by Peter Watson
What made Heidegger’s thinking so immediately popular was that it gave respectability to the German obsession with unreason, with the rejection of urban rationalist civilization, with, in effect, a hatred of contemporary Weimar itself.23 Moreover, it gave tacit approval to those movements associated with the idea of the Volk, then being spawned, that appealed not to reason but to heroes, that called for submission in the service of an alternative will to science, to those who, in Peter Gay’s striking phrase, “thought with their blood.” Heidegger did not create the Nazis, or even the mood that led to the Nazis. But as the German theologian Paul Tillich was to write later, “It is not without some justification that the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger are connected with the anti-moral movements of fascism and national socialism.”
Martin Heidegger is remembered now as much for his involvement with the Nazis (see Chapter 34) as for Being and Time. Much less well known are two other philosophers, one of whom, certainly, is every bit as deserving of attention as Heidegger. Max Scheler, who was born in Munich in 1874 and died in Frankfurt in 1928, was—like Wilhelm Dilthey—one of those Germans we know far too little about. One man who thought he was very important was Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, whose PhD thesis in 1954 bore the title “An Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing a Christian Ethics on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler.”
Scheler’s father was a Lutheran pastor, his mother was Jewish. He tried medicine first, then philosophy and sociology under Dilthey and Simmel, taking his doctorate at Jena. He met Husserl early in the new century and married Märit Furtwängler, sister of the conductor, Wilhelm. Scheler settled in Cologne and Frankfurt, where he formed a circle with Ernst Cassirer, Karl Mannheim, and others.24
Scholarship about Scheler has been intensifying lately, not just because of the late pope’s interest but also because his arguments have relevance in the animal rights debate and the abortion dispute.
Scheler is known for two main ideas. The first centers around the phenomenon of sympathy.* The fact that sympathy exists and we cannot escape it, is for Scheler proof of God’s existence, that love is at the center of our existence, that the “heart,” not the mind determines values, and not in a rational way—values can only be felt, as colors are “seen,” without any rational explanation. The existence of sympathy means that each person is morally unique, and that—above all—we do not exist with others, we exist toward them: we should accept this and use it. His other idea was that there is an “ordre du coeur,” a hierarchy of values, from high to low as follows: values of the holy; of the mind (truth, beauty, justice); of vitality and nobility; of utility; of pleasure. Scheler thought that the mistake in most systems of ethics was to elevate one value above all others, rather than recognize that this hierarchy exists and tempers all judgments. He thought that when human beings elevate a lower value over a higher one “disorders of the heart” occur. For Scheler, reason has little to say about value (he overlapped here with Wittgenstein); instead the “heart” governs our approach to life rather than our intelligence; experience is what counts, not will. Feelings and love have a logic of their own, he said, quite different from the logic of reason. He was asserting that there is a fundamental connection among all of us, and that the work we do to render that connection stronger and clearer is the way to contentment.25
Like Dilthey, Ernst Cassirer’s main concern was to explore what was similar and what was different about the forms of knowledge we know as the sciences, on the one hand, and the humanities on the other, though he preferred the phrase “cultural sciences” instead of “humanities.” Cassirer was born in Breslau in 1874 into a cosmopolitan and well-off Jewish family. Another branch of the family lived in Berlin, where one cousin, Bruno, was a publisher and a second, Paul, a well-known art dealer.26 In 1919 Cassirer was offered two professorships himself, one in Frankfurt and one in Hamburg. He opted for the latter, and taught there for several years, becoming rector in 1929, the first Jew to hold such a position.27
Cassirer’s main book, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms), was a three-volume exploration of symbolic forms, in which he argued that moral experience and mathematical experience were essentially the same, exploring the basis that moral choices were as “necessary” as mathematical logic. To give some idea of Cassirer’s highly technical work (which approach he regarded as inevitable in the modern world), he looked at Leibniz’s and Newton’s approaches to differentiation, as a way to understand change, on a graph and applied that to change in other fields, exploring whether change—in history, for example—could be understood in a similar, or equivalent, way.28 Can other areas of life, outside mathematics, be regarded as “formal” in the same fashion? He also examined what implications Einstein’s concept of relativity had for Kantian philosophy, in that Kant had said that our understanding of space was instinctive, or intuitive, when of course Einstein’s concept of “curved” space was anything but. Cassirer’s other important book was Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (The Logic of the Cultural Sciences; 1942), which explored the similarities and differences between the natural sciences, mathematics, and aesthetics, in which he argued that “thing perception” (Dingwahrnehmen) is generally given pre-eminence over “expressive perception” (Ausdruckswahrnehmen), and this is why the natural sciences are usually felt to have “a more secure evidential basis.”29
Cassirer was forced to leave Germany in 1933. After stints at Oxford and Göteborg, he transferred to Yale and Columbia (being spurned by Harvard because, as a young man, he had turned down a visiting professorship there, considering it “too remote”). In America he wrote two books in English, including The Myth of the State, a reply to a number of German (and National Socialist) writers, in which he sought to explain fascism as arising logically from the Platonic tradition in European thought. He died tragically young after a heart attack while walking in New York in 1945. He influenced Erwin Panofsky and Peter Gay, among others.
A PATRIOT WITHOUT A COUNTRY
Weimar Germany was also blessed with what the French scholar Alain Boureau calls “a momentous generation” of historians: Ludwig von Pastor, Percy Schramm, Ernst Kantorowicz, Norbert Elias, and Gershom Scholem. Most were interested in the Middle Ages, Pastor as a Catholic version of Leopold von Ranke, who had of course written a seminal history of the popes in the early nineteenth century. Born in Aachen, Pastor’s greatest success was to persuade Pope Leo XIII of his seriousness of purpose, so that the contents of the Vatican Library—hitherto closed—were opened to him. This led to his lifetime’s work, his Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages), sixteen volumes that run from the Avignon Papacy of 1305 to Napoleon’s entry into Rome in 1799. Unlike Ranke, Pastor eschewed the institutional changes and innovations and concentrated instead on the individual incumbents. His theme was that the weakness of the papacy reflected the “flaws” of the times, and that its shortcomings were not always the weaknesses they were made out to be, enabling the popes to retain power and influence longer than would have otherwise been the case. Owing to the unprecedented access he was given, his history superseded all others and is still regarded as a seminal work.
Like Pastor, Percy Schramm and Ernst Kantorowicz were interested in the Middle Ages, but there the similarity ceases. Schramm (1894–1970) served in the army in World War I, after which he studied history and art history at Hamburg, Munich, and Heidelberg. He is generally credited with making art history a much harder, more interesting, and more powerful discipline than it was originally, less dilettante-like, showing how, in his most important book, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio (Emperor, Rome and Renovatio), the German emperors of the medieval period had used the symbolism of the Romans to underwrite their power. In World War II, Schramm volunteered for service and was made official staff historian for the German High Command Operational Staff. His book Hitler als militärischer Führer (Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader), pu
blished in 1963, stresses the good side of the Führer as well as the negatives.30 Schramm saw a lot of Hitler and was close to General Alfred Jodl, acting as a witness in Jodl’s support at the Nuremberg Trials after the war, and was removed from teaching. He was reinstated in the late 1940s, and his inside accounts of the high command have become required reading.
Ernst Kantorowicz had many of the same interests as Schramm and a not dissimilar approach but, being Jewish, his fate was very different. After four years in the army in World War I, he studied philosophy at Berlin. An extreme right-winger, he joined the militia that attempted to put down the Spartacist uprising, and became involved with the Georgekreis, the artists and intellectuals devoted to Stefan George (see 574). This group, elitist and culturally conservative, had a big influence on Kantorowicz’s first important book, a biography of Frederick II, which examined the king’s charisma and spiritual qualities, rather than getting involved in the minutiae of the institutions of his rule.
By then it was the 1930s and although Kantorowicz had been appointed professor at Frankfurt, he was forced out, moving to Oxford at first, like Cassirer, then on to Berkeley. There he became known for two things, for refusing to sign the oath of loyalty demanded by Senator Joe McCarthy (Kantorowicz resigned from Berkeley and moved to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton), and for his second masterpiece, The King’s Two Bodies, which sought to explain the birth of the modern state as growing out of the medieval conceit that a king possessed two bodies, one that was human and died, and another that was immortal and passed “mystically” from monarch to monarch.31
The fourth of this great generation, Norbert Elias, was also Jewish. Like Schramm and Kantorowicz, he also volunteered to fight in World War I, serving as a telegrapher. His interest in the German Zionist movement brought him into touch with the likes of Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, Leo Lowenthal, and Gershom Scholem.32 He took courses at Heidelberg with both Karl Jaspers and Alfred Weber, later moving to Frankfurt to work under Karl Mannheim and be near the Frankfurt Institute. In 1933 he had to flee Germany before his thesis could be presented; he went first to Paris and then on to Britain in 1935, where he started work on his most important contribution, The Civilising Process. This appeared in 1939 but, because of other events, wasn’t noticed until much later, and for that reason is discussed in Chapter 40.33
Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the youngest of the golden generation, was born in Berlin and studied mathematics, philosophy, and Hebrew at the university there, where he came into contact with Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Gottlob Frege. Sympathetic to Zionism, he immigrated to Palestine in 1923, becoming in time head of the department of Hebrew and Judaica at the National Library of Israel.34 He was interested in Kabbalah and mysticism, feeling that Judaism had mystical origins and could not be properly understood without that element.35 He tried to construct a narrative of Jewish belief which concluded that, contrary to what many Jews believed, the ultimate form of their religion was not achieved until relatively recent times, the Middle Ages, when Maimonides attempted a final reconciliation between Jewish thought and Greek thought. This was an important achievement of theological scholarship though by now, back in the Weimar Republic, hardly anyone was listening.
33.
Weimar: “A Problem in Need of a Solution”
On October 28, 1929, the notorious stock market crash occurred on Wall Street, and U.S. loans to Europe were suspended. In the weeks and months that followed, and despite the misgivings of many, Allied troops withdrew from the Rhineland. In Thuringia Wilhelm Frick was about to become the first Nazi to be appointed minister in a state government, while in Italy Benito Mussolini was clamoring for the revision of the Versailles Treaty. In Britain in 1931 a National Government was formed to help balance the budget, and Japan abandoned the gold standard. There was a widespread feeling of crisis.
Sigmund Freud, then seventy-three, had more personal reasons to feel pessimistic. In 1924 he had undergone two operations for cancer of the mouth. After the operation he could chew and speak only with difficulty (the prostheses didn’t work properly), but he still refused to stop smoking, probably the cause of the cancer in the first place.1 At the end of 1929, as Wall Street was crashing, Freud delivered the most telling of his cultural critiques. Totem und Tabu (Totem and Taboo) and Die Zukunft einer Illusion (The Future of an Illusion) both had mixed receptions, but Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) was much more timely. There had been famine in Austria and attempted revolution and mega-inflation in Germany, while capitalism appeared to have collapsed in America. The devastation and moral degeneration of World War I was still a concern to many people, Hitler was on the rise. Wherever you looked, Freud’s title fitted the facts.2
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud developed some of the ideas he had explored in Totem and Taboo, in particular that society—civilization—evolves out of the need to curb the individual’s unruly sexual and aggressive appetites. He now argued that civilization, suppression, and neurosis are inescapably intertwined because the more civilization there is, the more suppression of the instincts is needed and, as a direct result, the more neurosis. Man, he said, cannot help but become more and more unhappy in civilization, which explains why so many seek refuge in drink, drugs, or religion. Given this basic predicament, it is the individual’s “psychical constitution” that determines how any individual adjusts. For example, “The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships with other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental process.” We are, he insisted, progressively more and more cut off—alienated—from each other. The point of his book, he said, was not to offer easy panaceas but to suggest that ethics—the rules by which men agree to live together—can benefit from psychoanalytic understanding.
Freud’s hopes were not to be fulfilled. The 1930s, as we know now, were, as one historian put it, a “dark valley” ethically.3 Not surprisingly, therefore, his book spawned a raft of others that, though very different, were all profoundly uneasy with Western capitalist society.
The book closest to Freud’s was published in 1933 by the former crown prince of psychoanalysis, now turned archrival. Carl Jung’s argument in Modern Man in Search of a Soul was that psychoanalysis, by replacing the soul with the psyche, only offered a palliative.4 Psychoanalysis, as a technique, could only be used on an individual basis; it could not become “organized” and used to help millions at a time, such as, for example, Catholicism. And so, the “participation mystique,” as the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called it, was a whole dimension of life closed to modern man. This lack of a collective life, ceremonies of the whole as Hugo von Hofmannsthal called them, was the main ingredient in neurosis, and the general anxiety.
For fifteen years, Karen Horney practiced in Weimar Germany as an orthodox Freudian analyst, alongside Melanie Klein, Otto Fenichel, Franz Alexander, Karl Abraham, and Wilhelm Reich at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Only after she moved to the United States, first as associate director of the Chicago Institute and then in New York, at the New School for Social Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, did she find herself capable of offering criticism of the founder of the movement. Her book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, overlapped with both Freud and Jung but was also an attack on capitalistic society for the way it induced neurosis.
Horney’s chief criticism of Freud was his antifeminist bias (her early papers included “The Dread of Women” and “The Denial of the Vagina”).5 She was also a Marxist and thought Freud too biological in outlook and “deeply ignorant” of modern anthropology and sociology. Horney took the line that “there is no such thing as a universal normal psychology.” For her, however, two traits invariably characterized all neurotics. The first was “rigidity in reaction,” and the second was “a discrepancy between potentiality and achievement.” Horney didn’t believe in the Oe
dipus complex either. She preferred the notion of “basic anxiety,” which she attributed not to biology but to the conflicting forces of society, conflicts that act on an individual from childhood. Basic anxiety she characterized as a feeling of “being small, insignificant, helpless, endangered, in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, attack, humiliate, betray, envy.” Such anxiety is worse, she said, when parents fail to give their children warmth and affection. Such a child grows up with one of four rigid ways of approaching life, which interfere with achievement: a neurotic striving for affection; a neurotic striving for power; neurotic withdrawal; and neurotic submissiveness.
The most contentious part of Horney’s theory was her blaming neurosis on the contradictions of contemporary American life. She insisted that in America more than anywhere else there existed an inherent contradiction between competition and success on the one hand (“never give a sucker an even break”) and good neighborliness on the other (“love your neighbor as yourself”); between the promotion of ambition by advertising (“keeping up with the Joneses”) and the inability of the individual to satisfy these ambitions. This modern world, despite its material advantages, foments the feeling in many individuals that they are “isolated and helpless.”
FROM HEGEL TO HITLER
In 1924, the year that tuberculosis killed Kafka, Adolf Hitler celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday—in prison. He was not sent back to Austria, but was in Landsberg jail, west of the Bavarian capital, serving a five-year sentence for treason and his part in the Munich Putsch of 1923. The trial was front-page news in every German newspaper for more than three weeks, and Hitler broke through to a national audience. During his time in prison Hitler wrote the first part of Mein Kampf, which helped establish him as the leader of the National Socialists, helped him lay the foundation of the Hitler myth, and helped him clarify his ideas.
