and mobilizing the masses requires speaking to them about what matters to them and on a level that they can grasp. What the masses can understand and what they do get fired up about are their sexual, racial, ethnic, and religious identities. Both epistemological
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by the late 1950s and early 1960s, significant portions of the Left came to agree with the collectivist Right on yet another issue: Forget internationalism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism; focus on smaller groups formed on the basis of ethnic, racial, or other identities.
Mao’s Little Red Book was read widely on college campuses and increasingly studied by revolutionaries-in-training. From it they absorbed Mao’s lessons of making revolution through sheer political and ideological will, of not waiting for material conditions to develop of themselves, of being pragmatic and opportunistic and willing to use ambiguous rhetoric and even cruelty—and, above all, of being constantly and militantly activist even to the point of wildness and irrationality. Make the revolution somehow and anyhow!
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) argued that civilization is an unstable, surface phenomenon based upon the repression of instinctual energies. Bio-psychologically, human agents are a bundle of aggressive and conflicted instincts, those instincts constantly pressing for immediate satisfaction. Their constant immediate satisfaction, though, would make social living impossible, so the forces of civilization have evolved by incrementally suppressing instincts and forcing their expression into polite, orderly, and rational forms.
The battle between the id and civilization is ongoing and occasionally brutal. To the extent that the id wins, society tends toward conflict and chaos; and to the extent that society wins, the id is forced into repression.
The task of the psychoanalyst, then, is to trace the neurosis back through its irrational, unconscious channels to its origin. Patients, however, often interfere with this process: they resist the exposure of unconscious and irrational elements in their psyches and they cling to the conscious forms of civilized and rational behavior that they have learned. So the psychoanalyst must find a way to bypass those surface, blocking behaviors, and to strip away the conscious veneer of civility to probe the seething id below.
The Frankfurt School portrait of capitalism, Marcuse explained, is what we find realized most extremely in the most advanced capitalist nation, the United States.
Having created a monolithic technocracy—the machines and the bureaucracies and the mass man and the self-serving ideology—capitalism can pretend to be open to criticism by allowing some radical intellectuals to dissent. In the name of “tolerance,” “open-mindedness,” and “free speech,” a few lonely voices will be permitted to raise objections and challenges to the capitalist behemoth.[284] But everyone knows full well that nothing come of the criticisms. Worse still, the appearance of having been open and tolerant will serve only to reinforce capitalism’s control. Capitalist tolerance, then, is
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The Frankfurt School taught us that capitalism’s orderly technocracy has repressed much of humanity, driving much of its energy underground—but that repressed energy is still there, and potentially it can burst out. Thus, Marcuse concluded, capitalism’s repression of human nature may be socialism’s salvation. Capitalism’s rational technocracy suppresses human nature to the point that it bursts out in irrationalisms—in violence, criminality, racism, and all of society’s other pathologies. But by encouraging those irrationalisms the new revolutionaries can destroy the system.
The Matrix is simply a recapitulation of ideas that were developed in the Frankfurt School.
Marcuse looked especially to the marginalized and outcast Left intellectual leadership—especially those trained in critical theory.[287] Given the pervasiveness of capitalism’s domination, the revolutionary vanguard can come only from those outcast intellectuals—especially among the younger students[288]—those who are able to “link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception”[289] and who thereby can see through the appearance of peace to the reality of oppression, who have retained enough of their humanity not to have been turned into Joe Sixpack—and above all who have
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Marcuse’s reign as the pre-eminent philosopher of the New Left signaled a strong turn towards irrationality and violence among younger Leftists. “Marx, Marcuse, and Mao” became the new trinity and the slogan to rally under. As was proclaimed on a banner of students involved in closing the University of Rome: Marx is the prophet, Marcuse is his interpreter, and Mao is the sword.
Epistemologically, the prevailing academic and intellectual climate was either anti-reason, ineffectual in defending reason, or saw reason as irrelevant to practical matters. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kuhn spoke the new language of thought. Reason is out, the intellectuals were teaching, and what matters above all is will, authentic , and non-rational commitment.
