The Ominous Parallels - Tranche VI
Posted by mshupe 6 months, 3 weeks ago to Philosophy
Chapter 3, Excerpt 2 of 2
Hitler’s War Against Reason
The culture of the Weimar Republic was an invaluable asset to the Nazis. Taking whatever epistemological doctrines they needed, two were emphasized by the Nazis. The first is dogmatism. Seventeen centuries earlier, Tertullian, one of the Church Founders, declaring in regard to the dogma of God’s self-sacrifice on the cross: “It is believable, because it is absurd; it is certain, because it is impossible.” The Nazis dogma matched anything offered by the medievals.
The second was pragmatism. The voluntarist worship of mindless action may be designated by the term “activism.” Goebbels puts the point: “Important in not what is right but what wins.” Explains Hitler: “There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or the scientific sense.” Nazism is the revealed truth – there is no truth. The clash is trivial; dogmatism and pragmatism are interchangeable . . . two variants of the same irrationalism. The Nazis rejected Aristotelian logic with its intellectual consistency.
Dogmatism gave the Fuhrer the aura of supernatural authority; pragmatism gave him “flexibility.” In metaphysics, subjectivism is the doctrine that feelings are the creator of facts. Racial subjectivism holds that a man’s inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes. Declared Hitler in Mein Kampf, “I need men who will not stop to think.” Epistemology had done its work. On their own, the Nazis could not have begun to achieve what the intellectuals accomplished for them.
Hitler’s War Against Reason
The culture of the Weimar Republic was an invaluable asset to the Nazis. Taking whatever epistemological doctrines they needed, two were emphasized by the Nazis. The first is dogmatism. Seventeen centuries earlier, Tertullian, one of the Church Founders, declaring in regard to the dogma of God’s self-sacrifice on the cross: “It is believable, because it is absurd; it is certain, because it is impossible.” The Nazis dogma matched anything offered by the medievals.
The second was pragmatism. The voluntarist worship of mindless action may be designated by the term “activism.” Goebbels puts the point: “Important in not what is right but what wins.” Explains Hitler: “There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or the scientific sense.” Nazism is the revealed truth – there is no truth. The clash is trivial; dogmatism and pragmatism are interchangeable . . . two variants of the same irrationalism. The Nazis rejected Aristotelian logic with its intellectual consistency.
Dogmatism gave the Fuhrer the aura of supernatural authority; pragmatism gave him “flexibility.” In metaphysics, subjectivism is the doctrine that feelings are the creator of facts. Racial subjectivism holds that a man’s inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes. Declared Hitler in Mein Kampf, “I need men who will not stop to think.” Epistemology had done its work. On their own, the Nazis could not have begun to achieve what the intellectuals accomplished for them.
The second paragraph mentions activism as the consequence of voluntarism. This book describes the core of voluntarism. Compare it to mobs that march for "social justice" and "Liberate Palestine" today. Their manufactured anger supports bogus ideas.
Racial subjectivism has penetrated nearly every Western university, government agency, and large corporate C-suite today. Epistemology has done its work.