Free Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff Page A

delivered a ringing anti-reason manifesto, 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.”
    If Tertullian’s is the correct view of religion, the Nazis were evidently qualified to enter the field. The absurdity of their dogma matched anything offered by the medievals.
    The other half of the Nazis’ epistemological leitmotif, the concomitant of the Nazi dogmatism, is the Nazi pragmatism. To grasp the relationship between these two halves, one must first grasp the nature of pragmatism, including its philosophic roots.
    Those who regard the intellect as cut off from reality tend to regard the man of intellect as an impractical theoretician, who is impotent to act or achieve goals in the real world. According to this viewpoint, a fundamental dichotomy cuts through human life: thought versus action, intelligence versus achievement, knowing versus doing. “The know-it-alls,” states Hitler, “are the enemies of action.” 17
    In elaborating this idea the Nazis repeat most of the voluntarist commonplaces of the later romanticists. The essence of human nature, they say, is “will,” which they regard as man’s means of access to reality and as the ultimate source of human action. “Will” in this context means a set of blind, irrational (and allegedly innate) drives that crave an outlet—and Nazism means giving them one. It means (according to a party slogan) “the triumph of the will,” through a life of blind, irrational action, action unmediated and untouched by the operation of intelligence.
    The voluntarist worship of mindless action may be desig- nated by the term “activism.” Activism is the form of irrationalism which extols direct physical action, based on will or instinct or faith, while repudiating the intellect and its products, such as abstractions, theory, programs, philosophy. In a very literal sense, activism is irrationalism—in action. “We approach the realities of the world only in strong emotion and in action ... ,” says Hitler.
Men misuse their intelligence. It is not the seat of a special dignity of mankind, but merely an instrument in the struggle for life. Man is here to act. Only as a being in action does he fulfill his natural vocation. Contemplative natures, retrospective like all intellectuals, are dead persons who miss the meaning of life.
    Professor L.G. Tirala, a philosophically trained Nazi ideologist, sees beyond the obvious romanticist sources of this attitude. He traces the Nazi activism to the two-world philosophy of Kant (which in turn he ascribes to Kant’s “Aryan” nature). Kant’s view, he writes, is:
“The essence of the world is richer and deeper than the world of appearance.” The world of activity and action is subject to different laws from the world of appearance.... [T]his primacy of action, of the world of action—in the case of Kant, especially the world of ethical action—arises from a primary predisposition of the Aryan race which does not derive from the quibbling, hairsplitting intellect [“klülglerischen Verstand”]. All Teutonic men of science have acknowledged this truth more or less consciously in a primacy of action over pure thinking. The deed is all, the thought nothing ! 18
    Unreservedly accepting such a viewpoint, Nazis and Fascists alike frequently state that it is a matter of indifference whether the doctrines fed to the masses are true or false, right or wrong, sane or absurd. Leaders in both movements are content, even proud, publicly to describe their own ideologies as “myths” (a term popularized by the French romanticist Georges Sorel). A “myth,” in the Sorelian-Fascist-Nazi sense, is not a deliberate falsehood; it is an ideology concocted for purposes of action, without reference to such issues as truth or falsehood. It is addressed not-to man’s capacity for reason, but to a mob’s lust for faith, not to the