We consider it necessary and timely, therefore, to ask how the effect of becoming part of a mass on an individual is related to the essentially different elevation and inspiration that he experiences by being sheltered in a genuine community. Many confuse mass and community, and think that they see a return to genuine community in the growing tendency to make the individual part of a mass.
A mass is quite distinct from the various forms of genuine community like the family, the state, the nation, and the Church. First of all, in a mass, individuals are accidentally and un-organically lined up next to each other; they are thrown together without any inner principle of unity. In every community, on the other hand, there is a definite principle of unity, based on the realm of meaning at its core in the context of which individuals encounter one another.
Each community has a definite theme that forms it interiorly and gives it its particular countenance. Individuals belong to communities in a variety of ways, depending upon its theme. The family appeals to one aspect and stratum of the person, the state appeals to another, and the nation to yet another. A mass, however, lacks the structure provided by such an element of meaning; it is an accidental, unformed conglomeration of people which does not constitute any definite spiritual space in which each person has an ordered function comparable to that of citizen or subject, father or mother, brother or sister, and so on.
Second, linked to this distinction is the fact that the individuals in a mass possess a uniform role. Each person is, so to speak, the same as everybody else. In contrast to this, each individual in the community possesses a different, definite, and clearly delineated function. The community does not impose uniformity upon the individual, but rather (all solidarity notwithstanding) preserves the individuality of each person untouched. A mass, however, robs each person of his individuality, categorizing everyone as “average.”
Third, a mass has a destructive effect on the human being as a spiritual person: it makes him irresponsible. The individual loses himself in a mass; he loses his head; he surrenders himself to something dark, intangible, and anonymous. In the community, he is dealing with something constant and tangible, something which appeals to him as a spiritual person, gives him a definite responsibility, and confers upon him rights and obligations. In communities structured with authority, the authority can relieve the individual of the responsibility for certain decisions. His position is one of conscious obedience, which he puts into practice as a free spiritual person—he does not simply “let himself go.”
If we ask which aspects in the human person are awakened by being in a mass and how the individual is influenced as an element of a mass, the answer will always be: by sub-rational aspects and illegitimate forms of influence. The individual does not react with his own spirit when he is a part of a mass. He is not convinced by sound arguments or evident intuitions, but is instead swept along by suggestion and purely dynamic influences. A certain sensational atmosphere of the mass situation opens the floodgates to every illegitimate influence. Just as certain speakers can talk only when surrounded by this atmosphere and perform like a prima donna only in front of a mass, so too the listener is infected by his surroundings. There is an uncontrollable urge to imitate; the cheaper a slogan and the baser its appeal, the more receptive will the mass be to it.
Enthusiasm without an objective basis, unfounded indignation, and cheap emotion can all be found here. The same slogans, the same pseudo-pathos, the same dynamic effects which leave a person unaffected when he is alone in his accustomed surroundings, can “trigger” him if they are presented to him when he is in a mass gathering of people.
Genuine community is completely different. Here the individual retains his customary critical distance vis-à-vis all ideas and thoughts that are presented to him, and the community milieu makes him even more conscious and responsible. The principle of unity on which the community is based appeals—and the higher the community, the stronger the appeal—to the human being as a spiritual person and orients him in a special way to certain issues and realms. Through his membership in a community, his spiritual eye takes particular note of everything which belongs to the theme of that community. But this does not make him more predisposed to illegitimate influences, to being captured by the power of suggestion, or to being dynamically “swept along.” His consciousness as a member of a family, as a citizen, and so on makes him even more aware and more critical with regard to every question that touches on the theme of the respective community.
Communities are a beneficial spiritual help because they provide a spiritual space in which individuals can gain better insight and achieve greater clarity in matters that would have been more difficult to grasp on their own. This is not to be confused with the illegitimate, uncritical attitude that goes hand in hand with being taken over by a mass. A community unites human beings as spiritual persons in an ordered, meaningful way and is a great support and help for its individual members in forming resolutions, in developing a readiness to perform heroic deeds, and in holding fast to one’s convictions. The support of the community does not make individuals immature, nor does it rob them of their responsibility, nor does it function as a substitute for legitimate conviction. Instead, it creates a spiritual space which facilitates insight into ideas, because this space is itself shaped and formed by these very ideas, helping one to draw the consequences that flow from them. Objectifying a certain spiritual content which lives, for example, in a family or religious order serves to strengthen the individual and gives him special support.
It would be entirely wrong to take the influence of a milieu which operates on an intuitive level (rather than on the level of intellectual cognition) and equate it with the illegitimate, sub-rational element of suggestion. The antithesis that concerns us here is not between intellectual insight and intuitive experiencing or between explicit insight and gradual, unconscious absorption, but between the legitimate understanding of something (in whatever fashion) and being illegitimately, dynamically “swept along” by a sub-rational suggestion or “succumbing” to it when only a momentary, superficial influence has been exerted.
The higher a community’s realm of meaning is, the more will it be concerned with the ultimate meaning and authentic destiny of the individual. In the supernatural community of the corpus Christi mysticum, the ultimate meaning of the community coincides with that of the human being. In general, the person comes into his full personality only in a community; hence in this highest of all communities, he fulfils his ultimate meaning as an individual person to the degree that he is fully a member of it. This community constitutes the utmost antithesis to a mass. But as we have seen, even the communities which are based on lower realms of meaning are also entirely distinct from a mass.
As soon as a community attempts to be more than its realm of meaning objectively permits—as soon as totalitarian tendencies begin to take hold in a state or nation, or their significance is exaggerated by being deified—the danger of the individual being taken over by a mass inevitably arises. What a community, given its particular essence, cannot achieve is replaced by the individual sinking into a mass.
Today there is a special danger that the individual may be absorbed into a mass, since the longing to overcome individualism, the desire for something which we ourselves do not produce but discover, something that is greater than ourselves, leads to the view that being “caught up” in the exhilarating atmosphere of a mass or being “swept away” by something intangible is a great suprapersonal experience. Just as the sub-rational, vital sphere has been deified, likewise here the sub-personal has been confused with the suprapersonal.
These people know so little about genuine objectivity that they fail to grasp that real growth beyond one’s own subjective narrowness and arbitrariness is bestowed by every real insight into an objective truth and all behavior that conforms to it. They stretch out their hands, therefore, for a substitute that consists in some kind of power which comes to them from outside their own se
lves and is independent of their own arbitrariness and decision-making, whether it be mass movements or certain so-called “modern” currents in the air today. In reality, however, they do not grow beyond their own person, but slide down to the sub-personal level. They think that they have been caught up by something great and superior; but their feeling rests on a delusion.
Similarly, our desire for the legitimate support and enhancement of our subjectivity which genuine community provides, and our need to be embedded in a unity that does not stem from our arbitrary choice, can go terribly astray when we seek these things by being dissolved into a mass. The fleeting, sensational intoxication of the exhilarating atmosphere of a mass, which is quickly followed by an awareness of coming to one’s senses—for every person of any depth has a guilty conscience over letting himself be “swept along” by illegitimate influences and yielding to his lower instincts—is worlds apart from the noble elevation that is granted to an individual living in a genuine community.
Here too, as with most contemporary aberrations, we encounter anti-personalism as a primary root of all the evil that has arisen in our times. We must once and for all stop elevating the community at the expense of the individual. We must grasp that the community cannot be pitted against the person. Individual and community are ordered to one another in such a way that we will never be able to understand genuine community if we do not clearly acknowledge the human being as a spiritual person made in the image of God. At the same time, we will never do justice to the essence of the person and the fullness of his being if we do not fully understand the nature of community.
As I have often affirmed in these pages, the modern anti-personalism which we encounter in Bolshevism and National Socialism represents, not a victory over liberal individualism, but its ultimate and most radical consequence. Only the rehabilitation of the human being as a spiritual person, as a being with an immortal soul destined to eternal community with God, can save us from being dissolved into a mass and lead us to genuine community.
INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY
Der christliche Ständestaat
November 18, 1934
In this excerpt von Hildebrand brings more philosophical precision to the critique of collectivism. Drawing on his investigations in The Metaphysics of Community (1930) he charts a course between “liberal individualism,” which asserts the individual at the expense of deep bonds of community, and collectivism, which asserts the community at the expense of the individual person. He makes a particular point of saying—and this is very characteristic for his personalism—that liberal individualism fails really to understand the individual person, and that collectivism fails to understand community. One main target of this essay is the Austrian philosopher Othmar Spann (1878–1950), who said: “It is the fundamental truth of all social science … that not individuals are the truly real, but the social whole, and that the individuals have reality and existence only so far as they are members of the whole.” Von Hildebrand thought that this way of exaggerating community played right into the hands of Nazi collectivism.
In this essay, he summarizes the major themes of his social philosophy in sixteen theses.
1. The fundamental mistake of individualism is its failure to acknowledge that the human being is a spiritual person endowed with “intentionality” [the capacity to understand reality]. This failure isolates the human person from the world of objective meaning, values, and ultimately from God, due to its anthropocentric deformation of the world. Paradoxical as it may seem, it disfigures the human person very severely and effaces his true dignity.
2. Community can never be understood if the individual person is not grasped in the full depth of his being, nor can the individual person ever be fully understood if his capacity for sustaining communities and his fundamental orientation to community are not grasped. Every attempt to degrade the individual in his ontological dignity and value takes its toll on community. And any degradation of community that views it merely as an association which is indispensable for the achievement of certain external purposes but completely lacks a being and value of its own also entails a trivialization and mutilation of the person.
3. The individual person is a substance; natural communities such as mankind, family, state, nation, class, and so on, are not substances. No natural community exists as substance. Accordingly, the individual is ontologically superior to all natural communities.
4. The individual person is not just one substance among others. As a person, he is much more authentically a substance than an inanimate object or an organism. As a person, he is incomparably superior to all that is non-personal, and therefore also to natural communities, which have no personal being.
5. The individual person is incomparably more than a mere member of a natural community. As an individual person, he is ontologically antecedent not only to his function as a member of a community, but also to the communities themselves. With respect to the ontological relationship between an individual and a totality, the comparison between the organism and its members is applicable to natural communities only in part. (The case is different, however, with the supernatural community.) This is because natural communities (such as mankind, nation, state, and class) are not the ontological foundation of the being of the individual person; individual persons “sustain” the being of communities. Thus, the form of a totality differs in principle from that of an organism.
6. Although non-artificial communities (such as mankind, the family, the state, the nation, and the class) are not “organisms” in the full sense of the term, they are organic “wholes” that encompass individual persons as members. They do not simply unite them as an aggregation of individuals.
7. Communities are ontologically antecedent to individual persons insofar as individual persons are members of a community—that is to say, insofar as they enter into a community as its members. It is true that individuals sustain the community (though not vice versa). However, the community sustains the function of membership which the individual person exercises. This is why the bonum commune in the community—for example, in the state—is superior to the bonum of the individual citizen, whereas it is greatly inferior to the bonum of the individual person, to his meaning as a spiritual person, and, above all, to his salvation.
8. The individual person is superior in value to all natural communities not only in an ontological sense, but also because only he can become the bearer of moral values and (more importantly) a vessel of grace, albeit only through a completely gratuitous gift of God. Natural communities other than mankind—the state, the nation, the class, etc.—have a longer lifespan than the individual, but they are, in the last analysis, merely mortal, whereas the individual person is immortal. God is glorified more by a single saint than by any state qua state, or any other natural community, no matter how perfect it may be. It follows that we must utterly reject every instrumentalization of the individual person which measures his value according to his usefulness to a natural community such as the state—such as we find, for example, in every form of Spartanism. This is also the basic mistake of every form of nationalism.
9. On the other hand, communities possess a value of their own. They are valuable not only because of their importance for the individual; they also glorify God directly by their own perfection. But their own unique value is less than the intrinsic value of the individual person.
10. In questions or situations in which the bonum commune and the bonum of the individual come into contact with each other on the same level—for example, the economic situation of the individual in relation to that of the state or class—the bonum commune has the higher status and takes priority over the bonum of the individual.
11. The individual is objectively placed by God in communities such as mankind, the state, and the nation, wherein he discovers already existing obligations toward these communities; but such obligations do not bind him on the basis of his own decision to become a member of these communities, as is the case with
one’s obligations to a club.
12. Another basic mistake of liberal individualism is the idea that the more peripheral a good is, the more it is addressed only to communities and not to individuals. According to this view, the goods of civilization are addressed to communities, but the higher goods are reserved only for individuals. This is the source of the well-known slogan that religion is a private matter.
For liberal individualism, the human being becomes lonelier in proportion to the increasing sublimity of the realm of values to which he relates. In his depths, he is alone. From the Catholic point of view, however, the opposite is true. The higher the realm of values is, and the deeper the level in the person to which it appeals, the more does it address not only the individual, but the community as well. God is the most intimate concern of every individual person and at the same time the most widely shared concern addressed to humanity as a whole—in other words, each individual responds to God out of the “we.” Therefore, the more elevated the good that constitutes a community’s realm of meaning, the more closely knit and authentic that community will be.
13. The higher the good that constitutes a community’s realm of meaning, the greater will be the conformity between that community’s realm of meaning and the authentic meaning of the individual person. In the Church as corpus Christi mysticum, the meaning of the community totally coincides with the supernatural, ultimate meaning of the individual person. Similarly, the meaning of mankind and the natural meaning of the individual person largely coincide. Hence, every attempt to instrumentalize the individual person in his relation to the community collapses, for here being an individual person and being a member of a community overlap. The more perfect the individual person is as such, the more perfect will he be as a member of the community; conversely, the more perfect he is as member of the community, the more perfect will he be as an individual person. However, in communities whose realm of meaning is not identical with the meaning of the individual, and in which the given realm of meaning encompasses only a fragment of the individual—for example, in the state, the nation, the class—there is a very great danger of instrumentalizing the person, once his function as a member is considered to be more important than his being as an individual person.
My Battle Against Hitler Page 36
