JOHN DEWEY'S OMISSIONS ON GERMANY

Howard, Harry Paxton

The Progressives Bookshelf John Dewey's Omissions On Germany GERMAN PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS, by John Dewey. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2. Reviewed by Harry Paxton Howard THIS book is an expansion of...

...Not only was the first great political "success" of German classical philosophy achieved in Russia, but there is much in Hitler and in Nazism that is not essentially "German...
...At the same time, 'the Communist International at Moscow instructed German Communists to fight the German Social Democrats and the Weimar Republic as their first enemies...
...From this, Dr...
...Socialism in one country" Or "national socialism" was started in specific plans in Soviet Russia in 1928-29...
...When Hitler beats his breast regarding Germany's own sins—"our internal aberration of spirit, our internal division, our own collapse . . . our own slow inner confusion" and declares "they are wrong who seek the cause of Germany's distress in externals," he is engaging in lamentations essentially Hebraic rather than German...
...This was not a division between the "ideal and actual"—the division which constituted the "two worlds" of Germany...
...Dewey's, the omission of the Marxian influence on German politics and thought is quite remarkable...
...Reviewed by Harry Paxton Howard THIS book is an expansion of that published in 1915, when it consisted of three long chapters starting with "German Philosophy: The Two Worlds...
...THIS is an excellent presentation, wholly sound...
...Further, Dewey emphasizes as peculiarly "German" some things which are equally true of some other .countries: "Hitler's philosophy, or world-outlook, is that the identity of the ideal with hard fact may be effected here and now, by means of combining faith in the ideal to which destiny has called the German people with force which is thoroughly organized to control every aspect of life, economic, cultural, artistic, educational, military, and political...
...In 1918-19 the Marxists split into moderate and Communistic groups...
...Bertrand Russell has correctly noted that the whole spirit of Mein Kampf is Hebraic...
...The former were the mainstay of the Weimar Republic...
...The whole tone is characteristic of many of the latter books of the Old Testament...
...The closed National Socialist state was to be ultimately succeeded by a free association of all humanity, in which state-secured rights and state-imposed obligations would disappear...
...Engels was on firm ground when he declared that the German "working class movement is the heir of classical German philosophy...
...Since his day in Germany, "histories of philosophy, or religion, or institutions have all been treated as developments through necessary stages of an inner implicit idea or purpose according to an indwelling law...
...German ideas are the fruits of German philosophy and historical conditions, not of "race...
...Hegel "fixed the ideas of Fichte and fastened them together with the pin of evolution...
...This forerunner of National Socialism also set forth a formula of "historic stages...
...No philosopher "has ever thought so consistently in terms of strife and overcoming as Hegel...
...What is wrong with the Nazi German outlook is the Nazi German mind— and this grew out of ideas and conditions some of which long antedated Hitler...
...In some respects, Dr...
...Similarly with Nazi emphasis on "race" and "blood...
...Even in the heat of troglodytic warfare for supreme power in Russia, Lenin found time to promote a "Society of Materialistic Friends of the Hegelian Dialectic...
...And the idea of special "missions" lost nothing in the process...
...This division, this monstrous contradiction between moral "mission" and brutal "action," still exists in Hitler's philosophy —the official philosophy of present-day Nazi Germany...
...Dewey skips a few generations to set forth his thesis that in regard to Hitler's "One World," it was "Hitler's mission to overcome that division between the 'inner' and the 'outer', the ideal and the actual, between spiritual faith and the hard realities of action which had constituted 'The Two Worlds of Germany...
...Willkie's...
...The unified "one world" of totalitarianism was achieved most fully in Russia, 15 years before the Nazis gained power in Germany...
...Dewey's book may be a useful antidote to current hate-propaganda against the Germans as a people...
...If the name Lenin or Stalin were substituted for that of Hitler, and "proletariat" or "Russian people" for "German people," this statement would have equal validity...
...Hitler believed that "the absence of a unified Weltanschauung was the cause of Germany's defeat while its development is the prerequisite for her recovery...
...This latter is quite true, but the disunity of which Hitler spoke was that between German Nationalists and the "Jewish-Marxists," "Jewish capitalists," and others who opposed them...
...EQUALLY serious is Dewey's complete omission of the influence of German philosophy upon Russian politics, and the subsequent reaction of Marxian-Russian philosophy and politics upon German...
...Further, Dewey is well aware that racial consciousness, prejudice, and hatred have far deeper roots, are more widely spread, and have been far more intense and violent in these United States than they were in Germany prior to the advent of Hitler...
...It is now brought down to date by the addition of a tew chapter (put at the beginning) on "The One-World of Hitler's National Socialism...
...Even in a brief presentation like Dr...
...Fichte, under the influence of the wars and upheavals of the Napoleonic period, rewrote the Kantian philosophy in nationalist and State Socialist terms, and added the dialectical formula of "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis...
...Dewey's account of German thought takes us briefly through Luther to his successor Kant and the "two worlds," one the world of sense and material things and scientific categories, the other the world of "moral duty and moral freedom," which found (expression in concepts of national and historic "missions" to save not only the Germans but all humankind...
...Dewey gives no hint whatever of the great influence of the Englishman William Houston Chamberlain on the development of Germany's strabismatic "Aryan-ism," or the influence of Kipling and his "Master Race" doctrines both on Chamberlain and on Germany direct...
...The latter were the decisive element in 1930-32, when they cooperated with the Nazis in the undermining of the Weimar Republic...
...So far so good...
...For this, they made common cause with the Nazis...
...And one-party states on a permanent racial basis were also not a German invention...
...But there is no hint of this in the book...
...The German-descended Austrian's "One World" is of 'course not Mr...
...Marx was the most politically effective transmitter of classical German thought, with its whole paraphernalia of "historic mission," the use of "science," the Fichtean-Hegelian "dialectic," dictated "Socialism," and the "historic stages" by which a National Socialist state would give way to its opposite—a free and universal association of all humankind...
...It was through the German Social Democracy, more than through any other element, that these Fichtean-Hegelian concepts continued to be an effective factor in German political life...

Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 21


 
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