Keeping One Eye on Steve Bannon and the Other on History, Part 2

Ernst Cassirer’s Warnings on Fascism and Political Myth
By Kirsten Ellen Johnsen
Part 2. The Mythic History of the Western Concept of The State
The law is not concerned with the special happiness of any class in the state, but is trying to produce this condition in the city as a whole, harmonizing and adapting the citizens to one another by persuasion and compulsion, and requiring them to impart to one another any benefit which they are severally able to bestow upon the community, and that it itself creates such men in the state, not that it might allow each to take what course pleases him, but with a view to using them for the binding together of the commonwealth.
— Plato, The Republic (519e)
Platonic Ideals of State
In Plato’s thought, the philosophic truth of man is easier to ascertain when mankind is viewed as a whole. For Plato, Cassirer claims, “The soul of the individual is bound up with the social nature; we cannot separate the one from the other” (63). Plato described a political ideal governed by and informed with imagery of cosmic order. “The political cosmos is only a symbol, and the most characteristic one, of the universal cosmos” manifesting in the “geometric equality” that governs “ ‘the whole of this world by the name of order (kosmos)’ ” (66). In order to divest philosophy from the influence of mythology, Plato advocated for a different orientation towards the ideal of cosmic wholeness. “For what man sees in the gods is only a projection of his own life — and vice versa. We read the nature of the human soul in the nature of the state — we form our political ideals according to our conceptions of the gods” (66). In other words, our cosmology informs our politics. This is a theme Cassirer follows throughout The Myth of the State. Political form follows cosmological ideal. The ideal Plato espoused was a system of justice in which all manifested form operates according to its place in a cosmic principle of order.
The King as Divine Representative
Once Christianity came to power, Plato’s philosophies were adapted to a new worldview. Augustine placed the Christian God at the center of the Platonic cosmological structure that informed political structure, with the king as His representative. Yet in Christianity any political structure, as a creation of fallen man, embodied a basic paradox. This “fundamental obstacle … could not completely be overcome. The state was good in its purpose, in its administration of justice. But, according to the Christian dogma, it was bad in its origin. It was the result of the original sin and the fall of man” (107). Christian cosmology presented a conundrum when it came to obeying the king as a divine representative. Law itself, as an inherited concept from the Platonic ideal of the state and a manifestation of the justice of an ordered universe, was seen to have its own legitimacy. In this way “the secular order is not merely ‘temporal’; it has a true eternity, the eternity of the law and, therefore, a spiritual value of its own” (105).
Man’s Right to Revolution
Thomas of Aquinas attempted to resolve this situation by Aristotelian empiricism. He claimed that “the state originates in the social instinct of man. It is this instinct that first leads to family-life and from there, in a continuous development, to all the other and higher forms of commonwealth. This original impulse does not relieve man himself of his fundamental obligation. He must by his own efforts build up an order of right and justice. It is this organization of the moral world and the state by which he proves his freedom” (114–15). The “surprising… revolutionary element” in this line of thinking redefined the subjects’ relationship with authority. “Subjects are under no authority to obey an unjust or usurped authority. Sedition is, indeed, forbidden by the divine law; but to resist an unjust or usurped authority, to disobey a ‘tyrant,’ does not have the character of revolt or sedition but is rather a legitimate act” (104–5). These philosophic developments, coupled with the rediscovery of the Stoic principles of the Natural Rights of Man, began to lay the groundwork for the democratic ideals of the American and French revolutions.
Ruthless Rulership
Cassirer spends a few chapters analyzing Machiavelli. While Machiavellian political thought has influenced the development of totalitarian leadership style, the historical occurrence of his effect on the development of the ideal state is not well developed by Cassirer. The impact of Machiavellian philosophy, according to Cassirer, is perhaps not “brought to light until our own age” in which we may now “study Machiavellism in a magnifying glass” (141). Its significance is in the ruthless techniques Machiavelli espoused, and how his influence eroded any sense of altruism on the part of leaders. Machiavelli “simply ignores” the idea of the “divine origin of the state” (135). “Power, real and factual power, is anything but divine” (136). Religion in the hands of rulers is “a powerful weapon in all political struggles” (138). For Machiavelli, the state has become both independent of and isolated from both metaphysics and ethics. Cassirer does not clarify the ways he sees Machiavellism manifested in his contemporary totalitarian leaders. This leaves the reader to imagine how Machiavellian ‘any means necessary’ tactics are evidenced in our times. However, he leaves us with a single important hint of what Machiavelli presaged. Machiavelli “discovered an entirely new type” of political strategy, “based upon mental weapons instead of physical weapons” (162). Describing what these mental political weapons really are and how they exert power over us today is the central point of Cassirer’s final work.
Philosophic Assumptions: The Cosmological Premise for Politics
It was the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries where “reason…first declared its power and its claim to rule the social life of man” (167), claims Cassirer. Here, again, a changing cosmological structure of thought influenced political structures. Galileo demystified nature by claiming mathematical language as the key to deciphering it. What had been a “unity and inner harmony of medieval culture had been dissolved” when “the hierarchic chain of being that gave everything its right, firm, unquestionable place in the general order of things was destroyed. The heliocentric system deprived man of his privileged condition” (169). Descartes continued this reformulation of reality by introducing methodological doubt. He “reject[ed] all authorities and def[ied] the power of tradition. This Cartesian demand led to a new logic and epistemology, to a new mathematics and metaphysics, to a new physics and cosmology” (168). Yet this new clarity of the human mind in science still met with the messy passions of man’s social and political life. Undeterred, the “determined rationalists” (165) of the seventeenth century sought basic ethical tenets to demonstrate social truth. To do this, they returned to Stoic philosophy. While “Stoic philosophy could not help man to solve the metaphysical riddles of the universe”, it provided an essential service: “the promise to restore man to his ethical dignity” (169). Stoic philosophy held that the natural rights of man were based upon the autonomy of human reason, independent from external assistance from an omnipotent being. This political position is familiar to the national mythology of the United States of America, as it is expounded with full force in the words of the Founding Fathers:
When Thomas Jefferson, in 1776, was asked by his friends to prepare a draft of the American Declaration of Independence he began it with the famous words: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ When Thomas Jefferson wrote these words he was scarcely aware that he was speaking the language of Stoic philosophy. . . . The ideas were regarded as fundamental axioms that were not capable of further analysis and in no need of demonstration. (167)
Reason and Disillusionment in the Evolving Concept of The State
The ideals of the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution, which swept through Europe in a tide that turned from euphoric to demoralized. “The French Revolution had ended in the period of the Napoleonic Wars. The first enthusiasm was followed by a deep disillusionment and mistrust,” (179) Cassirer points out. On the one hand, the German Romantics turned to ideals of the past, and a revaluation of myth. The Enlightenment had eschewed myth as uncouth superstition, but the Romantics saw in myth a purity of origin. “In the system of these philosophers myth becomes . . . a subject of awe and veneration. It is regarded as the mainspring of human culture. Art, history, and poetry originate in myth” (182–3).
Other philosophers reacted to these historical events by turning to questions of theodicy, the age-old good-versus-evil inheritance of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Kant, in dealing with the disillusionment of the French Revolution “that began with the highest moral ideals … and ended with the reign of terror” (257), came to believe that the “supreme moral principle” becomes corrupted when it meets with “the strongest and fiercest resistance” in the “actual world” (257). At this point Kant claims that the “constructive principle” representing a “true ethical order, becomes a destructive and subversive principle” (257). The essential purity of the sublime, universal, moral ‘Good’ is overwhelmed, undermined, and corrupted by the world of form. Ideals may never be realized completely, but remain in an oppositional struggle. This “estrangement between the divine and the temporal order” is fundamental to Christian philosophy “since the time of St. Augustine. . . All secular life is corrupt in its very principle; its redemption can only be brought about by its radical destruction which is the climax of the great historical and religious process” (260). In this political philosophy one can detect a metaphorical reference to cosmological schemata and may be reminded of Plato’s principle that a conception of the state is based upon one’s idea of the gods.
The State as a Spiritual Being in Time
Hegel reconciles the dichotomy of this dualism quite differently. “What he presents in his philosophy of history is a paradox” (260). Instead of accepting an opposition of the “realm of nature and the realm of grace” (260), Hegel establishes the inter-penetrability of time and eternity. Eternity is “to be found in time itself” (261). “ ‘It is the theme of philosophy to ascertain the substance which is immanent in the show of the temporal and transient, and the eternal which is present.’ Unlike Plato, Hegel does not seek the ‘Idea’ in a supercelestial space. He finds it in the actuality of man’s social life and of his political struggles” (Hegel, qtd in Cassirer, 261). For Hegel, writes Cassirer, “the true life of the Idea, of the Divine, begins in history” (262).
Hegel describes a methodology of thought. What is important is “ ‘the result along with the process of arriving at it’ ” (Hegel, qtd in Cassirer, 250). “What we find in reality” according to Hegel (Cassirer states) “is always an identity of opposites . . . Even in Hegel’s political thought every thesis is followed by its antithesis” (250). What mattered, Cassirer insisted, was “not the political credo but the new orientation of political thought . . . The new mode of questioning” (254) that he introduced. The question of theodicy is balanced through the interplay of the divine reason of God recognizing a “positive existence” in universal history, to which “that negative element is a subordinate and vanquished nullity” (255). Evil, as the antithesis of the process, is necessary. Without evil “history becomes lifeless; it loses its meaning and purpose. What we seek . . . is not man’s happiness, but his activity and energy” (256).
“This apotheosis” Cassirer writes, “applies to the historical process taken as a whole” (262). It is more than an act of divine revelation into the realm of time. “In the Hegelian system history is no mere appearance of God, but his reality: God not only ‘has’ history, he is history” (262). Hegel “denies that we can speak of historical life outside and before the state” (263). His conception of the state places it at the “very core of historical life”, producing “ ‘such history in the very progress of its own being’ ” (Hegel, qtd in Cassirer, 263). “No political theory before Hegel ever proposed this. To Hegel the state is not only the representative but the very incarnation of the ‘spirit of the world’ ” (263). This is not the “spirit of a particular nation but the universal spirit, the spirit of the world” as an “ ‘Absolute Idea’ . . . [in the process of] its own need of coming to itself — to conscious knowledge of its own being and mission of freedom’ ”(252). “ ‘It is the course of God through the world that constitutes the State . . . When conceiving the State, one must not think of particular states, not of particular institutions, but one must much rather contemplate the Idea, God as actual on earth, alone’ ” (Hegel, qtd in Cassirer, 265).
The Necessity of War for State Self-Preservation
For Hegel, the duty of the state to preserve itself is its only moral imperative. For the state, the dialectical unity essential to Hegelian thought is found in its negative pole, which he takes to be war. Cassirer interprets Hegel as believing that “to abolish or terminate war would be the death blow of political life” (266). Each particular state has its own will, and “ ‘since the content of the particular will of the state is its welfare, this particular welfare is the highest law in the relation of one state to another’ ” (Hegel, qtd in Cassirer, 266). It is the “ ‘truth which lies in power’ ” that Hegel worships, (Hegel, qtd in Cassirer, 267), and this worship, Cassirer claims, contains “the clearest and most ruthless program of fascism that has ever been propounded by any political or philosophical writer” (267). He identifies Hegelian political thought as a philosophy of submission of individual morality to state identity.
Cassirer illustrates Hegel’s perspective on the spiritual will of the state. “ ‘The spirit of a nation is an existing individual, having in particularity its objective actuality and self-consciousness. . . The destinies and deeds of states in their connection with one another are the visible dialectic of the finite nature of these spirits. Out of this dialectic the universal spirit, the unlimited spirit produces itself’ ” (Hegel, qtd in Cassirer, 273). This universal, unlimited, world spirit as the “ ‘divine Idea as it exists on earth’ ” expresses itself in one dominant nation at a time “ ‘to be the bearer of the present stage of the development of the world-spirit’ ” and by this right must rule all the others, who “‘count no longer in universal history’ ” (Hegel, qtd in Cassirer, 274). Cassirer is highly critical of Hegel’s ideas as having provided an essential underpinning for the rise of nationalism and fascism.
The Fatal Destiny of Hero and Race Worship
Cassirer follows the philosophy of two other thinkers, which he contends constitutes essential underpinnings leading to fascistic, totalitarian thought. These are the philosophies of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) and Arthur Compte De Gobineau (1816–1882). Carlyle was a popular lecturer in Europe, and although his concepts of hero worship did not have a lasting place in academia, his influence on crowds in his day was considerable. Gobineau’s ideas also slipped into obscurity, but their long-term impact is clearly evident by contemporary resurgence. Both worldviews echo the Western ideas of divine purpose and destiny in history and sublimate individual morality to this will.
Essential to Carlyle’s popular appeals was his idea of the age-old human hero. He “simply declared hero worship to be a fundamental instinct in human nature, which if it were ever rooted out would lead to despair for mankind” (215–16). True heroes “are the representatives of the Divine Idea” (192) Hero worship was endemic to human experience, “ ‘an everlasting hope for the management of the world’ ” (Carlyle, qtd in Cassirer 189). Without heroes “there would be no history; . . .[for history] consists of deeds and actions, and there are no deeds without a doer” (191–2). Hero worship “always meant to him the worship of a moral force”(222) which, according to Ernest Seilliére, Cassirer writes, “led him to a deification of the political leaders and to an identification of might and right” (191). With Carlyle, “every new hero is a new incarnation of one and the same great indivisible power of the ‘Divine Idea’ ” (230). The hero manifests God, acting in time.
Gobineau extrapolated the idea of the hero as divine actor in time to the idea of class and race as the manifestation of destiny. “Gobineau’s metaphysics claimed to be a natural science and seemed to be based upon an experience of the simplest kind,” stated Cassirer (231). As Newton has discovered the law of gravitation, Gobineau thought that the human world should also fall towards a common center, and that this was the destiny of race. Gobineau “had to prove that race is the only master and ruler of the historical world” (232), superseding all other forces of human existence. Cassirer states that Gobineau even sublimated nationalism to racism. “Race is the highest aristocrat” for Gobineau, and everything must subordinate itself, even the principle of law. He is impressed by Gobineau’s “attempt to destroy all other values” in establishing the supremacy of race as the determinant of all human value, purpose and destiny. Cassirer considered Gobineau’s thought to be naïve and circular, amounting to a tautology. “Ontology preceded morality and remains the decisive factor. Not what a man does but what he is gives him his moral value” (238).
Gobineau’s thought, according to Cassirer, continued to constrict until “the impoverishment… and the narrowing of his mental horizon was in a sense the necessary outcome of his theory” (245). For the inevitable outcome of a philosophy so dependent upon pedigree may begin with the “greatest enthusiasm” and “unlimited hopes” as an “intoxication of race worship and self worship” (245) is the “deep disillusionment” of the inevitable self-destruction that purity must face in contact with the corrupting world. “The higher races, in fulfilling their historical mission, necessarily and inevitably destroy themselves” (245). By and by, Gobineau’s “vivifying principle” (245) becomes infected by the degenerating influences of interaction with the slave races, and while peaceful coexistence may have been achieved, “there will be no energy, no sense of enterprise, no will to power or conquest” (246) and “human life will have lost everything that makes it worth living” (246). This “last word of Gobineau’s theory . . . is, indeed, the quintessence of his whole work” (246). Race worship results in “not only a deep pessimism but also a deep negativism and nihilism” (247) Gobineau offered his “clean sweep of all human values” to a “new god . . . a dying god, and his death sealed the fate of the human race and human civilization: it entangled them in his own ruin” (247). This fatalistic picture of the future offers no space for free will and individual moral imperative.
Political Idolatry: Fatalism and Prophecy in Fascist Mythology
Cassirer returns to the theme of fatalism in political myth in the final pages of The Myth of the State. The higher power of destiny rules over causality as a “rebirth of one of the oldest mythical motives” (290) to determine the “rise, decline, and fall of civilizations” as exemplified in Oswald Spengler’s wildly successful Decline of the West. He was concerned that such philosophies of history “that consist of somber predictions of the decline and inevitable destruction of our civilization” undermine “fundamental theoretical and ethical ideals” (293) of philosophy. Not only can they become “a pliable instrument in the hands of the political leaders” (293), by abnegating humanity’s role and responsibility in shaping destiny, these philosophies overwhelm rationality by reverting to pre-Enlightenment “mystical thought” (294) and threaten to unleash the most dangerous kind of idolatry, Bacon’s idola fori, that of “the political idols” (294). Cassirer argues that the abnegation of the individual freedom of will in shaping the future “relieves men from all personal responsibility” (288) and lays a populace open to the manipulations of politicians who may act as a “public fortuneteller. Prophecy is an essential element in the new technique of rulership” (289). When political idols promising social renewal are sought as carriers of the heroic role to provide redemption against a backdrop of threat, be that threat seen as national, civilizational, or couched in metaphors of a recurrent natural cycle, the functions of symbolization that Cassirer identified are being used to mobilize mythic forces towards political ends. Cassirer warns that “our modern politicians know very well that great masses are much more easily moved by the force of the imagination than by sheer physical force. And they have made ample use of this knowledge” (289). He made these statements more than seventy years ago, before the advent of mass communication, the digital age, social media, and the manipulative techniques of demographic marketing and psychometric political targeting.
See Part 3. Steve Bannon’s Fascist Political Myth
Works Cited
Cassirer, Ernst. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946. Print.
