Politics, Values, and National Socialism 2012039520, 9781412851671

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Editorial Note
Introduction to Aurel Kolnai's Politics, Values, and National Socialism, by Graham McAleer
1 Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido (1925)
2 High-Mindedness (1931)
3 The Total State and Civilisation (1933)
4 What Is Politics About? (1933)
5 Heidegger and National Socialism (1934)
6 On Human Equality (1934)
7 Othmar Spann’s Theory of Totality (1934)
8 The Abuse of the Vital (1934)
9 Democracy and Reality (1935)
10 An Essay on Hatred (1935)
11 The Humanitarian versus the Religious Attitude (1944)
12 Contemporary British Philosophy and Its Political Aspects (1959)
13 Human Dignity Today (1960)
14 Dignity (1969)
15 The Ghost of the Naturalistic Fallacy (1962)
16 A Defence of Intrinsicalism against ‘Situation Ethics’ (1970)
17 The Moral Emphasis: Obligation, Practice, and Virtue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Copyright © 2013 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8042. www.transactionpub.com This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American Â�National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2012039520 ISBN: 978-1-4128-5167-1 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kolnai, Aurel. [Works. Selections. English] Politics, values, and national socialism / Aurel Kolnai; Graham J. McAleer, editor; translations by Francis Dunlop. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-5167-1 1. Philosophy, Modern--20th century. I. McAleer, G. J. (Graham James) II. Dunlop, Francis. III. Title. B1646.K7772E5 2013 192--dc23 2012039520

Contents Editorial Note

vii

Introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s Politics, Values, and National Socialism, by Graham McAleer

ix

1 Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido (1925)

1

2

High-Mindedness (1931)

15

3

The Total State and Civilisation (1933)

45

4

What Is Politics About? (1933)

53

5

Heidegger and National Socialism (1934)

85

6

On Human Equality (1934)

91

7

Othmar Spann’s Theory of Totality (1934)

107

8

The Abuse of the Vital (1934)

117

9

Democracy and Reality (1935)

125

10

An Essay on Hatred (1935)

139

11

The Humanitarian versus the Religious Attitude (1944)

175

12 Contemporary British Philosophy and Its Political Aspects (1959) 13

Human Dignity Today (1960)

197 213

14

Dignity (1969)

227

15

The Ghost of the Naturalistic Fallacy (1962)

251

16

 Defence of Intrinsicalism against ‘Situation Α Ethics’ (1970)

265

17

The Moral Emphasis: Obligation, Practice, and Virtue

303

Bibliography

305

Index

307

Editorial Note The great majority of the essays in this collection are translated into English for the first time. Only five of the sixteen essays have previously been published in their present form and all are gathered here for the first time in an easily accessible volume. The translations, from Spanish, German, and Hungarian, have been done by Francis Dunlop. Francis has been tireless in translating the work of Kolnai and is responsible for much of Kolnai being easily accessible. This volume is dedicated to him. Though never assembled in book form by Kolnai, the last entry here, “The Moral Emphasis,” is a statement of the basic themes of moral philosophy and places Kolnai’s own views, concepts, and innovations in systematic order. The essays are presented ordered by date of composition. The exception is the two essays on dignity, which I have placed side by side. I would like to thank the Kolnai estate and the Kolnai Archive (University of St. Andrews, Scotland) for kindly granting permission to publish the Kolnai works in this book. I would also like to thank Professor John Haldane (University of St. Andrews, Scotland), the literary executor of the Kolnai estate, for his assistance in bringing this project to fruition.

vii

Introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s Politics, Values, and National Socialism Graham McAleer Pick up a book of contemporary moral philosophy and you will find pages devoted to the major theories of ethics, for example, Kantianism and Utilitarianism, puzzles about the nature of obligation, musings over what exactly motivates us to do moral acts that conflict with our own interests, and difficulties connected with whether rationality or the emotions account for our moral knowledge. This collection of essays concerns a different problem, one seldom addressed. What sort of thinking concludes in moral subversion? It is the mark of a first-rate theorist not only to fix on a vital topic ignored by others but to offer a framework for adjudicating the matter. The essays collected here confirm that Kolnai is one of the great conservative theorists of the twentieth century. He likely honed in on the problem of subversion on account of what is distinctive in his thinking. Much conservative thought begins with a commitment to a robust conception of human nature. Kolnai, by contrast, is vividly struck by its fragility. Intriguingly, progressivism holds this in common with Kolnai. Yet, whilst progressivism views human nature’s malleability as a capacity for hopeful change, Kolnai mostly saw threat. If human nature is easily beguiled, how can one confirm civilizational values that foster personal flourishing? By way of an answer, Kolnai employs a simple method: carefully analyze the leading intellectual positions and thinkers of the day, the dominant social movements, and prevailing moral moods—psychoanalysis, fascism, Heidegger, Schmitt, National Socialism, hatred, and arrogance—and show how they run counter to the value architecture of civilization. Kolnai’s essays presented here date from 1925 to 1970, with twelve of the nineteen essays from 1925 to 1944. Born into a middle-class, liberal ix

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Jewish family in 1900, Aurel Stein changed his last name to Kolnai in his teenage years: in 1926, after converting to Catholicism, he changed his name again to Aurel Thomas Kolnai.1 A precocious Hungarian youth, Kolnai always had an interest in moral and political matters. At a tender age he bucked convention, supporting the English and French 1914 war effort despite living in Budapest, one of the two Imperial capitals at the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the aftermath of the empire’s collapse, and now resident in Vienna, Kolnai watched the rise of fascism in Europe. Few saw as early as did Kolnai the colossal threat posed by National Socialism, and even fewer were able to offer an analysis of the phenomenon with any depth and range. Kolnai’s observations found voice in the book that Axel Honneth calls “path-breaking,”2 The War against the West. A seven-hundred-page survey of the ethical and political writings of the Nazis, written in English and published in London in 1938, The War against the West is largely a compilation of Nazi writings organized around themes. Kolnai adds short analyses throughout the book, but he thought the themes he highlighted (e.g., gathering a set of Nazi texts around the theme of the eroticism of military life) gave analytic insight aplenty. This Transaction volume can usefully be read as the philosophical companion of The War against the West and is likely the most sustained contemporary philosophical inquiry into the value context of National Socialism extant. The early essays in this Transaction volume were written in either Hungarian or German and are searching theoretical works pondering the value perversions that gripped central Europe post World War I. They are an index of the times, but their theoretical range ensures their continued importance for anyone interested in the dynamics of moral subversion, value theory, and the analytics of totalitarianism. The first essay dates to 1925 and concerns Max Scheler’s assessment of the theory of appetite in Freud. Freud is famous for the central place he accorded desire in his assessment of psychology. Scheler is widely acknowledged as one of philosophy’s greats, but in 1925 his stature was simply enormous; he had not yet been eclipsed by Heidegger, whose thought would come to recast much of European philosophy. Scheler had a profound impact on Kolnai’s own thinking, and he is a recurrent figure in the pages here. At the time of this 1925 essay, Kolnai was actually a minor part of Freud’s Vienna Circle but on the cusp of detaching himself completely, having all but concluded that Scheler was a better guide in morals and politics. If, with Aristotle, the human is a political animal, it is crucial to grasp rightly man’s animality so as to shape a successful politics. Freud offers

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a genetic account of human appetite: History—evolutionary, collective, familial, and personal—matters on this account. An implication is that appetite is viewed as metamorphic. Appetite, concludes Freud, is not simply kinetic but radically liable to shaping. Freud strips down human nature to a few dynamic elements and grants institutions, like the family, enormous formative power. To Freud’s focus on history and development, Scheler opposes an eternal order of value to which appetite can respond. To his mind, human appetite cleaves to an eternal order of value, and psychological development happens within a stable framework of a hierarchy of value. To the Schelerian, we misunderstand the human if, with Freud, we emphasize the history of desire rather than refinements of appetite deferring to a fixed value order. Through painstaking phenomenological analysis, Scheler showed that though there are myriad values, they all fall into one of four broad categories: the holy and personal, culture or the arts and sciences, the vital, and the useful and hedonic. Personal development, civilization, and human action all revolve around this value landscape. In this essay, which Kolnai read to the Vienna Circle, Kolnai wants to modify a basically psychoanalytic or genetic account of desire by the use of Scheler. Naturally, the paper is theoretically unstable. Kolnai seeks a fusion of sorts, but the pull of Scheler is starting to dominate Kolnai’s thinking.3 Indeed, Scheler’s position becomes central to Kolnai’s value analysis of National Socialism, and his general theory about how exactly moral subversion operates. The topic of “Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido” sets the stage for Kolnai’s reflections on the enormous philosophical significance of the next few decades in the West: Fascism will evoke history as the tutor of political desire while Kolnai recommends, again and again, value enrichment as basic to the civilizational project. Nineteenth-century thought, whether one thinks of Hegel, Darwin, or Freud, was dominated by ideas of history and the genesis of things. This domination was partially halted with Husserl’s innovation in philosophical method, phenomenology. Scheler and Kolnai are early exponents of phenomenology. Kolnai’s description of phenomenology is a handy definition of the method, but it also tells us much about what he saw as the distemper of the times. The description is worth quoting in full: But the phenomenological method, as its name already implies, approaches things from precisely the opposite direction from the psychoanalytical. . . . Rather than explaining, decyphering, deriving and reducing the phenomena to their common denominator, or establishing the laws of their occurrence and development, it tries to intuit and grasp

xiiâ•…â•… Politics, Values, and National Socialism their immediate ‘essences’ and to hold fast, through the most appropriate concepts and descriptions, all their varieties, together with their ideal, unvarying, ‘connections of meaning’. In the last analysis, the aim of this method is not to make possible the control and manipulation of the matter being investigated for the sake of healing, but to analyse it for the sake of understanding.

The lineaments of moral subversion, and its antidote, are outlined here. Kolnai’s thought is marked by hostility to reductionism. Fond of Bishop Butler’s “things are what they are,” the phenomenologist’s effort to describe the core of an experience, “for the sake of understanding,” as Kolnai puts it, is no mere epistemological preference: it is basic to right living and good political order. The reduction of things to a “common denominator” strikes at the principle of pluralism, with the constriction of monism favoring the centralization of power: deference to the unique quality of essences preserves their eccentricity and privilege, these being vital both to constitutional government and proper regard of the person. Note also, Kolnai’s worry that soteriology has a subversive edge. Not indifferent to reform and justice, Kolnai was nonetheless anxious that the effort to heal not be achieved at the cost of wholesale transformation. This point is crucial, and precisely because of one thing Freud gets very right. Kolnai would always remain impressed by Freud’s insight into human malleability. In his 1925 essay, Kolnai criticizes Scheler for thinking that human psychology is stratified in sui generis layers. In his 1913 The Nature of Sympathy, Scheler explains ethics as the intersection between value hierarchy and a range of emotional levels each with particular moral significance. For example, the most rudimentary emotional level, identification, explains loyalty to a people and place and helps explain the emergence of galvanizing political and religious leaders.4 The value hierarchy appears in all Kolnai’s work, but Scheler’s moral psychology does not. This psychology suggests that the human person has a resiliency, and no matter the quality of the value framework, human nature will near enough keep its bearings. Against Scheler’s basic moral confidence, Kolnai clearly favors a sense of moral vulnerability and vigilance against the illusions easily fostered by soteriology. Assuming Freud’s ideas of malleability and delusion, right access to the value frame is more vital than ever; subversion is a more complete threat, and a suspicion of rapid and significant social and institutional change warranted. Kolnai ultimately rejects Freudianism on account of its reductive propensity, its manipulative soteriology, and its ignorance of value structure. That human life unfolds inside a rigorous value order, Kolnai confirms in many of his own original phenomenological studies. His 1929 study of

Introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s Politics, Values, and National Socialismâ•…â•… xiii

disgust is well known,5 and had an impact on the thinking of Bataille, for example.6 The 1933 essay “High-mindedness” identifies a moral attitude that is aloof from value structure. This essay has the observational deftness of the phenomenologist but might best be viewed as a contribution to an older style of moral analysis. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great formalized Christian moral reflection with the categorization of the seven deadly sins. A description of malformed moral psychological states—wrath, lust, envy, and the like—are deadly in a very real sense for Gregory: untended, these psychological states corrupt our persons, twist our relationships, and poison our actions, oftentimes with horrifying results. Gregory’s analysis shaped Western consciousness profoundly, but Kolnai suggests that Gregory’s definitive formulation of moral theology requires extension. Sitting between pride and vanity, Hochmut is an eighth contender for a deadly sin. Pride is an overbearing celebration of worldly achievement; as Hume says, pride is essentially about my relationship to things in the world. High-mindedness, argues Kolnai, is a glorying in the self where “I and value are one.” This attitude is subversive because it detaches the self from things, and especially, separates the self from the objective realm of values. “Pride may injure, though can just as well quicken; high-mindedness annihilates.” Vanity depends on a spectator; it is a moral threat because vanity encourages an abdication of personal identity and responsibility as the hope to find favor with the spectator dominates. Being indifferent to the spectator, Hochmut is a reverse-vanity, having “a characteristic apriorism of the feeling of self-worth.” Reticence before the world is an essential part of a person’s self-possession, but high-mindedness is a flight from what “troubles the exquisite crystalline absoluteness of the subject and obliges it to split.” Subjectivism, pantheism, and evolutionary theory are some of the intellectual positions tinged with high-mindedness, but Kolnai is especially anxious about “collective” high-mindedness and the way group-superiority wallows in “attitudes of isolation and selfexaltation.” Such exaltation is extremely volatile, for high-mindedness is a falsification of the true standing of persons, intricately involved with the world. A preoccupation with security and inviolability results, and a horror of surrender takes hold. An appetite for security without deference to values, Hochmut is the spiritual condition of totalitarianism. “High-Mindedness” is the first in a series of articles about the atmosphere of totalitarianism. Written in 1933, “The Total State and Civilisation” continues the theme, arguing that totalitarianism is a return to primitivism and as such contradictory. Its advocates are desperately

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Â� critical of the turn in the West to commercial civilization. Primitivism is the solution, for at the start of the industrial revolution, the Scottish Whigs, Hume and Smith, argued that commerce is driven by the appetite for vanity and refinement. No renewal of culture can come from the destruction of refinement, insists Kolnai, yet such is the drive to primitivism. Always sympathetic to the Scots, Kolnai argues that the first, and most important, casualty of the attack on refinement is the person. The idea of the person entails a certain distance one from the other, an allowance of eccentricity: the material for the cultivation of personal taste, style, and interests are objects offered by refinement and attained through trade. Refinement enables personal cultivation, but it also facilitates the distance between persons and the state, permitting persons to critically survey state action. Primitivism, by contrast, is a radical identification of persons, the folding of the state into tribalism, and the displacement of the ordinary cares of the world by existential tension. Advocates of primitivism were appalled by the casual comments of Whigs that a man’s hours were never so innocently spent than when trying to make money. Opposing such a shriveled conception of human life with a fresh emphasis on the existential comes at a terrible cost, argues Kolnai. Stripping the human to existential care puts emphasis on security and therewith a concern for the group, worry about the borders ringing the group, and increases the sense that communication across boundaries is a threat. Uniform, in its multiple meanings, becomes all-important. Many of the National Socialism essays document Kolnai’s worry that Catholicism is responding poorly to the rise of fascism. On account of his method being phenomenological, Catholic theology seldom obtrudes into his analyses. However, his interest in the Church does help him explain why National Socialism had such a lure for Catholics, and his observations remain current. In the space of a year, Kolnai wrote essays on Schmitt, Heidegger, and Spann. Why would these thinkers—and Schmitt and Heidegger are thinkers of the first order—prefer primitivism to the refinements of civilization? The idea of the Church itself made them vulnerable, argues Kolnai. In theology, the Church is an institution whose ideal is universal human fellowship obedient to God’s love. For the Church, all people are equal in having the same end, and this destiny loosens the bounds with any particular national community. Though high civilizations preceded Christendom, Kolnai argues that Christianity fatally wounded primitivism and facilitated a civilization that cherished the human person like no other. The idea of the human person having a value beyond the life of the state and community is

Introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s Politics, Values, and National Socialismâ•…â•… xv

nonetheless unstable. The idea of the Church is liable to be diluted to an international equalitarianism, the kind of humanitarianism sponsored by many international organizations today, and at the same time apt to collapse into separatist longings when the purity hoped for proves elusive. One of the most striking features of contemporary theology is its hostility to modernity and bourgeois liberal civilization. Most academic theology today is internationalist and humanitarian, yet, because skeptical of nation, trade and moral absolutes, separatist, localist, puritan. Kolnai warns that anarchistic Christianity is ill-equipped to break the “self-idolization and self-separation of the tribe.” Though Kolnai accounts for why National Socialism was a lure for Schmitt, Heidegger, and Spann, he is untiring in his savaging of them. Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political is a classic work of the twentieth century, and its stature is well recognized by Kolnai.7 His lengthy review is full of perception, but it is Schmitt’s famous vision of politics as the expression of a fault line, the distinction between friend and enemy, which naturally holds Kolnai’s attention. The power of The Concept of the Political rests on its corrective force: before Schmitt, people thought politics concerned questions about how best to live together, but by his definition, politics is not about the art of civilization but rather an assertion of a group’s existential worry—it is pure primitivism. Schmitt’s innovation is the suggestion that politics is not a matter of domestic order but international threat. Kolnai burrows deep and shows that the logic of Schmitt is the logic of the Church, mangled. On the one hand, politics, for Schmitt, is international affairs, yet on the other, it is driven by parochialism. Adequate only to the reality of foreign affairs is “the unity of conflict”; and politics, stripped of all value properties, only expresses in the starkest manner, a standpoint. Politics is not just subjectivism—it is subjectivism purified.8 Schmitt is the theoretician of Hochmut. He is not alone. In 1934, Kolnai wrote a short piece, “Heidegger and National Socialism.” It surely stands as one of the earliest contributions to an ongoing debate of whether, and to what degree, Heidegger’s thinking is fascistic. Kolnai is in no doubt that Heidegger’s horror of the “half-measures of civilization” did not merely drive Heidegger toward the Nazis but that he was the Third Reich’s “prophet, visionary and inspiration.” Heidegger aims to document the universal condition of human existence. It would be a mistake to think that identifying this universal condition facilitated global communication and easy access to the ideas of other civilizations, for this condition is a constriction (Beengtsein) wrought by pervasive fear of death. Haunted, human life constricts, and

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the universal collapses into “shared being,” and this is no more than the “absolutely compulsory community” of those around one. Threat, lived falsely, is the compromise of bourgeois civilization with its “conventional delusions, humbug, concealments,” but squarely faced, threat provokes a stark freedom, the resolve to live with it constantly. With such an ideal, “the barracks become temple, university and procreative laboratory.” With this ideal, existence no longer defers to the person and private life, nor objectively true beliefs, or a manifold of disparate social relations. “Shared being” replaces all of this, a colorless and toneless subjectivism prevails, and civilization gives way to high-mindedness. At the end of the Heidegger essay, Kolnai wonders: “Will the fearborn dream leave its lying mark on reality for long?” A “uniform night” is descending; how ought Catholics to properly respond? The faults of bourgeois civilization are not total, insists Kolnai: Catholics must defend it, reminding others of the finer aspirations of the culture and treating “unavoidable human weakness with indulgence.” “On Human Equality” and “Othmar Spann’s Theory of Totality” were written within months of one another in 1934. The Spann essay stands as another example of how Catholics ought not to react to the shortcomings of bourgeois civilization, while the former sketches Kolnai’s own response. Kolnai struggled to secure a permanent academic home his whole life, and in 1934, despite having written a seminal phenomenological analysis of disgust and a book on sexual ethics that still stands, I believe, as the most complete study of the subject, he was working as a journalist in Vienna. Known today as a conservative theorist, in 1934 Kolnai was center-left, and this shows in his equality essay. The essay has two goals: to protect the idea of equality from subversion by National Socialism and to make up a significant shortfall in liberal civilization. The Nazis do not reject equality. Fascist society has stronger motifs of equality than liberal bourgeois society, Kolnai reminds us, but these motifs—the emphasis on uniformity, Germans all equal in their superiority over other peoples, and absolute obligation to the state—cancel out equal rights and the principle of individual freedom these rights serve. National Socialism is evidently a falsification of the value of equality but, Kolnai thinks, it narrows the value rather than misidentifies it entirely. National Socialism is a distortion of solidarity, but it rightly sees that equality and solidarity stand together. In this essay, Kolnai expresses dismay at the disparities in living standards prevalent throughout liberal civilization: Social equality is necessary, but an inkling of Kolnai’s future conservatism is found in his claim, nonetheless, that equality before the law is “most perfectly Â�applicable”

Introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s Politics, Values, and National Socialismâ•…â•… xvii

respecting criminal law. Kolnai departs from liberal orthodoxy when he claims that the heart of equality is not equal rights but solidarity: minimum wage, workers’ housing, and community self-government are commitments to a group equality upon which equal rights can then gain individual purchase. In some excellent pages, Kolnai explains how solidarity is the buttress of equality. What Kolnai terms “the moral sovereignty of personal life” is thwarted by serious economic inequalities. Social equality fosters the exercise of life, its opportunities for enrichment, the crafting of a thoughtful life, and moral responsibility: It secures a standing in society yet itself relies on what Kolnai interestingly identifies as “the element of partial equality.” The material conditions for the exercise of rights are a prior commitment to a particular social life; a commitment to group equality comes with a geography. Workers’ housing, for example, is an investment in a locality, a knot between elements spiritual, personal, and material contiguous and now bonded. This knot, which binds people, also binds concern and resources to a locality: it presupposes an equality peculiar, or partial, to some. Kolnai insists on this because equal rights are the recognition of distinct valid interests, but the implicit abstractness of these rights can literally strip assets of care and wealth from families and communities. It is perhaps this theme of partial equality that drives Kolnai rightward. It prefigures his critique of humanitarianism—the global ethic of the contemporary left—and is recast in Kolnai’s later conservatism as privilege. Though Kolnai is silent on the matter, it is highly likely that “On Human Equality” is Kolnai’s commentary on Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Appearing in 1931, and stating essential principles of Catholic social thought, including solidarity, it is also likely that the pope’s letter on social philosophy shaped Kolnai’s reaction to the wellknown Austrian Catholic social theorist, Spann. Kolnai finds little to admire. He wonders how Austrian Catholics can have fallen for Spann’s motley of romanticism, nationalism, and pantheism dressed up in Catholic Aristotelianism. For his target, Kolnai selects Spann’s relish for the idea of totality. Like so many today, Spann was appalled by the fragmentation and lack of care for others exhibited by commercial societies. Kolnai also opposes social atomism, and where he proposes, quite profoundly, I believe, the idea of partial equality to secure solidarity, Spann opts for the motif of totality: a rigidly hierarchical vision of human efforts wherein each one performs a role to further the collective good. Put abstractly, solidarity is a function of the part, for Kolnai, the whole, for Spann. Kolnai argues that Christianity has always

xviiiâ•…â•… Politics, Values, and National Socialism

favored a social and moral realism wherein the manifold parts and values of communal life are accorded their relative autonomy. By simply turning bourgeois individualism on its head, Spann offers solidarity without remainder. Instead of the Catholic tradition of accommodation and arbitration, Spann births a heaving, lumbering total state wherein the parts obediently function to serve the whole. The mood is totalitarian and has nothing to do with a Christian humility that is inseparably linked with realism. Christian humility acknowledges that there can be no reshaping of the world, only a mutual assistance that defers to independent agents and offers reconciliation rather than rivalry. Managing to serve up solidarity without humility, Spann, like the far more talented Schmitt and Heidegger, displays an unappetizing highmindedness. The subjectivism common to these thinkers confirms that something was seriously amiss in Catholic thought and warrants Kolnai’s startling declaration at the start of his 1934 “The Abuse of the Vital” that “the great heresy afflicting the Christian West today is National Socialism.” If our heretical triad brewed a twisted theology of the Church, the “philosophical content of this heresy,” Kolnai claims, is vitalism. The essay is complex. Returning to the theme of his 1925 article on Freud and Scheler, the essay reveals a new concern about the adequacy of Scheler’s value analysis. He now worries that Scheler’s thought might itself contribute to subversion. There is an unmistakable tendency within bourgeois culture when making judgments to defer to the values of generic happiness, utility, and whatever is pragmatic. For this reason, Scheler dwelt at length upon the singular importance of vital values, actualized by nobility, family life, combat, and the land. The essay begins topically with Kolnai warning Catholics that the Nazi passion for vitalism is a profound threat. He is mortified that Scheler’s valid insights watered down culminate in the disturbing spread of Catholic youth groups: these groups champion the “world of lads and lasses” and oddly ignore that Catholic life is fixed on persons in the family and the broader multigenerational community. More catastrophic is the completely mistaken strategy espoused by some Catholics that common cause with National Socialism will deliver such a shock to the superficiality of bourgeois civilization that a new seriousness will emerge to which Catholicism can appeal. Kolnai cannot hide his contempt for such foolishness and in Churchillian tones demands outright opposition by Catholics to National Socialism. Rather than worrying about how to save the culture, Catholics ought just to concentrate on grasping what counts as a good act. The essay thus

Introduction to Aurel Kolnai’s Politics, Values, and National Socialismâ•…â•… xix

quickly veers away from the topical and becomes a profound meditation on the idea of value hierarchy. Themes essential to Kolnai’s later thought are introduced: the essay is a necessary companion to anyone reading his essays “Practice and Morality” and “The Concept of Hierarchy.”9 A hierarchy of values undoubtedly exists and impinges upon us, thinks Kolnai, but we build our lives amidst a host of concerns, relationships, institutions, events, hopes, and fantasies. This host is shot through with all manner of value attributes, all of which make varied claims upon us, and some, genuinely moral claims, but our “act consciousness,” so to say, is preoccupied with navigating this throng of concern, events, and hopes. To explain, Kolnai gives an example: A man rescues another from drowning. Without a doubt a generous act, but, to the rescuer, the act surely registers in consciousness as “getting my neighbor out of danger.” It is an act emergent from simple human concern, not value estimation. A focus on value renewal, whether of vital values or any other domain, provokes a disintegration of human life, isolating into rigidly defined layers what dynamically merge together. A conservative would hereby be as mechanistic as Freud. Kolnai wants to emphasize that overvaluing one dimension of the human is a disservice to other dimensions. A person is “always in himself a representative of the totality of values with varying orders of emphasis,” and so value isolation subverts personhood by devaluing ordinary human concerns, where most of human life happens. When Kolnai was writing, contempt for bourgeois values was, as now, strong. Kolnai does not doubt that commercial civilization foreshortens the human spirit, but it facilitates well the ordinary world of human concern. Furthermore, it is not true that bourgeois Whig culture is hostile to the spiritual, but the spiritual is rather, as Kolnai so insightfully puts it, “shamefacedly withheld.” Kolnai identifies this stunted piety as a peculiar English and Scottish trait but insists that the effort to elaborate a rational portable order of material goods assumes a genuinely spiritual and moral mood. I believe this section 4 of “The Abuse of the Vital” is a profound insight into Whig civilization and clips the wings of an all too common facile condemnation prevalent among the left and right. Kolnai’s anxiety that ordinary human concern be recognized for its genuine moral bearing takes on real urgency in his 1935 essay “Democracy and Reality.” Kolnai addresses a concrete political problem: can dictatorship save a democracy? In the ‘30s, many European countries faced the issue of whether a democratic republic could exclude large swathes of the voting public who were confirmed fascists. In our own time, comparable issues, ranging from matters in national security to

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public finance, have pressed the meaning of democracy. Kolnai’s answer to these kinds of dilemmas is dramatic. Always horrified by pretentions to moral purity, Kolnai pours scorn on those democrats who refuse to use violence in defense of democratic order. Should circumstances warrant, a minority dictatorship is far preferable to the entire collapse of the democratic order: “For democratic politics only aims to preserve as much as possible of the constitution, not to preserve it entire until the moment of its impending death.” Temporary dictatorship is a delicate matter, obviously, but evidence abounds that there is nothing inherent in the phenomenon to make ossification inevitable. Kolnai even goes so far as to argue that the Austrian fascist dictatorship of 1933–34 forestalled a far worse National Socialist grab for power, albeit only for a time. The crucial point, he thinks, is that sticking to the rules, what he calls “the empty formalism of democracy,” must not eliminate “the reality of formal democracy,” the everyday interactions of people engaging in life. The negotiations of every day are the soil of democratic political negotiation, just as the play and competition of the day to day are the exercise of free personality that culminates in the self-direction of the democratic state. Crucially, the reality of formal democracy warrants temporary minority dictatorship, for always the police power of the state is underwritten by the in fact always policing function of the citizenry, as the people guard the good order necessary for the daily functioning of civilized life. On a day-to-day basis a people protects itself against totalitarianism and therewith accords a certain limited legitimacy to temporary dictatorship. Those who insist upon the purity of democratic procedure, because mortified by the idea of violence, radically misunderstand the true fund of democracy. It is the sociality of a people, the values around which cluster their basic daily interactions, and their vigilance, that gives democracy its legitimacy. Like the Scottish Whigs, Kolnai was convinced that social life was rooted in emotional communication. In a set of essays dedicated to the problem of moral subversion, it is unsurprising hate would figure as a topic. Dating to 1935, “An Essay on Hatred” is a long, phenomenological study that concludes in the striking formulation that hatred is the “diabolisation of the object.” Typical of his style, Kolnai introduces all manner of qualifications and revised formulations, but he does not waver from this central claim: Hatred toys with Satanism. Contrasting with fear, disgust, and love, hatred aims at the annihilation of its object. What is Satanic in this is that hate aims to strip its object not only of its perceived evil but any good that might run alongside the evil. Aiming at the elimination of a being, hatred becomes closed to value: Values are

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highly variegated and messy in how they layer each object. And because closed to value, there is always a vaunting of the self ongoing in hatred and thus, in the language of the old scholastic moral manuals, hatred is “a daughter” of Hochmut. Love not only nestles amid a plurality of objects found lovable, it also “hedges round” those objects, anxious that they be protected and elevated. By contrast, hatred is expansionistic: not curtailed by objects of value, and a stranger to restraint, it lurches into the world. Hatred is not arbitrary though. Fascinatingly, Kolnai suggests hatred “tracks” objects on account of “special points of relation.” His point here is not so much the idea that our hatreds are held passionately but rather that hate springs from “individual secluded objects which are loved like fetishes.” Hatred subverts because in its inception hate separates a person from publicly regarded objects of value and so replaces moral consensus with private objects of regard. Kolnai does not subscribe to the thesis of Nietzsche and Scheler that humanitarianism is born of resentment and hatred, but, like them, he is skeptical about its ethos. For like hatred, humanitarianism is an ethics of a narrowed field of human concerns. An ethic to reduce suffering, humanitarianism is indifferent to whether the means is personal sacrifice, technological innovation, or increased efficiencies in the state’s provision of services. Indifferent because it tends to focus on generic material human needs and little on the fullness of personal development: indeed, in the pursuit of the provision of material welfare it tends to be hostile to the refinements of the human spirit, seeing, for example, the playfulness of fashion and taste as perverse indulgences in the face of need. “The Humanitarian versus the Religious Attitude,” written during the war and published in The Thomist in 1944, is a profound analysis of the ethics of our age. The aforementioned essays were mostly written in the shadow of National Socialism. By 1944 Kolnai is living in the United States (though soon to move to Canada) and not only has his focus shifted to the ethics underlying democratic liberalism but he is also markedly more critical of this ethos than he was in “Democracy and Reality.” Among religions, Catholicism fosters humanitarianism not only because it acknowledges the legitimacy of a secular order but its theological ethics assumes a universalistic, personalistic, and rationalistic base. In this, Catholicism is rather wise, for civilization plus religion and civilization standing alone likely strike the eye as largely the same, concedes Kolnai. This is only at first blush, however. Humanitarianism excludes a deferential upward look

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to God and this, as well as changing the motivation for being moral, does twist and misshape the moral order. There are obviously many implications for morals if one believes that the order of values is a manifestation of a divine loving person. The grip of Hochmut on the self is weakened, claims of hierarchy contend with those of equality, moral equivocation is replaced by authority, and skepticism gives way to an amplified cognition of values. The religious attitude, Kolnai interestingly contends, softens an otherwise “prim, ice-cold, mutilated” moral sense. Reflecting on the events, personalities, and ideas that prompted the war, Kolnai expresses the concern that abandonment of the religious attitude has made possible a heady brew of self-idolatry, totalitarianism, and strange pagan imitations of religion. Perhaps this brew is not strictly necessitated by humanitarianism, but it and other concoctions are an inherent danger: the egalitarianism or leveling inside humanitarianism leaves no room for any recognition of intrinsic evils or a graduated emphasis that some values and appetites outrank others. Thus immoralism is a tendency of humanitarianism, for its ethos runs counter to moral cognition as such. This explains the typical reversals one finds in humanitarian ethics: for example, the sympathy to killing, whether blaming others for a killer (“social conditions”) or euthanasia, eugenics, and abortion as humane solutions to social problems. These malformations take on a creepy hue, for they are typically accompanied by a hypermoralism. Precisely because the refinements and eccentricities of the person do not register with humanitarianism, it has a fascination with formalism, rules, and an unrelenting and comprehensive administration of human life. Administration aims to impeccably deliver satisfaction of human needs, needs all carefully packaged by the regulations of government. Humanitarianism shares much in common with the cramped fetishes of hatred, therefore, only not malevolent but impeccable. “Contemporary British Philosophy and Its Political Aspects” (1959) was written for a Spanish audience and is an unusual essay. Reading British analytical philosophy, few are likely to see amid the abstraction and technical debate any obvious political import. That Kolnai does this helps explain why he was so drawn to contemporary English philosophy once he had settled in 1955 in England. Noting that Spanish philosophy has typically served conservatism, Kolnai intriguingly claims that English philosophy does so as well. C. S. Peirce argued that English philosophy was principally a continuation of medieval scholasticism, and, interestingly, Kolnai concurs. In a fascinating footnote to the essay he argues that contemporary English philosophy is a return to “authentically Â�British

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traditions” and distinguishes it from Cartesian influences (Locke and Hume), the French Encyclopaedists (Mill and Lord Russell), and Hegelianism (Green and Bradley). The English philosophy he has in mind is ordinary language philosophy. He sharply separates this style of philosophy from earlier analytical philosophy’s strident positivism. This latter, he says, is the character of American analytical philosophy, and this national difference remains largely true today. Kolnai rejects the scientism of American positivism for its reductionism, which his whole life he saw as a utopian and totalitarian defamation of ordinary experience. He relishes ordinary language philosophy precisely because it treats the intricacies of language as sui generis and is an attitude of deference to everyday life. Linguistic analysis is a defender of religion, and the values of culture and morals, not because, for example, English philosophers are especially religious, but, aversive to the “adulteration of language,” they reject causal explanations of the phenomenon as really something else. Kolnai was impressed by the significant continuity between Scheler’s thought and G. E. Moore’s ethics. A leading voice in the British school of intuitionism, Moore, to Kolnai, represented what was best about linguistic analysis, its contributions to moral philosophy. Sensitive to the contents of experience and reflecting upon the language we use ordinarily when explaining our moral interactions, British ethics, argues Kolnai, expresses a basic conservative gesture, an assent to what is. This is not to exclude possibilities of reform, but the humility implicit in linguistic analysis means that British ethics is anti-utopian, keenly aware that human effort, though noble, is “limited, contingent and always to some degree precarious.” “Human Dignity Today” was also written for a Spanish audience. Along with his later “Dignity,” the essay probes one of today’s most honored concepts, and Kolnai’s skepticism might shock. “Human Dignity Today” and “Dignity” courageously suggest that even the idea of human dignity can serve the ends of subversion unless deftly handled. Indeed, “Human Dignity Today” starts with a striking, disturbing claim. The essay was written around 1960 with the globe, as Kolnai puts it, divided between the West and the “Red world.” These two camps are united, however, in a keen regard for “‘technicism,” “materialist utilitarianism and the thematic cult of progress. In this respect, their dominant traits are not very different from those of the former fascist world.” People are sure, says Kolnai, that, with the end of the war and the utter discrediting of Nazi racialism, there is a growing sense of human Â�dignity: a new clarity about the equal dignity of each human being; gains

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in releasing human life from “the pressure of extra-human factors”; nations acting as collectivities for the administration of justice and welfare; and the end of colonialism. These senses of dignity can be summed up as the effort to realize “integral self-rule” but they also speak to the “external position” of man, so to say, and ignore “his stature, outlook, cast of mind, morality, and spirituality.” Kolnai does not deny that gains have been made. However, the attributes of what we might call “inwardness” are today more and more disregarded and yet they clearly touch upon the ideal of human dignity. The drive to equality inherent in the appetite for “integral self-rule” is hostile to the hierarchical institutions that, Kolnai is sure, enrich and inspire the ideal, nobility, spirituality, and refinement. Kolnai also stresses the shocking cost of securing dignity in the contemporary sense, the massive growth in the administrative state. To the contemporary mind, personal superiority is an intolerable idea but administrative tyranny is unthinkingly embraced. The threat to inwardness is compounded by the legitimacy granted commercialism. Not business simply but an ideology of a sacredness attributed to pleasures. Commerce qua the sacrality of pleasure might promise escape from “the pressure of extra-human factors,” but it is inevitably a ruination of inwardness. Kolnai agrees with his contemporaries that human dignity is an original moral value, but he argues that attention to moral perception shows that “dignity precisely does not inhere in man qua man, but qua divine.” And it is well that it does, for it is only on account of the dignity of man qua divine that both the external and internal aspects of dignity see growth. The hierarchical institutions that help foster refinement and inwardness are linked immediately or remotely to the roles of king, queen, hero, prophet, and priest, and the like, all of which are of divine or semi-divine origin. These social roles represent and institute the divine in the community, but no less is this true in a secondary sense for those who serve and take direction from these leading social elements. All men are equal in being bearers of the divine image and therewith all absolute social distinction is relativized without being abolished. It is the shared dignity of bearing the divine image that first distinguishes personal dignity from social office. The dignity of man qua man cuts against this social and personal expansiveness and indeed even subverts what it purports to hold dear. The contemporary idea of human dignity has a militant tinge, what Kolnai calls the “idol of realization.” Eager to accomplish human dignity, the contemporary mind defers to concrete governmental administration, but this necessarily poses a challenge to alterity. As we must have no superior,

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government must represent us, and it must strive to release us from want. “Integral self-rule” and release from external material pressures can only be a particular bodily self-realization inevitably concluding in tribalism. Universal dignity subverted, tribalism plus the pursuit of generic utility values of welfare technically accomplished by government, edges the contemporary conception of human dignity toward totalitarianism. “Dignity” (1969) is a dense and careful study of the phenomenon as it appears in value perception.10 Dignity evokes a “bowing gesture” that “tranquilizes” those responding to it but, unlike sublimity, our experience of dignity does not “crush” us; rather does it suggest reciprocity. Dignity communicates distance, a calm reserve, and even something like “tempered steel.” It has little to do with grace or shapeliness being a moral rather than an aesthetic value, and though it carries a “weight,” which suggests it possesses a place in reality, Kolnai rejects any naturalistic assimilation of dignity to quanta of power or the like. Values do not map in any straightforward sense onto reality, and this is even true of our hallowed conception of human dignity. We are confused when we think of human dignity as furniture of the world, not least when the notion ends in talk of human rights: Kolnai thinks the notion better explained as personal dignity, having the character of a quality. This is of apiece with the1960 article where he laments the loss of dignity as the cultivation of inwardness. In consequence, Kolnai, very much against humanitarianism, thinks dignity susceptible of more or less. Persons can amplify their dignity and can throw it away, as well. The undignified is all that would collapse distance, confuse boundaries, and challenge individuation. This recalls his seminal work on disgust where he characterized the leering intimacy of disgusting things as a challenge to personal articulation. In line with his sense of dignity as a refinement of personhood, Kolnai conceives of the summit of undignity as the willful disregard of the weightiness of the self. At the summit of un-dignity are not the deadly sins, for our passions’ mastery of us touches on the tragic and our appetites of anger and revenge, like Shylock’s pound of flesh, even have “something dignified” about them. Among the deadly sins, vanity is a possible exception, for it touches on the meretricious. In passages evocative of Scheler’s 1913 treatment of the vain man as a “spiritual vampire,” Kolnai thinks of the culmination of un-dignity as “the tout.” He describes the tout as someone “coreless,” who has abandoned any self-imposed limits to how the world will figure in his life and who instead has surrendered to fusion with the world, pampered by, and Â�fawning over, its more frivolous contents. That the

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idea of “the tout” comes to Kolnai’s mind here reminds us of his concern with commercialism in the 1960 dignity essay. In British English, a tout is someone who stands outside a stadium or music event selling tickets at trumped-up prices. Mention of a tout is inseparable from the image of a gaudy man, with an ingratiating manner, hard selling entertainment at prices that falsely indicate the quality of human experience available. The tout is then an agent of the “sacrality of pleasures,” and thus a falsifier of the true hierarchy of values. If the tout subverts the order of value for money, does the image of “the tout” as the summit of un-dignity also point to a hardening of opinion about commerce? In his vitalism essay of 1934, Kolnai, with carefully stated reservations noted, approved of the regard for business in bourgeois civilization. There, as part of the ordinary life of the social, trade functions as a soil for properly moral interactions. The key seems to be that commercialism is an ideology that sacralizes pleasure, and this can be distinguished from developments in business that build civilization, what Hume identified as the role of business in the refinement of the arts and sciences. The next essay is a critical celebration of G. E. Moore. “The Ghost of the Naturalistic Fallacy” is best thought of as an exorcism.11 Kolnai appears to have been unfazed that he never offered any detailed ontology of the value universals discerned in human action. He seems to have thought sufficient for the purposes of full moral reflection, careful phenomenological description, plus a clear sense of what values are not. In a similar vein, Moore is sensitive to our use of ethical language and very clear that in using this language we are not offering descriptions of vital life, evolution, history, progress, normality, or psychological development, and the like. To suggest that any of these are what we talk about when debating ethics is simple confusion, Moore argues, and Kolnai rather more pointedly insists, subversion. Kolnai is profoundly attracted to this disciplining character of Moore’s naturalistic fallacy, but he regrets that Moore’s fallacy is almost exclusively linked to his claim that the Good is an objective non-natural property that cannot be discerned through good things: these good things are no more what good is than certain vibrations in light are what yellow is. The Good is then intuited rather than “read off” things furnishing the world that we might say are good. This is not a helpful statement of intuitionism, thinks Kolnai: like Moore, Kolnai defends “ethical anti-naturalism,” but this formulation is the ghost he wants to exorcize. His basic objection is that such a pure notion of the Good is not a datum of common sense, and thus Moore proffers an “exsanguinated

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un-real concept” of goodness. Ex-sanguinated, says Kolnai, for two reasons. Moore has a tendency to seek out logical dispute and to ignore the only commonsensical indication of the good: our sentiments. Our feeling that something is good is “an intuitional concept of morality or value.” Secondly, ordinary experience knows the good only as justice, kindness, modesty, courage, and even as a good cigar, a good gun dog, and the like. Kolnai concludes: “‘Good’ seems to me to be all the more dependent on descriptive data and far more ‘definable’ than, say, yellow. . . . [It is] present qua veracity or purity or benevolence. . . . To identify moral goodness with one such standard moral quality – for example justice or love of one’s neighbour – is one-sided, arbitrary and misleading, but not at all a ‘Naturalistic Fallacy.’” One of Kolnai’s best essays on ethics, and certainly one of the most significant for understanding how he saw his overall theoretical commitments in relation to other ethical theories, is little known. “A Defense of Intrinsicalism against ‘Situation Ethics’” has previously only been found in a volume dedicated to a Christian ethical theory popular in the ‘60s, situation ethics.12 Few are likely to approach this book, as situation ethics is something of a period piece: Kolnai’s essay certainly transcends the occasion of its writing. The essay is long and includes many useful passages on Kolnai’s attitude to moral theology, virtue theory, legalism, utilitarianism, and subjectivism. The many strands of the essay are part and parcel of what Kolnai refers to as “the impersonal majesty of a normative and objectified Table of Values and Wrongs.” Kolnai defends “a non-rigoristic intrinsicalist” position or a modified version of the theory of intrinsic evils. A staple of moral theology, the theory of intrinsic evils is the claim that there are acts that may never licitly be done, no matter the circumstances and no matter the pragmatic pressures to perform them. That the innocent cannot be intentionally and directly killed is a well-known example. Moral theology is here profound, insists Kolnai, for it is from intrinsicalism that ethical life takes its “primordial basis of moral orientation.” It is basic to moral experience that some values be of “intrinsic and unbarterable meaning and validity” forming a “constant standard” of judgment. Values are an “autonomous, impersonal code of objective norms,” universals discerned as qualities inherent in actions that, recalling his essay on dignity, provoke “bowing to the intrinsic evidence of Moral Cognition.” So far, he agrees with the theologians. However, modification of their axiom is necessary, thinks Kolnai, for “moral laws . . . may in some situations come to be mutually Â�incompatible

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in concreto.” It is possible that on some “problem-laden” occasions a choice between lesser evils might be required. The theologians’ axiom offends ancient principle: Ultra vires nemo obligatur. In light of this principle, it is an undisputed content of moral consensus, says Kolnai, that persons are not bound should events pass beyond what their powers can tolerate. Kolnai does not amplify the argument and unfortunately he does not give us an example—though his friend David Wiggins, drawing on an event in Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea, does.13 However, his point surely is that morality has its origins in our daily, ordinary actions, and “problem-laden” events dramatically removed from the ordinary surely also attenuate the role of morality as such. Ranging fifty years, these essays Kolnai wrote in a state of worry. This is easy enough to understand with the early essays: Kolnai, being of Jewish origins, was living in Austria, after all. His worry ranges much wider though, for Kolnai thought civilization was in retreat on multiple accounts. Anxious to protect “the surviving islands of Liberal Civilization,” his concern is really one of theory: much of what passes for moral theory is subversive of moral order. All who think that totalitarianism is a permanent threat and who suspect that ideas can quickly get dangerously muddled will find plenty of clarifying ideas in this volume. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

For Kolnai’s biography, see Francis Dunlop, The Life and Thought of Aurel Kolnai (Ashgate, 2002). Private communication, June 8, 2010. The break with Freud is complete by 1930, when Kolnai publishes what is surely the most complete work of sexual ethics: Sexual Ethics, translated by Francis Dunlop (Ashgate, 2005). M. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy (Transaction, 2008). A. Kolnai, Disgust (Open Court, 2003). G. Bataille, Erotism, Death and Sensuality (City Lights, 1986). “What Is Politics About? A Note on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.” Exploring the World of Human Practice: Readings In and About the Philosophy of Aurel Kolnai, ed. Zoltán Balázs & Francis Dunlop. Part of what makes Kolnai’s analysis here so trenchant is that in another of Schmitt’s many important works, Political Romanticism (Transaction, 2010), Schmitt himself rails against subjectivism, and on Catholic grounds. These seminal essays are found in A. Kolnai, Ethics, Value and Reality (London: Transaction, 2008). ‘Dignity’, Philosophy, LI, 1976. “The Ghost of the Naturalistic Fallacy,” Philosophy, LV, 1980. Situationism and the New Morality, ed. R. L. Cunningham (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970). D. Wiggins, Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Harvard, 2006), pp. 250–58.

1 Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido (1925) Translator’s Note: In his Twentieth Century Memoirs, Kolnai comments on his paper thus: ‘Max Scheler’s Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, which contained among other things the best criticism of the Freudian reduction of all forms of love and affectionate sentiments to “Libido”, appeared in 1922, but I read it only in 1924, responding to it with rather lame qualifications in my Vienna-group lecture . . .; my swan-song in the precincts of psycho-analysis’. 1. Max Scheler’s discussion of Freud’s ontogenesis of love1 is noteworthy for several reasons. With the exception of Edmund Husserl, its founder, Scheler is today the most important member of the productive and influential ‘Phenomenological’ school of philosophy. Simply through his application of his master’s methodological principles from the sphere of logic to that of ethical, spiritual and psychological questions, he has shown himself to be an original thinker of the first order.2 But the phenomenological method, as its name already implies, approaches things from precisely the opposite direction from the Â�psychoanalytical. Its aim is not to found a metapsychology but a Â�pre-Â�psychology, if we ourselves may be permitted to coin a phrase. Rather than explaining, decyphering, deriving and reducing the phenomena to their common denominator, or establishing the laws of their occurrence and development, it tries to intuit and grasp their immediate ‘essences’ and to hold fast, through the most appropriate concepts and descriptions, all their varieties, together with their ideal, unvarying, ‘connections of meaning’.3 In the last analysis, the aim of this method is not to make possible the control and 1

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manipulation of the matter being investigated for the sake of healing, but to analyse it for the sake of understanding. Although the two kinds of research seem to diverge so much as to have absolutely nothing in common, Scheler has received great mental stimulus from Freud’s findings and theories, and he has bestowed on them a very painstaking critique, which, though sharp, is free from hatred and any attempt to belittle them. The recognition he affords them on many points must appear doubly remarkable in view of this, and seems even to add to them. His objections could themselves prove fruitful to one or two branches of psychoanalytic research. But they are also calculated to show up certain weaknesses of the approach of phenomenology. 2. Scheler first refers to psychoanalysis in his treatments of ‘feeling one with’ (identification with the mother in the genesis of male homosexuality) and of ‘fellow feeling’ (as consequence of, or, according to him, a kind of higher grade of feeling one with). He thinks of the analytic healing process as an example of the dissolution of traditions of feeling. As regards sexual love, he allies himself with Georg Simmel against Schopenhauer and Freud and underlines the homogeneous, sui generis, character of this phenomenon, arguing that it is not in the least a mere ‘superstructure’ of the ‘powerful’ sex-drive and cannot possibly be a ‘compound’ of sensuality and spirituality. 3. Following his treatment of other ‘naturalistic’ theories of the varieties of love, which are mostly only concerned with their phylogenesis, we get a summary of Freud’s ‘Three lectures on the theory of sexuality’. Scheler here emphasises that their author certainly does not make the ‘sex drive’ as such the ultimate explanatory principle of the life of feeling, but makes it out to be itself a secondary or developmental product, a structure. The perversions are, accordingly, not deviations from the normal, but more or less unusual fixations of sexuality when it casts about in an unfinished state. Man is born a polymorphous pervert, the normal sex drive represents a ‘favourable’, relatively frequent, chance of development. Besides it and the perversions, it also results in formations which owe their development to the processes of repression and sublimation. The former makes use of disgust, modesty, aversion to incest; the wish-complexes it relates to reveal themselves, in distorted form, in dreams and neuroses. But sublimation disperses the refined reproductory traces of voluptuous sensations amongst psychic processes of ‘higher value’, which thus make use of the not directly satisfied libido as

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a driving wheel. Here belong all kinds of affective ties, which no longer have any connection with genital sex. 4. Freud’s disclosure of childhood sexuality, for which he has come in for so many attacks on the part of the ignorant, receives handsome acknowledgement from Scheler. This in fact amounts to the discovery of a completely new region of the child’s psyche. In any case he is right in his observation that the directions of the ‘sex-drive’ proper in the period leading up to puberty are preceded by different erotically tinged interests in objects, which require to be studied on their own. Freud and his school have also presented ample evidence to show that the ‘fixation’ of such object-directions (as opposed to their typically successive cessation in normal development) can become especially important in the formation of subsequent sex-life and of life in general. He has thus provided a genetic understanding of a great many forms of mental illness, even many kinds of sexual perversion, for example, which were formerly ascribed without question to an inborn ‘disposition’ – thus abandoning any attempt to heal the afflicted individuals.

Scheler’s next comment, which we believe to be very significant, is more original. The Freudian method may perhaps one day lead us nearer to a completely new understanding of that peculiar thing which we call a man’s ‘fate’. ‘Fate’ is certainly not the same thing as what comes to us in the form of stimulants and emotions from without. Nor is it in any sense consciously chosen. It seems to be a portmanteau-word for everything of which we commonly say ‘such and such could only happen to a person like him’. The succession of data, Scheler says, which we feel ‘as belonging to our essence, once they have shown themselves’. . . . The fundamental principles of ‘fate’, in this sense, says Freud, are originally prefigured in the impressions, in his view primarily the erotic impressions, of earliest childhood. A more profound view reveals that Freud has thus come near to the idea that is perhaps qualified both to reconcile the hitherto prevailing opposition between ‘nativistic’ and ‘empiristic’ views and to replace them with a completely new basic assumption. . . . Every experience down to the simplest sensation has, in accordance with the extent and kind of its operation, a unique and determinate place-value in the formation of the entire life of the individual in the typical development and maturation of mankind.

The mistake of empiricism consisted in the fact that it acknowledged the differential value of the impression only so far as it made its effectiveness dependent on the already present accumulation of experience to which it was added. On the contrary, the unique, special character of every experience acquires its quite especially pregnant meaning through Freud’s insight that a psychic Â�experience . . . is also determined in extent and kind of operation in accordance with the placevalue which it has within the total development of a person.

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Man therefore unconsciously selects his experience; thus, according to Scheler, Schopenhauer’s aphorisms ‘on women’ are supposed to depend on real observations, but the fact that he arrives at precisely these observations is supposed to be explicable by his negative attitude towards his mother from an early age: ‘. . . by the “failure of the normal transference of libido to the mother”, as Freud would put it’. 5. But then Scheler casts doubt on the clarity of the concept of libido. He himself attempts a formulation; starting from the voluptuous sensations which arise in the infant as a result of stimulation of the erogenous zones,4 he tries to interpret libido as the striving for the repetition of such sensations. Libido, he says, cannot itself consist in feelings of pleasure, if it is to be treated as a motive. Little can, of course, be done with Jung’s concept of libido, which has been distilled into the concept of striving as such. Apart from this, the problem with the psychoanalytic concept of libido is that a striving is directly aimed at more or less definite contents, not to the experience of sensations. These contents may be characterised by the fact that they are accompanied by voluptuous sensations, but they must be present, though not necessarily in definite images. They are, according to Scheler, ‘values of the opposite sex’. He supports this intuition with the remark that even in homosexual intercourse such marks of the opposite sex are artificially constructed. He draws on the analogy of hunger, which is in the same way an essentially directed drive. Hence there can be no talk of a mere associative coordination between a merely general striving for voluptuousness and the idea of the other sex, but only of a rhythmically phased ‘alignment of a drive already directed as such to the opposite sex with a particular object of the opposite sex’. 6. Scheler only partially accepts the psychoanalytical assumption that the amorous preference of young people for opposite sexed members of their immediate family circle over the choice of extra-familial objects represents a regular stage of sexual development. He suggests that this indicates an experimental casting about of the drive, and will not accept that there is a really lasting sexual bond of this kind within the boundaries of normality. It is true that in his discussion of other ‘naturalistic’ theories of sympathy he also admits that he accepts a selective, placedetermining, we might say vehicle-like influence of the drives on the ‘higher feelings’: the drives, he says, prescribe to each one of us an ‘order of urgency’, according to which we can really perform some of the spiritual acts ‘slumbering’ within us and assign them corresponding

Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido (1925)â•…â•… 5

objects in the outer world. But at all events the different qualities of love are irreducible to one another and prefigured in the very structure of the soul. The Freudian method of trying to make the normal intelligible from the abnormal here leads (applied uncritically) to erroneous results. 7. In what follows Scheler dismisses the objection of those opponents of Freud who cast doubt on the special psychological role ascribed to the sex-drive. He shows very convincingly that there is, for instance, nothing which could be coordinated with the hunger drive (such as ‘breadwinner-love’) in the sense in which sexual love can be coordinated with the sex-drive. It is, however, true that Scheler can only find a place for the sex-drive, even thus (appraisingly) distinguished, within the so-called ‘vital sphere’;5 the sphere of cultural values and the highest ethical and religious values, or the mental acts directed towards them, have nothing to do with it. 8. Scheler sticks especially tenaciously to the keynote of his critique, that psychological qualities cannot be derived from one another. Apropos of repression he demands to be informed about the repressing power and draws a would-be ironical comparison between Freudian libido and Fichte’s ‘ego’, which also ‘sets bounds to itself’. He here accuses Freud of circular argument. As regards sublimation, including the predominance of a particular drive and the creation of substitutes, he launches an attack on the view that surplus libido can prescribe, say, specific talents. It was not the fact that Napoleon had had to put up with much bad luck in his relations with Josephine that produced his military campaigns. Surplus energy can only be channeled to already present talents, but this is only possible within fairly narrow limits; for all psychological dispositions have their own specific energy reserves. The idea that the individual strata are connected by a valve of unlimited extensibility6 is completely untenable. The alternative: either abandonment of higher development or abandonment of reproduction, is futile if taken absolutely (it is only to some extent valid for a one-sidedly intellectualistic cultural ideal). Were Freud’s arithmetic of energy correct, lasting sexual abstinence would necessarily result either in the highest spiritual achievements or the creation of neuroses; this is hardly what experience teaches us. What we completely miss in Freud is both more precise information on the distinction between a justified and necessary ‘control’ of libido and the sex-drive, and a ‘repression’ of the same, which, according to him, represents the major source of mental illness; and, at the same time, some precise information about the different conditions

6â•…â•… Politics, Values, and National Socialism under which repressed libido leads now in the direction of ‘sublimation’, now in that of ‘illness’. As long as these two points lack an exact and precise clarification, the Freudian theory bears in itself the great danger of at one time pressing ethics into the completely false alternative of ‘primitivism’ versus ‘ascesis’, at another the equally great danger of obscuring the frontier between morally necessary and justified control over the sex-drive and a false, unhealthy ‘repression’ of the same.

9. In our opinion, probably no pychoanalyst will assert that Scheler’s critique is superficial and has no bearing on unsolved problems. But even his own arguments reveal many weak points which we must first bring to light. Afterwards we shall try to establish what useful pointers psychoanalysis can take from this critique. We shall from here on ignore the agreements of the great thinker. But the weaknesses of Scheler’s arguments stem on the one hand from certain gaps in his knowledge of Freud’s theories, on the other from a definite hamfistedness of the phenomenological researcher, against which he has no sovereign remedy when he enters the sphere of real events. We ascribe his decision to take such a step, his occasional announcement that he himself is ready to cancel the ‘phenomenological reduction’, to his thirst for knowledge, which cannot bear the confinement of the bounds prescribed by the method. 10. We must remark here, en passant, that there would be little point in considering any specific opinions of Jung even as merely possible interpretations of Freud’s theory, since the opposition between the two researchers is especially pointed and deliberate here: Freud and his disciples are unwilling to make any concession at all to the watering down of the concept of libido and the monism of drives. This is why Freud’s very concept of libido already includes within itself a certain determination of the quality of psychic energy. A limitless replaceability, switchability, ‘multiponibility’, so to speak, of psychic energy was never taught, even by Freud. Scheler could have happily spared Freud the reproach of the ‘Fichtean ego’, had he not groundlessly and erroneously made a point of imputing to him a monism of drives and had he not failed to notice that Freud always reckoned with the original presence of a rival authority to the libido, now opposing the reality principle to the pleasure principle, now the ego drives to the sexual drives. Perhaps the relevant formulations are not unambiguously laid down; nevertheless, the implied attempt at a circular interpretation of libido-inhibition never occurred to Freud, on the evidence of his writings. Scheler’s misunderstanding of the concept of repression seems to us also questionable. Repression never means the non-gratification or combating of a drive in Freud, nor

Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido (1925)â•…â•… 7

does it signify an extreme form of such renunciation in contrast, say, to a ‘modified control’, but the banishing from consciousness of emotionally emphatic representations. Granted, the assumption of an unconscious psychic life (presupposed by Freud’s concept of repression) must seem rather like an abomination to the phenomenologist. But when one is minded to leave the sphere reserved for one’s usual method, one ought freely to face even those possibilities which must be completely closed to that method. Scheler seems here to fall into the error, often made by others, of substituting for the living Freud an imaginary ‘wild psychoanalyst’, who professes to explain everything human by means of the average quantity of his sexual gratifications and to guide them by regulating them. An already fully formed drive, which the person knows about and consciously ‘condemns’, ‘governs’ or ‘indulges’, is not, according to Freud, at least not primarily and directly, either psychologically creative or destructive. Here Scheler seems to have forgotten what he acknowledged a few pages earlier, that Freud does not regard the sex-drive as primarily effective as a self-contained unit. No more does psychoanalysis present us with the choice between ‘primitivism’7 and ‘ascesis’, for the removal of repression does not mean the abolition of actual inhibitions, and, on the other hand, sublimation does not in the least mean the (gradual) reduction of sexual activity to nil. 11. It is perhaps no accident that Scheler, in his heart of hearts, refuses to acknowledge assumptions about drive-conflicts or drive-interferences, let alone psychological new creations that follow from them. These are things which necessarily lead into the problems of the presence and existence of psychological phenomena, or (to put it into Schelerese) refer to the dependence of the ‘essence’ of certain psychic ‘acts’ on the ‘existence’ of other psychic phenomena. To be sure, Scheler has admitted the justification of such an interpretation in a roundabout way, where he propounds the theory of the selective influence of impulses on the qualities of the higher acts, but he fares like so many who only allow themselves to make concessions grudgingly: they implicitly retract them again. This is apparent in the lack of clarity he is guilty of whenever he discusses the sex-drive and sexual love; he passes at will from one to the other and confuses them, despite frequently emphasising the distinction between them. Thus he unexpectedly confines the privileged position of the sexdrive, a matter of vitality, to sexual love. But it is more important, in our view, that he has a distorted interpretation of the libido concept, in which sexual love is already prefigured. For his thesis that the drive is directed

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not to the harvesting of sensations but to ‘objects’, is certainly tempting, but one-sided and doubtful. Certainly the striving of libido has absolutely nothing to do with the refined project of a balance of voluptuous pleasure over pain. But one cannot conclude from that to the assumption of a striving directed to the closeness or ‘availability’ of ‘value-charged’ objects. An impulsive striving is surely above all directed to the performance of activities. If sexual love is something other than the sexdrive, the sex-drive is also something other than sexual love, and in its case activities which bring voluptuousness are to the fore. We can agree with Scheler on this so far, that we allow the immanent developmental tendency of libido to count as a normal drive; that is why there is that ‘experimental casting about’, for would this be possible if the striving were directed first to some kind of ‘having’ of objects and only then to sexual activities? Only in respect of sexual activities is there a need for the localisation of the ‘values of the opposite sex’ to a few, often typical, individuals, in whom they are experienced. The representation of such values already presupposes the performance of impulsive sexual movements. As for the unclear grasp of the concept of libido in the Freudian school, it must here be emphasised that, besides external manipulations, non-motor internal bodily process can also be classed with activities accompanied by voluptuousness, and these help us understand the purely passive sensations of voluptuousness (say, of the infant): psychoanalysis has provided many proofs of the existence of organ pleasure, and this is never, not even after normal pubertal development, wholly contained in the genital sex-drive. In the light of this, the utterly primitive libido ‘striving’ after ‘sensations’ already seems nothing like so monstrous as it does to the researcher who can only understand the psyche in terms of conscious acts. For the primitive striving is not a search for means to help one attain a certain state, whose sure promise of pleasure one recalls – this is a logical definition of striving – but a state of tension, which contains in itself traces of the pleasurable state and can once more pass over into it.8 Such considerations cannot be avoided as soon as one agrees or condescends to practice psychology! Although we regard Scheler’s emphasis on ‘the values of the opposite sex’ for the genesis of the normal, indeed for every sexual constitution, as a fortunate stroke, we must yet maintain that it has by no means helped us (nor could it) to an unambiguous determination of the object; nor has it even given a hint about how we are to understand localisation, the choice of person. But perhaps the abnormal case, in its greater morphological

Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido (1925)â•…â•… 9

(structural) intelligibility (think of Bergson’s stimulating investigations!), can contribute to the understanding of the normal, provided one allows the normal a special morphological position and not only a conventional higher evaluation. (The ‘abnormal’ case is precisely the typical, [as episode and component!], that is, desire for incest; or a more typical one: fetishistic ties.) 12. The question now arises, whether the dispute about the derivability of psychological qualities is not a mere battle of words, idle talk at cross purposes. On the one hand, who would deny the existence, the relatively continuous persistence and the unique value-content of such qualities? On the other, who would doubt that psychic life is in continual flux, that qualities are continually making an appearance and again disappearing? Despite all this, the problem seems to us by no means an empty one. We must follow Scheler in rejecting the idea of a mosaic-like composition of feeling-states, as well as any inclination to do away with differences between values by appealing to the original ‘material’ of the psychological attitude.9 This popular psychological tendency, which has a penchant for prefacing, for example, the word ‘sublimation’ with an ‘only’, depends on the factually erroneous belief in a mechanism to be operated arbitrarily, a fantastically fleeting changeability and reversibility of psychic states. Certain motifs of psychoanalysis may encourage this error, but, all in all, it is largely revealed to be an error by psychoanalysis itself: we simply recall the detailed and tiresome technique of causing experiences to be relived, the roundabout ways of transference, resistances, non-reversibility and, in their place, the mere non-manipulability of psychic processes. These aspects of psychoanalysis, which shine forth clearly enough from the relevant literature, are not addressed by Scheler at all. But now, to Scheler himself! According to his view of the psychological world, qualities of feeling present themselves as, at most, conditioned by other (more dynamic) feelings, and never as developments of them, but only, as it were, of themselves. But a decisive objection to this is the fact that even feelings related to one and the same object change in the course of time, sometimes steadily, sometimes abruptly. Love for X can imperceptibly pass over into hate or indifference; in the first case the note of passion, the dynamic element, remains. Think also of Rebecca in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, whose sensual love for Rosmer is ‘sublimated’, under the influence of various motives, into a totally different kind of idolisation of him. Certainly it is hard to take this as a combination of sensual love

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and respect or admiration. But the sensory love has helped to condition it, and has itself ceased: is it perhaps not contained in it, somewhat like the chemical element in a compound? Little of this may still remain in discrete traces; as little may such a synthesis be performed in a laboratory. The exchange of energy from one psychic level to another, as Scheler puts it (with his platonising lust for constructing an unshakeable order of ideas), may not be quite so cumbersome. But not only a change of drive, even the mixing of drives, is mistakenly a stone of stumbling for Scheler; to be more precise, every change of drive is a mixture of drives, a new motive which emerges though the concourse of different motives. Nobody experiences green as a mixture of blue and yellow, but out of blue and yellow a fully authentic green can present itself. There is no sexual love where sensory attraction and amorous attraction ‘thwarted of its goal’ (Freud) are not mingled together, even though the fundamental quality cannot be described as a movement back and forth between the two poles. Yet, once more, this ‘fundamental quality’ first shows itself when the objective conditions of the individual feelings, which are supposed to flow out of it, or, as it were, move away from one another, are fulfilled! It is clear that sexual love presupposes a considerable amount of sublimation: certain perverse and polygamous inclinations which degrade the object of sexual appetite are no longer found in it, although they were formerly to be detected in the loving person. Scheler’s arguments are therefore not capable of demolishing psychoanalytic ideas of a dynamic total organisation. 13. In our concluding ethical part, we shall have to turn the tables and ask whether a certain psychoanalytically conceived malleability of the drives is not rather a presupposition than an obstacle to a morality which does not simply mean to ‘contemplate’ moral values, but, for good or ill, also bring them into being.10 On various moral questions one may think differently from Freud or most of his pupils, but one ought to find it hard to deny that the leading psychoanalytic principle of the enlargement of consciousness is a fundamental ethical principle. Scheler entertains the fear that one might all too easily confuse and confound good and evil, valuable and valueless, with one another; our fear is, rather, that an all too ‘essence-bound’ metaphysical separation between the two could lead to an abandonment of the advancement of the good, the increase of the valuable, merely for the sake of upholding the clinical isolation of the good or the valuable.11 He will surely have to concede that the prudish fear of

Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido (1925)â•…â•… 11

‘coming into contact’ with evil is not an essential trait, in his sense, of Christianity, but rather an appurtenance of the puritanical ethos of pride and mistrust which he combats. Here ends our criticism of Scheler. 14. Psychoanalysis has much to gain from the objections, questions and conceptual distinctions Scheler puts forward. Leaving out of account the critical suggestiveness he usually brings to bear in such passages of arms, we think we can distinguish four groups of problems for psychoanalysis which are given life by Scheler’s attack. (a) Questions of normality and pathology; the extent to which the first exists and the possibilities of variations within it. And an extremely closely related question: the relation and (in terms of developmental theory) the increasing correspondence between content (end) and object, especially of the sexual drives. (b) Questions of psychological development in general; especially the extent to which denial of the outer world, as opposed to a wish or drive, is really determinate of development and contributes to the formation of higher psychic attitudes,12 or how far it only offers an opportunity for this. (c) Questions about repression, condemnation, sublimation: sublimation within the drive and away from it. The fact that so many acute critics of Analysis simply conflate repression and inhibition suggests that, apart from the difficulty of renouncing traditional ways of thinking in order to consider the Unconscious as a sphere of real forces, there may be objective grounds for this. Every factual restraint of a wish present to consciousness demands an incipient repression of the object of the wish from consciousness: where are the boundaries to be drawn against proper, harmful and cowardly repression? Furthermore, why are the wishes extracted from the unconscious during an analysis and remembered or reproduced not really re-lived; is this to be ascribed only to transference (through which the former over-saturated layers are as it were dried out) or does there remain an indissoluble union between the unconscious as form of psychic existence and the affect-laden contents of the unconscious (so that becoming conscious of them in a genuinely experience-like way automatically amounts to volatilisation)? To put it another way, how far and why does the revealing, recalling re-experience count as real abreaction and disposal? Scheler’s question about the relation between repression, sublimation and having one’s fling leads finally to: (d) The question whether the relation between psychoanalysis and ethics is adequately explained by the claim that the analysand is ‘given back

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to himself’ and can now so control his drives and desires that there is no longer any possibility of neurosis? Or whether some basic principles are already concealed, taken for granted and used as criteria in the analytical process?13 These are questions which demand to be treated with greater precision and will one day receive it. Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Contained in Max Scheler, The Essential Forms of Sympathy. (‘The Phenomenology of sympathy’, pt 2, enlarged and revised edition.), Bonn: Cohen, 1923. The work forms the first volume of a series, entitled ‘The essential laws of the emotional life’. The forthcoming volume, The essential forms of the feeling of modesty, is going to contain an even more thorough discussion of Freud’s theories. T. K. Oesterreich – see his volume, no. 4, of Überweg’s History of Philosophy – is hardly mistaken in calling Scheler’s appearance the greatest event in ethics since Kant. It differs from Bergsonian intuition, to which it is a near relation, through its preference for the unvarying conceptual element. The development of phenomenology can be traced back beyond Husserl via A von Meinong to F Brentano. Here he expresses doubts as to whether the quality of such sensations in the infant can really be ascertained. However he seems himself to attach little value to these doubts. He seems to accept as a fact the continuity between infantile erotism and adult erotism directed either to self or others. He very aptly comments here that there can only be one genuine and morally acceptable racial policy, namely that which works against the inhibition of sexual love by any inferior influence. We take this apt designation from the psychology of Alfred Stöhr, who, in his treatment of communicating goals, distinguishes the valve from the relay connections. This alternative would seem particularly bizarre if we were to consider ‘primitivism’, with complete justification, not as boundless copulation and childbearing, but as the genuine attempt to return to the womb or to regress to the state of a single-celled being. It is often suggested in psychoanalysis that the striving for regression is for the most part unattainable. The idea of the reflex arc may be of use here. Scheler’s merits are exceptionally great precisely in his enrichment of our knowledge of value-nuances. This is also the heart of the critique directed at Scheler by the modern Catholic school of ethics (e.g., Wittmann). Here we find the concept of end opposed to his concept of value. The guidance and control of appearances, which has been the aim of natural science, in the widest sense, is within definite limits also unavoidably postulated in ethics. But this is of no further interest here. Cf. S. Ferenczi, Essay on Genital Theory, International Psychoanalytic Library, XV, Vienna, 1924. Cf. the divergent sexual ethical atmospheres of Freud’s disciples in the closer sense, the circle around Jung and that around W. Stekel. The application of psychoanalytical insights and methods to school teaching (Pfister) seems especially to present its supporters with the inescapable question of what kind of persons are to arise out of the smelting oven of de-neuroticising; it is possibly only an empty fiction that one can practise the latter at all without somehow answering this question! May the analyst himself repress his ethos? The view that repression of this kind, e.g., repression of

Max Scheler’s Critique and Assessment of Freud’s Theory of Libido (1925)â•…â•… 13 ideals, also exists is now making headway (Freud, Ferenczi), which, besides, makes it clear that the much maligned ‘prevailing moral views’ have many strata. And psychoanalytical work relates, after all, to the formation of psychic material, whose fate is also part of the most basic ethical subject matter. It must already have begun with the exposure of morally conditioned psychic mechanisms. A simple ‘disregard’ of ethics by the analyst proves hardly possible. It would also be difficult to overlook two secondary accents in significant works of the master himself and of his circle: a naturalistic, which betrays a distaste for ‘social’ evaluations and assessment of drives, and a rationalistic, which expresses the happy hope of the intellectual and also factual conquest of the dark depths of the soul through the powers of consciousness. Although Scheler’s suggestion of the dilemma ‘primitivism-ascesis’ rests on a misunderstanding, the existence of an unresolved duality of tendencies, which are not clearly weighed and fenced off from one another, seems to us indubitable.

2 High-Mindedness (1931) Translator’s note: there is no straightforward contemporary English equivalent for the German word Hochmut, the German title of this paper, as Kolnai himself emphasises. Neither ‘pride’ nor ‘arrogance’ will always prove adequate substitutes, but the now archaic ‘high-mindedness’ does, I think, come nearest to it, and will, I think, pose no problems to the likely readers of this translation. 1. Towards a definition of high-mindedness (i) Ever since Jesus Christ attacked the Pharisees for their moral selfconceit and caused the hopes of salvation on the part of the weak, the helpless and the humbled to blaze forth, and ever since Augustine scourged high-mindedness as the arch-sin of spiritual being and primal corruption of all spiritual and moral values, the contrast-pair of high-mindedness and humility has been one of the dominant motifs of our thinking. If St. Francis of Assisi was the truly heroic knight of humility, perhaps no-one has felt all the tragedy of human high-mindedness as deeply and passionately as Pascal: man in his double status as ‘a mean between nothing and the whole’, was perhaps the problem for this great and passionate contender against his own high-mindedness. Truly simple and primitive humility was certainly no longer characteristic of this age; even Geulincx’s remarkable, far-reaching doctrine of the nothingness of human willing – ‘Ubi nil vales, ibi nil velis’ – has something artificial, something of the attempt to spare one the ultimate and total surrender to God through a sudden declaration of peace. In our own day we are indebted to Soloviev and Scheler, among others, for their fine philosophical revivals of the feeling of humility; we have also learnt to challenge the element of high-mindedness above all in 15

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epistemological ‘subjectivism’, in ‘liberalistic’ theories of society and in other tendencies culturally related to them. However we quite often find misunderstandings about the nature of high-mindedness: sometimes every kind of pride, all appropriate distance, every rational ordering of life is also rejected along with it; sometimes high-mindedness is interpreted as mere ‘exaggerated’ pride and thus to some extent justified; sometimes again it is falsely confined to internal or moral pride alone. It is the purpose of the following pages to shed some light on these matters. There are several kinds of outlook which reveal a similarity to Â�high-mindedness as regards its direction, intention and ‘gesture’, and yet are not identical with it. In such cases there is sometimes a real Â�connection with high-mindedness, sometimes not. We must first include here all those feelings and qualities which relate primarily to the ‘intrinsic value’ of the subject: pride, self-assurance, vanity, haughtiness, conceit (‘self-importance’) and other subtle variations. Then also other general forms of spiritual and moral ‘disposition’ or ‘decision’ which have an essential connection with high-mindedness: we are thinking particularly of epistemological and philosophical subjectivism on the one hand, and the phenomenon of ‘evil’ as such on the other. Conceptual distinctions like, for example, that between high-Â� mindedness and self-assurance, etc., always come up against the limited and peculiar, almost ‘solecistic’, expressive powers of each particular language. The English ‘self-assurance’ is not a proper equivalent for ‘Selbstgefühl’. Again, ‘pride’ and ‘high-mindedness’ are both translated by ‘superbia’ in Latin. French, analogously with German, distinguishes between ‘fierté’ and ‘orgueil’, whereas the English speaker uses ‘pride’ – despite the existence of ‘haughtiness’ – for both. This need not prevent us from making the necessary distinctions, as we have also to differentiate between various types of high-mindedness, which yet all bear the same name. A multiplicity of terms never denotes arbitrary ‘caprice’, but rather a special and apposite perfection of the language in question. (ii) It is easy to show that high-mindedness is not simply an extension of pride. We always talk about pride ‘in or of something’; but no-one can be high-minded ‘in or of something’, or even, properly speaking, ‘on account of something’ (a possession, or a value one possesses). The inhabitants of a small town may be ever so ‘proud’ of their little municipal art-gallery, they may take this pride to ridiculously inappropriate lengths, but there need not be a hint of high-mindedness in this. Is it a matter of high-mindedness when a woman is proud of her beauty, or a man of his understanding? There may well be much high-mindedness in the case as well, but it is

High-Mindedness (1931)â•…â•… 17

not an essential part of the situation. Even moral pride is not necessarily high-mindedness. A joyful observation of one’s own abilities, even when measured by social or human criteria as such, can still be undertaken with humility, with insight into one’s own fragility and imperfection. Indeed, pharisaical high-mindedness itself may still stand far below the peak of unalloyed high-mindedness! Stirner’s ‘individualist’, who would no longer go on comparing himself with others on the basis of alien value-criteria, is certainly more high-minded than the Pharisee whose moral pride takes the typical form of high-mindedness. It seems to be the case that pride turns into high-mindedness to the extent that, instead of objective values forming the ‘substratum’ of pride, the emphasis switches to ‘one’s own self’ as their highest embodiment. But that hardly explains everything. For pride is, again, not simply love of values; it too unmistakably intends one’s own self as well. I am indeed proud of ‘something’, but, precisely, something of mine. Certainly I cannot be high-minded, in the same sense, ‘because of’ these things of mine; rather, my high-mindedness makes itself concretely felt ‘in connection’ with them. One could put it like this: the proud man enjoys the glow that radiates from his ‘valuable things’ and reflects back on him; the high-minded man lives in himself as lightdispenser, whether or not this light is reflected especially dazzlingly back from many external ‘objects’. Even psychological and bodily personal qualities belong to those objects, as do what is achieved through them; the high-minded man is not primarily concerned with any of these things. The high-minded man does not think: “I am the one to whom this and that belong, who has done this and that . . .”, but only “I am I”. Qualities and achievements are not constituents of the ego, but merely signs of this ego’s value-height. Certainly the proud man, who over-values the value-objects that belong, or are accessible, to him, approaches the condition of the high-minded man; but high-mindedness is not constituted by this over-valuation. This rather first appears where, so to speak, over-valuation smothers valuation. Let us assume that I am exaggeratedly proud of some work I have done: subjectively and perspectivally, I then evaluate the theme, the significance and the success of the work higher in relation to other similar work than they objectively deserve, I evaluate the work, as it were, with disproportionate ‘concentration’; I myself look ‘up’ to the work, treat it as a gift-like ‘self-surpassing’, and so on. It is different when I over-value the work from high-mindedness: the over-valuation in relation to other analogous achievements then takes on a kind of mystic character, as though it were rather a matter of an incommensurability which, from the start, rules out

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any genuinely objective comparison; the value of the work is merely a confirmation of my personal value and goes without saying; no gift has been given me, making it possible for me to create it; rather, I therewith concede a gift to the ‘undeserving’ world, a reflection of my self. These two types are very seldom clearly distinguishable, but in general they clearly do occur. The primary point here is simply to show that high-mindedness is not merely exaggerated pride, but rather, despite many links with it, something qualitatively different, including something like a change of direction. The proud man may exaggerate the importance of himself for the world; the high-minded man grants the world merely importance for himself. The proud man wants to secure a worth-while existence; the high-minded man knows existence only as his own existence. Pride may injure, though can just as well quicken; high-mindedness annihilates. The proud man “knows what he owes to himself”; the high-minded man knows that he owes nothing to anyone or anything. The proud man sets store by his ‘high’ place in this or that order; the high-minded man feels that he does not belong to any order. To do justice to gradations as well: the high-mindedness of the proud man is that he ‘sets store by himself’: the pride of the man of high-mindedness is that he sets store by not having to set store by anything. (iii) It is obvious why pride in “internal goods” and the “qualities of personal being” comes nearest to high-mindedness, or is most exposed to the entry of high-mindedness. (We shall return below to the special connection between high-mindedness and wealth and power.) The more we have to do with inalienable internal qualities of personal existence, the nearer lies the danger of confusion, as though ‘one’, the abstract ego perhaps, were the real author and creator of these values. I feel the good that is ‘in’ me, ‘in’ my very being, as my self, and see in it an emanation of my selfhood. ‘I’ as such, ‘am’ this plenitude of value. I am full of value – not, say, my possessions, my bodily form, my ‘skills’ – hence I and value are one. This is the intentionality of high-mindedness. It is thus not a matter of merely feeling one’s own value, even essential value (in distinction from values of achievement, possession and relation). The difference between pride and high-mindedness which is still always clearly detectable in such feelings is expressed in the fact that the man proud of his value also feels deeply and passionately his defects and disvalues, whereas the man of high-mindedness, even when in fact clearly aware of his disvalues, is simply not concerned with such things. Thus it will not do to say that pride and high-mindedness are related as achievement values to the values of the person’s being; although there

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may be a tendency towards this, high-mindedness may also be centred on ‘achievement’ and ‘situational’ values and, on the other side, a man may feel the value of his personal depths with mere pride, free of all high-mindedness. For the essential value of the person, however little reducible to, say, potential ‘utility’ values, nevertheless signifies no ‘selfenclosed’, as it were, ‘complete in itself’ value of the subject as such, unrelated therefore to an objective realm of values! But this is precisely the fundamental presupposition of high-mindedness, whether or not it may “occasionally acknowledge” objective values, even if only to be able to develop itself in reality. The fact that there are undoubtedly such things as “collective highmindedness” and “objectively limited high-mindedness” also shows that high-mindedness should not be confused with ‘individualism’ or ‘feeling of one’s own person’ (Persongefühl). There is national or party highmindedness and there is high-mindedness in the matter of a thinker’s conviction. By high-mindedness of this latter kind we understand the exclusive and, as it were, ‘automatic’ approval of one’s ‘own’ stand-point, whether it be a matter of social affiliation of some kind, or of a particular method or emphatic direction of thought. But nor is high-mindedness simply “uncritical partisanship”, “dogmatic rigidity”; it is more and less than that. Less, since it does not have to be at all ‘prejuduced’, ‘blind’ or ‘unthought out’ in the individual. More, in that it does not stop at belief in one’s ‘own’ superiority or direction (though this be quite unsubstantiated), but feels what is alien or opposed as somehow ‘irrelevant’, lacking contact with one’s own, insignificant. (Think of certain varieties of Chauvinism or the radiant and indestructible smile of many an interlocutor at the remarkable fact that anyone could hold a different view.) It is not then the emphasis on the person’s value that distinguishes high-mindedness, but a characteristic apriorism of the feeling of selfworth. ‘My’ person, my community, my objective stand-point is as such, as ‘mine’, uniquely valuable. In the particular case this will, admittedly, be empirically ‘confirmed’; without this ‘sidelong’, supplementary intention of objective value, which concedes to the not-self a shadowy existence, a real case of the stance of high-mindedness would be as good as impossible. Pride, however, itself subject to perspectival delusion in favour of one’s own and what is close to one, is ‘empirically’ aware of value in quite another sense; ‘self’-hallowing here appears rather as a secondary joyful and (if you will) perhaps even ‘thankful’ experience of gain. As against this there is high-mindedness’s ‘a priori’ of self: a priori not in the sense of an unconditioned and, for all else, ‘standard’ belief

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in a once-and-for-all, ‘objectively’ felt, chosen or intuited ‘value’ (value of any kind, of any sphere of objects), but in the sense of an eternal and invincible stance of self-worth in the evaluating subject: no matter what aspect of the person or what objective reference is here and now represented in or taken up by this ‘acting’ self. One could almost say: only in the act of high-mindedness itself does the subject hold ‘his’ concrete, personal and objectively determinable own special being to be valuable (whereas by contrast the proud man first emerges out of such evaluations); it is of his high-mindedness itself that the high-minded man is essentially ‘proud’: of his unquestioned superiority of value and significance, by no means ‘evident’ but transcending all objective and intuitive evidence, in no need of any kind of cognitive endorsement; of his own holding fast to the subject’s claim, as subject, to be all in all. Nothing so clearly shows this apriorism of high-mindedness as its immunity to all relativisation. Genuine pride not only allows, it even favours (at least in typical cases) the experience of littleness and limits in its object; for every objective bond preeminently intends the particular concrete form and hence the boundedness of its object. High-Â� mindedness, however, must always think of its object, or, better, its content, as a highest and an absolute. This does not mean that everyone who is ‘high-minded’ is a megalomaniac. But where high-mindedness as such is found – whether in the treatment of fellow men, in mimicry or gesture, in a train of thought or a work of art – there is also a corresponding absolutely solemn ‘seriousness’, a ‘can’t-see-the-joke’ in the strictest sense, a majestic pointlessness and a dismissal of any question, responsibility, discussion, ordering or definition. All high-mindedness is satanic: wills to be its own God. Therein it distinguishes itself from sheer massive ‘presence’ (Dasein) – immune to derivation and detailed justification alike – as usually manifested by healthy, sturdy, ‘earthy’ people: ‘presence’ relates its ‘matter-of-fact-ness’ to its character as God’s creature, in a deep-lying – not readily schematisable – community of being and significance with the rest of creation; and its heavy-handed drollery exactly corresponds to this note of, as it were, ‘rooted’ dependence, just as the crystal gravity of high-mindedness corresponds to the idea of complete exaltation above relations and of a priori self-validity. This is what we mean when we speak of the ‘iciness’ of high-mindedness, which can come to the fore in matters most trifling in themselves, for example when someone dismisses a piece of information, which is neither clearly nonsensical nor superfluous, with a pitying grimace, and which clearly has nothing to do with cold-bloodedness or mere reserve.

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(We shall have to mention an essential contrast in detail between pride and high-mindedness again below.) (iv) It is a much simpler undertaking to distinguish between the other related attitudes. Self-assurance is pride ‘in’ one’s own person and has already been distinguished as such from high-mindedness. Self-conceit usually indicates an over-valuation of one’s own knowledge and ability, but is nevertheless rather different from the a priorism of high-mindedness. Self-infatuation is also a very close neighbour of high-mindedness and is again differentiated from it through its remaining fixed on something concrete and objective, even if it be one’s own person. For the typical man of high-mindedness it is neither his own person nor – as in the case of the hidebound, confined or monomaniac – a favourite concern or connection which becomes the object explicitly grasped and felt, possibly supplanting all other objects of value; its theme need not in the least be ‘limited’ in an empirical or quantitative sense. It is in the ‘act’ itself, whatever be directly intended in it, that high-mindedness lies hidden, that strange, spiritually ‘destructive’ bending back of the intention onto its ‘subject’, as it were, its abstract point of departure, the ‘elevated view-point’ adopted vis-à-vis the object; that internal cancellation of the superficially performed object intention. Certainly, high-mindedness will in fact also clearly show itself in its affective, intellectual and practical preference for concrete entities close to the subject; but it is not exhausted by this, and can doubtless be distinguished from other forms of these things by the specific level of emphasis. It is, for example, one thing when I behave selfishly in some matter from an urge to satisfy certain needs and from stubborn insensitivity, another when I do it from that deep-lying indifference to the fate of one’s fellows which is characteristic of high-mindedness, and which naturally tends to show itself first as complete indifference to what happens to ‘strangers’. For there is, still, a ‘proximate’ relation between the ego and what happens to its ‘own’, whereas the concern for alien destinies presupposes an outward-turned intention of much greater coverage. However, even the neglect of self from high-mindedness is not unknown. It also makes a great deal of difference whether I, say, adhere to a conviction as a result of tradition, inclination or instruction, or when I refuse to give it up merely from high-mindedness. Then too the content of my ‘convictions’ must be determined by something concrete – after all, no-one is nothing but high-mindedness – though in this respect I shall be much less inwardly concerned with it. Indeed, there is also a high-minded spiritual bearing whose constituent values are continually changing – and not merely in the sense of temporal development. And this high-minded mentality is

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inscribed on every detail of my conduct: anyone can distinguish between the person who strives to defend and assert ‘something’ unconditionally, and the one who means to keep his stand-point free from any influence. Thus the first man will be most attentive in conversation when it turns on the meaning and kernel of his idea or the material consideration of a counter-idea, whereas the man of high-mindedness will reveal a deep-lying force in his attempts to exhibit the irrelevance of ‘disturbing’ trains of thought, their failure to touch his position, the crazy or almost worthless character of the other’s opinion. Such a man should not be confused with a demagogue or careerist; he is not, or not centrally, concerned with the attainment of external personal goals. (Nor without qualification with ‘imposing’ his personality from within. Compare below the types of dominance- and isolation-high-mindedness.) Such distinctions may seem ‘hairsplitting’ to the simplifying philosopher, but the plain man continually uses them in fleeting and fragmentary form. The relation between high-mindedness and vanity is worth noting. Although the latter also contains an element of ‘self-elevation’ vis-à-vis the surrounding world, it appears in this light to be opposed to highmindedness, since the vain person is entirely taken up with his milieu and seeks his own value in the favourable judgment of his fellows. In fact there are typical forms of high-mindedness in which all ‘regular vanity’ fades away, and vain characters who appear to renounce all ordinary ‘human dignity’. Nevertheless high-mindedness and vanity do not exclude each other. Vanity also conceals a tendency towards an abstract, contentless, exalted position; and high-mindedness tends all too easily to work out in practice to the will to indicate and fix the subject’s elevation in ‘visible signs’. The cynic is not only high-minded: ‘his vanity peeps out of him through the holes in his ragged cloak’. If, on the other hand, the vain ‘player’ only lives for his ‘public’, this also means that he demotes the milieu to the condition of mere audience and in this sense makes it the foil against which his own subjectivity can be validated. (This subjectvalidation is, despite functional dependence on alien judgments, ‘absolute’ in itself, with no reference to objective values.) The classical highmindedness-ethic of the Stoa becomes an unmistakable ethic of vanity when it undergoes secondary adaptation ‘for everyday use’: Epictetus’s ‘Actor’-ideal of the wise man. For all that, high-mindedness and vanity must ‘above all’ be always most clearly distinguished. There also is good reason for the linguistic distinction between highmindedness and haughtiness (allied to arrogance, self-importance, etc., and the French adjective hautain). Haughtiness is a modality of behaviour

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towards others, not a spiritual attitude, like high-mindedness. It is true that one can hardly imagine it without high-mindedness, but the amount of genuine high-mindedness in haughty conduct can vary greatly, especially on different occasions, and, besides this, not all high-mindedness brings about haughtiness. The haughty, or ‘high-handed’, person harbours an element of ‘turning aside’ to unfamiliar things, of care for matters which always bring with them a certain tension vis-à-vis high-mindedness. In addition, haughtiness also presupposes in general a reference to social, and therefore relatively objective, value-criteria. This, of course, is far from excluding high-mindedness; certainly, a person who acknowledges the importance of social rules has ipso facto renounced some of his highmindedness, but, on the other side, one’s own social ‘high place’ can help high-mindedness to its proper sphere of activity. When anyone treats a social inferior haughtily, the conduct does manifest real high-mindedness, for the background of objective values merely serves him as a mould which gives shape to the a priori self-elevation. (This happens especially when he is not only rude to inferiors, misusing his position or superiority egotistically or ‘sadistically’, but when he treats those in a lower social class, without any closer enquiry, as ‘a priori’ humanly inferior, as in the highest sense ‘unreal’. See also below.) But nor is haughtiness simply the outward and ‘visible’ aspect of high-mindedness. (v) We shall now briefly consider the relation of high-mindedness to moral evil as such and to intellectual subjectivism. It is clear that not only is high-mindedness itself evil, but that all moral evil exhibits a shading of high-mindedness. We must above all hold this if we think that evil is not simply a homogeneous power, to be conceived of in substantial terms, but that all its forms contain a perverted and disordered grasp of elements good in themselves, of genuine values. The lever of value-perversion is indeed high-mindedness, which provokes the particular and, as it were, ‘isolated’ holding of value to renounce the relation of vassalage to God and to rebel against the objective order of values. The pattern of such value-holding is the inalienable, in itself ‘absolute’, ‘subjective being’ of created spirits. This independence of all real influences is the universal point of departure for high-mindedness, but also, even in its ‘absoluteness’, in the yielding to the temptation it contains, the primal source of moral evil. Satan’s fall was brought about by his high-mindedness, which, characteristically, immediately became high-mindedness ‘directed downwards’, towards men. It is not only sins of presumption which, in a very broad sense, presuppose high-Â�mindedness as general condition; the same goes also for those of cupidity and Â�beastliness.

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‘I should like’ can only displace ‘it is objectively good for me’ if there is a refusal to conform to the sphere of objective values (as general background intention) and the subject withdraws from obligation, or from the objectively founded function of curbing the onslaught of impulse and desire. However, the more detailed content of moral evil is not so closely related to high-mindedness. Nor is the degree of immorality a simple function of the degree of high-mindedness involved. If, on the one hand, high-mindedness conditions sin as such, or at any rate necessarily helps to condition it (this is not the place to outline a general theory of moral evil), it is, on the other hand, straightforwardly expressed in the characteristic sins of high-mindedness, which are obviously very far from being the ‘only’ serious sins. High-mindedness is differently patterned according to the different ‘presumption relations’ which I intend between myself and the values and realities outside ‘myself’ (not always outside ‘my person’); but moral evil is differentiated after the material values which I deny in my conduct, and the related kinds of this denial. In a rather similar fashion high-mindedness also appears as an intentional and psychological precondition of intellectual subjectivism, which is naturally exemplified not only in certain philosophical systems (of India, the Western World in the modern period, but also Greece and the Middle Ages), but also in perfectly everyday and banal ways of thinking (for example, ‘The world is what we see in it’, and so on). The exclusive and primal demand on reality by the ego as subject of thinking is a characteristic inflection of high-mindedness; its preeminent possibility rests on the special importance of the (originally contentless) function of thought for the subject, in the formalistic sense of ‘nothing but subject’. Otherwise, however, the development of my intellectual style and ‘worldview’ is again poles apart from my ‘personal’-subjective elevated claim on things. An epistemological idealist or formalist certainly need not be markedly high-minded as a person, although he must unconditionally incline that way. For it would be wrong to believe that, say, the alteration of a solipsistic world-view into an ‘impersonal’ and idealistic one (in the sense of ‘consciousness as such’ or pantheist world-reason) signified a genuine objectivism and a renunciation of the high-mindedness of the subject as ‘principle of thought’ vis-à-vis the ‘content-laden’, ‘inert’, things and values of existence which serve as mere ‘stuff’ for thinking. Since we must forbear from completing this exposition of the relation between high-mindedness and analogous stances, we shall now look somewhat more closely at the possible structures of what high-mindedness intends.

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2. Forms of high-mindedness (i) It is a general characteristic of high-minded conduct that it tends somehow to cut the subject off from surrounding objects, especially from fellow human beings. A priori self-elevation is expressed not in an empirical comparison of my value with that of the others, but in comprehensively stripping them of value. The more unconditionally highmindedness controls conduct in its entirety, the more likely it is that not only the achievements of the surrounding world but also all its concerns are rejected, and ‘pronounced’ to be nothing. High-mindedness denies the value-content and existential weight of what is outside the ego; the man of high-mindedness is ‘sufficient unto himself’. This is at least the fundamental striving of high-mindedness; its concrete expression can vary. But there is certainly one form where this striving expresses itself in the consistent form of self-isolation and general apathy vis-à-vis the affairs of the world. But there are numerous deviations from such a strict negativism: sometimes a fixation of interest on a few somehow ‘ego-representing’ persons or objects while all others are excluded (a type which should perhaps be distinguished from mere object-directed ‘one-sidedness’ or ‘confinedness’), at others a very general (perhaps ‘practical’) attention to things, yet without real ultimate concern for their ‘destiny’, but rather for the sake of either mere ‘activity’ itself or the securing of certain fully ‘self-assured’ or ‘abstract’ goals. The manifestations of isolating high-mindedness are familiar enough: readiness to occupy a standpoint ‘above the conflict’; general contempt for people and false attribution to them of purely mechanical motives, bereft of value; nihilistic denial of values and principles; fear of being ‘profaned’ or ‘bound’ by personal relations; reluctance to search, ask or accept; refusal ever to be open to anything other than ‘oneself’. There can always be structural differences here. For example, apropos of the intention of value and reality: the cruder high-mindedness emphasises the value-emptiness of reality (all apparently opposing phenomena are the result of hypocrisy, idle talk, hysteria or varnishing), whereas the more subtle and consummate high-mindedness shrugs its shoulders at all definable values (such as moral values) and refuses to acknowledge them as such (not only their power in reality), denies them, so to speak, that intimate and subjective ‘breath of value’ which is what should first hallmark them as ‘values’, worthy of devotion and active championing. (We can see that pharisaical moral ‘puffed-up-ness’ is poles apart from the peaks of high-mindedness.) Nor will that variety of high-mindedness

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be totally unfamiliar which despises the material, definable, allegedly utterly ‘alien to reality’ and ‘ideological’ values still ‘more’ than reality itself, and would rather ‘compound with’ the latter, since it is less afraid of being inwardly disturbed, affected, and claimed by it. But since in the last analysis, in a metaphysical sense, value and reality are inseparable, entangled together in countless ways, they are usually in combination that which makes high-mindedness ‘suffer’ and would like to dispose of: everything ‘objective’ and ‘object-like’, which we must come to terms with, which troubles the exquisite crystalline absoluteness of the subject and obliges it to split. The purer and subtler the high-mindedness the more readily are even the interests and concerns of the particular person, as ‘member’ of the world, consigned to that sphere of object-anathema. This of course also indicates a further turn from ‘moral evil’ in the material ethical sense, although this indifference to one’s ‘own life’ leads not only to a drying up of egotism, but also to abstention from all moral effort and to the at least potential dismantling of the relevant ‘inhibitions’. It would, of course, be wrong to claim that every act of self-isolation, of distancing and refusal to take an interest is high-minded. We would otherwise have to assume that a life fashioned on gradations, distinctions and the drawing of boundaries would, as such, be filled with highmindedness. However, pseudo Christian fanaticism of this kind (as in some sects) should not be taken seriously. (Their desire, by the way, is to make the world precisely as high-mindedness regards it: a meaningless, inarticulated broth, in which the subject can be immersed, without having to ‘incur obligations’.) High-mindedness, therefore, is not to be confused with restriction of contact, selection of objects, modesty, distance – even pride in distance – as such. Neither order and economy in personal relations, nor the ‘avoidance’ of certain people or objects in itself, nor the ‘concealment’ of things, which are normally only concealed in the right place (cf. modesty about the body), nor detachment from types of relation (cf. the contacts of officials) have anything to do with high-mindedness. It is not high-mindedness, not even of a ‘permitted’ kind, when I am not able so to divide up my day that I also have leisure to listen to all the family worries of my tailor. It is precisely that almost universal partition, gradation and hierarchical differentiation of relations which rejects highmindedness and inserts the subject into the world with its wealth of values, instead of somehow ‘elevating’ him above it. Even pride in distance (‘I know what I owe to my position’) and pride in independence (‘I wish to stand on my own feet’, ‘I wish to fashion my life under my own steam’) are not necessarily the cause of high-mindedness. For not only pride of

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station, to which a certain respect is due – always qualitatively appropriate, but clearly also never quantitatively identical for every station – but also a certain independence in the conduct and arrangement of life, together with the avoidance of shackling and disproportionate dependencies, are objective values and do not imply absolutism of the subject in the form indicated. Certainly the danger of high-mindedness is not far off: a person may feel the value of his station, even though he shares it with others, as a metaphysical emanation of his subjectivity and ascribe some kind of ‘impenetrability’ (like that between ego and non-ego in stringent highmindedness) to the boundaries dividing him from lower placed people; or he may wish to appear ‘free’ of every kind of ‘obligation’ to others, or ‘free’ of all favour, friendliness, help and instruction from them. And the difference between high-mindedness and non-high-mindedness is not simply that high-mindedness begins with a certain ‘high degree’ of the latter, for even very far-reaching refusals and boundaries can still lack high-mindedness, and, again, even a single gesture or a refusal in an apparently trivial matter can betray genuine high-mindedness. High-mindedness is present when there is an intention of irrevocability and impenetrability of these boundaries and divisions, when there is a ‘perpetuity’ of the distances in question, even if this happens in light and fleeting form. (High-mindedness is not only a debasement of others, but always also – even when hidden and, in actual fact, insignificant – a direct questioning and challenging of God.) A glimmer of a ‘perpetuity’intention contains more high-mindedness than the maintenance of ever so great and manifold distances. Some absolute self-refusal towards a person, who might in the given case really and truly ‘need’ me (even if not to save his life or a similarly fundamental earthly good), betrays more high-mindedness, than when I keep my distance from a great number of ‘acquaintances’, for reasons stated. And again on the other side: a cool and general, a priori non-compliance with people in general is more of a reflection of my ‘infinite’ elevation and is more high-minded than if I reject certain people for certain reasons in a much sharper fashion and keep my distance from them. (ii) Not only the striving for isolation, but also claims for mastery and achievement can come under the heading of high-mindedness. We have already suggested that making changes in the world need not itself presuppose its inner acceptance. To represent the a priori exaltation of the subject in visible fashion, exhibits a perhaps less consistent, but no less natural path of high-mindedness, than withdrawal of interest as such. It would be completely wrong to think that ‘empirical’ domination and

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repression, pretentious demands, violence, etc., could not be combined with high-mindedness because they depend on concrete hedonic and manipulative goals, for in truth there are also empirical and material ‘proxies’ (occasions, receptacles, offshoots) of high-mindedness. Its share in conduct changes according to whether the objective goals of possession, construction, destruction and activity, or rather the determination to wall round, encircle and transfigure one’s own abstract exalted position are to the fore. Everyone knows, for example, the type of the ‘tyrant’, in the most confined sense: his inner loneliness, his contempt for mankind, his (we might well say) strict ‘transcendence’ vis-à-vis his subjects, who are for him merely the ‘crowd’; in that he ‘rules’ the people after this fashion, he thinks of them as further from him than if he lived the life of a hermit in a cave. Certainly even here too a certain ice-cold ambition, an ash-pale vanity, hinders the absolute victory of high-mindedness; however, this selfindulgence in elevation over the rest, which is, however, completely inconsequential and empty of content, and hence nothing but ‘elevation over the rest’ – for the genuine princely ambition is already a deviation from the pure tyrant-type – is only more than an organ of high-mindedness, in that it still needs an ‘organ’, and hence the existence of society and a concrete rank order within it, in that it takes grumbling cognisance of a once for all, fleeting, datum. Yet there are even far more plebeian forms of ‘life in society’, which are clearly partly brought into being by high-mindedness: we are not afraid of being thought paradoxical in including among them the type of the ‘careerist’. We mean, of course, the genuine, abstract, careerist, his interest in the matter confined to ‘getting on’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘success’, not, say, the one who pursues a definite ideal or interest-furthering goal and advances without scruple or dignity. That self-degrading, inwardly utterly indiscriminate and defenceless ‘proximity’ towards people, to which the careerist yields himself, excludes genuine closeness and community almost as completely as the tyrant’s ‘office’ of domination. The world, for the careerist too, despite all the uncleanness of the physical and psychological intermingling he undergoes, with all that that entails, is nothing but a boundary value of the non-ego, a resistance to be forced en bloc, a ‘flat surface’, which in contrast to an ‘elevation’, has to be accepted; only that in this case the plane forms also the ‘medium’ of the self-elevation, in that the careerist chooses as the starting-point of his upward progress the shoulders of his fellow men. Careerism expresses the high-mindedness of the petty and undistinguished, where over the place empty of personal distinction and dignity a practical harlot’s Â�willingness

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combines with the frosty isolation of the unconnected subject. Highmindedness is also concealed in further expressions and systems of the ethos of adaptation. The general subjective will to adapt – its formulated idea comes from sub-human biology, though of a kind which, as biology, is questionable and a justified object of criticism to historians of culture – degrades and devalues the aim of adaptation more than its subject; that to which I have above all ‘to adapt’ is for me a bundle of ‘circumstances’. High-mindedness lies hidden here behind the grovelling of the idea of adaptation. Not without reason is ‘adaptation’ often also interpreted as the means of ‘warding off disturbances’. I adapt myself to things, almost in accordance with the art of mimicry, in order to guard against having further genuine contact with them. (Compare the ethic of Stoicism: worldservice as secondary, preservation of inner indifference to things of the world as primary principle.) There is, then, no doubt that high-mindedness can also be combined with activity, external ‘engagement’, decisions and attitudes concerning empirical things. All the more, therefore, must we emphasise that there can only be talk of genuine high-mindedness as long as the questionable ‘pseudo values’ and ‘subject-representing points of view’ really do serve the function of exhibiting the subject’s exaltation on the basis of some concrete datum of elevation, or possibility of it, and of allowing it to project into the world. Not every property, every possession, every preferred tendency can go proxy for high-mindedness equally well, but only such as are already suited in themselves for bringing about an elevation of universal scope; hence especially those things which are least objectively specified, for example, preeminent sharpness of intellect indifferent to contents, or stylish fluency in communication, yield a more favourable soil for high-mindedness than a great talent for a particular discipline, or the ability to make a powerful impression on people. On the other hand highmindedness is often combined with endowments or achievements limited in themselves and ‘one-sided’, but nevertheless overstretched and blown up into universal values. However, here too we can usually find original powers or intentions tending to universality, as, for example, the gift of pointed deduction (which has led in one specialist area to really admirable results and on this basis is now trying to take the whole intellectual world by storm), or a generally aesthetic stance, a purely aesthetic gaze, through which even dedication to a particular art has been partially conditioned. At all events, some capacity or attitude can all the more readily become a vehicle of high-mindedness and allow the value-reversal necessary for this – the false conversion of an Â�objective value to a validity which

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derives from the absolute elevation of the subject – the less it embodies a genuine ‘quality’ of the person and its dedication to a ‘task’, and the more it is an expression of its somehow magically existing ‘superiority as such’ vis-à-vis the surrounding world. The occurrence of non-personal ‘collective’ high-mindedness (of nation, class, caste) is also connected with the possibility of an externalisation of high-mindedness discussed above. The real importance of the collective body, or the group-superiority concerned, facilitates the real expression of the attitudes of isolation and self-exaltation. Since high-mindedness attaches to the subject, not to the concrete person with his particular mental contents, the collective-high-minded individual is high-minded as it were ‘in the name of’ the group, without any detraction from the idolisation of his ego, which here plays the part of ‘an ego’ of ‘the nobility’ as such, or of some other social body. The one who is high-minded of social class conducts himself towards those of other classes not like a mere egotist or epicure, who sees the advantages which accrue to him as an individual from his belonging to that class, nor like the legitimately proud person, representing his class within the objectively given bounds, but as though he, ‘he’ as such, his very self, were that class. This is expressed even in the internal communication of people who are group-high-minded; the recognition of the ‘other ego’ is merely an empirical concession, through which the intention of the absorbing of the group-value in one’s own ego is not touched. The actual coming to terms with the multiplicity of egos – rather as in the schema of the liberal and atomistic conception of society – comes nowhere near abolishing the high-mindedness. The ordering of the mutual rights of the individuals is only an empirical and technical business aimed at the best possible preservation of the ‘world sovereignty’ of every ego, as though the existence of the ‘others’ was a kind of ‘necessary fiction’.1 Despite this the multiplicity of egos remains a serious problem for all high-mindedness once it stops trying to develop a consistently solipsistic position and takes the road of an extended – though merely provisional, external, more or less mechanical – contact with the surrounding world. (iii) One of the world-view-like expedients of high-mindedness is a kind of pantheism, which in this case brings about a ‘compromise’ between solipsism and the recognition of reality. We have here one of the possible intermediary levels of intention in which high-mindedness allows the validity of what is outside the ego. Pantheism – recall the Stoa or Spinoza, perhaps, rather than Plotinus or Bruno – first strips individual things, persons and concerns of their ‘ultimate’, but decisive importance, and

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thus frees the subject from any kind of concrete ‘surrender’ to them. The cancellation of the personal Godhead releases him from any tie, obligation and intended relation in the most intimate and deep-lying sense. Instead, the subject in the pantheist view of the world can himself be ‘God’; if everything ‘is really God’, there can be no doubt that I am. And if I am in all things, I need not be in any one of them. The unity of substance of the entire world yields the most suitable background from which my ego, which, according to all the evidence, is secretly not merged in that world-substance, can withdraw itself in splendid isolation. It is easier for me to isolate ‘myself’ when ‘otherwise’ everything is one, than when there are in the world real variations of proximity and a separate creator and ruler of the world still requires of me responsibility. Anyone may see how favourable strict pantheism is to the ‘mood’ of high-mindedness by comparing it with, say, the occasionally ‘pantheistic’ Christian mysticism of love. However, it is mere icy renunciation when I address the things of the world in this manner: ‘whatever you are, whatever you do and suffer, you are and will always be one and God’. A special antinomy of high-mindedness lies in the ‘Problem of the Devil’, or, in more general and empirical terms, in the problem of evil as such. If moral evil, that is, in the first place, Satan’s about-turn, presupposes a high-minded fall away from God, it is thereafter constituted by a genuine rebellion against God, and rebellion is already an incipient disavowal of high-mindedness. This basic attitude intensifies in the abundant ‘earthly’, ‘material’ and ‘beastly’ wealth of significance in moral evil, thanks to which the Devil is ‘Prince of this world’. The Devil plays AntiGod and Antichrist; organised evil exists. This depends on the fact that (as has already been said) it can not be said that evil ‘is’ high-mindedness or ‘consists’ of it, but rather that it possesses its own material contents, even a content of value, and is only conditioned by an act of high-mindedness. That is of course not enough to explain how high-mindedness, once posited, can be headed for this kind of, at least partial, self-abolition. Perhaps this fact reveals an aspect of the divine world-order and the metaphysical impossibility of complete high-mindedness; perhaps this very point might help us to an understanding of material evil as a ‘protective layer’ of the spiritual world against absolute Nihilism; perhaps the failure of his ultimate intention is already thus expressed in the tiniest ‘particles’ of the evil one. The primal high-mindedness of Satan gave itself the lie even when he ‘stood up’ against God. But on the other hand the element of high-mindedness within ‘communities of evil’ is worth comment. Satan does not ‘love’ his vassals, with whom he is ‘united’ in hatred of God.

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We should at least here hint at the likelihood that, ‘under the banner of evil’, devotion, caring and love in that all-embracing and ‘permeating’, ‘transitive’, ‘central’, sense – free from all intoxicated fanaticism – is, even in a purely empirical and psychological sense, impossible, in the way it is possible in communities of good. Whoever renounces allegiance to God, to being and the good as such, will lack every other ‘allegiance’, especially in the circle of those linked by that decisive breach of allegiance, to ultimate truth and perfection of meaning. (iv) Various shades of high-mindedness arise from its relation to a person’s inner security and insecurity. On the one hand high-mindedness seems to derive absolutely directly and intelligibly from unwavering security of being, which results in complete independence of the environment and superfluity of all consideration for it; on the other hand one might assume that, precisely, insecurity and fear would lead to cramped isolation and the fiction of an absolute, mechanical, inviolable and a priori security. In fact the apparent paradox might be accepted to this extent, that every general attitude which puts special emphasis on ‘security’ inclines towards high-mindedness, whether the over-emphasis derives from the real overflow of a ‘power-abounding’ or ‘satiated’ feeling of security, or from over-compensating for a ‘pathological’ insecurity. To a closer view, the matter looks a great deal more complicated, since there are quite different kinds of security-emphasis. We shall simply show how the doubt characterised above may be met: (1) Even really rugged, rock-like security of being is completely different from the a priori and world-despising ‘nothing can touch me’ of high-mindedness. The latter cannot be interpreted as a mere ‘extension’ of that security. We often encounter that kind of earthy stability of being with no trace of high-mindedness: it can be world-open, devoted, even humble. But it is perhaps possible that a fragment of secret insecurity still plays a part in ‘security-high-mindedness’: a concealed fissure, a shadow of inner emptiness or of unsteadiness in ‘ultimate’ things, of disorder in ‘shunned’ but not fully eliminable spheres; it is above all in another kind of full security – also internal, perhaps relating to one’s general status among one’s fellows – that every lack can become distressing and feed the growth of the claim for ‘inviolable security’, in the constellation of high-mindedness. It needs, however, a quite definite step to move from the positive simple ‘security’ based on strength of being to the negative security of high-mindedness, based on the general challenge of ego-alien being. (2) On the other hand, there must be in man an inner power – however distorted and crippled – for mere insecurity to stiffen into compensatory security-high-mindedness.

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The claim for security, in the face of which the factual lack of stability is felt so painfully, can, however, only be maintained on the basis of an existing power, a certain holding of security. This type of cramped highmindedness, anxiously avoiding any ‘surrender’ of self, is quite often present precisely in very assiduous and productive people. (Of course not all modest, reserved, shy, naively eager conduct can equally well be ascribed to high-mindedness, any more than ‘secure’, firm, skilful, as it were powerfully orchestrated behaviour is for that very reason a sign of it.) It seems that we have here – the reverse of the former case – a dimly felt, ‘undeveloped’ inner security, which through its claim to validate itself develops into high-mindedness, because the means are lacking for its ‘normal’ working out though the concrete situations of life. The above is, of course, only directed against the primitive schema, according to which there is simply security-high-mindedness and insecurity-high-mindedness, high-mindedness as ‘exaggerated’ security and as ‘reversed’ insecurity. No attempt should be made to deny the empirical findings of ‘hardness-high-mindedness’ and ‘cramp-high-mindedness’; nor indeed the various types of attempts to overcome high-mindedness: ‘breaking’ in the first case, ‘thawing’ in the second. Apart from that, many kinds of mixed types are both imaginable and familiar; for example, moral high-mindedness is based both on false security (conviction of one’s own goodness) and false insecurity (cramped dependence on the moral ‘norm’, poverty of life). Let me make one further explanatory note. We see that it just will not do to interpret high-mindedness simply as an expression of ‘emptiness’, and perhaps of the fear resulting from awareness of it. On the other hand we also know that high-mindedness does not grow from ‘abundance’, nor from the feeling of security and superiority which the latter yields in ‘sticking to’ the environment. The abstract ego’s striving for absoluteness can make use both of the plus- and of the minus-side of the person and certain kinds of relation between the two may be especially helpful. However, neither certain concrete signs of ‘superiority’ which represent the ego, nor a certain element of emptiness can ever be totally absent from high-mindedness. The whiff of emptiness is even detectable in securityhigh-mindedness, hardness-high-mindedness, even the types arising from achievement and abundance, since all that is individual and concrete, and productive of contact, is experienced as less emphasis and importance in comparison with the subject – again, not in respect of his personal uniqueness or impact, but of his being a quasi magic centre for the whole ‘swarm’ of values, powers and objects. We feel this ‘headlong fall’, or ‘shoving’,

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of value-objects into a chill vacuum in the great-grown, much-occupied, hard-to-approach type of high-mindedness: where the cramming full (not just quantitative) of a person’s world becomes an emptying at a deeper layer of the intention, a formation of an impermeable aura surrounding the high-mindedness-possessed ego. (v) When we try for a broad view of the occasions (object-values) of high-mindedness, we can speak roughly of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ high-mindedness. Here it is important to maintain that external highmindedness does really exist, that an accurate knowledge of internal, subtle, refined high-mindedness, together with the proper distinction between high-mindedness on the one hand and pride, strength of will, urgency, etc., on the other, should not tempt us to try and confine highmindedness to its more airy and concealed form and deny its presence in all domineering behaviour and insistence on external goods. There are also important differences within both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ highmindedness. For example, money-high-mindedness is ‘more refined’ than that founded on physical strength; the high-mindedness of the completely isolated world-despising ‘cynic’ (or better, ‘nihilist’) more refined than moralistic Pharisaism. Indeed, there is absolutely no pure linearity here; clearly, even a spiritually attuned high-mindedness can flaunt its object more crudely than, say, a ‘more instinctive’, less sharply objectified high-mindedness based on better physical or economic circumstances. At all events it may be granted that the spiritualising and refinement of high-mindedness also signifies an approach to its absolute ‘ideal’, or, better, allows more genuine, essentially ‘absolute’, high-mindedness to shine through its embodiments. For spirit can better represent the subject as such than matter. Nevertheless there are also direct points of contact between subject-high-mindedness and complete non-spirituality. The absence of all spiritual struggle, of spiritual tensions and breakings, of inner division, points somehow to high-mindedness: as though, behind the whole ‘well-functioning’ complex of appearances, untouched by inner contradiction, were concealed a self-satisfied subject, armoured and proof against all affections, disturbances, doubts and challenges. We feel something of the kind in classicistic and naturalistic works of art, even in some natural phenomena themselves. (Gigantic dimensions, complete lack of consciousness, blindness, ‘sublime emptiness’, ‘exalted pointlessness’ in Nature, at least in many of its parts, and viewed under certain aspects.) Thus, we also find the odour of high-mindedness wafted our way from the conduct of some, mostly young, men of great physical strength, who, untamed, without problems or scruples, live their lives in an almost

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unawoken state. For their strength is not in the first place harnessed for objective achievements and opportunities, but for the avoidance of doubt, suffering, the pains and demands of genuine self-opening and permeation. From the other ‘external’ forms of high-mindedness we select those related to power and money. Power in society lends itself well to being an accessory of high-mindedness – and all the more, the more abstract, unbounded and free of tasks and functions it is – since it conveys and expresses the superiority, indeed, wherever possible, the personal subject’s additional ‘transcendence’ of his fellow men. Power-relations can to a great extent be detached from the capacity for personal achievement and abundance of qualities, from objectively grounded leadership and teleological direction, and made autonomous; in this respect they prove themselves a favourable soil for high-mindedness. It has frequently been observed how greatly power, especially ‘absolutistic’ power, can strangely alienate and exclude its possessor from life, can cut him off from the world of human problems. The falling away of normal ‘resistances’, for all that many otherwise ‘impossible’ things become possible for the man of power, takes from him also the capacity to enter into the most important situations, conflicts and needs of his environment. For man is not God, and needs his special limitations and ‘denials’, not only so that he may be able to give his life and work a meaning, but also to achieve the fullness which is truly within his reach. For slightly different reasons, we may also place the possession of wealth within the sphere of high-mindedness. (We shall omit here the intentional and real relations between money and power.) Whereas power puts more emphasis on the ‘visible’ elevation over other people’s heads, money tends to place it on the qualitative emptying of the world and the abstract omni-validation of the subject; despite its poorer relation to spiritual contents it leads structurally to internal high-mindedness. Whereas the powerful, even the tyrant, still at least has actual power ‘over people’, and sees them working beneath himself in direct obedience to his orders because of their personal inferiority, the high-minded rich man, especially in capitalist societies, lives as if he did not live among men at all, without any kind of personal connection. Phenomenologically speaking, it is not that he ‘has the power to compel’ people to do things because of his money – as in the case of direct power; the fact is, rather, that he ‘can have anything’ for his money and, wallowing at pleasure in the treasury of abstract ‘society’ as though it were a piece of Nature simply lying open to him, has no need of people as such. He can also harness people as such to serve him, but only in so far as he really wants to. The metaphysical

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devaluation of things to ‘elements’, with which the subject can operate, is in general carried out more thoroughly by money-high-mindedness than by power-high-mindedness, although the latter is the more primaeval and surely the more universally present form in real life. The Leitmotiv of every variety of internal high-mindedness is the idea of the unimpeachability of the inner man. Different meanings may be contained in this unimpeachability: now simply the knowledge of ‘oneself’, of that ‘mindfulness’ that nothing and no-one can really do ‘me’ any harm (wisdom-high-mindedness); now the consciousness of a ‘certainty of salvation’ completely independent of the person’s condition (compare certain tendencies within Protestantism); now the awareness of having satisfied a moral law and thus of being unget-at-able in the most valuable and important senses (Phasiaism); and now the conviction that man is essentially an anarchic free being, not responsible to anyone, not subject to any higher power founded on value and thus could not be the target of any criticism (high-mindedness of immoralism). Cynicism and foul sensualism likewise reveal a tendency towards high-mindedness, since they, so to speak, eviscerate the objective values of reality and uniformly subject the things of the world to the ego, albeit not according to an a priori, but a materially determined, principle. Every idea of the world as a single-layered manifold of objects is as such connected to highmindedness, as is also every splitting apart of the world, into, say, ‘what alone matters’ and ‘what does not matter’. For these ways of intending it are aimed at a kind of ‘perfection’ of the subject, at whose feet the world – perhaps ‘his’ world – is laid, like a swarm or a mechanism, a trifle or a convenience; in them the world is cut to fit the sublimity of the subject. Spiritual high-mindedness is, with few exceptions, characterised by contempt for the ‘crowd’ (yet the most consequential isolation-highmindedness can also despise all persons equally, even ‘one’s own’), whether what makes the ‘crowd’ is concern for what is banal or for what is external and bodily, subjection to instinct and enjoyment, or just being bound to moral schemata and ‘prejudices’. However, the crowd is also at times intended in partially positive terms, as a foil for the sublime ego. Pharisaical high-mindedness in the closer sense presupposes some kind of moral consensus, even a moral criterion anchored in society; fulfilment of its demands signifies in this case, of course, not genuine, possibly loving, incorporation in society, but rather a conditioned ‘independence’ of it; the ‘spotless one’, insofar as he is this and is this in the eyes of the community, need no longer disturb himself about anyone he doesn’t know. Here, then, society plays the double role of a body ordained to the realisation

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of morality and of a ‘crowd’, from which the one who is really ‘beyond reproach’ stands out as a being infinitely superior to it. As representative of moral judgement and control the other person is to some extent positively evaluated, but as individual person being actually despised. (A deep mistrust of every person as such underlies this. However, the line of separation really lies between those who are ‘admitted’ to the community or sect, and those who, from start to finish, are obviously only members of the despicable crowd.) We cannot here discuss in detail spiritual high-mindedness – ‘Hubris’ – as the basis of complete world-views.2 The most general characteristics of such world-views must surely be: construction instead of response to things and grasp of essences; over-strained value demands with loveless rejection of value-materials and principles of reality, or, conversely, sublime worship of the monistically interpreted world – no doubt there are also half-way houses, but there is always a refusal to accept the reality of multi-layeredness, gradation and abundance of tensions within us and in the sphere of values, and either rejection of a superhuman power or its monstrous over-inflation, thanks to which the subject, again ‘absolute’ in his sphere, no longer needs to approach it in humility, free obedience and devotion. (vi) High-minded treatment of human beings and things nearly always has a flavour either of ‘contempt’ or of ‘leaving out of account’ (we might also say ‘degradation’ or ‘lack of consideration’).3 In the first case the emphasis on the ego’s a priori superiority falls on the concrete and visible aspect, in the second on the element of virtual absence of relations, which is included in that ‘incomparable’ superiority. In either case we find high-mindedness’s ‘intention of annihilation’ directed towards the object of the surrounding world; in the first it seems to apply within the sphere of the object’s empirical existence, in the second it relates to this existence as such. We have already enlarged on the fact that by no means every act of rejection, opposition, contempt, setting at a distance, or unfriendliness falls under the concept of high-mindedness—even in the sense of a ‘legitimate high-mindedness’. Thus one cannot conduct oneself ‘high-mindedly’, in the same simple and direct sense in which one conducts oneself angrily, hostilely, distantly, icily, and so on. The genuine presence of high-Â�mindedness implies full consciousness of the conduct’s intentional content. This can, of course, be apparent even in an insignificant and fleeting gesture. Pointers to a non-high-minded intention are: objective orientation, (tacit) affirmation of an objective order of gradations among values and distances, elasticity and

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continual responsiveness of attitude (though persistency can be fully based on a continuously responsive attitude and be free of high-mindedness); Indicators of the high-minded intention are: the a priority of one’s own value and the lightning flash of general contempt for the non-ego (even sometimes in the treatment of a particular, perhaps really lower-value object; in such a case the special lower value is not centrally intended, but only seized as an occasion for demonstrating ‘my infinitely lofty position above less valuable objects as such’). But the real object rejected in highmindedness is God; talk of high-mindedness is always the more justified the more the high-mindedness-intention can be freely directed, over and beyond the immediate object, to God – to concrete value and being, and to their conjunction as such. As has already been said, all intended absoluteness and endlessness of contempt or rejection points to high-mindedness. For example, the unmasking and humiliation of an opponent can be completely objectively required, and is not unconditionally an act of high-mindedness. But highmindedness is involved when there is a desire to take the humiliation to extremes and thereby to strike the person in the whole depth of his being, or when occasions are actively sought for the exposure and humiliation of people as such. I can, without high-mindedness, be ‘mortified’ at the tendency or form of criticism directed at me – especially when it expresses a desire to condemn me without objective examination, or when objective facts are used as a mere welcome opportunity for destroying my credit – but my ‘sensitivity’ becomes high-minded when it is a response to the fact of being criticised and attacked as such. To choose one’s friends carefully or to shun an all too rapid intimacy with the first Tom, Dick or Harry I meet has nothing to do with high-mindedness. But its presence can no longer be denied if I banish every friendship as such from my life, or take scrupulous care always to preserve a conversational tone of icy formality with people who do not belong to my circle of friends. No highmindedness need be involved if one generally deals with subordinates or less cultivated people in such a way that some distance is always preserved and the relative note of hierarchy shines through the structure of one’s communication; on the other hand high-mindedness is indeed present if not even this trace of relativity in hierarchical level finds expression, but the lower-placed person is treated as a mere machine, unit of power or number, and circumstantial and individual gradations, exceptions, modifications, or any other factors apart from the known hierarchical data are left out of account.

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There are two especially important ways in which high-mindedness is shown in inter-personal, including object-related, communication. The one is the concrete emphasis on one’s own a priori superiority: intolerance as such is not so much a case of it – this can be rooted in very strong objective prepossession and then be all but free of high-mindedness – as is that ‘being-self-evidently-right’ which, instead of first opposing and badgering the one who thinks differently, smiles at, pities, ‘calls to order’, treats him not as a perhaps dangerous opponent, but as a defective, invalid, drunkard, a ‘throw-back’, ‘obstacle’ or shocking ‘abnormality’. Such highmindedness often colours the nature of the preacher’s tone, the scholar’s conceit, the esoterica of sects. The second form of high-mindedness we have in mind here consists in the avoidance of struggle and the suppression of combat. Mostly among the representatives of a kind of spiritual snobbery, there flourishes that snobbish cult of the undertone, the abhorrence of emphatic attitudes, of polemics and letting fly, which is so deeply dyed in high-mindedness. For these things do not mean love, peace and mercy, but ‘there’s no point in arguing about it’, ‘a dispute would touch me too closely and too sharply’, ‘the world is mine through my knowledge alone’, and similar further expressions of high-mindedness. Is it high-mindedness, to have no concern for people? If this is meant literally, the answer must be ‘yes’. A radical inward isolation from one’s fellow men not only signifies high-mindedness in general, par excellence, but even a simple lack of concern for their (moral) judgement reflects it. For it is a form of self-worship to hold the voice of one’s conscience to be strictly infallible, and still more is it contempt for one’s milieu to dismiss the objective importance of the collective ethical opinions of men – for all the distortions to which they are certainly bound to be subject. However, it would, of course, be a sign of inner moral feebleness, immediately to derive one’s judgment from those of one’s fellows, the one ‘going the rounds’, so to speak; it would be petty fear of men to start by aligning one’s attitude, in the central and directly objective sense, with the reaction to be expected from the circle one is somehow dependent on. To the contemplative mind, the defiant phrase ‘why should I worry about other people?’ contains something clearly noble and right, a reference to the objectivity of values, which is, in principle and in the first place independent of social consensus. By ‘people’ should be understood here not men in the comprehensive and material sense of spiritual, biological and, indeed, socially linked units of life, but only a particular aspect of society, men in a particular respect of their socialisation, that familiar, communal

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and further socially directed ‘objectification’ which we designate with the expression ‘the people’. Defiance of the opinion of the people, especially when it is objectively founded, naturally has nothing of high-mindedness in itself. It would be in principle unsocial and therefore high-minded, in our view at least, to set out to deny or correct, as such and in all circumstances, the justification and value-representative claim of what I have called ‘the people’, by which I mean the ‘opinion-forming circle of men, who, speaking rather vaguely, have been involved in some matter, partly functionally, partly personally, but above all through their proximity’. As far as high-mindedness towards ‘things’ goes, naturally it involves any principled indifference and world-impoverishment. On the other hand confinement and one-sidedness of personal formation and occupation is, in itself, certainly not, nor is any positing of rank-orders and hence relative devaluation, which is, for example, common in the Christian view of the world. But high-mindedness does attach to the attitude according to which the world is only there for the sake of art, or that the organisation of earthly things is unimportant, and concern with it foolish or unclean. But a full measure of high-mindedness is concealed in the world-conquering ideal of the spirit of natural science and technology, when it functions as the basic tone of life, and intends things as, in one sense, completely lacking any nature of their own, knowledge of them as merely potential reckoning, mastery and capture, and dealing with them as willed evocation of wished for effects. But aestheticism is no less deeply entangled in high-mindedness (and, by the way, surely less ‘useful’ and liberal than technological scientism), and seizes on things, again without penetrating into their being, only as occasions for release or representation of feelings and for cultivation of moods. This comparison also shows clearly that the idea of high-mindedness, to which there can in general be no pure lack of communication with the world as a corresponding reality, is most intimately bound up with seeing the world as a one-levelled manifold, poor in being, goals and orderings, which the subject, without having to ‘approach’ it in love and uprightness, fancies he can ‘master’ and ‘dispose of’. 3. On the overcoming of high-mindedness (i) The subject of our investigation has been high-mindedness, not humility (Demut). Nevertheless, quite apart from the natural power of humility, a direct struggle to overcome high-mindedness can be undertaken. I shall make a few more observations on this theme.

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Whatever special form high-mindedness may take, the two intentions of ego-superiority and of ego-isolation are inseparably connected in it. The ego of high-mindedness is ‘his own God’: hence empirical allusions to a clear ‘God-likeness’, and hence also the hint that a need of things is simply not felt. An absolute superiority which is at once creative and loving is the exclusive property of God. Mere isolation, however, which has no desire to turn into an endless looking down on the non-ego, is a matter of primary weakness, poverty, lifelessness, not of high-mindedness. The relation of subject to object, this sublime fundamental law of spiritual being, includes both a ‘synoptic’ raised position of the subject (to ‘know’ something is, in a sense, to ‘have’ it), and also a bond of the subject to the object, his coordination with it (without ever having in the primary sense created it, as God does). The subject beset by the tragic original sin of high-mindedness holds onto the first part of this relation and at the same time rejects the second. Hence the absolutising of superiority and the addition of the isolation-intention; but hence also the almost suicidal character of high-mindedness, which brings the self to meaninglessness. It follows from this that neither self-abasement alone, nor coming to relate to things alone yields a fully adequate counter-movement to high-mindedness. Both still leave high-mindedness a point of entry, a breach to slip through. Mere self-abasement presents all too real a threat to degenerate into an abasement and devaluation of one’s own empirical person, in a withdrawal from empirical reality and thus again into a secret high-mindedness of the ego, which thrives under the mask of self-despite and unpretentiousness. However, exaggerated ‘busyness’, activity, and search for relations by no means guarantees a real inner dedication to things, a breaking and bending of the ego’s high-minded self-isolation. No barrier will really be erected against high-mindedness until one’s own imperfection, littleness and frailty, and also one’s own – variously graded – belongingness to the world, one’s own obligations to it, are felt together in the same act. (Nothing but one aspect of the Christian relation to God is meant here.) Over against the false contrite humility and surrender of all self-assertion there arises therefore a certain consciousness of one’s own value as a postulate, as a good, to which the world has a claim. But over against all false demands to have ‘mastered’ or ‘satisfied’ the world through mere ‘concern with its materials’, perhaps along some chosen ‘line of treatment’, and in this sense to have ‘disposed of it’ (compare superficial ‘philanthropy’), there is the demand to respect men and things, the knowledge of their relative enclosedness, the difficulty, for our goals and powers, of penetrating them (for even the trick of declaring the world

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to be simply ‘open’, or ‘lying open’, is an hidden attempt to close us off from it). What I experience as already ‘mine’, I do not need to open up and acquire by working at it. We could summarise this by saying: to protect yourself from highmindedness, know your own ‘littleness’, but still finite and significant greatness; but know your milieu as a sublime manifold, in principle accessible to you, indeed in some sense even waiting for you, to which you must however clear your own path with devotion and care, and through a thousand self-conquests. (ii) We can perhaps still put into words as follows that attitude to oneself, and to things and spheres of life, which will leave the least possible room for high-mindedness. It is part of its overcoming that I feel myself, despite all security of being and independent of my actual ‘opinion’ of myself, as open to change, influence and correction, indeed, within objective limits, still always accessible to thoroughgoing purification, awakening and conversion. All this, however, not without resistance, not through weightlessness and surrender of firmness, for even that would once more open the door to a new form of high-mindedness; untouched, unencroached on, unaffected, the ‘most intimate’, purely subject-like ego could then withdraw itself from the ‘unchecked’ changing of my concrete being, simply abandoning it to the play of powerful external influences and, as it were, extra-personal impulses. The empirical ‘dissolution’ would be, metaphysically speaking, ‘coagulation’ in high-mindedness. The thing that has to be opposed to high-mindedness is, then, not in the least a ‘letting oneself go’, least of all applied to the totality of personal being, but a general ‘opening up’ to men, things, values and personal developments, which are limited by internal possibilities, graded according to objects, indeed, in decisive individual cases, wrested painfully from one’s own self, since only this guarantees incorporation with others, being affected along with others, the cooperation of the heart of the person, the metaphysical man himself. Sometimes high-mindedness receives a shock when previously existing functional relations with the world around are fully consciously felt, ‘admitted’, and actualised, whether it is a matter of at first unnoticed or ‘suppressed’ interpersonal ties, of objective interests which are only now ‘discovered’, or even of claims, whose puritanical denial indeed in many cases – where, say, no foreignness of taste, emergency, specific desire for hardening or definite moral prohibition bring about the renunciation of the claim – can be far more high-minded than their hidebound and egotistic assertion.

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Real multiplicity, hierarchy and value-permeation of objective relations are the counterpart of the stance of high-mindedness. A purely empirical multiplicity of interests and occupations alone is not enough: mere many-sidedness is just as possible to combine with an ‘infinite superiority’ vis-à-vis the world as the monomania of being in love. For then the world appears to the subject as a manifold or collection of objects helplessly delivered into his hands. However that monistic treatment of the world, which grasps all things as ‘real expressions of one and the same law’, etc., ‘short-circuitingly’ reduces them, that is to say, to a common denominator, is also favourable to high-mindedness, since it once more allows and suggests to the ego, that it persist ‘undisturbed’ in one fundamental position. I only seriously undermine my high-mindedness when I affirm or work at things in their special being, and try to know and to acknowledge their objective connections and dependencies – renouncing every claim, according to which I first assemble them in some order or series as a spectator or as a living thing – and always also ‘sense’ those of their orderings and connections which I am never able adequately and visibly to have before me and to formulate. But every ‘conquest of high-mindedness’ will remain bungled and incomplete if it is not supported by positive acts of humility. Without a humble approach to God, creator and world-centre of existing things, it is impossible ever truly to strike down in one’s heart high-mindedness towards the creature. Notes 1. 2. 3.

In his essay ‘Versuch einer Klassifizierung, etc.’, Archiv für systematische Philosophie, 1928, the author attempts to exhibit strict liberalism as an expression of the principle ‘There are only lords’, and not ‘Neither lords nor servants’. But see the discussions of idealism in Part 1, solipsism and pantheism in Part 2. Compare on this the high-mindedness of domination and isolation.

3 The Total State and Civilisation (1933) I 1. The most graphic picture we can represent of the total state, to which much appeal is made today, is the image of the ‘primitive’ social group. There is, of course, no single type of ‘primitive’ society, and the word ‘primitive’ is itself an ambiguous term, not a sociological concept with a definite meaning. Nevertheless it makes good sense to talk of primitive societies as opposed, for example, to the concept of civilisation, which is also limited by the qualitative variation among cultures. Roughly speaking primitive society is best represented by the ‘tribe’. This, for its members, means the world, on which the individual is totally dependent for his relations with the rest of mankind, and whose forms of life and thought are absolutely binding on him. Why the term ‘primitive’? Because here a person appears as most subject to the forces of nature and only resistant to them (including alien ‘humanity’) through the most rigid uniformity of his fellow members, a dull, unawoken and prejudiced being, lacking the civilised traits of human autonomy, rationality, versatility and world-openness. The extent to which the idea of the total state, so widely discussed, recalls the way of life of the primitive tribe will here be demonstrated in its most essential features. Totalitarianism is basically Primitivism – though a particular kind of it, a critical answer to an already existing civilisation. Only serious internal defects and crises on the part of this civilisation have enabled the rise of such a paradoxical atmosphere and tendency. But our task is not so much to emphasise this as to point out that the renewal of civilisation by way of a return to the Primitive is a deceptive and perilous illusion. 45

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2. The primitive group bears the sign of ‘totality’ in that its destiny and the resolutions of its chiefs affect its members in every aspect of their lives. To use a fashionable phrase, the life of the primitive tribe really has an ‘existential’ note. In accord with today’s ‘discoveries’ its political life is not a particular category of life among others, but the cramp and determination of all life. The warfare, the hunting, the ‘economic life’ of the tribe is the very direct concern of all its members, is, so to speak, a matter of life and death to everyone. Any kind of ‘opposition’ to the prevailing ‘policy’ of the tribe either means actual uproar, overturning and removal of the chiefs or surrender, exposure and killing of the rebel. The rights of the individual have as little place as physical protection against the outside world and a peaceful interference in the territory of others. All the details and decisions of life are ‘unconditional’; all problems, conflicts and solutions strike at the roots of a man’s being, leave no room for ‘compromise’ or ‘reservations’, put his very life in question again, and impose on him the choice between dying and killing. All those who form a unity are bound together completely and unconditionally; everyone outside, and whatever is not part of the life of the community, is fair game. 3. Another sign of totality in the primitive group is the lack of differentiation among prevailing values. There obviously cannot be any human life, individual or communal, without a multiplicity of values and valuetypes; but this multiplicity (and therewith the experience and awareness of values as such) can be absent in the more important sense, and all values completely reduced to one kind and be generally obligatory in this given form for the members of a society. For primitive peoples religious, ethical, juristic, political, aesthetic, intellectual and even economic values merge into one another, although the respective spheres often seem to be kept separate in a practical sense. Here there is no God to give directions about the state, and no moral norms as such which one might apply even to the actions of the gods; there is no idea of justice which might be made valid, at least in a fundamental and partial sense, even against the rulers of the group; there is no autonomy of systematic study and doctrine, etc. On the other hand there are also no ‘reasons of state’ in the narrow sense and no abstract ‘interest of the state’ in distinction from the interest and will of the narrower circle of rulers. The concept of ‘economic man’ is also unthinkable here, whether in the more ‘liberal’ sense of the greatest possible general provision of goods or the socialist one of a demand for a just and sufficient provision of all members of the

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society according to their needs. Rather, there is a subsistence economy, meaning one where there is provision for the group’s generally remaining alive and the satisfaction of certain customary needs; this neither includes the attempt to raise and increase the production of goods as far as possible nor to ensure a more regular supply and exclude the possibility of want among the lower social strata. The prevailing economy depends on cult, tradition and war. All this implies that no abstract ‘values’, as opposed to concrete ‘powers’, have any part to play. The existing state, the ruling powers, the prevailing customs and way of thinking are in themselves ‘sacred’. The individual is allowed no spiritual decisions, discoveries or supports. The ruler also represents whatever prevails; management and executive coincide. The unified and unequivocal social power is subject to no higher judgement; it is opaque and impermeable, cannot be divided, confined or improved. The ideal case of this primitive totality is not really ‘dictatorship’, or ‘repression’. Rather, a state of affairs where it is impossible for anyone to appeal even inwardly to a higher authority against an oppressive power, let alone find among fellow-tribesman even a concealed or timid echo of support. Mutiny would be more likely here than genuine criticism; it would be easier for individuals to think of violently replacing the present rulers than of making holes in this system of completely closed domination. 4. It is certainly less clear that the primitive group must correspond with the total state even in respect of the form of rule. We could easily imagine its possession even of a kind of democratic choice of prince and a general obedience of the subjects without a separate ruling caste. But since the recognition of parties, that is, like-minded organisations, is radically excluded, it somehow belongs to the picture that the closer dependents of the ‘prince’, or the inmost circle of rulers, organise themselves into a ruling federation within and over the tribe. We have in fact many accounts of such phenomena in the social life of so-called primitives. The important thing here is that we do not find anything like the functional groups ‘army’ and ‘bureaucracy’ as in the modern constitutional state, or anything like the hierarchies of social dignity and privilege as in mediaeval feudalism with its loose system of territorial governance, but a reality with self-bestowed and omni-competent plenitude of power, which could be described with the Oscar Spannian concept of the ‘state-bearing estate’. The primitive group can very well be too little differentiated even in a technical sense to have genuine

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Â� ‘economic estates’; insofar as there already are such, embedded in a general framework of upper and lower, ‘noble’ and ‘mean’, the stability, absoluteness and unalterability of the inequality of the estates speaks for itself. It then belongs to the closed form of the tribe, fits with the power of the prince and his favourites and is religiously sanctioned – as a ‘divinely willed dependence’, so to speak. Nothing would so much harm the absoluteness of the tribe as vital totality and the system of values incorporated in it as any kind of ‘individual’, ‘bourgeois’, rights of the individual members, which went beyond their insertion and accreditation in the order of estates. That the tribe is ‘all’ to its members does not at all mean that the ruler or the noble in this world can in himself be ‘all’ as in some over-ripe and decaying despotism or plutocracy; but rather that, over against his slaves or inferiors, as embodying the totality of the tribe, he can be clothed with a mystical, absolute, unassailable and uncriticisable princely dignity. This is especially true of the genuine lifeguards of the prince, the confederate group around the centre of power – the ‘state-bearing estate’. 5. Last but not least the primitive group, as ideal type, possesses the totalitarian property of exclusiveness. It is natural for the ‘tribe’, in the sense meant here, to exhibit hostility and exclusivity towards the rest of humanity, rather than mutual communication and openness to the outside world. For it is a world in itself, for its dependents it is the world as such, with its own unequivocal pretensions to power and value, not an organ or partial representative of mankind. This can certainly be combined with acquisitive raids, conquests, occasional treaties, incorporation of alien tribes. What is important is not that the tribe banishes the human world beyond its borders entirely from sight, but that it treats it as a mere danger-area and field of battle, not as an equally important completion and outshining of its own imperfect being. The essential thing is not that the population of the primitive group should be as small as possible but that its boundaries should somehow count as impassable and should tightly enclose the total life of its members. A small circle can be an ‘open’ and a large empire (though the possibility diminishes with increasing size) a ‘closed’ community in the sense of Henri Bergson’s fundamental distinction. The open community serves the task of mediating to the individual the connection with the world of values accessible to Man as such and the life of Mankind itself; the closed community takes it upon itself to replace that world and that life for its members, and thereby severs that connection (however rich in values it may itself be).

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Whereas yesterday’s imperialism doubtless bore world-open and humane features in itself, and combined the raw drive for power and expansion among the nations with a regard for human contacts and a readiness for cultural synthesis, today’s nationalism turns back to the primitive self-idolisation of the tribe as a genuine ‘closed community’. Some kinds of occasion for war may thereby become scarcer, but war as a fundamental form of human existence is still fully acknowledged; for between exclusive total and ‘existential’ communities, which still touch and irritate each other, hostility is the basic law and the normal way of relating. It is no accident that Carl Schmitt, the National Socialist theorist of the state, exalts hostility to the true formative determining factor of the state as such, and the readiness to die for the group to the true political attitude. With this we have returned to the motif we discussed at the outset, the ‘intimate connection between the existence of the state and the life of its members’, and the ‘naked’ form of life, unencumbered by the garments of civilisation, and community morals of primitives. II 1. In contrast to this, one might describe all the essential traits of civilisation as breaches of totality. In civil society not all events, decisions and attitudes affect the existence of men and women; there certainly is a means of protecting life against nature and society, which makes possible rational and willed activity relatively independent of the question of existence, a self-elevation of spirit above need and fear, a free enjoyment of culture. There is multiplicity, tension, relative independence of values and value-spheres: religion, which is not politics; ethics, which is not led by a concrete power; knowledge, which practices genuine research; an economy governed more by the play and formation of needs than by a particular authority or form of life. Value and power, norm and ruler’s will, law and command, justice and force are distinguished. There may be those with more and less power, army and officer corps, administration and bureaucracy; but no ‘state-bearing’ estate, no ruling caste, whose coincident willing is the will of the totality as such. There is rather a formation of the collective will against the background of various possibilities considered, a public discussion (not necessarily in parliamentary form, ensured and regulated by general suffrage), the right of the individual to speak also for himself – or, better, it means something, it is a basic characteristic of this kind of society, that the individual also speaks for himself. Lastly the civil society has no statal

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or national exclusiveness; it is ideal, humanity itself in perspective. Not humanity as a single, gigantic, exclusive ‘total state’; but the reverse, a state limited in territory and population, which acts as though under contract to mankind and with an eye to it, which in respect of communications, education, values and criteria of moral judgement looks to mankind and contributes to the life of the unlimited, supra-statal, community of everything human. Further, it seems to us that a civilisation sprung from the Christian religion and Christian church will strive in this direction with special keenness. There certainly were high civilisations before Christendom; moreover it may be that certain civilising tasks are clearly more easily introduced when, in the course of development, there has been a loosening of religious and churchly ties. Nevertheless the personal value of Man, independent of state and power, in the Christian experience of faith, the supra-statal and supra-national community relation of Man in the fact of the Christian church itself, have been taken up with a whole-heartedness unattained elsewhere. The Christian affirmation of state power and national divisions ‘in their place’ only perfects the distinctions and therewith the break-through. An anarchistic Christianity could never have had a civilising effect or taken hold of a mankind allegiant to various states; a church which had wanted to become the state of mankind, would itself have become an ‘exclusive’ super-state without remainder. As it is, ideal and concrete Christianity underly a civilisation which is destined to carry through the most decisive and definitive breach with all primitive selfidolisation and self-separation of the tribe, and to perfect the destruction of all spirit- and soul-choking barbarism of ‘total’ giant prisons. All pacts on the part of church circles with ephemeral totality-nonsense seem in the long perspectives of this great development to be utter folly. 2. We must now touch, at least very briefly, on the question of whether the primitivist totality-madness, which is so active today in the midst of a largely civilised world, can be judged simply as the senseless raging of evil and destructive drives or whether rather it conceals a meaning that has lost its way. We believe the latter to be right. The imperfections, mishaps, vices and lethargies of civil society can be interpreted as hopeless dissolution and disorder rather than as true universalism, towards which all civilisation really tends, whereas the advance-guard of a raw, misunderstood, false universalism are once more taking the field. For there can be no doubt: all that civilisation signifies and demands – mastery over nature and self-mastery of mankind, noble distance, objectivity,

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nobility, obligingness, tolerance, uprightness, readiness to come to an understanding and to community with what is alien, refusal to give the precedence to the drives for validation and struggle, acceptance of the multiplicity of values and needs – all this by no means entails the collapse of life into unrelated compartments, but rather a grasp and building up of genuine universalism, in contrast to the falsely so-called universalism of the Spann school, which is really a contracted nationalistic cult of exclusiveness and mulish Prussian planned organisation. True universalism is precisely what the fanatic of ‘race’ and German heathen H. Stewart Chamberlain calls it, and rejects as incompatible with his views. These centre on genuine ‘totality’ of human relationships and the corresponding coherence of values and spiritual relations in the consciousness and form of life of the fully valid individual person (?). Certainly, our imperfect civilisation, burdened with serious problems and shot through with poisons, which up to now has not been able satisfactorily to solve either the problem of social or of international cooperation, conceals this emerging and tenderly announced totality with a network of selfish passions, backwardnesses and absurdities which threaten to break it up (?). But what do the modish heroes of primitivistic, false, totality offer as a remedy? Instead of systematic, religious and prophetic (?) personal insight into the human-wide web of values and needs in which his life is inserted, blinding and contraction, mechanical resonating to a narrow-minded tribal thinking; instead of self-mastery blind discipleship; instead of self-effacingness and personal dignity anti-personal surrender and participation in the raging self-idolisation of an exclusive group. Instead of community with multiplicity, instead of oppositions even within the body of the people overcome by friendship – the pseudo-community of a common uniform, for which the foreigner and dissident (?) is simply the ‘enemy’. Instead of humane feeling and solidarity the iron destiny of being torn apart, a particularism as brutal as it is senseless, war as the norm or at best the pseudo-peace of wild beasts who tremble at one another. 3. Butr at this point the impracticality of the ‘total’ state within the framework of civilsation is manifest. The return to the Primitive can only succeed at the price of the destruction of that framework whose building up was carried out as a turn away from the Primitive. Nationalism is self-contradictory; no modern nation can be a ‘total’ tribe, since its depth of culture and multiplicity of interests is incompatible with such ‘uniformitisation’ (?). No more could its moral exclusiveness be

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combined with its material and spiritual ties with other nations. In the primitive tribe the direction towards warfare is made tolerable by the looseness of its foreign relations. This is unthinkable in the cultivated world of today. War as a form of existence here betokens suicide; and the total state demands war as a form of existence all the more because of the multiplicity within itself which it has to repress. Whosoever says totality – in this sense – says war. Whosoever says war – in this sense – says self-destruction. The total state and nationalism by no means betaken a violent solution, but thoroughgoing surrender to the belief that a solution is impossible and that life has reached a point where it must bury its own deadly sting in its own body. But there is another point. The enemies of civilisation play with the hope that they can keep and develop the material means and comforts of civilisation despite killing its soul. No hope could be more deceptive. Technology (in the widest sense) is a social function and not a collection of devices, formulae and experiences available at will for anyone. Otherwise no technology or exact science would ever have been lost; but we know that this has often happened. A mankind which turns against thinking will in the end also forget scientific and technical thinking and must accept the ruin of its means of preservation. Not in vain is the ‘heroic’, ‘existential’ and ‘total’ conception of the state a doctrine of hostility and death. There will never be a ‘totalitarian’ civilisation; but the attempt of this false ‘totality’ will be the suicide of civilised Man.

4 What Is Politics About? (1933) (Translated from the German by Francis Dunlop)1 I 1. There was a time when ‘politics’ simply meant the way a country is governed, or, as an object of study, the theory of the state. Today the discriminating usage of the intelligentsia receives full confirmation from the systematic disciplines, and there is a general concern for a sociology of politics. This is definitely not supposed to be about constitutional law, the art of government or reasons of state, but about the mysteries of politics in the most confined sense. Carl Schmitt, whose work2 has become a model for the most recent studies of this kind, has even tried to interpret the state as ‘the purest example of political existence’.3 However, ‘political existence’ is still given a very specific, and questionable, meaning here. In view of the enormous influence that this unusually profound and spirited work of Schmitt’s has had, and of its obvious connection with a very definite and tendentious interpretation of both state and politics, the champion of a different view must work out especially carefully where he stands in relation to it. Speaking very generally, one may place Schmitt among those thinkers very widely represented among German-speaking intellectuals today, who can be briefly described as ‘irrationalists of life and power’. The members of this group appeal to thinkers like Nietzsche, Klages, Scheler (?),4 Bergson (?),5 Sorel, Pareto, Spengler, Heidegger and so on, in this or that respect and with more or less justice from case to case. In terms of the history of ideas one might link them inter alia with Vitalism, the Youth Movement, Bolshevism and Fascism. Naturally this is not the place to produce a philosophical critique of this complex movement of thought. 53

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We can only indicate in the barest outline and with special reference to political theory the fundamental ideas of this way of thinking: ‘life’ and ‘existence’ do not serve any rational purpose, or any values, ethical or logical, which could be understood as normative; they exist simply for their own sake. It is in principle impossible to rationalise life completely, that is, to give it a pervasive structure of rational considerations and normative responsibilities; the attempt to do so falsifies and weakens life, leads to hypocrisy, half-measures and atrophy. Rational justifications of this ‘life-centred attitude’ are mere pretences, ideological will o’ the wisps. Nothing that takes place in the human world, or even the spiritual world, is really the attainment of purposes, but the unfolding of the life-drive. In the social sphere life takes the form of power. Moral legitimations of power are futile and superfluous. Since power justifies itself, conflicts between powers whose spheres of action intersect are natural and unavoidable – indeed the true test and highest intensification of vigorous life. Power can be concealed by means of laws and humanitarian ideologies – perhaps cleverly disguised or made really impotent – but there is no substitute for it as a fundamental category of social existence. Liberalism and democracy, public discussion and a plurality of parties are, on the one hand, the cover for capitalist power seizures, on the other, passing phases of weakness in the lives of states. It would be a mistake to think that all attention to irrational motives, all criticism of customary rationalistic constructions, all sociological interpretation and relativisation of points of view and systems of ideas, must be irrational in this sense. Indeed, as we shall see, this cannot be said of all Schmitt’s points. His distinction between that aspect of the life of states which can be given the quite general name of ‘administration’, and that consisting of ‘politics’ in the narrower sense,6 is of inestimable benefit to political science (as an example of the narrowly political we may take the basic political orientation of the regime, on the basis of which the rules of administration are worked out; this is in a certain sense irrational, since it cannot be unequivocally derived from normative considerations). So is his demonstration that the contemporary rationalisation of life is a historical process of a specific kind, which gives rise to distinct kinds of claim and provokes irrationalist reactions. We should also add his critique of all ‘rational’ social theories, with their naive pseudo objectivity and their uncouth pretensions to truth.7 But this is quite different from putting the main emphasis on what is purely vital, irrational, and ‘a-spiritual’; or – let us be frank – ‘barbaric’, when writing about social existence.

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2. Schmitt bases politics, and hence the state, on the idea of enmity. What leads him to this singular outlook, this quasi ‘Copernican Â�Revolution’? The argument goes like this: the state is the product of communityforming political groupings. (From this point of view, ‘in the beginning’ really was ‘action’ – not ‘being’!) A political grouping exists when human groups confront one another ‘concretely and existentially’, that is, they do not represent rationally explicable points of view or value preferences, but ultimate forms of being. To help them establish themselves their members are prepared to give their own lives and to annihilate their enemies. Forms of being as such do not necessarily create community in this sense, just as not every group is a state. Politics begins where there is a readiness to die and kill, where collectives confront one another as enemies. The enmity in question is, of course, not a private, anarchic one, but a matter of groups. Jesus’s commandment in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Love your enemies’, has no bearing on this.8 Clearly therefore politics presupposes comradeship, kinship, community, but only when there is war and antagonistic grouping does a social collective really become a political one, that is, a state. Just as a man becomes Christian through baptism, so social existence becomes political through enmity, It is clear that the more fundamental idea here is not friendship but enmity, since the latter phenomenon is regarded as constitutive for friendship itself in the strongest sense, for the political unity of human beings.9 It is not peaceful, economic and cultural coexistence that founds the state and brings ‘friendship’ into being as a political phenomenon, but standing together in the face of the enemy – in other words, war. Corresponding to the basic value polarities ‘good and evil’ in the ethical sphere, ‘beautiful and ugly’ in the aesthetic, and ‘beneficial and harmful’ in the utilitarian, Schmitt makes the distinction between ‘friend and foe’ central to the political sphere (pp. 14ff). Is his argument circular, when he confines the political application of this idea to ‘public’ friendship and enmity, and at the same time reintroduces his definition of politics as a public affair? It is not, to the extent that he presupposes the fundamental phenomenon of the ‘Public’, and emphasises the unity of conflict as the defining feature of public existence in its political form. His treatment of the contrasting ideas of friend and foe, good and evil, and so on, as analogous pairings, seems more open to question. For the contrasting pairs of good and evil, etc., quite apart from the height of the values concerned, take an ultimate objectivity of value for granted which is completely absent from the category of friend and foe. Certainly the Â�beneficial and the harmful, and even more so the pleasant and the Â�unpleasant, are

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relative to the individual person, the accidents of his body and soul and even his momentary condition; but they represent value-qualities of a general and arguable kind, so that one may justifiably speak of useful books and pleasant forest air, even though the books referred to are of no use to many, and person after person takes no pleasure in forest air. By contrast ‘friend and foe’ – not to be confused with ‘friendliness’ and ‘malevolence’ as qualities of character – do not refer to value-qualities, but merely to relationships and groupings. The individual’s standpoint (or that of a particular group) is in this case not only the presupposition of and criterion for his feelings and judgement, as in the case of values, but its own proper content. It means something to say that an upright man is in favour of good and against evil; it is less important, but still means something, to say that the hedonist is in favour of what he finds pleasant in the given case and in general, and against what is unpleasant; but does it mean anything at all to say that political man supports what he is for, and opposes what he is against? Can a grouping that is in itself purely accidental determine the creation of a realm of meaning?10 Schmitt leaves us in no doubt about this; friend-foe relations, or political antagonisms, are ‘neither purely normative nor purely ‘spiritual’ antagonisms’ (pp. 14ff).11 The friend, or better one’s own group-existence, does not represent what ought in some way to be, or what is right or in order; nor does the foe in any way represent what ought not to be, what is wrong or destructive of order. The opposition is not normative, and hence not discussible; it cannot be settled through explanation or understanding; it is existential, resting, so to speak, on the collision between self-asserting forms of existence, and can only be resolved through the destruction of what exists, through the removal of one of the parties by physical conflict. Schmitt does not say that every political antagonism that arises necessarily leads to real war, but it is part of its nature that it can lead to it, and it does tend to lead to it,12 and it can really only be properly resolved in this way. It is not so much perpetual war with all its possible foes that makes a state a real state, as a continuous readiness for war – not, of course, preeminently in the technical and organisational sense, but in a sociological, psychological and legal one. We shall return to this sociological assessment of war. But first we must investigate the nature of political, ‘existential’, antagonisms more closely. 3. Schmitt’s concept of ‘the existential negation of another existent’ is equivocal. Is the incompatibility of the two ‘existents’ supposed to be based on their radically different qualities, or on their rival claims to

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possess, say, territory or raw materials? In the latter case the antagonism would be entirely or predominantly an economic one, which Schmitt expressly excludes from the category of existential antagonism. But in the first case it is pertinent to ask why the two forms of existence ‘collide spatially’, and why they do not go on simply existing alongside one another. I only need to risk my life in standing up for my own form of existence when its presence, that is, the existence of my community, is threatened in its given form. Certainly it can come to this; a difference in form of existence can coincide with competition for the physical space needed for effective existence. Clearly this is the case Schmitt has in mind. But as soon as one makes this clear, one at once sees that it is not simply a matter of the mystical enmity of antagonistic forms of existence, of different tribal deities, perhaps, but necessarily of situations that on one side border on interests, economics and property – on what is quantitative. War is normally also a struggle for something. But an analysis of the antagonism of the forms of existence seems even more important. Schmitt asserts that wars conducted for religious, moral or economic reasons are unthinkable.13 But it is not obvious why two peoples should not fight for the possession of a piece of fertile land from the very first day they find themselves existing as separate entities. But again, if their ‘existential’ opposition cannot be a religious or moral one either, one must seriously ask whether the two foes are really likely to confine their mutual reproaches to the scandalous charge of ‘otherness’. Α glance at the facts of history teaches us that even in wars where territory disputes play a minor part and where none of the participants is really defending its threatened political autonomy, the fighting is about something specific, such as religion, honour, the organisation of society. In those cases where no objective and impartial judgement can easily or, in my view, possibly be pronounced in favour of one, and against the other party, the reason is not the absence of arguments, that is, of objectively valid principles, on either side, but their actual presence. Let no one suppose that these considerations are idle. They are indispensable, should anyone wish to obtain a more accurate picture of the content of political life. Schmitt, of course, is not unaware of the well-known motives for waging war that history provides. He concedes that ‘religious, moral and other antagonisms are used for political ends, in order to bring about the hostile alignment that really counts. Once this grouping for war has really taken place, however, the decisive antagonism is no longer religious, moral or economic, but political’. Considerable agreement is possible with the

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second proposition; sociologically speaking, it is highly informative. It points to the existence of a special political sphere in the social world, and to the fact that its concerns are derived from value spheres more directly accessible to the senses. But in the first proposition the anthropomorphic terms ‘used’ and ‘bring about’ are symptomatic [our italics in the preceding sentences in this paragraph]. They recall the hoary old story of cunning clerics using men’s fear of the dark, or of thunder and lightning, to secure for themselves fat benefices, as intimates of the deity. But such tactical and demagogic ‘use’ of religious and other antagonisms is a secondary procedure, and it is highly questionable whether groupings for war can be deliberately ‘brought about’ at all. Schmitt sounds more plausible when he says (pp. 25ff): ‘Every religious, etc. antagonism changes into a political antagonism when it is powerful enough to divide men effectively into friends and foes’. This sociological insight is further refined, when he adds that ‘at the very moment when this realignment is effected (that is, realignment into friend and foe), the non-political antagonism, with its hitherto accepted criteria, fades into the background and the parties concerned become subject to the completely new, specific and . . . often very illogical and “irrational” conditions and consequences of what has now become a political situation’. If this is true – and one may go a long way towards accepting it – one may nevertheless refuse to accept unqualified the arrogant assertion that ‘there are no normative and no ‘spiritual’ conflicts’. We can rather talk of ‘normative and “spiritual” conflicts’ now being represented by concrete powers of a particular kind, and which, correspondingly distorted and re-accented, make themselves felt in a play of concrete power mechanisms of a particular, ‘political’ kind. The political antagonisms are now, however, not completely irrational, not impervious to meanings and objective value-qualities; their expression is no mere trial of the other’s strength, no mere carnage between opponents who can only be characterised as ‘this one here’ and ‘that one there’. This, again, is worlds apart from Schmitt’s assumption that the change from a pre-political, let us say a ‘material’, antagonism to a political one is brought about simply by one party’s ‘becoming strong enough’; and that the politicisation of the antagonism really consists in its new power ‘to divide men effectively into friends and foes’. The transformation of a material antagonism into a political motive, its attainment of political actuality, depends not only on its inherent strength, but also on a number of further conditions – how far such an antagonism can link up with current political concerns, how far leading political groups

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feel it and, once aware of it, actually consider it ‘exploitable’, or how far several material antagonisms converge in one political focus, or admit of polarisation around one political axis. The political is by no means simply equivalent to what is most intensive, serious or weighty, although at the bottom of every great political struggle (there is also routine skirmishing of a diplomatic kind and within political groupings) there lies a selection of definite antagonisms, experienced as intensive and weighty, involving both spiritual matters and interests. Schmitt is mistaken in his claim that the politicisation of an antagonism signifies the friend and foe groupings based on it. If friend and foe are to be taken simply as ‘opposed’ social groups (like different churches and schools of philosophy, competing economic units or artistic movements) his definition is too wide. But if, as he apparently will have it, they are to signify no less than totalities ready for war, death and destruction, his definition is too narrow. Can it really be maintained (to anticipate a later point) that party antagonism in the modern state is really only political when armed ‘party militia’ stand behind each side, or their formation is somehow imminent? On the other hand it can be objected that this over-narrow criterion of the Political is quite insufficient! Do not a wellorganised band of criminals and the police, or two great criminal concerns in a state of feud, equally deserve to be called ‘warring totalities’, and does this really make their antagonism a genuinely political one? The spiritual antagonism of the supporters and opponents of prohibition in the USA today seems to us to be an antagonism that has ‘become political’, since it is frequently at the centre of national politics, although it is hardly likely ever to lead to civil war; whereas the perpetual physical struggle between the officials of prohibition and the extensively organised bands of smugglers can scarcely be described as a political one. It seems to us, then, that Schmitt essentially exaggerates the relationship between politics and war. This is clearly related to the striking fact that in his work politics is treated almost entirely as a matter of external relations; internal relations completely vanish from sight. His sole mention of the class struggle relates to its power to push national antagonisms into the background and bring about a state of civil or international class war.14 This neglect of internal relations on the part of one so outstandingly well informed about the problems of internal politics, as Schmitt is, obviously has a deeper meaning and cannot be the result of inattention or insensitivity.15 Indeed, we may venture to suggest that this averting of the gaze from internal politics has without doubt an internal political meaning. This almost exclusive concern with

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external politics, this rigid holding fast to the primacy of foreign affairs, nicely corresponds to a definite view of internal politics, to the structure of power within the state! War, then, is the cornerstone of the life of the state; and this derivation of the state from external relations, together with this, as Schmitt himself says, pluralist picture of the world as an essential multiplicity of sovereign states, and the sharp polemic we also find in this work directed against discussion, an essential category of internal relations, as a basic category of civic life – these things are logically very closely related and show the way in which the primacy of external relations and, as it were, the repression of internal, are both in fact directed towards the solution of questions of internal politics. 4. The defining feature of the state is, for Schmitt, the jus belli (pp. 33ff). It is from this point of view that he attacks Cole’s and Laski’s theories, according to which the state is one form of grouping among others. He denies that the state is any kind of grouping, ‘society’, or, so to speak, contingent assemblage of comfortable sovereign individuals (to render Schmitt’s indignant scorn in yet more drastic terms); in Tönnies’s language, it is not an ‘association’, but an absolutely real entity, a ‘community’. This seems to us correct, in so far as we also regard the state as a special kind of community which conditions the forms of association and possesses considerable metaphysical dignity.16 But the ‘state’ in its developed form (such as the monarchical empire, the ancient polis and the modern constitutional state) is surely a poor example of Tönnies’s idea of ‘community, an outstanding feature of which is an element of natural growth, of the familial and tribal. But a more important question is whether the state and the political sphere are really constituted by the jus belli. A secret society with clearly defined goals, which orders its members to kill its ‘enemies’ and subjects them to its internal courts of justice, is not necessarily a political body in any important sense, and certainly not a state. An international movement, which makes similar claims on its adherents, though with only partial success, is certainly a political force of the first rank, but again not a state. Nevertheless, the claim that every community at war has something political about it, and even forms a kind of ‘state’, or perhaps only a ‘state within a state’, when its power is really considerable and its exclusiveness well marked, is more plausible than the corresponding claims that politics only makes sense when it embraces the possibility of asserting its own and annihilating another’s existence through warfare, and that the state is

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necessarily a sovereign warrior community confronting other such communities. But this is what Schmitt actually says. A people which devotes itself to peace and wants to have no enemies is not doing anything political but doing away with itself as a political subject (p. 41). An ‘idyllic’ world where mankind was united and free of the possibility of war, whether or not it could ever come to pass, would nevertheless be a world containing ‘neither politics nor state’ (p. 42). Not only would the peoples subject to a League of Nations with powers of decision not form states; the worldstate itself would not be a state, ‘it would he neither state nor empire, but would completely lose its political character’. For in respect of its earthly environment it could have no more enemies. It could not be organised for the struggle against a foe. The ‘friendship’ of those individuals and peoples united within it could not constitute a political community, since the correlate of ‘antagonism’ would be missing.17 It is hard to be polemical in the face of such exaggerated constructions, since the risk of sounding a banal note is all too great. Nevertheless, the thinker must always be mindful of his subject and take no heed of the glorious or lamentable nature of his own task. But are we really expected to nod agreement when told that in the world-empire there would be no more distribution of power, no more hierarchy, rivalry or resolution of public antagonisms? No more ups and downs in the cultural, economic and even the straightforward power relations of the federated nations and their appointed personnel? Would there be no more disagreement about how certain central decisions (of a religious kind, for example, or concerned with the planning of the world economy) were to be resolved, or how the individual nations and districts were to be governed? Would there be no more state taxes, no legislation for state education, no state courts and police? It seems to us much more likely that politics would simply acquire a new dimension, that of the organised super-state, although it would, in exchange, lose important, though not unreservedly ‘pleasant’, elements. There would certainly be no more armaments debates or diplomatic alliances, as we know them. One might object (as we ourselves do): Even a world-state cannot completely do away forever with the possibility of enemies, revolutions and armed collective action. Indeed, no! Schmitt adds the bitter comment that, in the future, man will not speak of wars but of ‘means of compulsion’ and of ‘executions’ (pp. 64f).18 But he never completely denies the possibility of a world-embracing organisation at perpetual peace, his concern being the thesis that such a condition would signify the end of the state and of politics. But it is by pressing our first objection that we

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come to the really important point. It may be generally acknowledged that every state-like formation, and every political power, must be prepared to consider rising up in arms (not necessarily only ‘defensively’) should the need arise, or be capable of considering it in an emergency. An absolute rejection of this possibility seems in fact tantamount to the dissolution of all civil society. For a single man who is ‘of another mind’ could then overturn the whole defenceless world-state. Even the existence of party groupings of any kind, in even the best-balanced and most freedom-loving democracy, would probably make no sense unless it were at the same time ‘thinkable’ that if the impossible happened and an attempt to suppress them completely were made, it could be met with forceful resistance. But this is not the essence or heart of the matter. Schmitt’s ghastly vision of a united world-empire helps us to see this clearly. Here too ‘war’ would still be part of the picture, but its possibility would be so small and remote that it would be quite obvious that war and the concern for war, that is, the ‘friend-foe’ relation in Schmitt’s sense, have very little to do with the basic determination of politics and the state. (In the same way it would be manifestly false to speak of a civilisation dying out or fading away simply because crimes were so rarely committed that only a feeble remnant of its police and law-courts still continued to function.) Let us now leave consideration of the ‘world-state’ and go on to consider the relation between municipality and state and, in particular, the federal state. The supreme authorities for taxation and police, for example, in the large municipalities resemble and stand in for the state itself, but in no way are they organised for possible wars against other regions of the same state. Apparent exceptions turn out to prove our point. Paris in Jacobin days, ‘Red’ Vienna in contemporary Austria, in their pointed struggles for power with the rest of the country do not simply represent themselves as demographic or residential units, but as the political Left at state level, a party division intended to embrace the state as a whole. The important regional power struggles in the German Empire furnish an almost vanishing prospect of military engagement between the states concerned – for example, Bavaria and Prussia – and one that bears no relation to the political weight of the antagonisms. One might perhaps put forward the American Civil War, the largest post-Napoleonic military operation of the nineteenth century, as evidence that even regional antagonisms in a federal state lead on to the ‘real thing’ (so Schmitt), that is, to war, once they achieve real political significance. But in fact the Civil War was by no means an abstract collision between Northern ‘existence’ and Southern ‘existence’ as such, but resulted from the combined effects

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of various antagonisms, those, namely, between the different cultures of North and South, between a factory and a plantation economy, and between the moral and the utilitarian, racial and aristocratic attitudes to slavery (thus providing a superb example of how political oppositions develop). And in any case nobody would ever claim that the complicated and eventful internal political history of the United States from the Declaration of Independence to our own day merely amounted to a kind of ‘background’ to the Civil War, or a step on the way to an inevitable civil war of the future. The American example – that strange combination of revolutionary and territorial warfare – may well show that ‘the beast merely sleeps’, that in certain circumstances internal politics develop into foreign affairs, ‘discussion’ into war. But it also shows the reverse. The war was ended by the reunification of the realm and survived by the Democratic Party, which, largely under the banner of Free Trade, brought together the ‘aristocratic’ white population of the South and the second-class citizens and lower-class dissenters of the East (Catholics, Jews, and so on) into combined opposition (radically opposed to civil war) on internal affairs. And who would see today, in the dispute between church and radicals in France, a ‘possible’ revolt of the Vendée, or in England’s class and party struggle a (potential) war with Scotland? The Irish question has received an ‘internal’ and federative solution, which may well prove lasting. Can all this be called ‘the death of politics’, an ‘extinction of the state’? In no way is war the culmination or essence of politics; it is simply a means, notwithstanding the fact that once it has come about it brings its own far-reaching problems and is, to a great extent, subject to its own laws, like any situation of comparable urgency and decisiveness. We shall later have more to say about the actual material goals of the state and, especially, of politics, and about the grain of truth one-sidedly exaggerated by the ‘friend and foe’ theory. Here we must simply concede that the controversy over the sociological assessment of war is certainly supported by a total view of things not wholly lacking in value. Schmitt’s way of thinking sees war as the life of a community raised to its most intense and solemn pitch. This is the view we utterly reject. We certainly do not think that war or conflict between organised and armed powers is, under all circumstances, reprehensible and barbarous. In our view the ability of men to assert themselves by going to war, especially when their cause is just, is intimately bound up with the value and dignity of persons and communities. Life is not the highest good, nor is death the greatest evil. But we are no less clearly convinced that the essential meaning of life

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can never be found in death or the prospect of death, but in life itself – and then not in ‘life’ as such, or in ‘life’ as the luxuriancy of experience, as crass naturalists or scintillating vitalist philosophers hold, but in the ranges of meaning life offers, and in the shaping of its goals. A positive value can be attributed to the warlike attitude, in as much as it represents a positive and manly stance towards evil; it has absolutely no worth as a fundamental good of existence itself. But, to take a sociological point of view once more, the ‘friend-foe situation’ is an essentially possible borderline case of the political process, which doubtless possesses its own dialectic and its own requirements, and which, thanks to its own special urgency, puts all current political or technical concerns into a new perspective for as long as it lasts; but for all that it is not the real fulfilment or culmination of the political process, nor does it transform every single one of its technical goals into an unimportant and contingent technical accessory to military contest! 5. Liberalism, according to Schmitt (p. 58), perverts all the categories of public life, replacing war and peace, which ‘clearly distinguishes between the status of the two parties’, with the ‘dynamic of endless competition and endless discussion’ (in accordance with the separation of the economic and mercantile sphere from that of ideology and the ‘spiritual’, each the object of contempt for those inclined towards ‘heroism’). A strange opposition, ingenious yet absurd! In the first place war and peace are primarily concepts of external relations, whereas discussion belongs to internal politics, competition to the social and economic realm. Secondly, why should there not be something like ‘endless’ competition and discussion and at the same time peace, for the most part, alternating with the occasional war? Analogously, one cannot play off the more rhythmically alternating activities in the life of an individual, such as work and rest, eating and not eating, against, say, the ‘lasting states’ of breathing or thinking, on the grounds that they ‘clearly distinguish between the status of the two parties’. We see in this forced contrast yet another expression of Schmitt’s fundamental concern to ensure the primacy of external relations and to discredit internal politics, at least as the major theme of public affairs. This is merely a new-style sociological version of the age-old principle: ‘It is power, not justice, that counts’. Power, the stalwart endurance of war against the foe, that is what matters. Discussion, intended to solve questions of justice and correctness, is superfluous tomfoolery. The question is how the state is to deal with the enemy, not how the people are to be governed and life

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lived within the state. That is, government and life should be so ordered within it that it could bring to bear against the foe the greatest possible amount of force. To put anything else in the forefront of attention is a philosophy of ‘weakness’. This would of necessity be exploited by ‘others’ who are free of it, by the ‘enemy’. The correctness of our interpretation of Schmitt is confirmed by his denial that there can be any significant struggle of a spiritual kind (p. 59); in the concrete reality of political existence, he says, ‘there can be no rule of abstract orders or sets of norms; all there can be is control of specific human individuals or groups by other specific human individuals or groups’. Rightly understood, this is a sociological truism which can always be used against certain formalists and rule-fanatics. But if we take it further, this sociological realism becomes a pseudo-sociological fantasy of power worship. The ‘discovery’ that even in the case of liberal institutions neither the ‘constitution’ nor the ‘people’ itself ‘rules’, but that there are always specific wielders of power, specifically privileged strata and kinds of men, injustice of a specific kind, etc., is supposed to be sufficient to ‘legitimate’ as sociologically natural a form of institution which is primarily and, so to speak, ‘openly’ directed towards the development of power and dominion. This ignores the fact that the second member of Schmitt’s opposition (concrete power-wielding individuals and groups) is in itself as impossible, or in need of completion, as the first (the rule of abstract orders and sets of norms). All dominion, and even the constitution of any kind of leading group, has its own particular material principle (e.g., theocratic), all exercise of power by ‘concrete individuals and groups’ is limited by ‘order’ or ‘sets of norms’ on whose basis that level of control is still possible; above all, ‘control’ varies in kind and degree according to the type of objective rule with which it is institutionally linked. The ‘dominion’ of morality, law, the economy or of ‘rule’, says Schmitt (p. 59), has only ‘a concrete political meaning’. This is correct only in the sense that that ‘dominion’ of morality, and so on, is only possible in a particular and concrete political form. It would be totally absurd to claim that the difference between the ancient Persian monarchy and a parliamentary democracy consists ‘simply’ in the fact that in the one case a single man ‘ruled’ at the head of a standing army and the viceroys appointed by him, whereas in the other we have ‘rule’ by a ‘clique of professional politicians’.19 The difference between a prison and a holiday camp is not just a matter of the difference in character between the persons in charge. Rather, the life of the community has in either case a different rationale; certainly we can talk of an ‘order’ in the second case

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as much as in the first, but talk of ‘the authorities’ is not so appropriate, of ‘rule’ and ‘compulsion’ even less so. Thus the question of the detailed structure of the ‘order’ in the state, the question of how it is ruled and ought to be ruled, how far, for example, there should be mastery and inequality, with what material qualifications or kinds of value power should be especially bound up, how far it should be concentrated or divided: this is the proper object of politics.20 The working out of this does not mean armed struggle, but the contrast and comparison of the ideas of order, that is, primarily, social discussion. II 1. Carl Schmitt’s vision of politics is characterised by the primacy of foreign policy, by war as the supreme manifestation of community and by the expansion of power as the be-all and end-all of communal human life. As against this, I offer a conception of political life which gives the primacy to domestic politics, to the teleological function of the state, and to debate as the rational prelude to decisions about where the state should be heading. Does this mean I am just proposing a different ‘party’ policy, or arguing about the meanings of words? A closer look at the phenomenon of ‘politics’ should go some way towards allaying both these suspicions. No theoretical understanding of politics, not even Schmitt’s, is uninfluenced by the thinker’s own position.21 If I make the ‘friend or foe situation’ the centre of politics and put the warlike power-seeking of foreign relations at its metaphysical heart, I thereby commend unlimited armed conflict as the normal and approved form of settling political issues; I commend aggressive and unyielding power relations, the unquestioned submission of citizens to their rulers, and a domestic social structure most suited for waging war. If I deny political debate, with its competing views, I thereby reject the idea of social adjustment and of supervision and inspection from below, and at the same time support the traditional, or perhaps newly emerging, arbitrary distribution of power. Schmitt’s position is in fact counter-revolutionary in an anti-proletarian sense: the reference to the enemy without is supposed to distract attention from the experience of ‘class struggle’ and its rational and ethical content; the canonisation of the irrational element of power and the trivialisation of ‘liberal’ discussion are supposed to provide a relative ‘justification’ for the anti-proletarian class struggle conducted from above, a kind of ‘rationalisation’ by courtesy of realistic sociology. The citizen with a bad conscience, still stricken with liberal illusions, offering under their spell

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only fainthearted and resigned resistance to the proletarian onslaught, can be filled with new zeal by Schmitt and made ready to fight. However, the proletarian desire does not have to be interpreted as an abstract will to power, since it is formed around a new and rational idea of social order. But there is one respect in which the ultra-revolutionary – or Bolshevist – will to class struggle might be thought to support Schmitt’s conception: it offers the prospect of a complete uprooting of the enemy class – though this war-aim of absolute revolution from the Left is hardly an option for any kind of counter-revolution. These facts could certainly be given a different kind of political interpretation. But they do not presuppose the liberal dogmas of a merely ‘fictitious’ will of the state as the resultant of the ‘autonomous’ wills of all citizens, of the ‘equal validity of every opinion’ or of an ‘endless rationalisability of power relations’, any more than they do the demand to abolish war or any kind of force whatever. But one definite fact emerging from this discussion does support our own interpretation: the question Who is to prevail over whom? is necessarily subordinate to the question How is the communal life of mankind to be structured?. The kind of existence is a more decisive category than the conflict of existences. As opposed to ‘structure’, ‘conquest’ has a merely secondary importance in an objective and essential sense. If ‘Hinz vs. Kunz’ is not primarily a question about alternative ways of structuring a given slice of social life but is actually supposed to mean no more than ‘Hinz vs. Kunz’, then the issue is no longer one requiring rational treatment; it is not ‘politics’ but something of no more significance than the struggle between competing football teams (a possibility almost realised with the circus factions of the Blues and the Greens in the Byzantine Empire). Lichtenberg expressed it with exemplary firmness when he said that the question is not whether the sun does or does not set on a particular empire but what it manages to see in it. This implies not, certainly, the unimportance, but the altogether secondary importance of foreign relations. Whether I ‘prevail’ over this or that man is certainly important but is in itself a trifling matter compared with how I live. A state may or may not be at war with this or that other state, but the question about the nature of its regime, the political atmosphere in which its citizens go about their business, is always unavoidable, can never lose its topicality and can never be, as it were, accidentally on the agenda. State A and state B do not have to come into contact with each other, and they can cease to be in contact, but the relations between social groups within A and within B are the most central constituents of the ‘existence’ of these states. Certainly foreign

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relations are far from being the chance ‘encounters’ of nomadic tribes who have perhaps hitherto known nothing of one another. But we have only to think of dispositions of foreign relations such as ‘the balance of power in Europe’, ‘mastery of the Mediterranean’, ‘the Far Eastern question’, ‘disparities in armaments’, etc., to see at once that they do not concern simple antagonisms or ‘friend and foe’ situations, but questions of order concerning some single focus of reference.22 The actual powers and power aspirations of the individual nations and states represent different points of view, religious, cultural, internal political or social. Certainly in these cases the simple power interests of the individual ‘powers’ do seem to predominate – though to different degrees. In domestic politics, however, especially in the internal relations of ‘states’ in the self-contained, modern, sense as in absolutism or democracy), the leaders, leading groups, parties, classes and so on absolutely never represent mere ‘loosely’ connected and formally identical units of power, but are intelligibly bound together as the exponents of competing forms of life, of ‘positions’ vis-à-vis pressing issues that concern everyone, of ‘answers’ to current organisational questions. By the primacy of domestic politics we are then to understand that these constitute the really decisive issues for the formation of social life, though they are certainly not without ‘irrational’ aspects which are only intelligible in the light of ‘historical’ power struggles. In foreign relations these last dominate the picture, although in a less integral and essential fashion they carry along with them historically compelling elements of decisions relating to social organisation. That these must play some part, however small, results from the fact that all conceivable human groups are contained in the ideally all-embracing community of the ‘human race’. We can hardly conceive of a collision between ‘foes’, however hostile and primitive, where both parties have not in some way claimed to ‘be in the right’ and to be superior to their opponents according to some recognised objective ‘value’. However, as long as foreign relations remain foreign and are not, for example, the internal relations of federal partners, their material will always be contingent, fluctuating, evadable; its implications certainly cannot be extended arbitrarily far, but nor does it constitute a clearly defined and unavoidable presence. The case is different with internal politics, which turn on the form of the state. The relationship between the two is rather like that between aesthetics and ethics. Art plays an enormous spiritual role in human life, although the extent to which individual persons concern themselves with this or that art, or with any, is a contingent matter, even a matter of chance. However, there is no conceivable escape

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from the ethical questions of life. For the state is not a vehicle or a medley of strivings for power which equally well might not have existed, but has two functions indispensable for social life, that of guaranteeing the protection of the law and that of centrally regulating relationships. The proper content of politics is the actual structure of this central social apparatus and the way it responds to the life and power aspirations of the groups subservient to it; political debate is the argument between groups and points of view, not about existence and non-existence, I-live-andyou-die, but about fashioning the destinies of all alike. It is therefore not a bloodless substitute for war, not a degenerate shadow of fighting, but a social function with elements of both struggle and co-operation, which could not be replaced by any kind of war, even civil war. Political discussion was not invented by liberalism but has existed in every state. Just as there has to be a council of war in wartime, so in times of peace, when the state is carrying on its proper business, there must be an endless network of advisings, considerings and thoughtful assessment of powers, without which no ruling or mutual contact between rulers and their subjects (every regime in the world must take their ‘mood’ into account) would be possible at all. Liberalism and democracy simply give political discussion a rationalised legal form and offer a stimulus and a pledge of minimal participation to all citizens and ethnic groups. In this sense it could be said that ‘politics’ in its real essentials only begins with liberalism and its building of general discussion into the form of the state – in direct opposition to Schmitt’s view that with liberalism the state became perverted and ceased to be. 2. For all that, there is absolutely no denying the peculiarly ‘irrational’ aspects of politics, which can easily lead one to interpret all affairs of state in irrational terms if too much emphasis is placed on it. When Schmitt attempts to understand the state in terms of politics, and to interpret politics in terms of the extreme borderline case of a sublime and pointless existential trial of strength, he turns everything on its head. It is like a proposal to define the psychophysical concept of a ‘man’ as ‘smallest natural fighting unit’. He simply ignores the perfectly obvious, proper and commonplace meaning of the state and makes its more ‘exciting’ emergency function, which naturally takes this meaning for granted, into the substance of the case. Nevertheless, he is right to claim that politics has something to do with the irrational element in the life of the state. What, then, is this irrationality, and how does it differ from the generally irrational aspects of human life? Taken in themselves, both the ‘common

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good’ of politics and the individual good of any particular person can only be materially defined within limits – the trite saying ‘Man’s heaven is his will’ is true for both. It is also true that, from both the individual and the collective points of view, a cholera epidemic is indisputably bad and a well-managed currency indisputably good. One might at first think that the specific irrationality of the life of the state consisted in the fact that here, as in the individual case, no taste, lifestyle or value preference, which are all in themselves irrational, can be taken as given, since in public life man confronts man, will confronts will, value code confronts value code. There is no rational way of settling these differences, just as it is also impossible to argue an individual into accepting a way of life that differs from the one he is used to. There is, in addition, the awkward fact that even private interests, perfectly rational and intelligible in themselves, such as pure ‘welfare’ interests, cannot be rationally weighed against one another but only pitted against each other in somewhat combative fashion. But is this correct? Are there not forms of social life, just as there are (more or less perfect) ways of regulating interests, in which, at all events, some sort of standard of adjudication is applied and a certain adjustment secured? There is a great difference between the ‘irrationality’ of politics on the one hand, and, on the other, the ‘irrationality’ of the struggles between men and animals, or between nomadic tribes who encounter one another on their wanderings, contest a grazing- or watering-place, or think they are serving their gods with blood sacrifices. In these latter cases the contest between two firmly established systems of goals or effective powers is cleanly resolved through physical means, unclouded not only by convictions or appeals but also by vague influences of a ‘psychological’ and ‘demagogic’ kind. In the first case we have discussion at various levels, warnings and promises, persuasion, conversion, propagandising and theoretical debate; rules of procedure which can be broken, but not at all times and in all ways; corporate moods and swings; a predominant tendency to change, whose relation to the particular decisions and outlooks of those involved is always something of a mystery. It is this last point that puts us onto the track of specifically political irrationality. It is not just a matter of the multiplicity of subjects involved, as though it were confined within a closed social circle. When a new people settles among a host people in such a way that it is clearly separated as a whole, despite there being certain economic exchange relations and perhaps even certain spiritual relations between individuals of either people, this irrationality does not yet appear in its typical form in the two groups taken as a whole. Nor is it found between the castes of a

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caste-ordered society, where the castes by and large, apart from certain hierarchical religious relationships and fixed economic obligations, can be thought of as living separate autonomous lives; in a stable oligarchic state, supported by a sub-class of spiritually unawakened serfs or peasants, without rights or claims, the latter are essentially untouched by the ‘refined’, ‘lively’ and not precisely characterisable irrationality of politics. How strange! It is precisely the allegedly so rationalistic and mechanistic modern party democracy and the age of genuine ‘class struggles’ that have suggested the thesis of the irrationality of politics – though we do not mean to imply by this that the phenomenon first genuinely came into being in our age. But this peculiar irrationality (and today’s democracy is certainly not the first case of it) is found where the representatives of different points of view are grouped around a common centre.23 The single point of reference characteristic of ‘the state’ as such, the quasi personality of the state embodied in, say, a ‘prince’ or a ‘cabinet’ on the one hand,24 and on the other the manifold and opposed social groups of the leaders, thinkers, and so on, interested in the course of its activity, constitute the conditions for the existence of the ‘political’ in the narrowest and truest sense. Political irrationality is not pure instinctive life as opposed to the supposedly ‘impotent’ life of the spirit, but is a genuine spiritual Â�irrationality – certainly partly conditioned by instincts – which presupposes the rational focus of all spiritual activity. We spoke just now of manifόldness and opposition. Do we not also find this in a somewhat watered-down form in Schmitt’s category of friend and foe? The state administration, which embraces the social unit, with its uniform system of goals (Schmitt would perhaps prefer to speak of large municipalities or spheres of authority rather than the state) is in itself still ‘non-political’; only with the appearance of friend and foe, as at least possible categories or potential relations, do we hear the note of politics. But any honest observer, whether he shared our own or Schmitt’s predilections, would grant that the contrast between his and our view goes very deep. We cannot see anything political in the struggle of primitive peoples against savage beasts; we can only see very little that is political in the war of extermination between two warrior tribes, rather more in the wars of expansion of a great king; and the quintessence of political life in, say, the contest of two parliamentary parties or the competition between two tendencies in determining the policy of one and the same party. But this ascending series of ‘political’ levels does not go with increasing scope for the friend-foe relation; on the contrary, it is gradually inhibited, relativised, given a place in an indissoluble unit

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of shared life. Certainly ‘politics’ does bear in itself a specific relation to struggle, but within this relation it exhibits precisely an alternative to physical annihilation or even social elimination or the ‘disposal’ of one’s opponent. The well-known secondary sense of the word ‘politics’ as meaning ‘tactics’ or ‘shrewd diplomacy’ also points to this. Naturally we have here no simple replacement of violent by crafty means in the service of the same goal of annihilation, but a fundamentally different conception of the coexistence of a plurality of policies and attitudes to power. In other words, the essential mark of the political sphere is not the relation between friend and foe but the coexistence of opponents on the basis of a social unit of reference. In the sphere of foreign relations this unit of reference is more or less indeterminate, a matter of culture and so on, and lacks a quasi-personal focus of conduct, while the ‘opponents’ are primarily determined as individual products of a particular territory; in the domestic sphere the unit of reference is the relation to the state’s ‘direction’, to the policies and personnel of a central apparatus for decision making and guidance, and the ‘opponents’ are primarily, in accordance with their social function, determinate groups and representatives of ‘standpoints’ with direct intentional reference to the central guidance and the life of this social unit. Our concern here is, above all, the second variant – internal politics. 3. The specific irrationality of political discussion is not that it lacks objectivity or that there is something illusory about it, but that it inevitably has two meanings. It is quite true that its aim is not to adjudicate about a purely objective truth and falsity, as in science, or even about what is advantageous and disadvantageous, given some quite definite choice of goals. But that does not in the least mean that it is just a substitute, prelude or mask for the settlement of group enmities, which would as little admit of resolution by discussion as, say, an attack of hungry wolves or the destructive waves of a spring tide. The fact is that the oppositions first arise and take some definite form because of the unit of reference, through the fact of mutual dependence and concern with the ‘common good’. Think, for a small-scale example, of the case of a father who criticises the manner of life of his son and tries to dissuade him from what he considers to be its mistaken course. He may well also have his own advantage in mind, in that he wants to ensure that he does not lose his own fortune or his social standing through his son’s extravagance. In all this he is very likely to start by taking for granted some other way of life from that of his son, some relatively different set

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of value priorities, which he perhaps unjustly interprets as an index of the son’s stupidity, depravity or imprudence. But it by no means follows that he is not also concerned to guard his son from serious harm of a kind that even the son would clearly recognise to be seriously injurious to himself. Within limits, which change from case to case, he can get his son to see this, or else be brought by him to see that his fears have no material foundation. In their discussion a great deal may be brought to light concerning ideals of living; the son may come to see that he has shown disrespect for certain values which the family or its social circle have stood for and which he himself still finds important; the father may learn that what he is up against is a well-thought-out point of view with which he must reach some quite definite compromise. So, too, political discussion is neither superfluous nor mere delusion. But it does also, to some extent, inevitably express the real contest of various ‘forces’ for a share of power and goods.25 It is in fact impossible to make a rigorous separation between this contest and the purely objective discussion of the common good, of what is ‘right’ for the state; this is because the power interests only reach the stage of alliances and manifestos in their interpretations of the common good and their reference back to the given central ‘state power’,26 and because the ‘competition between styles of life in society’, which comes between the struggle of interests and the objective problems of the state, can only come alive with the attempt to solve the question about how the given state should conduct itself. Individual tastes and interests only acquire their title to be acknowledged when they can be inserted into an objective conception of the state, one that the ‘general public’ can accept. In a secondary sense, of course, we also find a clear demarcation between spheres of validity for forms of life (as in religious questions) and the pure conflict of interests (as in the determination of formulae for the allocation of taxes and subsidies). Political discussion also overlaps with the purely academic sphere of jurisprudence, political economy and the theory of the state. But the very heart of politics – the rise and fall of policies and parties, the trust and mistrust of the ‘masses’ towards a regime, good and bad ‘conscience’ in a party before ‘public opinion’, the calculation of what may be politically possible or impossible, the practical alternatives open to the state – all this contains an inseparable tangle of ideals and interests, statesmanlike thought and the private will for recognition. An attempt to free discussion from its entanglements is as meaningless as its abolition, although there are bound to be relative solutions for particular questions27 and although a partial, perhaps dictatorial, restraint and confinement of discussion must

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always be possible, though it is precisely this that betokens a degree of depoliticisation in the life of the society.28 For the aim of discussion is not the discovery of a definite ‘truth’ about the state, to which all its parts have then to conform irrespective of their interests and predilections; nor does it arise from the confrontation of various spiritually unrelated and impermeable wills, one of which has simply to ‘conquer’ the others or even to ‘exterminate’ them, or among which power has to be divided on a proportionate basis by way of compromise.29 These ‘standpoints’ and ‘factors’ are by their nature not rigidly separate and individuated things like professional groups or official parties; they are always ‘produced’ with reference to the question of the day and the policy being followed by the central government, and they change their meaning in response to changes in the relations of authority and trust between the regime and all its people, between leaders, their subordinates and subjects in general. (The role of the ‘non-political’, of the ‘unpredictable crowd’, of the unforeseen, the condition of the economy, swings, surprises!) The specific, one might say the paradoxical, feature of politics lies precisely in the fact that it concerns the course which power, the central governmental direction of society, is to take, with its manifold relations of alliance and opposition, with the various, from its point of view, ‘subjective’ groups and party conceptions which already somehow presuppose the existence of society’s central direction and justify their claims to it. The fact that power is more the theme of relationships in the political than in any other sphere has often produced the mistaken idea that the only thing that counts is the success and increase of the ‘one’ power at the expense of ‘others’. But we do not find either a mutual impingement of the rational plans of independent and self-seeking subjects, as in the pure market economy (where, for all that, some social substrate has always to be presupposed outside the scope of the plan), or simply a central plan as in a planned economy or a completely organised state (where at least ‘nature’ and the wills of all concerned have still to be taken account of). What we do find is the interplay between plans conceived from different points of view and underlain by different interests and a shared set of goals. Forget, then, the idea of feeble rational appearance concealing powerful irrational reality! We have, rather, the variously coloured modifications of a generally rational concern, always compromised and weighted but also nourished by particular interests, which are in themselves not subject to the generally rational concern, a fact which gives the impression of something especially irrational, incalculable and conflict-ridden in politics. We do not find the dull and deadly confrontation of friend and foe,

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but an overarching ‘friendship’ shot through with particular friendships and corresponding enmities, alike endangered and supported by them. The undeniable irrationality is not to be found in the futility of rationality but in the manifoldness and elusiveness of its nevertheless interlocking particles. Political activity does not mean fighting without any consideration, or even with merely external and secondary consideration, for a total order, but means, precisely, fighting about the total order. Such is the internal politics of a state; the foreign relations of states will only be truly ‘political’ when they become the worldwide internal relations of mankind actually united, even if they include wars or ‘executions’. 4. The real content of political life, the object world of politics, consists, then, not of wild coalitions of ‘friend and foe’ but of everything of importance for a society, especially relationships, above all power relationships, in so far as they relate to the bearers and ways of proceeding of the central power – the state power, but also municipal or other public power. Various material factors dictate whether, how far and when social affairs become politicised and become the subject matter of political discussion and pressure-group formation. Some important power relations, which thoroughly determine the entire life of the society, such as stable class relations, may be confined to a marginal place in political reality, as long as they are quietly accepted and not, or only partially, supported by the manipulations of state power; on the other hand, some in themselves minor questions concerning the occupancy of some post or rates of tax can assume a highly political character when they are symbolic of far-reaching choices or social conflicts. Indeed it often happens that seemingly tiny details are bitterly fought out and become the occasion of momentous political crises, as for example the matter of the tax on tea in the American Revolution, the dismissal of Necker or the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution, the affair of the armoured cruiser or the nugatory differences in social policy in the recent collapse of the great coalition in Germany, or the appointment of a general manager of the railways in Austria; as for foreign relations, one may recall the causes of the Franco-German War and the Great War. The special importance of clearly isolable particular questions like these and of unforeseen events in politics is partly due to the presence of opposed group formations whose antagonisms can flare up at certain selected points of conflict and can be thus relieved. But this need for clear, limited and intelligible ‘catalysts’ itself also points to that unit of reference within which the antagonisms are confined, and which therefore

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are not normally carried to extremes or brought to the highest level of current tension. Incidents can be smoothed over (Fashoda, Agadir) and government crises survived (the dying down of the Negro question to a lower level of tension after the Civil War). But this phenomenon of political details having symbolic power has other causes. Politics is, firstly, not a private business and secondly is not ‘social’ in the aggregative statistical sense or even in the sense of a merely spiritual and material life-sphere, like culture or economics; nor is it merely a public functional device, a self-enclosed subject of activity like the administration, justice, or the armed forces. It is a ‘public matter’ in the pointed sense of collectives consciously acting alongside, against and with one another. Here there is a special need for easily grasped and remembered cases for decision, which of course stand for deeper life-questions and group interests, through which the watchful interests of the masses are inserted into the ambit of rational action. This also accounts for the role of symbolic (often not, or not primarily, ‘leading’) personalities, slogans and formulae, historic events such as battles, collisions, elections and parliamentary decisions, and flags and insignia. From the point of view of the leading circles (the government, party leaders, etc.), but also of the masses, in so far as they are organised and capable of taking a wide view, isolated conflicts and critical situations often function as tests of the scope of a political power, the ability of the group leaders to count on their supporters, the degree to which there is a common mind – on certain matters – within the people, and so on. The composition of the political object-world in a particular group of people at a particular time is therefore dependent on all social facts relating to the group concerned (including its milieu), with special reference to the dynamic brought about by displacements, as changes become important, generally known and in need of settlement; for the most part the social forces themselves are already formed by the state or with political reference to the state – perhaps through the parties; the state apparatus is by no means merely a ‘mirror’ of the social world, and the parties and other politically determined groups by no means act as mere representatives of tendencies of thought and class interests, but also comprise a system of goals of their own30 with their own traditions, even in part their own ways of life. Political topics differ not merely in their subject matter – derived from their religious, economic, directly political, etc. origins – but also formally, in various ways. They may concern an entire population or, despite their relevance to the state, merely a small group within it – for

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example, the leadership problems of a single party.31 They can vary in urgency and topicality (think of the power position of a prominent statesman), and be in varying degree centrally political (compare government powers and rights to freedom). Political matters can also be more or less ‘deep’; questions which, especially in a relatively peaceful time, do not essentially and directly touch current government policy (as, for example, the development and the demands of a not yet ‘respectable’ party on the Left in a country by no means ripe for revolution but involved, say, in industrialisation) may yet much more deeply affect the foundations of the system of government itself and the relationship between state power and the classes and other social circles, than highly topical political questions which may at any time bring about the collapse of the regime. 5. Let me, in conclusion, look once more at the value sphere of politics, especially in the light of the contrast between the friend and foe theory and what we may briefly call the theory of political order. Against the idea of essentially irrational enmity let it be at once asserted that politics is above all concerned with the application of non-political values – those of religion, welfare, justice, humanity, technological control, comfort, etc. But of course we may also speak of peculiarly ‘political values’. They include success, significance, forcefulness, ingenuity, creativity, and the timing of political conduct – values, which are in general independent of any political tendency and can characterise conservative just as much as revolutionary politics.32 So, for example, at a particular moment of crisis, both a quite definitely rightist solution and a quite definitely leftist one would make sense and would be compatible both with the preservation of the unity of the state and with national traditions. So the question of whether one is, speaking crudely, primarily of the Right or of the Left, is not an object of genuine ‘political evaluation’ but is determined by already professed principles of ethical value preference, religious and metaphysical prejudices, personal and class allegiances. But it is a matter of political insight, political instinct and political inventiveness to discover what actual solutions are possible here on both ‘leftist’ and ‘rightist’ presuppositions; what still acceptable moral and mass-psychological cost is entailed by the rightist solution; what still acceptable risk to the existence of the state is entailed by the leftist one. However, the friend and foe theory of politics champions an untenable absolutism and relativism of political values. According to it, every already existing system of political goals, every already existing ‘battle camp’ counts as absolute for its adherents, or rather its members,

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and as incommensurable with all other points of view; there are no political values in the space between such camps, and relativism is the only possible position for an outsider. Every political victory is both absolutely valuable, absolutely valueless (for the ‘enemy’) and, at the same time, absolutely irrelevant. The theory of political order, however, will recognise, between the pure category of subjective success in battle and extra-political value foundations, an intermediate sphere of those genuinely political values which will correspond not simply to the victory of the better over the worse, and not simply to the victory of the one over the others, but to the right and lasting harmonisation of the elements of a social unit of reference, albeit certainly from the preferred standpoint of one of these elements. An example from domestic politics is provided by the great statesman, who, from the point of view of his party, class, confession or region, engages in ‘state politics’ even to the extent of completely disregarding these prepossessions. At the level of inter-state relations think of a foreign policy of such a kind that it is able to create a secure and possibly also leading position for the home state (even by warlike means in the extreme case) but always acknowledges the system of goals of the given circle of states as such and co-ordinates the power position of the home state with an objective function within the wider system of goals. The formula suggested above in italics contains the suspect word ‘right’; by this I wish to indicate, firstly, that political values can have no validity without reference to other, more fundamental values, that is, a policy good in itself must operate with as large as possible a stock of sound and obvious values (justice, welfare, culture, etc.),33 though it is necessarily also directed against other values of these kinds. Secondly, a good policy strives for a genuine ‘harmony’, that is, a leading role for one’s own standpoint (one’s own ‘camp’), which, thanks to the objective function it performs, is recognised, supported and tolerated by the representatives of other standpoints, whereas the radical defeat, elimination or annihilation of an opposed power is reduced to the unavoidable minimum. Notes 1. Aurel Kolnai, ‘Der Inhalt der Politik’, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, Tübingen, XCIV, 1, 1933, pp. 1–38. 2. Der Βegrιff des Politischen, Munich-Leipzig, 1932, an expanded edition of the essay of that name in the Archie für Sozialwissenschaft, 1927. Simple bracketed page numbers in text or notes refer to Schmitt’s book.

What Is Politics About? (1933)â•…â•… 79 3. ‘The concept of the state presupposes the concept of politics’ (p. 7). ‘The state as the standard political unit’ (p. 33). ‘The pluralism of the world of states follows from the conceptual criteria of politics’ (p. 41). Once mankind is so organised that there is no longer any possibility of war, there will be ‘neither politics nor states’ (p. 42). The ‘state’ has no properties as such, since it really embraces the entire life of society; one must investigate the specifically political categories (pp. 11–12). 4. This bracketed question mark is in the printed text [eds.]. 5. See previous note. 6. Cf. Schäffle’s distinction between the routine work of the state apparatus on the basis of rules and regulations, and ‘politics’ proper, which is a region of ‘novelty’ (cited by Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie, Bonn, 1929, pp. 71–2.) Political action proper enters in ‘where unregulated situations demand a ruling’. This sphere is irremovable: as E. K. Winter somewhat extravagantly puts it (‘The True State in the Sociology of Law’, Zeitschrift der öffentlichen Recht, 1931): ‘In the last analysis states can only be governed by men, never by laws in themselves’. The bureaucratic conservative conception of the state is, however, mistaken in holding that this sphere is dispensable, as is the liberal conception in thinking that it can subsequently be rationalised to an unlimited extent by supra-statal Natural Law (Mannheim, op. cit., pp. 71ff). Roughly, the view of the ethics of sentiment, which certainly feels the irrationality of the world, especially in its power relations, but cannot endure it (Max Weber, Politik als Beruf, Munich, 1921, p. 443). The recent emphatic revelation of the irrational (R. Behrendt, Politischer Aktivismus, Leipzig, 1932, p. 59) is supposed to be a reaction to the liberal capitalist rationalisation of the whole of modern life, at the same time a counter-consequence of that politicisation of socialised man (p. 57), which is an aspect of the liberal rationalisation already directed at the irrational. Cf. elsewhere in Behrendt the extension, or résumé and analysis, of the political conflict-irrationalism championed by C. Schmitt. 7. See Mannheim, op. cit., I: Stages of the sociology of thought: psychological functionalisation, which detects the dependence of values on interests and affects in the social standing of their bearers, and nonlogical functionalisation, which finds it in the commitment to formal structures of though, to the system of categories itself. However, this does not make the values objectively irrelevant. Relationism does not mean illusionism. The ‘genesis of possible truth as bound up with the social process’ remains an open question. Perhaps ‘absolutes’ are ‘to be found’ in the course of the development of social ideas. The rootedness of thoughts in the social being of their originators does not have to be a source of error. An immanent evaluation of political preferences can be combined with sociological research, in that their objective realisability is tested within the environmental conditions actually obtaining. 8. Schmitt actually asserts this (pp. 16–17) by distinguishing the public concept of hostis from the private one of inimicus. One does not have to hate the political enemy personally, but neither does one have to love him, certainly not to support him against one’s own interest. The Sermon on the Mount certainly does not command this; but then does it really command a ‘support’ of the private enemy in a personal conflict? Certainly a genuine personal enmity may have a characteristically poisonous trait as against the more ‘institutional’, ‘objective’ enmity of war. But surely Christian morality excludes an ultimate and wholehearted surrender to the latter just the same. Either it strictly forbids all personal animosity and injury, hence war also; or it tries to relativise any animosity and arch it over with love, justice, respect for the other, and in any ease with ethical scrutiny, humanisation and limitation of war. Christ does not go with Treitschke, Kjellén or Bcrnhardi.

80â•…â•… Politics, Values, and National Socialism 9. Leo Strauß says the same: ‘Notes on Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of Politics’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, vol. 67, pp. 736ff. Combat is the ‘real thing’, according to Schmitt, enmity the primary and ‘grouping’ factor. Hobbes’s ‘state of nature’ view of society, which takes an individualist form, assumes an ‘original situation’, in which everyone is everyone’s ‘enemy’. We find it obvious (Strauß’s points take roughly this line) that Hobbes’s radically naturalist fiction is far better suited to serve as theoretical subsoil for social morality than the apparently much milder theory of Schmitt, which also takes for granted an original community. If the supposed animosity of all against all comes to be restrained by treaty and judicial order, it can be completely replaced by a community of common purpose and a collaboration of all mankind. Schmitt, by contrast, regards it as the eternal or normal destiny of men to struggle against the alien community in combination with the companions of one’s own community. 10. Here too we agree with Strauß’s interpretation of Schmitt, op. cit., pp. 734ff. Schmitt does not really have in mind any kind of close connection between politics and other spheres of culture, or the ‘autonomy’ of politics. The thought is, rather, that politics is something fundamental and uniquely ‘real’, not one among many ‘objective domains’. It is ‘above’ the other spheres of culture. ‘The understanding of politics implies a fundamental critique at least of the prevailing concept of culture’. 11. This is put more extremely and unambiguously in the 1927 version: ‘neither normative nor ‘spiritual’ antagonisms’. 12. War is not the end or goal of the state, but ‘the reality of an ever-present possibility’, the ‘real thing’. 13. ‘The rationale of war is not to be found in any defence of ideals or laws but in its being waged against a real enemy’ (p. 38). But who is the ‘real enemy’? Even the answer that it is the economic competitor is rejected by Schmitt as ‘liberalistic’, and, for the most part, rightly (though we would be far from saddling only ‘liberalism’ with the one-sided perspective of ‘economism’). But cannot ‘ideals and laws’, or adherence to them, make an essential contribution to someone’s becoming a ‘real enemy’ of mine? Is it not somehow artificial to break off an analysis and content oneself with the claim that one community somehow becomes the ‘real enemy’ of the other in the course of history? 14. Whenever the class struggle is really ‘serious’, Schmitt opines (p. 25), we already have a particular proletarian ‘state’ making war on the bourgeois state. This amounts to an untenable conversion of the – certainly meaningful – metaphor ‘state within a state’ into the basis of the concept of the state. Domestic politics cannot possibly amount to inter-’state’ politics. (Cf. the text, below.) 15. Here too it is worth noting the divergence of the expanded new edition from the 1927 essay. Whereas in the latter Schmitt simply pays no attention to domestic politics and understands politics exclusively as foreign relations – except for civil war, where the parties have already become like hostile ‘states’ – the new edition contains a discussion of internal politics, which the author of course considers as, by comparison, greatly lacking in dignity (pp. 17ff.). According to this, there are within the state ‘numerous secondary meanings of ‘political’. Hence educational, municipal, social politics, etc. However, ‘opposition and antagonism within the state’ remains ‘constitutive for the concept of politics’. Are these partial ‘oppositions’ also supposed to be simply elements of ‘antagonisms’ in abeyance or cold storage? At all events Schmitt sees in the carrying on of ‘weakened’ oppositions a ‘parasitic’, ‘caricature-like’ politics, which operates with ‘tricks and dodges’, is identical with ‘party politics’ and has no acquaintance with ‘the real thing’. This is true, to the extent that the question how the citizens of a state ought to live is ‘unserious’ as such, and the seriousness of life only begins when the living man is faced with the shadow of death. But we only need to formulate the proposition clearly to refute it.

What Is Politics About? (1933)â•…â•… 81 Certainly one may speak of a primacy of internal politics (p. 20) when there is a real possibility of war in this sphere, that is, when civil war impends. Elsewhere in the book edition (p. 34) Schmitt discovers that it is an achievement of the ‘normal’ state to guarantee peace, safety and order within its territory, and speaks of the ‘necessity of satisfaction within the state’. But what does he mean by this? That the state can itself designate the disturber of its functions as an ‘internal enemy’, declare him a ‘hostis’! In our view those functions and the way they are met are themselves much more important than the proscription of those who disturb them. And it is surely not the meanest task of the genuine statesman to get by if possible without ‘internal enemies’. 16. D. von Hildebrand, Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft, Augsburg: Haas & Grabherr, 1930, pp. 310–11: ‘Res publicae’ as the proper sphere of the state, centred on the ‘protection and realisation of the law’; public safety a fundamental presupposition, an elemental good for the individual. Schäffle: ‘Rule-governed central apparatus for the coordination of all parts of the total life of society and organ of positive intervention in the interest of the preservation of the whole’, cited by Adolf Menzel: ‘Die energetische Staatslehre’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, 1931, p. 165. According to Hermann Heller (Die Souveränität, Berlin-Leipzig, 1927, p. 81) the state is ‘the homogeneous collaboration exclusively of particular human acts, in this respect like any other human association, but completely distinct from them in that the acts which give it reality are the guarantee of all collaboration in this area’. (Of course every society contains something ‘statal’, but not always in the sharply characterised or constitutional form of the modern state.) 17. There would be no more politics in a pacifist world (p. 23), ‘despite interesting oppositions’, etc., since ‘there would understandably be no opposition on the ground of which a man could be required to lay down his life’ – and just as little reason ‘for killing other men’. So is the presence of politics bound up with universal conscription? If not, does it only affect the personnel of the standing army? Is the question of who is to govern ‘interesting’, but ‘not political’? Schmitt’s special terminological position really conceals value judgements (see Strauß, our note 21). 18. Wars waged in a pacifist spirit, perhaps as ‘war to end all war’, are (p. 24) ‘especially intense and inhuman’, since the enemy is even morally disenfranchised. It may be remarked here that, e.g., those wars of certain times and peoples in which, in the case of victory the whole enemy population was exterminated or sold into slavery, were quite certainly waged without pacifist slogans and not as ‘wars to end all wars’. Furthermore, people seek to put their opponents morally in the wrong and to justify themselves in all genuine antagonisms, whether between individuals or peoples and their leaders. The affirmation of abstract hostility as such is much more a matter of ideologues than of statesmen and warriors. 19. The distinction made by R. M. Melver (The Modern State, Oxford, 1926, pp. 306–307) between the ‘ruling class’ of capitalism and that in the feudal sense is very true: ‘The capitalists did not become a governing class in the sense in which the landowners had been. They exerted of course a strong influence on government, but they were not, as by a kind of natural right, the rulers of the state. Their property power was not naturally translated into political power’. 20. A recent notable critique of Schmitt by Georg Schmitt in the Catholic RheinMainische Volkszeitung, July 1932, sees the kernel of Schmitt’s position in the fact that he will not acknowledge that politics is the problem of defining an order for the life of the state. He is also right in his interpretation of Schmitt’s concept of politics itself as a polemical one, in that it is spiritually directed against liberalism, though materially against the proletariat; however, he does not work this out at any length. Cf. what follows in the text.

82â•…â•… Politics, Values, and National Socialism 21. Strauß shows this clearly in Schmitt’s case, op. cit., pp. 745–47. Schmitt’s thought is not value-free, rather he affirms politics in his sense, and not because he regards ‘non-political’ (i.e., pacifist) existence as utopian – he thinks its realisation is a real possibility – but because he ‘detests’ it, feels ‘disgust’ at it, as he shows, for example, in his mocking use of the word ‘entertainment’ (in the description of the rich content of a ‘non-political’ condition). For he sees ‘the seriousness of human life threatened’ by this possibility. In emphasising the independence of the political, its distinction from the moral’, etc., Schmitt contradicts himself: it is not just as a scholar that he affirms his own sense of politics, but as an expression of his own ethos, which is certainly very different from a humanitarian ethos. ‘Politics cannot be evaluated, or judged against an ideal, at all’ (Strauß, p. 739), because Schmitt has already posited it as the highest of life’s values. 22. This topic is rejected by Schmitt. Strauß puts it concisely (op. cit., p. 747): ‘The affirmation of the ‘Political’ is the affirmation of the state of nature’. Hobbes, however, who argues from a much more extreme conception of the ‘state of nature’, places its overcoming at the heart of his theory of society. 23. Μannheim writes about an objective platform for ‘real discussion’ (op. tit., pp. 157–58). 24. Such a sharp differentiation between the state and society in general and the other social groups within it is only found in our own culture: Alfred Weber, Die Krise des modernen Staatsgedankens, Stuttgart, 1925, pp. 18–19. This of course says nothing against the general sociological lawlike tendencies of the ‘statal’ sphere at the basis of every society. Even so, the phenomenon of law can be studied only in certain societies of superior culture, and the phenomena of ‘caste’ and ‘Dharma’ predominantly in the culture of India. 25. Party struggles are always also struggles for the patronage of office, as Max Weber (op. cit., p. 406) makes clear. 26. Alfred Weber convincingly argues (op. cit., p. 84) that every party, even a class party, has to put itself forward as an instrument of a universal state policy. 27. The falling off of discussion in the working of today’s parliament, which Schmitt emphasises in his Verfassungslehre (Munich-Leipzig, 1928, p. 318) and elsewhere, is certainly very significant and is connected with the increasing ratiόnalisation of the machinery of the state and the change of function of parliament from being an organ of mere supervision to the bearer of state power; but this certainly does not bring with it a dying away of political discussion in the democratically governed society itself, but rather a more intense politicisation of society-dwelling man in general (see later in this note). Schmitt discusses the liberalistic ‘endlessness’ of discussion in his work Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des Parlamentarismus (Munich-Leipzig, 1923, p. 24): In place of the claim to absolute truth we find a ‘competition of opinions’. But that sort of competition is not possible at all except where there is an intention to find the truth, and the discussion leads again and again to relatively valid and relatively final solutions. 28. The sphere of internal politics does not stand and fall with the presence of liberal state institutions. It is also incorporated (Max Weber, op. cit., pp. 410–11) in the separation of the political civil service from specialist officialdom. The ‘political civil service’ in the narrow sense depends both logically and historically on the existence or production (actual or at least assumed to be possible) of an ‘opposition’, of a plurality of state-related standpoints: it represents, as against the technical executive apparatus, the predominant will of the state in its development and conception, in its opposition to real or possible alternative conceptions. 29. Majority decisions would be pointless as automatic arithmetical operations; they presuppose arguable questions for universal decision: Alfred Weber, op. cit., pp. 44–45.

What Is Politics About? (1933)â•…â•… 83 30. Cf. in Max Weber, op. cit., p. 420, the distinguishing of political leadership, as fulltime occupation, from the strata of notables in more recent democracy, especially and earliest in the United States. 31. To some extent, especially in the American system of large programmeless parties, necessarily ‘unofficial’ (because fluctuating and requiring a continuous reformation and regrouping of standpoints) mass psychological operations of politics are all but completely transferred to the intra-party sphere. A constitutional fixation or legalising of parties would be pointless, as Hermens (Democracy and Capitalism, Munich-Leipzig, 1931, pp. 53–54) rightly remarks: new extralegal tendencies, new ‘parties’ in the spirit of their original function, would immediately form. 32. Cf. note 29. 33. Roman Boos (Wirkichkeit und Schein im modernen Staatsbegriff, Berlin-Grunewald, 1931, p. 49) puts it very well: The fundamental requirement is ‘that the state should be given a form, which allows it again and again to re-submit itself to the standards of human justification’.

5 Heidegger and National Socialism (1934) When Martin Heidegger, whom many consider to be Germany’s leading philosopher, publicly announced his support of National Socialism at the beginning of 1933, he suffered the fate of so many other adherents of victorious yet widely distasteful movements when there seems no other way of convincingly rebutting them in the heat of the moment: he was pronounced an opportunist, a weather-cock, who thought nothing of giving house-room to both a set of highly obscure and superfine philosophical ideas and also a brutal S.A. mentality. But in fact the two things go excellently together, not primarily for career reasons but because there is an inner harmony between them. For at bottom Heidegger’s teaching is the philosophy of Nazism, the annunciation, with all the apparatus of modern philosophy, of a new barbaric life-style, closely related to an acute and penetrating critique of the essential ‘half-measures of civilisation’. Heidegger, whose Magnum Opus Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) appeared as long ago as 1926, is no beneficiary or hanger-on of the Third Reich, but its prophet, visionary and inspiration. Take his language – obscure, hard to interpret, distorted by violent neologisms; this cannot be dismissed as bombast or charlatanism. Its obscurity clearly expresses his rejection of universal reason and the ‘democratic’ cooperation of educated men, the easy appropriation of another’s ideas. The bleakly heroic and unremittingly strenuous life that is glorified in this philosophy is almost forced on the reader in his effort to understand it. The difficulty of this style is not, as with many thinkers, the result of a striving for exactitude and subtlety of conceptual grasp, but of an exaggerated, fundamentally pagan and desolately sad response to the ‘burden’ of life itself.

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The basic mood, we might say the basic material, of life and existence is, according to Heidegger, fear (Angst). It is not some meaning or value; not God’s love, or even the life-giving Eros of the ancient world; not pleasure as such or the empty will ‘in itself’; it is simply fear. It is that general, indeterminate, above all objectless, ubiquitously concealed and lurking fear, on which even everyday, common-or-garden fears of this and about that are based. Human existence (Dasein) begins with constriction (Beengtsein) and worry, with the various degrees of ‘apprehension’ (Besorgen). Human existence – or man himself. For Heidegger mainly understands ‘Dasein’ to mean man, and always uses it when referring to him. ‘Man’ and ‘person’ would connote too much for him, would be too heavily laden with particular and allegedly illusory meanings. The drives and essential characteristics of man, the properties and presumptive values of persons are unimportant and fleeting, presenting themselves merely as afterthoughts. Basically, human existence simmers away without form, subject to that uncanniness which primordially belongs to it, and which makes itself known in fear. Human existence only takes on any definite form through its end, death. It is true that the original ground and occasion of fear is not death but human existence itself, which is afraid of itself. For something alien and choking, the ‘world’, is inserted into it; its inalienable primordial characteristic is ‘thrownness’. But death, and temporal advance towards the end, are essential properties of it. Through death human existence receives boundary and outline; the countenance of all human affairs is, if we may render Heidegger somewhat trivially, a ‘Hippocratic countenance’ pregnant with death. Death determines the appearance of human existence to the last everyday particular. So, we have uncanniness, fear, death, care, flight, thrownness and enslavement: in vain we ask ‘why?’, ‘what for?’, or about the treasure which human existence strives to save. Nothing is hidden behind these things except human existence itself, which is only possible in this fear and movement towards this death, from which there is no escape and from which one cannot look away. The contents, the forms and colours of life can only be derived from it. ‘Human existence is being, whose concern in its being is this being’. ‘Human existence is what it in fact is so that it can have being’. ‘The bare “that” in the nothingness of the world’. This almost sounds like a new version of Historical Materialism: everything is a mere superstructure of the drive for physical self-preservation. However, there is an enormous difference. Marx takes the biological drive-constitution of man for granted; again, he planned the carefree culture of man, once he

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becomes master of the economy, as a utopian goal. None of that applies to Heidegger: his fear-besotted human existence is going nowhere, for ever, without prospects; nothing lovable, desirable or admirable can be expected from his origin; no hope of any kind gleams before him. An influential branch of protestant theology, from which our thinker hails, teaches the tragic ‘falling away from God’ as irrescindible basic law of man in his earthly reality. But in Heidegger there remains only the tragic falling away, without any return to God, without regard for any conceivable or desirable salvation and grace. Human existence cannot be valuable, happy or virtuous. However, it can be truer and more fulfilled in itself, in so far as man quite deliberately takes upon himself this tragic ‘life unto death’ and lives it in full heroic dedication as ‘shared being’ with those connected to him. A life without evasions, extenuations, illusions, conventions, even moral rules, whose observance could provide a surety of salvation or a hope of it! Heidegger becomes a denier of morals, like many gnostics and, in part, Luther himself, not out of superfluity of pleasure in life but from tragic pessimism about all earthly life. Freedom from all the comforts and artificialities of the culture of society to discover one’s ‘own self’ means precisely to find the ‘shared being’ of absolutely compulsory community and to live towards death in radical self-surrender. Heidegger even speaks of a ‘passionate freedom unto death’, which is surprisingly reminiscent of certain false doctrines which ingeniously turn liberalism upside down rather than inwardly overcome it: the idea that ‘true’ freedom is to be found precisely in obedience and subordination, that it can only be a freedom to and not a freedom from, and so on. Thus a community of the saints is an idle chimera; however, there is one thing we can do: take on ourselves, in splendid defiance and gritted teeth the solidarity in salvation of the damned. There is no heaven; but the earth becomes our relative heaven when we completely accept it as hell and bravely draw from it every consequence. Here already we can see the severe stylistic unity of all the most radical ideologues of the Third Reich, who – think of Carl Schmitt, of Jünger and his circle, Hielscher or Bäumler – exalt the werewolf ethos of the Freikorps to be the formative law of the true nation and play it off against the despised ‘sham sanctity’, the mendacious ‘idealism’ of bourgeois society. This continuous eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with death, this reduction of life and its entire content to the eternal opposition of life and death, what else is it if not the inner aspect of that ‘community of death’ of the nationalist intellectuals who want to persuade themselves that they

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are children of the ‘Front experience’ and who have to replace bourgeois culture with a warrior culture which focuses all humanity on struggle and death? We should also recall here Schmitt’s theory of ‘friend and foe’ as the primordial category, requiring no further content at all, on which the state is founded, his wallowing in the business of war as ‘emergency’, his despising of every idea of peace and order among men as a foolish idyll. Certainly the warrior band is not only a community of death, but also of victory and action, indeed an order of officers of genius, as a national Bolshevism in bondage to technology proclaims it. But in this muchlauded dynamism, courage, efficiency, resolve, the total ‘engagement’ of the individual is everything, the material truths and values, life-goals and demands for happiness, order and cultivated thinking are nothing. That exactly corresponds to Heidegger’s ‘resoluteness’, no matter to what; and to Heidegger’s ‘care’, whose object is not welfare or the enabling of spiritual goals for their own sake, but merely the manifestation of ‘shared being’. Precisely through this crazy assiduity of highly tensed dynamism, this intoxication of exercising power and the feeling of oneness, is the booming of dark nothingness in the world’s heart, in which this breed of men, including Heidegger – the deepest and most dreadful babbler of Nihilism – believes, only despairingly drowned out! It is completely in the spirit of Heidegger that they announce the passing of the age of the bourgeois, of urban civilization, of the ‘security’ which made possible the existence of something like an objective spirituality with a value of its own. Now, safety, remaining alive from moment to moment for the sake of oneself and one’s fellows – whose circle is comprehended in the Heideggerian term ‘shared being’ – must be fought for with every action and movement, every breath and thought. In this world, which will no longer keep away from the gaping abyss of being and non-being, things like objectively true beliefs and moral laws, human rights, the free expression of opinion without immediate risk to life, separation of universal from local authorities, holding personal life to be valuable, manifoldness and combination of cultural and social relations, have of course no place. Man, who has found again his ‘own self’ and has therewith fully incorporated himself in ‘shared being’ and knows the obligations of ‘care’, at once tears himself irreversibly free from conventional delusions, humbug, concealments and arrangements of the irresponsible individualistic ‘public’, ‘das Man’ – as Heidegger and with him the Lutheran theologian Gogarten have it. The theory of an unconditionally binding and wholly embracing ‘shared being’, and especially of its identity with the true being of ‘one’s own self’, that is the absolute

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absorption of the individual in a clearly determinate community of care and life unto death; the rejection of ‘man’, that is, of all public life based on free will and a manifold of relations, and not clearly demarcated: – this is Heidegger’s sociology. It means denial of the person, denial of society and of humanity as a realm of persons, denial of any ordainment of man to God, to objective truth and objective value, denial of the suprapolitical and suprasocial moral obligations of men to one another. It exactly fits the ideal of a nation of disciplined warriors, of the barracks become temple, university and procreative laboratory. Its political sign could never be doubted for a moment, even had its founder forgotten to declare himself for National Socialism and for the ‘University of struggle’. The in places masterly and incisively ironical critique of ‘das Man’, of bourgeois public life – so, for example, the detailed description of the conventional way of talking about death in terms of something ‘possibly happening to me’ and somebody else’s ‘passing away’ provides a classic piece of cultural criticism – moves very close to the political sphere. Â�Private life and free formation of community disappear, there only remains a single continuous chain of command and obedience, of subordination and comradeship, which brooks no interruption even in the purely spiritual sense. Solitariness is excluded just like any spontaneous understanding and mutual agreement of men; no less are all ‘abstract’ moral values and norms, not to speak of religious beliefs, which can only be methods of self-reassurance on the part of an indolent bourgeoisie imprisoned in ‘das Man’. The internal command of conscience is only significant when it coincides with the external command of the indestructible, unambiguous, unified, downright concrete, once for all, entirely self-satisfied community. In the absolute community ‘human existence’ lives itself just as absolutely. To quote Heidegger himself: ‘Genuine togetherness originates in the genuine self-being of resoluteness, not in the ambiguous and jealous agreements made in “das Man”. . . .’ All public opinion, which still somehow emerges from the soil of the person’s freedom from reserve and is not a command which totally absorbs the person, is dismissed by Heidegger with the catch-phrase ‘gossip’. In place of bourgeois civilization and its tables of value the Nazi philosophy puts death, conflict and empty ‘action’ alone. This represents a less seriously acted out, but doubtless still more seriously meant and a more radical breach with the self-evident and traditional basic presuppositions and material values of human life than we find in Bolshevism, which at all events pursues certain principles of reason and justice in a barbarically distorted and infernal form. That dismal warrior-state,

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which is here, in an astonishingly paradoxical way, dreamed up by man’s intellect, certainly escapes much of the thoughtlessness, ungenuineness, superficiality and cowardice found in the average bourgeois world. For this we are to exchange the product of satanic and despairing pride, pigheaded self-surrender from arrogance and ant-like bustle from the vacuum of life. We are to sink into the sublime darkness of a uniform night, since a cloud-draped sun, the flickering of our lamps and the smouldering of their wicks has got on our nerves. Will the fear-born dream leave its lying mark on reality for long? However that may be, the Catholic, whose faith is not only ‘sincere’ at heart, but the firm centre of gravity of his spiritual and moral existence, remains immune from the evil charm. He will reproach the ‘bourgeois’ world of ‘das Man’ (in the widest sense) not with the basic tendency of its cultural and moral aspirations, but with their shallow formulation and luke-warm observance; apart from this he will always rather treat unavoidable human weakness with indulgence than throw himself at the feet of a ‘power’ and ‘self-containment’ of unholy provenance.

6 On Human Equality (1934) (Translation by Francis Dunlop, with some help from Zoltán Balázs) I. The Idea of Inequality These days we are almost deafened by asseverations of human inequality. Whilst in our happy youth the ideals of democracy and socialism seemed self-evident and the objections of the Right served only to slow down and postpone their realization, today the new principle of power is everywhere on the offensive, and the adherents of ‘progress’, as we used to understand it, defend what remains of their former achievements with the argument that revolutionary changes jeopardize the tranquillity and prosperity of the people. It has been discovered that men are unequal, and that any system based on the fiction of their equality is an artificial edifice, doomed to collapse. Prophets of inequality usually begin their reasoning with innocent-sounding observations: for example, that men obviously differ in respect of height, colour of hair and eyes, mental capacities and application; or else that a well-Â�considered principle of justice should not assign ‘the same to everyone’, but ‘to each his due’. However, the more concrete and purposive interpretation of inequality has a much more definite reference. We are usually required piously to acknowledge four types of inequality, which are closely bound up with one another, yet easily and clearly distinguishable: (1) the inequality between rulers and ruled, the authorities and those subject to them, leaders and led, elites and ordinary people; (2) the inequality between social classes, i.e., of rich and poor, masters and slaves of production; (3) the inequality between ‘one’s own group’, that is between those of my nation, party or type, and 91

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anyone who is ‘alien’ ‘to me’ or ‘to us’; (4) the inequality between higher and lower races, or biological inequality. It is easy to see that these inequalities are strongly connected, in both general tone and particular political emphasis; yet there are typical contradictions and tensions between them. Political dictators may, to some extent, play off the ‘masses’ against the emancipated bourgeoisie, but a capitalist social oligarchy, at least in certain circumstances, gets on very well with an anti-estatist and egalitarian liberalism in the political arena. The international cult of aristocracy is somehow inconsistent with nationalism. There is a logical opposition between chauvinism and racism, though people’s attitudes rarely reflect it: a German chauvinist ought to find it natural for the French to be equally chauvinistic, and to wish to destroy Germany no less than the other way around; but the German racist may demand of the French peaceful submission in view of an objective superiority of the German-Nordic race. Thus, the doctrine of inequality is fragmented and ambiguous. This does not refute it, of course, but, at all events, casts doubt on these hasty theoretical conclusions drawn from the facts of inequality. It looks as if the very fact of there being so many sorts of inequalities detracts somewhat from the presumed basic and definitive nature of inequality. Moreover, the principles of inequality in vogue today also point to equality, in some sense of the word. For they do not emphasize limitless individualism and freedom; on the contrary, they stress the values of authority, community and discipline. This, however, would be inconceivable, were there no far-reaching positive equalities, or, let us say, uniformities of view, way of life and sentiment. In this sense, a Fascist society is familiar with many more equalities than a liberal bourgeois society, although the former provides not only the citizen as such, but also the worker as such, with considerably fewer rights vis-à-vis the upper classes. It is as though the antirevolutionary spirit of our time does not so much deny real equalities as equal rights, together with their source, the principle of individual freedom. On the other hand, it grants an extraordinarily large space of freedom to the powerful, the leaders, the ‘important persons’ or, perhaps, the favoured nation. Obedience to such a powerful, freely acting will, an affirmative relationship to it, is supposed to give the good subject too his share in this intoxicating ‘experience of freedom’. However, the principle of human equality is, despite all uniformity of shirt-colour or more essential things, fundamentally rejected. There is no equality between the average man and the hero, the follower and the leader, the Jew and the Aryan.

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By and large, this inegalitarian attitude may be expressed as follows: (1) an emphasis on equality within the group as backing for the inequality of those outside it; (2) an emphasis on the (supposed) value differences between human types rather than the differences between the characters and inclinations of individuals. To take an example from the current German ideology once more: every German is somehow equal, not with respect to any other German, but as against the inferior non-German races; similarly, every man in uniform is equal as having a higher rank than the civilian; the essentials are differences of rank between human groups – nations, races, intra-racial eugenic classes, classes and ‘estates’ defined according to their social functions – whereas the ‘individual whims’ of the group-members who threaten the coherence of the group are inessential. Thus, the theory of inequality does not proclaim an absolute inequality or even incommensurability, but ‘equality among equals’. Those of equal worth should have equal rights. It is true that the Fascist systems we have seen so far have realized precious little equality of rights even in their own confined sense, since the Führer is absolute master even of the most heroic and pure-blooded of his immediate followers; and it is impossible to detect the slightest trace of this so-called corporate self-rule. Perhaps, however, this will change once the external and internal enemies still standing in his way have been annihilated. It is undeniable that the slogan ‘equality among equals’ has a seductive ring to it. It is really easier to imagine complete equality in an aristocratic club, a printers’ union, or within a monastery, than in a company composed of Spanish goat-herds, Puritan shopkeepers from London and Hindu nabobs. It looks as though the equal rights of those of equal position made much more sense than the equal rights of a prince and a common soldier. This consideration becomes especially compelling if we believe that differences arising from climatic and other factors cannot be eliminated, and that it would not be good if they could, indeed, that there ought to be princes and ordinary soldiers (or something like them). II. Arguments for Equality and Equal Rights While advocates of inequality point out the obvious differences of men and their worth, as well as the social necessity of distinctions of power and rank, champions of equality also put forward various arguments in defence of their position. These can be roughly divided into three kinds. They argue, first, that the ideal is not the equality of men, but their equal rights; second, that although human equality does not in fact exist, yet it may constitute a sensible and possible goal of progress; third, that Â�inequality

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obtains only from a relatively external and superficial point of view, and that in essential respects men are indeed equal. All these arguments have an element of truth, but, all in all, we do not find them satisfactory. 1. There can be no doubt that equality of rights means something different from equality in fact, indeed, its full sense cannot be made clear unless we point out that its implementation is independent of factual inequality. Thus, the full pathos of equality before the law derives from its applying equally to rich and poor, high and low, even worthy and unworthy. This concept implies not only equal treatment of both rich and poor, inferior and superior, in one very important respect, but also that the good man may not regard the bad man as fair game; and therefore it disregards not only the sometimes wholly external, sometimes positively unjust, circumstances of social life, but also the most inward and organic differences of worth between men, however certainly these differences may be discerned. But this principle, though in itself justified and of the first importance, does not provide us with a final answer to our question. For, on the one hand, this judicial equality is far from being fully realizable; and, on the other, it is insufficient in itself and even inconceivable without some backing from factual equality. Equality before the law – most perfectly applicable in the field of criminal law – is the less fully realisable the more men’s social functions are governed by legal rules. Thus, even the most democratic electoral law can prevent individuals from voting if they have a bad police record, though, otherwise, they enjoy the full protection of the law; the legally protected privileges of the holders of executive power also violate the principle of full equality before the law; foreigners do not have the same rights as citizens, nor, in many cases, do the defeated people of ‘inferior quality’ have the same rights as the citizens of a victorious state. To this it may be added that the mere existence of differences in wealth is opposed to the equal right of men to exploit natural resources; and again, that opponents of the collectivist social order have reason to doubt that in such a society there would be an equal right to bring to fruition one’s talents and industry. On the other hand equality of rights cannot in itself satisfy the ideal of equality. It is conceivable that a peasantry destined to a dull and brutish life would have no confidence in its ‘equal rights’, but put its destiny and affairs entirely into the hands of its landlords. Such a wholly abstract equality of rights has nothing to do with equality as a moral ideal. In more favorable circumstances, for example, in modern capitalism, equality of rights transcends its immediate value, and becomes above all a reliable

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implement for achieving some kind of more substantial equality. This is not just a matter of the so-called ‘final end’ of socialism. Issues like that of the minimum wage, workers’ housing, community self-government, real representation in the public service, and so on, are already closely bound up with the idea of equality, without reference to the equality of rights. But above all, equality of rights would have no meaning without reference back to a more material kind of equality. Why is equality of rights an issue among men and not among men and other mammals, men and animals in general, men and every thing? Indeed, why not among all dogs? The legal question is independent of the factual question, but that does not alter the fact that it can only be raised among subjects of law. But the question: who or what is a subject of law? is not a legal one. And though it is not a factual one, either, in the sense of empirical fact, it is a matter of metaphysical fact. The equality of the rights of men is grounded on their equal (and exclusive) capacity to be subjects of law, and this is inseparable from their being in some sense equal as a matter of fact. The fact itself that the members of a society are aware of their equality before the law and of the legal rules equally valid for all of them is not itself a legal equality but a factual, psychological, one. 2. This consideration holds against the theory of equality as a goal yet to be achieved. Certainly it means something to fight for goods not yet possessed, and in cases of crucial importance there may be the promise of ultimate success. In contemporary English society, for instance, most of the demands for equality that were voiced a century ago by the then apparently utopian and hopeless Chartist movement have since been realized. And if such progress is both possible and attainable, the present signs of regress do not alter the fact, howsoever it may also set us thinking otherwise. But a goal of equality would make no sense, unless it were rooted in some sort of ‘natural’ equality of men. Why are we offended today by the sight of many people in great need, while others live in luxury? And why are we so much less offended by the fact that it is always men who control horses and never the other way round? And do we not even take offence at the difference of salaries at the city hall? And why are we so offended at the sight of many illiterate people applying spiders’ webs to their wounds, whereas all the blessings of science are open to the sons of the privileged classes? And why are we not hurt by the fact that some people are endowed with extraordinary musical talents, while so many of their fellows are tone-deaf? It would be possible to adopt the ‘aim’ of eliminating all such inequalities, but somehow

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we feel that it would be ‘absurd’ in some cases, in others not. And only because we feel the absurdity in some cases, we think they may come to an end in the course of time, in other words, despite their present brute facticity, we do not regard them as eternal truths. 3. And so we come to the third popular theory of equality, according to which equality is essential, while inequalities are superficial. The many differences between men may well be ineliminable, very interesting, perhaps even valuable, but in crucial respects men are all simply equal. Anything opposed to this basic fact is, in fact, unnatural, an obstacle to the free and happy self-determination of mankind, hence to be brought to an end through resolute reforms. But unfortunately, whilst the ideal of equality in itself – both in the special form of uniformity and in the form of equal value, rank or rights – is a fairly clear and intelligible concept, the business of distinguishing between what is essential and inessential, or wholly essential and not wholly essential, is a highly arbitrary matter of taste. Someone might say that we are corporally unequal, but spiritually equal. But the reverse is, rather, the case: we often find a wider range of spiritual differences. There are greater disparities between people as regards how much they think than how much they drink. What in this world could possibly be ‘essential’ if, say, the inequality between a saint and a villain were held to be ‘inessential’? Or, if this is more to your taste, the disparity between a Kant and a young man guilty of terrorist acts against his own people? Clearly what survives of their ‘essential’ equality is simply their common humanity. But within this, they differ from one another in precisely the most essential respects; and are relatively equal in the most inessential ones. True, the claim that both are human is not merely a matter of biology, since it really also contains essential contents. A saint and a villain could make one another understand what the weather was like, what time it was, whether or not the bus had left. Perhaps even whether a statue is beautiful, or whether one should join the army to resist an enemy invasion. A saint might turn into a villain, and vice versa; if certain external circumstances had been different, their whole development could have taken a different – more similar, or more divergent – course. Two individuals speaking different languages are able to learn each other’s tongues. Remote, wholly alien peoples can build up close contacts with one another and become mutually assimilated. Foreign learning, arts, technical skills or forms of bourgeois culture can, to a considerable degree, be taken over and imitated. Sexual relations and procreation are possible between any

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two individuals of opposing sex. There is, in principle, no religious or metaphysical concept that could be formed by the human mind which is inaccessible to any other human mind; and this theoretical possibility becomes in many cases reality. Christianity and rationalist Enlightment alike appeal to mankind in each of its members. Thus, even if it is not the case that all men are essentially equal, it is still true that nothing could be more essential than those respects in which they are equal. Their equality does not consist in the lack of inequalities, or the fact that these are not essential; rather, it, so to speak, pervades and overarches their differences, however crucial these may be. One should not conceive this as if there were a wholly abstract, general, formal, conceptual, kind of equality here, full of contradictions and differences in content; nor as if there were only differences, all reducible to the same level. Besides, the general and abstract equality of men allows for infinitely important inequalities, yet it is embodied in countless particular cases of equality (e.g., the ‘equality’ of a refined aristocratic scholar and his janitor in the event of fire!). On the other hand, the conversion and perfection, impoverishment and decay, migration and interbreeding of men does not only have an equalizing effect, it creates new inequalities, too. Equality, therefore, should definitely not be sought in a rigid denial, restriction or elimination of inequality, but in the interweaving and offsetting of the latter with elements of equality. This factual equality may be, to a large extent, the result of intentional activity of social reform, but it is, in the first place, already given in the basic nature, life-situation, history and opportunities of mankind, independent of our will and ideals. III. The Five Basic Pillars of Equality Our analysis has brought us to the point where we should now cease to look for the moral ideal of equality in prevailing similarities of human appearance or value, but rather, in the basic nature of the relations that bind men together, and thus precisely in the factual inequality of men. We shall show this more clearly below. But let us, on the basis of what has already been said, set out point by point what we have in mind. As we see it, the five essential preconditions and buttresses of human equality are: (1) personality, (2) objectivity, (3) the unity of mankind, (4) the element of partial equality, and (5) the element of differences and Â�variations. 1. That the equality of men has an utterly different meaning from, say, the equality of eggs, can be explained simply in terms of the Â�characteristic nature and dignity of human existence. The affront we feel at the sight

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of human inequalities is quite different from that aroused by inequalities in types of object in a picture. Why are we troubled by the juxtaposition of Pharaoh and his slaves, and not by that of mountain peaks and small hills? The blemish clearly does not lie in the contrast as such; just as – we have already hinted at this – we are not affronted by the contrast between the genius and the average man, even between the statesman and the private individual or the lucky and the unlucky as such. The affront lies in the fact that in the juxtaposition of Pharaoh and his slaves the slave’s ‘human dignity’, title to life, life-chances, level of intelligence, moral responsibility and so on, are damaged, tarnished, stunted, extinguished, as it were; whereas Pharaoh himself possesses a kind of power and superiority that we do not regard as a free and rich development of personality, either, but rather as counterfeit greatness, a kind of corruption, a man’s being totally absorbed by his own power, etc. Briefly, the concept of human equality is not a merely formal, comparative one, but it is rooted in the very concept of man. The mutual relation between two men is morally and metaphysically relevant only because the solitary existence of a single man is relevant, too. Of course, this should not be understood as a claim that only the prosperity, salvation or cultural level of men are important, and not equality in itself. For the moral, even, for the most part, the intellectual and material existence of men, is inseparable from the element of equality. The moral sovereignty of personal life is endangered by every serious inequality, which may also do essential harm to independent thought and care for bodily health. We may go even further: a real dawn of awareness and development as a person is possible only within a community, and community, as the reciprocity of personal beings, immediately raises the problem of equality. Equality, in a word, is a requirement not of the satisfaction of our sense of symmetry, but of the precious and ensured existence of human personality. Whether the principle of personality is derived from its Christian religious conception, from the evident dialectic of reason, or from the attentive empirical examination of our own value judgements, matters very little here. The somewhat clumsy sounding Â�Benthamite principle: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, may also be taken in this sense, if the word ‘happiness’ is understood, with J. S. Mill, in a fairly broad manner, and if the inept notion of ‘the greatest number’ is taken to imply that individuals are ends in themselves. 2. Objectivity is the aspect of men’s reciprocal relations in which a certain sphere of absolute equality is grounded. The principle of objectivity

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teaches us that there are circumstances in which men’s special values have to be disregarded, however important they may be, in favour of the basic personal worth of men. Hence comes our acknowledgement that in a particular case the baser man may be right, and the more honest man wrong; that the actual guilt of the accused does not simply follow from his vicious character; that, a priori, either party in a discussion could be right; that, in itself, the relationship between a superior and a subordinate pertains only to a certain field of activity, never to their whole lives; that facts, as facts, may be given to everyone alike, however much men differ in their power to alter them; that moral laws – in their general aspects – are binding on everybody; and that there exist formal relationships between men, contractual ones, for example, whose validity is independent of any men’s particular value, or of the greatness and nobility of their primary goals. The same principle of objectivity makes possible equality before the law, human rights and political equality; but also the possibility of morally justified legal and state-exercised coercion employed against any subject, as well as the possibility of the principle of majority voting. The logical aspect of objectivity is expressed by the fact that the formal interrelations between facts are the same, no matter which intellectual subject is aware of them (as it is often, albeit incorrectly, stated: the laws of thought are the same for every rational being). The same goes for the formal interrelations of value principles. The psychological aspect of objectivity is that men are normally aware of this general and impersonal feature of reality; in so far as they are not, this is a remediable defect. The metaphysical, and therewith the social, aspect of objectivity means that men may at any time enter a situation in which their special distinctions of value and rank fade into the background, and reality as given equally to everyone asserts itself. This is the case when, say, a prince grapples with the normal school curriculum, an outstanding poet faces an operation in a hospital, or when, all of a sudden, bodily dexterity and physical resourcefulness become crucial qualities in some dangerous situation. 3. The principle of human equality is also founded on the metaphysical unity of mankind, which is revealed by a number of particular facts. It would make little sense to speak about human equality if people lived in isolated communities, within which the principles of personality, reciprocity, objectivity and understanding, were operative, yet who confronted other groups as wholly alien beings, with whom community was impossible, as though they were forces of nature. In reality, however, no

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close and intensive community life, whether familial, tribal or national, can have absolute priority for its members. There is no one whose entire set of human relationships is confined to a particular community or its sub-groups. There are no two men (or two human groups) who have really had absolutely nothing to do with one another or could not have come into closer relationship. For example, the relation between a Swede and a Spaniard does not simply consist in the fact that there are diplomatic relations between Sweden and Spain, but also in that they are perhaps both Christians, or both members of the same international union or organization. Or perhaps they are both affected by the same European political or economic situation, or meet at the same Swiss health-resort, and, for the most part, relate to one another in the company assembled there as if they were a couple of Dutchmen or Poles. The principle of the unity of mankind is, however, directly important not only for ‘international’ relationships, but also for the inner structure of a circumscribed social unity, such as a nation or state. A xenophobic militarist spirit does not favor democracy within the nation’s borders, because it does not regard the members of the nation primarily as human beings, with all their human relations as such, but rather as parts and instruments of a self-centered and enclosed organization. Interrelations between only a few men may already be of a ‘human’ kind, or may have, on the contrary – to use a fashionable term – a ‘totalitarian’ shade. In today’s world where coloured shirts are the fashion it is far from being the case that the principle of ‘human equality’ would hold with an eye to any one of them. Even an organized world-state, ruling over all men, might be antiegalitarian in its attitude, for even such a world state would not necessarily mean humanity transcending political and governmental order, or standing out in the relations of any two or more men. 4. Nevertheless, the actual realization of the principle of equality, even its constructive and purposive conception as a basis for planning, also requires initiation into partial, particular or local elements of equality. Although every strict nationalism has an antidemocratic edge, the very idea of a nation is, as we know from recent history, not only reconcilable with, but also inseparable from, the concept of democracy. Since equality cannot merely consist of equal rights and a mutual recognition of interests, but requires a more immediate kind of community and solidarity, it is clearly not possible without elements of ‘uniformity’ as such, through which a special equality is directly given within the defined social unity. Even equality within an aristocracy may have a role in preparing for

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the principled acknowledgment and technical fitting out of democracy. In this respect, however, the township as local, the nation as linguistic and cultural, and the state as legal and administrative community are of particular importance. However much the idea of mankind belongs to the idea of equality, so that two men from different parts of the world can come into some sort of relationship with one another, can face one another as man and man, as two full members of ‘mankind’ – which means that members of a group of people randomly selected from any part of the world are bearers of or candidates for intellectual and moral community – every particular delineation of equality presupposes some more special equalities within the smaller community. Institutions of democracy are always, on the one hand, experimental drafts of an absolute and abstract type of equality, but they are also, on the other hand, ex post facto extensions of a narrower, factual type of equality. A certain tension between formal equality of rights and material equality of level, between equal rank and uniformity, will always belong to equality, yet it is also urgently necessary – that the form may never be bare, lifeless, form – that it contain a certain minimum of material and factual uniformity and homogenity. The concrete social equality we have in mind is not paradigmatically exemplified in the human community of foreigners who meet in the neutral Swiss health resort without understanding each others’ language. This is why one cannot refuse to accept a certain democratic aspect in the principle of universal conscription, even in the drill of the coloured shirt brigades. The trouble here is not, as with the hierarchic structure of the caste system, the absence of all democratic tendencies, but the overwhelming and overpowering presence of the markedly antidemocratic tendency, so deeply hostile to personality and mankind. By virtue of their general spirit and basic organization the particular equalities can bring out the fact that a closer community here, as it were, represents and deputises for mankind, subordinating itself to the viewpoints of humanity, or, on the contrary, that the community in question opposes mankind, denies and exludes it, and desires not to deputise for it, but to take its place. A sign of such a tendency is when uniformity becomes prominent at the expense of equality of rank, and when equality before the law, and, in general, the element of individual rights, are thrust wholly into the background. Under these circumstances it does not mediate the organic integration of the members of the particular community in the whole of mankind, but it seeks to sever all their immediate ties with humanity. In a purely historic and factual sense, however, even this kind of counterfeit, anti-human, uniformisation may have certain

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equalitarian results, on which a truly equalitarian, Â�democratic kind of politics may later build. 5. However, equality between men also follows conclusively and very convincingly from human inequality itself. The nature of this inequality is so diverse and variable, that it resists any firm classification and differentiation. The opponents of equality fail to note that the broader the brush with which they depict the endless differences, including valuational ones, between men, the more profoundly they remove the foundations of any kind of appropriate squeezing of men into hierarchical pigeon-holes. If we contrast a cultivated with an uneducated man; a decent paterfamilias with an idle drunkard, only the essential valuational difference will stand out, whereas equality will fade into the background as an empty word. But what shall we say if the decent father is a dull philistine, whose spiritual needs are satisfied by trashy novels and beer-garden concerts, whereas the drunkard’s life is spiced with brilliant insights, or even beautiful creations? Let us take this further: if the contrasting pairs we have mentioned are represented not by two, but by four different persons, does it make good sense to subsume the cultivated person and decent father into a single ‘valuational’ category and the other two persons into the category of ‘the valueless’? The more inequalities there are, the vaguer they are! A gifted man may be an egoist and a lecherous scoundrel, a man of high social standing may be an uneducated, empty puppet, a morally impeccable and serious man may be an abominable Pharisee, a saint may be a humourless and dangerous simpleton, an educated person may be a weak and degenerate beggar, and an energetic and successful man may be spiritually very much inferior to the commonest illiterate farm labourer. The role and value of man changes considerably with the place and time he occupies; we all carry unknown perspectives and depths inside us; and there is always the possibility that we may come to a standstill, become rigid or hardened. It is true that no two men are equal; – but, men are equal! Trumpeters of reaction and corporatism keep saying that they have no objection to ‘equality among equals’. But the only real meaning of human equality is precisely this: equality among unequals! Moreover, equality of the right to inequality! The consummation of social democracy is neither universal suffrage, nor egalitarian control of incomes, nor collectivisation, but the condition in which everyone may allow himself to be to some degree an eccentric. The philosophical starting-point for the principle of equality is far from being a disregard for value distinctions, but just

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its Â�opposite: their faithful and thorough recognition. The Gospel, which places the sinner above the righteous man in one important respect, without in any way rehabilitating, approving, denying or ‘writing out’ sin itself, still provides us with the most profound and irrefutable conception of equality. IV. Social Equality and Its Limits We have finally to sum up the bearing of the considerations discussed above on the main problems of social life. Here we shall be content with a few purely theoretical remarks. There is no space in this article for any definitive analysis of the problems democracy and socialism. But I shall make four points here. 1. First, it is a huge mistake to neglect the watchword of equality, as is even fashionable today in leftist circles. Both liberalism, which has degenerated into mere bourgeois opportunism, a sectarian theory of tolerance, or cautious fence-sitting, and so-called scientific socialism, are seriously guilty of negligence in this respect. Neither the slogans of an ‘undistorted’ market economy and absence of class war, or those of a ‘planned economy’ or class struggle, can take the place of the moral ideal of equality, as a regulator of social progress. Those psychological stratagems which suggest that the demand for equality can be traced back to an ignoble ‘ressentiment’ of the weak, the depressed and the disfavoured, deserve no more consideration than any similar dodge of amoralism. We readily grant that a destitute pariah may easily forget his faith in equality, if he is personally raised to the rank of the powerful and the rich, but this does not in the least affect the soundness of the faith, which, moreover, a large number of well-to-do people of intelligence have held and still do hold. The pariah in his destitution may well have an ardent desire to exchange his position for that of an Indian maharajah, but we do not, for that reason, approve of his scheme. The principle of equality, however, ought to be taken into account, even if its application were to reduce the total economic yield of society, for it primarily affects men’s fundamental moral relations, and not their average standard of living. To our knowledge, only Great Britain contains a good number of socialist thinkers who see these issues clearly (cf. especially Tawney’s splendid Equality). 2. Secondly: there is no such thing as social equality as a single organizational principle. Rather, there is only a system of social Â�equalities,

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carefully constructed for the reduction and relativization of social inequalities. It includes social, rather than personal, equality before God, equality before the law, freedom of opinion, assured participation in politics, adult education, social politics, communities which transcend social class, and the various structures of nationalized and collectivized production. There is no ‘ultimate’ state of equality that would render superfluous the complicated system of legal relations, and cultural and political achievements which aim at equality. An omnipotent collectivist ‘state’, which wanted to tie the whole population to a single standard of living, would not only be in thrall to a counterfeit realisation of the principle of equality, totally lacking any moral justification, but would in addition need such a huge apparatus of power that it would again bring dreadful ‘inequalities’ with it. We do not thereby wish to suggest that a capitalism alleviated by social policies, universal suffrage and free public education, would be the last word in social democracy. Today’s enormous disparities in living standards, and the colossal social prestige of wealth in Western bourgeois democracies, are certainly not reconcilable with the serious acceptance of the principle of equality. Nevertheless, what needed to be shown was that the mechanistic system of collectivist socialism is far from really providing any warrant for the ‘radical’ realization of equality. 3. Our third remark is that the triumph of the principle of equality will be able to rely, to a large extent, on the separation and balance of inequalities. The more sophisticated and dispersed in a society is the system of authority, domination and differences of status, the less sense it makes to talk about a massive, ultimate, caste-like inequality between man and man, and the more real significance is attached to individual and political rights, as well as the basic equalities assured through welfare and cultural public services. As against today’s reactionary and barbaric idea of social totality we must stress the idea of social plurality and equilibrium, which will favour the fullness of life and relatively equal status of individuals. Obviously this view runs counter to that of collectivist socialists, who want to subordinate both economic and intellectual life and death to state power; but it is also opposed to the capitalist idolization of the ‘economy’ and ‘production’, and also to the ‘corporatist’ idea, which believes it is possible to freeze all social strata in a single hierarchical series, from top to bottom. Equally obvious is the principle’s positive relation to the principle of humanity as transcending state and nation, as well as to the relativity of national self-sufficiency and

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Â� isolation. Â�However, such an adjusted and subtle system of equalities and inequalities is inconceivable without a considerable degree of stability and continuity in cultural development. Thus it also has its ‘conservative’ aspect. 4. Finally, one must not ignore the ineliminable constraints of equality, either. The undeniable and multiform variations in value and energy among men can never be so circumscribed and domesticated as to cancel one another out and be transformed into an ‘average’ social status of strict equality. Their values, capacities and achievements will always retain a certain tendency to go on accumulating and irradiating one another. The direct representatives of state authority cannot exist in permanent poverty, uncertain origin and lack of cultural traditions. As regards relations between states, there ought also to be leading nations and relative centres of power. Equality will never be realized as an ultimate state of things and will never be dispensable as a many-sided ethical principle of social ordering.

7 Othmar Spann’s Theory of Totality (1934) Professor Othmar Spann, the passionate and productive, much admired and much attacked Viennese thinker has long passed as an eminently ‘Catholic’ social theorist, one whose special mission it is to act as a link with ‘nationalist’ thinking. The reason for this is to be found in the fact that both Spann and the Catholic position are hostile to the mechanistic and natural scientific view of reality, together with the liberal conception of society. Spann, of course, has many points of contact with ‘catholicising’ Romanticism; but his concept of totality was also an attempt to borrow from Aristotelian and Thomist Scholasticism, and he has made much use of the expression ‘Corpus Christi mysticum’ (mystic Body of Christ). There is also the fact that has contested the perfectly obvious pantheist understanding of his theory and claimed that he does not share the National Socialists’ racial doctrine. He has been most keenly defended in various rightist Catholic circles caught up in romantic and ‘anti-capitalist’ sentiment, whose members neither know nor even suspect that they may thereby be supporting a typical prophet of Nationalism, Hegelianism and, notwithstanding the subjective good faith of his Christian profession, Pantheism. Nevertheless, the National Socialist press propaganda of one of Spann’s most gifted and closely connected pupils, E. M. Kogon, has met with very little success in Catholic and patriotic Austria in the last few months. And the gap between Spann himself and his Catholic supporters has been constantly increasing. The idea of totality forms the corner-stone of Spann’s theory: the claim that the whole ‘precedes’ the parts, and that between the supreme totality and the lowliest part there is a mediating hierarchy of ‘partial totalities’, somewhat like the relation between the whole organism, organs and cells in a living being. In addition, the totality is not a genuine existent, a 107

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Â� spiritual agent behind the visibly working parts, but is itself ‘articulated’ in the parts, without simply being reducible to them. Rather, there remains a ‘focus’ hovering over the parts. The most peculiar feature of this theory of Spann’s is that it derives entirely from general speculation about wholes and parts, from totality as a fundamental category of all being. There is no comparative treatment of the different actually existing forms of totality relations. Indeed, we find a completely naive juxtaposition of examples, such as a house and its bricks, a poem and its letters, a wood and its trees. For Spann’s real purpose is to show that the individual in the life of society is just as obviously there for the sake of the whole, and merely as a member of it, as is apparently the case with the limbs of a living body. That means that, in the ideal, normal and proper state of things, a person, with his entire essence, his complete spiritual and moral being, belongs to the state, and must surrender himself to the state authority through the mediation of the partial authorities. Spann is the philosopher of the total state in the most literal, and utterly metaphysical, sense. He calls his radical theory of totality ‘Universalism’. Its counterpart, which he paints in the most dismal colours, and according to which individual elements come together and form totalities, bring about certain effects and mutually relate to one another of their own accord, he damns with the name of Atomism or ‘Individualism’. There is no reconciliation between these two conceptions and no genuine compromise; they represent Good and Evil, the Divine and the ‘Diabolical’. Any attempt to mediate between them is mere weakness and myopia. Spann’s attitude is thoroughly ‘idealistic’. Anything material, or, better, any autonomy of the material, of what is physical or matter-like, as with ‘self-interested’ human needs, is anathema to him. So are the natural sciences, which he acknowledges to be at best a wretched substitute for a romantic ‘hermeneutical’ theory of nature. Totality, ‘the higher’, determination ‘from above’ on the one hand, association of parts, ‘the lower’, causation ‘from below’ on the other – in his eyes these things go together from the outset. All the essential characteristics of the world and of life, all ultimate criteria of assessment, all pro and contra in the widest sense, are in his view derivable simply from the purely formal idea of totality. Not only does he detest causation, he is only prepared to accept the categories of goal and of value as reflections of his magic totality idol. Hence his lavish and enthusiastic praise of Hegel. But there is a blindingly obvious and irremovable clash here with catholic and scholastic philosophy. These may well be strongly disposed towards an Â�acknowledgement of ‘the primacy of the whole over the parts’ – at least

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in the prevailing tendency of logical concept-realism; but the assumption that purpose and value (bonum), and also causality, are independent categories is much clearer and more in evidence. Spann’s world-view is not catholic at all, but belongs with the pantheist emanationism of the Neo-Platonists, with ‘ontologism’, which would derive reality from pure concept-deduction, and with the irresponsible speculations about world‘production’ of so-called German Idealism. No thinking catholic should be deceived by his attempt to interpret everything ‘from on high’, in some way, and nothing in terms of pressures or forces, drives or needs. This kinship with our theistic and value-charged world-view is purely formal. Christian realism, which also acknowledges the relative right of the allegedly ‘lower’ (the world of the senses, of drives, of the measurable and weighable, the purely causal aspect of things), is an essential aspect of Christian humility. The Christian affirms the autonomy and superiority of the spiritual, but he will neither despise nor trivialise the material, nor attempt to explain it away by magic. We have much less to do with deriving all explanations and decisions immediately and short-circuitingly from ‘the higher’ than with the question of what this ‘higher’ actually looks like when we closely attend to it! Our Divinity is as little to be found in Spann’s ‘totality’ as in Plotinus’s ‘Unity’. Spann’s Idealism and Formalism are as essentially opposed to the humble realism and material richness of the Christian ideas of God, man, morality, knowledge, society, etc., as the formalistic constructions of the positivism to its ‘left’, such as Vaihinger’s ‘As-if’ theory, or Kelsen’s pure legalism. Spann tries to meet the charge of pantheism with the claim that God is not, for him, the essence of the world-whole but a focus of its totality, superior to the world and irreducible to it. One can only reply that a great many things can be meant by the word ‘God’ and that there are also many varieties of pantheism. To add that the Totality-God is a supra-worldly focus and grant him, so to speak, non-articulated remainder status hardly gets us any further. His God is still a pantheist one, whether or not he is made to wear theistic headgear. The personal creator God, the God of justice and love, is none of all this, for He cannot be deduced or made visible from the relation between the Whole and its parts, from a relation essentially analogous to that between a living thing and its organs. The old causal and teleological proofs of God’s existence, whatever one’s last word on them may be, are still incomparably richer and more convincing than Spann’s new proof from the Totality, since they point to an autonomous and rational, personal, effective power, and their starting-point is much more that of real metaphysical data than of formal schematic argument.

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The same goes, with slight variations, for the ethical theological proof; even the disputed ontological proofs of Augustine and Anselm at least concern a much more genuine and higher concept of God than Spann’s. But the question whether one’s concept is pantheist or theist is by no means exhausted by the statements one makes or supports bearing directly on the question of God! Subjectively and ‘officially’ a man may swear by the transcendent Trinitarian God of Catholic Christianity; but if he also regards the created world as an extended sub-articulation of a supreme totality in partial totalities, if he denies causality and free will (or, which comes to the same, interprets it as merely being-in-order within an organic totality), if he demotes the person to a mere smallest component of the articulated totality of the state, his thinking is nevertheless unmistakably pantheist. So it is with Spann. He does not humbly and unaffectedly contemplate the metaphysical richness of the harmoniously and purposefully ordered forms and levels of being and value, mysteriously proclaiming their divine author, but also calling on Him in their imperfections, oppositions and illogicalities; rather, he sees it as a gigantic self-contained mechanism with various levels of totality, which are usually also levels of value and power, as the unfolding of a ‘super-organic’ living being. The huge fissure which opens up in Spann’s own system, like his master Hegel’s, when, with a daring leap, he transforms the universal totality into the totality of the state (this of course is the whole point of the performance) will not occupy us for the moment. Let us now look more closely at Spann’s concepts of totality and of community, noting especially their implications for the person. *** I have already touched on the fact that Spann’s understanding of the phenomenon of totality must be completely inadequate because he treats all totality relations alike. Von Hildebrand has already shown clearly and in detail (in his Metaphysik der Gemeinschaft) that different totalities, such as a wood in relation to its trees, a melody as a significant combination of notes and an organism in its superordination over the individual organs, and so on, can only be regarded as independent, not merely additive, totalities in very different senses and to different degrees. It is also my view that the central thesis of Spann’s theory of totalities rests on a basically simple confusion, on the combination of a trite platitude with an only apparently self-evident prejudice. Let us take two of Spann’s examples: the detached hand, which is no longer a ‘hand’ in this state,

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but a lump of dead matter, and the citizen, who presupposes the state, and cannot exist or even be thought of without it. The detached hand is certainly no longer a hand in the functional sense. It no longer has any place in the constitution of the human organism concerned, and therefore no longer represents the organ ‘hand’, being unable to go on performing its functions. That is a platitude of the first order, a mere tautology. In the same way, a former company treasurer who no longer belongs to a company cannot any longer be a company treasurer. But we also note that the detached hand is in an extremely uncomfortable situation. It has lost its property of being alive, has become dead matter, which is all the worse for it because it was living once, and for some time will not even possess the quiet dignity of the mineral world, which is non-living from the start, but must first wither, decay, decompose. This is the fate of the part which parts company with the whole. The whole, the body, can still live without the hand. All this is extremely interesting and important, and not a trite platitude. But it is no longer absolutely obvious; it is certainly not deducible from the category of a whole and its parts. It belongs in the realm of particular biological and metaphysical facts. The hand ceases to possess life not because it is a part separated from the whole but because it is a detached hand. The fact that it undergoes a particular kind of reduction in value in this state is likewise simply a particular fact of the metaphysics of nature and of our sense of value. It absolutely does not follow from the loss of the relation to the totality as such. A beautiful lock of hair certainly changes its state when cut off, but remains a beautiful lock of hair. So one cannot simply use the repulsive example of the detached hand to argue against ‘individualism’, in situations not involving detached hands. What then of the citizen, who cannot exist without a state? Certainly, in a purely formal sense, he too ceases to exist ‘as citizen’ when he leaves the state (or it ceases to exist), just as the detached hand no longer exists ‘as hand’. Thus far, tautology; thus far the totality theory must be of equal validity for anything. But from here on, everything is totally different – in reality, I mean, not for Spann. Statelessness, hence, perhaps, loss of some state’s protection, is certainly a very serious matter. But a man in this lamentable condition, which certainly makes the circumstances of life much harder, can as such continue to live, corporeally, spiritually and socially, for example in the bosom of his family. Many an emigrant will feel himself better off as stateless than, for example, as a citizen of Soviet Russia. Even a man deprived of citizenship or shipwrecked can once more become a member of a state community, whereas the detached hand can never again be a hand. These are no quibbling distinctions, but

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go to the heart of the matter. The exiled, isolated, person may well be very deeply affected, but he is not seized at his very heart, and annihilated, like the separated organ ‘hand’. In the one case we have ‘organism’ and ‘hand’, in the other ‘society’ and ‘person’: the concept of totality, which comprises them both (and so much else!), merely serves, by way of linguistic amalgamation, to transfer the particular structure of the one sphere onto the radically different relations of the other. Certainly, the citizen disappears when the state falls apart; but the metaphysically decisive bearer of citizenship is the human being, and he does not disappear with it. He can live stateless, and can become a citizen again. That the whole is prior to its parts becomes, metaphysically speaking, in this case a bloodless truth about concepts. Stateless emigrants can at once found a state on unclaimed territory, if they merely possess the ‘idea’ of the state, or awaken it among themselves. Language is indulgent and allows us to describe even this procedure as an ‘articulation’ of a state whole in its parts. But in that case ‘articulation’ means something completely different from what we have in mind when we think of the development of a germ-cell into a living thing, or the begetting of children by a married couple or even the writing down of a work already implicitly composed in one’s head. Even the genuine ‘organs’ of the state, the authorities, are ‘produced’ by the state as its members in quite a different sense from the citizens, the populace. But even these official organs are, essentially, first men and only secondarily organs of the state. They are in the first place persons, and everything else, however important and valuable it is, is simply an attribute of their personal being. Let us now move on a little. Spann does not deny that a man belongs to various totalities (and not only to the state), and that he stands at the intersecting point of various systems of classification. He certainly does not deny the community of the family, or of the Church. He gives full weight to its ‘separateness’, its orientation towards the supra-social, divine world-totality. He occasionally speaks of ‘personality’ as a ‘relating back’ in the life of the totality. But thanks to the theory of totality and articulation, the denial of causality, freedom and mutual influence (we shall be discussing this shortly), all this is nothing but an empty bauble. Above all he sees the numerically smaller communities as partial totalities of the larger ones; the family on the one hand, the business on the other, belong in his eyes to the hierarchy of totalities which constitutes the state (or better, the nation organised as a state). In the same way he sees the levels of extent or totality, in good Hegelian and also Prussian fashion, as self-evident levels of value-height. These two momentous errors can

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only be mentioned here; they are comprehensively treated and refuted in von Hildebrand’s book. But we ought to look more closely at the absolute impotence of the person and the related – this may sound extraordinary – denial of community in this out and out mechanical, schematic system of totalities. For in Spann’s system, the fact that a person belongs to several social totalities and shows in his personal being a subjective relating back of these memberships, is merely a shadowy epiphenomenon of the worldmechanism, from which nothing else follows. The life of every totality is a purely immanent articulation, which offers no place for any ‘causal’ interference from outside, but which is related to everything outside itself only through the higher totalities which embrace them. A person may be, for example, a natural scientist, besides being a citizen. He is the latter as a constituent product of the state, the former as constituent product of the totality ‘study of Nature’ (which is partly ideal, partly makes its appearance in an organized way). State and Natural science derive their life ‘from above’, as though there were no living, willing, and judging creature, man, as a connecting link. For he can only conduct himself as member of the state within the one, as natural scientist within the other totality. The two totalities may be connected, in that it is, for example, one of the state’s tasks to support the activity of science by means of money and power. But man as such, as natural scientist or representative of some other cultural sphere or whatever, cannot creatively contribute anything of his own to the formation of the state. This would be ‘causality’, ‘meaningless accident’, ‘determination from below’, ‘anarchy’. Nor are there any mutual influences between social totalities or cultural spheres, for example between state and economy, but only a mutual assignment of materials, which are then merely ‘of the state’ for state activity, merely ‘economic’ for economic activity, and so on. This means that personal cognitions, preferences, decisions and discoveries are never noticed, but only the strictly immanently describable articulation processes of impersonal totalities. Men act solely as organs of totalities, deciding and commanding as the embodiments (foci) of totalities, being influenced and obeying as parts (members) of totalities. For man as mere man, as person and no more, is not only subordinate to an objectively necessary and divinely ordained higher authority in the life of the state, the culture and the family; he is essentially, substantially, merely an emanation of ‘higher’ totalities, at best a locally and subjectively assembled parcel of various such member-functions. All ‘interference’ from below, all co-determination by the person as such in communal arrangements, all building up of community from what

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the members contribute from themselves and their non-community life, is from this standpoint not only questionable, in need of limitation, but wrong in itself, bad, senseless, in the strictest sense unthinkable; in so far as this sort of thing unfortunately occurs it denotes merely decay, caricature, distortion of genuine community life, as well as a masking and misuse of what still remains of it. Spann’s social totality presupposes the removal of all such individualistic disturbance. It is ‘organic prosperity’, which has nothing to do with reason, will and the working out of the individual salvation of the ‘cells’. To put this in a way less appealing to him but basically, perhaps, more to the point, it is a gigantic business, divisible into sub-businesses and entirely an end in itself. Romantic and dreamy phrases often conceal the driest, dreariest and most hopeless conceptions of life. I do not mean crass deception, as when one says the opposite of what one really means! But romantic and idealistic atmospherics are ideally suited to transfigure, to ‘idealise’, the mere ‘operations’ of life and economics, and to lull to sleep that troublesome critical alertness which makes higher demands on the enrichment of meaning and the level of responsibility of every real, individual, concrete human life. There always remains, however, a highly unromantic, prosaic, word which Spann loves inordinately; and through it Spann reveals unvarnished what he really wants. This word is ‘achievement’. Achievement is more important than component part. . . . Achievement in the business of the ‘whole’ is the be-all and end-all of man. A man’s social role is entirely determined by his ‘objective achievement’, like the role of a bodily part in a body. Indeed, it is more like the role of a screw in a machine, for Spann’s thinking is in reality completely mechanical. It is about determining man’s achievements with machine-like clarity, however much he may despise the atomic and mechanical image of Nature. But it is a false, deceptive, ‘objectivity’ (this is also very Prussian), which fails to do justice to the matter, to the object, because it is obsessed by the ‘performance’, the effective power, the smooth process, as end in itself, and regards the person as mere raw material for a national machinery of power and production. When Spann opposes state-centralism and supports the ‘sovereign’ material jurisdictions of the corporations, this simply corresponds to the principle of an organisational subdivision of the totality – the ‘corporations’ are also mere sub-detachments with partly independent jurisdictions. It has nothing to do with alleviating the schematic authority of the totality in favour of the person, with genuine spiritual spontaneity in life, or with real community. For there is no community for a man to whom person, freedom, choice, voluntary agreement, even the concept of relation itself, is anathema. With

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rigorous logic Spann holds relations, contact, mutual intercourse between the ‘members’ to be incompatible with the fundamental proposition of autonomous ‘articulation of the totality’. The mutual association of men is only indirect, through the totality. This is Spann’s interpretation of the relations between parents and children, employer and employee, captain and fighting man. What then where analogous totalities and superordinations do not occur, as with marriage and friendship? What sort of totality is supposed to be articulated here? Spann tries to save himself with talk of ‘twinning’ and ‘complementary pairing’. Obviously man and wife are organs of the reproductive drive, whereas the meaning of a friendship can only be that the two friends mutually educate each other in the civil virtues they lack. Somehow everything proceeds along its allotted path of service; if not, the devils of atomism are at play. For example, it would not be quite in order if a young man should one day simply read Goethe, and be edified by him. No, it must be: ‘the student’s relation to Goethe is mediated by the teacher’. But even that is not enough! ‘The teacher’s relation to Goethe is mediated by his university teacher, that of this higher teacher by creative aesthetic criticism, as for example Schlegel’s, or Lessing’s’. But that’s enough! Chesterton’s joke: ‘Lieutenant Smith talked very well, but of course not as well as Captain Jones’, would not sound funny to Spann at all; it is precisely the key to this strictly ‘Â�idealistic’ world-view, and its obsession with strictly hierarchical relations of superordination and sub-articulation. But this kind of thinking, which even grasps the phenomenon of economics in too mechanical and external a way, and which is a pain to see when moved by such tender human concerns as love and friendship, really ought not to drag the Corpus mysticum about in order to use it to baptise the barbarous mysticism of the total state. Christ’s Body will never provide the right material for the building of a soulless world.

8 The Abuse of the Vital (1934) 1. If the great heresy afflicting the Christian West today is National Socialism as such, there is equal warrant for affirming that the philosophical content of this heresy consists in ‘Vitalism’, in the abusive overestimation of so-called ‘vital values’. Again, just as the great danger today for Catholic thought in the German-speaking lands is to pass from joint opposition to Liberalism and Marxism to become the shameful adherent of National Socialism (apparently a much more acceptable ideology, though in reality a great deal more pagan), the philosophical bridge thereto is furnished by a passion for ‘vital values’, which are supposed to be the answer to the despised principles of general happiness and utility. The danger has assumed even clearer form in the exuberantly blooming aberrations of the ‘Catholic youth movement’ than in the disquieting phenomena of ‘Catholic nationalism’. The antics of the youth movement, which has notoriously ‘Bacchic’ forebears, are fundamentally anarchic, pagan, naturalist, immoralist and anti-civilisatory; its absurd and tasteless attempts, utterly incompatible with the Christian conceptions of person and family, to set up a ‘world of lads and lasses’, often look even more derisory, though hardly more approvable, when it also tries to combine them with the Catholic life of religious and moral observance. The philosophical framework for all this, however, has been furnished above all by Professor Hans Eibl, the not untalented Austrian ‘middleman’ between Catholicism and ‘racial consciousness’, or, to put it bluntly, Catholicism and National Socialism. The fact that his 1933 Munich lecture on this topic (cf. also his book Vom Sinn der Gegenwart, Vienna, 1933) met with a very cool response from orthodox Nazis can only fill 117

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us with satisfaction, since the National Socialists are quite right, from their point of view, to resist an attempt to distort their own essentially different way of thinking in a Catholic direction, and to regard Â�Rosenberg, Bergmann, Blüher and Stapel as more appropriate exegetes of their position than Eibl. It is our vehement desire that every Catholic, who is and wishes to remain one, should know as clearly as possible that on this point (especially in spiritual matters!) nothing but uncompromising opposition will do, and that every attempt at combination is artificial and unsustainable. Eibl’s trick consists in this: he does not try to make National Socialism acceptable as a movement in some way ‘Christian’ at heart, but, rather, as one preparing for an ‘awakening’ (a ‘radical change’, if you prefer) towards Christianity. Since the dissolution of the Middle Ages, he argues, the history of the West has shown a continuous descent down the ‘scale of values’: from a fundamental affirmation of religious values, through the spiritual and moral values and the vital values, to the low-point of today’s (or yesterday’s) prevalence of mere pleasure and utility values, where economics, technique, hygiene and luxury provide the sole objects of the heart’s devotion. The German spiritual revolution of the present day will not lead at one jump to the heights of the religious high middle ages, but the mighty shock it is administering will inaugurate the great counter-movement upwards, in that it is already bringing the far higher vital values of blood and soil, nationality and race-worship to the heart of communal orientation. An engaging contrivance, indeed! 2. The philosophical contemplation of history is a fine thing, but of dubious persuasive value, especially when it has one eye on the future. The wish, lest the wisher appear ever so wishless, is usually father to the thought. Anyone who compares Eibl’s vision of history with St. Augustine’s Christian yet completely differently articulated one, or, again, Spengler’s sublime heathen version, not lacking in logical consistency, will find Eibl’s quite remarkably artificial and forced. To see a correspondence between the developments of ‘modern times’ and the scale of values drawn up by Scheler and Hartmann seems very forced; the prophecy that the ‘re-ascent’ must take the form of retracing a particular course in the reverse direction impresses us as an empty assumption, with no historical experience to support it – if indeed it does not completely contradict it. But we have no desire to go on carping with cheap polemic at a vision conceived, at all events, on a large scale, and would rather check the credentials of the underlying theory of values.

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However, we should not forget that we have here before us an example of an intellectual sickness that seems to carry all before it today, which I would call the ‘idolatry of the historical’. It is an example of that pseudo-objectivism which does not regard the life and death, well-being and spiritual health, faith, love and hope of the ‘individual’, in English the person, as the really important thing, but the ‘struggle’ of misty, incomprehensible, demonic ‘historical powers’. This stance, though acting under the aegis of ‘devotion to something higher’, is through and through subjectivistic, if you like, ‘liberal’, in the worst sense. For, just as it scorns the clear and evident categories of personal existence, it also scorns the clear and evident categories of true and false, right and wrong, justice and injustice. The Catholic victim of this spiritual consumption no longer believes in God and the Saviour and the Church inaugurated by Him, with the treasury of dogma it guards, but in ‘Catholicism’ as a ‘creative cultural force’ – for ‘truth means only what is fruitful’! On this basis I could quite easily change over to, say, Islam, for it could happen that the Moorish buildings of Seville, Granada and Cordoba, or the Constantinople of the Seljuks, have more aesthetic appeal to me than St Peter’s, Rome, or the cathedrals of Northern France. In reality the most urgent task is always to concentrate the struggle against the virulent heresy, and not to engage in irresponsible speculation about it, asking whether this heresy shows us the direction of history, which will ‘finally’ lead to the universal triumph of theocracy. It is no doubt a fine thing not to get pharisaically stuck in one’s momentary state of virtue and sin, but the most important thing is that the good must count as good and the bad as bad; the large-scale changes, reversals, and their interpretations, are the business of providence – in which I, as a true Christian, may humbly, forebodingly, yet openly, believe – and not my business. 3. As for the linear hierarchy of values it is not in the least such a simple and unambiguous matter that the so-called ascent from ‘hedonic and utilitarian’ values to ‘vital’ values could count as a self-evident guarantee of quasi-automatic further advance to the ‘spiritual’ and, further still, to the ‘values of holiness’. The difficulties and misunderstandings which crowd in on us here can only be indicated very briefly. But first of all, there is a fundamental objection. A distinction must be made between the ‘realm of values’ in itself and those considerations of value which govern man’s consciousness in his actual conduct. These relations are complex and extremely important. For example, the man who realises the value of justice in what he does, may in fact primarily also want to

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behave ‘justly’. But the one who performs a magnanimous act in Â�pulling a drowning man out of the water, thinks less of his own magnanimity than of his neighbour’s danger (that is, a genuinely ‘utilitarian’ matter!) and of a kind of human ‘duty’, quickly to help the endangered person here and now. The noble lover may in certain cases very well also be directly conscious of ‘love’ itself, but is in the first place, or importantly, aware of the substantial ‘value’ of the loved person herself, which is in most cases not itself a value of love. I shall have to return to the importance of this fundamental distinction, which Scheler himself, and especially Hartmann and, in a Christian context, von Hildebrand all expounded. Do ‘vital values’, which Nietzsche is supposed to have discovered, and Scheler, basing himself on him, to have seen again in a more systematic arrangement, actually exist? We can surely not dismiss out of hand a group of value-tonalities which have their place somewhere between the values of mere pleasure and interest, on the one hand, and the purely spiritual values of knowledge, morality and beauty, on the other. Here, it is said, is the place of values such as ‘welfare’, ‘being well brought up’, ‘nobility’, ‘vitality’, ‘courage’, ‘discipline’, ‘liveliness’ and ‘spiritedness’. An unprejudiced consideration compels us to admit that, in at least a majority of these cases, we are certainly not thinking merely of complex feelings of pleasure or a sure route to drive-satisfaction, nor even with spiritual and moral values in a coarsened or more primitive state, but with something ‘in its own right’. However, we have only to put these things together to see how unsatisfactorily and with what poor results this sphere has been philosophically worked over, how uncertain these now so over-worked value-cognitions seem. On the one hand we have the value-shades of ‘welfare’, ‘health’ and ‘strength’, whose separation from pleasure, drive and utility seems far more forced than evident. Certainly these value-tonalities tend to suggest the life of the human psycho-physical organisation taken as a whole rather than as disintegrated into individual factual and desirable motifs. But it is incomprehensible why welfare should be separated in reality from utility; it is also impossible to see why ‘utility’, as mere function of the sum of pleasure and pain, should be conceived in disregard of the objective benefit of the vital organism. The point of sharply distinguishing the sphere of pleasure and drive from the ‘higher’ vital sphere is to connect pleasure and drive with the sub-organic, ‘mechanical’ world of matter, or as one might say, to discredit it. But pleasure and drive only exist in animal organisms; they do not occur in the inorganic world; the connection

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with this consists only in the special relation of the goal-directed pleasure and drive system with technical control over the inorganic, or perhaps the sub-human, world. And again, it is not at all clear why what is called ‘mere sexual pleasure’ is not just as purely ‘vital’ as the supposedly higher ‘Erotics’ (which certainly need not be morally bounded and ennobled, but are still ‘morality-free’!). Even the value of ‘being well brought-up’ is hard to separate from the purposiveness of limbs and organs in their life-preserving and hence ‘useful’ function. It is quite different with the concept of ‘nobility’, which has grown completely beyond it. Hartmann, in a polemic against Scheler, has proved conclusively that the confinement of this value-tonality to the sphere of the ‘vital’ is unjustified. Spiritual and moral ‘nobility’ exists, which can as little be a vital property as it can mean the same as cognitive value or moral competence. Nobility is thus a value-tonality which pervades different value-spheres (no more about this can be said here). One more example. We cannot be unaware of the deep relationship between the ‘vital’ values and the aesthetic sphere. If being well brought-up and ‘racial nobility’ (a very treacherous concept with many interpretations!) show a specific relation to strength, so they do to beauty. If we would understand their value-content, we have on the one hand to think of the lowly bourgeois values of pleasure and security, and on the other, as has been said, of the spiritual value of the aesthetic. Man as artistic creator and connoisseur moves in the spiritual sphere, man as himself a direct exemplar of aesthetic values moves in the vital sphere. It is easy to see how complicated the matter is, and how over-hasty to rely complacently on neat systematisations in this sphere. But it is especially dangerous to allow the concrete unity of man to disintegrate into layers laid immovably on top of one another, reminding one of neo-Platonic ladders of ascent and gnostic eons! In the beginning was no abstract realm of values, but the trinitarian God, in whom (albeit in different ways) all values converge, but who is also creator and upholder of all that reality which is pregnant with, desirous of and filled by all values in the most varied combinations. The noblest and loftiest aspiring earthly reality, the human person, is in no way the mere product of an antithesis of values, a vehicle for the reactions of value-materials, as it were, but always in himself a representative of the totality of values with varying orders of emphasis. If the ‘merely spiritual’ and the ‘merely bodily and instinctive’ persons are already flimsy and virtually unusable fictions, the ‘specifically vital’ values in between, which are supposed to correspond to an independent quality-level of life in itself, are all the less capable of representing an image of man even at a particular historical stage.

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Recall once more the so-called ‘vitalistic’ value-world of the genuine and convinced National Socialist today – and one will at once come up against values of a very different kind. So, in the first place, wide-spread following of interests and desires: flight from the starvation-threats of unemployment and a longing for the welfare of bosses who need not work. Even more noticeable are motives of a purely spiritual kind, though with few exceptions they take a distorted, perverted and arrogant form. What is the point of ascribing ‘national honour’ to a class of ‘vital’ values? What has ‘honour’, of whatever kind, private or national, correctly or incorrectly understood, to do with vital power, even if it be of a mysteriously noble quality? Even the pathological passion for one’s own ‘nordic’ race, supposedly superior to all others, cannot survive a moment without reference to spiritual values. For this nordic race is well-known to be the fount of all culture, the deviser of all genuine research, the embodiment of all sense of duty and chivalry. 4. The fundamental distinction between making values the objects of one’s intention and realising values in what one does becomes even more important once we turn to that alleged enslavement of liberal and economically orientated society by the lowest value-sphere of ‘the mechanics of pain and pleasure’. Certainly, no thinking Catholic will be in any doubt about the inadequacy and perversity of this society’s spirituality. But the foundation is false, the condemnation contained in it unfair and superficial. The utilitarian world-picture, even in its neglect, denial or distorting interpretation of the spiritual, is very far from being hostile to it. Its central endeavour, to produce a rational, generally portable order of material goods among sensible beings who all ‘seek pleasure and avoid pain’, is not only inadequate in itself and, in addition, utopian, but, in the order of emphases, totally false and alienating from God; but it is yet an eminently spiritual and morally justified endeavour, which clearly issues from the personal being of men, though admittedly this personality is limited to a false polarity between animal drive-satisfaction and orderly reason, justice and morals. It should not deceive us if the talk here is often confined to pleasure and pain, economics, need-satisfaction, and so on, whereas the spiritual counterpart is shamefacedly withheld. Anyone who is familiar with the English (and still more, the Scottish) attitude of understatement, will also find this trait again in Marxism, alleged to be ‘purely materialistic’. People get excited about pay and metric Â�hundred-weights, but all the time Â�spiritual ordering Â�criteria are being

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silently Â�presupposed. Certainly this is wrong, and points to a real atrophy of the spirit! It is also not true piety, to hold God only in one’s heart and never on one’s lips; for the prudish aversion to the ‘lips’ is perverted, and the conversation of the ‘lips’ essentially contributes to the determination of the public atmosphere of men’s souls! Nevertheless: precisely in the cultural system of utilitarian humanism, whose deep-rooted inadequacy has become obvious in its contemporary collapse, the spiritual values were felt to be cleanly separate and delimited from the ‘matter’ of life’s machinery, in a perfectly clear and pure – though stunted and unhealthily isolated – form. Whether, therefore, even by mere contrast to this world of ‘materialistic’ souls, today’s vitalist ‘national awakening’ somehow means a step upwards, seems ever more doubtful. 5. Doubt becomes a definite denial when we remember that the vitalistic pseudo-idealism is especially fitted to ensnare all spiritual and moral reference to value in a false, downward sinking ‘synthesis’ and to disguise every genuine upward look far more surely than any sincere, or rather insincere, matter-emphasising ‘materialism’. That pseudo-Â� idealism of the mythically collective formal ‘whole’ or ‘super-you’, with its denial of the person, which was championed by the great heresiarch Hegel and the smaller but, thanks to his ‘catholicising’ attachments, especially dangerous Spann, is a far more poisonous anti-religion for genuine Christianity than the bleakest materialism, which can make much less headway against the soul and positively cries out for its spiritual and religious counterpart. Truly, we must proclaim to all Catholics: your most dangerous foe is not the one who compares the soul to urine and gall and chatters on about man as a system of atoms, but the one who opposes the religion of the true God with a religion of devils! Not the one who believes in microscopes and mocks the altar, but that ‘vitalist’, who, instead of examining blood under the microscope, celebrates the black mass in the blood of the altar! The true meaning of an enthusiasm for those puzzling and scintillating ‘vital values’ is, to rule out the adequate experience of the spiritual, moral and holy more surely and definitively than economistic atheism has succeeded in doing. Vitalism is not the first and promising breakthrough from naturalism, but the ultimate and definitive perfection of naturalism. At one time our task was to wake humanitarian and materialistic spirituality from its slumber and shake it into action; now it is the crusade against the intoxication of Â�paganism. Just as Jesus had first to oppose the Pharisees, not the sinners

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and tax-gatherers, today we would fight under his banner chiefly against the pride- and power-cramped devilry of a pseudo-sublimity, which is more hostile to us than all the presumption of petty material concerns and of making man happy at the expense of his soul. And we must be especially on our guard against the false prophets who try to disguise the insinuations of our fiercest foes by using our own phrases.

9 Democracy and Reality (1935) (Translation by Francis Dunlop, with some help from Zoltán Balázs) The excellent debate which has been running in the most recent numbers of Századunk has, in the view of many readers, perhaps definitively clarified some highly topical, disturbing and difficult problems, such as ‘democratic force’, ‘democracy and power politics’ and ‘self-limiting democracy’. Nevertheless, in the view of the present author, a more thorough critique of some of the relevant concepts would assist future generations in making up their minds about democracy – which is, perhaps, the most vital and pressing task which now faces us. I should also admit at the outset that I do not stand ‘above parties’ in the democratic debate, but always align myself with the so-called ‘realists’, who say that the use of force and restriction of rights is legitimate in a democracy, and reject its self-destruction in any form. Naturally, as I shall show, it is by no means inconsistent with the most emphatic rejection of ‘material democracy’, a term of dubious value in the mouths of Bolshevists, a completely mendacious one in those of the Fascists. 1. Ethics and Moral Aesthetics If anyone should ask me to try to sum up in a brief sentence the most important lesson of everything I have read and observed in my life, I should reply (with some exaggeration) that the most dangerous enemy of genuine moral thought and conduct is not egotism, or pleasure-seeking, or indolence, or intellectual immaturity – but moral aesthetics. The way of the most fantastic moral backsliding is paved with schemes for a ‘faultless’, ‘contradictionless’, ‘squeaky clean’, ‘consistent’ morality. 125

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We have in mind the kind of moralist who prostrates himself before all ‘open-handed’ wickedness, but scourges imperfections and blemishes with fanatical fury. This is the mentality which is capable of admiring the aggressor, but applies the strictest pacifism to the victim who defends himself; which meets the man who wallows in sin with ‘understanding’, but brands the upright man as a ‘hypocrite’ as soon as he shows himself to be no more than a human being after all; which shows no mercy in roundly condemning passing sexual folly, but approves the break-up of an otherwise good marriage for the sake of a ‘deeper experience’ and a ‘more genuine passion’. It is the mentality (to come closer to our theme) which leads the bourgeois to yearn for ‘straight Bolshevism’ in a democratic regime, and the leftist to prefer, say, the Italian dictatorship to the Jugoslav, or the German to the Austrian; which calls the Cheka and the Gestapo ‘tragic necessities’, but deals dismissively with Masaryk because of certain nationalist dodges of the Czechoslavak government; which – like the temper of the left in England – demands extreme patience in the face of what is done by the violent regimes of Russia or Germany, but thinks the end of the world is coming if an English policeman finds it advisable to ban a turbulent street demonstrator without ceremony. He sees no urgency in the question of what the society around him will look like for the next fifty years; the essential thing is to keep his own holy hands unspotted by violence, and to see that no damage is done to the geometrical regularity of his own democratic principles. Most of us are in some measure responsive to such trains of thought – perhaps not so much because it provides a feast for our pride and selfsatisfaction, as because it lures us into the tempting illusion of finding a simple and definitive solution to the problems of the moral world. The adherents of formal democracy – whose starting-point is not the conduct of real life, but a (sensible and self-evident) abstract construction – naturally incline towards this error, especially in those societies where intellectual and historical conditions lend an unusually powerful vitality to opposing antidemocratic tendencies. A pedantic esteem for democratic ‘correctness’ takes the place of a burning desire for democracy. 2. Majority and Minority Is democracy constrained to surrender itself (a) if a powerful and violent minority is unwilling to adapt itself to the rules of the game (b) if the supporters of democracy are not in the majority? In answer to question (a), see sections 4–6 below. As for question (b), on the face of it, logic by itself demands a positive answer. Democracy is nothing but

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Â� majority rule; if the majority is against it, there follows the suspension of its principles. If, in such an eventuality, a democratic government still supports independent institutions, this spells the end of democracy, since the wishes of the majority are being ignored and we have a dictatorship of the minority. But, in my view, this line of thought confuses the essence of democracy with its technical arrangements – even though these are without doubt of primary importance. The essence of democracy is, then, not fulfilment of the will of the majority, but a form of life in society in which there is provision for the development of a broad common knowledge (which ideally embellishes everyone’s thinking), and the achievement of a ‘general will’, which comes into being on the basis of the common knowledge. In so far as the ‘general will’ does not present itself as unanimous, a majority decision provides an ‘interpretation’ of it (Rousseau), or rather an approximation – and thus in a certain sense its general legitimacy – in all questions of long-term policy and particular matters. The meaning of the will of the majority, then, is merely internal to democracy; a numerical majority in itself does not provide democratic confirmation of anything. If the majority does anything to interrupt the play of the formation of majorities and minorities, the violence done to democracy is of the same order as if the perpetrator was not a ‘majority’ but ‘a second lieutenant and six privates’. An Italian or German government plebiscite, then, contains not a shred of democracy, even if the people give a 99% yes-vote, and 95% of them do so gladly. If I have a pack of dogs and some gladly obey my whistle, it by no means follows from this that I and my dogs live in a democracy. If a five-strong band of robbers knocks down and robs two defenceless travellers on the state highway, this is as little ‘an achievement of the majority will of a democratic community’, as if a single intrepid robber does the same. As soon as a majority fails to acknowledge the universal community above itself, it is no longer a majority in the moral sense of the word, but in a merely statistical, psychological, possibly strategic, sense. But one should always guard against fixing the ideas of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’, as though a people could be composed of ‘a majority’ and ‘a minority’. Sometimes the left descends to paltry constructions, like the reactionary principle that democracy means the rule of folly, since it is surely clear that the dull are in the majority, the intelligent in the minority. A firm majority and a firm minority can as little create a democratic community as that, in a circle made up of fifteen dogs and twenty-five cats, there can be set up a government of tomcats with a majority of ten.

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How and to what extent it is possible to maintain a democracy, when democratic voting itself yields a (uniform or internally collapsing) Â�majority to enemies of the system, is a separate – and to a large extent technical – question. The majority principle is far from being the only technical question in the functioning of democracy. It is so far important that the situation, though at all events denoting a serious crisis for democracy, contains absolutely no logical or moral reason such that government should give in to the democracy’s enemies. 3. An Anti-democratic Majority However – this is to pass beyond formal considerations – it is not only an embarrassing but also a shocking and somehow paradoxical situation that democratic parties in a democratic regime should find themselves together outvoted, or that an anti-democratic group should attain a majority by itself. The former case clearly does occur, and the possibility of the latter is also beyond dispute. No-one could show why the Nazis could not also have reached the 55% mark during the Weimar regime, or, in the Austrian democracy, why they reached 36% and 40% (Innsbruck, May 1933); and if Henlein’s 70% majority in the Sudetenland (May 1935) is also connected to the circumstance that this national group is a national minority in a state with a foreign majority, it is still a significant fact that the belief in nazi-fascism of the German community in Czechoslovakia, founded on the free formation of opinion, is in a massive majority. The anti-democratic majority is therefore a real possibility – and it is by no means an accident that up till now the possibility has been only very seldom realised. A people already assured about its freedom will only renounce it in truly extraordinary circumstances: a prerequisite for this, as we can see, is not merely a serious ‘crisis’ in general, but also a special set of circumstances in which the way of life and aspirations of the people concerned reach a situation, grounded in history and foreign relations, which seems incompatible with the democratic system. However, it also makes perfect sense to suggest that the anti-democratic – apparently intra-democratic – majority is simply the result, rather than the cause, of democracy’s collapse. It announces, rather than ‘postulates’, the suicide of democracy. It is also true that the ‘suicide’ shows itself not so much through the over-generous and thoughtless apportioning of human rights, as through the essential impotence, inadequacy and weakness of democratic politics and statesmanship. This is not in the least to prejudge the question of how far the suppression of democratic trends is justified, nor the question of what has to be done if the anti-democratic

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majority has already come into being. In my view, the installation of a (provisional) minority dictatorship is always more justified, logical and defensible than the ‘constitutional’ surrender of power. For democratic politics only aims to preserve as much as possible of the constitution, not to preserve it entire until the moment of its impending death. 4. Democracy and the Use of Force? The idea has repeatedly surfaced that the use of force in self-defence is inappropriate, senseless or impossible for a democracy. It is argued that democracy essentially means the renunciation of force. If it were only possible to save it by violent means, then eo ipso it cannot be saved. I believe, indeed, am convinced, that this is completely false, and that this approach to democracy confuses an important but still peripheral element with its essential content. In general, the essence of democracy is by no means ‘peace’, or the ‘absence of force’. This much, however, may be said, that a relatively peaceful state of affairs, which considerably reduces the employment of force, in both quantity and quality, is an essential aspect of the orderly everyday functioning of democracy. The absolutely peaceful paradise of so-called ideal anarchism is not only not a necessary consequence of the pure ideal of democracy, but, on the contrary, clearly excludes democracy, at least from within the categories of man’s earthly life. That is, this tension-less, competition-less, uniform, untroubled, somewhat trance-like harmony, is, taking the fundamentals of man’s earthly life as our yardstick, incompatible with all free play of human understanding and personality and with all conscious self-direction. The perfect peace of an opium den is, metaphorically speaking, the extreme antithesis of democratic society. I venture to affirm that, for example, the world-despotism of a Napoleon or Mussolini would more nearly attain to such a paradise than the Geneva cooperation of the national democracies, and that Hitler would be much more suited for this approach than Mussolini, since he is not only master of full, opposition-less, political power, but could also play the part of religious, aesthetic and hygienic saviour. Democracy equals discussion (Masaryk). Genuine common knowledge is impossible without differences of opinion; but differences of opinion, according to the given structure of man’s intellectual, spiritual and bodily constitution, could not come into being without the possibility of actually opposed endeavours. Discussion (about living together, or human existence!) lacks all meaning and weight if, underlying all combat and opposition, there is never any possibility or desire to stick to one’s opinion as a whole person. Consider, for example, that even the best organised police force

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would still with difficulty be able to protect the safety and property of a man who was never willing to resort to physical resistance: never collared a pickpocket, never summoned help by telephone, fearing that it would lead to bloodshed, and so on. But, apart from that, I fear, the police force itself is not an abstract or magical force whose being is merely legal, but consists of men who do exercise force. If there are some who might accept ‘force’, but not ‘bloodshed’, they would be deluding themselves with empty verbal trickery. The conduct of a hostile individual or group can always compel the users of force either to renounce their use of force (perhaps the housebreaker is allowed to make off with his loot), or to face the possibility of bloodshed. Apart from this, there can be no doubt that the use of gaseous or hypnotic anaesthesia is just as fundamentally ‘anti-democratic’, as the more direct mechanical use of force. No state can exist without force; a democratic state is still a state. Moreover, in so far as lasting co-existence were possible without a state, that possibility would not spring from a democratic, discursive, ground. In itself, therefore, democracy needs force, rather than excluding it. Democracy equals discussion. Naturally a life opposed to violence is also of vital importance for its establishment. Discussion requires the kind of fundamental concord, understanding and self-restraint which creates the possibility – better, the possibility and effectiveness – of reasoning, persuasion, formation of ‘majorities’, acknowledgement of legal rulings, and so on, in the place of violence, oppression, physical annihilation and banishment. Indeed, peace is normal in a democracy and part of one’s milieu, violent combat the exceptional and isolated state of things. Hence derives the theory that democracy denies itself with the employment of violent means, as a merely seeming authority. But from the fact that in normal circumstances it is not wholesome to rummage and slash about in someone’s body with a sharp knife, it does not follow that surgical intervention is in general a harmful and death-dealing act. There is nothing unusual in the fact that the powers of the state render evildoers harmless through violence, by imprisoning, seriously constraining and occasionally executing them. These things certainly take place on the ‘edge’ of society and are not closely involved with our everyday lives in the way that, for example, family, work or coffee-house relations are, yet, if ‘we’ (the society of ‘honest citizens’) did not also station ourselves on this ‘peripheral’ front, then precious little could endure of the daily bread and substance of our lives. If, however, it is right to use violence in arresting the thief, then it is plainly right to crush the robber band too, although this sometimes requires a multitude of pistol shots; and if law and order in society

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is entitled to such protection, how could the defence of democracy not be justified in the shedding of blood against a fascist putsch? Of course, a well-functioning democracy would not come to such a pass; of course, our jubilation when a robber and murderer is floored is not at the fact that there was someone to be floored, and in general we do right to bewail the fact that had this man – or indeed, many other men who have gone to the bad – enjoyed better economic and cultural conditions, perhaps they might have stayed honest and harmless. Unfortunately, however, we all have to act in particular situations; there is never any contradiction in the fact that, as an MP or journalist I shall press for ‘salutary reforms’, but in the face of an evil-doer who attacks me or my house here and now, I shall simply act in accordance with the situation’s requirements. There is no doubt that there are today far more thorny and hopeless cases than ‘an insurrection by a fascist minority against a strong democratic regime’ (Brno putsch, 1933). How should the democratic camp proceed, if the fascists are in the ‘majority’ – at least, that together with hesitant right-wing elements, possibly also with the bolsheviks – and things are such that the orderly functioning of democracy is impossible without a ‘putsch’ and in the event of its establishment? What should happen, if a right-wing regime, whether or not the majority of the sitting parliament supports it, should make democracy ineffective in the course of a coup d’état? (Austria) What laws are valid in a regime which is antidemocratic from the start? I am not claiming that every believer in democracy is always morally obliged to attack its opponents with guns or fists, if they hold power, or aspire to do so. In some situations this would not only be hopelessly foolish, but there would be no reason for it (see also below). I simply maintain that on many occasions this would be right, above all in an already existing democracy, or, to be precise, when the ruling power is still in democratic hands, and that it never implies an ‘internal contradiction’ in itself. It is not true that the use of violent means from the first and even for the future ‘poisons’ democracy. Let us recall that from an originally absolutist regime democracy can never emerge in a democratic way, but only on the back of a violent uprising, or the high-handed resolution of an absolute monarch. It would be a strange democratic conviction which could only recognise the latter as a ‘source of law’ and scorned all revolution and freedom struggles, for the reason that they would make us ‘sink to the level of our opponents’, ‘dishonour our ideals’, and so on. My only comment on the latter claim is this: it seems to me that we have different ideals. As regards the matter of ‘levels’, it is undeniable

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that the believers in freedom and in despotism both operate on the level of reality – if not, these things become aesthetic knick-knacks, and they make themselves a laughing-stock with their moral poses. That the use of force generally makes the victors into despots, and relentless lovers of violence, is simply false empirically. The ‘dictatorships’ of Clemenceau and Lloyd George came quietly to an end after the war; after the breaking of the Kapp and Hitler putsches the right-wing parties continued to be tolerated – regrettably, a great deal too far; after the dissolution of the German national and Nazi parties in Czechoslovakia, the dissolution of further parties did not ‘follow automatically’. As for the question whether there is a stopping-point on the ‘slippery slope’, that always depends on the people concerned and the particular circumstances of the stoppingpoint. The assumption that men are devils and for that reason obliged to behave like angels would make the conduct of any life impossible. As I see it, many think that we are faced with a more painful problem than the ‘original’ revolution – however bloody – where an already existing democracy becomes unworkable. If we have a right to use force for a pure ideal, do we have a right to it in the case of a discredited regime, perhaps for an ideal that has been tested and failed? I readily acknowledge the psychological difficulty of this situation, as well as the need to do everything to prevent it in time. But it should be most empathically stressed that precisely this kind of situation, when it has once come about, can be a decisive proof of the soundness of the moral judgement, and the tenacity of the political will. It is, for example, clear that a nation, twothirds of whose population are fascist, must be governed in some nondemocratic manner for a longer time and through more durable forms. But it is a completely different claim that one must, perforce, submit to the leaders of the 70%. In my view it stands to reason that one ought never, and under no circumstances, to do anything of the kind. This will appear somewhat clearer in what follows. 5. ‘Democracy’ and ‘Dictatorship’ Perhaps it would be wrong of me to say that both these concepts are, roughly speaking, just over-simple constructions, and, as such, though doubtless indispensable, far from adequate to the reality of political life. The claim that, if ‘pure’ or ‘ideal’ democracy is impossible, then the same goes for any other kind, cannot therefore be taken seriously; but it would also be a mistake to say, instead, that the question can only be ‘who is to be the dictator?’. There is no qualitative difference between ‘dictatorships’; they differ merely in the identity of the ruling personnel

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who wield them, and are all but ideal borderline cases of bandit-power. But from the democratic point of view there are gigantic differences in quality between a reactionary and a progressive dictatorship, a totalitarian and a military dictatorship, a ‘demonic’ tyranny and an ‘enlightened’ despotism. One naturally has also to allow for the many mixed regimes which have proved viable for long periods in their historical settings, such as constitutional monarchies, or authoritarian democracies. What I have in mind here is completely different from that of the bolshevik, and especially the fascist and völkisch romantic distinction between a democracy of ‘form’ and one of ‘content’ (of which only the latter would be of value, the former a contemptible flourish). In my view ‘a democracy of content’ is an empty phrase, or at most refers to values which never have anything essentially in common with democracy, for example, the establishment of public elementary schools and dispensaries for diseases of the lungs. All democracy is ‘formal’, since the problems of the development of common knowledge, law and order, moral responsibility, personal dignity, equal justice, and so on, are formal problems, relating to the ‘structure’ of human social relations. The so-called ‘happiness’, ‘satisfaction’ or ‘enchantment’ of the people, as mere psychological facts, or the so-called welfare of the people, as mere material fact, may, in contrast to this, be called bases ‘of content’, but, as I have said, have nothing to do with democracy. (Let there be no misunderstanding: I am far from thinking that people’s psychological equilibrium, or material prosperity, could in general be best ensured by dictatorial means.) For this reason I absolutely refuse to find a way round the lying slogans of the democracy of content in contradiction to that of form, but do indeed differentiate between the reality of formal democracy and the empty formalism of democracy. If, for example (the extent to which the objective possibility might have been realised is of little importance), early in 1933, Chancellor Schleicher had broken up and disarmed the Nazi assault troops with the help of the loyal parts of the army, the Prussian police, the South German governments and the social democratic ‘Iron Front’, rendered harmless the party’s main ringleaders, dissolved the Stahlhelm, or reorganized it, and proclaimed a military emergency dictatorship – in this case the formalities of democracy would no doubt have suffered a more serious affront, certainly for the time being, than through the election campaign of Hitler’s government and the drama of the Potsdam parliament, but who doubts that, even if only for a very short time, incomparably more democracy, indeed more ‘formal democracy’ would have survived, than what has survived since

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the ‘legally established’ ‘national coalition’, dependent on the ‘will of the majority’, came to power. A great many personal and intellectual rights would have survived; essential fragments of the life of parties; the validity in principle and to a great extent in practice of the Weimar or a similar constitution; the social democracy of the trade unions. If someone should reply that he much preferred the periods of the Scheidemann or Wirth governments, it is sufficient answer to say that he is right and that, for example, Washington is more sympathetic to us than Bratianu, Bamberg cathedral seems more beautiful than that at Milan. If moreover we are told that the transformation of the Scheidemann-Wirth period into that of Schleicher and Hitler can only have been the result of great defects and crimes, this would indeed be an extremely sensible, instructive, relevant comment, well worth bearing in mind, but pertains as little directly to the topic as when we are only able to advise a man reduced to beggary, who is faced with a choice between death by starvation, suicide, crime and a modest, but to some extent respectable field of work which keeps the wolf from the door, to choose the last, and are not able to ‘advise’ that it would have been better to manage his wealth properly at the time – though it would do no harm to drive his mistake forcefully home to him. I await the objection that the ‘politics of compromise’ necessarily leads to the ultimate triumph of the opposing side, and that the German left, mainly the German social democrats, precisely because of this willingness to compromise, damaged the position so much that it gave rise to the Schleicher-Hitler situation. Certainly this is not the place for a detailed analysis of the fall of Weimar Germany; perhaps many things would have been much better founded if the social democratic workers had been more strongly opposed to capitalism and nationalism; perhaps many things would have gone much better if the communist workers had given proof of the kind of ‘opportunist’ outlook we see in Czechoslovakia today. Perhaps Austrian social democracy would have done much better if it had shown more self-restraint in 1920, more firmness in 1924, more self-restraint again in 1927, again more readiness to fight at the beginning of 1933, or again more resigned opportunism at the beginning of 1934. We can’t be sure, but we can be sure that politics is the art both of ‘exigencies’ and of ‘intransigence’. If the search for or avoidance of compromises was the universal rule, then every cautious coward, or else any fierce and hot-headed idiot, would be a perfect politician. But even if it is true that the president of the German trade unions refused Schleicher’s offer of a coup d’état, because it was incompatible with the

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legality principle, then the comrade concerned was the embodiment of a classic synthesis of coward and fool. Perhaps I may be allowed to add here a few words about the establishment of the Austrian fascist dictatorship. I do not now wish to revive the belief either that the Austrian regime in 1933 and 1934 might have preserved just a few fragments of democracy; or that it would have wanted to do this if it had been possible; or that there would have been absolutely no possibility of this. However, it is a fact that, by removing the forms of democracy and making itself independent of the ‘people’s will’, it averted, at least for a time, a national socialist regime, or the danger of becoming a submissive client of the Third Reich; and thus directly rendered a not insignificant service to Europe and civilised humanity, and indirectly to the cause of democracy itself. In the name of democracy we may regret that Austrian political Catholicism did not join forces with the left in the, at least, relative salvage of democracy; but we are as determined as we can possibly be not to regret in democracy’s name that it denied the Nazi movement, which assumed gigantic dimensions, the possibility of electoral campaign and propaganda, and that then it violently stifled it with no respect for its supporters. As regards the question debated by Pikler and Jaszi – ‘is a humanistic and progressive government, with enlightened goals, to be supported at the price of invalidating human rights?’ – it can only be answered, sternly and simply, ‘yes’. But only if, in the same breath, we add the prior comment that this is nothing but a ‘lesser evil’, a choice to be made in an infinitely unfavourable situation, like that of a borderline case. The attainment of concretely humanist and progressive goals, the actual building up of suitable social conditions, is impossible for us without the establishment of human rights. ‘I violated the Constitution, in order to save the Union’, said Lincoln; but he did not say: ‘Henceforth I shall govern without a constitution, in order to raise the Union to the most exalted heights possible’. I really do not wish to emphasise the permanent necessity of ‘educational dictatorship’. I only protest against our being unable to see, besides some rough sketch of ideal democracy, something other than ‘this’ or ‘that’ dictatorship. 6. Fundamental Limits of Basic Freedoms In the course of the debate in Századunk Oscar Jászi emphasised the distinction between the freedom to uphold an opinion and that of the call to action. As in legal practice the tracing of a boundary between the two things is often also a question of interpretation, it is evident that even to

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such a straight liberal as Jászi there occurred the idea of the gradation, or rank-ordering, of basic freedoms. I myself venture to insist on the idea, though in a somewhat more systematic, developed form. From the first – not only when they are on the point of violently seizing power – the enemies of a democracy are not entitled to the same basic freedoms as are due to those inside it – or to those parties and trends moving at least on its verge. Yet if, for example, all anti-democratic propaganda and party organization were banned, this would not mean the ‘so-called dictatorship of democrats’, since the believers in democracy could be divided into essentially different parties and nuances of policy (on the basis of social class, economic programmes, opposing views on constitutional technique, religious and cultural problems, regional differences, and so on). Besides, a democratic political system can be imagined such that it only excluded its explicit and extreme opponents (for example, Nazis), but allowed more temperate or adaptable ones to operate (for example, the pre-Hitler Deutschnational party). Further examples can be postulated between particular planes of ‘operation’. We can conceive a state of affairs in which the promulgation of fascist and bolshevist ideas is only allowed in more or less ‘academic’ form, and, say, no party candidates of this kind are allowed to stand in general elections and make political speeches. And, indeed, a state of things in which, for example, members of the Upper House with essentially prestigious functions can only be elected from candidates who are in some qualified sense reliable supporters of the democratic constitution. Of decisive importance is the fundamental principle – to be recognised as principle – that, with reference to tendencies opposed to the democratic constitution (thus to its content, not only its demand for legal continuity) government authority can restrict or withdraw, according to need, the law of freedom of speech and association, with the possible assistance of the judiciary. By ‘principle’ should be understood here that the idea of democratic freedom of opinion and competition between points of view does not signify the equal value of all possible opinions and points of view, or even their equal authority and right to be upheld, but simply the kind of freedom and equal rights necessary for the continuing existence of a democratic state and the main content of the democratic constitution. Subversive and anti-democratic principles and forces can only operate on the periphery of the life of democratic discussion and argument, and the formation of democratic consciousness. We may then well consider the ‘ideal’ state of affairs to be that in which the democratic state is allowed to restrict basic freedoms as little

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as Â�possible: yet the ideal formulation of principle for the democratic state is not the complete lack of restriction of fundamental principles, but, on the contrary, comprises restrictions and possible restrictions corresponding to the permanent, life-pervading and assured practice of basic freedoms. In brief, the conceptual equipment of democracy’s objective is not only the free formation of opinion and its legal endorsement in the evolution of the common will, but also the demand itself that the power of the state is in the hand of those who affirm this. In the last analysis democracy cannot exist unless democrats wield the power, a fact which remains a central element of the goal itself. The question how such a ‘fact’ may come into being at all in the course of history cannot be investigated here.

10 An Essay on Hatred (1935) 1. Imprecise, confused and wishy-washy use of terms is the one great methodological danger of research in the humanities; the other, opposed, danger, is the craving for premature definitions, for artificial barriers which prevent the researcher from really penetrating the wealth of meanings his object possesses. Although in their place they are wonderful creations of the human mind, literature and mathematics are the two great dangers of philosophy. In this paper, then, we shall do our best to avoid weaving lyrical variations into the theme of ‘Hatred’, and to shun existing or still to be formulated definitions (as elegant-sounding as the definition of a circle); instead, we shall start from the commonor-Â�garden concept of hatred, and seek above all to narrow down its conceptual content. The basic tone of hatred is enmity, opposition, rejection, a state of negative feeling. In all this, hatred resembles antipathy, rage, disgust, contempt, rancour. As is usually the case with important everyday concepts, we also consciously misuse the words ‘hatred’ and ‘hating’ to characterise attitudes and sensations which are really much more superficial and imprecise. The man who says he ‘hates’ cold roast beef knows very well how little this food-fad of his has to do with hatred; again, the one who thinks he ‘hates’ mountain spas is perfectly well aware – even if circumstances beyond his control have brought him to spend three teeth-grinding weeks at one – that his unpleasant stay there is, both in degree and in kind, radically different from his hatred of the man who once deprived him of his living and seduced his fiancée away from him, and, apart from this, is notorious for repulsive and disdainful conduct. Nevertheless, a degree of caution is in order not only in our own use of words like ‘hatred’, but also in criticising the usage of others. If someone hates not just cold roast beef 139

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but, say, alcohol, which has been the ruin of parents and siblings and to which he owes a congenital handicap of his own, and if he is then easily capable of smashing a schnapps bottle on the floor in a rage – is the use of the word ‘hatred’ in such a case a merely rhetorical one, is there really nothing of genuine hatred in this sort of distaste, fury or bitterness? And isn’t it possible for someone to hate conurbations in all seriousness? Or a particular city, where he suffered severely for years and went to pieces morally, in close conformity with the city’s general character as a background for life? Perhaps it is pointless to argue about the justification of a particular use of words. But no-one can deny that in cases like these we have to do with a feeling which is much closer to hatred for a ‘malicious fiend’ than to simple ‘distaste for some object’, even if this distaste is as such ever so strong, like the idiosyncratic aversion to a particular fruit.1 Hatred is above all a feeling necessarily characterised by personal involvement – with a hint of ‘totality’; phenomenologically speaking, there must be both depth and centrality. Not ‘depth’ without centrality, as in a mystical mood, or perhaps an indeterminate warning aversion against a person one occasionally meets, without having any closer contact with him. And still less ‘centrality’ without depth, as in the satisfaction of a current interest, for example the elimination of an acutely uncomfortable business rival. The feature of depth is at all events more to the fore than that of centrality. It will not really be ‘hatred’ that I feel for the cut-throat who has attacked me and with whom I am fighting for my life. However, I can perfectly well hate people who have never really crossed my path, have never stood in the way of a central personal project of mine, but who seem to me to embody a repulsive form of life and whom I, at all events, have felt – however peripherally, without any threat to my person – to possess power. The fact that hatred, in contrast to current states such as displeasure, anger, rage, to some extent disgust, is a stance, which to some extent structures and represents the person, goes closely with depth and centrality. There can be anger, for example, without any depth, and it can be directed towards an object with which the subject has otherwise, that is, generally and continuously, thoroughly positive emotional ties: thus parents can be beside themselves with anger if they hear that their darling child has behaved with life-threatening carelessness. It is quite otherwise with disgust,2 which is to a large extent bound to its object, indeed ‘characterises’ it, and which, moreover, is rooted deep in the psyche. However, it is precisely its schematic relatedness to definite classes of objects, together with its internal relations with the products of secretion, phenomena of

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decay and ‘paltry’ manifestations of life (vermin), which show the utterly peripheral character of disgust. Hatred, by contrast – without being therefore any less intentionally directed – is always an essential element of life, one that helps to determine its structure. Hatred is a historical aspect of human life, like the circumstances of birth, character, conversion, passion, love, work and sickness. Hatred is, then, an experience of enmity, important for a person’s history and representative of him. What does a preliminary survey tell us about how it apprehends its object, the enemy or the inimical thing? Hatred presupposes a ‘full take’ of the object; this must be somehow objectively important, significant, dangerous, powerful: if not always in its current state (the now prostrate and deeply humiliated foe), yet still in respect of its more general role, or some pretension it has. Anything disturbing, noxious or thwarting can be blotted out, banished, overcome, whether it be strong or weak, important or unimportant, spiritually significant or without any spiritual reference; but, if that is all, they cannot be hated.3 We do not wish to assert point-blank that hatred is only possible towards a spiritual and personal power of equal rank, but we have no difficulty in affirming that such a case is the central one, and that other cases are only intelligible as extensions or transferences of the same. In the typical case, hatred is only an issue when it is possible to talk of ‘serious combat’, or when such an encounter has very close historical links with the hostile relationship: when, for example, someone even hates the young children of a hated and powerful foe. The other side of the presupposition we are exploring is the possibility of spiritual relations with the object. One does not hate the waters of a tidal wave, however bitterly one may also resist them; nor does one feel hatred of a beast of prey that attacks one; indeed hardly of an insidious and ferocious highwayman. A member of the ‘governing class’ will hate an equal who has dealt treacherously with him in a far more genuine sense than he will hate a servant who has behaved disloyally. The cultivated man will find it difficult to hate an uncultivated one, even if he has maliciously inflicted on him the most grievous damage. He will be all too easily inclined to treat him as an evil power of Nature to be headed off. Of course, since ‘cultivated’ and ‘uncultivated’, ‘aristocrat’ and ‘plebeian’, are merely opposites of highly relative application, what we have just said is only intelligible within a more or less unchanging social milieu. On a remote island or theatre of war, where fundamentally new social relations make their appearance, such limits to hatred can completely disappear. But even in this more precise and limited sense the assumption of equality is only valid ‘in a downward

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direction’, not in an upward. I can very well ‘impotently’ hate the much more powerful person at whose mercy I find myself; I can equally well hate the more distinguished, more important, more cultivated person ‘with a muffled resentment’. Certainly something of an existential level in common is presupposed even here. It is easier to feel it from below upwards than from above downwards. Though the particular contents of the experience of the more primitive are more accessible to the more highly placed than vice versa, the metaphysical equality of all mankind is more accessible to the person poorer in distinctive values. The bourgeois may view the proletarian as a mere ‘hand’, a mere food-consuming unit of labour; but though the proletarian can view the bourgeois as boss, blood-sucking parasite, or diabolical oppressor, he can never see him as mere instrument of production. One might also put it like this: hatred is only possible towards an object to which we can ascribe responsibility, ethical accountability. We shall return to the idea of a close relation between hating and regarding as evil. But let us at once qualify this: on the one hand responsibility and ethical accountability are here being understood as graded (the feudal lord is more free and responsible in his social network than the serf, the spiritual superior is likewise more than the ignorant man of instinct), on the other hand, effective power is also required along with spiritual responsibility (the more powerless the ‘evil’ opponent, the less can hatred find a target). But in the light of this motif hatred must be most strictly separated from fear. The character of the object I am afraid of is, in itself, a matter of complete indifference; all that matters is what effect it can have on my condition. Qua fear, fear of the persecutor is of exactly the same order as fear of the storm. Of course some objects are such that fear becomes an occasion of hatred. The grim foreman who threatens to lay me off can easily become an object of my hate. But no ‘derivation’ of hatred from fear can be considered here. I will especially hate the unjust foreman, but I will much rather fear than hate the far stricter one whom I do not regard as unjust. I can both fear and love him; and I can hate a malevolent and vicious colleague, even when he can no longer do much harm to me. Hatred is then clearly directed at the ‘nature’ of its object, though never simply at its nature, as is at least relatively true in the case of conceptual evaluation or an aesthetic feeling, but with a very pointed emphasis on the effects of this nature on the subject (the ‘hater’), and in particular on the spiritual influences on the context of life which links subject and hated object to one other. Hatred is neither directed at nature in itself, nor at causal connections, but at their ‘historical role’. Political

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hatred is an example, that is, hatred of opponents different in family, social circle, perhaps also as individuals, who want to change the nature of the fatherland they and I share, to make it different. An extremely important aspect of the problem of hatred is the question of what is really supposed to happen to the object of hate. To what extent does one desire the annihilation of the object in hatred? Neutralisation, banishment, ruination, killing, metaphysical profanation of the adversary, perhaps frustration of his orderly interment, all these things are implications of the hate-filled will. Admittedly, the hater may actually want none of them: even so, not everyone who fears actually flees or even tries to flee, or reconciles himself to the idea of flight. A man who woos a woman can hate his rival and yet banish every thought of even driving him from the beloved’s presence: perhaps if he is convinced that his idol would really do better if she chose the rival. One might object that this only relates to what the hater actually wants and has nothing to do with the hatred itself, to which indeed the hater is not absolutely subject; if I am thirsty, I would certainly like to drink the water that is standing on the table, though I may also refrain for reasons of hygiene or good manners. But things are not quite so simple with hatred. Who can say for sure what the hater would like to do with his enemy, when he completely identifies with his hatred, when he is not bothered by moral scruples or external considerations? Will the hatred be appeased if the opponent is ‘removed to a distance’, or driven from a particular field? Is he to be injured, tortured, humiliated? Is his death the real goal? Or is this perhaps not enough? For hatred can outlast the enemy’s death, and pursue him beyond the grave. The hater can also try to blacken or blot out his enemy’s memory; he can wish eternal damnation on his soul. Hatred has, therefore, no naturally obvious goal, like a particular fear, feeling of disgust or appetite. The idea that murder is the paradigmatic goal of hatred and that everything else is only either a weakening or anticipation or an embellishment, cannot be affirmed without arbitrariness. Nevertheless an intention of annihilation4 unmistakably belongs to it; and physical killing is just the most vivid and concentrated act of annihilation. But we will not go so far as to call every other expression of hatred ungenuine or concealed. A person who hates someone, persecutes or oppresses him, tries to dislodge him from his social position, without even remotely approaching an attempt on his life, can in the full sense hate him, nor will it do to say that he would really like to kill him and only represses the impulse to murder with an effort.5 One who is still seeking to dishonour the name of a fallen enemy is not still trying to make good the murder or – if he has really committed

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it – give it a more stylish form, but, over and beyond all desire to take his life, is attacking the metaphysical being of the foe. Hence hatred is both more and less than will to murder: as currently felt and actively fostered it is usually less, but it often bears within itself a hint of a lasting claim to annihilation – indeed, it may well be asked whether a hint of this kind is not always present, at least in shadowy form. We said that hatred is directed to the historical effects of an essence, to the existence of a given spiritual structure. But this existence can never be completely annihilated, once the essence concerned has been realised in world history. One can still hate Napoleon or Bismarck today, and equally a dead step-mother unknown to the general public, whose distressing characteristics again appear in her daughter. Two further considerations show that hatred is not simply bound up with the idea of murder. Firstly, it is clear that one can hate impersonal spiritual powers, not just individual persons. No doubt that is unusual, but only an obscurantist rigorist would say that hatred of Greekdom, Russianism, Catholicism, Classicism or Bolshevism does not really amount to hate, or would interpret these attitudes in terms of hatred of persons representing them.6 This kind of hatred may well sometimes kindle a lust for massacre, but it misses the point to say that its essential content is the extermination of ‘every single Greek’, and so on. Secondly, a related phenomenon within the sphere of personal hatred. It may be asked whether an alteration of essential nature, a radical change, a conversion can represent a goal and resolution of hatred. It would seem not. If we want to ‘better’ someone, we must, fundamentally, love rather than hate him; it is precisely because of this love that we care about his nature and want to change it. But if we are really fathoms deep in hatred for someone, we are far from wanting to educate and ennoble him: on the contrary, it is not his defects but his values that disturb us; we would prefer him to be not better, but objectively worse. (His virtues are ‘glittering vices’.) But this is not the whole story. Certainly individual disvalues in a person we love can especially pain us, and we can be especially diligent about their removal; on the other side, the hater can be severely disturbed by the individual virtues and perfections of his enemy. But when parents, for example, so insistently desire that their child should be ‘different’, and discipline him while continuously harping on their love for him, we may well harbour doubts about the genuineness of this love. And a hatred which admires virtually everything in its object, is teetering on the brink of envy and secret love. My point, in short, is this: between the unique, identical person and his various individual traits lies the layer of his

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character, his still alterable ‘basic direction’, which nevertheless reveals a certain uniformity, constancy and wholeness. Hatred can be directed towards this source of practical choice, as towards an impersonal historical tendency, without touching the person’s whole being. (Or, conversely, only this being here and now, when, for example, an artist envies and ‘hates’ the greater genius whose disciple he is.) But then hatred begets a will to conversion or re-education. Thus ambitious parents can hate as it were the entire essence of their lazy and dreamy son, but also fanatically ‘love’ this son, precisely as their son, in a purely abstract sense as ‘point of reference’, and treat him with all imaginable solicitude – in the name of love – no less than with all imaginable malevolence. Cases of this kind form a boundary sphere of hate; but for all that even the re-creation – not, say, the unbroken perfection and purification – of the object can be considered as an effective direction of hatred. Whenever the hated one suddenly, say on the occasion of a somehow deeply grounded failure, shows a complete change of mind, takes stock of himself, renounces the whole tendency of his claims, that can spark off a cessation or diminution of hatred in the other party, just as if the hated one had suddenly died. If, therefore, hatred is directed towards annihilation of its object, annihilation must not here be understood in the definite sense of physical death or even social ruin; the person himself as ‘indivisible kernel’ is not the sole and unequivocal object of hatred; this can also work itself out in such a way that it only influences the object’s situation and make-up, without attacking its ‘ultimate’ physical and metaphysical being. On the other hand hatred never unequivocally means a well-circumscribed repression and reformation, but always grasps the entire person by means of empirical features. Every hate is indefinite as regards its concrete goal and brings with it, irrespective of what is currently aimed at, an atmosphere of ‘absolute’ annihilation, a glimpse of killing and obliteration. 2. I pass now to the grounds of hatred, or, better: to those aspects of the object to which hatred is directed. These seem to be of many varied kinds; one may recall the difference in this respect from negative feelings such as fear and disgust. The object of fear is a power which presents a danger to the subject; the object of disgust has a ‘disgusting’ nature which also has a particular content and of which there are various types. But hatred is not directed to a quality of the ‘hateable’, indeed, there is no such thing; and it certainly is not simply directed to powers which inhibit or disturb the subject. Indeed, even the feelings of ‘sympathy’ and ‘antipathy’ have a simpler structure, precisely because they are fully

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‘unaccountable’: they depend on the most varied and contingent features and associated details, but only on them, and, in general, all we mean by them is that someone ‘pleases’ or ‘displeases’ us, though we sometimes add, cursorily or inconsequentially, things like: he is ‘kind’, ‘intelligent’, ‘stylish’, or ‘there’s something “off-putting” about his eyes’, and so on. By contrast, a most conspicuous feature of hatred is its at least always virtually present double motivation. One takes in both the nature of the object and its dynamic role, sometimes one, sometimes the other being to the fore. If I suddenly ask the man in the street whom he habitually hates, he will, likely enough, answer: ‘my enemies’. But – especially when the question clearly means ‘what kind of people’ – he may also answer: ‘evil people’. Yet in both cases he clearly has the same hatred in mind. In the first case he does not simply mean that he is defending himself against his enemies or, in his own interest, trying to harm them; in the second case he does not just mean that he condemns these evil people and approves of society taking steps against them. Does he then think, in all seriousness, that ‘hostile to him’ and ‘evil’ mean the same? Stupid philosophers may endeavour to think so, but the average man endowed with rationality, to whom the distinction between the two concepts is as familiar as that between yellow and blue or war and earthquake, will certainly not. If we consult our experience of different instances of hatred, we do in fact find that sometimes injury, sometimes indignation underlies it, that often there is an intimate fusion of the two and rarely a complete absence of either of them. But there are boundary cases: the hatred of pure revenge on the one hand, hatred of a person we find ‘satanic’ on the other. But even in boundary cases like these it is easy to find the other element. Vengeance is typically sought not for simple injury as such, but for what has been ‘perpetrated’ on the subject or related person, for the ‘outrage’ inflicted on him. One does not hate the morally irresponsible malicious madman, although one may greatly fear him; one hates (in normal circumstances) the ever so powerful, but gentlemanly, foe less than the spiteful one, even though he is less dangerous. Even a deluded person, clearly in the wrong in his conflict with the one he hates and deserving hatred far more than him, will insult his opponent by using ethical terms, calling him, absurdly, a scoundrel, will slander him with moral reproaches. Again, one does not go out into the wide world to look for rogues whom one can hate with good reason and with pleasure; one hates only the evil which somehow confronts one, which penetrates the subject’s life-circle and there possibly does harm. The personal engagement, partially conditioned by the hatred,7 would otherwise be meaningless, misplaced, ungenuine.

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That does not mean that the quasi spatial extent of hatred has to be roughly the same in every case. Think, for example, of the antagonism between two enemy states, in which I am at first involved not as a citizen but only as a political commentator; I can become more closely involved not only if, say, I spend some time in one of the two countries, or, indeed, if my own country gets drawn into the sphere of this conflict for reasons of world politics, but also because the crisis between the two enemy states becomes acute and war at last breaks out: this means that a decisive situation has arisen which, without further ado, more closely concerns the material and moral destiny even of other nations. On the one hand, therefore, hatred always contains something of a selective search for its object; it does not arise automatically, or selfevidently, but it is – like love in its higher and closer sense – something like an ‘affair’, a course adopted by the person. On the other hand, it is essentially not like a playful fancy or an adventurous quest; rather, hatred is, in the full sense, ‘suggested’ to one. The typology of hatred, of course, by no means only includes the cases of self-defence (vengeance) and moral indignation. Even the situation of ‘objective enmity’ is distinct from either. Another important type is constituted by religious hatred, or the very similar cultural hatred, that is, hatred between colliding world-views and forms of life. We find some boundary phenomena of hate in cases of ‘over-compensation’ for personal love which has been suppressed, perhaps spurned or requited with unfriendly conduct, or for other reasons. It may well be true of such cases that the hatred is in no way originally directed to the nature or any property of the object, but appears somehow abstract, primarily empty of content, a counterpart of the now unaccountable love; only subsequently are the disvaluable and evil traits of the object chosen to feed it. So called self-hatred could also be taken as a similar kind of boundary case, according to this schema: I, with these my properties, which I certainly do possess, am incapable of living up to my ideals, and of achieving the successes which my most intimate self claims as its right – I, so intimately bound to myself, ought to have done this – hence I deserve to be hated by myself. These somewhat questionable types of hatred have at any rate one decisive element in common with genuine primal hatred: the dynamic relation, the existential connection between the hater and its object. A person refuses me or fails in connection with my goals, although I had possessed a right to expect help, although we are bound to one another by inseparable or hardly separable ties. Then again, perhaps, a love, which simply vanishes or ceases – so that the person concerned no longer thinks of this woman, no longer occupies himself

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with her – does not ‘transform’ itself into hate. Nor will a man ‘hate’ a pretty woman who conducts herself flippantly and negatively towards him on the night of a ball, where they have seen each other for the first time. Even in these cases, then, we find a kind of objective conflict and not merely a groundless fancy – that is, my deep and lasting ‘love’ for a woman, or perhaps for an outstanding member of my profession, is itself already an objective fact, an existing relationship independent of my ‘good pleasure’, which I can neither posit nor call forth through the choice of the moment. A woman, therefore, who light-heartedly makes advances towards a man susceptible to her charm, only to refuse outright to honour the promissory note previously issued, is also rightly criticised by third parties. Hence (relatively speaking, within the given relationship!) there is also a hint of the ‘hate-worthy nature’ in such cases. On the other hand religious and cultural hatred8 appears to be a pure, direct ‘nature-hatred’, a hatred of a kind of essence as such, in which there can be no question of any failure of reference to ‘myself’. Yet this is not quite so. Above all, proximity, a sphere of contact, is a necessary condition: granted that the Frenchman is inclined to hate the Englishman and the German not only as hostile neighbouring powers, but also in respect of their utterly different ways of exemplifying human character, he will hardly hate the Swede or the Russian for the latter reason, although their ways of life are just as different from the French, perhaps more so, and although French and Russian spheres of political power can cross. Which of us will feel tempted to ‘hate’ the heathenism of Malaya or the Malayan way of life? But that might very well be the case if they should be forced upon us in some (today unimaginable) constellation of world-politics. What about the pioneers of the expansive, proselytising religions, the apostles and missionaries themselves? They would doubtless justly defend themselves against the imputation that they are led by hatred; and they are usually or always concerned to join their attempts to convert with some secular beneficence. And yet: for all their genuine love for the heathen, is there not also present a hatred of heathenism, a religious hatred, in the language of the apostles themselves, a ‘hatred of error’? Yet the heathenism of the Fijian islanders in no way ‘obtrudes on’ an English clergyman or French Jesuit! Here we must recall that the religious or perhaps the specifically Christian experience of the world (think of the word ‘catholic’, claimed by many Anglicans also, and indeed by many genuine Protestants) so strongly conceives of mankind as a unity in the sense of a potential community of salvation, that distance and lack of contact are not acknowledged, that many priests are expressly inspired

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by missionary zeal alone in deliberate opposition to the usual pastoral functions. We can represent the matter to ourselves on a small scale as follows: A mother cherishes her son, who is ill at home with the measles; but his father goes a two-day journey to support the second son, who, they have just heard, is laid up with typhus. The apostolic mentality still feels the brotherhood or sonship of the most out of the way peoples, and feels it more deeply the more distant and helpless they are; it loathes the darkness of heathenism as though it were typhus, and even ‘hates’ it, since, unlike typhus, it has no power over the body and the state of the brain, but it does have power over the soul. The most typical and concentrated cases of hatred are to be found where there is an ‘objective state of enmity’, an objectively and personally conditioned antagonism within a more or less sharply outlined sphere of reference. Examples: A ‘detestable dandy’, courting ‘my’ girl not without success, and who keeps addressing the less approvable sides of the beloved’s character, and encouraging them to blossom; a political opponent with a qualitatively different vision of the country, a man absolutely different in social class and life-style, who embodies another or, still better, ‘the other’ possibility for the whole life of the nation, perhaps the ‘rule’ of the Junkers or Schlachzizen on the backs of the sleepily vegetating serf-masses, or ‘anarchical mob-rule’ with a corresponding flavour of the beer-hall; a rival at work, who mocks my achievements in front of our colleagues, who has intrigued against me with the boss, also against N, about whom I care little – despicable weapons, but unfortunately often successful ones – who ‘to crown it all’ is in his free time only interested in race-horses instead of reading good books, a repulsive bloke, and so on. The ‘enmity’ is, then, formed of many components. At its heart can be the simple fact that two people, thanks to their qualifications and experience have a claim on the occupation of one and the same position, for which only one of them can be considered. It can, on the other hand simply begin with the sharp, mutual, dislike of two persons, an antipathy for which both parties could cite reasons relating to character and way of life; at first they only ‘meet’ fleetingly, but become ‘linked’ through their opposition, so that they subsequently take pleasure in developing a dynamic field of tension between each other, and seek out or take up a ‘field’ where they can battle it out. Both of these two aspects are necessary for genuine hatred. Neither simple rivalry nor simple dislike can signify hatred. It is perfectly possible to work for the ruin of a person who threatens our plans, not only without hatred or any other feeling but in the spirit of a chess move;

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one can both combat a gentlemanly opponent, who confronts one almost as a symbolic embodiment of the cause of dissension, without hatred, and also avoid the society of an unpopular and otherwise indifferent person without hatred. Certainly it may often happen that attitudes like these come very close to hatred, and may degenerate into it unnoticed. But it seems to me that at this point we are missing something very important for the understanding of hatred. Our experience of it, in our own persons or in those of others, is of a strong uniform movement of feeling and not as an indefinite jumble of self-defence and feelings of alienness, of envy or rivalry and direct antipathy. And yet we are trying to analyse hatred as something like that, neither ‘fish, flesh nor fowl’. Have we gone hopelessly wrong? Against this weighty objection we can, for the present, reply as follows: it is evident that neither mere conflict of interest in the widest sense, nor simple dislike in the widest sense are a sufficient condition of hatred; it is also the case that, when we examine genuine, massive, hatred we can always distinguish both aspects of it – not only in varying proportions but also in the most varied qualitative shades. We gladly concede the possibility that hatred often or usually originates in such a way that the two aspects of the intention are unified from the start through a particular coincidence of situation. Nor are we ruling out the assumption that the intention of hate essentially possesses a deeper meaning which we have not yet put into words, and that the two aspects we have discussed are its radiating surfaces. Access to this meaning must surely be one of the bridges that lead from phenomenology to metaphysics. Yet, for the moment, we would rather not immerse ourselves too deeply in it. We have already hinted that the point of unity we seek lies in the concept of the common circle of reference in which different kinds of essence also represent different policies, different possible decisions for the whole circle. This is especially clear in the struggles of parties and groups as such, where selection of personnel and the material question of the regulation of the whole, that is, questions of the Who and the How, more directly interpenetrate. When I meet a person who is ‘antipathetic’ to me, it can easily fall out that I think, at first merely sketchily, of this for the present quite ‘static’ opposition as actualised, or concentrated, at the level of a community of reference experienced as such, wherewith the seed, at least, of hatred is already sown. (In marginal cases the community of reference we are thinking of can be quite broad and loose, but equally well very intensively felt for ideological or mystical reasons, as, for example, a social group in which different attitudes to humanity as such are expressed.)

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Likewise, oppositions which seem to lack any spiritual content, and are merely competitive, often conceal indications of completely definable opposing policies. Thus two politicians, who both belong to one and the same ruling class and are apparently engaged in the otherwise uninteresting power-struggle of two rival noble families, nevertheless also represent the – admittedly somewhat shadowy – opposition of divergent political and social tendencies, without which it would perhaps never come to ‘hatred’ between the two at all, but the struggle would develop more in the light-hearted style of the fencing-floor or the card-table. 3. It is time we considered the theme ‘hatred and love’. The conjunction is banal enough, yet cannot be avoided. The collective consciousness of mankind is not mistaken in its assumption that hatred and love, conceived quite generally and crudely, are symmetrically contrasting primal forces of the human soul; one cannot fully fathom the one without doing justice to its relation to the other. As hatred is the negative, so is love the positive stance towards an object, and both presuppose an ‘engagement’ of one’s own person. Apart from that, we shall, it is true, find some characteristic asymmetries in the structure of the two.9 In what follows we hope to obtain a wider view of the psychological connections between personal hatred and love. The most conspicuous difference between love and hate is the much narrower range of hatred. At any one time, of course, one can hate just as many objects as one loves; one can, if you like, fall out with oneself and the world so as to hate virtually everything and love virtually nothing. Nor do we wish to argue about the statistical relationship between those who hate more and those who love more. My concern here is something more objective and essential: a greater variety, a wider sphere, of objects can be loved than hated. ‘Loved than hated’, not, say, ‘liked than disliked’; there is no law of this latter kind. However, to put it briefly, objects which are not persons or spiritual powers of some kind, can, where positive evaluation goes, be much more easily ‘loved’ than, where negative evaluation goes, be ‘hated’. A smoother, more continuous, path leads from liking and affirmation to love than from disliking and rejection to hate. The objection lies ready to hand: when one likes a fine book binding, there is as little genuine ‘love’ in the case as there is ‘hate’, when one angrily removes a hideously bound book from the most conspicuous shelf. Well, perhaps that aesthetic loving is not yet love; but it is nearer to being love, it can more readily become it, than the corresponding aesthetic dislike is near to being hate, or can become so.

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The divergence we are pointing to can be seen more clearly if we fasten our attention on the far greater number of forms of love there are. We have heard of amor benevolentiae, amor concupiscentiae, amor intellectualis; but no-one has ever made an analogous classification of hatred. Earlier, we touched on the fact that all hatred contains an intention of ‘annihilation’, which can, of course, be present in various grades of concreteness and scope. It does not, therefore, take a clear single form as in a ‘murderous intention’; but moves in the relatively narrow path of ‘disposal’ or ‘suppression’. It is different with love. Its realm contains the intentions of advancement, unfolding, having near, union, self-dedication and service, a far more variegated world of phenomena, much richer in possibilities. If one prefers a more concrete list, think of parental love, love of children, friendship, sexual love, love of country and perhaps also the mystic Eros of the Greeks! We can also, of course, detect various tonalities in a father’s hatred of his son, a son’s for his father, a man’s for his wife, a citizen’s for his own or a foreign country, and so on. And yet there is a good reason for our employment of far fewer distinctive terms for them. Let us recall that what the loving father ‘is’ for his son, the loving son for his father, the loving husband for his wife and vice versa, all of these are completely different things and the more different and variegated, the greater and more perfect the unfolding of the love is; for the fact that one of the ‘lovers’ enumerated here calls a doctor when the corresponding ‘beloved’ person is ill, is more of a general act of human love, which is also naturally exemplified in very close relationships, but in itself is just as likely to be shown in, say, the relations of a landlady to her lodger, when these are not particularly strained. Hatred knows nothing of these differences. If their hatred and rage boil over, and the father shoots his son, or vice versa, or the married couple poison one another or kill one another with pickaxes, all this comes to much the same thing. The will to annihilation has several forms, degrees and instruments, but it has, at bottom and precisely when taken to its limit, one pretty clear meaning, for the non-being of an object is itself strictly unambiguous and invariable. Being, on the other hand, is manifold and many-formed. Since love affirms being and places itself (i.e., the subject) in a positive relationship to (alien) being, it must project itself in a manifold of concrete intentions. One has only to compare the difference between the intention-pairs ‘drawing near-furthering’ in the case of love and ‘removing-destroying’ in hate. If I throw a person out of my house and strike him to the ground, the two actions form a kind of gestural unity, which is far from present if I, say, embrace a person and offer him refreshment. To obliterate an object from

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my own world and from ‘the’ world qua my world merge incomparably more into one another than the attempt to incorporate an object more into ‘my’ world and the attempt to strengthen its place in ‘the’ world. Killing can be felt as a superlative form of removal, but, for example, loving union, ardent admiration and sacrificial advancement are not intensifications of one another, even though in some cases they can grow into one another. Hatred is always haunted by the never completely realisable fiction of annihilation. Love can never have an abstract supreme goal, even in an ideal sense. The lover’s love for his chosen, the believer’s love for God, the old teacher’s love for his growing pupils, they can not on any account be brought under the same denominator of concrete activity, but every one of these loves also contains many goals, without, of course, lacking a principal motive. The question whether we are not simply playing with words cannot be ignored. The fact that we designate many more different stances with the same word ‘love’ than we do with the word ‘hate’ could be a purely verbal matter, which may interest the philologist but should not tempt the philosopher to empty speculation. If language uses a single word for sex-drive, gratitude, kindliness, and so on, that may be the worse for it, but why build a theory of the ‘structure’ of love and hate on it? However, the stroke passes us by. We can very well separate improper and superficial games with language from its legitimate desire to express things. In figures of speech such as ‘faire l’amour’ (for the sexual act), ‘I love this dish’ (instead of ‘I enjoy eating it’), ‘I love being the first to arrive at a party’ (instead of ‘I like being etc.’), we are dealing with things which have a merely remote likeness to love, or, as in the first case, need have no more than an aspectual relation to it. However, sexual love in the closer sense (whose phenomenal difference from sexual excitement is well-known) is genuine love, and when, in addition, it is closely bound up with the sex-drive in the proper sense, in respect of its essential tendency and its actual outcomes, we may well see in it a noteworthy feature of the facts themselves, not a caprice of language. Genuine love is always present where one engages oneself ‘for’ an object for its own sake, for its character and its historical uniqueness, where something is ‘dear’ to one. One may, in harmony with all this, perhaps wish to be united with this object, help towards its further development, or even admire it in a glass case and take pride in showing it off, as the case may be. The fact that there are more kinds of love than hate is not accounted for by accidents of nomenclature, but by the fact that our positive relations with the objects of the world are more diverse and more adapted to the particular nature

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of these objects, than our negative relations. In other words, relations of positive feeling are completely bound up with different functional relations with the objects – although love is by no means identical with the experience and affirmation of the relations between father and son, husband and wife, citizen and country, and so on – whereas relations of negative feeling are all coordinated with the one functional relation of resistance and disposal. We talk of an ordo amoris, meaning a proper ordering of our loves to give structure to our lives, but there can be no talk of an ordo odii as its counterpart – which is not entirely independent of the fact that one ought to declare hatred as such ‘morally inadmissible’. Insofar as hatred is ‘justified’, insofar as we have to acknowledge it simply as a fact of life, perhaps in the reduced form of ‘pure’ opposition without any craving for annihilation, it can never, like love, pervade the web of life like a network; rather, it can reveal itself here and there in ‘punctiform’ fashion – in places where the subject is confronted by an enemy, an adversary, an effective and powerful object of his antipathy. Here, for all that, I can expect the objection that this may be the normal or healthy stance, but that there are also people who hardly ever, or only very occasionally, love, but hate virtually everything they come into contact with: family, country, profession, the opposite sex, the people they meet, life itself, themselves, and everything else. Essentially, therefore, even if not usually in fact, hatred can be exactly as extensive, graded, ordered and varied in content as love. The objection can be rounded off with the comment that this impressive kind of hatred can be variously tinged according to its objects: the subject hates ‘authority’ ‘in’ his father, ‘logic-free’ sensibility ‘in’ the female sex, and so on. But, whether or not it be true that, in the first case, hatred is linked with rebellion, in the second with the will to ‘pure reason’, and so on and so forth, it cannot provide a parallel to the different kinds of love. When someone turns his back on his father, avoids the society of women and cannot meet the people he is sometimes compelled to meet without a gnashing of teeth, the variability of attitudes inspired by hatred can in no way compete with the qualitative manifoldness of filial devotion, woman-worship or married love and the great personal friendships. The more it is hatred which generally comes to the fore, the more it reduces the entire life of human relationships to one level; once it absolutely predominates, we can no longer find hatred of parents, of country, of mankind, and so on, but only a uniform hatred of the world and of life, to which all objects are more or less equally sacrificed. Denial and destruction essentially mean uniformity, though occasions, associations and means may be extremely varied; but to take

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things positively must necessarily be particularised in terms of objectively given possible relations. We find ourselves back again with the initial contention that the circle of objects pertaining to hatred is narrower than in the case of love, and that (in harmony with this) the transition from plain rejection to hatred is jerkier, lacking the continuity of the transition from plain affirmation to love. What we have meanwhile established is the multiformity of kinds of love in the sense of its links with the many kinds of functional relations, and in contrast to the ever-identical basic intention of hatred, which wants to reduce all functions and thus cannot itself be moulded in adaptation to their growth. Now of course we do not mean that the ‘basic Â�affirmations’ – I shall call them ‘pleasant impressions’ – are in themselves more frequent or comprise a larger class of objects than the ‘basic rejections’, or ‘unpleasant impressions’. Certainly, the former, in themselves, have no numerical superiority; indeed, unpleasant bodily sensations may well show a greater wealth of nuances than pleasant sensations. But where we find the beginnings of personal engagement for and against objects – that is, love and hate – here the affirmative intention reveals itself as in principal more variegated than the negative; for the latter is directed to the removal, the former to enlivening permeation and accentuation, of functional relations. If it is true that the movements of love tend themselves to ‘support’ the relationships of life, whereas the movements of hate present themselves in more ‘punctiform’ fashion ‘in’ certain aspects of relationships, this is still not enough to imply the greater extent of love – after all, those ‘points’ where hatred shows itself, can be found anywhere – but it does at all events imply that, whereas love is present everywhere in germ, or wherever persons begin to relate positively to some object, personal engagement in the form of hatred may presuppose a distinctive ‘turn’, and exhibits something more ‘jolt-like’. Let me try to make this clearer: when an object ‘pleases’ us, seems ‘worth-while’, brings us ‘benefits’, we may gradually and almost imperceptibly ‘grow fond’ of it, and allot it a special place among the other values of our life, making it part of our own personal riches; when, on the contrary, an object ‘mispleases’ us, seems ‘disvaluable’ and ‘threatens’ us, we bar it in this or that way from the contents of our life, from our personal good, linking this with some appropriate measure of ‘concern’, ‘worry’ and activity, but still not at all necessarily with a swinging up of the soul, an intimate movement of the person himself, as is the case in hatred (and love). For that a special turn seems to be necessary. If we, for example, come across a new pleasure, perhaps a quite harmless and banal one, we shall at least allow

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it a modest corner in that value-sphere of creation which falls to our lot; we shall feel in this pleasure, in the essence of the object that gives rise to it, however fleetingly and dully, the value of God, life, personal being or some aspect of culture – with which a grain of love for that object is also given. But we shall try to dispose of a new element of displeasure, perhaps a new danger, by simply putting it out of action. Apart from our attempts to hold it off or do something more specific, the object in itself is indifferent to us, cannot engage our feelings or absorb us, is not given a place among the intimate contents of our soul. At first, therefore, there is no hatred in the case. It is true that even objects which arouse abhorrence or fear can imprint themselves on our psychic life, and impose on it some of their own colouring. But the huge difference, as compared with objects evaluated positively, is that the latter at once cause the soul to turn towards them, whereas this is not true at all in the case of objects which have a negative effect. Here we find exclusion, personal avoidance, even though success may be only partial or the avoidance itself may, from the technical or otherwise psychological point of view, involve some attention to the things in question. The turning towards positively toned objects can gradually pass over into ‘love’, provided these objects rise to the plane of beings endowed with personality, or are approaching that level. One does not ‘love’ flowers in the same sense as that in which one loves one’s wife and children, but one can also most decidedly love flowers or ‘one’s own’ flowers. Imagine a retired old gentleman, surrounded by well brought-up children and a swarm of flourishing grandchildren, but whose special pride and greatest joy is the exquisite little rose-garden, which he himself looks after. On the other hand, one will be hard put to it to say one ‘hates’ a desolate stretch of land or the dreadful yard of a tenement building. Yet the roses ‘compel’ us to ‘turn to’ them no more strongly than these unpleasant objects, indeed, the reverse is often the case. But our turning towards the roses is ‘of our own accord’, out of love or very nearly so; whereas in the case of the ugly places, we hurry through them with a greater or lesser degree of disquiet and vexation, but without that inward rising up and ‘hearty’ apprehension, which characterises hate as well as love. Nor can there be any talk of this when we drain marshes and demolish old hovels, in order to transform their sites into agricultural land and build friendly little houses. This may, for various reasons, be part of an economic or cultural ‘war’, but there is no real enmity or hatred in it. From all this it follows that hatred is a narrower and more specific phenomenon than love. The spontaneous searching turn of hatred does

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not so fluently, and with such evolutionary obviousness, arise from the primary reaction to an impression, as the corresponding contrary movement we know as love. Hatred requires a much more strictly determinate significance and activity of the object, and also a much more closely confined situation of relatedness. The objects of love can be encountered and taken up almost ‘at pleasure’; the objects of hate must (essentially) stand towards the subject in a relation of enmity – grounded also in the natures of subject and object – or at any rate ‘suggest’ such a relation. Hatred is in principle more of a reciprocal relation than love. In fact, it quite often happens not to be reciprocated; but it is senseless where there is no possibility of its being fully reciprocated. Love, however, is quite free of this limitation; a very important variety of it is normally directed towards what is child-like, tender, bud-like, immature, ‘sub-personal’, from which there could be no thought of true reciprocation, or at any rate not of the same kind of love. It could be more often the case that love is ‘reciprocated’ by the loved person after the event, whereas mutual hatred occurs more frequently at the same time, ‘between’ the persons. Where hatred is directed not to persons, but to impersonal ‘powers’, these are either such as to be capable of hatred, for example a nation, or such that they do at least themselves help to embody a stance of hate or have champions imbrued with the relevant hate, such as political parties. In the rare cases when animals or lifeless objects are ‘hated’ – and not merely detested, feared, regarded with disgust – their symbolic and associative connections must, in an extraordinary and magical manner, stand out clearly. The mutuality of the hate-relation naturally does not mean that both parties mutually ‘hate each other’s hate’. Rather, one hates the other’s ‘counter-active nature’, and the possibility of counter-hatred is merely a structural presupposition, it is not itself an occasion of hate. In a secondary sense, however, it can happen that the opponent is also hated for his ‘loathsomely’ hate-swollen, ‘hateful’ conduct. The sharper accentuation of the object through the intention of hatred in comparison with that of love can be gathered from the last points. In order for there to be hatred, there must be a more pointed and strained turn to the object, one characterised as somehow non-recurring or historic. Love is more immanent in the structure of life and the spiritual ‘extension’ of the person, whereas hatred pierces it, creates special points of relation which cannot be explained in terms of the subject’s functions, but are centred on the interference of counter-active waves. A person’s ‘loves’ or love-relations, be their partial causes ever so shallow, contingent, event-like at particular points, give in their ensemble a

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vivid picture of his life and concerns, his system of values and ends. But his hate-relations constitute projecting blocks: they may be altogether indicative of his character, lighting up some of its depths, but they do not afford a picture of him, only points of orientation given at particular times, more self-contained and less a reflection of the general attitude of the subject towards the world. It follows, in one sense, however strange it may sound, that the individual significance and dignity of the object of hatred is greater than that of the love-object. All love is more likely to bring along with itself the background of the ensemble of things loved than hate a background of other things to which one takes up some position. One might except from this comparison the great love-passion, for whose subject the whole world apart from the beloved person becomes a pale, insignificant, skeleton. And yet it goes often enough on record how a great sexual love makes one open and receptive even for values of quite a different kind, even though everything becomes a kind of train of the beloved. In any case the exception falls away if we exclude the acute love-passion, which makes its appearance as a special ‘condition’, and confine ourselves to the permanent life-constituting love-relations. Compared with them there is no doubt that hatred contains a more isolated and so to speak penetrating intention of its object. If love gives us more of a vivid picture of the person (the subject), hatred rather presents him as he steps decisively and tragically out of himself. In hatred’s desire for annihilation, which is sharply distinct from the intentions of mere resistance and prevention (in fear, disgust, or avoidance from laziness), the dynamic unit of existence is experienced in more singular fashion – as if the whole universe were pressing down unavoidably at one point in the living-space – than in the fullness of the intention of love, where the lover’s life, structured and graded by value, remains more self-contained. Though it may also follow that love and not hate is the ultimate ground of our spiritual ties with objects, yet I suspect that the sharp dissection of their objective character, in the non-religious and cultural-historical sense, presupposes hatred. Analysis arises most obviously from unmasking conditioned by hate. Would, say, formalistic and methodological thinking be possible unless we could take for granted a (very general, quite large-scale and not at all immediately relevant) stance of hatred towards certain typical vital phenomena? But we shall do no more than hint at this extension of the theme.10 The question what might be meant by terms like world-hatred, hatred for ‘love’ or other vital forces, hatred for one’s own needs or the objects of the world coordinate with them, leads over to the question of the concrete

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relation between love and hate. Up to now we have been comparing the meaning-structures of the two taken in isolation. 4. There are two ways of understanding a co-existence of love and hate: it can mean either a correspondence of a complementary kind with opposed objects, or an ambivalent, ‘paradoxical’ stance to one and the same object. We begin with the second phenomenon, whose scope is often overrated. Hatred is supposed to lurk at the bottom of ‘all’ love, and ‘all’ hatred is supposed to be due to somehow unfortunate, frustrated, disappointed, embittered or unconfessed love. If one understands this in a sufficiently general sense, it can indeed be strictly proved. Every love brings with it the possibility of hatred towards the object concerned, for a close bond with the same is created in it, and everything displeasing and counteractive on its part is therefore suited, because of the (relative) permanence of the bond, to kindle genuine ‘hate’. Examples: hatred for the son who has turned out badly, for the unfaithful beloved, the object of a crush, who behaves with dismissive hauteur. From the other side hatred always rests on love: the spiritual ‘appreciation’ of the object itself, which conditions the hatred, the turn to the object present in hatred, would be unthinkable without an incipient, aborted movement of ‘love’. No hatred can be personally more burning and cutting than that for an object which has disappointed the one who at first ‘loved’, punished him as it were for his love now known to be ‘mistaken’ and has turned him into a ‘hater’. Seldom through mere rejection or mockery of the love, refusal to love in return: to a greater or lesser extent it mostly also happens that the object ‘unmasks’ himself during the course of the developing relationship, reveals his disvalues and, still more, the merely apparent character of many of his at first admired qualities. However banal the means to be employed, we cannot avoid indicating the limits of this doctrine of polarity. In the first place, one should not confuse successive with contemporaneous attitudes; if love darkens into hatred, if, after initial hatred, ‘the ice is broken’ and love takes its place, these are certainly interesting psychological processes, which certainly also shed some light on the essence of love and hate, but in no way do they attest an inward ‘identity’ of the two, transforming the empirically valid ‘symptoms’ into accidents and secondary considerations. The assumption that, wherever there is love, the invisible obverse of hate is ‘unconsciously’ present, and vice versa, is a bill without collateral: if there are vacillating sentiments with suppressed or inconspicuously dawning

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components, if sometimes a suppressed attitude, perhaps as a result of a sudden external change, breaks abruptly through into consciousness, or rather into the central sphere of consciousness, the last thing we should infer is a corresponding ambivalence even of ‘apparently’ clarified sentiments. Pure hate-free love and pure love-free hate are manifest – though admittedly not very conspicuous – facts of experience. This is especially clear when we have before us not, say, the passion of love or hate in all its delusions – where one may well suspect that secret feelings of hate, or of love, are being submerged or buried by the cramped over-emphasis of the ‘concealing’ attitude – but rock-steady lasting love, which finds much to criticise in its object, without being in the least misled or beclouded by the fact (love with a dash of humour), and likewise rock-steady lasting hatred, which does not absurdly diabolise its object, but concedes there are values to be seen in it, but outshines them with a forceful perspective of ‘disvalue’ and ‘hostility to value’. The one remaining correct insight here is that, as against ‘indifference’ (interpreted broadly), attitudes of love and hate on the one hand show a certain formal similarity, on the other hand can, in their vacillating forms, also create something of a combination, an experimental alteration, or even, as far as their orientation goes, a still indeterminate ‘keen interest’. The logic of mixed attitudes of love and hate is based on a kind of intentional ‘splitting of the object’. However, the linguistic usage according to which we love a person and ‘hate’ some particular feature in him, or the reverse, is inadmissibly lax. Love and hate are of really occurring essential wholes, not of abstract ‘features’. But we can well love a person and yet again ‘hate’ him, when the disvaluable and ‘to us hostile’ features we discern in him are sufficient in strength, coherence and depth (link between essential traits and tendencies of conduct!) to constitute a unified character worth rejecting: when, that is, even though not in the sense of a metaphysically real split in the person, there is inherent in him an ‘alter ego’ with aims both different and counter. Just so, in face of a person we hate, a ray of love can spring up in us, not of course when we merely perceive something ‘favourable’ speaking in his favour (possibly even of moral significance), but perhaps when a deeper trait of nobility in him becomes apparent to us, or when we learn something which makes his historical role in the business that concerned us both appear in a different light, when he thereupon begins to impress us as ‘a different person’. When love and hate are present with a common object, they are not just statically distributed between the object’s ‘light and shadow sides’, or its ‘debits and credits’, but are expressions of an in itself split, vacillating

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and ‘suspended’ attitude to the object’s ‘single meaning’. There are many boundary cases where love is only a mask for hatred, as when someone condemns and tries to eliminate all concrete expressions of a person’s essence under the pretext of ‘love desirous of improvement’; hatred too can be only a seeming mask of love: as when, the more we love a person, the more sharply and zealously we enter the lists against elements of his conduct that ‘must be eliminated’. It would however be a crude error to claim that we ‘also hate’ everyone we love, since there are certainly particular things that do not appeal to us, and vice versa. The second question concerns the complementary co-existence of love and hate with opposed objects. How far does love for an object imply a corresponding hatred for a contrary object, how far does hatred presuppose a corresponding love for something else? That such relations do exist as such is clear: it is, perhaps, natural to hate the enemy of the beloved, to love the hated one’s enemy, and also to hate the type which represents the counterpart of a loved being, or, if one hates a particular object, to try or be ready to love an object conspicuously dissimilar from it. However, the thoroughly torso-like incompleteness of these correspondences is clear. The purely logical limitation is three-fold: (a) there are no strict opposites of characters or kinds of being, as there are opposites to particular characteristics (like brave-cowardly, and so on). (b) The lack of definiteness in opposites of kind is further increased when we consider the real existence of characters, especially within existing personal and historical circles. (c) The unique and concrete coincidence of essential traits in an object with its dynamic relation towards the subject is even less obviously translatable into a set of opposites. There is no way in which I can clearly and logically coordinate a ‘friend’ and ‘helper’, possessed of an ‘opposed’ essential nature, to my ‘traditional foe’, who is encumbered with certain traits of character I find obnoxious. Whether and how far a beloved complement corresponds to the object I hate, and vice versa, is a matter to be settled empirically; in general, it can only be asserted that an intention of love or hate for clearly determinate contraries does, here and now, occur in hate or love. Speaking purely psychologically, it is highly significant that the individual person, especially in his particular states, can also be predominantly disposed to love or hate. If, on the one hand, the ‘passionate’ person is at the same time readier for love and for hate than the ‘cold fish’, there are however ‘sunny’ people, who can love without hating, and gall-like ones, who achieve the opposite. In this matter we are, of course, always concerned with a relative preponderance of particular attitudes which achieve real psychological expression,

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not with absolute distinctions. The law of the logic of feeling, that to a particular predilection there must correspond a particular rejection and that particular negative evaluations presuppose the opposite position of positive evaluations, is not affected by this. The case of love and hate approximating to a symmetrical relation with opposed objects is represented by the judgement of third parties in a significant conflict. If the objects of love and of hate are already ‘completely’ opposed to one another, without any help from the judge, and the subject can whole-heartedly decide in favour of the one and against the other, there is a strict logical connection between hatred and love. This is especially so when we are not just lending our aid to the assaulted and weaker party, or, better, opposing the violent law-breaker, or when we are supporting the party more closely allied or akin to ourselves, but, rather, appraising the nature, full significance and objective meaning of the two contenders and finding ourselves in a position to align them with polar opposites like good and evil, civilisation and barbarism, construction and destruction, freedom and slavery, and so on. This state of affairs is also interesting, firstly because it shows the greater power of hatred to direct us: a particular case of hatred is more immediately qualified to encourage the third party to come to a decision, to divide his readiness to love and hate, than a particular love or friendship, which completely lacks this kind of urgent summons to the third party. However, it also shows that hatred is more in need of logical completion. Other people’s hate, whose sphere of influence we enter, compels us somehow to the production of love, whereas, though the love of others can itself ‘infect’ us (ich sei ‘in eurem Bunde der Dritte’ – let me make a third in your party), it could never drive us to hatred. Hate is always more charged with love’s question-mark than vice versa: the mountain peaks of love can tower over the plain of ‘everyday’, passionless, petty living, but the volcanoes of hatred are fed by a fire in whose fervour we can never help suspecting love. The poet Chesterton somewhere issues this challenge to the prophet of a ‘cool’ mechanical uniform life: Likelier the barricades shall blare, Slaughter below and smoke above: And death and hate and hell declare That men have found a thing to love.

In the light of this passage we shall glance at two forms of the connection between love and hate: the just-mentioned inducement to battle, which contains a great unifying idea, and that phenomenon of a narrowing of love’s foundation, which one might call ‘world-hatred’.

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Misanthropy, world- and life-hatred, are not stances which could exist in such clear outline as hatred proper of a well-defined object. They lack the background, the field of operation, the concentrated acuteness of genuine hate. But if we come across an outlook which seems to contain real hatred alongside despair, emotional deadness, indifference and utter lack of interests – as in, say, the anarchist, who tries to injure ‘society’, as such, or in the satanically disposed cripple, who wants to ‘avenge himself’ for his disability on nature and humankind – the absolute negativity, the absolutely equal distribution of hostility towards all ‘world-elements’ again recedes. It contains two tendencies in which we can follow up traces of love: firstly, an ideal of society, mankind or the circumstances of one’s own life, in more or less concentrated and conscious form, which is the object of love and nurture, and founded in opposition to hatred itself; secondly, we meet with individual secluded objects which are loved like fetishes, and in this way also serve the passion of hatred like a kind of strategic supporting point. A person hates state and society, but loves a hidden sect, or its leaders; another hates family, colleagues, passers-by, but loves his dog, whose legendary faithfulness he compares with the alleged rottenness of mankind. The one thing loved can also be the wider milieu, that is, as it ‘ought’ to be. There are boundary cases to hatred proper, concentrated on an object, in which the ideal ‘loved’ in background fashion is nevertheless no mere fantasy, but can be loved as a real object with no trace of hallucination. So, for example, when someone hates capitalist society down to the smallest detail of its workings, but not only ‘loves’ the ‘approaching’ socialist society in a purely utopian and programmatic sense, that is, properly speaking, merely affirms it, but also loves society as such, simply as a human community, in and ‘behind’ capitalist society: he is whole-heartedly ‘with’ the person who somewhere helps another in his distress; he feels the suffering of his own people even disproportionately, although he would himself think nothing of taking responsibility for the further distress caused by a revolution, and so on. (An analogous case, though unrelated to ‘universal hatred’, is when we hate the present habits of a person right down to the depths of his character, and yet somehow love the ultimate kernel of this individual, that is, over and above his abstract personal being; this ‘ultimate kernel’ is again also represented by perceptible details, perhaps trifles.) I can therefore only advise, that in every case of world-hatred, search should be made for a complementary love-object, which represents, so to speak, a paradigm of the world as it would be if it was worth loving rather than hating. For example, a person can hate everything around him, but cling lovingly to the memory of a set of people he once found dear.

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Stress is often laid on the fact that love can sometimes be evidence of hate, that every bond that unites can easily work out as a barrier which separates from outsiders, that a unifying idea is necessarily also something which divides men’s minds. The last example is marked by the fact that here we are confronted with a general or at least far-reaching claim on the part of the world – ‘society’, ‘mankind’, the ‘state’ – to direct us, which cannot but meet with opponents. Crusades and inquisition are far more of a proof for than against Christianity’s claim to be a religion of love; the Jacobin terror may on the one hand have trodden human rights under foot, but it is on the other a sign of their vitality. The question whether these turns towards enmity were ‘necessary’, whether a ‘more complete’ permeation of mankind with those experiences of value and salvation would not have prevented them, cannot be brought up here; they are in themselves intelligible as complements of a loving outlook. The more passionately I am dedicated to a vision of human community, the more bitterly must I ‘at first’ be against those who try to destroy it or disturb and deny it merely by their non-participation. Certainly that vision of community can be extended to include the refractory, to embrace them, in the sense that they too deserve our devotion in spite of all – stones answered with bread – but the opposite course is also logically in order, to do away with these elements of opposition, to remove them altogether from the human community in our immediate environment. Surely everyone knows from his own experience that we all, in our fully private, non-ideological, ‘apolitical’ love for a person, will gladly broadcast the fact through our aversion for other persons or types of person who are widely different. This is linked with the perspectival finitude of personal life: if we love an object, this is in general more of a free-floating, isolated, ‘gift’-like datum, than when we hate an object, which always implies a more dynamic relation to the circumstances of our life. (But even such a free-floating love can never be made completely independent of the scantiness of our entire life-expenditure, and will be accompanied by the – perhaps completely unclearly outlined – shadow of what we ‘correspondingly do not love’, which we ‘correspondingly reject’.) 5. We come now to the question of ‘how hatred sees the world’. We start with the thought that all hatred contains the suggestion of a metaphysical experience. This is also true of love or fear, but perhaps in a less considered, formulable, pointed, sense. The fearful would like to save himself and would be content with that; the lover affirms, has contact with, hedges round, an object, and thereby, in a secondary sense, colours the part of the world which contains it. Hatred, however, persecutes and

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tracks its object, instead of merely banishing it from the zone of contact, it strives for its ‘annihilation’ and enrols it under the category of ‘evil’, which all points to a more highly tensed metaphysical consciousness. A purely and consistently hedonistic, positivistic and unmetaphysical outlook on the world could more completely dispense with hatred than with love and fear. The demand and promise of hatred – at least in one of its aspects – amounts to a kind of decision over the destiny of the world. ‘World’, of course, cannot here be taken literally; nevertheless, the world-selection in question here is felt not as a strictly isolated special domain, but as a perspectival world-covering in the shape of a dome. The hated opponent is not only the opponent of the hating subject himself, but appears as the element to be simply attacked, as ‘evil’, as one who ‘ought’ not only to be ousted, but, in addition, ‘annihilated’; not only, on the other hand, as an ‘evil one’, who must be recognised as such and condemned or, in addition, punished, but also as ‘that evil counter-power over there’, as the concretely given evil opponent, with whom a war is being fought for the possession of a representative piece of the world, which, therefore, transcends itself and stands for the world as such qua object of combat. When one considers that perhaps no hatred was ever more glowing and world-shaking than religious hatred, one will not find the suggestion too far-fetched that every genuine hatred conceals within itself a trace of religious hate. For religious hatred is indeed not, say, the attitude of a judge towards one whom he considers wicked and false, but an attitude whose motto is ‘we, God’s army, here against that army of the devil there’. If there is a classic world-view of hate, it is surely Manichaeism: the view of the world as battle-field and battle-product of the One Definitely Good Principle and the One Definitely Evil Principle, with just as good a title to be real. Would we be wrong in conjecturing that the root of that coincidence of moral condemnation and hostile personal attack, which is the mark of all hatred, however trivial, is to be found in the religious, specifically manichaean, idea that the world is divided into the company of those evil beings there and these good beings here – among whom ‘one belongs oneself’? In all this the world is most emphatically regarded as a world on which both parties certainly do not have a place, although both try to make good their place on it. I certainly do not think that this thought is contained in all the hatred of any lout, let alone any animal. But let us not forget that a ‘world-view’ is not the property of philosophers or cultivated people, but of all beings who think and feel; that it may well be hard for the philosopher to analyse and substantiate the concept of

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sin, yet the shepherd ‘possesses’ it just as he does the concept of wool. The under-estimation of ordinary common sense (like the related chatter about ‘instinct’ and ‘the unconscious’, which is supposed to explain everything) originates in the disproportionate regard for thematically formulated thinking, which – for reasons we cannot follow up here – is far poorer in most people than suggestive, fleeting, non-recurring, elliptical, incompletely expressed acts of thought, which are nevertheless deliberate and effective. It might perhaps well be the case that we could not hate if we did not have – part of our collective heritage – the idea of the devil, of the ‘evil one’, a world-shaking, as it were army-recruiting, power. It goes without saying that this idea did not first enter the world with Christianity, Parseeism or Judaism. However, we may assume that hatred – like love – acquired a much tighter meaning in the spiritual atmosphere of these religions, on the basis of an ethical world-dualism, than the Greek ideas of friendship and enmity. If we only assess people simply by whether they are qualitatively ‘better’ or ‘less good’, ‘worse’ or ‘less bad’, ‘more valuable’ or ‘more worthless’, we are, as I see it, still linking the question with that of friendship and enmity (Socrates discusses these matters in Plato’s Republic). Hence we never reach that depth of love and hate, of will to shared life and will to annihilation, which we attain when we can ascribe people – no doubt often independently of their individual values and disvalues, virtues and vices, abilities and defects – to the ‘communion of saints’ or else the ‘crowd of sinners’.11 With every obvious reservation, therefore, and mindful of pregnant expression rather than of uncontroversial formulation of what I mean, I would like to put it like this: human hatred presupposes a ‘diabolisation’ of its object, accompanied not by a theologically clarified concept of the principle of evil, but by a view of the object as bearer of an evil ‘world-role’: as though not only the bad traits of the object were bad, but as though its interests and acts of will were in themselves, whatever their content, emanations of an evil world-power. The battle of ‘interests’, which is part of what hatred posits, is naturally quickened thereby with a special pathos. The fact that individual traits in the character or conduct of the hated one are ‘interpreted’ as one-sidedly bad is not the kernel of the matter; it is not just a matter of a secondary dressing up of one’s own interest. Rather, if there is to be real hatred, there must also be a contrast of essence, a seizing on the objectively disvaluable traits in the opponent, so far as these are themselves bound up with the given situation of conflict. Only on this assumption are such auxiliaries called up as the almost insanely evil interpretation of all utterances of the one hated.

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When it is said that all hatred presupposes the idea of the devil, and, on the other hand, that all love presupposes the idea of the absolutely valuable, that is, God, the two constructions are, after all, not of the same order. Indeed, the first mentioned claim is not even tenable in a purely empirical and psychological sense; on the other hand, the theory that all love is love of God is surely defensible on the basis of a theological metaphysic. But there is a difference here: the lover is satisfied by the beloved more than the hater by the hated; the turn to the ‘world-principle’ sets in a stage earlier in the latter case, a stage closer to current consciousness. For hatred points without more ado to a ‘battle-front’, which immediately suggests the idea of a ‘front’ dividing the world; love, by contrast, by no means so directly implies the idea of a battle front and a separation between this side and that, not even in the sense that one feels that one belongs to the same fighting community as the beloved object. There must already be a special expansion of the experience of love – perhaps of a contemplative kind – if one is to see in the object concerned the rule of a world-principle, whose ultimate source and highest representative is not this object itself. Perhaps it is also true that absolutely any object of the existing world is much more likely to lead the ‘spectator’ to God than the Devil; nevertheless, hatred itself posits a closer reference to the Devil than love to God. This is of course also connected with the greater variety of kinds of love in comparison with hate, of which we have already spoken: the continuous transition between higher spiritual love and more lowly forms of attachment has no analogous gradations on the part of hate. Furthermore, this helps us to understand that the Manichaean view of the world, for which the central datum of being is the confrontation of good and evil powers, somehow ascribes more reality to the Devil than to God. Greater impartiality, however, helps us to see precisely that the aforementioned asymmetry points to an existential precedence of the Good. For it helps us to the insight (certainly attainable in other ways) that the experience of the conflict between good and evil follows far more directly from the side of ‘evil’, but that an experience of evil necessarily also implies a reference to the ‘battle front’, and hence a reference back to the good; on the other hand, the experience of the good can be self-contained, and only requires a reference to evil in special circumstances or for the sake of metaphysical completeness, never as part of the experience itself. The logical and ethical dubiousness of hatred in general – to a great extent independently of which ethical system ‘we make our own’ – is clearly to be seen in the fact that two (individual or collective) opponents can hate each other passionately – just as in religious hatred – and that, in

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very many cases, it is the opponent who hates the other more passionately than vice versa, who can be, according to ‘general’ judgement, ‘patently’ worse in a moral sense, the ‘vicious’ one of the two. The questionable ‘diabolisation’ can therefore not only be ‘mistaken’, unjust or deluded, it can even directly reverse the real state of things (cf. below, the hatred of the Devil!); to be obsessed with the other’s evil may be directly linked with one’s own actual evil. The very common attitude of resentment, which leads one to make all kinds of insinuation against better and more capable people, to attribute to them secret shady motives, and keep an especially watchful eye open for their misdeeds, belongs here. This phenomenon only interests us to the extent that, in its extreme forms, it throws some light on what is problematic about hatred. With some simplification and stylisation I would say that all hatred is directed against ‘evil’; but, in accordance with the situation of conflict, it imputes non-evil and valuable elements to ‘the evil’, and thus does evil itself. This is especially clear from the way conscienceless and violent men are so receptive to hatred and hate-filled denigration of their opponent. If, in von Hildebrand’s sense, moral surrender consists in putting the principle of ‘important for me’ in the place of ‘objective value’, it applies to hatred, in that ‘against me’ is confounded with ‘against the Good’. It goes without saying that this presumption is never purely arbitrary and unfounded, but it connects with the – perhaps even scanty – existing elements of disvalue in the opponent, in order then to proliferate unchecked and uninhibited and even to distort his merits into defects. This of course should not lead one to confuse the characteristic phenomenon of the evil person’s hatred of the good with the phenomenon of hatred as such. (This whole discussion presupposes that we can agree on an objective material distinction between good and evil; yet a too hasty exclusion of such an agreement would gravely hamper the growth of knowledge.) If a clearly ‘evil’ person hates a clearly ‘good’ one, this hatred can also be mutual; the evil one is not evil because he hates, let alone solely for this reason; and this is only one type of hatred among many others. That ‘diabolisation’, then, which is an element in the hatred of mortal men, can be best grasped metaphysically or theologically, if we interpret it as the stance of a creature who is both attacked and tempted by the devil. God’s abhorrence of evil (a clear-cut doctrine of the church), including the evil in its concrete bearers, is the first archetype of our earthly hatred (and can be called hatred, in an extended sense); the second is the (in the strict sense) hatred of the devil and of the damned souls in general for God, for the Good, and also for created spirits in general. The Â�abhorrence

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of mortal man for the evil which assails him is thoroughly good; if he hates and ‘diabolises’ his ‘enemy’ in his whole essence, indeed even the good in it, this is certainly evil, but still implies the good element of a general, as it were, formal turn against the ‘devil’ as such. The hatred of the damned souls for God is, however, that boundary case of hatred in which there is no longer any question of holding the opponent to be evil, but the soul remains utterly hardened against the Good – though one’s own self-being is still affirmed as ultimate formal boundary value. Characteristically, the real primal sin of the devil is not hatred, but pride (Hochmut), of which hatred is only the consequence.12 Besides this violent ethical self-legitimation in hatred, which has just been set forth, the destructive trait of hatred is still open to moral attack. The absoluteness of the annihilation-intention bears in itself a trace of hostility towards being as such. There is also the fact that hatred, by its very nature (hint of a world-traversing front) directs itself preferably towards what is real, powerful, mighty. Hence there is in it something ‘world-uprooting’, a tendency to smash the structures of being. The likewise very typical hatred of power and success, which does indeed contribute so much to the unmasking and combating of injustices, points to this nihilistic, world-dissolving tendency of hate-proneness, to drive a wedge between value and being. On the other hand the question arises here whether combativeness, the spirit of reform and criticism of the powers that be would be possible without hate, whether even personal self-assertion, which is indeed inseparable from the critical examination of questions of objective value, could proceed at all unless hatred were given some licence. 6. Both the fundamental ethical rejection of hatred and its possible and necessary correctives are rather hackneyed things, about which not much of importance can be agreed. Everyone knows that one ‘ought to’ hate the sin, not the sinner, and that one cannot always distinguish the two; that feelings of hatred are perhaps unavoidable, but that at any rate it is possible to fight against it, to confine oneself to justified selfdefence and an objective settlement of the antagonisms; and that one can oneself respect the person as such in the hated – loathed – opponent, indeed, even love him. Nor can it possibly be our task here to conduct an ethical and religious polemic against those who reject the above point of view from either side: against those who reject the Christian demand to overcome hatred as unhealthy, unmanly, un-German, and so on, and declare themselves

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for a formula like ‘love what is good, hate what is bad’ or ‘love your friends, hate your enemies’; or against those who expect that a sufficiently extensive religious enlightenment of mankind will bring about the disappearance of all hatred or who are prejudiced against almost all struggle and all enmity. The question whether the spirit of the undiluted gospel approximates to the latter position or whether such a view is based on confusion, can as little be discussed here. Catholic Christendom, at all events, rejects – see also the foregoing discussion – the idea of a world (at least an earthly one) without enmity, a world without genuine battle, including personal commitment.13 However, before we conclude, we ought to say something about two questions which are perhaps important as philosophical prolegomena to ethics. The irremovably present yet completely indefinite mutual relation between love and hate, which we addressed in §4, proves that hatred can be overcome. There is no rigid polarity, according to which every decrease of hatred would have to correspond to an equal decrease of love in the contrary direction. It is, rather, both wise and possible deliberately to cultivate and expand the loving attitude, whilst the attitude of hate is confined, loaded with restraints and over-shadowed by the commandment of love. ‘Friend’ and ‘foe’ are not related like reciprocal values in mathematics; human beings are, rather, free to assign more of their personal commitment to the positive side. Thus gratitude is neither in logic nor in fact completely detachable from revenge; but a maximum of gratitude can coexist with a minimum of vengeful desires: because the two are not experienced as symmetrical transcriptions of an in itself decisive mechanical law of requital; rather, gratitude is felt to be an expression of an ethos of support and love, vengefulness an expression of an ethos of destruction and hatred – love and hate as stances towards the world – though both have important links with the natural tendency to retribution of the person concerned. Hate can be an unavoidable part of a given situation of opposition and also ‘correspond to’ a love presupposed in it, whether it be love for the milieu of the object, about which a ‘decision’ must be made, or love for the opponent of the hated one, in so far as a clear and essentially deep confrontation is present. But love is something more spontaneous, manifold, more involving the whole of life; hate has no way of measuring the love which ‘corresponds to’ it or of standing surety for its genuineness. In a purely phenomenological sense, preceding any ethical policy-making, hate is more bound to love than the reverse. An ethical elaboration of this statement is perfectly possible. We must see here an important point of attack for combating the heathen

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affirmation of hatred. Love may not be absolutely possible without hate, yet the disposition of love without the disposition of hate is possible. Perhaps there is no capacity for love without a capacity for hate; but a loving nature and a hateful nature are perfectly clear contraries. A person whose character is structured by ties of love and readiness for devotion can – and perhaps must – become entangled in hatred, and even strong hatred, at many points of the world he relates to; but his thought neither must nor can be permeated and infected by hatred. Secondly, the distinction between hatred which is more personally directed and that which is more abstract, and directed to non-personal objects, can be upheld. Hence the ethical demand to confine it to the latter cannot be simply dismissed as artificial. Although all hatred is directed to real products of the power of decision and not mere structures, and is thus never free from a certain personal touch, a tendency towards the annihilation of unique, historically given human essences, it also always contains a decision ‘about’ some third thing, perhaps something ‘loved’, indeed, there is always a suggestion of the ‘world’, ‘humanity’ or the ‘people’, so that the opponent is never irrationally hated without remainder as ‘that person there’, but also as ‘embodiment of a policy’, that is, as an effective power in the sense of a decision (one we oppose), in the language of feeling-perspective, of a ‘world-decision’. Thus all hatred is both personal and impersonal, and the emphasis can be differently distributed towards either side. Hence the relative possibility (and relatively greater justification) of hatred of ideas felt to be false, or hatred of ‘wickedness’ and ‘depravity’. Nevertheless, the personal ‘bearers’ involved here and now are always included as well, as is also the case with collective hatred of hostile priests or party leaders, to some extent of hostile social strata themselves. For only as thus embodied are the ideas and principles of conduct and formation, which are rejected and abhorred as such, effective, ‘active’, ‘oppressive’ within the confines of reality. Yet these ‘effective figures’, the current objects of hatred, these hated ‘images’, are, once more, not completely and unambiguously identical with the persons concerned themselves. When the hostile statesman withdraws, perhaps battered and defeated, into private life, he is no longer the one ‘we loved to hate’. The political hate of his opponents may still make him quake even in his lonely cell, and he may perhaps ascribe to it purely personal traits; but, at one fell swoop, he has ceased to be the focus of this particular burning hatred, which has now perhaps settled on some other person. Many reactionaries would no longer hate the worker, if he ceased to be a ‘Marxist’ (though he would still be a proletarian); the worker and democrat would perhaps

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have as such nothing against the young peasant who at present presses him hard in his fascist uniform. In the purely personal sphere it often happens that hatred pales and evaporates once the opponent leaves the shared social circle, or embarks on a ‘change of function’. From here we may derive some guidance for the concretisation and making valid of the desire for annihilation hatred contains, whose indefiniteness, endlessness, insatiability, are most indicative of the slippery slope which threatens to lead the hater down into ‘hell’. Impersonal ‘conquest’ and ‘putting out of action’, instead of endless and unlimited desire for annihilation, could be employed as tactical ethical leitmotif for ‘dealing with’ those who hate. Even in this respect, therefore, do ethical reflection and influence have scope. Hatred, by its very nature, transcends mere impersonal opposition, but there is the possibility of diverting it from the basic spiritual substance of our world, from personal existence as such, and of confining it to a certain zone centred on the sphere of impersonal decision about forms of human relation. Notes 1. Alexander Pfänder (Zur Psychologie der Gesinnungen, Halle, 1913) entirely refuses to believe that we could hate, say, animals and plants except as somehow ‘humanlike’ objects. But someone could hate even lifeless objects, for example, cars. Would they then not have to represent a hated cultural style? 2. On disgust and the negative stances as such cf. the author’s essay Der Ekel (Jahrbuch für phänomenologische Forschung, Halle, 1929). [Translated in Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, eds. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer, Chicago: Open Court, 2004.] 3. The mere attempt to harm an object (or a person), perhaps for one’s own advantage, can be completely free of hatred: Pfänder, op. cit., p. 25. 4. Pfänder (op. cit., p. 41) writes of the ‘corrosive, scorching, destructive nature’, and again of the ‘inhibiting, scorching, stifling virulence’ of the current of feeling known as hatred. 5. There is also hatred free of any practical intent, sufficient unto itself: Pfänder (op. cit., p. 28). 6. See Pfänder (op. cit., p. 15) on hatred of classes, party, peoples, etc. 7. Here too we refer to Pfänder (p. 97): current sentiments – preeminently love and hate – are not only directed at their objects, but also stream from the subject towards them; they are active on the plane of existential situation and are not built up on the results of reflection. Nor on merely receiving impressions; the ‘displeasure’ ‘sparked off’ by the look of the object, already presupposes hatred. Pfänder, op. cit., p. 35. 8. The great importance of these kinds of hatred is also emphasised by Pfänder (op. cit., p. 15). 9. Pfänder’s excellent essay, cited several times above, does not deal with these asymmetries, probably because he has chosen to concentrate on the formal divisions of the sentiments. 10. The connection between life- and world-hatred, the technical will to master Nature and analytical thought of an ‘unravelling’, ‘isolating’, kind has been emphasised by many thinkers stimulated by Nietzsche, including Scheler, and, more one-sidedly

An Essay on Hatred (1935)â•…â•… 173 and romantically, by Theodor Lessing, Klages, and so on. In reality we cannot gain any understanding of the essence of conceptual knowledge by this route, but only of its exaggeration when separated from other psychological and cultural spheres. 11. Cf. under the key-word Devil (Teufel) in Wetzer and Welte’s Kirchenlexicon, 2nd edn, vol. 11 (Freiburg i. Br., 1899): ‘Thus, therefore, is mankind divided into two armycamps until the Day of Judgment; ready for battle, the Children of Light confront the Children of Darkness, the Children of God the Children of the Devil (Apg. 26, 18, Eph. 5, 8, Col. 1, 13, I Thess. 5, 5, I John. 3, 10); there is no communion between justice and crime, between light and darkness, between Christ and Belial.’ Could hatred, in all its senses, be excluded from all this, even on the side of the children of God? 12. This is the opinion of most theologians (see op. cit.). 13. Cf. the entry ‘Love’ in the cited Kirchenlexicon, vol. 7 (1891), §VII: The strict duty of loving our enemies consists in the exclusion of hatred and desire for revenge, together with the outward signs of these things, also that such expressions of benevolence are shown, which among persons of the relevant status, otherwise count as duties. It is (according to Aquinas) not a violation of love to abhor the bad properties of a person, as long as the person as a whole is not hated; nor to rejoice at the punishment of the criminal and the frustration of evil designs, as long as it does not amount to sheer joy at the other’s misfortune, in which, of course, the danger of hatred is already clear. §IX: Odium inimicitiae (hatred of the person’s very self) is more unconditionally evil than odium abominationis (hatred because of his evil deeds), where there is still a question of separating the person from his evil conduct. Envy is clearly more severely condemned as peccatum mortale ex genere suo.

11 The Humanitarian versus the Religious Attitude (1944) I A completely or an originally irreligious civilization has in all likelihood never existed, but it is not, in itself, unimaginable; what is more important, the modern civilization of Western mankind, originally (and still, in part, actually) Christian, has revealed a trend of evolution towards a society in which, practically speaking, religion as a determining factor of private and public life is to yield its place to a non-religious, immanentistic, secular moral orientation which may best be described succinctly as ‘humanitarian’. While such a prospect cannot but appall the believer, it has also evoked misgivings and apprehension in a good many nonÂ�religious or not emphatically religious students of human civilization; nay, terrified some of them, perhaps, to an extent to which it could never terrify the believer himself. For it is precisely the nobler and more perspicacious kind of mundane thinker who is apt to be worried primarily about the fate of human civilization as such, than which he knows no higher thing. Yet it is a grave problem, and one that poses itself on a purely worldly level of thinking, how far an irreligious civilization can subsist at all, or how soon it is bound to degenerate into a state of barbarism: in other words, whether humanitarianism is essentially capable of maintaining itself in actual reality or is fated to defeat its own ends, thus marking but a brief transition towards disintegration and anarchy – coupled, of necessity, with new phenomena of tyranny and new forms of gross and superstitious creeds widely dissimilar to its own mental world. It goes without saying that the rise of Communism and of Fascism – most characteristically, however, of Nazism – is entirely calculated to 175

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impress the observer as premonitory signs (if not more) of just such a turn of evolution. The problem I have indicated concerns the Catholic less directly and from a somewhat different angle, but concern him it certainly does. It is not only that we are interested in civilization as against barbarity; nor, merely, the greater freedom the Church may hope to enjoy under a tolerant humanitarian system as compared with fresh brands of virulent paganism and a totalitarian idolatry of secular power; it is also well for us to understand wholly and in all its implications the intrinsic inadequacy of humanitarianism, so as to be able to help our non-Catholic and nonChristian fellows towards a fuller understanding thereof. For secular preoccupations of a legitimate and dignified kind have often in history supplied valuable and important elements of society with the initial motives for their conversions to the Faith. The sketchy remarks which follow, destined to throw some light on a very few aspects of the vast problem, are purely analytic in character, and in no way supposed to contribute directly to a historic prognosis or a cultural program. I may also observe that I intend to examine, here, the ‘humanitarian’ attitude as contrasted to the ‘religious’ attitude in general, rather than to the specifically Catholic one. By no means does this imply, however, any leaning towards the shallow and absurd view that all religions ‘teach essentially the same thing’; nor indeed the view that any kind of ‘religiousness’ is necessarily better, or more consonant with the basic values of Civilization than the irreligious attitude in its humanitarian form. II A few clarifications regarding nomenclature may seem advisable. 1. By a ‘religious attitude’ we mean a corporate – or at least, a socially relevant – outlook on human affairs which contains a reference to a ‘higher’ Power (or a system of such powers) underlying ‘cosmic’ reality, and invested with a ‘claim’ to determine, direct, or guide human thought and behavior. The term ‘higher’ is meant to indicate an order of Reality qualitatively distinct from the natural order of things and events as experienced in the everyday existence of a given society, including even such unknown objects and forces can at any rate be imagined as mere additional elements essentially fitting into the texture of natural reality. The word ‘higher’ (for which ‘transcendent’, or, in a looser sense, ‘supernatural’ may be substituted) also connotes a specific relationship

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between the supposed Power and the gradation of recognized values, as well as the hierarchy of social dignities, within natural reality itself: deities are usually, though in various manners and degrees, conceived as the sources, guardians and guarantors of law and morality; as paragons and measures of holiness and rectitude; moreover, as exemplars and incarnations of things noble and things royal. The ‘Power’ in question is also credited with a specific relation to ‘cosmic’ reality: with a faculty of creative and ordering activity, in regard to the things of nature, on a radically and incomparably vaster scale than the human one; a tendency towards assumptions of universality, omnipotence, and creativeness proper is mostly present in some form. Thus, in religion, the incommensurableness between man and the cosmic forces which surround and condition him without, apparently, being affected by his actions in any but an infinitesimal sense, is at the same time reaffirmed and – tentatively, at least – healed: man is no longer simply a hopeless exile lost in the vastness of things extra-human of which he is doomed to occupy a tiny corner; by dint of his proper contact with the Divine, to which cosmic reality is subject or in which it is centered, he comes to fill a rightful place, to assume a positional value as it were, in the Universe (whatever his concrete conception of the latter). Finally, to the Divine – though its personal nature be represented in a vague and uncertain fashion only – is attributed a ‘claim’ on man; in other words, man’s cognition of the Divine inherently entails obligations on his part. These are always closely interrelated, though never purely and simply identical, with whatever he experiences as moral obligations. The duties and functions of men (in society, or under the eyes of society) thus appear to be specifically incorporated in the ultimate principles of Being as such. I have, naturally, employed a more or less modern and technical language (though, as best I could, a ‘neutral’ one), rather unlike the terms in which actual religious consciousness is wont to express itself; yet it is in some such way, I think, that the main purport of that consciousness may be conceptually grasped. It remains to be added, however, that the religious attitude also very generally encloses what we might briefly call a negativistic aspect: a tendency to break, to pierce – at least, to modify and to relativize – man’s natural egoism, lust and joy of life The motifs of asceticism, sacrifice, self-renunciation, of fear and awe tinging the reverence due to the assumed higher powers, are by no means confined to Hinduism and Christianity; in some form or other, they reappear in practically every religion. Some consciousness (be it ever so dim and rudimentary) of the Fall and of the

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corruption of human nature, of the need to ‘propitiate’ the ‘angry’ or ‘jealous’ godhead – or again, of man’s need to ‘purify’ himself by techniques mostly involving asceticism – are seldom absent. It is by making him aware of his ambiguous and precarious status as a natural being that religion provides man with a more settled and enhanced position in the face of cosmic nature. His impotence in relation to his environment is rendered more bearable, and indeed even actually lessened in various indirect ways: but this is granted at the price only that he refrains from certain actions which he could perform without even becoming liable to any immediate or clearly consecutive punishment, and that he constrains himself to certain other actions which by themselves are entirely strange, and even contrary, to the trend of his primary and ‘normal’ needs. In connection therewith, the religious attitude always fastens on some element of mystery, too; some concrete and particular myths, holy objects, rituals and rules of conduct: things which from the very outset (and not only in our modern consciousness) essentially differ from the ‘evident’ and more generally communicable data of both experimental world-interpretation and rational morality. In all religion there is some aspect of the mysterious and arbitrary, distinct from normal everyday orientation: something that – apart, perhaps, from such rather specific states of mind as are described under the name of ‘primitive’ animism – subsists as an alien body in the midst of the otherwise prevailing types of thought and ‘pattern of reactions’. The religious contact is definitely experienced as an ‘irruption’ into the natural set of relationships. (Thus the belief in miracles does not, as the pitiably shallow philosophy of enlightenment would have it, issue from ignorance of the ‘laws of nature’; on the contrary, the very concept of the miraculous presupposes a familiarity with the laws of nature.) Finally, I have alluded to the ‘corporate’ character, if not of all religious belief or experience as such, yet of all religious systems and practices. Religion is essentially not a matter of ‘opinions’, ‘convictions’ or ‘conscience’, though these may play a legitimate part in a man’s basic acceptance or rejection of a religion, and again in their turn are conditioned by one’s religious allegiance and outlook. In fact, religion always intrinsically tends to be ‘tribal’ or ‘national’, or again, whether or not with a universalistic intent, to constitute a community of its own – a ‘church’. And, unlike many other types of ‘association’, the community coordinated to a religion tends to enter into the thematic content of that religion: the ruler is a descendant or a member of divinity; the people is a chosen or a priestly one; the Church herself, as a body, is holy. The adherents of a religion experience it, not only as important and as uniting, but as the token, and

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the generative principle as it were, of a specification of mankind aware of its own identity. If the religion is frankly universalistic, as is the case with Christianity, then mankind as a whole is deemed to be destined to reshape itself in the concrete community of the ‘children of God’. 2. The irreligious attitude, on the other side, need not of course be what we call a ‘humanitarian’ one. An un-spiritual, purely private and ‘Â�selfish’ outlook on life, for instance, is of fairly common occurrence even in religious ages. Humanitarianism, however, is the standard type of nonreligious philosophy. It has risen, in unprecedented vigor, on a soil tilled by Christianity: that is to say, in our own modern age characterized by a decaying and shrinking Christian religiousness. Obviously, Christianity at a stage of disintegration and retreat is calculated to prepare the ground for humanitarianism, for the Christian religion itself; being universalistic, personalistic and moralistic, we may even say in a sense rationalistic, bears a strong connotation of humanitarianism in the broader sense of the term. It places man as such in the center of the created universe; hence the Christian in the process of losing hold of his religion; and restricting his interests to the world of creaturely things, is likely to set up ‘man as such’ as the measure of everything, and to develop a humanitarian outlook. Many simple minds among the modern half-educated hold that humanitarianism is all that is essential and worthy of respect in Christianity: he who devotes his cares to ‘social welfare’ is the ‘true Christian’, though he may not believe in the biblical God, that ‘old gentleman with a big white beard’ – seeing that he obeys conscientiously the injunctions of Jesus the great ‘teacher’ of ‘unselfishness’. Many moderns less naive, and some of them actually Christians, maintain that humanitarianism is nothing but ‘Christianity rationalized’, which in their eyes may mean either a ‘perfected’ or an impoverished Christianity. The truth is that humanitarianism is one of the primary, inherent possibilities of our philosophical orientation; it is revealed, for example, in certain types of ancient thought represented by men who lived long before the Incarnation and never heard or cared about the Jewish God. But certainly modern liberal society, with its mental complexion mixed of Christian, semi-Christian and post-Christian ingredients, exhibits the traits of humanitarianism with a unique sharpness and completeness. The humanitarian attitude, then, takes its departure from the ‘human needs’ in a comprehensive sense of the word: what ‘men’ desire and what they fear, what ‘men’ appreciate and what they loathe, what promises to secure or to enhance and what is apt to threaten or to stunt the

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‘Â�development’ and the ‘happiness’ of ‘men’ is to provide us with the basic data for our orientation. All kinds of ‘needs’ and the ‘needs’ of all men or groups of men are equally legitimate in principle; any preconceived bias or restriction is illegitimate. Account is to be taken, indeed, of the mutual interdependence and conditioning of the ‘needs’, including the tensions and antagonistic relations among them: hence the necessity for a (temporary) repression of needs, and for their ‘scaling’ as well as for their ‘education’, is granted. But certainly human needs can only be opposed by – or, on the strength of – more imperious and urgent, more general and more durable needs. We must have a selective recognition and rejection or postponement of needs: but this must be effected on the basis of a purely immanent consideration of the needs themselves – that is, on a basis of ‘reason’; it must not be done in deference to any prejudice claiming absolute recognition over and above human needs as such – which would mean ‘superstition’ in the place of reason. A strictly humanitarian orientation is, of course, impossible in practice, because an all-embracing conspectus of mankind’s needs is beyond the mental range of its members, taken individually and collectively; ‘arbitrary preferences’ of various kinds will always enter, though sometimes surreptitiously; they tend to change more or less rapidly in the typical humanitarian mentality, which logically involves a cult of flexibility and adaptability. As regards the metaphysical interpretation of the world most suited to humanitarian ethics, it is inherent in the creed itself that this cannot be more than a secondary concern; on the whole, however, some variety of a naturalistic, mechanistic and sensualistic pattern is undoubtedly preferable, since an attempt to ‘explain’ the world with the exclusion of ‘transcendent’ entities is best in tune with the central tenet: the immanent sovereignty of human needs. Yet a deistic, pantheistic, or even ‘Christian’, phraseology may seem quite permissible: for a really consistent, broad-minded humanitarianism will not hesitate to register the ‘religious needs of man’, as well as his ‘aesthetic needs’, along with the more serious ones. In any concrete question of morals, moreover, humanitarianism may (and often does) happen to arrive at the same conclusion as, say, Catholicism. That the irreligious-humanitarian morality is in no case actually and intrinsically ‘the same’ as any religious morality, and in what typical ways it tends to differ therefrom in a material and tangible sense, will be examined in the third and main part of this article. 3. Before that, however, we must devote some attention to the phenomenon of quasi-religious attitudes. Man does indeed stand in great ‘need’

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of religion: wherefore, whenever the traditional religion of a civilization is weakening, and irreligious patterns of thought acquire ascendency in men’s minds, a secondary appearance of semi-religious or para-religious attitudes can be observed. We are faced with a heretical watering-down of the traditional religion, arbitrary qualifications of the humanitarian creed, semi-scientific fads and fashions, autochthonous or imported superstitions actually believed or flaunted as a matter of diversion, political ideologies assuming a religious tinge and fervor, and the like. In our own days, Communism and Nazism are sometimes described as ‘pseudo-religions’; the label is erroneous, particularly in the case of Communism, for what is present there is not so much worldly incentives operating under a pretence of religion as an attitude akin to the religious one which is camouflaged as a ‘scientific’ or purely political doctrine. Hence we ought rather to speak of ‘crypto-religion’, or use the standard term adopted by some critics of totalitarianism: ‘secular religion’. In fact, concepts purely immanent, natural and scientific in appearance, such as the ‘dialectic evolution of productive forces’ or the ‘world revolution’, the ‘Nordic race’ or the ‘Germanic values’ etc., come to assume a psychological function not devoid of certain ‘religious’ traits; for not only do they claim devotion and self-sacrifice, they also carry with them a note of mystery and arbitrary specification, they seem to embody a self-subsistent reality ‘transcendent’ to the rational operations of the individual mind, and, in a word, they belong to the realm not merely of political ideology but of ‘collective myths’. Lenin and Stalin, and Hitler to an even higher degree, unmistakably represent mythical figures in a far more proper and pretentious sense of the term than do the liberal, revolutionary and nationalist political heroes of the last hundred and fifty years, or the minor dictators of our own days. In a very loose way of speech, we might of course call the ideology of the French Revolution a ‘religious’ one, as it is certainly anything but a plain statement of ‘scientific truth’; but much more properly may we so describe Communism, and again in a yet stricter sense, Nazi racialism. Although, in fact, the ‘self-evident truths’ of the liberal revolutionary ideology are far less ‘self-evident’ than they were made out to be, and may in part be no truths at all, they are conceived as ‘self-evident’ to anybody’s individual reason as such; their appeal is directed simply to the ‘enlightened self-interest’ of men. The aspect of ‘revelation’ and ‘prophethood’ implied in Marxism-Leninism, and in a franker fashion and with stronger metaphysical connotations, in Hitlerism, has no counterpart at all in the sphere of humanitarian liberalism. Nor do I think we are Â�justified

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in calling nationalism the ‘religion of the present age’. A virulent and operative creed, enclosing even a good deal of unreasonableness, need not be anything like a religion: the latter requires an element of cosmic reference, of superhuman afflatus, of mystical transcendency, experienced – though not perhaps formulated – as such. A society absolutely addicted to humanitarian irreligion seems wellnigh impossible; the predominance of this creed will be mitigated by various ‘substitutes for religion’ which in a religious society would not be present or would be present in a less emphatic, a more simply natural form only. Besides, in the humanitarian societies we know Christianity itself has survived, though largely in a fragmentary shape, and in a restricted and equivocal position. But Communism and especially Nazism, signalizing the advance in depth of the crisis, seem to announce the possible advent of genuine new religions opposed to humanitarianism. This, however, is not meant as a prognosis. It is conceivable that all attempts to introduce new heathen religions in a society impregnated with Christianity will prove abortive; that there will follow a reviviscence of the old religion, or again, a consolidation and expansion of the humanitarian system made more livable, for some time, by subordinate religious factors like traditional Christianity, a somewhat tamed Communism, and possibly others to come. To avoid a crude misconception, it may be worth noting that ‘genuine religion’ has nothing, of course, to do with ‘true religion’ or ‘authentic faith’. ‘Genuine religion’ belongs to a purely natural, socio-psychological, descriptive order of concepts; it is quite irrespective of the truth or untruth of the given religion’s claim and contents. Several religions may not be essentially true at the same time, nor even enclose the same amount of partial truth; but many contradictory religions may well be fully ‘genuine religions’ at the same time. The worshippers of Baal professed a more genuine religion than many present adherents of a vague and threadbare Christianity soaked in humanitarianism; yet there is more truth, according to our belief, in the religious ‘persuasions’ of the latter than in those of the idolaters. III Turning, now, to the differential description of the humanitarian as contrasted to the religious attitude, we must naturally qualify our query. That the religious mind places God, or the Deity, or things divine, in the center of its outlook upon life, whereas irreligious humanitarianism does not admit of these except perhaps as mere verbal decorations – this is not the difference which interests us here but only the premise to it: the

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definition underlying the question. We might best put the actual question in the form of an initial doubt on its relevancy. There is an obvious nexus between religion and morality; but most of us have known definitely moral men who were wholly, or all but, irreligious. Civilizations seem to be called into life, and sustained, by religions; but, to put it in guarded terms, a case can be made out for progresses being possible in a civilization weakening in religion and approaching the creed of irreligious humanitarianism. We may prefer, and prefer infinitely (supposing, in particular, that we are already believers in one given religion) religion plus morality, and religion plus civilization, to morality and civilization alone; or again, to express it differently, morality or civilization inspired and informed by religion to morality or civilization built on irreligious foundations. Yet at the same time we might be obliged to admit that as morality or civilization pure and simple, one may look very much like the other. To take one very plain example: I may, at the risk of my own life, rescue a fellow-man from a burning house, because I obey God’s commandment enjoining the love of one’s neighbor; but I may equally do so without believing in any divine legislation, because I consider it a moral duty on humanitarian grounds. It would be a false notion (and, let it be stressed particularly, by no means a Catholic one) that in the second case my action, though objectively useful, cannot be a genuinely moral one. Certainly I may also rescue the man from danger because he is a debtor of mine, or in order to boast of my courage; but that is not the supposition. On the other hand, quasi-religious motives may also sometimes approximate towards a crude utilitarianism in reference to expectations in the hereafter. Not only is it possible for a man to understand, to appreciate, and to cultivate, say, justice, kindness and self-control without referring them back to the qualities and the will of God, but (in orthodox Catholic doctrine at least) the immanent distinction of Good and Evil is one of the logical premises to the Faith itself (God is good, and wills the good; the good is not simply ‘what God wills’). Are we, then, concerned with a mere difference in the ultimate motivation of moral behavior, without any bearing on the essential contents, as well as the actual recognition, of morality? 1. It is indeed the problem of motivation, and, linked to that, the problem of obligation on which the defenders of religious morals have dwelt most insistently when criticizing humanitarian ethics. From recognizing the good to practising it, from discerning moral values to accepting the sometimes very onerous obligations they entail, it is a far cry: religious

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belief in a cosmic reality specifically related to the moral law, and it alone, will guarantee the acceptation of that sacrifice, the translation of moral cognition and preference into terms of action – with the renunciation of pleasures and the endurance of hardships implicit therein. The irreligious man may fulfill his duties so long as they are pleasant; he may also comply with unpleasant ones so long as the privation of satisfactions they involve is moderate, and there is a recompense in sight on another level of pleasures; but as soon as duty pure and simple confronts the behest of the senses or the possessive instinct, duty will prove weaker: as soon as the man’s morality is put to the ultimate and decisive test, it will break down. Viewed in the average perspective, this argument is certainly sound; though it is worth remembering that moral life as a whole does not predominantly consist of ‘ultimate and decisive tests’ and heroic situations, and that religious moralists and pedagogues, too, are almost invariably eager to point out the physical and secular usefulness of a moral conduct and the probable deleterious consequences of sin. It is more important for us to emphasize, however, that irreligion is also bound to impair moral cognition itself. True the irreligious mind may discern good from evil; but again it ‘may not. Whereas our primary ‘moral sense’ as such does not depend on religious concepts, it yields no concrete, certain and fully articulated knowledge of good and evil: the latter requires an authoritative divine guidance (which may reach us either in an authentically revealed or, at any rate, in a vague, dimmed and partly distorted form). Whenever, on the other hand, a moral duty strikes the ‘decent’ but irreligious man as definitely unpleasant, he may well tend to explain it away and to develop a falsified ethic in order to escape both material unpleasantness and the equally unpleasant consciousness of moral guilt or inferiority. Against such an aberration he is protected by no sure safeguard. The humanitarian ethicist who takes his stand on the comprehensive system of ‘human needs’ will no doubt arrive at many materially correct conclusions: first, because true morality in fact closely corresponds with the universal and perennial ‘needs of man’, and secondly, because our supposed ethicist, if he is intelligent, will take account of the ‘data’ of the natural ‘moral sense’, too (that is, of men’s average moral preferences and judgments), in his calculus of ‘human needs’; yet nothing need keep him from placing, in regard to certain problems and in given cases, the urge of morally indifferent or intrinsically reprehensible ‘needs’ (which he deems to be more pressing, more general, or more unalterable) above even very clearly voiced imperatives of the ‘moral sense’. Not only, then, is irreligious morality a fragile thing in practice,

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but humanitarian ethic, too, is at its best a flimsy texture at the mercy of inherent dangers. Moreover, it must be axiomatic even for the non-religious but unprejudiced student that humanitarian and religious morality must always be different in quality. I am not hinting, of course, at the ‘supernatural virtues’ treated in Catholic philosophy, which logically presuppose the belief in transcendent objects of veneration, but am entirely confining myself to the sphere of natural morality. The moral judgment (the act of approval or disapproval as such), the moral decision and outward action, may occasionally or frequently be the same; the moral experience as a whole – even in reference to limited cases or subject-matters – is never the same. For the religious consciousness will, whenever a ‘moral attitude’ is elicited, experience the divine exemplar, codifier and guarantor of virtue at least as a backÂ�ground element of the situation. God is, generally speaking, not the thematic center of natural morality, but the underlying relationship with Him cannot but color and complete even the humblest moral act of deliberation or decision, however humdrum its object. We may understand the ‘nerve’ of justice, as it were (and behave accordingly), without any reference to divine justice ordering the world and providing even human justice with a supreme sanction; but with such a reference wanting or being excluded, we are cut off from the full meaning of justice – applied to matters howsoever trifling. On the impossible supposition that there were no God, I should still speak ‘the truth’ in affirming that a cardboard box now lying on ‘my writing-desk is yellow and circular, and tell a ‘falsehood’ in asserting that it is blue and hexagonal; yet the thought of God having revealed Truth and not falsehood, of Jesus having risen from the dead ‘in. truth’ (which the suspicious and critical Thomas quite understandably doubted at first but was ultimately compelled to admit on the strength of a supremely realistic test), of ‘Ego sum via, veritas et vita’, of true dogma and false heresy, etc., provides Truth, if I may so put it, with a sounding-board of sacredness and inexorable earnestness, should the ‘truth’ in question even concern the color and shape of an unimportant object. Apart from the cases of sensual attraction, particular personal ‘fancying’, or impersonal tribal ‘identification’, the love of our fellow-men will bear a prim, ice-cold, multilated quality unless it be grounded in the love of Him Who alone is absolutely worthy of love and Who bestows His gratuitous primal love upon all of us. Humility and reverence in the human relationships which properly require them may be possible without religious piety, but they cannot help losing depth, savor and firmness, if the sphere of their primary and standard objects is removed.

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The realm of ‘mores’ (that is, of morally relevant social custom) is perhaps even more intimately dependent on religious allegiance than the realm of morality proper. It is by no means in Christian communities alone that asebeia has been felt to be inseparable from anarchy and moral disintegration. The reconciliation of personal freedom, dignity, selfhood and vitality with the requirements of social discipline and coordination, though it may be conceived on extra-religious grounds, constitutes a special function of religion (owing to the specifically ‘uniting’ power of religious experience, and for other reasons which cannot be discussed here); in this matter, particularly, the humanitarian experiment is drawing on the dwindling resources of Christianity, and the precarious balance it has achieved exhibits the signs of shifting towards a totalitarian or ‘identitarian’ loss of liberty and personality: a self-idolatry of ‘society’ pregnant, perhaps, with new types of pagan quasiÂ�religiousness. 2. In sum, the primordial contrast between religious and humanitarian morality lies in the metaphysical substructure, and accordingly, in the ultimate or ‘official’ motivation rather than in the contents; but motivation and contents are far from being radically separable from each other, and, though it be in variable ways and degrees, an essentially altered motivation is certain to react upon the contents themselves. Thus, generally speaking, irreligious humanitarianism necessarily involves a certain bias for immoralism inasmuch as it has no room for the concept of intrinsic moral evil, and of the moral scissure in human nature. Rejecting all intrinsic discrimination between human ‘needs’, and interpreting moral ‘evil’ merely in terms of impulses which in given conditions are likely to interfere with the fulfillment of more imperious, general and permanent ‘needs’, it is bound to profess an ethical ‘positivism’ cleared from all experience of ‘sin’, which is tantamount to a flattening out of all moral life into a technique of the gratification of desires. True, the full substantiality or selfsubsistence of ‘evil’ is questioned in certain religious systems of thought, too (thus, in Catholicism as against Manichaeism); but notÂ�withstanding the essential goodness of being as such, at least in a secondary sense the existence of intrinsic evil – of a basic perversion of the will – is not only admitted but centrally emphasized. Hence, a tendency in favor of the ‘free will’, of responsibility in the strict sense, of a fundamental distinction between formal and merely material defects of human conduct, and of the idea of retaliation: a tendency entirely alien to the humanitarian attitude. The humanitarian attitude will lean towards making the goodness or badness of any type of conduct dependent on the part it may play in a

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Â� functional framework of situations; placing instincts and moods on a footing with the direction of the will, manifestations of the ‘subconscious’ with decisions enacted by man’s central personality, deficiency in ‘training’ or ‘development’ as well as ‘disease’ with malice and deliberate wickedness; and substituting ‘cure’ or ‘prevention’, ‘education’ or ‘elimination’, for all retaliation proper. To the humanitarian mind, Â�Raskolnikov’s ‘claim’ to slaying and despoiling the old usurer will probably appear ‘erroneous’, but not altogether absurd (on the one hand, the old woman’s ‘right to live’ is as much a primary ‘datum’ as everybody else’s; on the other, a strong and gifted young man represents a so much greater volume of ‘needs’ and so much more potential usefulness for ‘society’ that his ‘miscalculation’ is at any rate understandable); while the public authority’s right to execute the murderer must obviously appear absurd and fictitious – for the infliction of death and suffering will not be made undone but merely aggravated by the consequent infliction of more death and suffering. Under humanitarianism, the judgment of crime will tend to degenerate into a mere protection of ‘majority’ interests: to shrink to a mere repression of the inconvenient – or again, perhaps, to expand into a suppression of whatever may be deemed inconvenient. The selfsame mentality that rejects the concept of punishing the evildoer as ‘superstitious’ or a ‘mere disguise for the primitive urge of revenge’ may glibly accept the ‘elimination’ of the ‘unfit for life’ or the ‘maladjusted’ as an act of ‘higher humanity’. 3. It can be maintained that, in spite of its essential bent towards immoralism, the humanitarian attitude may also at certain phases find expression in a kind of hyper-mora1ism. Such transitional phases in the process of the impoverishment and evaporation of corporate religion have been marked, for instance, by waves of hyper-moralism of the Stoic and the Puritan type. An intensified, systematized and particularized moral strain may be substituted for the vanishing mystical substance of religion; with faith proper growing more doubtful, reduced and threadbare, a crampedly ‘impeccable’ life may serve to demonstrate one’s ‘effective’ belief in whatever is ‘truly essential’ in religion, or one’s actual membership in the body of the ‘elect’ or the ‘wise’. In advanced humanitarianism, the aspect of hyper-moralism will still be present but bear a different tinge. It will no longer cling to arbitrary relics from the old religious morality (including this or that element of material, ‘mystical’ ethics, as well as the overstressing of individual ‘conscience’) but appear more strictly formalistic and organizational: while morality no longer consists in anything but a rational and comprehensive

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Â� administration of ‘human needs’ as such, men’s vision is directed to ensuring a ‘moral world’ and an omnipresence of moral conduct. There is not much sense left in the concept of sexual purity; but, on the other hand, a large-scale building of spacious apartments for everybody will cause sexual impurity to disappear automatically and universally. The ‘solution of the economic problem’ will similarly do away with hatred, jealousy, greed, petty egoism, etc., for when all will live in abundance, there will be no need for anybody to develop such emotions. Liquor prohibition, the outlawry of war, the organized World State, universal free trade, institutionalized national self-determination, etc., come within the same context. Certainly moral values taken in any specific sense of the term seem to be engulfed and transposed here entirely in. concepts of material or ‘psychic’ welfare; but the less content attaches to the idea of moral perfection and the less moral substance appears to be left over, the more pretentious and cocksure becomes the pursuit of the claim to a formally ‘perfect’ world, a morally ‘waterproof’ and indeed a ‘foolproof’ reality as it were. 4. In general, we may state that the humanitarian attitude, while not necessarily out of contact with moral as distinct from material or hedonic values, will be inclined to concentrate (more and more, in the progress of its unfolding) on such moral values as can be grasped somehow in analogy with the evidence of the outward senses. Hence the ascendancy a) of formalism, b) of materialism – as opposed a) to ‘material’, ‘objective’, or ‘intrinsic’ value, b) to spiritual points of view. Supposing the primary sovereignty of human needs without any distinction derived from man’s dependence on a higher sphere of being, and having regard to their most complex and variable interrelationship, our orientation will necessarily seek guidance from principles as ‘plain’ and ‘neat’ as possible, which are invested with a character of quasi-geometrical ‘self-evidence’. The repression of inordinate self-seeking, the principle of commutative justice may carry as much appeal to the humanitarian as to the Christian; an appeal always lacking, of course, the complete weight of the Christian experience of good or ill, but occasionally, let it be admitted, exercising an even more acute and – transitorily, at least – more effective pressure. Every possibility of quantification will be seized upon: the ‘greatest good’ of the ‘greatest number’ is proclaimed; every inequality, at least every inequality not directly traceable to innate physiological differences, is frowned upon as an injustice. The differential characteristics of human persons will be negated unless they are

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verifiable by experimental and statistical methods. Much more attention is paid to the problem of making everyone alike share in the ‘good life’ than to the query as to what the good life really is like; there is less and less care about the existence of standards of culture, but an enormous amount of thought and effort is devoted to the dissemination of culture through education; because the meaning and purpose of life are viewed as purely immanent, and therefore at once self-evident and insusceptible of definition, the technique of life (with a particular stress on Â�technology) becomes the object of a devotion unmistakably imbued with a kind of misplaced religious fervor. The fatal tendency towards materialism is but another side to this. Taking needs as needs, the material needs of man are more massive, urgent and obtrusive than those of the soul, and therefore procure a surer guidance and a more fixed pattern of orientation. Everything else appears reduced to the status of a supplementary decoration; it is ordered on the model of the classic and proven organization of things material; the spiritual is tolerated or appreciated as an epiphenomenon, a superstructure, an article of luxury – gossamer stuff, as it were, that cannot be taken truly seriously in the face of the solid necessities and securities of the material sphere. Nor does this hang on the phrase ‘human needs’, which I think is most expressive of the attitude in question, but is inherent in the very essence of that attitude; instead of ‘needs’, we may as well choose as a dominant formula human ‘welfare’ or ‘happiness’, or even the ‘full unfolding of man’s dispositions and capacities’. All these may be, and very often are, interpreted generously and intelligently so as to comprise the spiritual, not excepting even the ‘religious yearning’: yet, once the perspective of an immanent humanitarianism is adopted and maintained, the spiritual will be credited with no other mode of existence than a mere elongation or ‘sublimation’ (that is, a possibly attractive but unnecessary and peripheric refinement) of the material, an affair of Sunday boredom or festive recreation, of after-dinner pastime or ungenuine romanticism. An unprejudiced contemplation of ‘humanity’, with its curious, manifold and contradictory attributes, is indeed calculated to draw us towards religion: in other words, towards the discovery of man’s ‘fallenness’ as well as his peculiar ontological nobility; of his relation to a supra-human reality which exists outside him; in a word, of the radical inadequacy of humanitarianism. However, given the premise of an artificial restriction to ‘humanity’, implying the axiom that all ‘higher aspirations’ of man are meaningless or at any rate irrelevant for us except as ‘higher aspirations of man’ – irrespective of the objective goal towards which they point – the

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physical substratum of ‘human nature’ cannot help occupying a central and overwhelming position. If a moribund patient is known to be a devout Catholic, or expresses the wish to receive the Sacraments, we will of course be considerate and complaisant enough to send for a priest, if only to apply a bit of soothing psycho-therapy; but on the plane of terrestrial immanence, any drug which we hope to be ever so slightly efficacious will appear more important and needful than the religious ceremony. ‘Culture’, again, has no small prestige in the world of humanitarianism; but it has often been observed that it is valued in view of its being somehow translatable – through whatever more patent or more hidden channels of ideas, and interactions of forces – into terms of ‘money’. The ultimately essential category is not, of course, ‘money’ (it is not an affair of capitalism or market economy, with socialism as a ‘remedy’), but ‘welfare’, economic security and superÂ�security, protection and perfection of the functional mechanism of ‘life’. ‘Culture’ and its enjoyment is supposed to ‘educate’, ‘recreate’ and ‘ennoble’ man: to render him fitter for work and more ‘productive’, to alleviate the strains he must endure and to make him more amenable to smooth and rational ‘cooperation’. Anyhow, the claim of taking into account man’s spiritual nature without a genuine and dominant reference to supraÂ�human spiritual reality is comparable to pretending to a vision of man’s physical nature without a knowledge of the lower animals and the realm of inanimate material things. In the climate of irreligion, man’s spiritual functions and capacities (considered, even, in a purely natural context of objects) will – no matter how much lip-service and sincere enthusiasm be devoted to them – inevitably be understimulated, undernourished, underexercised, and condemned to atrophy; it is the inherent nemesis of humanitarianism that the proclamation of man’s ‘sovereignty’ is bound to displace his center of gravity into the nether regions of his being, and to degrade his nature towards a level of sub-humanity. But, seeing that man is and remains man, he is certain to react, sooner or later, in a fashion unforeseen by his humanitarian shepherds: to react morbidly, dismally, disastrously and perhaps, again, aspiringly and gloriously. 5. A particular point we must pause to consider is that of sexual morality. That the irreligious mind is precluded from the apperception of the values of purity would again be a rash asseveration. Humanity in general possesses an experience of these as of other moral values – though, unenlightened by religious revelation and moulding, it is mostly a stunted and rudimentary one – and sexual immorality rests, not on a

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literal absence of that experience but (apart from the ‘weakness of the flesh’ proper which is apt to stifle it) on the intellectual counter-pressure of hedonistic ideologies. Now such a ‘repression’ of the moral sense by adverse ideology is particularly likely to occur in regard to sex morality. Moral ‘inhibitions’ in this field, more than in any other zone of natural morality, are likely to be qualified by the humanitarian critic as superstitious, obsolete, ‘hostile to life’ and ‘opposed to happiness’. The reason is obvious. ‘Lust’ – that is, inordinate sexual pleasure – typifies, in the most exemplary and characteristic manner, the concept of ‘sin’ as such; and the valuation of purity is the very touchstone of ‘material’ (essential, intrinsic, objective) ethics, In other words, ‘lust’ comes nearest to the idea of a material element of life – or a state of mind – ‘evil by itself’ (the word ‘impure’ is meant to express this) rather than evil on account of its impeding the gratification of more imperative needs or impinging upon more inviolable rights. Perhaps it will be objected that (in Catholic ethics, for instance) the seeking of pleasure is not itself immoral, the profligate or the pervert sinning merely in that he procures himself pleasure by illicit means: just as the thief deserves reproof only because he deprives another person of his rightful property, whereas the use to which he turns the stolen object or money has (generally speaking) nothing bad in itself. However, the structure of the two situations is entirely different: in the case of theft, there is a clear disjunction between good or permissible ‘ends’ and criminal ‘means’, whereas in the case of ‘evil lust’, such a separation is untenable; the circumstances which make sexual enjoyment immoral determine the quality of the pleasure in question and taint the respective experience of the subject as a whole. The situation is comparable not to the one involved in theft as it ‘normally’ happens but to what theft would be if the thief enjoyed with intense excitement the act of stealing itself rather than the goods of which he thus unlawfully gains possession. On the other hand, sex immorality – in its isolated typical forms, uncomplicated by violence or deceit – fails to involve any transgression of the ‘rights of others’, or even any damage to their interests; in an immanent computation of ‘human needs’, therefore, we may easily be driven to decide that those needs in their entirety are better served by disregarding certain ‘needs for chastity’ than by refusing gratification to certain, more or less vehement, sensual needs proscribed by religious or traditional morality. Humanitarian ethics will, without doubt, acknowledge and stress the elementary necessity of self-control and the general readiness to exercise it; but apart from this abstract and formal Â�postulate, definite standards

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of purity can hardly count on any support. The individual and social ‘harmfulness’ of inordinate sexual pleasure as such being susceptible of a very vague and circuitous demonstration only, it will appear ‘rational’ to entrust its indulgence or shunning to anybody’s personal taste – and more than that, to denounce any emphatic moral standpoint and terminology in these matters as intolerant, superstitious, narrow-minded, arbitrary and obnoxious. Immoralism will sometimes make fun of our resentment at murder, robbery, cruelty, tyranny, treachery, mendacity, arrogance, etc., ‘unmasking’ it as a manifestation of inferiority, the ‘instinct of revenge’, ‘neurotic fear’ or what-not; but serious and responsible humanitarianism will rarely endorse such a nihilistic attitude except in a local and accidental context. In regard to the sphere of purity, however, the outlook is darker. For here, as we have seen, adequate and objective moral experience is more intimately linked to a sense of religious mystery – a genuine belief in substantial ‘good’ (with the concept of ‘holiness’ hovering uncomfortably near), and in at least quasi-substantial evil. The temptation to discard this kind of moral experiences as delusive, neurotic, wayward, and requiring a thorough ‘rationalization’ (that is, dissolution), is perilously plausible. Only think of how the vast majority of non-Catholic opinion today looks upon Catholic standards concerning contraceptives and divorce or remarriage, not as too lofty and rigorous but as frankly revolting and scandalous. The most important consequence lies, not even so much perhaps in the actual spreading of sexual licence and its biological and sociological effects, disastrous though these may be, as in the enervating and deadening action of ideological immoralism in respect of purity upon men’s moral sensibility as a whole. The category of good and evil – of virtue and vice – being, as it were, mystically up-rooted here, a process of shrinking and flattening will blight moral life in its entirety, including even its most directly ‘justifiable’ and ‘useful’ manifestations. With the destruction of morality par excellence, the psychological center of moral fastidiousness is obliterated, the ground prepared for further corrosive ‘interpretations’, the leverage established for the destruction of morality pure and simple. A certain formal analogy to the theme of purity is presented by the moral problem of suicide. The felo de se, too, ‘violates nobody’s rights’ and merely exercises, according to his preference, his empire over himself. Here, again, the humanitarian mind is at great difficulty to find any justifiable ground for moral ‘interference’; and this, again, is a matter of at least great symbolic importance. Humanitarianism, while it certainly does not encourage man to practise all sorts of iniquity, portends a decisive moral abandonment of man.

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6. Another important dimension in which the contrast between the two ‘attitudes’ unfolds impressively is connected but by no means identical with the sphere of sexual morality. I am hinting at the rather obscure problems of generation and biological continuity; the sense of the future and the instinct of prevision; the experience of supra-individual duration. The fact that ‘modern’ man, under the influence of what is called here irreligious humanitarianism, reveals a growing tendency to stop procreation and to view the preservation and the status of his family (as a relatively ‘immortal’ social unit) with indifference has been much commented upon. It is not manifest that this should be so; on the contrary, it would be quite understandable that the loss of the religious belief in the soul’s survival after death should strengthen the need for ‘surviving in one’s progeny’; also humanitarianism obviously tends, not to neglect but to overemphasize the physical care for children and the task of their mental education. In fact, ‘enlightened’ man often refrains from begetting progeny unless he feels he can guarantee the utmost degree of security regarding its physical constitution and economic position – which does not happen too frequently or abundantly. However, at the heart of this meticulous responsibleness we may again and again discover an all too anxious insistence on one’s own ‘standard of living’ – the famous ‘motor-car which is more indispensable than a child’. Yet this is not simply a matter of greed. Rather it ensues from a pious economy, not to say a deification, of ‘actual human needs’: that is to say, the claims of human beings existing at present (including children), or presumed as ‘present ones’ (children whose existence is ‘anticipated’). The willful and ‘unplanned’ multiplication of ‘claimants’, with the attendant complication of ‘needs’, is looked upon as irrational; the sovereignty of ‘actual needs’ is incompatible with the realization of a biological or historical continuum. Hence the tendency, not only to regard contraceptive practice as laudable but to consider even artificial abortion as more or less justifiable. Irreligious man lives ‘in the moment’; his great concern about the fate of such children as he happens to have or consents to have does not mean a genuine tribute to the future but merely the incorporation of some technically ‘future’ interests in the context of the present moment: not a genuine recognition of supra-momentary duration (which seems to presuppose a mystical experience, however vague, of eternity as mirrored in continuity throughout time) but merely a craving for ‘improvement’, ‘evo1ution’ and ‘expansion’ essentially immanent to the ‘present moment’. Whoever looks back upon the past as simply dead and done for will also

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lack the capacity for any organic contact with the future. And a mind must be so fashioned which rejects the idea of there being anything more holy and more objectively real than one’s ‘actual needs’ as well as those of the ‘other members of society’ (who people one’s ‘actual’, momentary world). What is most characteristic of the full-fledged irreligious mind is not its disbelief in the immortality of the soul but its loss of the desire for immortality: the evanescence of any meaning attached thereto. This observation is not contradicted but confirmed by the ‘modern’ tendency to ignore death, or banish it from the realm of consciousness, as though it were an unhappy accident or an indecent eccentricity, avoidable in general. Instead of the longing for a status in the order of eternity, the moment with its more and more elaborately subserved needs is set up as a substitute for eternity. Furthermore, the severing of ties with transcendent reality also Â�determines – subtly and slowly though this law may impose itself – a desiccation and fading away of man’s psychic bonds with reality pure and simple. The ‘release of energies’ ostensibly brought about by man’s emancipation from religious concerns, anxieties and inhibitions proves temporary, illusory and lethal. Life that has become ‘its own master’ is bound for suicide. I will no more than mention one highly important political implication: the increasing difficulty for liberal-democratic societies of conducting a sustained foreign policy based on prevision and the sense of continuity. 7. That ‘culture’ in the specific sense of the term – high art, and creative thought – are likely to be seared and to wither away in an age of irreligion has become almost a truism these days, although there was a time when ‘culture’ in this high sense was expected to profit from the disappearance of religion, and also to supersede it advantageously. For it may be conceded that the initial relaxation of religion’s control over men’s minds may sometimes produce a stimulating and enlivening effect on thought and imagination: the first doubts concerning what was generally and unquestionably held to be true yesterday, as well as a certain measure of the freedom to disagree even in basic things, may exercise an apparently fertilizing fascination on the mind and encourage the flight of fancy. But a morbid overÂ�excitement dissembling an inward consumptive process – a decrease of genuine power and of recuperative faculty – will not be slow to follow, and in due course will again yield its place to manifest drabness, inertia and mental drought. The truth is that man is as little equipped to be ‘imaginative’ of his own force as to

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maintain his moral level on the resources of his own nature. Creative and constructive imagination is consistent with disbelief in the existence of its object, or with a state of evanescent religious belief in general, but it is not consistent with religious unbelief as a basic and stabilized state of mind; nor can it thrive in a social milieu sterilized of transcendent references. Imagination may not imply actual belief, but it does imply a resonance of actual belief, piety, devotion, anxiety, consciousness of one’s dependence on a superior Reality: when that resonance is dead, imagination itself will crumple up and become mummified in spite of all endeavors to recapture a mystical ‘mood’ (which is in fact only the aura attending the actual deference to a mystical reality) and of all artifices applied to ‘inspiring’ our thoughts with the allegedly ‘noblest’ theme of human welfare and ‘optimum adjustment to conditions’. Perhaps, it will be contended, the lack or ungenuineness of ‘high culture’ can be put up with if at the same time society lives in a civilized order and a state of prosperity – including literacy and a good level of education – which is doubtless possible in logic. But is it so in reality? In this respect many doubts have been expressed. ‘Where there is no vision the people perish’ is a slogan often to be heard today; though most of those who repeat it seem to take it for granted that the prospering of the ‘people’ is itself the primary and proper object of the ‘vision’. Anyhow, I may not be far wrong in assuming that a danger deeper and more dismal is inherent in spiritual inanition and levelling than the boredom and dissatisfaction of a tiny ‘minority’ of refined intellectuals. Humanitarianism suppresses, thwarts and stultifies too much that is by no means a mere froth upon the surface of ‘serious’ life but belongs to the very viscera of human constitution. Whether or when the mankind of which we are will again hunger strongly and widely for the kingdom of Our Lord we do not know; but there are not a few presages that in some way or other (sociologically speaking) the ‘gods and demons’ will, sooner and more sweepingly than many would surmise, come into their own. More acute observers have voiced the paradoxical suspicion that the emancipation and deification of human ‘life’s aims’ may result in a decay of men’s joy of life, psychic vitality and appetite for work as well as enjoyment of pleasure. If that were true, and more than an accidental and sporadic or transitory phenomenon, it might indeed mean that Â�humanitarianism is doomed to defeat its own ends. Some would put the blame specifically on Puritanism; but I wonder whether the old crabbed Puritans did not live with far more ‘gusto’ and vigor than do the vitamin-conscious sovereign selves of an earth-controlling, labor-saving,

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‘streamlined’ modernity. Others would indict, precisely, mechanized production and the soulless ‘mass existence’ it determines; but civilizations which lacked our technological temptations have revealed more or less analogous symptoms of psychic consumption after the basic faith which inspired them was gone; it seems as though our socio-economic technique of life were less a primary cause than an effect and expression of more central processes. We will not argue at any length with the not too numerous austere moralists who allege that modern man is cloyed and oversaturated with goods and pleasures (as though the simple abundance of goods or comforts could account for the fierce obsession with prosperity; as though surfeiting itself would not indicate a wrong and one-sided kind of food, or an ill-balanced disposition on the eater’s part) nor with those tenacious humanitarians who persist in denouncing ‘underconsumption’ and this or that ‘maladjustment’ betokening that the ‘economic problem’ or, better still, the ‘cultural problem’ is ‘not yet solved’. Most of us bewail the ‘disproportion between mankind’s stupendous progress in controlling the material forces of the world and his much less satisfactory control of moral and spiritual ones’; and this sounds fairly convincing. However, the reason does not lie in the so much greater controllability of material forces but in the fact that Man has essentially chosen to ‘progress’ on the wrong track; and he will continue doing so as long as he dreams of ‘controlling moral and spiritual forces’ (on the model of the material ones, of all things!) instead of surrendering to the moral and spiritual Reality outside and above him. By formalizing, restricting, relaxing and refusing his allegiance to Him Who Is, man has set himself at war (a war waged on innumerable fronts) with Being as such, and condemned himself to seek satisfaction in the dissolution and reduction of all Substantiality and Nobility. By ‘emancipating’ the Image from its Exemplar, the privileged Creature from its sovereign Creator, he has virtually destroyed his very humanity. He will recover his humanity (including even its undergrowth of psychic robustness) as soon as he truly and integrally reasserts the greatest and most vital of his needs, ignored and maimed and stifled by humanitarianism: the need for a meaning of his life which points decisively and majestically beyond the range of ‘his needs’. Aurel Kolnai Cambridge, Mass

12 Contemporary British Philosophy and Its Political Aspects (1959) I. ‘Linguistic Analysis’ The Philosophical School originally known as ‘Logical Positivism’ and today as ‘Linguistic Analysis’ exercises such a hegemony in practice, and occupies such a privileged position in England today, that its preponderance could be compared with that of those ‘official’ philosophies or obligatory ideologies that exist in certain places. It is particularly associated with the name of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (1899– 1951), who, after studying at Cambridge and practising as an engineer in Austria, held the Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge. However, not only are there many philosophers in England of a different orientation,1 there are also many varieties and divergent tendencies within ‘Linguistic Analysis’ itself. It is not a matter of an even approximately uniform grouping – far from it; for, apart from the fact that English public life is characterised by an almost absolute, though somewhat delusive, liberalism, ‘Linguistic Analysis’ definitely rejects all system-building and any attempt to reach a comprehensive conception of the world or of what there is. Rather, it consists in a method, with certain presuppositions, and as such has come to constitute a tradition, an atmosphere, a style of thought which certainly involves excesses and is rooted in ‘fashion’, but which of its very nature requires original contributions, critical discussion and argued disagreement. I should add that my own primary allegiance is to the phenomenology of Husserl, Scheler and Hildebrand, and to the philosophy of ‘common sense’ (especially Reid, Balmes and Moore), and that although I have been glad to submit to a certain extent to the intellectually educative effects of 197

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‘Linguistic Analysis’, I do not ‘belong’ to this school and hold even less title to ‘represent’ it. Thus I am operating here with my own highly simplified and possibly even highly fictitious model of ‘Linguistic Analysis’. But I should also emphasise even more strongly that I have no intention either of making propaganda here, or of diplomatically concealing points of disagreement. Above all, I am totally opposed to that journalist’s or travelling salesman’s historicism which delights in announcing what is new, or perhaps to come, as though it necessarily meant that progress, completion or happiness were at last within reach. I have no wish to put on a display of fine modern merchandise (which would not be my own); I simply want to show that ‘Linguistic Analysis’ has in fact freed itself from certain nihilistic and subversive prejudices of recent neo-positivism, that it has taken up a much more phenomenological and in a broad sense ‘Aristotelian’ position, and that, to my way of thinking, its political implications, associations and undertones bear a certain conservative sign. All this could change and be turned upside down tomorrow; today I confine myself to the cautious claim that English philosophy, as it appears to me at this moment, ought to evoke a positive interest – albeit a critical one – in those who are engaged in fashioning a strong and enduring intellectual framework for conservative politics. This I believe to be the transcendent mission of a considerable part of Spanish thought. The Modern English School A few words on the affiliations and evolution of the modern English school. It is rooted in the empirico-positivist tradition of Hume, not in the more synthetic, system-building positivism of Comte and Spencer. It is also entirely unhistorical in its outlook. Both pragmatism and ‘behaviourism’, or operationalism, assisted at its birth, and here I should point out that perspectives such as these are not completely alien to Aristotle (his conception of the soul as the form of the body, etc.). But then nor are Hume, on one side, and the philosophers of ‘common sense’ on the other (Reid, Hamilton, the Anglican Bishop Butler) completely independent of each other. The more naively empirical, the more crudely naturalistic positivisms of the past were concerned with knowledge, now of metaphysical reality, now of brute observable facts. What most clearly distinguishes ‘logical positivism’ (the direct ancestor of the ruling philosophy of today) from the older positivisms is its particular preoccupation with logic, its interest in the criteria and structural properties of intelligible meanings. One of its most important sources of inspiration were the recent extensions of formal logic, related to the new philosophies of

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mathematics, a region of thought sometimes imbued, perhaps by chance, with a naturalist, rationalist ‘Voltairean’ spirit (Russell), but more often lacking any particular metaphysical sign. Thus, logical positivism in its primitive form (the early Wittgenstein, the Vienna school: Schlick, as well as the young Waismann, today professor at Oxford and more than tolerant towards metaphysical speculations, even of a vague and nebulous kind) was aggressively anti-metaphysical, vocally scientist, full of naturalist and reductionist tendencies and subversive of morality and the spiritual life. But even then the preoccupation with logic, the urge to clarify meanings – which is opposed to the ‘progressive’ obsession with mastering the world and making men happy through material means and technical calculation – was setting limits to these tendencies. This development was encouraged, I believe, by influences more akin to contemplative realism, which, historically speaking, is an heir of Scholastic philosophy: I refer to the group of Brentanoist philosophies (Husserl, Meinong and others) in the Austro-German sphere, and in England to that neo-realism rooted in ‘common sense’, phenomenology, anti-Â�naturalism and anti-pragmatism whose representatives include Cook Wilson at Oxford and G. E. Moore at Cambridge (Moore was perhaps the greatest philosopher of this century; he certainly had the most integrity and limpidity, and his enchanting modesty and objectivity made him perhaps the most likeable as well. He died in 1958, after handing on his chair to Wittgenstein in 1934). Thus even in the early period of logical positivism we miss, for example, the well-known positivist element of utilitarian, biological or evolutionary ethics. Some of these philosophers recognise the autonomy of the higher values, not because they are religious or even especially devoted to morality or culture, but because they are offended by the adulteration of their proper meanings by means of causal explanations in terms of a few natural, tangible, solid and measurable data. Rather, there will spring from this logicist attitude (which is still more deeply rooted in phenomenology) a formalist deviation, albeit not of a Kantian kind (for Kant is a system-builder, a constructor, despite his analytical powers): ethics will become more or less equivalent to a ‘logic of moral discourse’.2 The later Wittgenstein (whose works were only posthumously published), together with Gilbert Ryle and the other leaders and disciples of the school, now take offence when they are called ‘positivists’, and in general direct their attention to what is today known as ‘Linguistic Analysis’, while other heirs of the Vienna School, above all in North America, still adopt a more properly positivist orientation, though with

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an even stronger accent on logic. This bifurcation finds expression in the way that the latter group are more interested in natural science and its conceptual requirements, while the former investigate human praxis in its totality, with all its multifarious projects and themes, whose conceptual requirements are very different and, as I see it, far more genuinely philosophical, and much more like the conceptual apparatus of the Scholastics or the phenomenologists. The Foundations of a ‘Perfect Language’ This is a prominent mark of the disjunction. On the one side the endeavour of Carnap and other neo-positivists established in the United States to construct the foundations of a ‘Â�perfect language’, codified in mathematical symbols, free of the ambiguities, equivocations, changing shades and ineliminable variabilities that make actual human speech so elusive and so vulnerable to rhetorical, or ‘Â�persuasive’, abuse. On the other side the current English practice, whose spirit is quite contrary to theirs, of thoroughly investigating ‘ordinary language’, of extracting from its riches and even its imperfections the knowledge – carefully considered and raised to a level of logical consistency – of what is already materially familiar, of the world just as we suffer it, live in it and modify it. In other words, it is the attempt to keep to the demands of logical rigour throughout our analytical discourse of the chosen theme, but in the knowledge that all our clarifications – austere, dry, disinterested, reasoned, even pedantic – presuppose, without our ever being able to change, replace or ignore them, the huge fund of man’s ‘pre-philosophical’ knowledge and thought, with its subtle and yet imperfect, capricious and even irresponsible, logical structures. Because it has become so much more modest, agnostic, simple and, so to speak, resigned, the present successor of neo-positivism has, in a sense, drawn nearer to metaphysics – of an intuitive, casual kind, glimpsed beyond a great variety of perspectives and experiences as much intellectual as affective. It continues to cultivate logical rigour, but makes concessions, which shows a kind of wholesome humility, since this is a matter of knowledge without rigour. There remains, however, a positivist mistrust of ‘metaphysics’, whether of the systematic, syllogistic, ‘classic’ variety which seeks for rational ‘certainties’, or of the intuitive, arbitrary, visionary, ‘romantic’ kind, which loves to involve itself in what is obscure and impenetrable. It still tries (and at this point I am almost in complete agreement) to avoid any

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formulation that might sound pretentious or bombastic, or like a play on concepts divorced from their primary meaning, the meaning which is rooted in the evidence of experience, or in ordinary language. One might say that the positivist horror of all possible kinds of ‘meaninglessness’ lives on in the disguise of verbal precision or plain speaking. But this attitude has passed, gradually though not yet completely, through a process of modification which has now almost reached a point of decisive change, of inversion of sign. So much so that the truculent positivist joy in ‘unmasking what is meaningless’ and impiously condemning all utterances that are neither formally logical or mathematical, nor dry and immediately verifiable descriptions of facts, nor theories of experimental science,3 seems already buried in the distant past. There is a tendency to elucidate what is vague, ambiguous and fundamentally obscure (even though it may in the process appear precise, clear and elegant) and to ‘translate’ it into a more critical, valid and balanced phraseology (not ordinary speech, but a philosophical language with unavoidable technical terms, ‘which can, however, be defended before the tribunal of current usage’). This tendency, one assumes, presupposes that speculations cast in vague, equivocal or obscure terms, or even in an idiom of false clarity, dogmatic certitude or complacent simplification, can, in spite of it, be given a meaning better worth consideration; indeed, that non-positivistic philosophy – metaphysical, idealistic, intuitive, refined, or whatever – may very possibly contain something important yet hard to formulate, even if it may say it in an inadequate, obscure, equivocal and high-flown or pseudo-precise way. The former desire to suppress what is genuinely philosophical has given place to the task, essentially phenomenological, of understanding it, and, wherever possible, of extracting it from the heart of everyday life itself (including its scientific, technical, affective, moral, aesthetic, etc., aspects). The other branch of neo-positivism, still in its ‘adolescent’ stage, diagnosed ‘pseudo problems’, Scheinprobleme, in all philosophical speculation, and exposed them with a roar of triumph. By contrast, the philosophy inspired by the later Wittgenstein among British thinkers of today recognises the classic problems and dilemmas as genuine difficulties, even though it sees them as for the most part provoked by the ineluctable imperfection and ambiguity of language. Far from simply putting them aside, it proceeds to handle them by a method of linguistic clarification it calls ‘therapeutic’: this, in the last analysis, is a way – perhaps in general a very fruitful one – of trying to ‘resolve’ them. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that linguistic analysis is in the

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process of returning – discreetly and critically, with some embarrassment and Â�inhibitions – to metaphysics (in a broad sense of the term), without which, after all, human life would remain unnaturally distorted. Linguistic analysis is not a doctrine intended to exclude genuinely philosophical thought. It appears to me rather to have proved itself as a school of critical thinking, useful, indeed indispensable, in guiding, purging, disciplining, stimulating, canalising in the direction of wiser judgement the speculations and intuitions of philosophers – though there is no doubt that even today it can smother and render them sterile.4 The Linguistic Zeal of the English It is clear that the name ‘linguistic analysis’ is not, like ‘psychoanalysis’, analogous to ‘chemical analysis’; that is, it is not analysis in the sense of the taking apart of a whole into its elements, ingredients, factors or atoms. Rather, it is exactly analogous to ‘grammatical analysis’, which is certainly a kind of taking apart, but not with the intent to disintegrate or reduce, but to interpret, understand, intuit, make clear the ‘meaning’ of the whole as such. This fact already indicates the in some way ‘conservative’ character of contemporary British philosophy, its Â�predominantly receptive and reflexive note, in contrast to reductive schemes aimed at ‘interpreting’ reality with a view to changing it, to reconstructing it in conformity with a pragmatic and preconceived (Marxist) model. In contrast, also, I proceed to add, to the constructions of idealist systems which aspire to ‘explain’ and ‘justify’ the world. (Although this appears to be an equally conservative activity, it is full of revolutionary potential [Hegel], since it implies a devaluation of reality on the ideal plane, which will always tend to change into an active and ‘creative’ utopianism). In contrast, finally, to a philosophy subordinated to teleology for which ‘interpreting’ the world would only be interesting as a means of sanctifying it. The purely ‘analytic’ attitude, which also characterises the phenomenological style of thought, attempts to interpret for its own sake, though I believe that this cannot be less than an interpretation for guidance in human practice, helping man to live with a heightened consciousness, to attain a more lofty level of reflection, understanding, characteristic intentions, and the capacity to adapt them appropriately to the situations that call for them. What, then, of the specifically ‘linguistic’ basis? Language, after all, is not the world, or reality, or the complete ensemble of things, their relations and partial orderings. Certainly; but philosophy is far from being either primary experience or the scientific study of things, although it is,

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in a germinal and rudimentary fashion, present in both. It is the reflective illumination and secondary corrective of our thinking, both theoretical and practical (both moral and appreciative, I would add), about the things that surround us, constitute us, oppress us, satisfy us, etc., both in themselves and their relations: thinking that crystallises in language, in our use of words, propositions and syntactical relations. From time to time philosophers have been obsessed with language, from the Greeks to de Bonald and Balmes, and more recently the phenomenologists; nor should we forget the linguistic aspects of the definitions and distinctions of scholastic philosophy, moral theology and jurisprudence. Well then, the preoccupation with language, the distinctive mark of the English school, comes from the discovery, or, better, from the vivid awareness, that the idioms of speech contain their own characteristic, arbitrary and mysterious life, which is not simply identical with a plain and simple revelation of things as we know them; and that, as a result, the reflective, analytic and interpretative – meaning-confronting – penetration of ordinary language, with its various supplements, can put right many errors, falsifications and one-sidednesses, and encourage in every direction what contemporary French philosophers call prise de conscience (‘awareness’). In Husserl’s Logical Investigations and in the carefully nuanced descriptions of his disciples – Reinach, Scheler, Hildebrand, Pfänder – attention to language and linguistic observations abound.5 The linguistic interest of the English today stands out not only by being more thematic and sustained, but also by being less ‘essentialist’, less focussed on substantives or even adjectives, more syntactical and propositional, and therefore more conscious of ‘types of situation’. In this respect the linguistic school shows a certain parallelism with existential philosophy – though I am not sure if this has yet been noticed. However, we can see similar tendencies in the late work of Husserl; I am thinking, above all, of his magnificent posthumous work Erfahrung und Urteil.6 Words as Signs The phenomenological method, especially in its descriptive variant and obviously akin to the Scholastic ‘rational psychology’, consists in the analysis of ‘philosophical’ concepts of particular philosophical interest, represented by key words. Examples: Bewußtsein von (‘intentional’ reference), ‘cardinal and ordinal numbers’, ‘value’, ‘hatred’, ‘resentment’, ‘inauthentic’ or ‘ungenuine’ in contradistinction from ‘deceptive’ or ‘insincere’ (Pfänder), ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’, ‘disgust’ and ‘what gives one the shivers’ (my essay Disgust, 1929). Here words are mostly Â�understood

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as transparent indicators of concepts, rather as though each word designated a univocal and predetermined meaning which we simply had to discover. However, despite frequent etymological investigations, the linguistic interest does not become a theme in itself, though the creation of new technical terms and arbitrary, ‘stipulative’ definitions (a common German vice, this), disseminated as if they were not created but took confident possession of ‘essences’ is common. On the other hand ‘linguistic analysis’ regards ‘current usage’ as central, and although of course it uses and creates new technical terms of its own, they are employed in a far more marginal way, with apologies, so to speak, in awareness of their malleability and of their being a ‘lesser evil’, just as the trace of ‘current usage’ always remains vividly present. It is the ordinary man (not parliament, not the ‘people’ in the private and dialectively subversive sense, and again not the ‘sage’ or the ‘aristocrat’) who is sovereign over philosophic thought, with his incomplete and fragmentary intuitions of common sense. ‘Usage’ – it is here that meanings are sought, and perhaps more distinctively those of types of proposition, locutions and forms of expression rather than those of words apparently corresponding to fixed concepts. For example, the relation between the forms of affirmation and the forms of appreciation. (It is significant that Cardinal Â�Newman, whose fundamental work is entitled The Grammar of Assent, was a highly typical Englishman.) A more specific example: Nowell-Smith’s analysis (in his Ethics) of the affective and non-affective connotations of valuejudgements, especially moral, or, speaking more loosely, practical ones. He asks ‘Can I say this: “You would do well if you did this; nevertheless, do not do it!”?’ Such an utterance is not rigorously contradictory or logically absurd, but it is, in Nowell-Smith’s words, ‘logically odd’. To be intelligible, it needs special justification or explanation, morally legitimate or the reverse. (If you did this you would act rightly, in accordance with the law which you and I accept as valid, but in acting thus you would harm me, you would adversely affect what is in my interest; hence I would like you not to do it. Or, by contrast: you would be right to do it under ordinary circumstances, but in this very special situation your acting in the ‘conventional’ or even ‘prudent’ manner would be immoral.) Practical and moral evaluation do not with logical necessity imply the accompanying recommendation ‘Act!’, but if the supposition is natural, it contains it by ‘contextual implication’.7 Nevertheless ‘linguistic analysis’ is not ‘linguistics’ and not even a philosophy of language, although naturally there are genuine mixtures and transitions, one might say ‘overlaps’. Not only a book like Jespersen’s

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Philosophy of Language, but also grammar as such, and syntax of all kinds, contains philosophy – a good deal of it. The Spanish distinction between ser and estar, the Spanish and even more the English distinction between I speak and I am speaking, the distinctive use of the forms of past tense, prepositional usages, etc., are full of epistemology and even ontology. However, in English philosophy, the linguistic interest, although a matter of method in the first place, does not go beyond the instrumental. It does not study language properly, rather it takes advice from it – and corrects itself, modulates itself, with ‘therapeutic’ intent, from case to case. The excessively subtle analyses, with their pure and delicate expressive distinctions, produced by Professor Austin at Oxford – the meanings of ‘excuse oneself’, or of ‘pretending’ – already constitute an extreme, a limiting case. Besides, there is a lack – too great a lack, since the philosophical point of view is thereby harmed – of interest in different languages. It seems to me that linguistic analysis suffers from a national, even insular, monism, which seems to verge on naiveté and detracts much from the objective value of its enquiries. The logical emphases of different languages vary considerably among themselves, and it is a clumsy fallacy to identify current English (or current Spanish, French, German, etc.) with current language as such. How may this defect be compensated for? A difficult question. Certainly not by the ‘organised intensification of cultural exchanges’. But there is a definite lack of multi-lingual perspective amongst those dedicated to linguistic analysis. Although I would attribute a definite one-sidedness to the English linguistic analysts – not a sectarian one, but rather a convenient and customary one – in their methodical predilections, I would, on the other hand, also accuse them of not being linguistic enough. In the final analysis English philosophy is still philosophy, and, for all that it handles its themes linguistically, remains in contact, more or less, with the classic and perennial problems of philosophy. In recent years there have been increasing signs of interest in what is now known in England, with a ponderousness which gives me the impression of entering a Â�German or North American ambit, ‘the philosophy of psychology’, a second edition of Scholastic ‘rational psychology’ (the most valuable contribution, I believe, of the Aristotelian heritage, with echoes of Brentano, Meinong, Pfänder and other phenomenologists). The best example I know is the little but very characteristic and substantial book Intention (on intention, motivation, the will, the practical reason) of Elizabeth Anscombe, who is married to another philosopher of the same type, Professor Geach. These two, both profoundly and emphatically linguistic philosophers, are at the same time Catholics with certain roots in Thomism.

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II. Political Aspects The ties between philosophy and politics, the influences in both directions, vary considerably in both character and significance, according to social and historical circumstances and the type of philosophy concerned; but in some way, however recondite, a national philosophy, thriving at a particular time, always reflects the general spirit of the society in which it flourishes, and, on the other side, constitutes a source of mental reference which is bound to exercise a directive function on public affairs, and to have, at least in embryo, some political implications. ‘Linguistic analysis’, it must be observed, is preeminently what is known in English as a ‘philosophers’ philosophy’ – a philosophy for professionals, for academic specialists, who discuss and dispute among themselves, with very little tendency to popularisation and very few ties with the literary world, or the world of belles lettres properly speaking. (For the most part it expresses itself simply in dry philosophical books, even more in ‘papers’.) In this respect it is more akin to Scholasticism, to a Meinong or perhaps a Zubiri, than to figures like Ortega, Unamuno or Sartre, or even Hume. Up to now, attempts at real political philosophy have been relatively few, little noticed and rather modest. I would name Weldon, who died a few years ago (a positivist with a realist accent, belonging rather to the early foundation of the school); Mabbott, author of the book The State and the Citizen, anti-totalitarian with a certain empirical and pragmatic colouring, purely ‘commonsensical’ and ‘open conservative’, sceptical of liberal dogmatism; Gallie, propounder of the contestable, but very carefully argued thesis that liberalism and socialism represent two mutually irreconcilable moralities (forms of ‘ethos’) (though without reaching the sensible conclusion that both are false), and Acton – neither a Catholic, nor a relation of Lord Acton – author of the masterly work The Illusion of the Epoch, which is the most implacable, most patient, most complete and most convincing annihilation of the web of logical contradictions and conceptual swindles that makes up the ‘philosophical farrago’ (to quote the concluding phrase of the book) of the Marx-Engels duo and their successors. Flourishing of Ethics By contrast, we are witnessing a profuse flowering of ‘ethics’, the philosophical preoccupation most characteristic of the British, and perhaps the Scottish even more than the English. It is true that contemporary Â�English ethics often remains firmly cloistered within the bounds

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of a mere ‘logic of moral discourse’ – the impassioned analysis of the concepts of norm, rule, obligation, code, license, prohibition, commandment, etc. It gives the impression of a formalism infinitely more sensible, modest and bound to the authentic experience of moral norms in their diversity, than Kantian formalism; but all in all there is something sterile, meagre and mutilated about it, and perhaps more dangerous from the moral point of view, since it gives scope to relativism and neglects, to a greater or lesser extent, anything that does not easily lend itself to formalisation, such as sexual ethics. (I would here draw attention to a strange mixture of laxity, consequence of the weakening of religious influence, and of ‘decency’ or modesty, symptom of Victorian neo-Â�puritanism – a Â�thousand times repudiated and rejected, but still not dead.) Despite the one-sided emphasis on linguistic logicism, English ethics today still bears indelible marks of the intuitionism peculiar to Moore (‘the good’, an irreducible quality), and of the ethical intuitionism properly so-called of Prichard, Carritt and Sir David Ross, which is radically ‘common-sensist’ (based on the idea of consensus, of Securus judicat orbis terrarum). As for its contents – which cannot be ignored8 – linguistic ethics sometimes combines utilitarian and humanitarian features, at others formalist and regulatory ones, with a fairly strong measure of conventionalism – the most flexible if most superficial form of traditionalism. It is still far from having completely abandoned Christian values and motives, though in general these are accepted or presupposed rather than specifically professed. The leading writers of this school (Hare, Nowell-Smith), in spite of their formalist, normative or deontological stress, tend towards an almost Thomist identification of moral rectitude with practical good works, whereas intuitionism, in agreement with my own position, insists on a radical distinction between them (this does not mean a complete absence of relation between them, as in Kant’s crazy thesis). However, among the linguisticists we may especially note Bernard Mayo (from Birmingham), with an interesting contrast between the moral and the personal, and also his insistence on what I (in one or two articles which show much coincidental agreement – though there is also considerable mutual independence – with his two books)9 call the thematic primacy of evil (prohibition, consciousness of guilt, the task of freeing oneself from evil). A curious case, somewhat apart from the rest, is that of Popper (of Viennese origin), whose genius shows itself as much in his philosophy of science, whose flavour is primarily positivist and Kantian (both in a broad sense), as in his social philosophy, primarily inspired by a leftist-liberal

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democratism. He has just come to acknowledge ‘the informal, confused, non-scientific and totally extra-Cartesian basis of our knowledge of reality’ (note the convergence with the older Husserl: our primary certainties have their place in a context of ‘world-knowledge’), and the ‘outstanding importance of tradition’ for the very possibility of reason and the fashioning of a reasoned and reasonable practice. His short article on tradition supplies an irrefutable and immensely valuable logical instrument for anyone who aspires to be a conservative of wisdom and a sensible reformer. His special aversion to Plato and to historicism, with which I unreservedly agree, arose from his anxieties about Fascism, but they have come to make him an enemy even more feared by utopians of a revolutionary cast. This is part of a general tendency observable in recent decades and indicated a few years ago by Rafael Calvo Serer: intelligent liberals (and not only those who have mastered the art of appearing so) and those who love liberty (more than the dream of human omnipotence, whose other side is necessarily naturalist and reductionist degradation) are turning, willy nilly, for good or bad, into conservatives. Reason directs them towards tradition, even though they would not have possessed that reason had it not survived in them; however attenuated it may be, there is still some continuity with the high traditions of Christian civilisation.10 It should be added that, despite much debate which will continue to repeat itself – this is a feature of philosophy – the thesis of free will and moral responsibility based on it generally prevails (Mabbott, Cranston, Popper – distinguished refutation of determinism – and others). Conclusions Despite its many defects – it is too relativist and too remote from ontology and religion,11 and sometimes also too superficial, unnatural and boring – linguistic analysis constitutes an inestimable, I would not hesitate to say admirable, achievement of intellectual honesty and authenticity, of disinterested, unfettered, conscientious and temperate thought, of habits of criticism (quite different from the posturing of intellectual rebellion and emancipatory slogans) and intellectual confrontation through recourse to ‘current speech’ and the judgement of the ‘ordinary man’ – which is the one genuine human totality. My conclusion is that its political implications are essentially and predominantly conservative,12 and that consequently it deserves our sympathetic and serious, to be precise, our sustained attention, to a much higher degree than the turbid fantasies of German and French Existentialism, with its nihilist, reactionary or subversive and even communist affiliations. I do not say that

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it is a conservative philosophy – this would be the affirmation of a communist, who would label as ‘reactionary’ any thinking not bound up with the urge for political ‘progressivism’ – or that it is entirely free of leftist dangers. Firstly, it is not a philosophy whose adoption or implanting I would recommend; more important, ‘the’ philosophy does not have to be ‘conservative’ in a pregnant or ideological sense – if it were, it would not be a genuine philosophy. Rather, in virtue of being ‘mere interpretation’, with no trace of partiality or fixed prejudice, of taking account of all human preoccupations in their complexity and multiplicity, of holding fast to the nature of things and keeping an open horizon, philosophy is bound to be conservative in effect, since conservatism is in essence the primordial and fundamental assent to the world as work of God; of course man plays a noble and important part in the secondary elaboration of the world, but it is a limited, contingent and always to some degree precarious one. It is clear that the ‘open’ conservatism that I profess – it is not liberalism, though it contains a spirit of liberality – is not the only possible kind, and that it is desirable that on the political field there should be a friendly plurality of conservative forces. It is equally clear than an authentic philosophy which is bound up with specific beliefs and profound experiences of a Christian kind is preferable – provided it does not cease to be authentic and sovereign philosophy marching under an intellectual standard – to an irreligious and unchristian philosophy which is indifferent to God. As long as it remains authentic philosophy, it may easily turn out better qua philosophy. Some linguistic philosophers, who have doubted the tangible meaning that certain metaphysical theses may in general possess, have expressly criticised certain religious dogmas. However, attacks of this kind do not necessarily tend to weaken religious faith. Rather, they have acted as a stimulant to various theologians, reviving in them a keener sense for the logical rigour theological formulations require. I personally think that this has been of great benefit to religion. I do not believe that evasion is the most efficacious means for conservatism. I believe that any conservatism fails if it is not focussed on the perspective of the ordinary man, a perspective which implies and sanctions the existence and vocation of all kinds of men who are not ordinary. We need pure thought, contemplation and analysis just as much as we need knowledge at all; we need powers, dignities, hierarchies and also political and social counterweights. But Juan Español is the legitimate king both of a sane philosophy and of a conservative order of society. Without being able to enter into details, I should like to conclude by putting into relief a curious fact. Many of us believe that the Frenchman

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Bertrand de Jouvenel, author of Power and Sovereignty is the greatest master of conservative thought in our epoch. But despite the deliciously fresh toughness of Power, it cannot be disputed that Sovereignty marks an immense advance in philosophical impregnability, a much loftier pitch, a greatly strengthened logical consistency. But equally it cannot be denied that this valuable improvement is the result of the author’s wide-ranging and intimate dialogue with the spirit of contemporary English philosophy. Notes 1. For example: Findlay, who seems to me the finest and most profound philosopher in England today, of both Hegelian and Meinongian persuasion, and only in third place a Wittgensteinian; Paton, the veteran Kantian of Cambridge; Popper, original and influential in philosophy of science and political philosophy, with positivist and Kantian touches, harsh critic of Wittgenstein, as also of Plato, Hegel and Marx; the Scot MacMurray, a personalist with a Christian-Marxist ideology, some affinities with Existentialism and the Esprit-circle; Sir David Ross, erudite Aristotelian of international fame, less known abroad as the culminating figure in intuitionist ethics; Lord Russell, positivist of ‘archaic’ variety, naturalist and Voltairean free-thinker, but decades ago shared with Moore in the work of undermining Idealism; the (very open-minded) Thomists D. J. Hawkins, a priest in Surrey, and Fr Copleston, Professor of the Gregorian University in Rome and with the Jesuit school of Heythrop College, near Oxford. Copleston’s very instructive and painstaking book Contemporary Philosophy, has been published in a Spanish version by Herder of Barcelona. 2. The ‘emotive’ theory of moral judgements, put forth by Ayer, was a very characteristic growth of the then already out-dated neo-positivism: the judgement ‘You ought to do this’, enunciated by me, was supposed to reduce to my ‘desire’ (albeit a reflective and sustained desire) ‘that you should do this’. Ayer himself is now professor at London, and finding his way to more moderate positions. 3. Hume’s celebrated maxim – either pure logic (including mathematics) or scientific description of tangible fact: if it is neither, cast it into the flames – is already refuted by its very enunciation, since this is surely neither pure logic nor description of natural or historical facts. Wittgenstein, more subtle and self-ironical than Hume, admits the confusion of his first juvenile work the Tractatus, and that what he wrote is perhaps meaningless. Popper, relying on this amazing admission, saw with some historical insight a point of affinity between neo-positivism and the fashionable irrationalism, which has been the target of his more crushing attacks. 4. Like every philosophical ‘school’ – that is, every mental climate sufficiently isolated and established, with sufficient internal coherence – linguistic analysis suffers from too many affectations and private idioms. For example, locutions such as ‘But in such and such a context we see that the word x behaves in a different way’ instead of ‘But in such and such a context, the concept of x has a modified meaning’ or ‘. . . rather, the word x is used with a different meaning’. 5. Brentano, the first great demolisher of constructive idealism and one of the fathers of modern neo-objectivism, had already given much dispassionate attention to the investigations of the philologist Miklosich on existential propositions. Marty, Brentano’s great Swiss disciple who held the Chair of Philosophy at Prague, was particularly interested in the structure of language. 6. Certain passages in this book, especially paras 7–8, perfectly express the philosophical heart of a conservative conception of the world, not without a hint of theism – die

Contemporary British Philosophy and Its Political Aspects (1959) â•…â•… 211 Welt als Boden universaler Glaubensgewißheit. Even more than Husserl, the majority of contemporary English philosophers find any kind of political preoccupation, let alone any ‘cultural politics’, totally alien to them. For not only does conservatism – a sane, open and considered traditionalism – contain political truth; the truth as such is conservative. 7. ‘You would do well if you did this; nevertheless, do not do it!’ does not exemplify the rigorous contradiction and pure meaninglessness of ‘I affirm this, and it is false’. 8. However, the anti-formalist material value-ethics of Scheler and von Hildebrand, in its original form, is too exaggerated and arbitrary; Scheler’s depreciation of obligation was the target of an impressive critique by the German Thomist Wittmann (1923). Hildebrand’s recent work, Christian Ethics (New York, 1953), gives due attention to the crucial deontological aspect of morality. 9. Logic of Personality (1952) and Ethics and the Moral Life (1958). 10. The Open Society and its Enemies (1st English edition 1945), Popper’s principle work in political philosophy, exists in a Spanish version; I do not know if his likewise excellent The Poverty of Historicism has been translated. 11. Let me refer here to the distinguished Christian thinker H. D. Lewis, Professor of Philosophy of Religion in the University of London, a protestant without any apparent dogmatic prejudices. Lewis’s painstaking enquiries – he is expert in the linguistic method, but above all inspired by Moore – on the various shades of religious consciousness and its perversions find their natural home within the precincts of phenomenology. 12. It may also be said that contemporary English philosophy reflects a conservative disposition in the society from which it springs, which is more desirous of conserving the goods it has and perfecting some of its own values than of realising a future according to preconceived ideals. It might even be said that through the ‘later’ and now Anglicised Wittgenstein we are now seeing a definite return to the more authentically British traditions (the Scottish school, Bishop Butler, and finally Moore and intuitionism, and one might even mention Samuel Johnson and Burke as non-professional philosophers), in contrast to the French Cartesian influences (Locke and Hume) or those of the Encyclopaedists (Mill and Lord Russell) and to the Hegelian supremacy between 1880 and 1910 (Green, Bradley and Bosanquet).

13 Human Dignity Today (1960) I A simple laying out of themes: Dignity: its relation to value, ‘height’, self-chosen goal, rarity or uniqueness, personality, reason, reverence, liberty, gravity, objects capable of being evaluated, merit, morality, responsibility, equivalence, pressing necessity, possession, hierarchy. Dignity as invariant and as variable. Respecting and disregarding dignity. In what sense ‘inalienable’? In what sense susceptible to increase or loss? Dignity as ‘quality’ or ‘characteristic’, as ‘possession’, as ‘rule of relating’. Descriptive sense and sense of ‘object of attitude’. Necessary interpersonal or ‘social’ reference of the concept. Focal tie with the idea of ‘reserve’ and of ‘intangibility’. Attitudes specifically contrary to dignity. Man as ‘image of God’; ‘person’; ‘rational being’; ‘moral being’ and bearer of ‘rights’ and ‘duties’. The preservation of dignity. The ‘false presumption’ of dignity and the surrender of dignity. The dignity of command; the dignity of service; the dignity of equality. The individualistic sign and the impersonalistic counter-sign of dignity; the dignity of the common weal. Human dignity is not a function of ‘the anthropological’ as such. Human dignity and extra-human things. The danger for human dignity is human (in the first place and the main sense of the word); indissoluble complementarity of human dignity and lack of dignity. II From the point of view of human dignity, modern society (with its industrial, technological, utilitarian, progressive and ‘temporary’ [ephemeral?] dominants) exhibits certain characteristic and definable aspects of 213

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Â� progress, and others of regress. It should then be added that, in the subjective or ideological sense, it is neither primordially and conspicuously based on a new flourishing of human dignity (as perhaps Christianity, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were) nor is it cut off from the ideal of human dignity or indifferent to it. It is clear that today’s society is far from constituting a perfect unity; it is at least divided into the Western world and the Red world; what is more, the ‘third’ world (the ‘undeveloped’ countries, or those which are ‘advancing’) cannot be simply ascribed either to one or the other. However, these worlds manifest, to a great extent, a significant substance in common: that is, their adherence to technicism, ‘materialist’ utilitarianism and the thematic cult of progress. In this respect, their dominant traits are not very different from those of the former fascist world, or of what survives of it. Let us now consider the increase of human dignity. There seem to be three aspects of this: 1. Respect for the equal dignity of all, qua ‘men’. Here fascism was more clearly distinct, since it tended, especially in its Nazi form, strongly to deny racial equality, and showed itself equivocal in what concerned social equality. There is no doubt at all of the prevalence today of the very serious affirmation of both social and racial equality. There is now a fundamental recognition both of the dignity inherent in every human being, and also of the equal right of every human being to ‘realise’ his full dignity. No man is primarily destined to ‘serve’ another man, kind, circle, type, group or other human world as its ‘instrument’. Society today tries to establish the necessary division of functions without condemning anyone (and without allowing that anyone appears to be predestined for it) to a primordially servile or instrumental existence. 2. Closely connected with 1., there is respect for the endeavour to emancipate man from the pressure of extra-human factors; in other words, respect for man’s conquest of the extra-human or material cosmos. This conquest is primarily ordained towards the hedonic and bodily ends of man, but reference is also made to his dignity: modern society strives to make it ‘independent’ of extra-human contingencies. (Symbols of flight, speed, ‘freedom from want’, dissemination of ‘culture’, certain medical and surgical conquests.) 3. Finally, and still intimately bound up with 1. and 2., the organisation of society (national, and even global: of humanity itself, ‘in process of becoming’) as an integral unit of action; a ‘socialist’ ideal not in any way

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limited to the Bolshevik world. This collectivism fails to see an ineluctable tension with the individualist presupposition (humanity incarnate in ‘every’ individual), but is at the same time subordinate to it: universal individualism proper, taken seriously as an object to aim for, contains collectivism. 4. Let us not forget the increase of universal ‘nationalism’ in its contemporary sense: that is, the demand of every self-nominated ‘nation’, or rather of every social milieu determinable in any way (even when it is no more than experimental and programmatic) in geographical, racial, linguistic and cultural terms, which are to a considerable degree accidental, that it be made capable, or that promises be made to make it capable, of constituting itself as a unit of collective consciousness and political will, . . . the demand, I say, of every ‘nation’ in some sense of the word, to be governed by its own human kind, so to speak; the supreme emphasis of the ‘third world’, that of ‘development with a very long way to go’. To put it in yet other words, today’s humanity tends not to tolerate the sovereignty over him of any other human type (a desire which is naturally not independent of the growth of intervention by the state and the great number of personnel who administer the modern state). We may perhaps sum up the modern rise of human dignity in the following words: the attempt to bring about the integral self-rule of man qua man, of man qua any human being, and for that reason of man qua integrated humanity, is in the ascendant; a self-rule inseparable from the penetration and subjugation of extra-human reality. In this context human dignity appears primarily under the aspect of human power – human in its full sense, but for that reason, apart from the intellectual proficiency such power implies, having moral implications regarding the web of relations within the human collective. Let us now consider the regress of human dignity today compared with the world of the past. (Here also we must note the excessive Â�simplicity of the concept ‘the world of the past’; for it comprises an infinite Â�number of distinct realities. Let us think primarily of ‘society’ before 1939 and before 1914, but without excluding any reference to the background of historical periods even further back.) The focal point resides in the aspect of dignity which can be designated in one word: distinction, though of course we shall also see the role played by the ambiguity

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of man’s independence from matter. He who says ‘distinction’ implies inequality; so it seems that we are entangling ourselves in pure banality: increasing human dignity as inherent in the equality of men can only proportionately lessen human dignity as tied to hierarchical relations; in sum, nothing happens without, perhaps, a chance redistribution. But things are not so simply arranged. Perhaps there is an optimal distribution, of such a kind that, for example, the ‘sum total’ of human dignity, so to speak, increases when slavery is abolished (to be confronted only with free men perhaps confers greater dignity than possessing slaves), whilst the expropriation of all the free owners rather diminishes human dignity as a whole, for my human dignity as worker or employee can hardly be increased by the fact that there are no longer any people who are not in a dependent position. In other words, quantity and quality are not simply complementary qualities whose sum could be exactly constant; the dignity of hierarchy or distinction and the dignity of equality or universality are not comparable to a positive quantity and a negative one whose absolute values would cancel each other out. The matter may be clarified by thinking, not so much of the dignity of the master or owner compared with that of his subject or slave, as of the qualitative dignity of man – of his stature, outlook, cast of mind, morality, spirituality, etc – in distinction from his external position. There is no doubt that today this is more and more disregarded; the very idea of this kind of dignity seems to be dying out. I need not here describe the signs of this process; the essence of the matter is perfectly expressed in the catchword ‘the masses’, or even in the fact that the value of the individual is measured perhaps by the growth of his income or else by his purely functional aptitude for serving the collective interest. One cannot in strict logic ascribe this to the absence of kings or princes, exploiting bosses, landowners, privileged persons or simply managers or wealthy men, or on the other hand to republican government, universal suffrage, cooperatives, social assistance or free public services, and so on; in short, it is compatible with the existence of totalitarian tyrants, and, a propos the western democracies, with a milder hypertrophy of more restrained state power (which also comprises a new kind of inequality). Let me be clear: there is no doubt that hierarchical institutions enrich and inspire the development of the qualitative concepts of ‘royalty’, ‘nobility’, ‘gentlemanliness’ and also, to some degree, those of ‘spirituality’. Lordship, security, leisure, relative financial independence, the mode of life of the ‘proprietor’ provide us with examples of attainable qualitative dignity. But there is no rigid tie. In a sense I can carry myself like a ‘king’ or a

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‘gentleman’ without being a great lord or a squire or owner of any kind; but I would be completely unable to carry myself thus (or even wanting to, of attaching value to such conduct) if there were no historical basis of hierarchical institutions or personal distinctions institutionally supported. Well then, the social dissemination of the ideal of human dignity is dialectically opposed to the preservation of those institutions; a distinction which becomes universal tends to iron out concrete and publicly acknowledged distinctions. Naturally this tendency is encouraged by the critical exposure of the failure of qualitative nobility among the ‘nobles’, the fact that any ordinary man may display greater ‘royalty’ of character and stature than many reigning monarchs, etc. On the other hand, lack of respect for institutional dignities will be disseminated, when a certain point is reached, to an increasing disappearance of the consciousness of qualitative dignity; the removal of formal distinctions between categories of men will appear to supply, in itself alone, the substance of human dignity (cf. atheism and spiritual height). Well then, what about the aspect of our problem constituted by the relation between man and extra-human reality? The ideal – in its stoic and other forms – of detaching oneself from external things is, strictly speaking, within reach of everyone: ‘to possess as if we did not possess’; ‘not to possess’ without letting ourselves be determined, moulded, maimed and crippled by lack and pain. The rich man can become too bound up with his possessions; the poor man can mentally elevate himself above his estate (keep his honour and his spiritual independence, etc.). But to the possibility of such internal and essential independence there is attached, unfortunately, the reservation that I have just made: that of ‘strictly speaking’. Independence in virtue of indifference is not impossible; examples can be called to mind, and a more searching gaze might discover the presence of the phenomenon in everyday life, at least in a relative and attenuated form. But it is not easy to achieve. Certainly it exists, but there is a hint of unreality and absurdity about it. We can of course heroically put up with a painful illness; but when it is possible to cure it we do not hesitate to prefer this way of making ourselves ‘independent’ of it. Without Â�contesting the deplorable and vicious occurrence of ‘belly worship’ on the part of those who eat much and too luxuriously, it is in the end hunger rather than eating which subordinates us to the ‘belly’. Thus it is the elimination of misery, and not the conviction that human dignity does not depend on external possessions, which seems to guarantee and in the end realise the dignity of all men. Today very few would dare deny it; it

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is also more or less the official doctrine of the Church. ‘To possess as if we did not possess’: very well, but on condition that we do already possess; as long as we do not possess at all, it is admitted that we preoccupy ourselves, almost go all out, to possess. Well then, where do we draw the exact boundary between possession (of the ‘necessary’) and want? How many possess and enjoy what is ‘sufficient’? Is relative poverty supportable, either at the individual or the communal level? (This question is closely involved with that of the possible ‘achievement’ of material progress.) And for this reason the many undeniable advances of human dignity in modern society do not prevent its ineliminable problematicity in the social context itself; the formative idea of a constantly increasing prosperity has an aspect of the cul de sac about it, a trace of the definitive renunciation of dignity as inherent in personal character rather than in favourable external circumstances. Dignity as value which demands and obtains itself has obscured dignity as human virtue and way of being; and independence vis-à-vis external goods thanks to their possession changes into a kind of dependence on them, less hard and urgent that that owed to penury, but quietly accepted and, as such, irremediable. There are other doubtful aspects of the modern ‘realisation’ of human dignity. ‘Global realisation’ seems to militate against the possibilities of conditional and limited but more genuine realisations. The human or popular type characteristic of our century can no longer tolerate superiorities, but does tolerate tyranny with surprising ease; its desire is not to maintain its dignity in the face of power or superior authority, but to install powers and authorities in which it can feel itself completely ‘embodied’ (as if it were ‘obeying itself’, as Rousseau put it); it prefers a substantially ‘descriptive’ representation to a representation through genuine acts of election; it finds the idea of being governed from ‘outside’ intolerable, but submits with pleasure to a one-party regime and to obey a dictatorship which evokes in its mind the image of its ‘own’ regime. The formidable and irresistible ‘masses’ show themselves at the same time malleable as never before. The most typical part of modern humanity, the least embarrassed by traditions, seems to realise its dignity through a human omnipotent power, omnipotent even in respect of itself. Whilst, let it be admitted, the authentic ideal of human dignity as regards the treatment of individuals (that is, humanistic demands concerning prisoners, women, children, etc.) continues to advance, we are at the same time faced with an age of new and unheard of cruelty, harshness and inclemency – in comparison, at least, with the two or three preceding centuries, and to some degree with a much more extended past. A mystic correspondence

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begins to appear, thanks to the concepts of the unity and the omnipotence of mankind, between the ideas of the complete dignity of man qua man and the possibility of a total negation of this same idea. It will be worth the trouble to look once more at the logic of the concept. ‘The dignity of man qua man’. What can this mean? Could it conceal a fundamental equivocation? One further point: modern society qua non-totalitarian possesses a tendency essentially destructive of human dignity, that is, commercialism (advertisements, the ‘temptation’ of ‘suggestive’ techniques, the grubby attraction of artificial and one-sided hedonism). Naturally we sometimes think of these things as if they were absolutely new, unknown ‘before’ or ‘in the past’. But they are not; though their systematic and pervasive, ‘total’ and mechanized, form is modern; an ideology of the sacredness attributed to pleasures taken in rigorous abstraction purely as ‘pleasure’; the dialectic of the senseless multiplication of ‘needs’ as condition of the satisfaction of needs in general, including the most basic. In this respect also, the humanistic divinization of man ends by imposing his extreme degradation, the total privation of his dignity – or rather, less to impose it than to promulgate it with the greatest cynicism, almost openly and formally. Let us return to the concept of the dignity of man qua man. In reality, this is rather a concept of reversion and resentment. Nor does it possess a primary meaning like the thesis of human goodness, or again of human badness, since the concept of human goodness only has sense in the context of human badness, and vice versa; at the same time dignity precisely does not inhere in man qua man, but qua divine (and in the same way degradation signifies his essential alienation from the divine). I do not mean by this that the concept of human dignity lacks application or real meaning; far from it. Here it is. I must, then, retract some of what I have said. The concept of human dignity is certainly original, but not that of man qua man and nothing more, but of man qua divine, and, as such, as a ‘model’. The king or prince, or even the hero, is of divine or semi-divine ‘ancestry’; the priest or prophet (when distinct from the king, etc.) is ‘messenger’ or ‘spokesman’ of God, or holder of some divine secrets; in general, power or authority is considered the ‘representative’ of God or of such and such gods. There forms around it the atmosphere of a qualitative, mysterious and transcendent dignity. Very well; but what follows is not in the least (as some retrograde, counter-revolutionary spirits have thought) a satanic rebellion of man against this qualitative superiority and its hierarchical expression, to

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the detriment and degradation of man himself. From the very first the acceptance of ‘divine dignity’, in this sense, contains an affirmation of human dignity, though not of man qua man simpliciter. For the man who embodies such authority could not represent the divine unless man were capable of functioning as an image (similitude or even emanation) or as a recipient or agent of divinity. In spite of the hypertrophied and overvalued distinctions between man and man, ‘human’ authority (royalty, priestliness, etc.) represents not only the divine but also the human. What is more, the very man who obeys and serves, the receiver of quasi divine commands, the instrument of higher ends, in virtue of being able and obliged to be such, participates in the divine essence or ‘grace’ in his turn, ‘represents’ it in secondary fashion; it is then asserted in a thousand ways that man and man are entirely of the same stock (the ‘ascension’ always remains a fundamental possibility, even if it is only occasionally realised). What is subsequently revealed will be the basic separability of personal dignity and the objective social situation, in the same way as the fact that personal dignity, to a high degree a matter of personal outlook and conduct intelligible to all (or to an indeterminate number of persons not objectively identified), is attainable by ‘man as such’; and that consequently there also exists a human dignity – a human closeness to the divine – in the face of the powers and hierarchical authorities. This is not a revolutionary illusion or utopian construction, but rather a more adequate interpretation of the reality in contrast to the rigidified and deeply arbitrary fictions of hierarchical authoritarianism. It can carry a religious emphasis, which occurs in a particular way in Christianity – relativisation of the secular authorities; ‘exaltation of the humble’. But this does not yield the modern creed of the dignity of man qua man or of the human simply qua human being. While Christianity introduces a new and strong emphasis on dignity coming ‘from above downwards’ and massive ecclesiastical authority, it also underlines the purely qualitative aspect of dignity: despite the formidable dogmatic and disciplinary authority of the Church, the Papacy and the episcopate, the personal sanctity of every man however humble, and the immutability of moral laws, also possess validity in the face of those authorities. The dignity of man comes from above and drops anchor in the institutional authorities (including that of the secular power), but it also drops anchor as completely in the pure personal qualities of man. (It certainly also shows itself in the influence of Stoicism: no power can touch the inviolable inner life of man, despite the obedience and respect we owe to the lords and the external authorities.)

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Well then, the contours of a two-fold distinction are now emerging: 1. The distinction between ‘man qua man, as image of God’ and ‘man qua man, tout court: man qua human being’. 2. The distinction between ‘man, in accordance with his personal quality, his outlook and conduct, whether his position be exalted or humble’ and ‘man without any stipulation of character or quality, in addition to the elimination of any hierarchical reference’. How are these two points connected? And what causes the transition from the qualitative and religious concept to the non-qualitative and atheist concept of human dignity? There is also a third question: Is the unconditionalness of the modern humanistic position absolute, or is there a new kind of limitation or reservation that serves to modify it, a dialectical result of its very essence? (a) Although man simpliciter and not such and such a man possessing distinctive qualities is an ‘image of God’, this reference as foundation of human dignity accentuates what is variable and virtual in its ‘possession’ by man. The same ‘humanity’ may shine out with very variable brightness from different persons (and acts or situations), but man is always man (and it cannot be denied that this very fact confers on man a certain elemental dignity and is the basis of his general and equal right to treatment implying an automatic and invariable element of respect). By contrast, the radiance of the divine translucence in the phenomenal presence of man manifests itself very differently according to his distinctive qualities and attitudes; it might be better to say that it is revealed in them rather than in the simple and invariable fact of his being human. Accordingly, the invariable presence of human dignity in man resides, when not in his ‘being worthy’ in fact, in the possibility of his reversion, conversion or ascent to such a mode of being. In other words, the divine in us is much more liable to be obscured or still to be specifically evoked than what is merely and literally human. (b) The principle thematic factor of the above-mentioned change must be sought in the longing for realisation. Universal human dignity, as including qualitative and distinctive ‘worthiness’, cannot be realised, let alone through institutional means and unitary determination; human dignity as object of ‘conquest’ and technical realisation, through scientific and planned organisation, or perhaps as the necessary fruit of progress, will be the dignity conceived in the purely humanist mode, which is moreover unhindered by the complication of the inevitably differential character of beliefs and religious dogmas.

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(c) The new tenuousness or fragility of respect for human dignity is well known, despite the desire for its universal realisation. It is true that ‘man qua man’ has absorbed divinity, and also that the place of his essence and dignity continues to be located in ‘man himself’, the individual indistinct and, in aggregations of individuals (‘the people’, ‘the masses’), in contraposition to the privileged objectivations of the human (communism does not consist in adoration of the State, and its hierarchical features are interpreted in a manner more revolutionary than essential). However, the acknowledgement of human dignity in the individual comes to depend differentially on a factor connected to the idol of ‘realisation’, completely different from the ‘worthy’ attitude or conduct of the individual in question. We can briefly call this his functional integrability; the western analogue of this totalitarian concept is so-called ‘adjustability’. Man identifies himself simply with divinity; but the individual no longer simply represents man, but represents man only in as much as he ‘fits’ (above all, in respect of his ideological tendency or aptitude for ‘education’ or indoctrination) into the organized system of self-representation, self-realisation and sovereign self-governance of organized humanity. And in this sense, the modern tendency connotes an aspect of reversion to tribal exclusivity: to ‘we-ism’ as against universalism. Dignity, in a certain special but perfectly tangible and significant sense, is once more becoming considered as incompatible with alterity. The value located in any man without qualitative or hierarchical condition undergoes a certain displacement, thanks to the unavoidable ‘realisation’ of the basic postulate, towards the concept of every man, or in other words it tends to be overridden by the regime of a new concretism which has taken the place of pure indifferentist or neutralist liberalism. Any man, yes; but any man on condition that he be suitable to represent ‘every man’; to perform in the setting of a humanity organized with reference to the complete rule of ‘every man’. The man who represents rather an obstruction in the realisation of the total plan deprives himself, in a secondary sense, of human character, and therefore the title of human dignity is (perhaps entirely) denied him. III The ancien regime, using the term in a very broad sense, can be charged with having neglected the egalitarian aspect of human dignity, and perhaps also with having cultivated the qualitative aspect more in theory than in practice, by not providing enough counterweights to the cult of hierarchical dignity with its bad habits of excessive symbolism,

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Â� superstition and arbitrariness. It is not just that it was not sufficiently on the watch for worthy conduct on the part of superiors on the one side, and for the demands of invariant, ‘purely human’, dignity on the part of inferiors on the other. It also erred by inadequately interpreting the very concept of hierarchical dignity, overestimating the antithetical relationship (the schema of the ‘fixed quantity’) between the dignity of the superior and that of the subordinate, at the expense of the relation of reciprocity which binds together the two dignities mutually counterpoised. The principle I allude to here is that of ‘whosoever honours another’s dignity – Â�especially that of his subject, servant or inferior – honours himself’. This principle, expressed in his own way by St Paul in what he says about Christianity having cancelled out the classic distinctions between ‘Jews and gentiles’, ‘masters and servants’, ‘males and females’, together with the admonition ‘to serve one’s master with love’ – in such a way that the distinctions are not in fact annulled but mitigated and reassessed – is not designed to substitute a single and uniform dignity of ‘everything human’ for the unequal dignities, but aims at a conception related to hierarchical dignity which includes as necessary implication the equal dignity of persons as such, if not of existents as such. This insight came to be smothered, or almost so, beneath the dead weight of the conceptual orgies of ‘asiatic’, ‘byzantine’, ‘pagan’ or ‘servitudinising’ type mixed up with the historical development of Christianity, with the exaggerated and twisted concepts of divine ‘omnipotence’ and ‘predestination’, the over-emphasis on the ‘nullity’ and the ‘corruption’ of man, and the anti-libertarian tendencies of Protestantism as such in the Counter-reformation and the Catholic baroqueries of various kinds which it spawned. The supreme honouring of the Divine Dignity in the libertarian voluntarism of Duns Scotus was badly understood, and the decisive defence of both Divine and human dignity in the liberating and epochal doctrine of Luis de Molina was completely unknown. To defend God’s Dignity recourse was had to its mocking degradation by Báñez and John of St Thomas: God, a capricious oriental despot supposed to reign over servile souls, reduced to the level of automatism. Unjustly interpreted as ‘humanist’, the molinist doctrine did in fact have humanist results, ultimately conducive to atheism, and, as if by accursed coincidence, the current opposed to the antilibertarian cult of absolutism also had to lead to humanist absolutism, to the divinisation of man. We have certainly not managed to penetrate the true focal secret of Christianity: the essentially reciprocal nature of hierarchical dignity qua dignity, and the fact that the comprehension of this fundamental law, cutting through

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the primitive concept of the hierarchical relation, is not destined to level it but to put it out of harm’s way, to conserve and even to exalt hierarchical dignity, above which it places a genuine, rock-hard and inalienable alien dignity, and on which it confers, grafting on it this respect for inferior dignity (Christ washing the disciples’ feet: then, Christ as type of the human master who is at the same time authentically divine chief; and the disciples are types, not uniquely of the bishop but at the same time of ‘man qua man’, images of God but not of divine substance), it confers on it, I say, the full light of qualitative dignity. In our days, Ernst Jünger hits on the secret, writing: ‘True piety is unthinkable except between marvellous beings’. What consequences should we draw from all this? Here are some remedies: 1. It is preeminently a spiritual task, and constitutes here a focal point, to cast down the idol of ‘realisation’. Naturally that does not mean renouncing the application of principles to reality, taking ideals seriously, truly pursuing what is desirable; in short, it does not mean the cultivation of hypocrisy and of decorous fictions with no hold on reality. It means rather not weighing values according to the pattern of their prompt and manifest realisability; not forgetting what is difficult to realise and resists technical and global planning. Taking account of what is being lost in a less obvious way than what is being openly gained. 2. Maintain the distinction between qualitative dignity and the respect owed to man simply qua man; maintain the distinction between dignity and mere satisfaction, though without resentfully denying that security and the satisfaction of human needs form a relative condition of human dignity. 3. Propagate an attitude of both respect and critical and limiting reserve towards authorities and hierarchies, and prevent the tendency of authorities of the modern and humanistic type to reclothe themselves in a cloak of evident and total ‘representation’. 4. The conservative attitude of defending and strengthening religious beliefs, practices and authorities must link up with a revisionist and reformatory desire, not as a forced concession and extrinsic adjustment but as an autonomous deepening and restoration of true religious life. It is not a matter of ‘degrading’ God, even though it be simply temporary

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and external to ‘flatter’ the sense of human dignity, but of revealing the true essence of God more deeply, simply for God’s greater glory (without which the corollaries would have no value), and with the intention of rectifying and protecting the sense of human dignity. 5. Bring to light and cambat utopianism – that is, belief in a perfect terrestrial world; see 1 – on behalf of a search (both conservative and reformatory) for values in their authentic interconnected plurality, keeping the sense of limitation which does not exclude the multiple fulfilment of evident and tangible improvements. Pursue multilaterally the advances of material well-being and its widespread distribution, but applying critical reins to this aspiration and explaining their necessity or justification.

14 Dignity (1969) Why, however, should it be necessarily wrong to discuss the nebulous in a businesslike manner? Findlay, Meinong’s Theory of Objects and Values, 2nd edn (1963), p. 315. I. General Approach (Priming, Grundierung) 1. The Conceptual Area of Dignity The English word ‘Dignity’ is a noun directly borrowed from the Romance (Latin, French); like ‘Beauty’, it is an abstract noun not derivable from a primary English adjective. Just as there is no direct analogue in English of ‘beau’, ‘bello’, ‘schön’, etc., there is none for ‘dignus’, ‘digne’, ‘digno’ or even for ‘würdig’, though the German adjective is itself derived from the noun ‘Würde’ (dignity). These foreign adjectives are all capable of a determining genitival or phrasal construction: thus, ‘digne d’attention’, ‘digne d’être honoré’, ‘liebenswürdig’, ‘würdig, gewählt zu werden’, etc. For the idea of desert, aptitude, equivalence or suitability as here expressed, we must use in English some word not connected with ‘dignity’ e.g., the verb ‘deserve’ itself or, especially, the adjective ‘worthy’ or sometimes ‘worth’ (an adjective for predicative use): ‘worthy of being admired’, ‘worth doing’, etc., as indeed in Â�German ‘wert’ (small ‘w’) may stand for ‘würdig’ (‘liebenswürdig’ is closer to ‘amiable’, ‘liebenswert’ to ‘lovable’). On the other hand, ‘Â�Dignity’ does exactly correspond with ‘dignitas’, ‘dignité’ and ‘Würde’. For the quality of having dignity, possessed by that which is ‘digne’, ‘Â�würdig’, etc., ‘absolutely’, without a specifying genitive or clause, we use the term ‘dignified’ (for which German also has ‘würdevoll’): a word 227

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synthetic and somewhat clumsy exactly like ‘beautiful’. From ‘worthy’ or ‘worth’ to ‘dignified’ there seems to be a pretty far cry. But an essential link clearly subsists. Dignity means Worth or Worthiness in some ‘absolute’, autonomized and objectivized, as it were ‘featural’ sense; and it is towards an elucidation of that sense – Dignity as the quality of that which is ‘dignified’ – that I am concerned to make an attempt here. If Dignity means Worthiness or Value of some kind – perhaps something not far remote from ‘Worth’ – it plainly does not mean Worthiness, Value or the quality of being ‘good’ either in the sense open to any further determination as expressed by ‘worthy of . . .’ or in the sense of Value or Goodness as a blanket pro-concept regardless of any more specific determination. It has a descriptive content. Significant kinds of value, goodness, appreciability or desirability may have nothing in particular to do with Dignity. It is, in this respect, on a par with any of the basic moral virtues such as justice, truthfulness, benevolence, chastity, courage, etc., including even integrity or conscientiousness, none of which is synonymous with Moral Goodness or Virtue as such, and each of which, notwithstanding its possible built-in reference to Morality (and moral evaluation) as such, is susceptible of contentual description. I propose now to examine (i) what appears to be the proper and characteristic response we yield to dignity when we sense its presence in an object, (ii) the set of more particular and concrete features which may be empirically ascertained to cluster round the phenomenon of Dignity: its conceptual aura or halo as it were. (i) What is ‘good’ in any sense will evoke a pro attitude as such, an attitude appreciative, supporting, bearing a sign of attraction, etc.; what is ‘pleasant’ will evoke liking, desire, delight; what is ‘instrumentally good’ is naturally rewarded by something like appreciative recognition, a response of approbation, and a tendency to choose it; the ‘beautiful’ elicits a response that might be described as delight with a tinge of devotion; and the morally right conduct or good character (moral virtue) compels ‘approval’, i.e., a sort of devoted appreciation with an aspect of volitive approbation to it – a gesture of sanction as it were. Obviously there is a very high degree of overlapping between these modalities of appreciative response; as indeed, on the object side, the pleasant and the beautiful, the morally good and the beautiful, the morally good and the useful, etc., display an intrinsic overlap which only prigs and pedants, slaves of didactic classifications, and fanatics of hierarchy, would deny. Still, the distinctions are natural, ineliminable, and well grounded in our experience of reality. Can we attempt at all to assign, to adumbrate at

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least, a Â�distinctive response to Dignity (or ‘the dignified’)? Whatever such a response may be, it must bear a close resemblance to our devoted and admiring appreciation for beauty (its ‘high’ forms at any rate) on the one hand, to our reverent approval of moral goodness (and admiration, say, for heroic virtue) on the other. Dignity commands emphatic respect, a reverential mode of response, an ‘upward-looking’ type of the pro attitude: a ‘bowing’ gesture if I may so call it. There is less emphasis in the paradigm response to Dignity on delight and satisfyingness than in aesthetic appreciation, and at the same time less on the deontic or mandatory or even on the hortatory aspect of moral approval; and no intentional reference at all to the useful and functionally efficient. In contrast with moral approval as such, it has little, if anything, to do with practical approbation and ‘action-guiding’ rule-obedience in any direct sense. Our experience of Dignity is centrally an experience of ‘Height’: a concept, alas, obscure and insufficiently analysed, yet widely and intimately familiar to men – except perhaps to consistent and inveterate positivists. But if cautious sobriety and careful fidelity to facts are seen to be the criteria of a positivistic approach, I am all for positivism. I do not imagine that by pointing to the splendid notion of Height I have said anything definitive about our response to Dignity. For one thing, I cannot now embark, in passing, on an elucidation of ‘Higher’ and ‘Lower’. In the second place, our experience of the quality of Dignity, though it presupposes our sense of the distinction between Superior and Inferior (e.g., the Spiritual and the Material, or the Rational and the Instinctual), is by no means identical with it. What is dignified is not necessarily sublime, and Dignity is not just a lesser degree of Sublimity. Our response to the sublime has something awe-struck about it, as if the presence of the sublime edified us but at the same time shocked or crushed us. Whereas, when faced with the quality of Dignity as such we certainly also feel edified but not so much ‘crushed’, overwhelmed or even deeply excited as, rather, tranquillized and perhaps impressed with a sense of our own dignity rather than with a sense of our own smallness and triviality. In other words, the dignified connotes the idea of verticality in a more discreet fashion than does the sublime, and connotes, at the same time, a certain idea of reciprocity. So far as we recognize Godhead or anything ‘Divine’, we eminently attribute sublimity to it, rather than dignity; on the contrary, even ‘humanists’ in any sense of the word would seldom speak of ‘human sublimity’, whereas the strange concept of ‘human dignity’ – discussed in part II – is one of the notions we seem to be most familiar with in whichever linguistic medium we may live and think.

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It looks as if our response to Dignity is the purest ‘value response’ (Wertantwort) as such: in particular, less stirring and less impregnated with delight than our aesthetic, less organically connected with approval and with any practical or deontic accent than our moral responses. If Dignity means ‘being worthy of . . .’, the completion that most aptly suggests itself would seem to be ‘worthy of being appreciatively acknowledged as worthy to be thus acknowledged and appreciated, sans plus’. (ii) What are some of the ‘more particular and concrete features’ that strike us as eminently dignified? No two of us might answer this question in exactly the same way, but I trust that the following attempt at a random enumeration would hardly shock or surprise anybody: at least, not in virtue of anything I include, though very likely as regards my inevitable sins of omission. Here, then, are the features typifying Dignity that most vividly occur to me. First – the qualities of composure, calmness, restraint, reserve, and emotions or passions subdued and securely controlled without being negated or dissolved (verhaltene Leidenschaft in German). Secondly – the qualities of distinctness, delimitation, and distance; of something that conveys the idea of being intangible, invulnerable, inaccessible to destructive or corruptive or subversive interference. Dignity is thus comparable, metaphorically, to something like ‘tempered steel’. Thirdly, in consonance therewith, Dignity also tends to connote the features of self-contained serenity, of a certain inward and toned-down but yet translucent and perceptible power of self-assertion: the dignified type of character is chary of emphatic activity rather than sullenly passive, perhaps impassive rather than impassible, patient rather than anxiously defensive, and devoid but not incapable of aggressiveness. So far, the predicates we have listed are largely but by no means exclusively of the moral order: they appear partly to imply wisdom and percipience; and they are chiefly applicable to so-called ‘human beings’, i.e., persons, but again not exclusively so: much dignity in this sense seems to me proper to the Cat, and not a little, with however different connotations, to the Bull or the Elephant. What about the monumentality of some trees and the silent life that animates plants in general? Is not the austere mountainous plateau of Old Castile a dignified landscape, even if we set aside the dignity of the wiry stoic race it has bred and the majestic sonority of the language it has brought alive? And, though man-made, cannot works of art (especially of the ‘classic’, though not exactly ‘classicistic’, type) have a dignity of their own? What we credit with ‘dignity’ here is, above all, the kind of ‘simplicity’ that is not the simplicity of linear monotony

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or notional perspicuity but, on the contrary, a great complexity of aspects and fullness of significance condensed into a bold stroke, whether suggestive of sweet harmony or of bitter asperity, by an extreme and perhaps undecipherable economy of means. (The Spanish adjectives escueto – ‘spare’ – and adusto – ‘dry’, ‘parched’ – express it most evocatively.) In conclusion, I must point to one more, and fairly central, aspect of Dignity, though I have hinted at it already when mentioning ‘inward power’ and the quality of the ‘monumental’. The aspect I have in mind is weight; the weight of strong bones rather than of exuberant flesh; the ‘weight’ that impresses itself upon us in some portraits by Rembrandt rather than that which oppresses us in Rubensian opulence. I have also anticipated my reference to it in emphasizing the quality of the self-contained (in Â�German: das In-sich-Ruhende). With its firm stance and solid immovability, the dignified quietly defies the world – even though, like everything else, it would have no significance whatever outside the context of the world. 2. Dignity and Value Categories Dignity obviously should not be identified with Morality. To a large extent, it enters into the category of the aesthetical. An indefinite variety of objects plainly insusceptible of moral appraisal can none the less exhibit dignity. Nor is it possible, conversely, to interpret morality as a sub-class of dignity. Moral virtues as important as benevolence and diligence, or again some forms of self-improvement, are not paradigmatically relevant to dignity. It implies no contradiction to say that X is a morally better but a less dignified person than Y or that Y is a more sinful person than X and yet less prone than X to certain frivolous attitudes which are distinctively opposed to dignity. Again dignity is not a purely aesthetical concept – unless we water down the category of the aesthetic to the point of wanting to say that everything that is intrinsically valuable is ipso facto ‘beautiful’ – and that, on the other hand, such basic aesthetical dimensions as grace, shapeliness, intensity and poignancy have little or nothing to do with dignity (cf. the characteristic contrast established by Schiller between Anmut and Würde). Does this mean that Dignity must be accorded a primordial categorial status of its own, bordering on the ethical and the aesthetical alike, or intercalated between the two even though merging into both? That question is merely terminological. The phenomenon of Dignity remains the same, whether we choose to call it a participant in both the ethical and the aesthetical realm of values or to

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erect it into a third realm of value overlapping with both. Two remarks, however, need to be made at this point. (i) When I associate Dignity with ‘Weight’ – I might also speak of solidity, firmness, density or ‘compactness’ – does this not sound as if I had in mind something like an ‘ontological’ value, as distinct both from the ethical and the aesthetic? But the phrase ‘ontological value’ has an unsavoury naturalistic tang about it: reminiscent of the Eleatics, Plato, Aristotle and his scholastic copyists and bowdlerizers, of ‘static’ rationalists and ‘dynamic’ vitalists, of historicist and millennarian Utopians. It is not Value that constitutes Being, and not a ‘more real’ Being or a ‘perfection’ of any kind of ‘nature’ qua a nature of its kind that we emotively apprehend as value or a ‘greater’ or ‘higher’ value. It is not Power in any sense that we mean by Good or Right, nor does superior Power testify to ‘truer’ Goodness or a more valid Right. I am second to none, be it Reid or Price or Kant, Moore or Prichard or Ross, in my moral hatred of such naturalistic misconceptions. Nevertheless, I do not feel sure at all that the notion of an ‘ontological value’ is nonsensical in itself; I believe that we may legitimately inquire into it provided only that we scrupulously abstain from identifying it with the concept of either Reality or Value in general, and strenuously resist any temptation to define either morality or beauty, or indeed dignity itself, in its terms. When we contrast the genuine with the counterfeit, apparent ‘thisness’ or power or value with a mere appearance of it, transparent with merely pretended worth, etc., we are thinking in both ontological and axiological terms with an eye on their peculiar connection – toto coelo different from any reductionist confusion or conflation or mutual ‘collapse’ of the two orders of concepts. Thus, when we say in praise of Jones that he ‘is a man’, in contrast with being a mere ‘ghost of a man’, a mere puppet, a shadow, a clown, a paper tiger, a mere automaton or flunkey, a hollow dandy or demagogue or mystagogue, we assert the presence in Jones of a ‘virtue’ in the full and strong sense of the word, though what we mean is not that Jones is an eminently ‘virtuous’ or righteous or conscientious man, not that he is naturally handsome and captivating without the use of elaborate cosmetics (or an athlete in perfect health). ‘Ontological value’ is not, then, a mere fancy of speculative metaphysics to be lightly dismissed as a ‘misuse of language’; I certainly would not propose it as a definiens of Dignity – I am myself enamoured of tentative and groping analytical description, and wary of premature definitions, i.e., of all definitions in philosophy – but I would risk the surmise that Dignity is not perhaps simply a twilight

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zone between the region of the ethical and that of the aesthetic but also connotes a specific trait of ‘ontological value’. Far from reductionism – ‘Entia sunt multiplicanda secundum necessitatem’. (ii) Again, I want to draw attention to that sense of Dignity in which it is inherent, not in the character of persons nor in the quality of any extrahuman objects but in hierarchical positions or relations such as rank, status, place, function, office and the like: that is to say, the dignity pertaining to ‘dignitaries’. (Cf. ‘being in authority’ as distinct from ‘being an authority on something’ and further, from ‘having authority’.) This is neither dignity as a distinctive personal quality nor dignity in the sense of ‘human dignity’ as ascribed to persons as such, but an aspect of verticality proper to institutionalized and even, to a lesser extent, to informal social coexistence, co-operation and division of labour. I cannot expatiate here on the problems involved by the relations between dignity of office and qualitative dignity. 3. Dignity and Related Qualities I have spoken above of the kinship and the differentiation between the dignified and the sublime. We might likewise discuss the relation between the dignified and the rational as well as the dignified and the spiritual (i.e., the deep and predominant attachment of some persons to intellectual, moral, religious and artistic themes); and again the close relations, which however do not attain to identity, between the dignified and the noble, the distinguished, or the exquisite. Obviously rational self-control is an integral aspect of dignity; but calculating rationality on the one hand, hard-headed or sweet reasonableness on the other hand, are less so. A spiritual centre of gravity eminently tends to make a person dignified; but dignity does not necessarily involve any marked and specified spiritual interests. We often use the words ‘dignity’ and ‘nobility’ synonymously, but not always: deep contemplation or sustained earnestness is dignified rather than noble, while the lineaments of a living body or even certain modes of gracious and graceful behaviour may more naturally be called noble than dignified. Distinction appears to imply originality and some outstanding achievement more than does dignity; but a measure of easy-going irresponsibility is more compatible with distinction than with dignity (Max Scheler was not only an exceptionally sharp, clever and cultured thinker but a highly distinguished philosopher and perhaps a generous man, but he certainly was not Â�dignified). A dignified

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bearing may fully strike us as something exquisite; but emphasis on fine quality as such, in whatever respect, pertains to the sphere of the exquisite rather than to that of the dignified. II. The Quality of Dignity and ‘Human Dignity’ 1. The So-Called ‘Rights of Man’ It is generally held that some fundamental linkage obtains between Dignity and what we somewhat clumsily and misleadingly call ‘the Rights of Man’. A dignified attitude involves respect for such ‘rights’ in others and a claim to one’s own ‘rights’ being likewise respected by others – though, according to circumstances, that claim may manifest itself in the form of active assertion, of disdainful silence, or even of charitable admonition or a sympathetic attempt to make the offender understand it. Dignity and the belief in ‘human rights’ converge in the ethical model of human relationships based on mutual respect and indeed tinged with a reverent acknowledgment of the alterity of others and the differentness of individuals. (Of course, what is meant here by ‘rights’ is not ‘positive’ but ‘natural’ rights – a most ambiguous and infelicitous figure of speech – i.e., rights invested with intrinsic evidence and not enacted by legal or other specific stipulations; the ethical validity of legal or conventional rights presupposes such intrinsic principles as pacta sunt servanda, or that any wanton or arbitrary interference with anther’s sphere of autonomy is morally wrong.) Yet the logical status of Dignity and that of the ‘Rights of Man’ sharply contrast with each other. Dignity is a quality; the concept of dignity is descriptive, though it also bears an essential and inseparable evaluative note. Rights are not qualities; their concept is not descriptive but prescriptive – ascriptive if you like, but their ascriptive is parasitic on their prescriptive sense. That rights ought to be respected is a tautology exactly like ‘Duties ought to be complied with’: they just consist in that they ought to be respected. Dignity does not ‘consist’ in that it ought to be prized, praised, admired or revered. Disrespect of a right constitutes an offence; indifference to dignity is only a defect, as is any lack of adequate response to a value. (Or, indeed, any impercipiency towards a significant fact.) My mental qualities are just as real as my physical properties, though perhaps they can only be perceived by others through the medium of some kind of behavioural or otherwise physical observation (yet not, of course, ‘discovered’ by a scientist Â�dissecting my brain); my rights are not in any comparable

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sense ‘real’ and cannot be ascertained by any method of psychological observation. Through the action of environmental or other factors, my dignity (like my knowledge or my courage, or my predilection for or bias against this or that thing) may increase or diminish in the course of time. Whereas, my being accorded some new positive right or my being deprived of one I have possessed does not directly alter my character; and my ‘human rights’, within the meaning of that term, while they can be punctiliously respected or brutally disregarded and trampled upon, cannot at all be conferred upon me or amplified or annulled or lessened: your accomplishment of your duty is not what makes it your duty, and your failure to comply with it does not invalidate that duty. Thus, we feel both that Dignity is somehow consonant with the ‘Rights of Man’ and that the two are situated on entirely different levels. This fact may not pose any noteworthy practical difficulty in our moral striving or even in the work of moral education, but it is likely to give rise to some philosophical puzzlement. 2. The Hybrid Concept of ‘Human Dignity’ It may be from some such sense of puzzlement that the oddly ambiguous concept of ‘Human Dignity’ has sprung. For ‘Human Dignity’ – the term ‘Dignity of the Person’ would be more correct, and ‘Dignity inherent in being a Person’ more accurate still – seems to share some characteristics of the ‘Rights of Man’ (or ‘Rights of the Person’) and some of Dignity proper (Dignity as a Quality) alike. The concept of ‘Human Dignity’ is properly and principally ascriptive rather than either descriptive or prescriptive. To respect ‘Human Dignity’ is a strict moral obligation on the same footing, if not wholly identical, with the respect due to the ‘Rights of Man’ – quite unlike the reverent response it is right and proper to give to ‘Dignity as a Quality’. Yet ‘Human Dignity’ is not, like the ‘Rights of Man’, reduced to complete vacuity if we remove it from the context of that rigorously owed respect. It has something about it of a faceless and inchoate quasi-quality we ‘ascribe’ to persons as such, independently of their distinctive virtues, modes of bearing, and mental levels and attitudes. It demands respect, but its meaning does not consist just in that demand. ‘Human Dignity’ is not, like ‘Dignity as a Quality’, a matter of more or less, not a matter of virtue, accomplishment or refinement; rather, it seems to be something ‘inalienable’ much like ‘Rights of Man’, and yet not quite in the same manner. Whereas the ‘Rights of Man’ can only be disregarded, negated, insulted, Â�violated or

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‘suppressed’, ‘Human Dignity’ can actually be impaired and destroyed, temporarily or Â�irreversibly, like any real ‘quality’. If tomorrow I fall into the hands of Communist torturers, they cannot ‘eliminate’ my human rights but only prevent me from exercising them; whereas they can easily make short work of my ‘Human Dignity’, more so even than of such inner ‘Dignity is a Quality’ as I may possess, by maltreatment, the administration of certain drugs, and putting me in one of their slavecamps. In a less dismal way even, my ‘Human Dignity’ may well suffer by drunkenness or more sinister drug habits, as well as by grave accidents independent of anybody’s guilt. If I am a congenital moron or have my brain permanently crippled by meningitis or am today perhaps the victim of incipient senile dementia, do I really ‘possess’ the same ‘Human Dignity’ as that ‘possessed’ by any other – normal, average, or even slightly sub-standard – ‘human being’? Thus, there still seems after all to be some rudiment of a ‘more or less’ about ‘Human Dignity’, in a fashion closely similar to the possible ‘degrees’ of free-will and responsibility (i.e., imputability) – greatly contrasting, of course, with the vast scale of gradation proper to the spiritual quality of ‘inner freedom’ or any other mental or physical qualities. Again, if you just gratuitously insult my ‘Human Dignity’ without any action apt to cripple my faculties of self-possession, what happens is much like a mere infraction of my rights: my ‘Human Dignity’ has not really been diminished, but you have yourself, by your lapse into iniquitous or uncivilized conduct, revealed and aggravated your own lack – not of ‘Human Dignity’, to be sure, but of Dignity as a Quality. Although the ‘Rights of Man’, whatever they are, are not positive (legal, institutional, conventional) rights, we can only conceive of them in a somehow codifiable form: we invariably speak of them in the plural, not in the sense of an indefinitely great number but as if there were four or five or sixteen of them, despite the fact that we cannot without some arbitrary stipulation enumerate them as we can count our fingers and toes, or the departments of France. On the contrary, we never speak of ‘Human Dignity’ except in the singular, similarly as we talk of civic rights but only of citizenship, or of moral virtues but only of (moral) sense, and of conscience. It looks as if we conceived of ‘Human Rights’ as postulates, i.e., specified rules for other people’s conduct towards a person, grounded in ‘Human Dignity’, which in its turn were neither a ‘claim’ nor a ‘quality’ but a kind of half-way house between a set of prescriptive claims and the basic quality of being-a-person: a semi-fictitious, semi-real status ‘ascribed’ to the person as such.

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3. ‘Human Dignity’ and ‘Dignity as a Quality’ We might feel tempted to interpret ‘Human Dignity’ as a minimum of actual dignity (Dignity as a Quality) quasi-automatically, quasi-tautologously ‘possessed’ by everyone in virtue of simply being a person; or again, as the virtual presence in everyone of Dignity as a Quality, a ‘perfection’ that everyone is ‘called’ to achieve actually, though only some of us do so and in very different degrees, while some of us are conspicuous by their display, again in very different degrees, of features specifically opposed to ‘Dignity as a Quality’, such un-dignity equally presupposing the unquestioned status of ‘Human Dignity’. This would pretty closely correspond to Arariguren’s distinction between moralidad como estructura (the fact that man is a ‘moral being’, subject to moral categories, exercising moral judgment and an object thereof) and moralidad como contenido (the actual morality, the moral value-and-disvalue or goodness and badness of men). Neither of these schemas seems to be altogether satisfactory. ‘Human Dignity’ is not, I think, important only in view of its representing a minimum level of actual ‘Dignity as a Quality’, nor of its potential blossoming out into ‘Dignity as a Quality’; and I do not feel sure about whether qualitative un-dignity also implies a loss or impairment of ‘Human Dignity’ or, on the contrary, would be impossible in a person who was no longer in possession of his ‘Human Dignity’ or, say, no longer in a state or condition of ‘Human Dignity’. An attempt to elucidate these complex relationships would overreach my present scope. But it seems certain that our ‘Human Dignity’ is threatened mainly by the impact on us of powers alien to our own will, whereas our lack of ‘Dignity as a Quality’ or indeed our un-dignity is mainly our own work: it cannot express itself or come to be except through our own agency. Deficient, alas, in heroic virtue and not of the stuff martyrs are made of, I would most likely ingloriously collapse under torture and fail to stand up to pain, fright and benumbing poisons: I would then be ready to behave, perhaps without even feeling that it matters much, in a fashion incompatible with ‘Human Dignity’. But I venture to believe I would still retain a higher degree of ‘Dignity as a Quality’ than the people of substantially liberal convictions who tend to welcome the ascendancy of a totalitarian tyranny as the fulfilment of Progress or of the ‘meaning of History’, or again as the surge of superior vitality or the Wave of the Future. Let us vary the example. Suppose you could do with my co-operation in a shady but profitable business deal, and offer me as a bribe a packet of twenty fairly good Dutch cigars. I feel tempted

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for a moment; but such traffic would be beneath my dignity. Realizing, however, that the success of your scheme to a large extent depends on my support, you raise your stingy offer to a promise of 500 Upmans or Partagas. Ah, that’s a different matter. ‘A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke’, as the young Kipling sang; and I sing, ‘Honour is only honour, but Havana is heaven’. I accept. Perhaps I have come to discern that there are loftier things on earth than the ordinary pedestrian standards of Right and Wrong; or to find out that in the long view your ostensibly crooked scheme is calculated to maximize pleasure in the world, very properly beginning with my pleasure. I cynically put up with my loss of dignity or, worse, slur it over in my mind and idealistically explain it away. No doubt, you have been my corrupters. But I am not just corrupted; I am corrupt! My lack or loss of dignity (‘Dignity as a Quality’), my un-dignity, my indignity is authentically mine. The question may now be asked: Have I thus also lost my ‘Human Dignity’? To raise the question is not to answer it. In a way, being now assailed by remorse, I may feel that I ‘no longer exist morally’; but the position is not quite that. Rather, it is that I do exist morally, and precisely am an immoral wretch. Admittedly, though, you the hatchers of the dishonest enterprise who have invited me to ‘lend you my aid in this raid’ (Kipling again) are at least as immoral as I am, but one would be less disposed to call you moral wretches. The distinction between the indignity opposed to ‘Dignity as a Quality’ and the vanishing of ‘Human Dignity’ stands out in bolder relief in your case than in mine. Of course, to confess to one’s own confusion is a cheap and scarcely dignified method of blunting the edge of the confounding objections one may anticipate. III. The Undignified 1. Bernard Shaw’s Short-Winded Sense of Dignity There is a rightly famous, incisive witticism by the late Bernard Shaw, which I am quoting from memory, but I hope with essential accuracy: ‘See to it that you get what you like, or else you will like what you get’. Surely this conveys a plea for Dignity and a warning against the lack of it. Whatever the intrinsic quality of our likes and dislikes themselves, and notwithstanding the prudential as well as the moral necessity of our controlling, repressing, tempering and modulating many of them, there is an elementary, not to say an elemental, feature of dignity about clarifying, developing, pursuing and making valid our personal tastes

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and choices. Again, albeit I hold that many of the most precious and delightful things (goods, experiences, values, satisfactions, etc.) we ‘get’ in life are such as are meted out to us gratuitously by Chance or Incident or Providence rather than obtained or attained or achieved by our own pre-existent desire and effective striving, it is true that pliability, unresisting adaptability and unreserved self-adjustment are prototypal opposites of Dignity. (When once as a small boy I had to write in a school essay that ‘Spring is the pleasantest season’ – a cliché I was acquainted with, finding however myself at that time that summer was more pleasant, though I have since come to appreciate a mellow early October day most – everything in me revolted at the idea that a taste, as distinct from a rule of conduct, should be forced upon me.) Thus Shaw seems to be eminently concerned with the dignity of the person: he exhorts the individual to shape his life according to his own vision rather than to allow his inmost preferences to be shaped by circumstantial facts and to fall into slavish dependence on his environment. But the predictive form in which he clothes his admonition – ‘or else you will like what you get’, a sanction appended to his counsel rather than an expansion of it – shows his pitiable failure to understand what is most important about Dignity: not to ‘get what one likes’ but to be able to endure what one ‘gets’ without necessarily assenting to it and growing to ‘like’ it. (The Stoic sage put it admirably when he admonished a youth complaining of his father’s lack of parental virtues, ‘Did Nature owe you a good father? No, only a father.’ He wrote neither, ‘You are wrong; the goodness of fathers is often inscrutable; you are too immature to discern it; you have got a good father’, nor ‘Make haste to depose your father and fashion unto yourself another that comes up to your standards’.) What Shaw does is to erect into an inexorable decree the very dependence on externals of the person he is inciting us to rebel against. Like any Naturalist, he confuses Dignity with Power, Wealth and Success. But, while naturalists of the conservative hierarchical temper taught us to participate in Dignity by admiring the Power, etc., of ‘our betters’, while those of a liberal capitalistic temper improved upon this by announcing that Power, etc., are ‘anybody’s’ and thus virtually everybody’s, those of the Socialist and fake-realist brand, like Shaw, completed the turn from embellishing Illusion to Utopian Delusion by asserting that Power, etc., can be organized revolution and subversive ‘conquest’ be made actually everybody’s. Perhaps people of this cast of mind believe that by the ensuring through a collective agency of everybody’s ‘Human Dignity’ (including a sense of individual self-assertion and self-fulfilment) Â�everyone will also acquire

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Dignity as a Quality or, what comes to the same thing, the concept of ‘Dignity as a Quality’ will lose its point – a view prefigured by the first great apostle of Progress, Condorcet, who confidently foresaw a rationally and scientifically redrawn world in which there would be no opportunity for the exercise of heroic virtue nor any sense in revering it. The core of Un-Dignity, as I would try to put it succinctly, is constituted by an attitude of refusal to recognize, experience and bear with the tension between Value and Reality; between what things ought to be, should be, had better be or are desired to be and what things are, can be and are allowed to be. That refusal, which may take an immense variety of forms, includes of course the now fashionable anathema on our (most happily) incurable ‘splitness’, ‘alienation’ and yearning for (religious and extra-religious, reverentially stated or more specifically pursued) ‘selftranscendence’. It does not, of course, include either submission to the existing order of things and the virtue of patience, or a sustained endeavour for reform, improvement and assuagement. Heraclitus may well have had this in mind when he wrote the magnificent words, ‘Better (or stronger?) is invisible than visible harmony’: ἁρμoνíη ἀφανὴςφανερῆς κρείττων. 2. The Feature-World of the Undignified I must content myself with a fleetingly sketched and hopelessly incomplete grouping of the relevant dimensions. Questions like how far – how exactly or how roughly – these correspond to the contrary dimensions of Dignity, or how far we might distinguish between mere lack of dignity (in an object in which its presence would be expected) and positive un-dignity, or the criteria of distinguishing between an awareness and pursuit of dignity which is itself a component of dignity and a pretense of or pretension to dignity which is peculiarly destructive of dignity – these and other fascinating problems about our subject must be entirely forgone here. Undignified is everything that is antithetic to distance, discretion, boundaries, articulation, individuation and autonomy: the features, then, of confusion, chaos, disorder, unruliness, indiscriminate community or consorting or intimacy, promiscuity, domineeringness and servility, and others down to conspicuous loquacity or (I will not go into this distinction) garrulity. (It need not be emphasized that clarity-seeking simplification has nothing dignified, the rejection of fausse clarté and the experience of tints fading into one another, etc., nothing undignified about it.) Another Â�heading under which undignified features may be grouped: brutish and noisy, or even

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naively unreserved and of-a-piece self-assertion, self-assurance and selfcomplacency; self-pity, emotionalism, exhibitionism, demonstrativeness, etc. Further, untruthfulness and ungenuineness; hypocrisy, false pretence and the whole empire of the showy, flashy and gaudy, the Kitsch, the cursi, the endimanché, the ornate trash or camelote, the poshlost (ponderous platitude). Finally, as opposed to ‘Weight’ or Gravity, all that is levity, frivolity, irrelevance, shallowness, needless triviality. Some clarifications and qualifications would obviously be necessary. Stage-acting and dancing are not as such undignified: a good deal of dignity can in fact enter into them; but whatever is stagey outside the stage connotes un-dignity. Opinions may differ about jazz, ‘entertainment’ in the closer sense of the word, many other frontier zones of art. Wit and brilliance as such are not undignified; humour, far from being undignified, supposes a keen sense of weights; but all forced humour and programme gaiety is undignified. Satire is a problem. (Austin: To pretend to be vulgar often, alas, is to be vulgar; but when? Karl Kraus the Viennese satirist, probably the finest writer of standard German prose in this century, in a sort of obsessive hallucination would pour forth pages interlarded with the most hideous Viennese semi-Yiddish and Aryan Viennese ‘cockney’ slang as well as with Prussian barbarisms more reminiscent of New-Yorkese, sometimes in visible but often in more effective invisible quotation-marks, without for a moment becoming vulgar. When I use locutions such as ‘. . . or I’m a Dutchman’ or ‘You betcher sweet life’ or ‘She is forty if she’s a day’ or ‘exquisitely girlish’ I fear I am being vulgar.) What professions outside the properly criminal ones are undignified as such? One answer is E. Friedell’s: that of a Professor (university don), because it involves a slow metabolism, a sluggish bowel a penchant for gradualist doctrines, and pedantry. I wonder. Two particular aspects, however, seem to me to require express mention. 3. Uncontrolled Passion No forms of the Undignified that are mainly constituted by loss of selfrestraint, enslavement by or half-hearted yielding to a passion, or even a shameless display of it, can, I submit, reach the apex of un-dignity. With the possible exception of Vanity – in which levity and inward dependence on pleasing others rather than passion proper occupy the central point – this applies to all standard passion, however objectionable and beastly, however morbid and devious: to Lust, Avarice, Â�Ambition, craving for Power, Revenge, Anger (and even Cruelty if suffused with anger), Â�rebellious or jingoistic Mob Violence. Shylock’s insistence on

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his pound of flesh has something dignified about it. So has Sappho’s drastic description of her state of sexual excitement at the sight of some pretty lass (though it cannot even be candid animal amorality, for in another poem she repels the amorous advances of a man in primly graceful terms of chaste indignation). Carlyle, much rather a proto-Fascist than a believer in Democracy, depicts the terreur and the excesses of the revolutionary mob with a sense of sublimity rather than with unmixed loathing; and I was myself enough of an aesthete when Englishing and commenting on the texts of some of the crazy visionaries of the Third Reich to betray a certain degree of horrorful fascination. How can we account for this relative privilege of Passion? Not only does a note of dignity attach to the elemental forces of Nature; it is even represented, however dimly and however swamped by un-dignity, in man’s implicit avowal of weakness when seized, and swept off his feet, by forces of that order, in his submission to what ought not to be but imperiously tends to be above his strength and beyond his control. I have omitted, presumably from a personal sense of shame, the intensest and at any rate most universal of passions, Fear. Cowardice is paradigmatically undignified. Yet a person crying out in pain, trembling with fear, quivering and writhing in anguish, imploring to be spared, etc., is not an incarnation of Un-Dignity. A tragic and thereby a remotely dignified note enters into his picture. His failure to achieve, and even to have striven for, stoic endurance has placed him in its perspective. In his flight from the inexorable Split he dare not face, his awareness of it is set aflame. The ‘Human Dignity’ he has been bereft of – though, as we here presume, not without his own complicity – bears witness to the Qualitative Dignity he has fallen short of and perhaps has come near to achieving. If not the outright coward, the victim of fear is a caricature of the hero and his disfigured countenance may be lit up with an ironic reflexion of martyrdom. 4. The Meretricious It might be argued that the feature sometimes described as the ‘meretricious’ embodies the culmination of Un-Dignity. There is, within my knowledge, no wholly exact foreign equivalent for the term, seeing that none of the more easily translatable words with their habitat in its neighbourhood – such as ‘venal’, ‘bribable’, ‘whore-like’, ‘mercenary’, or the nouns ‘toady’ or ‘flatterer’, or again ‘pandar’ or ‘pimp’ – offer a Â�perfect rendering of the quality in question. The professional harlot (meretrix, she who ‘earns’ by selling her carnal intimacy) including her

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more ‘classy’ variants, or again the pandar or procuress, are too narrowly specialized examples; the sales-agent need not have anything meretricious about him; the so-called ‘good mixer’ may or may not have a touch of it; the etymological lineage of ‘courtesan’ (French courtisan and Italian cortigiano, in English ‘courtier’) may be usefully remembered in the context of ‘toady’ or ‘flatterer’; perhaps advertisement-writers, ‘hidden persuaders’ and propaganda agents need a fair amount of meretriciousness to excel in their profession, but of course I mean ‘meretricious’ in a less technically restricted context. Anyhow, though commercial advertisements are morally harmless and relatively honest in as much as they overtly offer for sale some commodity which some people may have an interest in acquiring and which the vendor has an obvious and undisguised interest in selling, their study (along with that of Woman’s Own and similar or more sophisticated magazines) supplies an excellent method for getting acquainted with the objective feature of ‘the meretricious’. ‘The nylons worthy of your legs’ or ‘If your face doesn’t really feel clean with cream, yet soap and water is too drying, then Estée Â�Lauder’s New Fresh-Water Treatments were just created for you’ may serve as random examples. But the titles of certain (perhaps instructive) popular books may sound even more exciting to the logician: I mean such as Slimming for You, Your Arthritis and Your Sinus Trouble. The point is not so much the predominance of the appeal to base instincts, even though these are of course most directly liable to crude stimulation by seductive imagery, as the indiscriminate fake-personal mode of address: whereas in injunctions like ‘Thou shalt not kill’ or ‘Know thyself’ the incisive personal form of address patently refers to a universality (of which the concrete singular case is merely the point of application). When my glance first fell on Your Sinus Trouble I caught myself imagining for a moment that the author really meant my sinus trouble and was anxious to help me rather than just anybody suffering from that complaint. What characterizes the meretricious attitude is the intimate unity of abstract self-seeking and qualitative self-effacement. The meretricious type of person is, ideally speaking, at once boundlessly devoted to the thriving of his life and indifferent to its contents. He wallows in his dependence on his environment – in sharp contrast to the dignity of a man’s setting bounds to the impact of its forces and undergoing their influence in a distant and filtered fashion – and places himself at the disposal of alien wants and interests without organically (which implies, selectively) espousing any of them. The tout (including such variants as the slave of fashion, the echolalic loud-speaker, the genius for opportunism, etc.)

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embodies a parasitical, coreless, not to say ghost-like mode of life; he escapes the tensions of alienation by precipitate fusion and headlong surrender, and evades self-transcendence by the flitting mobility of a weightless self. His peculiar un-dignity resides in his jubilant renunciation of dignity: his spectacular success, that is, in creating around himself a world for his own use from which all reference to dignity and the missing of it has been crowded out; in which dignity no longer appears to be crushed but, rather, its very concept appears extinguished. IV. Some Ethical Problems Concerning Dignity 1. The ‘Paradoxes’ of Self-Assertion and Self-Renunciation The paradoxes or aporiae in question constitute a familiar subject in Ethics or rather the study of Virtues; they originate from Plato’s conception of a ‘hierarchical equilibrium’ and Aristotle’s medico-moral idea of the ‘right mean’, important new dimensions having been added by the Christian prizing of Humility and the modern shifts of emphasis to Objectivity and the ‘Critical Tradition’ on the one hand, to Individuality on the other. Awareness of this set of problems invades, of course, the areas of Epistemology and especially of Linguistic Logic. Most of the terms implied, such as ‘Pride’ and ‘Humility’, are ambiguous even within their purely descriptive concepts; and according to our own evaluative attitudes and our views about the relation between the descriptive and the evaluative we tend to speak of ‘true humility’, ‘pride as rightly understood’ (cf. the distinctions between ‘Stolz’ and ‘Hochmut’, ‘fierté’ and ‘orgueil’, and the English adjectives ‘proud’ and ‘prideful’), or ‘the golden mean between pride and humility’, or again the ‘right kind of pride’ and the ‘right kind of humility’ (without necessarily implying that these two should coincide, as if it were desirable that all men should have the same sort of temperament). A few hints must suffice here. (i) Personality and Impersonality are equally integral to Dignity in the sense of ‘personality’ interpreted as an intangible and imperturbable inward core, depth and weight, and ‘impersonality’ in the sense of selfdetachment, self-transcendence and objectivity. The theme of ‘personal response to impersonal standards of value’, not confined of course within the context of Dignity, may provide the key formula here. (ii) Modesty (in its general sense, not in that of sexual reserve) and its apparent opposite Exactingness (i.e., the display of high value claims, making high demands on the quality of objects, being ‘hard to please’ or

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being ‘particular’, in German ‘anspruchsvoll’) again are both essentially and positively related to Dignity. The ‘paradoxy’ is at least partly resolved by pointing to the distinction between ‘possession’ and ‘enjoyment’ as material and exclusive control of ‘goods’ on the one hand, and as experience, intentional reference and percipience of values on the other. The ideal of Poverty and even of smallness has been praised not by Christians alone (the finely worded formula Paix et peu is, I think, of Chinese origin); ‘scarcity’ and ‘spareness’, and a certain disproportion between ‘being’ and ‘seeming’ as a constituent of Dignity we have emphasized earlier. Conspicuous display and ostentation, pomp and circumstance are likely to be undignified unless they have some specific justification in terms of publicly relevant status and ‘dignitary’s’ dignity. Yet no one in his five wits, or perhaps even out of them, would praise a man for his ‘modesty’ who would visit only third-rate provincial museums or at the Louvre or the Prado or the National Gallery confine his attention to minor painters and at the Rijksmuseum to the Department of Eighteenth-century Decadence, because these are good enough for him, while everywhere shyly averting his glance from the el Grecos, Rembrandts or Cézannes lest he should enjoy a sight he does not deserve. Another relevant distinction concerns the simplicity of certain kinds of goods as contrasted with poor quality within one given genus. It is more dignified to content oneself with even very plain fare of acceptable standard than to prefer a more elaborate cuisine of fancy dishes ill cooked and made of inferior ingredients. This thesis involves further and fascinating category problems, which however cannot be discussed here any more than the wider problems of thrift and waste, or asceticism and the generous sharing of pleasure, etc. (iii) Pride and Humility, a theme partly merging into but distinguishable from that of Claim to Value or Possession and Modesty, again can no more than be touched upon here. If pride in the sense of ‘being proud’ strikes much the same note of distance, self-contained reserve and inexpugnable integrity that is characteristic of the dignified attitude, pride in the sense of ‘being prideful’ tends to be at variance with dignity in two respects: first, in view of its obvious links with coarse self-assertion and a puffed-up insistence on a privileged status of self as against others; secondly, in view of its likely desiccating and isolating effect on the agent himself which is antithetic to the sense of values, an inseparable aspect of dignity. Again, ‘being proud of’ one’s own virtues and accomplishments is apt to endanger dignity inasmuch as it tends to transfer emphasis from response to value to the cult of the self as such; and being proud, jealous and centrally (rather than merely peripherally) conscious of one’s own

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dignity borders on self-contradiction and conjures up the danger of a kind of obtrusive un-dignity, seeing that dignity eminently belongs to the type of moral and personal values which, unlike, e.g., justice, veracity or intellectual probity, are second-order qualities and are acquired – apart from the express removal of certain definite impediments – wholly or mainly indirectly, through the pursuit of values other than themselves and through the agent’s response to the same values present in others. The relation between Dignity and Humility seems to me to be even more ambiguous – and to show a greater amplitude between the positive and the negative extremes. Humility slanted towards servility and selfannulment (on the mundane plane, conflatable with ‘the meretricious’), not excluding ‘hero-worship’ and devotional servility – the attitudes of slavish self-abasement and systematic self-negation before the Divine – utterly flies in the face of Dignity. Such devotional postures and all too placid and complacent ‘I am naught’ modes of penitence and prostration are an insult to the dignity of God (conceiving of Him as a sort of Asiatic despot and capricious ‘Omnipotence’, an object of idolatrous adulation); again they proclaim the denial and hopelessness of moral discernment and effort. As Samuel Johnson has splendidly put it, ‘Tό find a substitution for violated morality is the leading feature in all perversions of religion’. Devout humility of this kind means, indeed, Pharisaism raised to the second power: the self-confessed ‘sinner’ and so-called ‘publican’ priding himself on not being like that Pharisee who is satisfied with his degree of sanctity. In contradistinction, however, to that short-circuited humility, that gesture of craven self-devaluation and as it were nihilistic yearning for ontological absorption, Humility qua self-transcendent surrender and submission to ‘What is higher than ourself’ is the very idiom or at any rate the crowning act of Dignity, in that it casts our being into the mould of ‘due response’ to what is ‘worthy of . . .’ (being thus recognized and served). It is not, I think, ‘perversion’ or idolatry and lack of dignity but one of the highest expressions of Dignity I know of that speaks from Péguy’s famous prophetic vision – ‘Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour des cités charnelles . . .’ – of the coming Armageddon (and his own glorious death in action at its decisive turning-point): . . . Heureux ceux qui soft morts dans ce couronnement Et cette obéissance et cette humilité.

The great German essayist E. Jünger has aptly if somewhat bizarrely written: ‘Piety (Frömmigkeit) is only possible as a relation between miraculous beings’. The inequality it entails may be immense – as it is

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between God and the Believer, in the religious framework – but it is not the straight inequality between a higher and a lower object which functionally complement each other. In at least every interpersonal context, Dignity connotes reciprocity no less, but rather more strictly, than it does inequality. The Greek idea that the height of our thinking is necessarily proportionate to the height of the object it refers to has caused great confusions in both Philosophy and Religion (e.g., that the objects of geometry are the noblest and most divine, and again that the devotional attitude as opposed to critical and scientific thought confers the greatest and most essential dignity upon us); but neither is the reverse as true as N. Hartmann seems to have thought it to be. We rightly smile when we come across the phrase – a decayed and probably commercialized remnant of religious piety and technically so-called ‘spirituality’ – that ‘thinking of beautiful things tends to make us beautiful’; but under a ghastly débris it buries a grain of truth. Moreover, the dignity of our thought as ‘masters’ of creation, our thought about lowly and mechanical objects itself, indeed all thought as such, implies a dimension of humility: in all intentional reference to objects, all awareness of facts, howsoever destined to enhance our ‘possession’ of truth and our purposive control of nature and its processes, we cannot but exercise a basic act of humility: that of surrendering to ‘compulsive evidence’ and submitting to the ‘Sovereignty of the Object’. Percipience in its ultimate root is recipience. ‘Natura non nisi obtemperando vincitur’, wrote Francis Bacon truthfully enough but without understanding that our greater honour resides in the obedience rather than in the successes in mastery which it may instrumentally subserve. His earlier namesake, Bacon the Franciscan, had been the worthier founder of science. 2. Moral Dignity and Rule-Morality So far as Dignity is a moral virtue, or perhaps rather a condensed manifestation of ‘being a virtuous person’, it is a relatively ‘object-free’, ‘stance-like’ (Haltung) quality, only secondarily and quasi-Â�occasionally pursued by the agent and not directly expressible in terms of rule-Â� obedience. Nevertheless, rules or maxims of conduct may be dignityinspired and presuppose an awareness of the concept of dignity. ‘I will behave in a dignified fashion’, thus put, sounds comical and unreal; indeed, Â�specifically undignified. (At the other extreme, that of purely directional virtues, ‘I will be just’ is a perfectly normal utterance, since it means nothing but the decision to conform to the purely object-referred

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duty of justice.) Yet there is nothing comical or morally dubious about a practical reflection like ‘No, I will not do this after all: it would be definitely undignified’; or again, ‘I will rather do as X did in that very similar situation: that was a truly dignified way of insisting on his rightful claim but, the principle being secured, quietly renouncing the personal advantage it might have afforded him’. A paramount concern about one’s own dignity impresses us as selfcentred, self-important, perhaps self-complacent to the point of hypocrisy, and again as gauche, quirky, beside the point, humourless, priggish, aesthetically as well as morally self-defeating. A person’s maintaining or protecting his own ‘Human Dignity’ or indeed the dignity of the office he happens to represent – which is an objective responsibility, and probably a strict obligation – is a quite different matter. But it may well be one of the techniques of civilized coexistence to hint at times that one’s own dignity is something slightly funny and to some extent expendable. For this, precisely, is implied in its being secure and invulnerable: such a style of behaviour expresses rather than negates one’s dignity itself, as a possession stable and self-evident – organically rooted – enough to allow for a certain latitude of carelessness. The same principle of ‘tempering and thereby perfecting imperfections’ is not in the same sense applicable to the particular moral virtues, especially not to the strictly directional virtues. A man obsessed with exact justice might by occasionally mellowing his strictness and according himself a margin of casual lapses from justice in small matters become a more lovable but not a juster man; occasional display by a philanthropist of selfish indifference might make him less of a bore but not a more benevolent person. Nothing, however, could amount to a more fatal misunderstanding of ‘Dignity as a Quality’ than placing it in an antithesis or setting it up as an alternative to plain deontic morality. Suppose X is an eminently and typically dignified person. What characterizes his actions, words and deportment is a penumbra of awareness of his own worth, his fidelity to duty and his respect for others’ rights and response to others’ virtues and to alien values – awareness of this compound of traits as a ‘self-evident’, by no means hidden or denied but conspicuous and yet under-emphasized constituent of his being. X commands trust not only in the sense that he can be trusted not to lie or to cheat, to honour commitments and claims, but even in the sense that any moral lapse he may be guilty or suspected of is powerless against the basic trust he inspires. That is not so, as irrationalist and anti-bourgeois romantics would have it, because he (X) is invested with a mystical and unanalysable quality of absoluteness, quasi-divinity,

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special intimacy with superior Powers, a privilege of experiential depth or anything independent of ‘ordinary’, publicly accessible and applicable criteria and standards of Right and Wrong; but on the contrary, because he is felt to be penetrated – rather than merely commanded, controlled, governed or interested – by Morality to the point of being personally inseparable from it. Some crazy fanatic or monomaniac ‘idealist’ may in some sense be appreciated or admired, an ‘amiable rogue’ like Gogol’s Chichikoy who trades in ‘dead souls’ (registered as live serfs) may excite affection, but neither of these is an instance of our dignified X. A man accredited with dignity may commit some deception and yet continue to be respected or trusted, not because his admirers place him above the moral law and feel that so fine and daemonic or inwardly powerful and existential a personage cannot be judged by ordinary codes but in the following way. Either his ‘wise and prudent’ friends (spectators, valuers) feel that his blameworthy action has had some exceptional justification and is not really blameworthy at all by ordinary standards: i.e., that in its wrongful character under some obvious categorial description it does not express X’s character as such and perhaps does express it, in X’s favour, under a finer though perhaps less patently available categorial description. Or else they feel that he has committed this actually blameworthy action in some particular, morally disabling, circumstances and that the action, though certainly his action and thus imputable and reprehensible, is uncharacteristic in the stricter sense of the term. His past and enduring conduct are surer guides to his appraisal, and he continues to deserve trust as if nothing to the contrary had happened. Yet the ‘intangibility’ or ‘invulnerability’ inherent in Dignity as a Quality is a peculiar quality rightly and reasonably apprehended as such by the valuer who recognizes its guarantee of future behaviour and accords it ‘credit’ and ‘implicit trust’; it is not a fact vouched for by some immutable ‘law’ of nature or supernature. Dignity as a Quality can go to seed and be lost (whatever the Stoics may have said to the contrary about Virtue) though not, I suppose, to the point of leaving behind no vestige of it at all. Bedford College, London

15 The Ghost of the Naturalistic Fallacy (1962) I In 1952, having for the first time to give a lecture in Madrid, I said somewhat dejectedly to the able and witty young man entrusted with the tedious task of revising the Spanish of my text that I found my lecture didn’t amount to much: it was but a long paraphrase of one single idea. Perhaps I hoped for an enthusiastic protest on his part. But he only offered as solace the terse remark: ‘Well, I have heard many a lecture that didn’t contain even one single idea’. In regard to the present paper, I only wish it could escape being classed in this last category, and be credited with expressing one single idea. If my claim holds good, the idea is roughly the following: that what Moore largely appeared to mean and partly thought he meant by the Naturalistic Fallacy was the interpretation of Good in terms of reality, or ‘natural’ reality, or reality susceptible of description by the sciences; that Moore’s exsanguinated un-real concept of Good came later to encourage an unhealthy tendency to ethical nihilism among the numerous philosophers impressed (and justly impressed) by his indictment of the Naturalistic Fallacy and also encouraged a non-commonsensical approach to ethics despite Moore’s own bias in favour of sound common sense; and that what he really meant (as can be shown ex littera Georgii Mori) but somehow confusedly or ambiguously meant by the Naturalistic Fallacy was rather the classic and false identification of Good with reality as such: the anticommonsensical illusion that Good was reality, and Evil unreality. I need hardly say that I for my part almost unreservedly reject the first nihilistic or non-commonsensical version and accept the second version of ethical anti-naturalism. And let me at once confess that not only do I stick to this one single idea, unable to enter here into any comprehensive 251

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discussion of Naturalism and Anti-Naturalism, but that for the purposes of this paper I also must appear in the reduced stature of a homo unius libri, and worse, confine my attention to a few selected significant passages of Principia Ethica. But if so, how dare I entitle my remarks ‘The Ghost of the Naturalistic Fallacy’, as if I were going to talk mainly of the Emotivists stimulated in their speculations by the Mooreian curse on the Fallacy, rather than of what is meant in Principia Ethica? Well, for one thing, the person in authority to whom I suggested the idea of this paper was in favour of a lively, sonorous title. From a more intrinsic point of view, my answer is that the fault I find with Moore’s treatment of ethical Naturalism is precisely his tendency to transpose his essential quarrel with that erroneous position on to the arid terrain of unmasking a logical fallacy in the strict sense of the word; it is in this way that he contributed to the bent of the neo-positivist – scientistic and formalistic – mind, ill equipped (on the whole) for dealing with problems of value and of morality. Much else in Principia Ethica has gone well-nigh unnoticed; like Marx’s Capital, though less understandably (seeing that it is not here a question of political effect upon the uneducated masses), Principia Ethica has exercised an influence quite out of proportion with the degree to which it has been actually read and materially known. The threatening tone of the relevant passages, the omission of nearly all reference to earlier opponents of Naturalism (evoking a sense of earth-rending ‘discovery’), and Moore’s insistence on using the term ‘fallacy’ all go a long way to account for its impressiveness and the well-deserved but lop-sided success that it has achieved. Few of us like to be caught red-handed ‘committing a fallacy’, and it is the panic fear, not yet entirely extinct, I believe, of falling into such a predicament that has done a great deal to paralyse ethical thought other than the purely formalistic and syntactic, and has inclined many people to keep on the safe path of an ethics without content, without a moral subject-matter.1 That is what I mean by the Ghost of the Naturalistic Fallacy; and my intent is not to defend ethical Naturalism against it, but to rescue ethical Anti-Naturalism from its palsying effect. II Two general remarks I consider indispensable. (a) Moore’s ‘ethics’ is ex definitione, as well as in its actual features, not so much an ethics as a Theory of Value (just as Aristotle’s Â�Nicomachean Ethics is principally a Theory of Practice); like other typical theories of value (especially in the German sphere), that of Moore is non-hedonistic.

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Rather it is not built naturalistically on the concept of human desires, urges and wants as such, but implies a specific, direct evidential or intuitional experience of Good as an autonomous quality. Unlike the ethical intuitionists proper, but rather like Brentano (less akin to Scheler, and still less to Hartmann), Moore conceives of moral Right and Wrong as nearly though not wholly identical with Obligation to do and to abstain from – not as identical with (or as one pre-eminent form of) the Good or with Goodness in its own right but, in an instrumental or consequential fashion, as conduct directed to the probable ‘production’ of Good and avoidance of Evil. In this sense he calls himself a utilitarian and has been labelled an agathistic (by contrast with hedonistic) utilitarian. At the same time, Moore is also guided, like Aristotle in this respect, by a properly ethical preoccupation. Significantly enough, his standard material instances on the negative side (i.e., of intrinsic Evil), such as ‘cruelty or malice’, ‘lasciviousness’, and ‘delight taken in something evil’, are not just disvalues the production of which is morally wrong, but are themselves straight-forward types of immoral attitudes. This does not apply, though, to another standard disvalue, namely Pain. Moore is rightly, I think, hesitant to accord to Pleasure the status of an intrinsic value on a par with that of Pain as an evil; the possibility of such an asymmetry already occurred to some Greeks before Aristotle and is mentioned by him. Moore’s positive concepts for an ‘ideal’, i.e., instances of Good, such as aesthetic enjoyments, personal affections, and cognition of things good, obviously stand much more loosely to moral themes in the proper sense of the word.2 Now, about Moore’s notion of Good two things must briefly be said. (i) It is difficult to say both what exactly he means by it, and why he takes it self-evidently for granted that Good – uniformly so denominated (unum nomen unum noininatum?) – must be the central concept of ethics, or even of a theory of value. (The Temple of Paestum is beautiful rather than good; joyful contemplation of it, true, is good rather than beautiful, but is this not a definitely marginal sense of ‘good’, and does the primary question here not concern ‘beautiful’ rather than ‘good’?) Certainly this strange, general, and yet somehow restricted meaning of ‘good’ is not a datum of common sense nearly so evident and solid as the meaning of ‘pleasant’ in the widest sense on the one hand, or the meaning of ‘morally good or right’ on the other. Neither Moore’s highly unconvincing ‘isolation’ method for discerning Good (if this were the only thing existing, would you wish it to exist?) nor his personal idiosyncrasies as to ‘the ideal’ endured in post-Mooreian philosophy. What remained (or became of it) was arbitrary subjectivism and breezy indifference to contents of value,

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a supposedly non-philosophical topic assigned to anthropologists. (ii) It may also be asked, though I would not labour the point, whether Moore by his reduction of Right and Wrong to instrumentality by reference to Good was not himself conspicuously ‘committing the Naturalistic Fallacy’ in the sense of offending against the Butlerian axiom ‘A thing is what it is and not another thing’. But then, if you take this fine axiom quite literally, you will find yourself precluded from predicating anything of any object. (Logical atomism, the gospel of meaninglessness and the paradise of mental anarchy.) (b) That we hate a thing because we do not know it is a piece of Spinozist sophistry dear to pacifists and abhorrent to me; but it is true that if we hate a thing (perhaps deservedly) and do not quite know what that thing is, or what it is that we hate about it, this situation is apt to make our hatred all the more obsessive and monomaniacal, just as a sense of awesome mystery will intensify loving adoration. Moore erected the Naturalistic Fallacy into the idol of his daemonology, feeling that it was something bad but being unable to get clear in his mind as to what it consisted in.3 Now, fallacies and confusions round one core of objects may be many, but how far they are, or why they must be, ‘naturalistic’ Moore himself doubts (pp. 13–14). Ethical naturalism may have several aspects, but are they necessarily referrable to one definite fallacy, and what might it be? I would only say here that I surmise something more substantive in the naturalistic attitude than in the fallacy on which it is supposed to turn, and do not think that Moore has succeeded in pointing unequivocally to a single, central fallacy or confusion underlying it. III Moore writes at section 10: It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things which are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were not ‘other’, but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. . . .

What we wish to know is not what kind or kinds of things people call ‘good’; ‘what we want to know is simply what is good’ (11). Simply? A bold word, unless we agree that ‘good’ denotes simply any object of a pro-attitude in any given context (‘And did he catch the train? Oh good!’). The concept of ‘good’ as an objective but non-natural Â�property,

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occasionally or usually or regularly linked to other (non-natural) properties but quite independent of these for its ‘meaning’ and not to be grasped through these, appears to me to be anything but simple. Yet Moore compares (12) the relation between ‘good’ and those associated properties to the relation between ‘yellow’ and ‘sweet’ as united in an orange (I would suggest honey, and perhaps add the property ‘viscous’ or ‘sticky’), and he points out that we wouldn’t define ‘sweet’ as ‘yellow’. (If we did, that would be a fallacy, though not, according to Moore, ‘naturalistic’, seeing that both properties are natural instead of one being non-natural.) Pleasure may be good (12), and so may Bentham’s general happiness (14), but neither can be what is meant by good; indeed, if that were the case, ‘good’ could not be predicated of them, for such a statement would then be purely tautological (12). Or, as in the conclusion of section 11, ‘We want to know what it is that they so call’ – i.e., what it is that men call good. (Yet ‘good’ is ‘indefinable’, opening of 14: is it not chasing a will-o’-the wisp to want to know what a quality is that at the same time we hold to be indefinable?) ‘When they say ‘Pleasure is good’, we cannot believe that they merely mean ‘Pleasure is pleasure’ and nothing more than that.’ Now, if I were an ethical hedonist or Hedonistic Utilitarian, etc., I should not feel greatly worried by this formidable logical knock-out blow. I cannot see why as a Hedonistic Utilitarian, or indeed as an ordinary person, I should particularly want to say ‘Pleasure is good’; this is in no way a statement of the Hedonistic Utilitarian position, and neither is it a very idiomatic locution (it would only rarely be used, and in rather special contexts). It is not pleasurable states of mind or experiences of gratification but objects, including events and states of affairs, that we usually call good; and of course actions and intentions (and qualities of character) when we mean moral goodness. As ordinary persons, we largely – but not quite consistently and certainly not exclusively – call good in general that which is directly or indirectly, but still somehow essentially or normally, conducive to pleasure. As Hedonistic Utilitarians we should lay down the principle that the whole meaning of ‘good’ ultimately reduces to this standard, though habitual fixations to certain intermediary links in the chain of causation overlie the connection and make it partly unnoticeable for the ordinary consciousness. An erroneous doctrine in my view, but hardly vulnerable to Moore’s logical master hit. If Moore or Brentano or Scheler or Ross (perhaps myself as well), want to say that ‘Pleasure is good’, that doesn’t commit the Hedonistic Utilitarians to anything (certainly doesn’t convict them of tautology or, as an

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alternative to tautology, of a veiled self-contradiction). Why not say that in cold weather a blazing fire in one’s room is good, i.e., gives pleasure and removes discomfort, and that everything good is conformable to this model (e.g., fidelity to promises adds to the volume of social co-operation, and thus to the average sum of individual satisfactions)? And when I enjoy a good meal or a good cigar or a good play, why on earth should I bother about the enjoyment itself being ‘good’? (As for the objectivized technical meanings of good, e.g., a good gun-dog, which Moore does not mention, I cannot see that they constitute a serious logical difficulty for the Hedonistic Utilitarian interpretation.) In regard to moral goodness, the question ‘What do we mean by moral goodness?’ may undoubtedly be asked, as distinct from the question ‘What kinds of conduct (or volitional attitude) are morally good?’, or ‘What are the main dimensions and forms of moral virtue?’ or as distinct from any taxonomic enumeration of the modes or models of moral goodness. As distinct from, I say; but can the question of the meaning of ‘moral goodness’ be put in complete separation from these things? That is another matter. Why or how should the question ‘What do we mean by moral goodness?’ arise at all in disconnection from moral experience? I am not relying here on the empty postulate ‘There must be a moral good and a moral evil, whatever it is’, but on the feeling that ‘Such and such kinds of conduct and intentions are morally good; and such and such other, morally evil’. ‘Yellow’ doubtless does not mean honey or lemon or tea-roses or bile or sulphur or the cross in the Swedish national flag, etc.; but, in a universe devoid of these and all similarly coloured things, should we speculate at all about the ‘natural property’ yellow (with a secondary and subordinate concern about finding later, perhaps, ‘instances’ of it in nature)? So far as I mean anything by Morally Good, I must have some idea, be it ever so inchoate and incomplete, of justice, honesty, kindness, self-denial, self-control, modesty, courage and so forth (perhaps a vague, foreshortened, or to some extent it may be a perverted idea thereof). Given this presupposition, I may proceed to second-order moral ideas and axioms, especially to the principle that the formal and explicit ‘will to behave morally’ is itself a basic constituent of moral goodness. No description of some kind of good conduct or character may furnish us with an adequate concept of moral goodness, but without an aspect of descriptive references or extension, I submit that no idea of what ‘moral goodness’ means is at all conceivable.4 ‘Morally good’ does not stand to its diversified forms (upright, kind, etc.) as ‘yellow’ stands to the various instances in nature of yellowness.

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It is very much less adequately presented by one single dimension of virtue than ‘yellow’ is presented by, say, a lemon alone. But on the other hand, it is not separable from its diversified forms, in the way in which ‘yellow’ could still be fully present to our perception even if none of the above-enumerated objects (lemon, honey, bile, stripes in certain national flags, etc.) existed at all. As Moore himself points out (25), good, being a ‘non-natural property’, does not exist in the same sense (namely as ‘part’ of a substance, so to speak) as natural properties exist, but is inherent in other (natural) properties or their combinations. (This has also to do with its evaluative emphasis.) ‘Good’ seems to me to be all the more dependent on descriptive data and far more ‘definable’ than, say, yellow. To be sure, no actually occurring colour is just yellow: this or that yellow must be a certain definite tinge of yellow, e.g., that of my Mirado pencil or Mr. X’s jaundiced skin. But moral goodness must be not just a certain shade of moral goodness but present qua veracity or purity or benevolence, etc., or as a compenetration of several such (descriptively widely different) qualities. To identify moral goodness with one such standard moral quality – for example justice or love of one’s neighbour – is one-sided, arbitrary and misleading, but not at all a ‘Naturalistic Fallacy’. Nor is it anything so silly as to confuse a feature with an accidental or even a regular concomitant of it (yellow with sweet, say, or even a colour with the corresponding wavelength), or as silly as to confuse a feature with a substance which it may characterize. (Yellow with an orange or red with a cherry, for instance. By the way, oranges tend to be reddish, and I have known a breed of lovely, honey-sweet white cherries.) My conclusion is that where we have to look for Ethical Naturalism and the possible fallacy at its back is not in the attempt to define or describe the moral good as such (a ban imposed on this can only discourage all ethical elucidation, and lead to the rarefied sterility of a vacuous ethical nihilism scarcely mended by the casual and arbitrary suggestion of ‘instances’ of good advanced by Moore in his last chapter), but in the forced reduction of the concept of the morally good to this or that plausible or attractive conceptual category of a non-moral order – one which has no place or no central place in moral experience, but does carry some kind of a nonmoral appeal. IV In section 26, Moore defines Naturalism as the method that substitutes for ‘good’ some other property of a natural object (or collection of such objects), ‘thus replacing Ethics by some one of the natural sciences’.

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Mostly Moore has in mind psychology; or again, sociology (later, dealing with Spencer, he brings in biology); but it may be simply physics, as ‘when Professor Tyndall recommends us to “conform to the laws of Â�matter”’. I think Moore is very near here to the real point but in one sense misses it altogether. The utter insanity of Tyndall’s phrase lies, not in proposing ‘to conform to the laws of matter’ as a definition of ‘good’ but in the fact that such conduct is not even an instance of good conduct and even more in the fact that it is not even an instance of possible conduct, seeing that it cannot be contrasted with any possible contrary behaviour. (Does Tyndall’s phrase mean that levitation is the archetype of sin, and that morality consists in abstaining from working miracles?) Moore now goes on to say (section 26): Whether good be defined as yellow or green or blue, as loud or soft, as round or square, as sweet or bitter, as productive of life or productive of pleasure, as willed or desired or felt: whichever of these or any other object in the world, good may be held to mean, the theory which holds it to mean them will be a naturalistic theory. . . . By ‘nature’ . . . I do mean and have meant that which is the subject-matter of the natural sciences and also of psychology. It may be said to include all that has existed, does exist, or will exist in time.

Later, Chapter IV and especially section 73, the list of the non-ethical sciences will be extended to theology and metaphysics, and existence falsely thought to define good will be made to include supersensible and timeless existence (real or imaginary). In my view, an authentic stroke of genius on Moore’s part. ‘Supernature’, if it exists, is also nature (Divine or angelic nature, in received theological language). The intelligible and perhaps immortal or eternal self of man, or the ‘real’ will of man (or the People) alleged by some to exist, is likewise a kind of immaterial nature; and to install nature in some such sense (or conformity to it) as the definition or even the standard or the paradigm of good is naturalism logically on a par with Hedonistic Utilitarianism or with the sham ethics of ‘flourishing life’ or evolution or success or historical fruitfulness, brilliantly criticized partly by Moore in the sequel (this same Chapter II) and partly by Professor Popper in The Poverty of Histόricism.5 But let us return to the above-quoted, highly significant, passage of Principia Ethica. It is strange that Moore should fail to notice the Â�complete logical disparity between the group of concepts ‘yellow–green–blue, loud–soft, round–square, sweet–bitter’ and the other group: ‘life–pleasure, willed–desired–felt’.6 The examples of the first group (yellow, loud, round, sweet and their alternatives or contraries, as principles or criteria of ‘good’) strike us

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as fantastic and patently insane; but I deny that they are illustrative of a naturalistic attitude. Observe once more that their absurdity consists not so much in the claim that such natural qualities may define good as in the supposition that they, as such, may even be called good, i.e., furnish standard instances of good. That yellow or that violet, that round or that square, etc., be good is sheer nonsense (only lunatics, but very few lunatics, perhaps some Eleatics and Pythagoreans, have held such views). Sweet may in general be better than bitter; but bitter oranges (and sour lemons) as well as bitter boonekamp liqueur are good, whereas if I poured a liberal amount of powdered sugar into your Irish stew you would very likely throw it in my face rather than eat it with a heightened sense of enjoyment. On the other hand, the second group of examples (pleasure, desire, will), which (however interesting their differential analysis would be) come grosso modo under the heading of Hedonistic Utilitarianism, are fully illustrative of a Naturalistic doctrine.7 But this group of examples in no wise evokes a sense of absurdity or a suspicion of insanity. Pleasure, fulfilment of desires, effectual willing, etc. (life also, in some sense at any rate), bear an a priori connotation of good. (Again, good conduct is pleasing to God and not only to God; and if I am virtuous I desire certain things I regard as fitting, and will my ‘good will’ to be effective.) And their contraries stand analogously to bad. Hedonistic Utilitarianism is in my view a false, but a respectable, doctrine. It is, as we shall presently see, Naturalistic but again not the most conspicuous or most offensive type of ethical Naturalism. I said a moment ago that the insane identifications of good with loud, round, soft, sweet, blue, etc., are not Naturalistic; and this is a very important point because it reveals most clearly the Mooreian confusion of Naturalism with ‘reference to natural realities, or real things or properties, as embodiments of value’. One who said that, e.g., round was good, or even that good meant round, would be propounding a crazy but not a Naturalistic thesis. For he would not be suggesting anything howsoever remotely akin to the belief that ‘what is natural is good’, or ‘good means conformity to nature’, or ‘nature is the standard of good’. Why? Because round occurs in nature but is not a bit more natural than square; ‘round is good and square is bad’ (or the converse) has absolutely nothing to do with ‘what is according to nature is good, what is against nature is bad’. Similarly there is nothing naturalistic about blessing soft and cursing loud (or inversely), nor about preferring blue to yellow (or inversely) with an emphasis howsoever obsessive and fictitious. Selective preferences and aversions within the

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area of natural objects or properties imply neither a worship of nature nor a condemnation of it. Just as if I foolishly believed that Swedes are angels and Dutchmen devils I should not thereby imply that nationality as such was the epitome of good or inversely, the incarnation of evil. Why, then, is Hedonistic Utilitarianism (as an ethical doctrine) Naturalistic? Pain is as real as pleasure (in some sense, more so; but this is not relevant to the question). It may indeed be said to be on a level with pleasure as a natural phenomenon. To be sure. But to seek pleasure and shun pain is not just a tendency occurring in nature of which the contrary occurs in a like manner, but the prevalent, primary, ‘protopathic’ natural (and pre-moral) tendency of sentient beings. It represents, not a selective preference of many of us in the natural context, but the call and urge of Nature. Moral imperatives and moral conscience trench and intrude upon this basic natural bent; it is not the principle of morality. Is it therefore morally bad, or indifferent? I cannot enter into that question, but would observe that on the plain non-Naturalistic view, which is at least the professed view of Moore, it would appear to be simply and strictly indifferent; whereas my own less formalistic and more moderate anti-Naturalism inclines me to hold that the Hedonistic Utilitarian practical attitude, being indifferent in relation with the focal emphasis of morality, bears both a virtually evil and an essentially good moral connotation. That pleasureseeking unchecked by ascetical counterpoises is morally evil on the one hand, and that the management of our vital concerns (which involves pleasure-seeking and above all prevention of pain) is itself a moral obligation on the other hand, are fundamental data of moral consciousness. In fact, most of Moore’s paradigms of good and evil (Chapter VI) bear a significant relation to pleasure and pain – the more so as he does not include the ‘cold’ principles of justice, veracity, honesty, promise-keeping, etc. (to which Kant and Prichard each in his own way were so specially attached) among the prototypes of intrinsic good. Aesthetic enjoyment and high-minded friendship obviously imply a positive emphasis on pleasure; ‘lasciviousness’, whatever exactly he meant by that, obviously embodies uncontrolled pleasure-seeking, which thus stands condemned; above all, how could malice and cruelty be prototypes of evil if pain were altogether and in every sense an adiaphoron from the moral or ‘value’ point of view? V I have no time left to expound Moore’s discussion (Chapter II, sections 27–35) of Naturalistic Ethics in the closer sense, i.e., the principles of ‘life according to Nature’, of ‘normality’, of the ‘expansion and intensity

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of life’ and of ‘Evolution’ (he failed to add ‘History’ and ‘Progress’) erected into standards of good and supreme moral imperatives. Let me just remark that precisely this text of some 17 pages, the most crucial and devastating attack upon Naturalism most naturally so named, has to my knowledge received little or no attention in Mooreian literature (or anyhow in philosophical literature tinged by Moore’s influence and fear of the Naturalistic Fallacy) – partly, perhaps, because he himself never reverted to this subject (as he did not to concrete ethics, the content of Chapter VI, either) in his later work. But it is here that Moore’s anti-Naturalist bias comes out most openly, undistortedly and passionately, and is expressed with the greatest intellectual acumen and clarity. I would, however, say a word in support of my contention that these variants of Naturalism represent Naturalism in the closer sense, as contrasted with Hedonistic Utilitarianism. The reason is that, even though value criteria like the pleasure, desire, preference, will or decision of the subject (or of a community of subjects to which he belongs) undoubtedly are naturalistic in that they express prevalent tendencies of nature or appetitive facts recognized as sovereign principles (Emotivism itself is an anaemic species of Naturalism), they still do not in any way refer to Nature in a comprehensive and overall sense. Nor do they refer to any concrete power or strength prevailing on the plane of brute factuality. Rather, hedonistic criteria connote an aspect of autonomous evaluation and thereby the hint of a departure from pure Naturalism. In fact, our selective preferences, taken even in a spontaneous and irresponsible sense to the exclusion of all conscience or rule-consciousness, involve a good deal of genuine value-experience and of attention to what is morally pleasing. On the other hand, the worship of strength, power, historical trend, vital superiority, success or victory or potent being or fact as such is justly called the real Naturalism by Iris Murdoch, if I understand her aright.8 Indeed, in section 27 Moore puts in a condensed form what, if I may venture to say so, he really means by Naturalism: ‘the belief that Nature may be said to fix and decide what shall be good, just as she fixes and decides what shall exist’. Whereas (in the preceding passage on p. 42) it is the fundamental, elementary and constitutive supposition of Ethics (in the widest sense of course) ‘that some things are bad and others good’. What Moore means here by things being ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is good and bad in the ordinary sense – not good in function of the fact that they are, or bad in function of the fact the they are not, or are a mere futile appearance or froth on the surface of reality, doomed to vanish forthwith or ultimately. And he rightly announces that ‘If everything

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natural is equally good, then certainly Ethics, as it is ordinarily understood, disappears’. So far, then, Naturalism proper is an attitude; and an attitude in my view both more at loggerheads with common sense and more base and contemptible than that of either Hedonistic Utilitarianism or arbitrary decisionism. But should we look for a fallacy at its core, or in Naturalism as such? Perhaps so; but I hardly think that the relevant fallacy resides in mistaking existent forms of good or standard instances of goodness or traits associated with it for ‘the meaning of Good’. The really relevant fallacy is suggested by Moore himself when, in the quoted passage and in the anterior section 26 (p. 40), he speaks of attempts to substitute for Ethics some one of the natural (including anthropological) sciences, or to construct an ethics based upon science. I would phrase the fallacy thus: ‘A thing is real and intelligible in proportion as it is assimilable to the categories, and accessible to the methods, of natural science’. But around this would cluster other fallacies of a more specific character, such as the fallacy that a thing must be good and lovable for being impressive and compelling, and that evil cannot be anything but absence of good, weakness or ultimate unreality. Or again, not unconnected therewith, the fallacy that our philosophical understanding of good and evil cannot be but directly guided by the paedagogical intent of persuading men to practise virtue and refrain from vice: ethics a ‘practical science’ (once more a view expressly rejected by Moore). So many variants of the one (pragmatical) fallacy: what suits us is true. Naturalistic delusion rather than fallacy.9 Bedford College, London Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

[Author’s annotation] Some exaggeration. I think there is an important insight implied in this; many philosophers of very different doctrinal shades have independently, mostly no more than occasionally, hit upon what I have called the thematic primacy of moral evil, and to my knowledge none has treated the matter so elaborately as Mr. Mayo. [See also Kolnai, Ethics, Value and Reality (edited by Klug and Dunlop, London, 1976), 105–6; ‘The thematic primacy of Moral Evil’, Philosophical Quarterly, VI, 1956.] Cf. Alan R. White, G. E. Moore, 127; ‘Hint of dissatisfaction with his usual attacks may perhaps be seen in their very repetitiveness’. As for the possible different meanings of the Naturalistic Fallacy, see White, op. cit., 124ff., and of the distinction between natural and non-natural properties, p. 135, the passages here referred to in Principia Ethica being on pp. 40–41, 110–111, 124. Even the barest and poorest minimum, the mere extrinsic reference to the decrees of some specified authority, connotes a distinctive designation of that authority and

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

some presumption of intrinsic goodness in that authority or in the fact of a disciplinary relationship itself. The religious position that ascribes to God ‘sanctity’ or ‘all-goodness’, and on that presupposition defines moral obligation in terms of Divine commandments, may of course be held to escape this criticism, for it operates with an independent notion of moral good, derived from intuitive and consensual moral experience. If I believe in the validity of not intrinsically evident Divine commandments on the strength of the various Divine commandments whose contents are intrinsically evident, it may well be argued that my beliefs, whether true or false, do not commit me to ethical naturalism, i.e., a non-moral concept of morality. By the way, what Moore may have meant here by ‘felt’ is entirely obscure. I understand my will’s or desire’s being the principle of good (and reject the thesis as Moore does), but what do we make of ‘feeling’? Has it ever occurred to anybody to suggest that nausea or anguish or an oncoming fever or frustration are good, just because one feels them? Or is ‘felt’ intended to mean our feeling that something is good? That would refer, not to a naturalistic, but (on the contrary) to an intuitional concept of morality or value; and such feelings provide the only possible commonsensical approach to the matter, though they may be fallible and in need of reflective analysis, various confrontations, reconsideration and correction. [See Ethics, Value and Reality, 144.] Unless Naturalism be taken in the wide sense that to call anything good, including morally good, implies some kind of pro-attitude to it. In which case Naturalism reduces to tautology. See ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume XXX (1956). I think Miss Murdoch’s points of view are very remarkable and reveal most essential insights, only I happen to cherish everything she seems to despise and loathe everything she seems to admire. [This paper, which is assigned to 1966 by the compilers of the Bibliography of Kolnai’s Ethics, Value and Reality (edited by Brian Klug and Francis Dunlop, London: Athlone Press, 1977), was written to be read aloud on an occasion that I have not been able to identify, and was left by the author when he died in 1973 in an incomplete and very provisional state, unprepared for publication. The unedited manuscript will be made available in due course in Bedford College Library (D. Wiggins, June 1979).]

16 A Defence of Intrinsicalism against ‘Situation Ethics’ (1970) 1. The Thesis to Be Argued in This Paper Situationism or Situation Ethics, a current of ethical thought that has mainly emerged in a Christian – both Catholic and Protestant – context, is opposed, on the face of it, primarily to ‘Legalism’ and may so far be represented as a move towards, or a position approaching, or again a moderate form of, ‘Antinomianism’. It may be defined as equating morally right action to ‘doing what is best in the particular situation in which the action is taking place’ or ‘giving the proper answer to the moral problem inherent in a situation with its peculiar circumstances’ in contrast with ‘duty-fulfilment’ or ‘action in conformity to a moral law’. This antithetic schema in itself raises, of course, a host of conceptual problems with some of which we shall have to deal. In spite, however, of the situationist aversion to ‘Law’ and distaste for ‘Duty’, the antithesis is not identical with the classic controversy between the (broadly speaking) Aristotelian moral philosophers of ‘Virtue’ and the (broadly speaking) Kantian formalists – the former defining the ‘good man’ in terms of ‘having the right wishing in the various morally relevant respects’ and the latter, in terms of ‘acting from duty-consciousness regardless of his wishes’. In a sense, Situationism is actually not greatly interested in the build-up of a ‘virtuous personality’ (a theme, anyhow, more closely concerning Moral Education than Ethics proper), and again, what it opposes is not so much the claim of Duty as the objective meaning and validity of ‘duties’. Although, for essential reasons, Situationism often looks like a laxist as opposed to a rigorist moral attitude, its emphasis is not on a 265

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negation of moral Right and Wrong or a (relative) depreciation of what is morally right in favor, say, of what the agent likes or wants; rather, its central point lies in its rejection or at any rate devaluation of any detailed moral code or codes, not only in the sense of a ‘table of laws’ (or ‘commandments’) but also in the sense of a table of particularized moral standards or values or points of view. While inveighing against ‘Legalism’ and inevitably hostile to rigoristic insistence on certain moral taboos, the Situationists see an unbridgeable gulf set between their principle and that of Intrinsicalism, i.e., the attribution to such specified moral values as, say, truthfulness or promise-keeping, or again monogamy, of an Â�intrinsic and unbarterable meaning and validity of their own. Situationists, then, operate with the concept of a unique – a supreme, all-Â�embracing and uniformly decisive – moral criterion which also embodies an Â�unconditional demand, and to which all other, specified or particularized, moral aspects or motifs or ‘duties’ are not merely subordinate but simply instrumental, of which they are mere applications proper to some situations but unsuited to others (being, in this second case, expendable without further ado). Whereas a non-rigoristic Intrinsicalist would recognize that moral laws, to say nothing of moral desirabilities, may in some situations come to be mutually incompatible in concerto (e.g., I cannot fulfil two contradictory promises I have carelessly or indeed frivolously made; by truthfully answering or even trying to evade a question I may deliver an innocent person into the hands of his malignant enemies) and that in such cases it must be ‘decided’ which is the ‘lesser evil’ and that must be chosen, a Situationist would deny that in such a case value stands against value or evil against evil and would speak, not of doing right by breaking a less urgent obligation or of choosing the lesser evil, but simply of doing the right thing or in other words, of intelligently conforming to the one omnipresent moral imperative, say that of producing the ‘maximum good’ (classic Utilitarianism) or that of ‘Love’ (Agapé or ‘agapéic love’: Christian Situationism).1 Supposing that I have presented here the Situationist doctrine, very incompletely of course but by no means unfairly or misleadingly, I propose to argue against it on the following grounds. The terms ‘Situation Ethics’ and ‘Situationism’ are infelicitously chosen; they blur the real issue and set the mind on a false track. This may not constitute a very serious objection; it applies perhaps to most technical terms in Philosophy and to most ‘-ism’ words. Nevertheless, the objection is worth making, for its significance reaches beyond a question of mere verbal usage; it leads us on to a critique of the antinomian

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emphasis suggested by the word. The target-fetish of the Situationists, ‘Legalism’, similarly connotes a false scent. As I hope to show, the perversity attaching to the ‘legalistic’ and the ‘puritanical’ attitudes, and, likewise, the traditional misconception of Morality as a ‘Law of Nature’ can perfectly well be exposed without falling a prey to the antinomian emphasis of Situationism and, above all, without lapsing into the extrinsicalism which constitutes its ultimate core. By its extrinsicalist negation of Moral Standards as really experienced by men, Situationism falsifies and subverts the concept of Morality; by the arbitrary monistic simplification inherent in its doctrine it aims at separating the conceptual appearance and emotive zest of moral consciousness from moral common-sense and its wealth of contents. In other words, Situationism substitutes for Morality or Ethics something else, though that ‘something else’ is not unconnected with one aspect of Morality; the connexion is clearer in the case of Situationism than in the case of Existentialism: if, therefore, it may be excessive to label Existentialism as a form of Immoralism, it would be even more unjust so to label Situationism.2 It is nevertheless a fact that Situationism is more concerned with a reform of our moral experience than with its interpretation; this feature in itself, interpretation ordained ad hoc to a reformatory bias, tends to disqualify it from a philosophic point of view;3 but the nature of its reformatory intent is such as to render it particularly open to immoralistic misuse. It has not unreasonably been branded as ‘dangerous’ by a number of critics. Like all naturalistic types of ethics, i.e., types of ethics that tend to conflate moral with non-moral values or desirabilities and identify Morality with the well-advised and effective conduct of Practice as a whole, it invites laxism, a proclivity to underestimate the majesty of Duty and neglect moral demands in favour of extra-moral advantages; but it may invite also rigorism,4 the ideal of moral ‘perfection’ as the sole guide of Practice and interpretation of all unsatisfactory and unlucky dealing with practical problems in terms of moral guilt or weakness. The focal point of the aberration, once more, lies in the theorist’s negation of, or insensibility towards, the inherent moral properties – values and disvalues – of certain definite and basically important kinds of action (conduct, intention) and accordingly, on the level of methodic approach, in a style of ethical thinking divorced from Moral Experience. It should be added at this point that in spite of the Christian background and presuppositions of most varieties of Situation Ethics it constitutes a structurally definable possibility of ethical speculation apart from any accepted religious position – it may bear a Catholic or a Protestant tinge

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but may also be conceived in a non-Christian, a non-religious or an atheist spirit5 – ; that it may reveal a characteristic kinship with some specifically Christian points of view but may at the same time be hard to reconcile with other specifically Christian modes of valuation; and that it is in no way (and does not generally claim to be) representative of traditional Christian orthodoxy, and much less of Christian Moral Theology, as such. The present paper is about Situation Ethics as a philosophic construction it refers to the problem of an authentically ‘Christian Ethics’ only in an accidental and illustrative, not in a systematic, manner. 2. The Meaning of the ‘Situation’ Emphasis On the face of it, the principle ‘Rather than mechanically conforming to a Law, suit your action to the particular situation’ (or ‘meet the demand of the situation’, etc.) has something about it that sounds attractive. Surely the important thing for the physician is to cure the patient – this patient, here and now – not to faithfully observe a traditional or current medical: e.g., Ubi pus, ibi evacua (Where ‘matter’ is collecting, evacuate). Even supposing this rule to be predominantly valid, we feel it to be more satisfactory if the sick person recovers (owing, perhaps, to a course of antibiotics) without the pus having been drained surgically than if the draining is carried out carefully and in due course the patient dies. Medical rules exist for the sake of curing patients, not patients for the sake of reverently applying medical rules.6 However, the simile may well be misleading; it presupposes a conception of Morality or ‘moral action’ on the model of a Craft like Medicine or Engineering in which, primarily and ordinarily, one definite purpose is paramount and ‘laws’ or rules are nothing but pieces of fact-knowledge pointing to a probable or average means appropriate to securing that purpose. (The practice of any craft, and very largely of that of medicine, may of course involve thorny moral problems7; e.g., a doctor may sometimes have to ask ‘his conscience’ whether or not to apply a risky method of treatment, or whether he ought to save the patient at the cost of endangering another person’s life or welfare, or whether he should tell a serious lie which may help the patient psychologically for the moment but hurt him in the long run by destroying his hope – and above all, his trust – on his subsequent discovery of the truth). Suppose I may avert some grave evil by uttering a crucial falsehood. Very well: perhaps I ought to do that; perhaps I will do that. But I shall do it with a most significantly different state of consciousness than the one I should feel if repairing a broken object

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successfully with some unconventional tool, flying in the face of some established technical maxim; perhaps, having resolved myself to tell the lie in question, I shall not despise myself but I should indeed feel myself very despicable in reflecting (subsequently) on the fact that I have told the lie quite simply as a matter of course, without having had to override the protest of my sense of self-respect. And, for the matter of that, why exactly was it ‘situational’ behaviour to tell that lie, whereas it would have been ‘non-situational’ behaviour to stick to the truth? Either took place or would have taken place – like every concrete choice, every action – in the context of the given situation. ‘My situation’ was that of giving a statement about a certain matter, though it was also a great deal else. To decide against telling the lie, perhaps because the alternative evil consequence appeared to me not very grave or rather uncertain, or because the lie in question might commit me to a sustained policy of deceit in the sequel would have been as ‘situational’ as the opposite choice; what might be comparatively ‘non-situational’ would be the doing of some irrelevant action quite out of context: e.g., if I had suddenly started roaring the Chilean national anthem. What, after all, does a ‘legalistic’ type of conduct mean? Applying, so one would suppose, a moral Norm precisely to a situation to which it ‘applies’, a situation that as such falls under its terms of reference. Confronted with a problem such as whether I should save my friend X’s or a distinguished man’s, Y’s, life in an acute situation of crisis (to do both being impossible), or whether I should try to save a drowning man’s life (considering that I am a very poor swimmer myself), it would not be ‘legalistic’ but just insane to decide ‘on no account to commit adultery’ or ‘to pay punctually my debt to my creditor’. For these praiseworthy resolutions do not apply to the problem on hand and provide no answer, not even a remote or tentative answer, to it; therefore they do not suggest answers that might even seem objectionable or ‘false’; whenever we do feel inclined to object to a ‘legalistic’ attitude it is not irrelevance to the ‘situation’ we have in mind. ‘Legalism’ in another sense – and it is here that the word appears to be most appropriate – is more to the point. Some (very primitive and unthinking) people may tend to assume, though perhaps only occasionally and inconsistently, that whatever is not prohibited by a code of ‘positive’, jural law, in especial that of their own country, is eo ipso also morally permissible – for example, prostitution (though not procuring), or any kind of heartless and callous behavior, or any unscrupulous grabbing or ‘sharp practice’ short of actual fraud – and that whatever is prescribed by the law of the land is necessarily also a moral

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duty: thus, obedience to the orders of tyrannous and inhumane authorities; nay, that anything ordained by the law is therefore also intrinsically right. Again, what is wrong here is not reverence for ‘the law’ in contrast with response to ‘the situation’, but confusion of the moral with the jural ‘law’: in other words: mistaking for a moral norm of what is enjoined by state-power. The stipulations of legal codes are indeed, as a rule, closely tied to moral norms of certain important kinds, e.g., respect for the life and property of others, or loyalty to one’s country; but they never as such mean moral norms, and normally and justifiably leave vast areas of morality uncovered. Marked unfriendliness to ‘little’ people and obsequious cringing to people whose good-will or resentment may easily be conducive or harmful to our interests is a morally base and contemptible kind of behaviour, but it does not and cannot fall under any paragraph of the criminal law; wilful indulgence in ‘impure thoughts’ is, as many of us firmly believe, morally bad, but the idea of its being penalized by the legal code is utterly ridiculous and revolting. Yet it remains true that a ‘legalistic’ spirit, in one sense, may be present in moral judgement itself which still fully deserves the criticism levelled against it by Situationists, by sensitive Christians, and indeed by sensible ethical thinkers. The mistaken and unlovely – and perhaps crudely perverse – ‘legalistic’ spirit I have in mind reveals a certain similarity to the ‘juridicalism’ as described above. Without going so far as to confuse moral norms with codified positive laws, it conceives of moral norms unilaterally and misleadingly on the model of such laws. Unaware of the complexity of many moral problems or anxious to evade awareness thereof and to arrive as quickly as possible at a rigorous, unequivocal and massively unproblematic moral appraisal, it is only interested in finding some moral norm that obviously and conspicuously applies to the situation in question, and turns a blind eye to other moral norms which may apply to it less conspicuously and which are less calculated to yield an unequivocal ‘directive’ but which may not a whit less essentially be relevant to the problem. It is easier8 to cling to the strict norm ‘Thou shalt not lie’ than to weigh the greatness of the evil I am likely or quite foreseeably almost certain to work by telling the truth in some cases: ‘I must not lie’ simply stands then, the rest is lost sight of. Some promise I have made, perhaps one whose content is per se morally dubious, is of no great consequence to the promisee; whereas by keeping it I have to renounce providing some great and genuine, objectively valuable, benefit for others: no matter at all; such considerations are a priori illegitimate; ‘a promise is a promise’ and I have to keep it without stopping for a moment

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to reflect. Or again, ‘divorce is divorce’ regardless of whether divorce in the given case implies perhaps the saving of two lives from interminable agony or is perhaps only the means and expression of an evil, lustful, promiscuous mode of life. In ‘legalism’ of this type, we do indeed find a reluctance to look carefully into the proper nature, the problem-content and the value-and-disvalue implications of the situation in question. True, but just as much do we find a reckless less lack of regard for ‘abstract’ and universally valid moral standards or categories, possibly even of actual norms, which happen to have a bearing on that situation. The appraiser has arbitrarily and superficially selected one relevant norm, one categorylabel invoking that one relevant norm, and discarded others likewise relevant, perhaps equally so, perhaps even more so. What he has done is not thinking of the norm only while neglecting the situation: such an interpretation makes no sense, for situation (the configuration of facts that demands practical attention) and ‘relevant’ moral norm or standard or point of view are mutually correlated and complementary. From the situation as such, from it alone, absolutely nothing – no moral imperative or direction, nor even a practical incentive or counsel – follows. The approach, say, of a large carnivorous beast does not ‘necessitate’ me to flee; it ‘occasions’ me to flee given my urge of self-preservation which in itself is not ‘situational’ at all but is ‘actualized’, set in motion, brought into action by, or ‘responds to’, the threatening situation. If a person is collapsing near me and I, instead of quietly walking away without any move to help him (taking as it were the ‘I can’t be bothered’ position of callous selfishness), rush to his help and do what I can to save his life, alleviate his pain or call in the succour of others, I choose to be actuated by my compassionate feelings or my formal sense of duty, in a word by moral sentiments (to some extent at least crystallized into ‘principles’ I have accepted): again a non-situational constant ‘responding’ to the situation. But, of course, I do not run away at the sight of a kitten, nor offer a robust, athletic-looking man merrily walking towards the station to carry him on my back. Situations do not mysteriously ‘produce’ moral motives to act (or to refrain from doing something) and moral norms have no meaning except by reference to (ultimately) actual but (proximately and more essentially, in the sense of permanent awareness) conceivable or possible situations. If, as I too admittedly think, there is such a thing as a misdirected ‘legalism’, it is a kind of attitude that fails to do justice to abstract and universal moral principles as well as to ‘the situation’. It should be further admitted, to be sure, that Legalism is also open to the more specific objection, often advanced by Situationists, that it tends

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to exaggerate what I call ‘the thematic primacy of moral evil’, in other words to overemphasize abstention from evildoing and underemphasize active (so-called ‘creative’) good-doing. (The State maintains an extensive system of criminal jurisdiction but no similar system of ‘recompensing virtue’; Society and in some ways the State do also manifoldly honour and reward virtuous conduct but chiefly in the form of recognizing and recompensing useful or admirable and distinguished accomplishments which involve and include a great deal of moral virtue but are not straightforward ‘right actions’ or manifestations of ‘moral goodness’ as such.) But Legalism is guilty, on this score, of bluntness of vision rather than of any fundamental perversion. For evildoing in fact stands out in sharper contours against the background of the general practice of life than does the exercise of virtue. Thus, veracity is a positive moral virtue just as mendacity is a positive moral vice but any single act of ‘truth-telling’ is very much less ethically remarkable than any single act of lying. Again, cruelty and malice are very much more noticeable, but also incomparably more evil, than mere passive indifference to the fate of another or others. Again, to refuse help to others in need, to callously avert one’s glance from the sufferings of others instead of trying to alleviate them whenever possible, is of greater ethical moment in a bad sense than the endeavor to procure a superabundance of good for others and procure gratuitous pleasures for them is in a good sense. Lastly, good-doing as the contrary opposite of evildoing is essentially less susceptible of being cast into precise rules on the same footing with the prohibitions which bear on evildoing – the moral restrictions, taboos or ‘Don’ts’. Active moral good-doing is, for reasons inherent in the very structure of life, largely a matter of the agent’s free choice, his self-chosen ideals, his moral genius as one might say; to refrain from wrongdoing is more urgent and more stringent, more duty-like, and is more easily testable. To find fault with these basic facts is not to criticize Legalism but to challenge the constitution of the world or the human condition; it amounts to an attempt at substituting for Morality a utopian subversion of the universe. Legalism deserves blame, not for recognizing the irremovable thematic primacy of moral evil9 but for its tendency to confine the moral outlook to what is easier to notice and what is easier to codify and to apply: an attitude conducive to an all too mediocre, trivial and inadequate but not to an essentially mistaken or perverse conception of Morality.

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3. The Ambit of Situation Ethics: Antinomianism and Existentialism; Prudentialism and Utilitarianism ‘Antinomianism’ means the contrary opposite of ‘Legalism’, i.e., the negation of the validity or relevancy of the Moral Law or moral laws, rules or imperatives. Situationism is more closely antinomian as regards moral laws in the plural than as regards ‘the Moral Law’ inasmuch as it impugns the idea of a moral code rather than of moral obligation as such. While ‘pluralistic’ in the sense of asserting that moral obligation has a different content and attaches to different kinds of action according to each different (perhaps ‘unique’) situation, it is anti-pluralistic (monistic) in the sense of denying the meaning and validity of several autonomous moral norms, standards or points of view. The situationist mood may tend to emphasize, at the same time, the concept of a unitary ‘moral principle’ or even more of an identical ‘moral goodness’ rather than of an all-embracing ‘moral law’, but, this is a comparatively inessential aspect of it. Thus, so far as antinomianism means the position that Morality is not basically ‘imperative’ (‘Ought’-like, obligational, deontic, imperative etc.) but say, ‘evaluative’ in nature, i.e., reposes on the distinction between Good and Bad or Better and Worse rather than between Right and Wrong, Situationism may be regarded as akin to but by no means necessarily identical with antinomianism; again, so far as autonomianism means the more extreme doctrine which simply denies, or equates to mere superstition, moral distinctions as such and proclaims our right to do as we please (though obviously it may often be ‘wiser’ not to pursue our pleasure directly and uninhibitedly), Situationism appears to be even more definitely not antinomian, since it purports to be the right conception of moral goodness and not a negation thereof. Yet even on this interpretation of antinomianism (understanding it as equivalent to immoralism, that is), a point of kinship between the antinomian and the situationist attitudes or ‘atmospheres’ is undeniably present: what is common to them is the formal gesture ‘Never mind if what you do infringes this or that widely accepted moral rule or standard; the one thing that matters is . . .’ (to wit, the ‘good’ you intend to achieve). Existentialism, which has significantly different varieties and cannot properly be treated here at all, is much like both Antinomianism and Situationism in its rejection of moral codes and its monistic conception of Value; but it is founded on a specific type of value-emphasis which cannot be defined in terms of antinomianism and is certainly not characteristic of Situation Ethics. It is no more pleasure-centered than ‘right’-centered or ‘good’-

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centered; what constitutes its conceptual core may be variously described as ‘freedom’, ‘selfhood’, ‘authenticity’, ‘personhood’ – coincident or not with a closely-knit ‘Community’ – or the agent as a true embodiment of ‘Being’. Whether conceived in an explicitly atheist or in a vaguely religious or in a professedly Christian spirit, whether denying or affirming the possibility of a ‘salvation’ of man, Existentialism is interested in what stands for something like a divine stature of man10 rather than either his goodness or even his good. It has a predilection for the extraordinary, the heroic or the deviant, the irreverent and even the irrelevant (‘gratuitously’ elevated to supreme relevance by arbitrary choice) but also possibly for excessive and mystical – chiefly, unconventional – religiosity; for the state of ‘crisis’ and for ‘marginal situations’. Existentialist and Situationist attitudes will easily interfuse and we are often reminded by situationist utterances of existentialist motifs and inversely; existentialism has surely exercised a strong impact on Situation Ethics. There are, nonetheless, reasons for keeping the two concepts apart. What is common to the two doctrines is, once more, their identical aversion to moral codes and, what I think to be more essential, to moral categorization. Situationism is undoubtedly the wider concept; existentialism ineluctably entails an emphasis on ‘situational decision’ by the agent as contrasted with his conformance to ‘abstract’ but contentual standards, whereas a situationist doctrine need not have anything to do with the conceptual idols specific to existentialism. Prudentalism, a salient feature of Aristotelian-Thomist ethics, as well as Utilitarianism reappear in a somewhat refurbished – perhaps, Â�clarified – shape in Situation Ethics, and here too the point of kinship lies in the displacement of emphasis from fixed particular types of Value and Disvalue towards the ‘unique’, ‘here-and-now’ situation – or agential behaviour evoked by it. The question, in other words, is not whether the agent’s conduct answers such and such moral standards (qua relevant to the situation, of course) but whether the agent deals with the situation in a welldesigned or well-adapted or conducive or expedient manner. The criterion is in each case a unified (i.e., monistic) and an ultimately non-moral one. Morality is interpreted as identical with right, correct, wise, reasonable, capably directed, etc. Practice as such.11 Within this framework, however, the divergencies appear to be considerable. Prudentialism tends to be an agent-ethic rather than an act- or a norm-ethic. It sees the criterion of right acting in the virtuous character of the agent itself: a character and a conjunction of habits governed and permeated by ‘Reason’, more exactly ‘practical reason’ (in its turn not only underlying, but dependent on, specific habits of virtuous conduct); reason as the art, so to speak, of applying the

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agent’s permanent and all-embracing purpose, scil, the pursuit of his own ‘true’ good, correctly and with full awareness and certitude to the given here-and-now situation. Right is what a good or virtuous – a well-trained, well-educated, shrewd and percipient, as also experienced – person would do, his reason not being swamped and obfuscated or momentarily perverted or swept away by the impetus of extraordinary or quasi-irresistible passion. Thus Prudence, the guiding light of Morality, is also its substantive unitary content, and at the same time the mark of man’s natural ‘perfection’ qua man (Reason being man’s distinctive feature). This is a highly complex and largely circular notional construction; the use of expressions like ‘true good’, ‘right reason’, ‘conformity of reason to the rectified will’ and the role attributed to ‘virtuous habits’ betray a surreptitious or shamefaced leaning on ordinary, traditional moral valuations and a shy evasion of radical utilitarianism or situationism. Aristotle already distinguishes Practical Wisdom or Prudence from mere ‘cleverness’, i.e., an able strategy in the pursuit of any kind of pleasure or inferior advantages; and his Catholic followers and interpreters or, in part, revisers, will – misleadingly enough – warn occasionally against mistaking ‘false prudence’ and ‘prudence of the world’ for what Prudence ‘truly’ means. If on the one hand such a mistake is obviously invited by the basic drift and conceptual atmosphere of prudentialism and if countless immoral schemes have in fact been salved with the chrism of sophistical ‘justification’ in prudential terms, on the other hand Prudentialists with a rigoristic bent have chided their opponents, the Conscientialists – i.e., the typical ‘legalistic’ casuists of Moral Theology – for providing too many loopholes for moral laxity by limiting moral obligation to what is clearly and beyond reasonable doubt prescribed by moral ‘laws’ and thus extending the realm of the ‘permissible’ to the point of securing a space of freedom for such milder kinds of unvirtuous, mundane and morally indifferent sorts of conduct as may escape from ‘legal’ definition. Many things we do are not prescribed or expressly sanctioned by our conscience but do not provoke its protest either or can extort a ‘free pass’ from it; whereas prudence ‘governs’ every step of him who ‘possesses’ it and impregnates his conduct with a positive and omnipresent morality: prudentialism is linked to the Thomist doctrine of all single, concrete human acts being either morally good or morally bad and none morally indifferent. Morality means right practice, and all right practice is eo ipso moral: prudence in itself implies morality; but again everything we do ought to be morally good, or else we are not governed by true prudence. A nomistic and categorical ethic cannot but reject this doctrine together with its implicit alternative of a laxist or

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rigorist conception of life. The agent is urged by the prudential moralist to be as virtuous as possible, ‘perfect’ as it were; but, objective yardsticks being underemphasized if not altogether denied, analytical checking of transgressions and judgement of conduct by an ‘impartial spectator’ tend to be evaded. As opposed to Conscience, the ‘inner judge’ or ‘man in the breast’ surveying and appraising but not actually decreeing or commanding the agent’s conduct, ‘Prudence’ is as it were its own guarantee; it is the agential power itself and, so far as it is operative, the epitome of its goodness at the same time. Yet, obviously, moral discourse is tuned to the conceptual key not of Prudence but of Conscience, i.e., the idea not of relying on the hypothetical virtue-wisdom of the supposedly virtuous but of calling the agent to account for his actions (which can be read and appraised only in terms of right and wrong kinds of actions as involved in any single ‘situation’); and Moral Theology and confessional practice have on the whole been definitely tied to conscientialism, with prudentialism inorganically affixed in the background as an ostensible metaphysical ‘basis’, in fact rather an ornamental appendage.12 Situationism, so far it expects the agent to deal with every ‘unique’ situation ‘rationally on its merits’ – not from caprice, blind sentimental impulse, flash-like ‘intuition’ etc. – comes very close to prudentialism. But, on the one hand, it will simplify that many-faced doctrine and render it more consistent, doing away with the built-in residuum of traditional valuations and virtue-categories; on the other hand, as a compensating means of orientation it has to postulate some handier overall principle of morality than the agent’s own ‘true good’ and ‘natural perfection’. This might be a humanitarian concept of ‘the greatest good of all’ as the supreme and exclusive ‘end’ to which every action ought to be and every moral action is ordained; or, under a Christian varnish, universal ‘Love’ or ‘Agapé’ or ‘Charity’ as the source from which every action ought to spring, shaped in its here-and-now content by a rational commensuration and calculus of the facts that make up or are relevant to the situation. Thus we might say that while Prudentialism already displays a definitely situational slant, this emerges more clearly in Situationism which abandons the ego-directed and perfectional emphasis with the qualitative biases clinging to it, replacing them with altruism as a straightforward moral principle. Altruism does indeed make more sense a as moral principle than does prudence or reason, or again ‘virtuous habits’; yet in another important respect situationism, recognising Universal Benevolence (with or without a Christian overtone) as the supreme moral principle but also as the sole substantive and irrefrangible moral principle, veers farther

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than does prudentialism from congenial acceptance of moral values and from an authentic interpretation of moral experience. For altruism thus exclusively inthroned (under whatever name) means the reduction without a remainder of all moral goodness to the ‘good of man’: that is, to a concept that in itself is purely non-moral. The prudential pursuit of the agent’s own good was less obviously moral, but more genuinely moral in so far as in the agent’s ‘own good’ it included (in however obscure and tortured a fashion) the agent’s own goodness: that is, virtue, dignity, distinction, ‘tempered’ and in some sense ‘purified’ quality. Altruism as such, however, is directed to the welfare of men alone, its only ultimate theme and teleology. We thus come to locate Situation Ethics in the closet vicinity of Utilitarianism, with which Prudentialism displays an equally indubitable but a more remote and qualified parentage. Utilitarianism itself, to be sure, has no single and unambiguous meaning. In its prototypic primary form, it is hedonistic, egoistic and consequentialist. In its modified forms, it may adopt a concept of ‘welfare’ not wholly reducible to ‘the balance of pleasure and pain’ but embracing, say, health, vigorous and well-ordered activity, harmoniously developed dispositions, etc. as autonomous components; or again it may transpose selfish into ‘universal’ hedonism (as derived, pretty fictitiously, from self-interest, or frankly accepted – on Sidgwick’s model – as a valid moral ‘intuition’); and, lastly, it may throw consequentialism overboard in favor of a merely wholesale justification of a traditional (consensual, intuitional, experiential) body of autonomous moral standards in terms of general utility. As regards the first distinction, that between hedonism and welfare-emphasis, the position of Situationism seems to be an open and indeterminate one; but then, anyhow, a comprehensive policy devoted to the aim of promoting pleasure and suppressing ‘pain’ (i.e., unpleasure, sorrow, suffering) will even on purely immanent grounds be hardly able to refrain from encouraging some kinds of pleasure rather than others or endurance of some kinds of suffering rather than of others. As regards the second distinction, Situationism as a humanistic and especially as a Christian doctrine plainly sides with altruism or universalism against egoism – though strictly speaking this may not be essential to its peculiar distinctive principle or inherent in its definition: the agent’s adequate response to the here-and-now situation, regardless of ‘intermediate’ permanent standards of value and disvalue. It is on the third point, that of consequentialism versus ‘normative’ utilitarianism, or in other words act-utilitarianism versus rule-utilitarianism,13 that Situationism ranges entirely, indeed coincides, with the unmodified prototypic form of the Utilitarian conception.

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The Utilitarian imperative runs: ‘Always act with a view to maximizing good and minimizing evil’ (we now disregard the distinction between the good/evil of self and of others, and the question whether good/evil strictly reduces to pleasure/suffering). The agent, then, when taking a decision should weigh the respective consequences of his possible alternative actions in terms of a balance of desirability and undesirability, and make his choice accordingly. That is what morality ‘means’; of course, the presupposition is implied that he also should be properly equipped with intellectual power (cf. ‘prudence’), relevant information, and experience concerning various similar models of practice, enabling him to perform such a calculus of foreseeable consequences pertinently, with a high degree of objective probability. The preparation of the act itself should consist in considerations of utility: hence the term ‘act-utilitarianism’. But it might not unreasonably be assumed that such an extensive thinking out of the foreseeable consequences in regard to every single here-and-now problem of practice would constitute an extremely wasteful method and that to apply it competently is anyhow beyond the reach of the ordinary man. This reflection suggests the passage to rule-utilitarianism, which could perhaps also be labelled ‘conservative utilitarianism’ and which prevails in Aristotelian and prudentialist ethics and in a different form also, e.g., in Hume, and is discernible in the outlook of both Bentham and Mill. To act morally, the agent should conform to a received system of rules which is ordained to, or expresses, the principle of utility; the code or codes of moral norms in ‘civilized society’ are in fact so interpretable to a large extent, and so far as they are not – so far as in some respects they are irrelevant or indeed run counter to the principle of utility – they ought to be intelligently revised and reconstituted. I would myself agree with this mitigated version of utilitarianism up to a certain point: that is to say, I would in no sense agree with the tenet that morality means utility but do admit that moral conduct is on the whole consonant with a wise management of the business of life, conducive to the interests of society, and that this is not so merely as at matter of contingent fact but that the nexus is a somehow essential one; for standards of human goodness not on the whole subservient of the good of men would never have come to be registered as valid in the consciousness of mankind or solidified into a moral consensus of society. Thus truthfulness, honesty and contractual morality in general are not morally right simply because they are calculated to promote communication, the dissemination of knowledge and the effective ordering of social cooperation (and thereby, the aims of human striving in their all-round conspectus), but the high importance attached

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to them in civilized society as a whole is very largely due to their being thus beneficial. But rule-utilitarianism certainly does not suit the situationist temper. For what appeals to this is, in the first place, not the principle of utility as such but precisely the agent’s direct recourse to a ‘situational’ decision over and above any intermediate moral normativities: and that means, so far as consequential utility is called in as the discriminating test of good and bad action, act-utilitarianism. The agent should not bring ‘ready-made’ universal and contentual preferences to the shaping of his right behaviour in the given situation but make his decision ‘in freedom’, in the spirit of ‘the situation’ and animated by the one principle alone that is supposed not so much to claim his obedience (analogously to conscience) as to inform his volition as a whole (analogously to prudence). According to Prof. J. Fletcher, that prominent, extreme and articulate champion of Situation Εthics,14 the agent’s will is not good unless it is fully steeped in ‘Agapé’ (agapéic love, or shortly ‘Love’ in this sense), but again if it is good it is not bound by any specified rule or standard about kinds of action obligatory or forbidden, commendable or condemnable, but ‘free’ to do anything rationally fitted to the aims emergent, under ‘Love’, from the situation. The much-quoted sentence from St. Augustine, ‘Love and then do what thou wilt’, is to be taken seriously and literally. Fletcher calls his moral doctrine, proudly – and rightly – ‘monolithic’, ‘pragmatistic’, ‘totalitarian’ and ‘utilitarian’. It certainly is all that; for the last word we might more precisely substitute ‘act-utilitarian’. 4. Situational Extrinsicalism Above all, to use another of Fletcher’s self-descriptive terms, it is extrinsicalist – in full consonance, of course, with the rest. This means that moral goodness and badness are not intrinsic but extrinsic to any of the materially descriptive categories into which actions may be classed. Lying is not as such bad; promise-keeping is not as such good. What can be said is only that this act of truth-telling (or lying), given its circumstances and its relation to Universal Benevolence, is (or was, or would be) good, while that act of promise-breaking (or promise-keeping), similarly viewed, is (or was, or would be) bad. As Fletcher also formulates it, moral characteristics are not properties but predicates. I would paraphrase it thus: chess-playing is neither good nor bad, but it was good of you to provide entertainment for this poor sick man by playing a couple of games with him, or bad of you to waste your time on chess-playing

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instead of devoting yourself to that urgent and useful task incumbent upon you. It is much like the logical structure of the judgement that Â�Vitamin B pills are good for many people but bad for me since they upset my digestion, whereas sugar and bread or noodles are good for me who am too thin but are bad for diabetics and for the fair number of people who are too fat.15 Fletcher’s ‘Predicates, Not Properties’ watchword may be criticized by logicians, but it is enlightening inasmuch as it reveals that, beyond the legalistic strictness which is the proximate target of his attack, his guns are trained at a more fundamental one: the objective validity of moral standards (except ‘Agapé’ alone) as distinct from purely practical appropriateness ‘to the situation’. But he makes his point even more explicit by stating that traditional marks of moral goodness and badness, e.g., those derived from the Ten Commandments or any other widely accepted moral codes or tables of virtues and vices are per se morally meaningless: actions orientated by such injunctions and commendations are good if inspired by ‘Love’ and fit to secure single concrete ends thus inspired, bad if contrary to ‘Love’ or ill fitted to the ends it suggests. Fletcher’s radicalism – and consequently, sometimes, clarity – compels our admiration: he caps the climax by declaring that whether ‘The End Sanctifies the Means’ ever was or wasn’t, in historical fact, a principle professed by the Society of Jesus, it certainly is not only a defensible but a well-nigh self-evidently true and right principle. He invokes Lenin’s answer given to an interlocutor who complained of the cruelty and tyrannical harshness of the ‘means’ applied by the Â�Bolsheviks in furthering their allegedly good ‘end’, as if the end sanctified the means. ‘Well’, said Lenin with disarming candour, ‘what else but the end could sanctify the means?’; and he was utterly correct. Fletcher also credits the moral agent, as envisioned by him, with ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’. Freedom is notoriously a word with several meanings. What he has in mind here is obviously not the classic philosophical concept of free-will, which is at least equally compatible with traditional ‘legalistic’ ethics – I freely obey or disobey the moral norms relevant to my practical situation; I freely choose between two ‘goods’, one of which represents or involves duty-fulfilment, whereas the alternative good, whose attraction may be very potent, objectively involves disregard for an obligation and perhaps even tempts me subjectively all the more by dint of the spicy lure, the perverse zest, of doing the illicit thing (the experience of pleasure enhanced by overlapping its intrinsic obstacle). Again, he cannot have in mind physical freedom, which is presupposed by every ‘action’ proper and is irrelevant to the debate; nor, finally, the

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concept of ‘freedom under the Law’, i.e., freedom from arbitrary authority, from the despotic whim and compulsive fascination of another – against which the impersonal majesty of a normative and objectified Table of Values and Wrongs provides the securest bastion. He can only mean a kind of ‘freedom of spontaneity’: the freedom of snapping one’s finger at rules and taboos and of ‘doing what one likes’, though, in contrast with rank immoralism or pure antinomianism, on the presupposition only of being imbued with the principle of ‘Agapé’ or ‘Love’ or Universal Benevolence. Indeed, by committing himself to the hyperbolic – and strictly speaking, wholly nonsensical – Johannine phrase ‘God is Love’, and putting on it the preposterous construction that it defines not God in terms of Love but Love in terms of God, Fletcher comes perilously near to the degrading and irrational doctrine of the so-called ‘Ethics of Divine Imperatives’ (‘Right is what God commands’, instead of ‘God commands us to do right’), i.e., the kind of extreme ‘Legalism’ which is the negation of all moral experience and of all rational cognition in the realm of morality.16 This religious fantasy is not, as he himself rightly observes, essential to the concept of Situationism; but apart from showing us his fanciful and inauthentic reading of Christianity, it throws additional light on the extrinsicalist turn of mind. Better blind submission and infatuated, obsessive discipleship than bowing to the intrinsic evidence of Moral Cognition. But a kind of experience of ‘freedom’, which however misguided may be intense, remains. And what of ‘responsibility’? This seems, if possible, more paradoxical. What we ordinarily mean by responsibility is precisely the testability, ‘checkability’, appraisability, judgeability, or shall we say the ethical intelligibility of an agent’s conduct in term of recognised (though not, in general, strictly definable or exhaustively enumerable) moral norms and standard of value, and ‘before’ an informal and indefinite ‘tribunal’ of others – ‘onlookers’, ‘appraisers’, ‘judges’ – who constitute a consensual medium of moral response, sensibility and evaluation.17 And it is just against this concept of moral discourse and arguable appraisal that Situationism is directed, placing as it does – reservation made for ‘Love’ – all emphasis On the agent’s ‘freedom’, not in the sense of free-will or of ‘freedom under the Law’ but in the sense of a sort of moral ‘sovereignty’, i.e., freedom to ‘decide’ in actu what for him is here and now right or wrong to do. Short of certain very simple and blatant cases of good-doing and evildoing (succouring others in danger with heroic self-abnegation, perhaps, or on the contrary assault and robbery or sadistic child-murder practised on a large scale), nobody could on such presuppositions form any reasoned judgement on the behaviour

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of a fellow-member of society, since he is precluded from analysing it into categorically tangible aspects of right and wrong. Almost everything can be ‘justified’ in virtue of a ‘Love’ (an ‘agapéic’) motivation: a man may shoot his eight children so as to spare them the horrors of an atomic war he fears to be impending; and almost every such justification may be plausibly or arbitrarily called in doubt: Mr. X’s sustained display of irreproachable conduct and manifold beneficence might be underlain entirely by his ‘base’ concern, quite alien to ‘Love’, for his security and ‘respectability’ or ‘smooth-running’ life. I cannot even see how an agent imbued with the situationist doctrine can be ‘responsible before himself’, i.e., before his conscience;18 for Conscience is an argumentative and analytical function (cf. ‘examination of conscience’): what I can really and concretely, in terms of professed norms and standards, justify ‘before my own conscience’ I can also intelligibly justify to others, even though (what may very possibly occur) on a specified point my conscientious emphasis appreciably diverges from the emphatic opinion current in my social environment. (A person who is a vegetarian on moral grounds can wholly intelligibly and lucidly convey his point – his moral repugnance to having other sentient beings slaughtered in order to feed on their flesh – to others: he will fail to convince most of them and elicit some counterarguments, Christian or other; but his attitude will strike few of them as a mere opaque whim, and though it may not earn him much sympathy, it will compel respect rather than inspire contempt.) Nevertheless, however ill the epithet ‘responsibility’ is applied by existentialists and situationists, I feel inclined to suppose that they must mean something by it. In a distinctive sense, we attribute responsibility – differently from our calling a person responsible for what he does – to a man arranging his policy, in a certain domain of affairs, according to his own judgement as opposed to simply carrying out the instructions of his superiors on every problematic point and at every important turn or juncture. In every hierarchy of office, a higher position is (normally) a more ‘responsible’ position. For successes and achievements of State policy, as also for the moral integrity and nobility displayed therein, highranking Government leaders are praised, and for failures and immoralities blamed, rather than their scribes, subordinates and technical executives. But their ‘responsibility’ lies in the policies’ being imputed to them and in their liability to being ‘called to account’, not in their range of power and latitude of decision. The alleged ‘responsibility’ of the ‘sovereign’ agent of Situation Ethics, an agent over and above any hard-and-fast appraisability of his actions, is one of the ornamental slogans, the euphoric hurrah-words

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well familiar to students of ‘emancipatory’ ideologies; the concept of that ‘responsibility’ is empty of content. And the main point is not that situationism fails to threaten the agent with sufficient ‘distinct damnations’ or specified reasons for social ostracism but that it deprives him of seriously applicable moral orientation and makes havoc of the conceptual scaffolding of his conscience. With sonorous magnificence, Fletcher disposes of the commonsensical objection that the human agent is not in general able to determine Right and Wrong, in regard to a given practical problem, merely from the all-comprehensive principle of ‘Agapé’ and his overall calculus of ‘foreseeable consequences’ (including, of course, their respective probability and their comparative weights!) but, in order to ‘choose Right as against Wrong’, nay even to work out a more or less meaningful and valid ‘moral decision’ where plain, unequivocal ‘Ought’ or ‘Don’t’ really fails to yield and indubitable and adequate direction, absolutely needs a differentiated body of contentual rules and standards. This might be true so long as men were children unthinkingly going astray unless treated to the drill of minutious catechisms of behaviour (with their often inevitably silly and disproportionately emphatic details); but after all it is time now that at long last they should mature to the status of adult persons.19 Why exactly now? The ineptitude of this random historicism defies description; by contrast, it appears to lend the Marxist brand of historicism an air of scientific respectability in virtue of its dubious but comparatively real historical basis in the sociology of classes and of technological equipment. The only similar basis that Christian Situationism might conceivably claim for itself is the increasing prevalence in modern industrial society of Atheism and Irreligion. Were I an historicist anxious to espouse the fashion of his epoch I would boldly celebrate the so-called ‘death of God’ but certainly not amuse myself with a ‘Theology without God’, and perhaps adopt the ethic of a humanistic utilitarianism but with a hearty contempt refuse to deck it out with a Christian paint and tags of a pious biblical or mystical phraseology. Utterly remote from the authentic religious ideal of imitatio Christi (this, to be sure, is itself no substitute either for an elaborate code of morals, which on the contrary it presupposes and postulates, or for an analytical ethic based on the phenomenology of moral consciousness, which is a demand of Philosophy), what the new slogans of man’s ‘maturity’ or ‘adulthood’ and ‘responsibility’, meaning his promotion beyond judgeability in terms of moral laws and categories, really express is the Utopian hubris of the Divinity of Man: the conceit of an omniscience of man, the infantile fancy of his all-goodness ensured by pressing the one magic button of Love, and the trance-like

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experience of his apparent technological omnipotence. That this radiant optimism should emerge in the epoch of Bolshevism and of Fascism, of a universal wallowing in ‘crisis’-consciousness and an all-pervading helpless dread of a possible universal suicide of the species, of carnages on an unexampled scale, and of an irresistible invasion by meretricious and pornocratic features of the surviving islands of Liberal Civilization – that remarkable coincidence is neither a paradoxy nor a mere coincidence, but, so far as history is not a realm of random contingency alone but also possesses features of a dimly intelligible ‘process’, may well be regarded as an only too natural connexion. The horrors listed above are intertwined with elements of a real and indubitable progress (mainly but I think not exclusively technological); and the more monstrous the horrors the louder the self-reassuring noises of Progress-consciousness is likely to grow. 5. The Poverty of Extrinsicalism Returning, however, from the nebulous spheres of historico-cultural criticism to the sober level of philosophic argument, we must admit that Situationism is not refuted by an unsympathetic reference to its modernistic backgrounds and associations. There are indeed, in spite of the presence of much solid substance hardly compatible with them, situationist overtones in the New Testament: the Moral Law is expressly confirmed, presupposed as a matter of course, supplemented in one respect or another, beautifully reaffirmed by St. Paul but at the same time somehow given a suppler note and certainly incorporated as a whole in the lofty and unitary religious experience or ‘commandment’ of ‘loving God with one’s whole heart’ and for His sake ‘one’s fellow-men as oneself’. Again, the Augustinian ‘Love and then do what thou wilt’ really originates from the ardent and versatile mind of St. Augustine – who, it may be worth to remember, also lived in a time of ‘crisis’ and decadence – and is only jubilantly quoted by Fletcher, as it has been by many others before. We should, though, I feel confident, vainly look in any text by Augustine for any such concretizations of the principle as that, e.g., marital fidelity or honesty in business matters are ‘good’ when conducive to the ends of ‘Love’ and ‘bad’ when they disserve the cause of ‘Love’. What he meant was presumably that a person ‘truly’ pervaded and guided by the spirit of ‘Love’ need not slavishly tremble before the ‘letter’ of the Law and meticulously strain himself to ‘observe’ it in all its ramifications: rather, surrendering and entrusting himself to Grace, he will again and again with nimble feet tread the objectively right path and avoid what is objectively

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wrong, repelling temptations with spontaneous ease and in a mode of radiant security. Dedicated to God and, in organic unity therewith, to the good (including the virtue) of your neighbour, you will seldom even feel a temptation to immorality, and if you do you will elude it in a smilingly self-possessed way as it were, with little effort and pondering. (To my knowledge, he did so in fact once a Christian, and though the institution was already established he never went to confession.) Perhaps the ‘ideal’ Christian can afford to live ‘above’ the Law – in the ‘freedom of the children of God’20 – yet not in the sense of living unaware and much less in defiance of the Law. Even so, the hyperbolic temperamental style in which this maxim of Augustine’s (like some others) is couched is misleading, dangerous and open to serious criticism; the maxim lends itself all too easily to a situationist interpretation closely approaching antinomianism and moral nihilism. Prefaced by whatever condition, ‘do as thou wilt’ is unsound and inadmissible counsel, and argues a magical rather than a rational state of mind. Presupposing the highest and most fundamental ‘motivation’ conceivable does not dispense the ethical thinker (nor of course the moralist) from the task of going accurately into the question what the various specified dimensions of morality mean or of sundering the praiseworthy from the morally second-rate and mediocre, and more urgently the permissible from the wrong. Certainly, ‘Agapé’ being granted, some more concrete moral implications seem to follow: thus, the exclusion of acts of wilful offence or cruelty, or even ruthless pursuit of one’s advantage at the grave detriment of others; and even – though more vaguely – attitudes of sincere and equitable cooperation. Even so, to ‘deduce’ moral truths immediately evident to a high degree and more generally recognized, such as the wrongness of deceit and the rightness of promise-keeping, from an injunction to ‘love God with our whole heart’ – something that we do not even properly understand and that is not even in our power to do except ill an indirect dispositional sense; and a God ‘ye have not seen’, as Jesus rightly said – is pretty reminiscent of putting the cart before the horse, or, in Scholastic idiom, of explaining obscurum per obscurius. Again, it is hard to see how ‘Love’, for God or even for men or mankind, could imply the values and standards of uprightness, fortitude, sobriety or chastity. St. Paul candidly enjoins the duties of chastity reminding his hearers that their bodies, awaiting their resurrection in the end, should be kept undefiled, destined as they were to be worthy ‘vessels of sanctity’; but why and in what sense promiscuity, modes of sexual gratification contrary to ‘norm’, and non-matrimonial connection ‘defile the body’, i.e., the real

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contentual meaning of sexual morals, is left by Paul in total Obscurity – presupposed, obviously, as a matter of self-evidence quite independent of any reference to God or to altruism as opposed to egoism. From a Christian point of view, it is not Fletcher’s interpretation (and that of some previous enthusiasts of the Faith, including partly St. Augustine) but the Church’s traditional interpretation of the supreme and summative Commandment that is valid: the ‘Love God, etc.’ principle does not actually contain and condense ‘the Law and the Prophets’, it is not a self-sufficient compendium of their teachings,21 but envelops, sanctions and enhances it; places it in an all-important perspective and a context of ultimate decisiveness. Some of the more simplifying Christian textbooks actually equate ‘loving God’ to just ‘loyally obeying His Commandments’, it being of course understood, with St. Thomas Aquinas, that those ‘commandments’ prescribe what is ‘naturally’, i.e., intrinsically good, ‘defining’ it not in the sense of making it a mere function of the arbitrary fancies of a Supreme Ruler but in the sense of pointing it out and casting it into higher relief as willed by a good and holy Creator who has designed ‘Nature’ and enlightened men about how to order their actions as free beings in ‘conformity’ with the ‘laws’ written into the constitution of that ‘Nature’. This construction, not free of some metaphysical confusion, undoubtedly also reveals an aspect of untenable ‘legalism’: whatever ‘Love’ for God (or for any person whatever) means it cannot mean ‘obedience’, i.e., practical subordination, alone; to speak of love while prescinding from its appreciative core and its emotive and ‘sentimental’ aura, as if love could be a position of the Will alone, is a misuse of the word. In that respect and up to that point, one may agree with Fletcher. But he gets caught himself in a very similar pitfall when, obstinately clinging to an indefensible unitary ethic of ‘Love’ yet – most praiseworthily – unable to deny response to the majestic dignity of Justice, he proclaims the bizarre thesis, utterly symptomatic of inept philosophizing, that ‘Love is Justice’. He grounds this on the universal, impartial and rational character of true Agapé as opposed to the aberrant and contemptible sanctification of love as a merely psychological, arbitrarily selective, and blindly emotive impulse. And this attitude, with which I am to a large extent in vivid sympathy – his strictures upon Tolstoy, in especial, filled me with deep pleasure – bears out his contention that ‘Situationism’ as he understands it must not be identified with Immoralism and Antinomianism. Now if Fletcher said that Love was not enough but must be supplemented with Justice, or the other way round, and that indeed the

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two essentially conspire, that Universal Benevolence is the natural background of Justice and that all love other than idolatrous infatuation for some arbitrarily singled-out object inevitably tends to foster attitudes of justice, all would be well. (Except, of course, that the whole of Morality would still not have been ‘accounted for’, since the demands of sobriety, chastity or a ‘high’ or ‘spiritual’ tone of life are not convincingly derivable from either love or justice which are both bearing on the theme of the relations between persons with divided and harmonizable interests rather than on that of the quality of their lives as such.) But Fletcher’s craving for unity, perhaps the worst source of danger to philosophic thought, drives him on to distort the somewhat pedestrian thesis about the reconcilability or indeed convergency of love and justice into a glittering paradox: the forced establishment of an identity between them, or more exactly, the arbitrary assertion that justice was a necessary corollary or implication of love. Such a sleight-of-hand requires on the one hand a mutilated concept of Justice and on the other an impoverished, prefabricated concept of Love. The truth is that 1 can have an extremely keen sense of justice and at the same time no more than a minimal, anaemic and atrophied sense of sympathy for my fellow men (both universally and singly), for justice connotes something that has nothing at all to do with love, scil, a cold but intense passion for ‘correctness’, ‘fittingness’, exactitude and ‘fidelity to the object’ (to ‘what is the case’), wherefore I may be remarkably truthful and reliable but at the same time pretty callous, heartless, unsocial and unamiable; whereas on the contrary I may be definitely warm-hearted, eager to help (whenever I come across people who suffer, but also on a more extended scale and in a more sustained and planned fashion) and capable of frequently sacrificing my own interest for the good of others yet at the same time possessing no more than a very loose sense of justice, prone to lavish money on ‘the deserving poor’ but sluggish in paying my debts to well-to-do or institutional creditors, disposed to treat offenders all too mildly or to waive my claims all too light-heartedly as well as to accord privileges with little justification, and so forth. Fletcher would in all probability call this ‘ungenuine’ love or not the ‘right kind’ of love; he certainly makes it clear that what he means by ‘agapéic love’ is not erotic attraction nor being-in-love (amor), nor impulsive sentimentality, nor again the selective love typified by friendship, but that active and intelligent universal benevolence ‘for God’s sake’ (sub specie aeternitalis, we might paraphrase it) which in traditional Latin is properly called dilexio (albeit the language of the Church freely uses expressions like amor Del, amor proximi, amor benevolentiae – as distinct from amor

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concupiscentiae; and ordo amoris – the right preferential scale of love – not to speak of the supreme theological virtue of charitas, a term that carries a suggestion of tender sympathy). Whether Fletcher’s interpretation of Christian ‘Agapé’ is historically correct I am by no means sure, but I would not labour the point. What I am sure of, however, is that his picture of Love is psychologically misdrawn and that this gravely interferes with the validity of his Ethics, for love is a primarily psychological concept, and an ethic centered in a psychological concept that is misrepresented as such cannot help being false. Fletcher’s concept of Love is arbitrarily pruned and doctored so as to ‘include’, to produce from a conjurer’s hat as it were, the concept of Justice and thus be made to serve as a naturalistic (and supernaturalistic; above all, monistic) ‘Moral Principle’. At the same time, in practice a situationist ethic will of course reveal itself as favouring a ‘love-morality’ rather than a ‘justice-morality’, not only in virtue of the magic of the word but also because a ‘free decision’ born in the heat of the ‘situation’, improvised without regard to any specified and permanent rules or codified points of view, is, so far as it may in any sense be ‘moral’ at all, likely to spring from kind and generous sentiments as elicited by the circumstances rather than from the rational and in some sense impersonal suasion of justice. Fletcher is inclined – so am I – to see the inmost essence of love, aside from sexual passion (however personalized), expressed in the term dilexio. But dilexio, as the word itself shows, has an essential and ineliminable selective connotation. Selective love is an emotive attitude that pervades mental life at all levels; its extension immensely outranges the narrow domain of the particular Greek concept of ‘friendship’ – it may, e.g., be unrequited in fact, but also one-sided in a necessary sense, for we may selectively love, that is to say passionately appreciate, admire and long for, non-personal objects which cannot reciprocate our love: thus, works of art or again places, but also persons ‘beyond our reach’ or no longer alive; it would be silly, insane or nonsensical of me to expect or even to desire certain paintings by El Greco, Rembrandt or Cézanne, or places like Madrid, Berne, Brussels, etc., or dead philosophers like Meinong or Moore, but even some living persons, to love me as I love them. Now selective love is for a large party wholly or almost wholly irrelevant to morality; it is obviously relevant to morality in so far only as it expresses particular appreciation of objective excellence of quality22 and in especial, of course, a discriminating respect and admiration for a note of high morality attaching to a character, an action, or an institution; but however complex the relations are between selective love and the morality of the

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man who feels it, selective love most organically and integrally pertains to love. Even in one who recognizes and tries to obey the ‘commandment’ of ‘love for all men’ (universal benevolence), a poor capacity for selective loves argues not only an insipid but stilled, if not crippled, personality. (Some would doubtless so regard even a person incapable of a strong and fully experienced love-attitude in the field of man-woman relationships, not necessarily negating thereby the specific values of ‘virginity’ as an aspect of supernatural dedication to God or to a highly meaningful spiritual task.) Love for the ‘next’ person (le prochain; one’s ‘neighbour’; the man one ‘happens to come across’) is also in a sense a species of ‘selective’, i.e., non-universal and privilege-creating love; Fletcher arbitrarily underrates the utterly essential Christian emphasis on this modality of love and reduces the concept of ‘Love’ to that of a universal, not to say neutral ‘universal benevolence (whose moral relevancy I am, however, the last to deny) and the frigid utilitarian calculus it practically involves (the importance of which I am again far from denying, though I regard it as much more fallible and its effectual range as much more circumscribed than Fletcher does). He, then, in my view, not only fails to do justice to Justice by interpreting it as a mere function of Love but also denatures Love by forcing it into the procrustean bed of a simplifying moral preconception; and I even see an unresolved tension between his situationism as such and his depreciation for acting on direct and unreflective sentimental impulse. Moreover, I consider it an open question how far his ‘Christian situationism’ is Christian – seeing, first, that the situationist overtones of the authentic Christian attitude suggest a very much less utilitarian brand of situationism, and secondly, that in spite of the teleological bent of Thomist ethics and the pastoral and diplomatic pragmatism manifoldly revealed in Church policies, traditional Christian ethics – Aquinas’s doctrine of the ‘Law and Nature’, and Moral Theology – have never committed themselves to extrinsicalism but on the contrary strictly insisted on the validity of specified moral norms and on the concept of intrinsic Right and Wrong. I have never yet observed any encouragement by the Church of a contentually uniform kind of confession in which the penitent declares that he ‘has sometimes acted from motives other than Love and has sometimes poorly calculated the foreseeable consequences of his action’ (without mentioning the so and so many acts of theft or embezzlement or adultery or assault, etc., he has committed); and in a theologian as ‘modern’ as Rahner23 I find confirmation of my view that it is essential for the penitent not just to ‘confess’ that he ‘is a sinner’ (which we all do as casually as we mention having had a

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poached egg for breakfast) but to confess himself guilty of the definite sins the stating of which really inflicts upon him the ‘medicinal pain’ of shame and humiliation. On the extrinsicalist view, it would indeed appear that ‘the end sanctifies the means’; and in proclaiming this openly and adorning it with Lenin’s quip ‘What else but the end should sanctify it?’ Fletcher certainly achieves, particularly as seen against his Christian background, an effect of crude piquancy. The point is here not so much that ‘ends’ of course do not sanctify or justify means, but that ends are not themselves means which could be ‘derived from’ or ‘put in the service of’ some comprehensive principle of Practice such as Love – just as keeping one’s promises is not a means but a manifestation and specification of Justice, or as a succulent dish is not a means but a fit part of a good dinner and its eating not a means but a specification of good nourishment and of an adequate response to gustatory values. In the name and even in the spirit of Love, very different and discrepant good – but also, less naturally, bad – ends can be conceived; and the monstrous system of Leninist government (formally interpretable in terms of ‘Love’, i.e., a zealous vision of promoting men’s material welfare and even their freedom), notwithstanding its uninhibited and systematic use of criminal means, embodies an evil end much rather than a mere evil means or class of means. What extrinsicalism involves is not just the freedom of using any kind of efficacious and technically apposite means in the service of putatively good ends but the freedom of choosing any kinds of end which the agent, given the scale of his predilections and aversions, may be inclined to set up as colourably ‘good’ ends. This position is as it were retroactively supported by the blatantly false doctrine of ‘ends sanctifying means’. The cynical witticism Fletcher quotes from Lenin typifies the kind of well-turned apparent triviality that is really essential falsehood enwrapped in clever sophistry. In one sense indeed every means is ‘sanctified’ by its respective end, otherwise it would not be a ‘means’; a means is precisely defined by its instrumental relation to a foregiven end. My end of doing some transaction or some sight-seeing in the town of X, where I do not live, ‘sanctifies’ (informs, determines and brings about) the ‘means’ of my buying a railway ticket to X. This unassailable truth is well known to everybody and never has been in doubt at all; only, needless to say, it is totally irrelevant to any ethical consideration and notably to the question whether or no ‘the end sanctifies the means’ as ordinarily understood. That question is not what sanctifies a means but whether a morally permissible or even highly

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laudable end makes an intrinsically wrongful end licit (or perhaps even laudable: ‘sanctifies . . .’). And to that question the answer is, generally speaking at least, No. In our epoch of Marxist-Leninist Communism, I can conceive of no morally better end than the annihilation of Communism; to bring Lenin’s name into disrepute might (to a modest extent at any rate) contribute towards that end; yet in my firm view I should not be justified in disseminating the lie – for a lie it would be – that Lenin led a dissolute life, or that personal power was his central aim, or that his paramount aim was to enjoy a life of opulence and that this made him the paid agent of the national enemy in 1917. Similarly, I am not allowed to kill a rich man and steal his money in order to improve my own standard of living (though this is a permissible end) or even to establish a new and finer clinic for sick children or a vast home for stray cats (though these would be morally high-ranking aims). Naturally, a morally good end accredits and even in a sense ‘sanctifies’ a means that in itself is indifferent as to its intrinsic moral quality – for an end is not really ‘willed’ unless the agent earnestly seeks to find some efficacious mean to achieve it – but the intrinsically bad moral quality of a means, which is independent of the quality of the end, precludes it from justification by that end. And Fletcher ought to be aware of this in so far at least that he does hold that ‘agapéic’ action implies the pondering by the agent of the foreseeable consequences of what he is doing and that, accordingly, a ‘means’ well adapted to some definite end conceived in the spirit of ‘Love’ may yet have to be rejected because its foreseeable consequences, unlike its end, are gravely incompatible with the intent of ‘Love’. He at least ought to say that what ‘sanctifies the means’ is not the ‘end’ but the compatibility of its foreseeable consequences with other ends the agent must keep in mind if he is ‘really’ guided by ‘Love’. I say more simply that what justifies a means is its intrinsic moral permissibility. Admittedly, though, its end may justify it when the alternative can be described in such terms as that both applying the means and renouncing the end (or pursuing it by some other available means) entail the risk of dangerous consequences but the risk attending the use of the means in question appears to be less grave and less certain. However, it will be the natural drift – though not a rigorous implication – of Situationism with its emphasis on an ultimate monistic concept of goodness and on the merely extrinsic rightness or wrongness of action to exalt the instrumental value of the ‘means’ even at the cost of a conscientious examination of its possible harmful ‘side-effects’.

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6. The Concept of Intrinsic Right and Wrong The rightness or wrongness of an action (of a volitive attitude, a ‘tract’ of conduct, a policy, an habitual direction of the will, etc.) is neither a descriptive quality on the same footing with the size, the shape, the colour or the weight of a material object or with psychological characteristics such as being excited or depressed, pleased or pained, vivacious or slow-minded, interested in this or that subject and so on, nor a mystical and unitary ‘non-natural quality’, and least of all a mere expression of the appraiser’s state of mind. For I cannot ‘approve of’ or ‘disapprove of’ something except in virtue of some objective quality of it, nor mean anything by ‘commending’ or ‘condemning’ some conduct morally – as distinct from simply being ‘for’ it or ‘against’ it, glad about or irked by it, for any practical reason of my own – except by reference to this or that commendable or condemnable descriptive feature or features of it. Rightness and wrongness can only be approbatively/ disapprobatively attributed to action (a note of ‘obligation’ or ‘duty’ and ‘prohibition’ or ‘transgression’ always somehow attaching to this class of judgements) but the unitary ‘pro’ or ‘con’ attitude herein expressed is of logical necessity closely tied to known and describable qualities inherent in the act (conduct, etc.) and differentially colored according to the distinctive ‘moral quality’ referred to. Thus, terms like honesty, loving kindness, cruelty, lewdness, etc., all denote, respectively, tangible describable qualities, and may mostly be used also just descriptively, with favourable or adverse evaluation ‘bracketed’ as it were; though in some such terms, such as ‘correctness’ or ‘impurity’, the evaluative meaning appears primarily expressed. And again, our approval of honesty seems tinged rather with the note of respect, that of magnanimity rather with the note of admiration; cruelty evokes a condemnation tinged with horror, lewdness one tinged with disgust. Moral experience thus forms a kind of conceptual ‘universe’ furnished with richly manifold contents; and extrinsicalism means in the first place a negation of that ‘universe’.24 There is, furthermore, one purely and strictly descriptive, factual moral quality, though it could not logically exist without a reference to other moral qualities nor be (as Kantian formalism would have it) the only and all-comprehensive moral quality: namely, the conscious and conscientious concern to behave morally (its contradictory opposite being amorality or moral indifference; its contrary opposite, the ‘satanic’ defiance of morality). This ‘second-order’ intrinsic moral quality, to which may be added the less weighty but equally evident

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moral goodness of approving everything morally good and even of appreciating everything in any way distinctively valuable per se, makes it easier to understand the basic ethical fact that some descriptive qualities of an action, behavior or emotive attitude are intrinsically good and Â�constitutive for the moral value of the behavior in question (and more remotely of the character from which it issues) as well as directive for our right evaluation of it, although no intrinsic moral quality as such, including that of being concerned about morality, determines by itself (regardless of other good and bad qualities) the rightness of that action or the degree of goodness attributable to the agent’s intention (let alone, to his character). Value- and disvalue-features, translatable to some extent into the language of discordant or mutually competitive value-features, will balance each other, and so may ‘colliding obligations’ in a problem-laden moral situation. In Aristotle’s doctrine of the ‘right mead’ this is expressed somewhat hazily and misleadingly but characteristically enough; in the analysis of the goodness and badness of an action by Moral Theologians the theme has received ample treatment; among more recent discussions of it, Sir David Ross’s theory of ‘prima facie obligations’ or competitive moral ‘claims’ is rightly regarded as classic. Perhaps the best example available is promise-keeping or ‘contractural fidelity’, a more evident form of right-doing and a most stringent obligation, the observance of which may yet be morally bad rather than good (or again intrinsically impossible, or in some cases definitely bad) by reason of the circumstances. Fletcher utterly distorts the datum in affirming that traditionally ‘commanded’ kinds of action – of which promise-keeping is one – are neither right nor wrong per se but may be either according as they conform or disconform with the intent of ‘Love’. Contrast the absurdity of this position with the truly maintainable intrinsic moral indifference of some other kinds of action, e.g., precisely promising itself, which is indeed neither right nor wrong per se but may be right when the arrangement of some reciprocal services calls for contractural regulation or any good purpose is essentially promoted by, or even necessitates, contractual commitment, but may be bad when it runs counter to another obligation already contracted or when the undertaking cannot be given without levity and mental reservation. Complying with one’s promise is always necessarily and unequivocally right and obligatory, without any recourse to a good purpose or a praiseworthy content being necessary or even relevant at all, unless it clashes with another promise given and thus implies promise-breaking, or the action promised is intrinsically

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bad (and definitely and seriously so), or the circumstances have in an unforeseen fashion so changed as to make the fulfilment of the promise completely meaningless or factually impossible or definitely evil in view of its certain or almost certain consequences. Circumstances may certainly modify the rightness or wrongness of an action, but that has nothing to do with the allegedly fictitious character of the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of some nameable and describable kinds of action, which alone provide the necessary standards for the moral appraisal of any concrete single action here and now. The description of actions is, as it has been much emphasized recently by analytical philosophers, essentially variable and a difficult matter: some typically relevant ‘circumstances’ may change the nomenclature under which the action can fall, others may not; but even in the latter case circumstances are relevant because, or in so far as, they subsume the action performed or contemplated also under another morally significant category of actions. It is morally even worse to murder one’s own father or brother than to murder a stranger, and we may designate the first two kinds of murder by the special names ‘parricide’ and ‘fratricide’; it is also, though special nouns are missing here, worse to murder one’s own uncle or again one’s benefactor than a stranger to whom one owes no special duty of family loyalty or gratitude; but in all these cases the ‘aggravating circumstance’ involves transgression of a further moral norm on top of ‘Thou shalt not kill’, i.e., the prohibition of simple ‘homicide’. Similar considerations apply to the (physically identical) act of sexual intercourse which may be conjugal intercourse (not illicit at all), ‘simple fornication’ or (worse) adultery or incest, the specification depending not on the direct qualitative description of the action but on the ‘attendant circumstances’ or ‘background of states of affairs’. However, relevant circumstances do make a difference as to the intrinsic content of the action simply inasmuch as the agent is supposed to be aware of these circumstances, and that he does the action being aware of them means that he is actually doing something (perhaps significantly) different from what he would be doing if he was unaware of them. Leaving the point of ‘simple’ homicide out of consideration, Oedipus was not guilty either of parricide when slaying his father or of incest when marrying his mother, for, being ignorant of the ‘circumstances’, he did not yield assent to committing either a parricidal or an incestuous action. Again, a ‘pleasure-murder’ (Lustmord, whether or no the pleasure of killing connotes a tinge of sexual ‘lust’) is per se an act of even graver malice than a murder committed for gain or for revenge; and (as Moral Theology establishes it theoretically, though it inclines

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to regard the distinction as practically negligible) adultery committed knowingly but simply out of desire for ‘this attractive woman’ though a grave sin, is an act less depraved than it would be if the transgressor were taking a special delight in committing adultery as such. While it is evident that most of the intrinsically good actions we might meaningfully think of doing or wish to do are not obligatory or indeed practically not within our reach at all, our moral sense is hard put to it to stomach the idea that sometimes we cannot help having to choose between several courses of action each of which is tainted with a feature of intrinsic malice: to break a promise in order to keep another, to tell a lie lest we should knowingly (and perhaps decisively) contribute to the success of some criminal project, to kill aggressors rather than submit to their intent or to allow one life (which it would be in our power to save) to perish in order to save another, and the like. Some such situations, but by no means all, could have been avoided by the agent (e.g., by exercising due caution, discretion, modesty, or fortitude), in other words their coming about itself implies guilt on his part, and all of them necessarily involve an element of the ‘morally deplorable’ – though in different degrees and fashions which cannot here be discussed. Linguistic strategems such as reserving the intrinsic malice of taking human life for cases that can properly be qualified as ‘murder’ or at least ‘manslaughter’, or the Moral Theologians’ efforts to veil the intrinsic malice of lying (or deliberately deceiving) by the phraseology of ‘mental reservation’, cannot dispose of the unpalatable fact that we sometimes have to do intrinsically bad kinds of things, though of course in all such cases, including those conditioned by antecedent guilt, it is possible and obligatory to seek bona fide to determine the morally best course available and to follow it. The moral-theological axiom that to do something intrinsically bad is never permissible (nunquam licet) cannot be upheld, since it analyses into either demanding the impossible (yet ultra vires nemo obligatur is an absolutely unchallengeable principle) or making nonsense of the concept of intrinsic moral qualities acid admitting, thus approaching situationism, the reduction of the concept of right and wrong to that of what is ‘concretely’, ‘on balance’, morally preferable ‘in the circumstances’. Nevertheless, the above-quoted moral-theological axiom has a sound core inasmuch as it expresses the greater stringency of prohibitive as contrasted with prescriptive norms and the greater dependence on circumstances of right-doing than of wrong-doing (cf. the axioms that ‘laws of commission’ obligant semper sed non pro semper while ‘laws of omission’ obligant semper et pro semper, and that what the agent does is bonum ex integra causa, malum

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ex quacumque defectu); more briefly, the valid principle that abstention from specifiable forms of evildoing, not barterable against any aspects of motivational goodness or consequential advantages, provide the primordial basis of moral orientation. The moral-theological predilection for pointing to acts of ‘lust’ or ‘impurity’ as the most obvious example for ‘intrinsic moral badness’, whether or not psychologically linked to a possibly misguided and obsessive habit of looking askance at sex as such, also reveals a sound logical substance. Sexual activity, tending to culminate in the ecstatic condition called ‘orgasm’, is inherently permeated with a well characterized species of pleasure to which, while it lasts, the agent tends to fully ‘abandon’ himself; this by itself marks a certain contrast with the characteristically ‘moral’ – self-distanced, self-judging, self-tempering state of consciousness, and if the action by any further specific standard is a morally inordinate one, the agent inevitably comes close to more totally and unreservedly assenting to a mode of immorality than does, e.g., a transgressor who disregards the welfare or even infringes the rights of others for the sake of his own advantage. That does not make ‘lust’ the gravest of sins, generically graver for example than injustice, deceit and dishonesty (which call for ‘retribution’ in a logically more evident and practically more urgent sense); but it does make ‘lust’ a more paradigmatic and illustrative form of intrinsic moral disvalue, that disvalue being as it were fused more intimately and indissolubly with the activity to which it adheres. However, the incomparably graver ‘satanic’ sins of cruelty and ‘malice’ (in the narrower sense), i.e., delight taken in the suffering of others and in harming them, as well as delight taken in morally corrupting others, also exhibit ‘intrinsic’ immorality in a paradigmatic fashion; this has sometimes been overlooked by moralists obsessed with the more ubiquitous nature and conspicuous power of venereal temptations. But Aquinas is supremely right when he says that a man who never indulges in adultery himself but who disseminates the teaching that there is nothing wrong with adultery is so far a much worse man than an inveterate adulterer who ‘teaches’ no such thing but just stifles the voice of his conscience or turns a deaf ear to its protests. Fletcher condenses his extrinsicalism in the formula that moral values and disvalues are ‘not properties but predicates of actions’. This grammatical distinction is undoubtedly not only of stylistic interest but may also stimulate a discussion of certain logical subtleties. Mostly if I say that this cardboard box is round I can just as well describe it as a round cardboard box, or if I can say that Jimmie is ten years old I can equally refer to him as ten-year-old Jimmie; but ‘These apples are sour’ need not

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mean that they are ‘sour apples’ (i.e., the variety of apples, perhaps the same as crab-apple?, produced by the kind of tree of which Jeff Davis is proposed to be hanged in John Brown’s Body), and if ‘this worm is round’ it is not necessarily a roundworm. But the difference, largely verbal, does not amount to much; so far as predicates are purely relational (‘Jimmie is John’s son’=‘John is Jimmie’s father’, ‘This is pleasant to me’=‘I am pleased by or with it’, ‘Guinness is good for you’=‘Guinness benefits your organism’, etc.) they would not be confused with qualities; but so far as they are qualitative, they are qualities predicated of an object. Apples as sweet as honey cannot be ‘sour apples’, worms as flat as a strip of thin paper cannot be roundworms; and to distinguish ‘sour apples’ from unripe standard apples and roundworms from some other breed of round worms I would need the criteria of further descriptive qualities, though I don’t happen to know which. Fletcher obviously means that although we may call one action good and another bad, actions are not classifiable into ‘good actions’ and ‘bad actions’ as they perhaps are into carefully prepared and impulsive actions or plants into phanerogamous and cryptogamous. True; but that does not a whit alter the fact that neither can we ‘predicate’ goodness or badness of them except by pointing to their establishable ‘properties’. Yet no such property (quality, category, criterion) can unequivocally justify us in predicating of them definitely that they are good or bad: it depends on the ‘situation’ with its various elements, ingredients or circumstances. True again, on the whole; but these, precisely, enter into the description of their ‘properties’. That no two situations are absolutely identical has nothing to do with their imaginary ‘uniqueness’; otherwise it would be simply empty of meaning to call any action in any sense morally appraisable. The differences between any two situations (in which actions somehow comparable as to their categorical character have been performed) are analysable in terms of universals capable of description and comparison. In a world of ‘unique’ situations as dreamed of by Existentialists and Situationists and in which actions, as extrinsicalism would have it, would not possess universally knowable and designable good and bad qualities – relevant and applicable to the assessment of moral problems and conduct in an infinitude of ‘situations’, so far as happening and behavior can be articulated into distinct ‘situations’ – no moral judgements would be possible at all but only a chaotic welter of arbitrary pro and con ‘reactions’. It is undeniable that moral problems, rooted partly in the complexity of situations, are frequently difficult to ‘decide’, and that there is a ‘legalistic’ temptation of complacently slurring over the difficulty by dint of a schematic and conventional application of

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categories ready at hand. But to propose to remedy our imperfection by grotesquely magnifying it on the one hand and transvaluating it into an imaginary perfection on the other, by debasing man as an appraiser into an idiot and inflating man as an agent into an embodiment of creative godhead, is a counsel of despair which is indefensible on all counts and has nothing to commend itself. In rejecting – however reluctantly – pure Antinomianism, Fletcher admits the necessity of some ‘order’. Man’s instinct for survival, and survival at the level of a modicum of civilization, is so sensitive to that necessity that it impels him to turn to Tyranny once the autonomous, impersonal code of objective norms has been devaluated and destroyed. He who pits his freedom against the Golden Rule, Chesterton said, lays himself open to subjugation by an Iron Rule. When Fletcher bids fair to supersede ‘Legalism’ with (in his own words) a ‘Totalitarian’ and ‘Monolithic’ Imperative of Utility, of ‘Love’ as he also calls it, he is more right than he probably thinks to be; that is, he inaugurates a more literal, far-reaching and sinister truth than he may be aware of. And Kipling’s battle-cry launched against the same general tendency in 1912: Whatsoever, for any cause, Seeketh to take or to give Power above and beyond the Laws, Suffer it not to live! Holy State or Holy King— Or Holy People’s Will— Have no truck with the senseless thing. Order the guns acid kill

might well be re-written today so as to include ‘Holy Agent’. Notes See the recent work principally treated here: Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics: The New Morality (Philadelphia, Westminster, 1966). Of the titles of its ten chapters, I quote here those of III–VIII: ‘Love only is always good. Love is the only Norm. Love and Justice are the same. Love is not Liking. Love justifies its means. Love decides there and then’. Instead of ‘Love’, a possible monistic supreme principle of a situationalist concept of Morals may be e.g., ‘Evolution’, ‘History’ or ‘Progress’, as in Marxism and various other forms of Historicism. 2. Some writers, however, consider on the contrary Situationism as a form of ‘extreme’ Existentialism. Thus Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, ‘Situation-sethik’, Kleines theologisches Wörterbuch (Freiburg: Herder, 1961), p. 336; cf. our Note (10). 1.

A Defence of Intrinsicalism against ‘Situation Ethics’ (1970) â•…â•… 299 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

Characteristically enough, Fletcher’s above-quoted book carries the sub-title The New Morality. Such a caption alone justifies the profoundest mistrust. I would not commit myself to a condemnation of Ethical Relativism in all its – very different – forms; in particular, there exists such a thing as an historical change in some of the contents of Moral Consensus, notably as regards the variable apportionment of moral emphasis, and the change can be for the better as well as for the worse. But ‘the new morality’ sounds like ‘the new look’, or ‘fashions for the coming season’. Nothing is more inherent in Moral Experience as such than the overall concept of Morality as a Constant Standard by which the varying forms of personal collective behaviour are judged. Our epoch may not produce a Caligula or Nero; in their epoch, Hitler and Stalin would have been impossible. But those two eminent rulers did evoke considerable moral resentment in their time, and the same applies to ours. As men, our paramount business is to comply with the demands of Morality; as philosophers, to analyse and interpret it – to ‘change’ it is an altogether minor and secondary concern, though it may be meaningful as applied to some limited and well-defined points. In D. von Hildebrand’s words, a ‘blindfolded radical legalism’: cf. our Note (16) on Hildebrand. Fletcher would recognize this, in the sense of a secular humanistic Utilitarianism scarcely different in contents from his own ‘Christian Love Ethic’. Cf. our Note (1). Nevertheless, the popular adage ‘The physician ought to endeavour to cure the patient rather than the disease’, its cheap humor resting on the syntactic ambiguity (in English and also in other languages) of the verb ‘cure’, does not amount to more than that a careful and open-minded medical mind is a better medical mind than a hoodwinked and schematic one. Obviously every physician knows that he would most surely and promptly eliminate the typhoid fever by cutting off the typhoid patient’s head but that his task is of a quite different nature, yet that ‘curing the patient’ means curing him of his typhoid, not for example providing for his happiness or physical invulnerability. Berdyaev’s pompous phrase (see Fletcher, p. 143) ‘Every moral action should have in mind a concrete living person and not the abstract good’ is a similar mixture of portentous platitude and logical muddle. ‘The abstract good’ is the only meaning and standard of morality, and it can be only secured, attained, performed, displayed, encouraged etc. by ‘concrete living persons’. Cf. my paper ‘Deliberation is of Ends’ in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LXIV (1963), pp. 27–50. In this respect, we cannot but fully agree with Fletcher. On this point, see my paper ‘The Thematic Primacy of Moral Evil’, Philosophical Quarterly, VI (1956), pp. 27–42; but above all, Bernard Mayo Ethics and the Moral Life (London: Macmillan, 1958), esp. chapter XI on ‘Negative and Positive Â�Morality’. Perhaps it is this point – that Existentialism at any rate represents a conception of the qualitative worth of man – which Rahner (see our Note (2)) has in mind when censuring Situationism as a more extreme deviation. As for the delimitation of Morality from Practice, see for example the particularly enlightening papers of Professor A. M. MacIver, Practical Philosophy and Morals, Inaugural Lecture at the University of Southampton, 1962, and Timothy L. S. Sprigge, ‘Definition of a Moral Judgment’, Philosophy, XXXΙΧ (1964), pp. 301–22. For the Prudentialist side, esp. for the tension between a Prudence-orientated and a Conscience-orientated ethic, see Th. Deman O. P’.s edition and annotations of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (2a-2ac, Questions 47–56), La prudence (Paris-Tournai Rome: Desclee, 1949), particularly pp. 378–84 and 460–78. The gist of these tortuously involved discussions seems to be that Prudence is superior to Conscience, for Conscience does no more than (imperfectly and discontinuously) show the agent (as a

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13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

‘theoretical’ fact) what he ought to do, whereas Prudence quasi-inerrantly ‘governs’ his behavior and makes him do what he ought. The author is interested in the effectiveness of virtue once its presence is granted rather than in a cognitive penetration of Right and Wrong. He does not conceal his awareness of the delicately ambiguous status of the word ‘prudence’ but, as the zealots of a school are sometimes fond of doing, tries to construe precisely this obscurity into an ‘admirable’ richness of meaning. The denomination originates, I think, from Professor Hare; it is established in recent English-speaking philosophy, and the subject has been much discussed by a great number of writers. See our Note (1). Fletcher’s later book Moral Responsibility: Situation Ethics at Work, (Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster, 1967), is not being considered here, since, apart from a briefer restatement of the principles exposed in Situation Ethics, it deals with detailed concrete problems of business ethics, sexual ethics etc. which fall outside the scope of the present article. With some of his reformatory casuistry Ι would be disposed to agree, at any rate more than with his ethical approach as such. Fletcher, (Situation Ethics, p. 13) delights in the story of a man who, like his father and grandfather before him, had invariably voted Republican but on one occasion after some pondering decided to vote against the Republican candidate and justified his decision in the words: ‘There are times when a man has to push his principles aside and do the right thing’. It sounds odd that it is only at some rare times that a man ought to do ‘the right thing’ and that – apparently – he should do so in defiance of his principles and on the other hand hold ‘principles’ that do not direct him to do ‘the right thing’. It seems that Fletcher, along with the ‘hero of his book’ – for so he calls him – cannot distinguish ‘principles’ which are in fact personal maxims of practice, having much or little or nothing to do with moral norms as the case may be, from moral principles proper. One’s political position may have moral grounds and implications among others, but it is something essentially different from a moral principle; and nothing can be ‘the right thing’ unless it represents a moral principle (or several such) decisively relevant to the practical problem on hand. Our Note (4) on Hildebrand. Chapter X of D. Hildebrand, True Morality and its Counterfeits (New York: McKay, 1955), ‘Basic Errors of Circumstance Ethics’, pp. 130–154, is probably the most profound and most devastating criticism of ‘Situation Ethics’ ever written, though its highly strung professedly Catholic emphasis may evoke in non-Christian readers a totally deceptive impression of philosophical irrelevance. ‘Circumstance ethics in denying the existence of general morally relevant and moral values, as well as the existence of moral commandments and moral laws rooted in these values, in effacing the difference between a moral commandment and a mere positive commandment, . . . leaves no other beacon for our moral life than a private relevation of God’s will. . . .’ Cf. the situational, ambiguously antinomian emphasis of the two short articles in favour of Prudentialism as against Deontic Ethics published by the late Prof. C. De Koninck in Laval Théologique et philosolphique, ‘The Nature of Man and his Historical Being’, V (1949), pp. 271–77; and ‘General Standards and Particular Situations in Relation to Natural Law’, VI (1950), pp. 335–38. See, against illusions of hubris attaching to the concept of Redemption and the notion of commandments, principles and laws being ‘no longer needed’, Hildebrand, op. cit., pp. 149–52, esp. the Footnote on p. 150. About Conscience presupposing universal value categories (and its primarily ‘negative’, i.e., warning and accusing function), see Hildebrand, op. cit., p. 139. About the antinomian misinterpretation of the ‘freedom of the children of God’, see the quoted Chapter by Hildebrand, esp. p. 134.

A Defence of Intrinsicalism against ‘Situation Ethics’ (1970) â•…â•… 301 21. Above all, the two comprehensive commandments given by Christ are in no way meant to invalidate either ‘the law and the prophets’ or the so-called ‘natural’ Moral Law outside the Judaeo-Christian revelation of which St. Paul says that ‘even’ the ‘Gentiles’ had it inscribed in their hearts. Cf. Hildebrand, op. cit., p. 152. 22. According to Moral Theology, the human act derives its ‘essential’ or ‘specific’ morality from the value of the object to which it adheres – an eminently selective type of dilexio. Thus, in the Ο. T., Hosea (9. 10): Facti sunt abominabiles, sicut ea quae dilexerunt. (They became abominable, according to the things they loved.) And St. Augustine (Tr. 2, on 1. Epist. S. Joann., n. 14): Talis quisque est, quails est ejus dilexio. Terram diligis? terra es; Deum diligis? quid dicam? quasi Deus es. (What a person is worth is measured by what he loves. Is it ‘earth’ you love? Earth you are. Is it God you love? What shall I say? You are almost God-like.) The point, then, even of ‘loving God’ is not ‘Love’ as such, but the selective adherence of man to God’s supreme holiness, goodness and purity: what Hildebrand in his basic works calls response to value. The Christian ‘love for sinners’ refers, of course not to some mystical superiority or to an ultimate ‘indifference’ of ‘being a sinner’ but to the intrinsic and supreme evilness of sin, of which the ‘sinner’ is the author but by which he is also beset, and the paramount urgency of helping the ‘sinner’ to repudiate and break away from his sin. About the disgusting perversion of a romantic glorification of sin, see chapters VIII–IX of Hildebrand’s quoted book. 23. See the articles on Penitence and Contrition (Repentance) in the Theological Dictionary quoted above. 24. Cf. Hildebrand, op. cit., p. 148: If matters were as circumstance ethics claims, no moral pattern would exist, no moral education’ (my italics). About concrete commandments – the ‘Divine Mandates’, interpreted in a chiefly institutional sense akin to Prof. E. Brunners ‘Ordnungen’ (The Divine Imperative (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1947)) – see the late Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s posthumous (Lutheran) Ethics (London, SCM, 1955), pp. 252 ff. We may also mention here that on p. 173 Βonhoeffer rightly refers to Luther’s magnificent phrases: ‘Love without Truth is accursed love’ (my italics).

17 The Moral Emphasis: Obligation, Practice, and Virtue List of Themes The intuitonist method in Ethics: Common Sense The Three aspects of Naturalism: Utilitarianism, Positivism and Perfectionalism Moral Sense: Intuition and its correctives The concept of Moral Emphasis: the ineliminable nexus between Moral and Non-Moral interests The concept of Practice, Practice and Morality The constant and universal meaning of Right and Wrong; its vindication against naturalist criticism The arguability of moral issues; the meaning of Conscience; the greater and lesser arguability of practical issues The stuff of life, non-moral—The supremacy and inconvertibility of the moral claim The «categorical»: Status and Sanction The relation between ethical (philosophical) and moral position; the dangers of subjectivism and (immerse) psychologism The secondariness of metaphysical interpretations The problem of freedom as underlying morality; the non-free and nonobligatory aspects of morality Thematic and implicit morality The merely relative separability between formal and material ethics (ethics (meaning and contents of morality) The use of the words Right and Good 303

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The positive existence of Evil as phenomenologically given Morality and Society; the «open tribunal» of mankind as the medium of moral appraisal and discussion; the confusion of the concept with Liberalism The practical relevancy of Ethics The utopian implications of the naturalist fallacies Inadequacy of «conventional» morality as quality of types of conduct Intention, motive and character; the central seat morality Political aspects (Social exemplariness; Practice; Utopias) Religious aspects (Background of obligation;) the «supra-moral» The moral emphasis and the metaphysical position of man The equivocalness of moral propositions: emphasis and interblending Conscience and the alleged Good Will Sanction: intrinsic and extrinsic Moral and Practical “rules” The untestability of Virtue Moral collision; conflict in a practical context; prima facie duties and the concept of «moral fact» outside freedom and duty Obligation derives neither from command nor from unequivocal evidence but from an existential status called in question Distinction between status and (meta) physical perfection Relations between Value and being: neither neutrality nor ultimate Â�identity Moral and perceptional or logical «evidence» Structural difference between various moral fields; quasi-logical «fittingness» and the «formal coordination» groups distinctive features of other moral dimensions The «impossibility of fulfilling the Law» and the super-derogatory; cf. perfectionalism Ethical theory (its practical function) and moral attitude Structurally different moral attitudes (styles) So-called “personal values” and their moral aspects Higher and lower values; their relation to morality Appraisal and self-appraisal; the “creative” aspect of M’ity, Reciprocity in the fundamental sense and “rights” Moralism and Immoralism; Rigorism and Laxism

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305

306â•…â•… Politics, Values, and National Socialism THE HUMANITARIAN VERSUS THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE First appeared in The Thomist, October 1944, pp. 429–457. CONTEMPORARY BRITISH PHILOSOPHY AND ITS POLITICAL ASPECTS First appeared as ‘La Filosofía Británica Actual y sus Aspectos Políticos,’ Punta Europa, 41, May 1959, Madrid. HUMAN DIGNITY TODAY Unpublished work, written circa mid to late 1950s. DIGNITY First appeared in Philosophy, LI, 1976, pp. 251–271. THE GHOST OF THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY First appeared in Philosophy, LV, 1980, pp. 5–16. Α DEFENSE OF INTRINSICALISM AGAINST ‘SITUATION ETHICS’ First appeared in Situationism and the New Morality, ed. R. L. Cunningham, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970, pp. 232–271. THE MORAL EMPHASIS: OBLIGATION, PRACTICE, AND VIRTUE Unpublished table of contents for a book on ethics.

Index altruism, 276–77, 286 America, 199 American, 62–63, 75, 205 American Revolution, 75 annihilation, 37, 72, 78, 130, 143–45, 152–54, 158, 165–66, 169, 172, 206, 291 Anselm, 110 antagonism, 56–59, 61, 147, 149 aristocratic, 63, 93, 97 Aristotle, 198, 232, 244, 252–53, 275, 293 art, 4, 16, 20, 29, 34, 40, 53, 68, 134, 194, 208, 230, 241, 274, 288 Aryan, 92, 241 ascesis, 6–7 atheism, 123, 217, 223, 283 atheist, 221, 268, 274 Augustine, 15, 110, 118, 279, 284–86 Austria, 62, 75, 107, 131, 197 Bacchic, 117 Bishop Butler, 198 Bolshevism, 53, 88–89, 126, 144, 284 bourgeois civilization, 89 bourgeois public life, 89 bourgeois values, 121 British, 197, 201–02, 206 Cambridge, 196–97, 199 caste, 30, 47, 49, 71, 101, 104 Catholic, 90, 107, 110, 117–19, 122, 170, 176, 183, 185, 190–92, 206, 223, 265, 267, 275 Catholicism, 117, 119, 135, 144, 180, 186 character, 2–3, 17, 20, 22, 41, 56, 61, 65, 75, 99, 140, 141–42, 145, 149, 153, 158–61, 163, 166, 171, 176, 178, 188, 202, 206, 217–18, 221–22, 228, 230, 233, 235, 249, 255, 256, 262, 274, 286, 288, 293–94, 297, 304 Chartist, 95

Church, the, 50, 63, 112, 119, 168, 176, 178, 218, 220, 286–87, 289 citizen, 66, 92, 111–13, 147, 152, 154, 206 civilization, 88, 175–76, 181, 183, 284, 298 commercialism, 219 communism, 175, 181–82, 222, 291 conscious, 8, 11, 120, 129, 163, 195, 203, 245 contempt, 25, 28, 36–39, 64, 139, 282–83, 286 culture, 29, 49, 51, 72, 76, 78, 86–88, 96, 113, 122, 156, 189–90, 194–95, 199, 214 death, 46, 52, 59, 63–64, 86–89, 104, 119, 129–30, 134, 143, 145, 162, 187, 193–94, 246, 283 democracy, 54, 62, 65, 68–69, 71, 91, 100–04, 125–37, 242 democratic community, 127 democratic party, 63 Devil, 31, 167–68 dialectic, 64, 98, 181, 219 dictatorship, 126, 129, 132–33, 135, 218 dignity, 28, 47–48, 51, 60, 63, 97, 111, 133, 158, 186, 213–25, 227–49, 277, 286 discussion, 1, 4, 20, 49, 54, 60, 63–64, 66–67, 69–70, 72–74, 99, 129–30, 136, 168, 170, 252, 260, 296, 304 distance, 16, 26–27, 37–38, 50, 143, 148, 230, 240, 245 divine, 31, 108, 110, 112, 177, 182–85, 219–21, 223–24, 229, 246–47, 258, 274, 281 domination, 27–28, 47, 104 drive, 2, 4–8, 10–11, 49, 54, 86, 115, 120–22, 134, 162, 169 English, 15–16, 95, 119, 122, 126, 148, 197–98, 200, 202–03, 205–07, 210, 227, 243–244 equal worth, 93

307

308â•…â•… Politics, Values, and National Socialism equality, 91–105, 141–42, 213–14, 216 essential, 11, 16–19, 21, 45, 48–49, 60, 63, 67–68, 72, 85–86, 92, 94, 96–98, 102, 108–09, 126, 128–29, 134, 141, 144, 151, 153, 160–61, 179, 183, 186–87, 190–91, 217, 219, 222, 234, 238, 247, 252, 265, 274, 277–78, 281, 288–90 ethic, 22, 29, 184–85, 274–75, 283, 286, 288 ethical naturalism, 257 Existentialism, 208, 267, 273–74 family, 4, 26, 73, 111–13, 117, 130, 143, 154, 163, 193, 294 Fascism, 53, 175, 208, 284 foreign policy, 66, 78, 194 France, 63, 119, 236 Francis Dunlop, 53, 91, 125 French Revolution, 75, 181 Freud, 1–7, 10 friend-foe, 56, 62, 64, 71 friendship, 38, 51, 55, 61, 75, 115, 152, 162, 166, 260, 287–288 German Idealism, 109 Germany, 75, 85, 92, 126, 134 God, 15, 20, 23, 27, 31–32, 35, 38, 41, 43, 46, 86–87, 89, 104, 109–10, 119, 121–23, 153, 156, 165, 167–69, 179, 182–83, 185, 209, 213, 219, 221, 223–25, 246–47, 259, 281, 283–87, 289 Good, the, 108, 165, 167–69, 183, 232, 251, 253–54, 256–57, 262, 273, 303, 304 hatred, 2, 31, 139–72, 188, 203, 232, 254 Hegel, 108, 110, 123, 202 Heidegger, 53, 85–89 high-mindedness, 15–43 Hitler, 129, 132–34, 136, 181 human dignity, 22, 98, 213–25, 229, 233 human rights, 88, 99, 128, 135, 164, 234–35, 236 humanitarian ethics, 180, 183, 191 humanitarianism, 175–76, 179–80, 182– 183, 186–87, 189–90, 192–93, 195–96 Hume, 198, 206, 278 humility, 15, 17, 37, 40–41, 43, 109, 185, 200, 244–47 Husserl, 1, 197, 199, 203, 208 ideology, 64, 93, 117, 181, 191, 219 immoralism, 36, 186, 192, 267, 273, 281, 286, 304

imperialism, 49 individual, 3, 5, 10, 19, 30, 33, 37–38, 42, 45–49, 51, 56, 61, 64, 68, 70, 72–73, 88–89, 92–93, 98, 101, 104, 108, 110, 114, 119–20, 130, 144, 158, 161, 163, 166–67, 181, 187, 192–93, 215, 218, 222, 239, 244, 256 inequality, 48, 66, 91–94, 96–98, 102, 104, 188, 216, 246–47 inessential, 93, 96 intellectual subjectivism, 23–24 intrinsic, 16, 176, 186, 188, 191, 228, 234, 238, 252–53, 260, 266, 279–81, 289, 291–96, 304 isolation, 10, 22, 27, 29, 30–32, 36, 39, 41, 105, 159, 253 Jacobin, 62, 164 Jesuit, 148 Jew, 92, 179 Jewish, 179 Judaism, 166 Jung, 4, 6 jus belli, 60 Kolnai, 1, 15, 196 legalism, 109, 271, 286, 299 liberalism, 54, 64, 69, 87, 92, 103, 117, 181, 206, 209, 222, 304 libido, 1, 2, 4–8 life, 2–3, 7, 9, 11, 16, 26–28, 33, 35, 36, 38–40, 42, 45–54, 57, 60, 63–76, 85–90, 92, 94, 97–98, 100, 102–04, 108, 111–14, 117, 119–21, 123, 125–30, 132, 134, 136–37, 140–44, 146–49, 154–58, 162–64, 166, 170–71, 175, 177, 179, 182–84, 186–87, 189–92, 194–97, 199, 201–03, 216–17, 220, 224, 230, 239, 241, 243–44, 258–61, 268–72, 276, 278, 282, 287–88, 291, 295, 300, 303 Linguistic Analysis, 197–99, 202, 206 logic, 1, 115, 126, 154, 160, 162, 170, 195, 198–200, 207, 216, 219 Logical Positivism, 197 Marx, 86, 206, 252 Marxism, 117, 122, 181 Marxist, 171, 202, 283, 291 masses, 73, 76, 92, 149, 216, 218, 222, 252 mastery, 27, 40, 50, 51, 66, 68, 247

Indexâ•…â•… 309 metaphysical unity, 99 Mill, J. S., 98 Moore, G. E., 199 moral aesthetics, 125 moral evil, 23–24, 26, 31, 186, 256, 272 morality, 10, 37, 65, 109, 120, 121, 125, 177–78, 180, 183–87, 191–93, 199, 213, 228, 231–32, 237, 246–49, 252, 258, 260, 267–68, 270, 272–76, 278, 281, 285, 287–88, 292–93, 303–04 morally good, 228, 253, 256–57, 275, 291, 293 morals, 49, 87, 122, 180, 183, 283, 286 Mother, the, 2, 4, 144, 149, 294 murder, 143–44, 192, 281, 294–95 nation, 30, 51, 87, 89, 91–92, 100–01, 104, 112, 123, 132, 149, 157, 215 National Socialism, 85, 89, 117–18 nationalism, 49, 52, 92, 100, 134, 182, 215 naturalism, 123, 199, 251–52, 254, 257–62, 303 naturalistic, 2, 4, 34, 180, 198, 232, 251–52, 254–55, 257–62, 267 naturalistic fallacy, 254 Nazis, 117, 128, 136 neo-positivism, 198, 200–01 Nietzsche, 53, 120 nihilism, 31, 88, 251, 257, 285 normal, 3–5, 8–9, 33, 35, 49, 66, 99, 108, 130, 146, 178, 236, 247

power, 5, 18, 23, 25, 32–33, 35–38, 40, 47–50, 53–54, 58–62, 64–69, 72–78, 88, 90–91, 93–94, 98–99, 104–05, 109–10, 113–14, 122, 124–25, 129, 131, 133–34, 136–37, 140–42, 145, 148–49, 151, 162, 165–66, 169, 171, 176–77, 186, 194, 210, 215–16, 218–20, 230–32, 239, 241, 246, 261, 270, 276, 278, 282, 285, 291, 295–96, 298 pragmatism, 198–99, 289 pride, 11, 15–21, 26, 34, 90, 124, 126, 153, 156, 169, 244–45 primitive society, 45 primitivism, 6–7, 45 progressivism, 209 proletarian, 66–67, 142, 171 Protestant, 265, 267 pseudo-religion, 181 psychoanalysis, 2, 6, 8–9, 11, 202 public, 22, 49, 54–55, 61, 64, 70, 73, 75–76, 88–89, 95, 104, 123, 133, 144, 175, 187, 197, 216

obscure, 85, 193, 200–01, 229, 277 ontogenesis of love, 1 opposite sex, 4, 8, 154 Oxford, 199, 205

race, 51, 68, 92, 118, 122, 149, 181, 230 Racial consciousness, 117 Racialism, 181 Raskolnikov, 187 relations, external, 59–60, 64 relations, internal, 59–60, 68, 75, 140 religion, 49–50, 57, 77, 123, 164, 175, 177–79, 181–83, 186–87, 189, 194, 208–09, 246–47 religious morality, 180, 185, 187 rule, 47, 65–66, 93, 123, 127, 134, 149, 167, 207, 213, 215, 222, 229, 239, 247, 261, 268, 270, 273, 277–79, 298

pagan, 85, 117, 186, 223 Pantheism, 30, 107 Paris, 62 perfectionalism, 303–04 perversion, 3, 23, 186, 246, 272 Pharisee, 17, 102, 246 phenomenology, 2, 150, 197, 199 philosophy, 1, 59, 65, 85, 108, 139, 178–79, 185, 197–99, 201–10, 232, 247, 253, 266, 283 piety, 123, 185, 195, 224, 246–47 policy, 46, 66, 71, 74–75, 77–78, 127, 136, 170–71, 269, 277, 282, 292 politics, 49, 53–55, 59–64, 66–78, 102, 104, 125, 128–29, 134, 147–48, 198, 206

Satan, 23, 31 Scheler, 1–11, 15, 53, 118, 120–21, 197, 203, 233, 253, 255 Schmitt, 49, 53–67, 69, 71, 87–88 Self, the, 21, 244 self-containment, 90 self-isolation, 25–26, 41 self-worth, 20 sex-drive, 2–3, 5–8, 153 sexual love, 2, 5, 7–8, 10, 152, 153, 158 sexuality, 2–3 Situation Ethics, 265–68, 272–74, 277, 282 situational extrinsicalism, 279 Situationism, 265–67, 273–74, 275–77, 281, 283, 286, 291

310â•…â•… Politics, Values, and National Socialism Smith, 115, 204, 207 social class, 23, 30, 91, 104, 136, 149 solidarity, 87, 100 Soloviev, 15 Spain, 100 Spanish, 93, 198, 205, 231, 251 Spann, 51, 107–15, 123 spirituality, 2, 34, 88, 122–23, 216, 247 State, the, 2, 8, 35, 45–53, 55–56, 59–78, 88–89, 94, 99–101, 104–05, 108, 110– 15, 119–20, 127–30, 136–37, 139, 141, 149, 162–64, 168, 175, 188, 191, 195, 206, 215–16, 222, 237, 242, 255, 268, 270, 272, 274, 282, 285, 292, 296, 298 subversion, 272 Századunk, 125, 135 Third Reich, 85, 87, 135, 242 totalitarianism, 45, 181 totalities, 59, 107–08, 110, 112–13, 115 totality, 42, 46–52, 104, 107–15, 121, 140, 200, 208 Tribe, the, 45–52 unconscious, 7, 11, 166 undignified, 238, 240–41, 245, 247–48 United States, the, 63, 200 utilitarian, 55, 63, 119–20, 122–23, 199, 207, 213, 253, 255–56, 260, 277–79, 289 Utilitarianism, 258–62, 266, 273–275, 277, 303 utopian, 87, 95, 122, 163, 220, 239, 272, 283, 304

value, 2–3, 8–9, 16–23, 25–31, 34, 36–38, 40–41, 43, 46, 48–50, 55–56, 58, 63–64, 66, 68, 70, 73, 77–78, 86, 88–89, 93–94, 96–99, 102, 105, 108–12, 118–23, 125, 133, 136, 156, 158, 160, 164, 168–69, 177, 188, 203–05, 213, 216–18, 222, 225, 228, 230–34, 237, 240, 244–45, 252–53, 259–61, 266, 271, 273–74, 277, 281, 291, 293, 304 vanity, 16, 22, 28, 241 Vienna, 1, 62, 117, 199 violence, 28, 126–27, 130, 132, 191, 241 violent uprising, 131 voluptuousness, 4, 8 war, 47, 49, 51, 52, 55–64, 66–67, 69, 71, 75–76, 88, 103, 132, 141, 146–47, 156, 165, 188, 196, 282 warrior, 61, 71, 88–89 wealth, 18, 26, 31, 35, 94, 104, 134, 139, 155, 239, 267 welfare, 70, 77–78, 88, 104, 120, 122, 133, 179, 188–90, 195, 268, 277, 290, 296 Western, 24, 104, 175, 214 world-empire, 61–62 world-state, 61–62, 100 Youth Movement, the, 53 Zoltán Balázs, 91, 125