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In Defense of German Idealism

1947; Routledge; Volume: 22; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/19306962.1947.11786333

1930-6962

E. M. Fleissner,

Critical Theory and Philosophy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesJohn Dewey: “On Understanding the Mind of Germany,” The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1916; reprinted as “The Mind of Germany” in Characters and Events (Henry Holt and Co., 1929), I, 130–48.This viewpoint is ably presented in “Approaches to the German Problem” by Hannah Arendt, The Partisan Review, winter, 1945. Her thesis is that “Nazism is actually the breakdown of all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad.” Cf. also Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism.The Macmillan Co., 1946. For an analysis similar to Northrop’s and anticipating his conclusions in many ways, see: John Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics (Henry Holt and Co., 1915). In a revised edition of 1942 Dewey added a chapter on the ideology of National Socialism in which he compared Hegel’s Vernunft to Hitler’s Volksinstinkt and maintained that, although Hitler himself hardly knew German idealistic philosophy and made his appeal to “the baser elements,” nevertheless his success depended largely on the German people’s familiarity with and acceptance of certain doctrines of German Idealism.Dewey, “The Mind of Germany,” p. 142.Fichte’s Addresses to the German People, Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen in its unrevised form are extreme examples.German admission of this sense of inferiority refers, for example, to the German lack of political sense, the servility of the Germans, their lack of unity, their inclination to overrate and imitate what is foreign, etc. German self-criticism can be as extreme as German self-praise. In a way, German Idealism itself arose from an aversion against the humiliating German political situation. Freedom and unity were sought in the Absolute since reality lacked both.An example is the German writer Ernst Wiechert.“Through the entire nineteenth century the spiritual leader of German thought was not Hegel but Friedrich Schiller, a humanist if ever there was one, and a believer in the nobility of mankind.” Konrad Heiden, Der Führer (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1944), p. 237.Georg W. F. Hegel, Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1920), VII, 128.George P. Gooch, Germany (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), p. 17.“There is an immense capacity for development latent in the German people,” Naumann declared in his lectures on the German Parties delivered in 1910, “which only awaits the overthrow of the parties of the Right. The word self-government signified in the mouth of the old Liberalism not merely a scheme of franchise but the will of every individual in his parish, in his province, in his nation to have his share of political activity. Thus arose in Germany the great idea of a political people in which each member possesses an importance of his own. We parties of the Left must hold fast to our conviction that the idea of nationality will only reach its full height if it is saturated with the conception of free, self-goveming citizenship.” (Quoted by G. P. Gooch, ibid., p. 107.) During the First World War Naumann wrote Mitteleuropa, which discredited him in the eyes of the west because of his demand for German leadership in a federated Central Europe. But although he yielded thus far to the war aspirations of the German political leaders, his major aim remained rather the coöperation of Germany with other states for the benefit of the whole than an increase of German power as such. He opposed annexations and remained true to the principles of democratic government. After the war he became the spokesman of the deutsche demokratische Partei and a loyal supporter of the Weimar Republic.Op. cit., p. 207 f.“For a period Hegelian thought was almost supreme in Germany (i.e., at German universities). Then its rule passed away almost as rapidly as it had been achieved.” John Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, first ed., p. 119.Cf. Konrad Heiden, op. cit According to him it is Chamberlain and not Hegel whose ideas, with Imperial favor, corrupted the intellectuals.For example, Hegel’s influence on Treitschke and Karl Marx is well known. Through them, some of his ideas reached two such different elements of the German population as the Prussian conservatives and the radical laboring class, and furnished both with a pseudo-philosophical basis for their political aspirations. I call it pseudo-philosophical because certain Hegelian conclusions were adopted dogmatically without a clear understanding of his philosophy as a whole. In the case of Treitschke, Hegel’s conception of the state was utilized to defend power politics within and without; in Marx, Hegel’s dialectic evolution of history was used to prove the inevitability of socialism. Hegel’s philosophy of history and of the state lends itself to one-sided interpretation because it is not in harmony with some of his basic notions (the timeless reality of reason, the necessity of spiritual freedom, the continuity of organic evolution). “The infinite in concreteness threatens to slip into the finiteness of the historically given—one sees the Absolute Spirit embodied in political realities, as, for example, in Hegel’s philosophical glorification of the Prussian state of his day.” (R. Hoenigswald; “Philosophy of Hegelianism” in Twentieth Century Philosophy [Philosophical Library, 1947], p. 273). These inconsistencies remain in check if they are considered in the light of his whole system. Detached, they easily turn into dogmas which, to my mind, Hegel himself would have repudiated.G. Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (Scribner’s Sons, no date), p II.Johann G. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Leipzig, 1871), p. 92.Fichte’s emphasis on education influenced Lassalle, the German socialist.Fichte, op. cit., pp. 166–7.“Aus allem geht hervor, daß der Staat als bloßes Regiment des im gewöhnlichen friedlichen Ganzen fortschreitenden menschlichen Lebens nichts Erstes und für sich Seiendes, sondern daß er bloß das Mittel ist für den hÖhem Zweck der ewig gleichmäßig fortgehenden Ausbildung des rein Menschlichen in dieser Nation; daß es allein das Gesicht und die Liebe dieser ewigen Fortbildung ist, welche immerfort auch in ruhigen Zeiten die höhere Aufsicht über die Staatsverwaltung führen soll, und welche, wo die Selbständigkeit des Volks in Gefahr ist, allein dieselbe zu retten vermag.” Ibid., p. 106.Fichte’s son, in the introduction to the Reden, states that the Reden bad an immediate emotional effect at the time of their delivery, but that their intellectual content was persistently overlooked. In 1824, their renewed publication in Prussia was forbidden by the then reactionary govemment and called “ein verführerisches, leere Phantome nährendes Buch.”Cf. footnote 25 on page 281, also quotation from Hegel, p. 283 below. Professor Dewey speaks of Fichte’s “ethical socialism” and describes Fichte’s ideas as follows: “The ultimate goal is a universal state as wide as humanity, and a state in which each individual will act freely, without state-secured rights and state-imposed obligations. But before this cosmopolitan and philosophically anarchic condition can be reached, we must pass through a period of the nationalistic closed state….Only through the educational activities of the State and its complete regulation of the industrial activities of its members does the potential moral freedom of individuals become an established reality.” (John Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics, first ed., p. 75.).Fichte, The Vocation of Man, The Open Court Publishing Co., 1940.Northrop’s interpretation confuses two things: it transfers the unconditioned freedom of the absolute will, i.e., of reason itself, to the empirical will of the individual.Cf. the introduction to Fichte’s Reden which quotes from Fichte’s Politische Fragmente, where he speaks of a German Republic which should be founded on “die absolute Gleichheit der Stände, während die nicht zu vermeidende Ungleichheit der Individuen, offenkundig und vor aller Augen, nur durch die Verschiedenheit der Fähigkeiten herbeigeführt werden solle.”Characters and Events, I, 144 f.It seems to me more like the will in Schopenhauer’s philosophy than in Fichte’s, detached from Schopenhauer’s negative attitude to it. Dewey’s definition makes no sense with regard to the everyday meaning of Wille in German, which is the same as in America.Fichte, Werke, Auswahl in sechs Bänden (Leipzig, 1912), VI, 446, 447, 448.Benedetto Croce, Germany and Europe (Random House, 1944), p. 57.Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (Simon and Schuster, 1945), chapter “Hegel,” pp. 738–9.Hegel, Werke, VIII, 247.“Das Prinzip des Geistes….ist zu einem Reiche des wirklichen Geistes ausgebildet worden. Diese Gestalt kann als die germanische Welt bezeichnet, die Nationen, denen der Weltgeist dies sein wahrhaftes Prinzip aufgetragen hat, können germanische genannt werden.” (Ibid., p. 244).Ibid., VII, 29.In Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe there is an account of a conversation between Goethe and Hegel (October 18, 1827). In discussing Hegel’s Dialektik, Goethe said: “Wenn nur solche geistigen Künste und Gewandtheiten nicht häufig gemißbraucht und dazu verwendet würden, um das Falsche wahr und das Wahre falsch zu machen.” “Dergleichen geschieht wohl,” erwiderte Hegel, “aber nur von Leuten, die geistig krank sind.”Northrop once contradicts himself partially and declares: “the culture of the Nazis may be defined as a Fichtean voluntarism which … . is developed along Nietzschean and pseudo-Darwinian, rather than Hegelian, lines” (p. 214 f.). This admission underscores the controversial character of his whole argument.My last quotation from Northrop, which assumes the same German spirit of aggression in the First World War as in the Second, although historians have long distributed the guilt for the first conflict among all the nations concerned, is another case in point.Santayana, op. cit.Croce, op. cit., p. 55.Heiden, op. cit., p. 216. Heiden, however, stresses Fichte’s “classic humanism” and “enthusiasm for liberty.”Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, Zürich and Wiesbaden, 1946.The political trend toward unrestrained nationalism in Germany borrowed its arguments from heterogeneous sources, but its truly sustaining basis was economic rather than philosophical.