Once upon a time, in the hallways of history, there happened a meeting
of minds between a philosophically illuminated poet, a toadying technocrat, and
a mystic given to the arcane. A meeting that gave birth to a catastrophe of all
too human proportions.
Nietzsche, in soul and in spirit, is brother in arms to Milton’s Moloc:
“Scepter'd King
Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest Spirit
That fought in Heav'n; now fiercer by despair:
His trust was with th' Eternal to be deem'd
Equal in strength, and rather then be less
Care'd not to be at all; with that care lost
Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse
He reck'd not….”
Stood up, the strongest and the fiercest Spirit
That fought in Heav'n; now fiercer by despair:
His trust was with th' Eternal to be deem'd
Equal in strength, and rather then be less
Care'd not to be at all; with that care lost
Went all his fear: of God, or Hell, or worse
He reck'd not….”
This poet-philosopher gave prophetic voice to a foundation myth about
the origins, and especially the decline, of morality in the west. Bespeaking a
more than true psychological insight or intuition about the invention and
breakdown of morality, Nietzsche’s philosophical myth would later serve as stage
directions for the creation of the German state under the Nazis.
Eichmann, on the other hand, as more recent history seems clearly to be attesting,
might appear on the world-stage as the incarnation of Milton’s Belial:
“he seemd
For dignity compos'd and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas'd the ear,”
For dignity compos'd and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his Tongue
Dropt Manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest Counsels: for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to Nobler deeds
Timorous and slothful: yet he pleas'd the ear,”
Eichmann, a servile architect of a state designed according to Nazi
ideology, laboured at a particular period in the history of the German people to
create a very specific application for Nietzsche’s mytho-philosophical insight,
an application whose composition and legacy was human engineered death on a
mass scale.
The last of the protagonists in our drama, Heidegger, the mystical voice
of philosophical anti-rationalism and unenlightenment, continued timorously to
trace his career path unhindered within the historical framework of this
technocratic ideology. In this, Heidegger the Accommodator is like Milton’s
Mammon:
“Let
us not then pursue
By force impossible, by leave obtain'd
Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state
Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek
Our own good from our selves, and from our own
Live to our selves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easie yoke
Of servile Pomp. Our greatness will appeer
Then most conspicuous, when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse
We can create, and in what place so e're
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and indurance.”
By force impossible, by leave obtain'd
Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state
Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek
Our own good from our selves, and from our own
Live to our selves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easie yoke
Of servile Pomp. Our greatness will appeer
Then most conspicuous, when great things of small,
Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse
We can create, and in what place so e're
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain
Through labour and indurance.”
We backward-viewers of this dramatic meeting can at least be certain
about this, however, which is that Friedrich Nietzsche is in no way responsible
for or causally linked to Adolf Eichmann’s ideological repurposing of his
philosopher’s mytho-poetic explanatory fantasy, nor for another philosopher’s, Martin
Heidegger’s, tailspin into a German nationalistic mysticism. Nor would the
holocaust of the German period have been avoided had Nietzsche never
articulated or published his philo-genealogizing myth.
This latter realization
would also seem to suggest for our consideration that, in a world becoming progressively
post-“moral” (using Nietzsche’s definition of morality), the reinvention of a
supposed Greek ideal/idyll, which was the historico-philosophical juncture of
our three actors, is perhaps not only impossible, but also ultimately undesirable.
Perhaps, in the face of the Eichmanns and other ideologists who appear
regularly on the world’s stages, and who seek to embody Nation and Race as
material and therefore intuitively “natural” moral values, we are, after all,
looking at the true face of Nietzsche’s natural, Zarathustrian Man—the fully
human animal.
NIETZSCHE
On the Genealogy of Morality is a philosophical myth, and neither a
critical philosophical analysis nor an argument of any reasonable sort. It is a
retroscopic myth, much like Plato’s Republic,
that harks back to the putative roots of ideas and idea-traditions; and the purpose
of this myth is to provide a perhaps more than true explanation, albeit of a
once-upon-a-time sort, about how western “morality” came into existence.
Mythopoetically, Nietzsche conceives of Morality negatively, as a celebration
of the values espoused by a priestly caste: of weakness and vulnerability, of
other-worldliness, and of the hatred of the body and the this-worldly body-life.
“Blessed are the poor in
spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are
they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are
the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”
In Nietzsche’s myth these
priestly-minded ones, who were natural-born “outsiders” to the heroic warrior
nobility celebrated and valued by the Greeks (think: Homer and the Heroic Code),
achieved ascendancy first by separating themselves from the naturally “good”
nobility of the Greeks, then by conflating the value of the naturally good, which
espoused this-Life with gusto, with the value of the unnaturally “moral,” which,
not measuring up to the challenges of this-Life, championed the after-Life.
On this telling there
were, once upon a time, The Greeks, an ancient people of Virtue who were
ethical (good) in the most natural and innocent sense of that term; they were
good and noble; a warrior caste in which one man’s worth, in terms of strength
or of intelligence or of oration, was always measured against another man’s.
This was in the pre-moral age of the west. Then, at a certain point in the
history of Western Man, the Religious Man, the Priest, went to war against the
Virtuous Man; it was a war provoked by a sense of outrage and a desire for
revenge (Nietzsche’s ressentiment), because
not all men are excellent warriors, or cunning, or highly valued contenders on
the stage of humanly conceived time. These “others,” who fell outside the
natural Greek world of values, were the non-contenders, the vulnerable, the
meek, the herd; they are, says Nietzsche, the spiritual ancestors to Western Jewish
and Christian thought, and therefore the original nihilists – the naysayers of the
vigorous Life.
Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is a pseudo-historical
reconstruction myth. It is not a philosophy argument “in favour of” the
breakdown of moral thought, but rather, a philosophical analysis of the birth
of “morals” as a nihilistic redefinition of “virtue,” a retelling of the
Changeling myth, where an after-Life replaces a here-and-now Life, an ex-change
that went unnoticed for some 2,000 years until its true character began to tell
in this, the period of its final disintegration.
According to the
Nietzschean myth, the moralistic nihilism or other-than-this-Life sentiment at
the heart of religious thinking, stands in opposition to an entirely human
ethic of natural virtue as goodness, as, for example, was articulated in the
Greece of antiquity; and Nietzsche prophesies for us in his myth a future
breakdown of this naysayer “morality.” Nietzsche’s analysis is not an attempt
at an applied ethic of any sort; rather, it is the mythical theory of a historical
rise, and then the modern fall, of a “moral” system of articulating a world
that is no world of or for natural men.
EICHMANN
Now, what if one were
to conceive of the possibility that Nietzsche’s philosophical myth was actually
“true” and that some version of a changeling event occurred in the history of western
ideas, and what if that one were also to accept the obvious conclusion that the
creation of a fully human ethic grounded in the this-worldly experience of the
human animal is the future job of men, and especially of philosophers?
Would it not also be
conceivable to envision the possible historical rise of a Nazi political ethic,
of the sort articulated by Eichmann in Jerusalem—a wedding between an evolutionary
worldview as the frame for human action, and the persuasiveness of a prophetic myth
that “shows” that the religious mythological framing for human value is
ultimately unmenschlich because anti-Life?
But then comes the Crito moment. Because in addition to the wedded
philosophical concoction Eichmann argues for at his trial, the audience slowly
comes to the realization that Eichmann has also arrived at conclusions
diametrically opposed to those drawn by Plato in his philosophical drama, Crito.
Plato’s Crito is about the death of Socrates.
Just before drinking the hemlock, Socrates is engaged in conversation with his
long-time friend, Crito, who tries to persuade Socrates that he must not allow
the state to put him to death, that he must live. Crito argues for the survival
in the here and now of a valuable human’s life (such as Socrates’ life), while
Socrates quietly reminds his friend that the physical life of the body is of little worth when measured against
the good life, which is the life
lived honourably and justly. On this philosophical question, however, Eichmann
sided with Crito. He argued not only that the physical life of a valuable group—the
German nation, is a grounded value, but also that the survival of the preferred
group must come about by the death of another (in)valuable group—the Jews.
Truly a concatenation
of ideas to die for…
But is it really such a stretch to imagine a translation of a
philosophical or prophetic myth into a political reality? Is this in fact not
absolutely inevitable at some point, and therefore predictable? The “argument”
of the Crito is represented by a
drama in which Socrates makes the case for the just and honourable life, which
is the life of philosophical virtue, but where Crito makes the case simply for the
material life of the body. Enter Eichmann.
In her recent book Eichmann Before
Jerusalem [Knopf, 2014; original German 2011], the German historian Bettina
Stangneth performs two public services. First, she provides a rectification for
the myth created by Hanna Arendt concerning the perceived mousy or
underwhelming personality of the man Eichmann by opening up for public perusal
all the most recent archives concerning the historical Eichmann and his very personal
monument to Nazi thought – the holocaust. And while her historical overhaul of
Eichmann does not pose any direct challenge to Arendt’s theoretical notion of
the banality of evil, it does abrogate the specific use of Eichmann as an
embodiment of that theory. Second, she lays out “in his own words” Eichmann’s
philosophical apologia sua vita,
which reveals an Eichmann/Crito of horrifyingly insightful philosophical
clarity.
Point One in Eichmann’s apology: innocence before the Law,
God, and Men (p. 216). “’Without making any kind of Pilate-like gesture, I find
that I am not guilty before the law, and before my own conscience; and with me
the people who were my subordinates during the war. For we were all… little
cogs in the machine of the Head Office for Reich Security, and thus, during the
war, little cogs in the great drivetrain of the murdering motor: war.” The oath
of allegiance that bound everyone, ‘friend and foe,’ was the ‘highest obligation
that a person can enter into,’ and everyone had to obey it. Across the world,
leaders had really only given a single order: ‘the destruction of the enemy.’
For Eichmann, the idea that the war had been a total, global one, in which the
goal was to eliminate the enemy, was a simple statement of fact. His radical
biologism led to the belief that a ‘final victory’ was imperative: the
unavoidable war between the races would leave only one remaining.”
Point Two: general morality is on
Eichmann’s side (pp. 216-217). So ‘What about morality?’ asks Eichmann. […] “’There
are a number of moralities: a Christian morality, a morality of ethical values,
a morality of war, a morality of battle. Which will it be?’ The leadership of
the nation, Eichmann goes on to explain, has always stood above the thought of
individuals. To illustrate, he brings in the Old Testament and also modern
science: the church, too, recognizes the power of the state as the highest
guiding principle on earth….”
Point Three: Moral thinking in the
west leads to the conclusion of obedience to authority (p. 217). “…’inner
morality’ is all well and good, but the most important thing is always the will
of the nation’s leaders—not simply because they have the power to force people
to obey, but because they act only on behalf of the people. THEREFORE [emphasis mine] a person should not allow
his inner morality to conflict with his orders; he should see that these orders
are for the good of the people and carry them out with conviction. […] I found
my parallels quite plainly and simply in nature. […] [T]he more I listened to
the natural world, whether microcosm or macrocosm, the less injustice I found,
not only in the demands made by the government of my people, to which I belong,
but … also in the goals of our enemies’ governments and leaders. Everyone was
in the right, when seen from his own standpoint.’ In other words: everyone
wanted total war, and that fact provided the legitimation of everyone to wage
it, using every means necessary, both ‘conventional and unconventional.’”
Point Four: evolutionary theory as
the basis for ethical theory (p. 218-219). ‘Eichmann completely rejected
traditional ideas of morality, in favour of the no-holds-barred struggle for
survival that nature demanded. […] The struggle among the races was in essence
a struggle for resources—a basic idea familiar to many people concerned about
future wars over oil and drinking water today. […] The only thing that mattered
was one’s own people. […] Philosophy in the classical sense, as the search for
transcultural categories and a global orientation, was an error, because it
sought universals and did not accept dependence on ethnicity. … As such
philosophy has no homeland, but—and it is crucial to realize this connection—to
the purveyors of Nazi ideology, philosophy had a people. According to Nazi
ideology and Hitler’s tirades, there was one ‘race’ that, having no homeland,
had an international bent and revered the unbounded freedom of the mind: the
Jews.’”
Point Five: conclusion (p. 219). ‘Only
an ethnic thought makes it possible to build a national character, and
humanitarian talk only allows this character to become confused and weakened.
In an ideology that sees reconnecting with ‘blood and soil’ as the only means
of survival, any international outlook mutates into the ultimate threat. This
threat must be destroyed before a global morality destroys concepts of the
German ethnic morality and undermines German defences. Or as the head of the
NSDAP Head Office for Racial Politics clearly stated in 1939: ‘There can be no
possible agreement with systems of thoughts of an international nature, because
at bottom these are not truth and not honest, but based on a monstrous lie,
namely the lie of the equality of all human beings.”’
According to Stangneth (p. 220), Arendt, a classically trained philosopher,
was only able to see an Eichmann who uses philosophy as a blunt tool without
being guided by its undergirding of moral intentionality; thus the imprudent analysis
one finds in her Eichmann in Jerusalem.
But what one discovers in Eichmann’s apologia
is a surprisingly well-informed “Nietzschean” analysis of his historical
circumstances.
There are two sides to
the Platonic equation, and Eichmann simply disagreed with Plato’s conclusion,
valuing Crito’s thinking about the life of ‘the good’ instead of Socrates’
dogmatic assertion that “the good life” is better than just life itself.
In his “A Message to the 21st Century,”
Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote: “[Heinrich Heine] predicted that the
armed disciples of the German philosophers—Fichte, Schelling, and the other
fathers of German nationalism—would one day destroy the great monuments of
Western Europe in a wave of fanatical destruction before which the French
Revolution would seem child’s play. This may have been unfair to the German
metaphysicians, yet Heine’s central idea seems to me valid: in a debased form,
the Nazi ideology did have roots in German anti-Enlightenment thought. There
are men who will kill and maim with a tranquil conscience under the influence
of the words and writings of some of those who are certain that they know
perfection can be reached.”
Isaiah Berlin’s dying
dilemma, of course, also hems in us western thinkers on every side: “So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very
fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon
the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the
life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon
some ultimate golden future?” And that very wise Oxford philosopher could only
offer this consolation: “I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only
that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then
compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to
happen.”
HEIDEGGER
Ruin bubbled up out of an
historical meeting of minds—a meeting at which an illuminated German poet-philosopher
fantasized about a alleged moral battle of ideas in our western past, and
prophesied about a free-thinking future for those with the courage of their
insight; a toadying technocrat with delusions of philosophy designed and
engineered a eugenic future for the German state, adding his own special
ingredient of materialism and tunnel-visioned nationalism to the idea of a state
liberated from future morality; and a mystical philosopher given to obfuscation
and linguistic camouflage pursued his pedantic work of “making straight the
way” for the future spiritual potential of the German people.
Martin Heidegger is the mystical voice of philosophical anti-rationalism
and unenlightenment; and in at least one respect he is like Milton’s Mammon – that
he picked his tedious way along the wood-paths of his thinking entirely
occupied with his own affairs, while the Nazi state was busy erecting a nation
of dead around him. It is obvious that Heidegger is Nietzsche’s post-cursor in
terms of method and style; because in an attempt to discover a language vehicle
appropriate to articulating un- or anti-rational thought, this thinker who “declare[s]
war on rationalism right through to the bitter end,” attempts to fuse poetry
and philosophy.
There are also interesting ‘intersections
of ideas’ between Eichmann and Heidegger, which may be indicative of a
discourse wafting on l’air du temp as
elements of a nationalist zeitgeist,
as they may be intersections of a truer, deeper philosophical persuasion. For
Eichmann, this type of thinking seems clearly to be politico-philosophical; for
Heidegger, however, whose reflections on the questions of Volk and Nation
become progressively more poignant as the war against Germany begins working
toward its dénouement, there is a marked numinous quality that shades his words
throughout.
On
total war: 18.05.1940 (p. 167)—“…our enemies, even though they have their aircraft &
armoured cars, still think along the old lines & have to rethink matters
from one day to the next. With us, however, the complete mastery of technology
has in advance produced a quite different kind of strategic thought. In
addition, the invasions are sufficiently well rehearsed. Now we will see how a
breakthrough of this new sort can also be secured & its consequences turned
to account differently from 1917 &’18. The ruthless ‘operation’ is in
itself also an unconditional commitment to the inner lawfulness of the
unconditional mechanization of warfare. The single person disappears as an
individual, but at the same time he has the opportunity to be informed of how
the whole thing stands in the quickest possible way at any day & any time.”
On
the deliberate hiddenness of Heidegger’s writing—22.05.1940
(p. 168)—“There’s no knowing when the time will come for my work to have an
‘effect’. But I believe that in the steps it takes & through the realms it
enters, it will –one day in the future when ‘philosophy’ is essential
again—have an effect, simply in the way ‘philosophy’ does have an effect,
invisibly & indirectly;”
Das
Volk, not necessarily as a material people, but as a spiritual assembly—9.06.1942 (p. 132)–in the context of German nationalists: “…we want
to try to bring together the people who share an inner bond-”
Das
Volk as a clearly material entity—02.02.1945 (p. 185)—“Yet
what really wears one down is the fate of this people, especially when thinking
beholds it in its western essence & with a destiny such as this.”
Das
Volk—17.02.1945 (p. 186) –“Over everything there
now lies a rubble of incongruity and strangeness, which is all the more
disconcerting because it was heaped by one’s own people over the hidden striving
of its own essence to grope its way to the truth.”
The
Nation—08.4.1946 (pp. 197-198)– “In everything dark
& confused about the path a providence is concealed. The unthinkable
destiny of our fatherland & the fate still in store for it is where we
belong, in the most secret of workshops, gaining ever fresh heart from the
growing knowledge.”
Heidegger also leaves us with his version
of a veiled NotaBene—When one is
anchored into the world-geist, which is the primordial Seyn of the world, then
the only means of abiding in that world-geist is through poetry, because it is
both essential [radical]—flowing from the wellsprings of the real self, and
creative.
It would seem that, at least on one level,
the problem with Men and their Ideas and their Technologies is that Human
History is the playground for all our experiments, good and bad, right and
wrong. History is replete with Frankenstein-type stories—The Garden of Eden,
Pandora’s Box, Caligula, Faust, MacBeth, Frankenstein—stories where the kernel
revolves around the notion of knowledge gone too far afield, too quickly. And
Man has not ever demonstrated that he has the spiritual or emotional maturity
to keep pace with his knowledge and linked technology.
But
then the problem of knowledge has never been whether man should possess tools or processes & methods that
allow him to delve into the unknown; rather, it has always been about spoilage
by misapplication – the slow process of taking one ‘piece’ of information and
consistently stretching it by application and misapplication until it becomes a
knowing of different things entirely, and for different reasons.
The
ideas of philosophy, for better and for worse, have never been the problem.
Rather, we Men do not seem to have the type of Will to Goodness, the Character
of Virtue, to wrap ourselves around the ideas of the world in a way that
consistently yields either Beauty or Kindness.
Further Reading:
Isaiah Berlin, “A Message to the 21st Century,” in The New York Review of Books; http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/23/message-21st-century/?insrc=hpma
Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem, Knopf, 2014;
original German 2011
Martin Heidegger; Gertrud
Heidegger, Letters to his wife, 1915-1979,
Polity Press, 2010.
David Aiken, “Praxis and Technology. Or, The Stalemate Between Knowing and Doing,” Panel
Discussion; 1997.
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