Street Life and Morals

German Philosophy in Hitler’s Lifetime

Lesley Chamberlain

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789144956
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

With resonance for today, this book explores a significant crisis of German philosophy and national identity in the decades around World War II.
 
German philosophy, famed for its high-minded Idealism, was plunged into crisis when Germany became an urban and industrial society in the late nineteenth century. The key figure of this shift was Immanuel Kant: seen for a century as the philosophical father of the nation, Kant seemed to lack crucial answers for violent and impersonal modern times. This book shows that the social and intellectual crisis that overturned Germany's traditions—a sense of profound spiritual confusion over where modern society was headed—was the same crisis that allowed Hitler to come to power. It also describes how German philosophers actively struggled to create a new kind of philosophy in an effort to understand social incoherence and technology's diminishing of the individual.

ONE

The Life of the Mind
Undone

In Hitler’s lifetime, 1889–1945, Germany experienced poverty and despair, reconstituted itself aggressively and hysterically, and tried to murder every last Jew in Europe. The Austrian-born Führer was the trigger for much of this abomination, and one of the causes. But this book, which borrows from Hitler only the duration of a deservedly aborted life, addresses something quite different. It asks what bothered German philosophers in those 61 revolutionary and chaotic years, and finds that it was how human beings could possibly understand each other. It concerned both academic and independent thinkers. This was not their only preoccupation but the way it arose reflected the same social difficulties that brought Hitler to power. And so, in the history of philosophy, it seems to be a matter of special interest.

What I mean by philosophy, as it was in Germany a century ago, is a systematic inquiry into the possibility of knowledge and truth: philosophy as Wissenschaft. The term is invariably translated as ‘science’ but in the humanities that equivalent is sometimes misleading. For Kant, German philosophy’s presiding genius from his death in 1804 to the times that concern us, it was the relationship between that scientific knowledge and moral truth that was crucial. That link in turn had distinct repercussions for German philosophy and society.

I do not think philosophy is directly related to its times, but that the connection is almost always there, in every epoch, indirectly. In Nazi Germany a good number of lower-level practitioners of philosophy and some leading figures erred politically. But it does not seem to me fruitful, for philosophy and wiser understanding, only to focus on that weakness. The story of German philosophy in the early twentieth century has so much more to tell us.

It is striking for instance how certain traditional humanist ways of thinking reached their limit and disintegrated in the critical German long half-century that culminated in Nazism. A worry about inter-subjectivity, about how I relate to You in a technologically advancing age, was more than thirty years old when Hitler became Chancellor. A troubled society produced both the question and the demagogue who exploited the lack of a solution.

The gist of this book is therefore both a survey of where and how traditional German Idealism fell short, and a consideration of how two successive generations of post-Idealist thinkers thought they could remedy it. In ‘The Challenge from the Streets’ I evoke the intense social, economic and urban transformation driving philosophical upheaval in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first forty years of the twentieth century. The philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel is a key interpreter and theoretician of the period up to the First World War. I also look at the artistic and intellectual culture more generally. Between 1900 and 1920 contemporary painting, sculpture, drama, poetry and literary prose tell us so much about the great upheaval in German values. They show us that the times were vivid with pain and collision and a loss of human bearings. One of Simmel’s most gifted students, Siegfried Kracauer, provides a philosophically informed commentary on an imperilled society from around 1920 until 1933.

In ‘The Collapsed House of Bourgeois Ideas’ I turn more specifically to the history of Kantianism in Germany. Among the older generation Hermann Cohen and Heinrich Rickert tried to adapt Kant’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy to the new social circumstances of urban industrial life in the twentieth. When the forces of philosophy regrouped after the First World War the Idealist Ernst Cassirer and the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl occupied the leading academic positions in the country, closely followed by Martin Heidegger, who offered his transformative outlook on our Being in the World. All three had a distinct relationship to Kant, but Heidegger had the most explicit mission to unsettle, dismantle and rebuild.

When Heidegger and Cassirer publicly debated the relevance of Kant in 1929, under growing political pressure on all sides, their quarrel became one of the defining moments of interwar German philosophy. ‘New Philosophy out of the Rubble’ picks up the moment when, in their wake, a whole generation of independent thinkers emerged. As sociology pushed philosophy to answer questions about human interaction, technology and the limits of reason, so thinkers emerged like Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, with startlingly fresh answers. Adorno was Kracauer’s informal pupil; Walter Benjamin had attended the lectures of the neo-Kantians Rickert and Cohen, and of Simmel; Arendt was Heidegger’s pupil. It’s notable that with the exception of Heidegger all of this third generation found themselves pulled into sociology and journalism as part of their response to the limits of philosophy as Wissenschaft. They became professional writers, and though they were still recognizably philosophers, the classical tradition that spawned them was now under radical revision. A breadth and an academic unorthodoxy characterized their work. As philosophers they could no longer, with Aristotle, rate theory higher than practice. Or they had to try not to. Their times and their thinking were coloured more or less intensely by the Marxism of Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch and Karl Korsch, and as a result the interwar period was a complex and nuanced scene of philosophy, full of signals for all of us also in the present day.

I end, in ‘The Possibility of Life Together’, by suggesting that German philosophy in the lifetime of Hitler, rich and modern, stimulated by inherited intellectual wealth and under pressure from radical social change, was the positive outcome of a world Hitler otherwise destroyed. At the same time it strayed so far from academic confinement that method and discipline were difficult to name.

The question arises why this picture, or map, which I am trying to create should be relatively unfamiliar, or if familiar then unwelcome, at least in Britain, from where I am writing. Jonathan Rée recently observed of the prevailing attitude to German philosophy in England after the Second World War that ‘In Britain philosophy had a public reputation as typically Teutonic and probably complicit in the chronic extremism of German culture and politics.’¹ I also believe that is the case. Ever since 1945 the assumed political connection has invited a hunt either for deficiencies in the tradition – usually deficiencies of nationalism – or for direct Nazi sympathizers. Of course they can be found. But should Kant be taken as an example? I can’t help recalling a little barb the British philosopher Anthony Quinton aimed at Kant some time after the war: ‘Kant, with his university post, his regular habits, and the crabbed technicality of his writing, is more the ideal of a philosophy professor than of a philosopher proper.’²

What Quinton meant with that ad hominem and not exactly professional verdict, I think, was that Nazism proved that Kant had always been wrong. Kant was simply the wrong kind of man (German) to achieve anything decent in the line of true inquiry (not German). Quinton, an Oxford philosopher in a quite different tradition, empirically based and recently oriented towards the analysis of language, was by contrast a proper philosopher. I must sympathize with him. He was personally scarred by the war.³ Further, when he mourned ‘the sinking of the great ship of European culture by Hitler’, he was certainly right that the cultural ship had gone down.⁴ I sympathize with several generations of Britons who could never bring themselves to accept Germany and Germans after the war.⁵ But I do think that in the twenty-first century it leads to unproductive and belated searches for the moral high ground.⁶ Or is it my peculiar weakness to find German culture, before both wars, incomparably rich and not to be written off as part of military defeat?

In 1969 the art historian and public intellectual Kenneth Clark declared a deeply negative view of German art, associating its inwardness and melancholy, as he perceived them, with the recent world catastrophe caused by Nazi Germany.⁷ Clark experienced a loss of civilization just as Quinton did. Histories of German philosophy even forty years ago, including those written by Germans, more or less agreed.⁸

Yet most of the thinkers I talk about in this book considered the great collapse already to have happened, at least in their own nation, in 1914–18, or earlier, with the brutal industrialization of old Germany. Their orientation as philosophers was exactly that, and that they had to pick up the pieces and look to a new future. Thirty years before Hitler became the German Chancellor German philosophy, with sociology on its margins, was already searching for how to embrace, conceptually or otherwise, the confusion and disorder in society which had helped make Hitler possible. Radical new forms of art and philosophy were required in response to a technologically enabled but spiritually damaged European humanity. That indeed is the main reason why the powerful and original responses to modernity, of the men and women of the 1900s, and the 1920s and ’30s, on behalf of philosophy, still speak to us, in ways in which Quinton does not, and Clark only partially.

Just to recap what Germany lost so suddenly with industrialization. When Hitler was born in 1889 (to be clear about the sequence of generations, that was the same year as Heidegger and Kracauer), Germany was still supremely the land of poets and thinkers, Das Land der Dichter und Denker. Whoever invented that phrase, and it may have been Madame de Staël on a visit to Goethe in Weimar in 1812, or the admiring Victorian English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton (which would be ironic, to say the least), it characterized a glorious German cultural century. German philosophy, though frequently parodied abroad as obscure, shaped a religion of creativity that overflowed into music and poetry. The philosophy was the culture, Kultur, and the artistic outpourings were inseparable from the style of philosophy. It wasn’t easy to emulate this complexity. Those who tried, like the English Hegelians and the New England metaphysicals, ended up with something far less. To that extent Kultur and the Idealism at the heart of it were indeed about being German, and Kant was the eternal touchstone of the German moral life. But then the pastoral, God-fearing, self-improving network of principalities formed an empire, built a manufacturing base and destroyed itself in competition with rival powers. One might even think that Heidegger and Cassirer, and Kracauer, among many others, had a Quinton-like or Clark-like experience of desolation. Cassirer clung on to the idea of a rich symbolic culture of the West which, like the Kantian philosophy itself, could not be swept away because certain truths and values did remain eternal. Heidegger was both more radical and more conservative. Though it can never diminish the error of his flirtation with Nazism, the truth about Heidegger is that he wanted his old rural Catholic south German village to remain pious and distant from the technology that had enabled war. He set about re-founding philosophy in the grandest manner to accommodate that simple vision.

Uniquely among the philosophers in this book Heidegger disliked Kant, while recognizing his importance. He preferred the non-rational and mystical Schelling. But otherwise, and with Cassirer even into the Hitler years and beyond, Kant, interrogated and revised, remained the spiritual father of the German nation. Kant was Germany’s best self before it was ever created. In the history of German philosophy in which all the philosophers in this book were caught up, right up to 1945 much of the debate concerned whether Kant could live on. When Heidegger and Cassirer debated in 1929 it was Heidegger who held the progressive view that finally, for an adequate twentieth-century philosophy, Kant was not enough; wrong, even. The Nazis themselves, conservative and petty bourgeois to a fault, jumped on the old, rotten bandwagon. They instrumentalized Kant as worthy of reverence, if not serious study, in their third German empire. One could quote their chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg here, but also Hitler himself, enunciating the name of Kant directly.⁹

So who was right, and why did a great philosopher become the subject of such intense debate, both scholarly and ideological? The first great revolt against Kantian Idealism had occurred in the early nineteenth century, and it had occurred out of post-1789 concern with the suffering lives of the mass of people. Ludwig Feuerbach, among the Germans, was the first to raise a concern with brotherhood – with interpersonal, intersubjective understanding – under the heading of the You and I relation. Feuerbach’s newly politicized educated class felt it would be immoral to fob off common suffering with those metaphysical fairy tales of the immutable moral law that kept middle-class critical minds in blinkers. This is how attacks on Kantian Idealism, with renewed vigour in the twentieth century, acquired their Marxist tinge, while in the same measure a National Socialist Kant was invented, a terrible end to a century and a half of moral integrity in philosophy.

Kant’s calm and dignified philosophy was of a stature to resist ideological attack. It was also of a complexity and refinement that no serious person could think of instrumentalizing it for totalitarian ends. But – and it’s important to remember, since this is a book about philosophy – it had one great weakness. It was an entirely subjective account of the concepts of truth, goodness and beauty.¹⁰ Kant was indeed talking to individuals, not to society, and there lay the justification for post-revolutionary complaint. Kant was not indicating how social and communal belonging fitted with the subjective practice of knowledge. His idealism was a magnificent critique of how the individual human mind seemed to work, independently of God, to create from out of its own equipment rational, moral and aesthetic categories to explain truth, goodness and beauty in the world. But it was also the foundation for the intense, locked-in subjectivism of the three great critiques, of Pure Reason, of Practical Reason and of Judgement. Kant’s subjectivism was of a potential darkness that the Romantics Schelling and Fichte deepened, as they joined his intense inwardness to irrationalism and nationalism.

One possible German inventor of the phrase ‘Land of Poets and Thinkers’ was the nineteenth-century literary critic Adolf Menzel, and he already meant it scathingly. As Romanticism faded and the mid-century hoved into view it seemed to Menzel that the Kantian-spirited deep Germans could do nothing else but read and write books, at the expense of attending to real concerns.

That was what linked the age of Menzel, and also that of Feuerbach and Marx, to the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer and Adorno a century later. It was the worry that German Idealism risked not so much obscurity (in which German thinkers would always be well versed) but a kind of ineptitude. The inwardness of Kant seemed to entail a complete lack of social sense and to deny the practicalities of living. Idealism took no interest in the bodily and material lives of ordinary men and women, as opposed to the ethereal lives of poets and philosophers. These criticisms of Idealism drawn up by Feuerbach and Marx came to the conclusion that it was hopelessly unpolitical, with regard to the needs of the modern age. Adorno and Horkheimer, and also Heidegger in his own way, would agree.

Must philosophy attend to ordinariness? Do we all need to be people of action? Are ‘real concerns’, and the political commitment of philosophy, so infallibly godly? Not everyone thinks so, and this was one of the debates in Hitler’s lifetime, reflected in the Heidegger/Cassirer debate and experienced as a radical change of personal philosophical style by Heidegger’s one-time pupil, the otherwise rather Aristotelian Hannah Arendt. The evaluation of praxis mattered so much in the German context, but then so did the high estimation of the Kultur to which philosophy belonged. As a result, I would say, it was instinctive still in early twentieth-century Germany to look to poets and thinkers to design a better world (and thus to overestimate the ease of any transition from poesis to praxis, something of which many Marxists would also be guilty). An indirect connection remained between philosophy and Christianity, such that philosophy was expected to provide instruction in how to live a more or less Christian life. In the intellectual ferment that made Berlin one of the liveliest cities in Europe, from around 1900 to the day of reckoning, many intelligent people had long since become non-believers. In the words of the sociologist Max Weber, religiosity itself had become mundane.¹¹ On the other hand, that clearly left German philosophy with a potentially enhanced public role, either utopian or critical, or both together, to describe the good life and how to lead it.

The Anglo-Saxon tradition in philosophy, Lockean, Humean, empirically and socially minded, sceptical of metaphysical claims, was always wary of Kant and his critical and utopian successors.¹² But German Idealism was, at its finest, through Kant, a modern answer to Plato and Aristotle. There were flaws, there were errors, but for committed post-Kantians, from Marx and Feuerbach to Adorno and Horkheimer, and taking in two of the three outstanding academic philosophers of Hitler’s lifetime, Cassirer and Husserl, there was a philosophy of human fulfilment to keep alive. When the political catastrophe descended, at different points in these men’s careers, the hunger for a revised Kantianism answerable to Plato and Aristotle remained acute. Just how could the Greek gods of German eterni...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. The Life of the Mind Undone
• 2. The Challenge from the Streets
• 3. The Collapsed House of Bourgeois Ideas
• 4. New Philosophy out of the Rubble
• 5. The Possibility of Life Together
• APPENDIX 1: The National Socialist Kant
• APPENDIX 2: The Philosophers and the National Socialist Terror
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• AUTHOR’S NOTE