NAZISM AND HOLISM Holistic thought, which has often been bracketed with "primitive" or peasant thought, made

a horrifying twentieth century return in parts of Nazi ideology. The association of holistic thought with Nazism led, especially in the English-speaking world, where atomistic thought had long achieved (incomplete) dominance over holistic thought, to a post-W.W.II literature denouncing and discrediting holistic thought though its associations with Nazism. Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy , in which , among others, the thought of the French process philosopher Henri Bergson (See discussion of de Broglie in Quantum Mechanics Chapter) is misrepresented as having Nazi collaborationist tendencies, despite Bergson's death after refusing Nazi "honorary Aryan" status, which included access to rations. Bergson refused, and died after waiting on a bread line. Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (which Popper once called his "war effort") portrayed Plato and Hegel as proto-totalitarians and misrepresented Hegel's advocacy of moderate constitutional monarchy as a forerunner of Nazism. Popper's The Poverty of Historicism denounced a construction, which was primarily based on the holistic thought the moderate social democrat Karl Mannheim. Popular accounts of Nazism, such as Peter Viereck's Metapolitics ( ), and widely read histories such as Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ( ) portrayed German philosophers Fichte and Hegel (the former a supporter of the French revolution, the latter sufficiently liberal (considered leftist) in his youth to accumulate a police spy dossier) as forerunners of Nazism. Georg Lukacs excepts Fichte and Hegel from the association with Naziism, but does associate the whole sweep of German holism, from Schelling through through Dilthey and the German sociology of Weber and Mannheim with Nazism.( ) Much of this literature by figures who had opposed holistic thinking before the rise of Nazism and had like Russell developed "logical atomism" was purely accusatory, and used the horrors of Nazism to strengthen a philosophical case in a polemic against holism whose origins go back centuries before Nazism. Nevertheless, the association of holist thought with German mainstream conservative thought, and the alliances which were made between holism and Nazi ideology make the issue of the relation of holist thought to Nazis a serious one. The psychologist and science historian Anne Harrington has recently written Reenchanting Nature. Harrington presents four deftly presented and illuminating case studies of German holists and their relations with Nazism. Two of them, Kurt Goldstein the neurologist and Wertheimer the gestalt psychologist were respectively social democrat and liberal, and left Germany with the rise of Hitler. Harrington has recently emphasized the role of individual choice in the alliance or lack of alliance of individual holists with the Nazi regime, claiming that ideas do not have a history, only individuals do (an interestingly anti-holist position in itself, despite the sympathy for medical holism in the work). However, it is not wholly arbitrary that holistic thought was dominant in Germany, but not in France or England. Nor is it simply a sum of individual, arbitrary choices that led to the alliance of so many German holistic thinkers with Nazism. Surely there must be greater probabilities of a holist allying with Nazism than of a logical atomist doing so. It is not mere chance that the members of the Vienna circle of logical positivists were for the most part on the left, primarily social democrats, nor that the Austrian school of economics, such as von Mises and Hayek were individualistic liberals with affinities for the individualism and liberalism of John Stuart Mill and British economics. There were, of course exceptions, two thinkers who had or claimed to have some affinities to the logical positivists, the physicist Pascual Jordan and the philosopher Hugo Dingler, had alliances with Nazism. But even these two individuals were not that close to the core positivism of the Vienna circle. Jordan combined his "positivism" with a strong holism and organicism, as well as a taste for the parapsychological. Dingler was primarily an extreme conventionalist, holding laws of nature to be definitions. Both had their difficulties with the Nazis, despite their public attempts to ally their own thought with that of the Nazis. There is greater probability that a holist would be found allied with the Nazis that an atomist or logical positivist would be. Certainly it is true that individuals made choices whether to ally or to attempt to ally with the Nazi regime, whether to stay or to leave. But to reduce the issue entirely to individual choice seems to ignore the extent to which those choices were made between options which were structured by a context both of institutions and traditions of thought in which the choosers participated. Clearly the alliance or lack of alliance of any individual was not wholly arbitrary. Granted, Nazi ideology was highly opportunistic in the currents of thought which it absorbed. Also individual scientists or philosophers were sometimes opportunistic in attempting to get government support for their projects or institutes by emphasizing the affinities between their ideas and Nazi ideas. Nevertheless, there was an overall emphasis in Nazi thought on peasant and rural tradition as well as on intuition and totality, themes which are to be found in holism. Several of the older figures, who were discussed here earlier, such as Paracelsus, Kepler, Kant and Goethe, were appealed to as forerunners by Nazi propagandists. Kant, defender of the enlightenment and rationality was obviously mis--described or misused by Nazi accounts. Paracelsus, whose occultist peasant-influence thought has much more affinities with themes favored by the Nazis was an advocate of peasant revolution which inspired Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Ernst Bloch. Goethe was appealed to both by the Nazis and by anti-Nazis such as George Lukacs or Friedrich Meinecke.

Nonetheless, German thought, in contrast with British, French, Scandinavian, and even much turn-of the century Austrian thought, was unusual in maintaining holist and polarity-analogy thought through the nineteenth and at least the first half of the twentieth century. As Britain and France, in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, respectively, moved towards individualist, capitalist, and representative democratic social organization, Germany maintained strong currents of holistic and organic thought. Anne Harrington emphasizes the revival of holist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But earlier, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the German Romantic movement, as we have seen, revived much of the holist and polarity-analogy thinking of the renaissance. As France underwent its revolution and industrial development and as British democracy broadened, both phenomena reinforcing atomistic and individualistic thought, German reacted against the French revolution and the Napoleonic invasion of French troops in Romantic thought which turned against the Enlightenment and against atomism. Although Britain had a Romantic movement, most notable in poetry and the arts, British empiricism Baconian inductivism and atomism dominated the mainstream self-image of British science in the nineteenth century. In Germany the legacy of the Romantic movement was more far-reaching and long-lasting. Germany, especially in science and philosophy, during the pre-revolutionary period of the 1840's had a strong counter-reaction against Romantic nature philosophy, with the materialism of Buechner, Molschott and Vogt. These scientific materialists (or "vulgar materialists" as Marx called them) rejected the thought of the Romantics as vague and vapid wishful thinking. German scientists, even when surreptitiously borrowing ideas and interests from the Romantics, denounced Nature Philosophy as an unfortunate interlude on the road to materialistic science. With the failure of the democratic revolutions of 1848 the popularity of the scientific materialists was somewhat displaced by the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer. However, German science, at least in its public self-representation, continued for the most part to reject the legacy of Romantic Nature Philosophy. Nonetheless, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, numerous German academics praised intuition, historical consciousness and holistic totalities in contrast to the alienated atomism, empiricism and individualism, which were identified with the rising industrial society and labor movement. In The Decline of the German Mandarins, Fritz Ringer chronicles the numerous pronouncements of German academics in favor of intuition of the whole and against mechanical and rootless individualism. It is certainly true that Germany's lack of a successful democratic revolution, the relative lateness of Germany's industrialization, followed by rapid urbanization and mechanization, combined with the prestigious but precarious position of the traditional German academicians, led the latter to identify the philosophical positions of atomism, mechanism, individualism, and analysis with the feared social phenomena of industrialization, mechanization, urbanization, and mass labor and democratic movements. The phenomena which in the England of the mid-seventeenth century which led to outbreaks of revolutionary thought among the farmers and the poor during the English Civil War, led two centuries later in Germany to more public and intellectually articulate utterances of the threatened professoriate and middle classes. Many commentators on Nazism noted the revival of primitivism in the movement. This revival was quite conscious, with the revival of pagan Nordic gods, Hitler's worship of Wagner's Ring cycle (following, Hitler's directions, Siegfried's funeral march was played continually after Hitler's suicide in his Berlin bunker). Nazism's revival of primitivism in one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world was the occasion for shock and then for reflection among many social analysts, psychologists, and critical theorists. Many writers, from the British logician Bertrand Russell to the Hungarian Marxist George Lukacs simply denounced Nazi irrationalism and primitivism in the name of Enlightenment rationality. Some others, such as Carl Jung (himself tainted by some writings in which he criticized Jewish psychoanalysis hoping to curry the favor of the German regime and to gain influence superseding that of Freud and the Freudians with whom he had broken) emphasized the "dark side" of human nature and the subconscious which reappeared in the technological and educated twentieth century in the form of totalitarian movements. Friedrich Heer identified Nazism (as well as Stalinism) with the resurgence of the seething resentments of the "underground" of the peasants and lower classes, whose views and attitudes had been pushed underground with respect to high culture during the Enlightenment, industrial revolution and the nineteenth century. Ernst Bloch was one Marxist writer (himself influenced by religious movements; Thomas Muenzer's peasant revolt, and the expressionist movement in twentieth century art) who in vain argued that the progressive or leftist forces needed to make room for or give expression to the ceremonial and primitive collective forms to which the Nazis so successfully gave expression. By simply repressing impulses for collective ritual and positive emotive expression, writers like Jung and Bloch claimed, the enlightenment rationalists only made the opportunities offered by the Nazis more attractive. (Bloch criticized Jung, not only for the latter's attempt to gain the approval of the Nazis for his psychology, but for Jung's identification of the non-conscious solely with the past and with the species-universal, and not with either cultural or future-anticipating capacities of the not-yet-conscious). Bloch also noted that historical progress is not simply a linear supercession of forms. Earlier, more "primitive" forms and impulses coexist with the later, superadded forms that rationality and technology contribute. In Heritage of Our Times (Erbschaft Dieser Zeit)

Bloch characterizes this situation as "Non-Contemporareity." Bloch's characterization of non-contemporaneous strata coexisting with contemporary phenomena resembles the multiple times of the French Annales historians, and the French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser . While the French structuralists seem to take the various times as coexisting, apparently in terms of changes or events of various scales of duration, Bloch treats non-contemponareity in terms of his "philosophy of the future" or philosophy of becoming and process. He discusses the "contradictions" in the Marxist sense, which are in the present. These include the unfulfilled potentials of the present, pointing to the future, as well as the residues and survivals of earlier epochs, which offer deceptive possibilities of return to the past. These latter include the rural reminiscences of recently urbanized people. Bloch, unlike those he characterizes as vulgar Marxists, does not see these purely as elements to be suppressed or as irrational residues to be expunged, but claims that they offer positive opportunities as well. In fact, the residues of archaic and rural consciousness, if not appealed to and dealt with will remain as residues of irrationality with future socialism and elements of reaction. One natural affinity of holism is with conservative (not necessarily but possibly radical right or reactionary) thought. Traditional conservatism has often appealed to the organic nature of society and traditional institutions, and made the analogy of society or culture to an organism. Early conservative thought, in reacting against the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution often put itself at odds with mechanical science as well as with machinery and the factory. Since the thinkers of the enlightenment aligned themselves not only with science but with empiricism and the analysis of experience into sensations or ideas in the form of sense-data, conservatism often rejected this atomistic analysis of experience which was held by the French and British followers of John Locke. Similarly, in opposition to democracy and (in earlier conservatism) capitalism, conservatives opposed an individualistic conception of society. Given the weakness of democratic institutions in German, the failure of its nineteenth century democratic revolutions, and the relative lateness and backwardness of capitalism in Germany in contrast to Britain and France until the late nineteenth century, it is not surprising that conservative thought should have been strong in Germany. With the defeat in W.W.I. and the partial democratic revolution which founded the Weimar Republic, and which was associated in the minds of many Germans with a regime imposed on Germany by foreign victors, much radical opposition to the regime took an ultra-conservative direction. This conservative thought with its organicism, its opposition to urbanization, industry, mass society, democracy and often (at least in rhetoric) to capitalism became one of the streams from which the Nazis could draw their support. On the other hand one finds much of Nazi thought to be of a highly technocratic sort, worshipping the development of machine technology and more concerned with industrial development than with peasant or communal values. ( ) As Anne Harrington notes, toward the end of the Third Reich the technocrats won out over the holists. The imperatives of military production took precedence over volkish values, and the theorists of technology won ascendancy over the theorists of holism. Obviously, also various social movements, including Marxism and the ecology movement have included strong holism components. Unless one is willing (as a few are) to identify both Marxism and ecology with Nazism, the alliance between Nazism and holism, although a real and troubling historical occurrence, is not an identity.

EXCURSUS: NAZISM AND HOLISM: ENDNOTES Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1945. Ibid., p. 791, where Russell claims Bergson's philosophy "harmonized easily with the movement which culminated in Vichy." Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 2 vols., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1945, fourth edition (revised), Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1962, reprinted, New York, Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 1963. Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1957, third ed., 1961, reprinted, Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 1964. Viereck, Peter, Metapolitics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind, New York: Capricorn Books, 1965. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of theThird Reich, Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1996. George Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, transl. Peter Palmer, sHumanities Press, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1981. The original German edition was subtitled Irrationalism from Schelling to Hitler," Anne Harrington, "Reenchanting the Human Machine: Writing Histories of Holistic Biology and Psychology in the Shadow of the Third Reich," Psychology Colloquium, University of New Hampshire, April 4, 1996. On Pascual Jordan and "positivism" see Richard Henry Beyler, From Positivism to Organicism: Pascual Jordan's Interpretations of Modern Physics in Cultural Context, Harvard University, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1994. Beyler discusses Jordan's competition with Dingler for Nazi favor, pp. 236-242. George Lukacs, Goethe and His Age, Friedrick Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, trans.Sidney B. Fay, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950, reprinted Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community 1890 -1933, Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1968, reprinted Hanover, New Hampshire: New England University Press, 1990, On whole and wholeness see pp. 95, 381, 387, 389, 393, 401. On atomism and mechanical see 246, 247, 262, 357, 375, 377. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, transl. by Neville and Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986,vol. I, pp 59-64, 137-138. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, transl. by Neville and Stephen Plaice, Berkeley California: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 98-116. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, 1984.