When German Philosophers Became Apologists for the Nazis | A Brief History of Things

The truth is the reverse: National Socialism emerged precisely as the social function and cultural role philosophy had carried were being sharply weakened.

German philosophy produced towering figures by the score, yet it not only failed to bring its intellectual weight to bear against the National Socialist movement the German Nazis launched — a good many of its members became apologists and cheerleaders for the Nazis instead, in what is remembered as a moment of shame for German intellectual life. How all this happened, how philosophy and politics came to resonate in Nazi Germany, what the Nazis' philosophical apologists were after, and how they came to endorse the National Socialist movement, remain absorbing questions to this day.

Nor should the significance be confined to Germany; it is something all of humanity should keep in mind. Contexts and philosophical tools differ from case to case, but the themes the Nazis' apologists fixed on when they probed the philosophical meaning of Germany's National Socialist "revolution" — crisis, nation, leadership, and order — still apply broadly across time and place, and can still serve as a bridge from ideas to action.

Take a longer view of history and you find that active political engagement was not just the norm for German philosophy; German philosophers also grasped the importance of that engagement more keenly than their Western counterparts did. German philosophy even acted as the shaper and midwife of German nationalism, a part its British and French counterparts could not play — and, to put it the other way round, a part they never had to shoulder.

With the rise of modern nationalism, myths of national superiority have long competed with one another. The British, the French, the Italians, the Americans, the Germans, and the Japanese have all produced them. To the American scholar Hans Sluga, what most sets the German version of this myth-making apart is its reliance on philosophical concepts. No other modern nation developed a "metaphysics" of its own nationhood in this way. German nationalism arose at a moment when there was no nation-state and no proper political order to channel and contain nationalist feeling. Germans were forced instead to fall back on literary, poetic, and philosophical means to make sense of it. The idea of the nation, the idea that Germans had a distinctive mission in the world, became the concept that tied politics to philosophy and drew philosophers into making political claims.

The pioneer here was the German philosopher Fichte. In his famous Addresses to the German Nation, Fichte distilled and stated, in striking fashion, the concepts and themes — crisis, nation, leadership, and order — that would recur again and again in the distinctively German strain of philosophical and political argument that followed. The Addresses appeared shortly after Prussia's defeat by France in 1807; Fichte believed a moment of crisis had arrived in the history of the German people. That crisis was at once political and philosophical, and it bore above all on the Germans and their understanding of themselves: it was a crisis of leadership, of the kind that rebuilding a true order demands. Re-educating the German people was the first thing the crisis required, and that in turn required excellent educators — that is, philosophers. The education was to include instruction in the "moral world order," an order only true German philosophy could reveal.

Beyond these ideas, Fichte believed in the primordial character of the Germans and their language, in the line to be drawn between German and non-German, and in the notion that the Germans' unique mission lay in doing philosophy and staying close to Greek culture. His own mission, as he saw it, was to discover the true philosophical order, to resolve the crisis through a new system of education, and to educate students thoroughly through science, practical labor, and military service. Even as he packed these ideas into a single philosophical-political address, he expected the themes to be worked out in full later on. One sees them carried forward in the addresses of philosophers such as Heidegger in 1933. In this sense at least, Hans Sluga notes, Fichte can be called a "forerunner of the Nazis."

This philosophical inquiry into German character was pursued right through the 19th century, renewed in the chaos of the First World War, and finally "carried forward" once more under the Third Reich.

Early in the First World War, an ideological conflict broke out among intellectuals from all the warring nations. For Germany's philosophical apologists, the problem of joining philosophy to politics remained the problem of German identity and of the Germans' mission in the world. As German philosophers saw it, the Germans were pursuing a third way of being in the world, a path between the British and the Slavs, "to guard against incursion by the Russians and the yellow race while at the same time resisting the odious commercial nature of the Anglo-Americans." Intellectuals in every belligerent country overstated their case during the war, but the postwar effect of that rhetoric differed entirely from country to country. The victors turned to other business, and their wartime nationalist propaganda was soon forgotten, or banned in disgrace. In defeated Germany, though, the yearnings and ideas of 1914 lingered in many minds as an unkept promise. Defeat produced not sobriety but resentment, and an even more urgent desire to press the questions of German identity, Germany's place in the world, and Germany's true nature — while the chaos of the Weimar Republic that followed fed still hotter argument about, and hope for, order and strong leadership.

When the National Socialist movement led by Hitler arose, the German philosopher Hermann Schwarz and others stepped forward without hesitation to declare that German philosophy was bound to hold the central place in the new world then taking shape: because National Socialism needed a foundation in philosophy; because the national values on which the nation's unity rested needed philosophical confirmation; because the experience of common blood needed to be clarified in the philosophical language of mysticism and idealism; and because German identity, the special mission of the German people, and the essence of German character could be stated clearly only in philosophical terms.

So, in Hans Sluga's view, when Heidegger spoke in his rectoral address of the German people's unique spiritual mission, he was not opening a new discussion but joining one that already had a long history. And beyond their fixation on German national character, German philosophers from Fichte to Heidegger were unshakably sure of their own "leadership" role: they took themselves for the "philosopher-kings" of the age.

Set against the philosophers' enthusiasm, the Nazi politicians were always half-hearted about this marriage of politics and philosophy. Facing the disorder of Weimar politics, the Nazi Party worked hard to leave the impression that, unlike other parties, the movement it represented and led could rise above all the usual political divisions. Since the party's interest in action and power was thoroughly opportunistic, National Socialism had no particular need of philosophy at all — and what appeal could philosophy hold, full of preaching, ill-mannered polemic, abstract reasoning, and a distinctly specialized air, for military adventurers like Röhm and Göring?

A Nazi political movement founded on activism did not really need philosophers to take part. What it stressed was decisive action and will, which also explains why Hitler and Rosenberg were fascinated by Schopenhauer, who painted reality as one vast struggle of the will. For the same reason the Nazis embraced Fichte and Nietzsche, who had each celebrated, in very different ways, the primacy of action. Even with that affinity, the Nazi leaders never built their politics on a philosophical foundation. The truth is the reverse: National Socialism emerged precisely as the social function and cultural role philosophy had carried were being sharply weakened. Judging by its disdain for philosophy, Hans Sluga argues, National Socialism was indeed a movement of the new century.

In time, of course, National Socialism did not confine itself to being a political movement. As it grew, it had to find legitimacy and justification for its claim to power, and so it needed a fitting set of philosophical ideas — what they usually called their own "worldview."

Yet the Nazi "worldview" had no roots in philosophy, and the Nazi political authorities were better qualified than the philosophers to pass judgment on it. The idea drew not only on 19th-century Romanticism, utopianism, popular myth, mystical belief, and irrational anti-modernism, but also on sciences and branches of knowledge that were, to varying degrees, better established or more respected than philosophy. As one historian of philosophy has put it: "The National Socialist worldview sought its grounding in specific disciplines such as history, geopolitics, race theory, genetic biology, characterology, and folklore — in everything except philosophy." Hitler, for one, took himself to be devoted first of all to history and politics; he was also proud of knowing psychology and biology, and kept up a considerable interest in art. The same went for Rosenberg, who showed an active interest in history and art. Neither man put his own ideas in the vocabulary of philosophy.

In Hans Sluga's view, the philosophers of Nazi Germany tried in vain to fuse philosophy and politics, treating politics as a kind of applied philosophy, and failed to see that every political choice — including the choice of a political system — is "pragmatic, arbitrary, and provisional." Neither the philosophers nor the politicians of Nazi Germany, however, would openly admit that philosophy and politics are plainly distinct. To admit it would have meant philosophers losing their influence in politics, and politicians losing the philosophical grounds for their political work. Neither German philosophers nor Nazi leaders wanted to see the two come apart.

Yet this marriage of convenience brought nothing but ruin and disgrace: the German philosophers' fixation on German national character came to be treated as the ideological basis of the Nazi racial genocide, though the connection was never that direct; their endless talk of moments of crisis, of order, and of leadership came to be treated as an endorsement of totalitarianism, though that was never what the German philosophers intended either.

What lesson should we take from this? Perhaps the one Hans Sluga draws in Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany: the point is not to try, vainly, to cut the tie between philosophy and politics, but to show — by dissecting the disastrous marriage of the two in Nazi Germany — that philosophers have no standing to set authoritative standards for political action. The better posture for philosophers entering politics is a critical one. Philosophy's real task in politics, in other words, is not to justify or guide the existing order but to sketch out new, alternative possibilities for practice.

Recommended reading: Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany

Cover image: Fichte, source: Wikipedia

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