Self-Abasement and Defiance
Our human disposition—in Europe, at least—is such as to make us equally sensitive to blame and quick to blame others. We do not want our toes stepped on, but in our moral judgment of others we get excited easily. This is the consequence of moralistic poisoning. There is generally nothing to which we are so sensitive as to any hint that we are considered guilty. Even if we are guilty we do not want to let ourselves be told. And if we let ourselves be told we still do not want to be told by everyone. The greater this sensitivity to blame, the greater, as a rule, is the inconsiderate readiness to blame others. The world, down to the petty circumstances of everyday life, teems with imputations of the authorship of some mischance.
Oddly, sensitivity to blame is very apt to rebound into an urge to confess. Such confessions of guilt—false, because still instinctive and lustful—have one unmistakable external trait: fed by the same will to power as their opposites in the same individual, they betray the confessor’s wish to enhance his worth by his confession, to eclipse others. His confession of guilt wants to force others to confess. There is a touch of aggressiveness in such confessions. Moralism as a phenomenon of the will to power fosters both sensitivity to blame and confessions of guilt, both reproach and self-reproach, and psychologically it causes each of these to rebound into the other.
Hence, philosophically, the first thing required of anyone dealing with guilt questions is that he deal with himself, thereby extinguishing both sensitivity and the confession urge.
Today this generally human phenomenon—here described psychologically—is indissolubly interwoven with the gravity of our German question. We are threatened by the twin errors of self-abasing lamentation in confessions of guilt and of defiantly self-isolating pride.
The material concerns of the moment lead many astray. Confessing guilt strikes them as advantageous. Their eagerness to confess corresponds to the world’s indignation at German moral turpitude. The powerful are met with flattery; one likes to say what they would like to hear. In addition, there is the baneful tendency to feel that confessing guilt makes us better than others. Humility cloaks an evil self-conceit. Self-disparagement contains an attack on others who refrain from it. The ignominy of such cheap self-accusations, the disgrace of supposedly helpful flattery, is obvious. At this point the power instincts of the mighty and the impotent fatally interlock.
Defiant pride is different. The moral attack of the others is the very reason for its stiffened obstinacy. It aims at self-respect in a supposed inner independence. But this is not to be gained if the decisive point remains obscure.
The decisive point is an eternal basic phenomenon, returned today in new form: he who in total defeat prefers life to death can only live in truthfulness—the only dignity left to him—if he decides upon this life in full realization of its meaning. What Hegel showed in his “Phenomenology,” in the grandiose chapter on master and servant, is the necessity which human consciousness would like to obscure in order to evade it.
The decision to stay alive in impotence and servitude is an act of life-building sincerity. It results in a metamorphosis that modifies all values. Here—if the decision is made, if the consequences are accepted and toil and suffering embraced—lies the sublime potential of the human soul. In Hegel’s exposition it is the servant rather than the master who bears the spiritual future—but not unless he honestly follows his hard road. Nothing is given. Nothing comes by itself. The errors of self-abasement and proud defiance can be avoided only if this prime decision is clear; purification serves to clarify both the decision and its consequences.
The presence of guilt, together with defeat, adds a psychological complication. Not only impotence but guilt must be accepted, and the transmutation which man would like to avoid must grow from both.
Proud defiance finds a multitude of points of view, of grandiloquences and edifying sentimentalities, to help itself to the delusion by which it can be maintained. For instance:
The meaning of the necessity to accept past events is changed. A wild inclination to “own up to our history” permits the concealed affirmation of evil, the discovery of good in evil, and its preservation in the soul as a proud fortress held against the victors. This perversion admits of sentences such as the following: “We must know that within us we still bear the primordial strength of will which created the past, and we must also stand by it and accept it into our existence.… We have been both and shall remain both… and we ourselves are never anything but our entire history whose strength we bear within us.” “Reverence” will force the new German generation to become like the previous one.
A defiance disguised as reverence is here confusing the historic soil—in which we are lovingly rooted—with the entirety of the realities of our common past. Far from loving all of those, we reject a good many as alien to our being.
In this affirming recognition of the evil as evil, queer emotional obscurities may admit of sentences such as the following: “We must become so brave and so great and so gentle that we can say, yes, even this horror was and will remain our reality, but we are strong enough to make it over within ourselves, for creative tasks. We know within us a fearful potentiality which once appeared in miserably erring forms. We love and esteem our whole historic past with a reverent affection transcending any single historic guilt. We bear this volcano within us, daring to know that it may blow us up, but convinced that only our ability to tame it will open the last expanse of our freedom and we realize, in the dangerous strength of such possibility, what in common with all others will be the human achievement of our spirit.”
This is a tempting appeal—born of a bad, irrationalist philosophy—to avoid a decision and intrust ourselves to a process of existential levelling. “Taming” is not half enough. The “choice” is what matters. Failure to make the choice immediately revives the possibility of an evil defiance, bound to end up by saying, “Go and sin.” The misapprehension in this appeal to reverence toward evil, even though it is negated, is that it could only lead to an illusive community.
A third manner of proud defiance may affirm all National- Socialism as a matter of “philosophy of history”—in an esthetic view compounding obvious evil and disaster, which should be soberly considered, into an emotional fog of false magnificence:
“In the spring of 1932 a German philosopher prophesied that within ten years the world would be governed politically from two poles only, Moscow and Washington; that Germany, in between, would become irrelevant as a political-geographical conception, existing only as a spiritual power.
“German history—to which the defeat of 1918 had actually opened vistas of greater consolidation and even Great-German achievement—revolted against this prophesied and indeed impending tendency to simplify the world around two poles. Against this world tendency, German history contracted for an isolated, self-willed, titanic effort still to reach its own national goal.
“If that philosopher’s prophecy was right in placing a time limit of only ten years on the beginning of Russo-American world rule, the precipitate pace, the haste and violence of the German countereffort was understandable. It was the pace of an inwardly meaningful and fascinating but historically belated revolt. In the past months we have seen this pace eventually outrun itself in pure, isolated raving. A philosopher lightly pronounces sentence: German history is past; the Moscow-Washington era is beginning. So greatly, longingly devised a history as the German one does not simply say, amen, to such academic resolutions. It flares up; in deeply excited resistance and attack, in a savage tumult of faith and hatred it plunges to its doom.”