~by David Aiken~
In the hallways of history there happened a meeting of minds between a
philosophically illuminated poet, a toadying technocrat, and a mystical
philosopher 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….”
The poet-philosopher gave prophetic voice to a foundation myth about the
supposed origins, and especially the decline, of morality in the west.
Bespeaking an obviously accurate psychological insight, or perhaps it was more
truly a philosophical intuition, about the invention and breakdown of morality,
Nietzsche’s genealogical myth would subsequently inspire certain knavish and
benighted folks who, some 30 years after his death in 1900, would use his
philosophical framings as political 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,”
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 the realization of human
engineered death on a mass scale.
The last of the protagonists in our all-too-human drama from the hallways
of History, Heidegger, the mystical voice of philosophical anti-rationalism and
unenlightenment, or obscurantism, continued mulishly to trace his career path within
the framework of this technocratic ideology, unhindered. 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.”
We backward-viewers of this dramatic meeting of minds 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.
From the perspective of
Nietzsche’s definition of morality, this latter realization would also seem to suggest
for our contemporary consideration that, in a world becoming progressively
post-“moral,” the reinvention of a supposed Greek ideal/idyll, which occurred
at the historico-philosophical juncture of our three actors, is perhaps not
only impossible, but also ultimately undesirable. For in the face of those like
Eichmann and Heidegger and other ideologues who appear regularly on the world’s
stages, and who seek to embody Nation and Race as material and therefore intuitively
“natural” moral values, perhaps, when all the cosmic dust has settled, we may
be 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 reasoned sort. It is a
retroscopic myth, much like Plato’s Republic,
which harks back to the putative roots of moral ideas and moral 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 wrong-headed
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, such as in Jesus’ “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
mentally and physically feeble, 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 life to come hereafter—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 over and against another
man’s or a god’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, the weaker,
went to war against the naturally Virtuous Man. Out of a sense of outrage and a
desire for revenge (Nietzsche’s ressentiment),
the Priest and those inspired by the Priest waged war upon the strong and able.
The priestly had understood that not all men are excellent warriors, or
cunning, or highly valued contenders on the stage of humanly conceived time;
and they understood that they themselves were lacking in these natural
qualities. These priestly “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 of 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 reflection on the birth
of “morals” as a nihilistic redefinition of “virtue”; it is a retelling of a 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 into an existence tale.
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 existential myth a
future breakdown of this naysayer “morality.” Nietzsche’s rumination is not an
attempt at an applied ethic of any sort; rather, it is the mythical theory of an
historical rise, and then the modern fall, of a “moral” system that for lo
these many long Christian centuries has been articulating a parallel 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
a reasonably plausible genealogical accounting, and that some version of a changeling
event occurred in the history of western ideas; and what if one were also to accept
the obvious Nietzschean 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 that this must especially be a work for 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—‘struggle
for the survival of the most ‘fit’’—worldview as the frame for human action, on
the one hand, and the cogency of a prophetic myth, on the other hand, wherein the
religious mythological framing for human value is perceived as ultimately unmenschlich because it is decidedly anti-Life?
But then comes the Crito moment of incomprehension. Because although the world
listened attentively to this wedded philosophical concoction that Eichmann
argued for at his trial, that audience slowly came to the realization that
Eichmann was no Socratic man of wisdom, for he arrived at conclusions
diametrically opposed to those drawn by Socrates in Plato’s 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. And it is on this philosophical question that Eichmann
sided with Crito against Socrates. Eichmann argued not only that the physical
life of a valuable group—the German nation, is a grounded and worthwhile value,
but also that the survival of the preferred group is justified, when historical
manifest destiny requires it, 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. Plato certainly expects his audience to side with
Socrates’ reasoning against Crito. But then, 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 that evil may be banal in its manifestations, it certainly 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 total and global, 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 in Eichmann’s apology: 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 in Eichmann’s apology: Moral thinking in the West
leads to the conclusion that the individual must be obedient 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 in Eichmann’s apology: 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 in Eichmann’s apology: conclusions about
national character (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), Hannah Arendt, who was a classically
trained philosopher, was only able to see an Eichmann who used 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.
As we see in the Crito,
there are two sides to the Platonic equation. Heads: Socrates; tales: Crito.
So, at the end of the day, Eichmann simply disagreed with Plato’s pro-Socratic conclusion,
valuing Crito’s thinking about the life of ‘the good’, instead of Socrates’
dogmatic assertion that “the just 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 us Western thinkers in 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 this
historical meeting of minds—a meeting at which an illuminated German poet-philosopher,
Nietzsche, fantasized about an alleged moral battle of ideas in our Western historical
past, and then prophesied about a free-thinking future for those with the
courage of their philosophical insight. At that same historical meeting of
minds was a toadying technocrat, Eichmann, who had delusions of philosophy
designing and engineering a eugenic future for the German state, who added his
own special ingredient of materialism and tunnel-visioned nationalism to the
idea of a state liberated from future morality. And then there was Heidegger—a mystical
philosopher given to obfuscation and linguistic camouflage, who pursued his
pedantic work of “making straight the way” for the future spiritual and
intellectual potential of a very material incarnation 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 woodsy paths and by-ways of his thinking entirely occupied with his own
affairs, while the Nazi state was busy erecting a nation of corpses 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,” thought to fuse poetry and
philosophy to create a new abode for Thinking.
There are interesting ‘intersections of
ideas’ between Eichmann and Heidegger, which may have been indicative of a
discourse wafting on l’air du temp as
elements of a nationalist zeitgeist,
as they may also 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.
Heidegger on total war: 18.05.1940 (p. 167)—“…our enemies,
even though they have their aircraft & armored 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.”
Heidegger on the deliberate hiddenness of his
philo-poetic writings—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;”
Heidegger on das Volk, not necessarily as a literal
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-”
Heidegger on das Volk as a clearly material or
essentialist 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.”
Heidegger on 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.”
Heidegger on 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 each and every human experiment, 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, and for
different ends. Knowledge in the hands of Socrates, framed through his vision
of the just man, will thrive differently than knowledge in the hands of Crito,
who is ready to do just about everything to keep the physical body alive in the
world for just a little while longer.
For
better and for worse, the ideas of philosophy have never been the problem.
Rather, we Men do not seem to have the type of Will to Goodness and Justice,
the Character of Virtue, to wrap ourselves around the ideas of the world in a
way that consistently yields either Beauty or Kindness.
(Reprised from a blog version posted
November 1, 2014)
Phrontisterion on Heidegger:
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-naked-messiah-martin-heidegger.html
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.com/2018/01/charlie-hebdos-great-heidegger-debate.html
· http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/02/heidegger-treacherous-millesime.html
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/04/heideggers-greek-inversions-reversals.html
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/11/my-nights-without-heidegger-editorial.html
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2016/04/martin-heideggeris-lady-philosophys.html
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2012/08/martin-heidegger-state.html
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2017/02/potpourri-from-charlie-hebdo-november.html
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/08/august-septembers-essayvoices-on.html
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/2014/11/novembers-essaynietzsche-eichmann-and.html
·
http://nonimprimatur.blogspot.fr/p/blog-page_24.html
Resources and 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.
·
http://triggs.djvu.org/djvu-editions.com/MILTON/LOST/Download.pdf
