Author: Sheila Marler

I have previously criticized the Enlightenment, but now I think it may have been too easy to find fault. I was asking whether our present reality has benefitted from the Enlightenment’s promises. Now it’s time to compare Enlightenment thought to competing systems. In this article we will consider the Enlightenment from the point of view of the fascists. Probably the most disturbing revelation in Kevin Coogan’s book is the fact that fascists have purposely used irrationality as a weapon against the Enlightenment.

Since 1918, irrationality has been part of an assault on liberal notions of political discourse. This approach began as part of a Weimar intellectual current called the Conservative Revolution. ¹ (Coogan p. 76). Today, we are seeing it at work in the United States. I believe this is the meaning of Kellyanne Conway’s ‘alternative facts’. It would also explain the behavior of Supreme Court justices who calmly demonstrate their disregard for legal argument and for the law itself. The fascist attack on the Enlightenment might help to clarify the Enlightenment’s importance to the West. If we want to avoid being overcome by this tactic, it’s necessary to recognize it for what it is.

Francis Parker Yockey’s Attack on American Rationalism

Among Francis Parker Yockey’s criticisms of Americanism was his claim that America’s Founding Fathers practiced a religion of Rationalism. He thought there were two key reasons that this ‘religion’ had been able to dominate America. The first reason was, America lacked tradition.

The second reason that rationality had been able to dominate America was that it had no originating ‘mother soil’ to provide Cultural impulses and Culture-forwarding phenomena. Rationalist religion came to America instead, through England. And it arrived in England by way of France (Coogan pp. 133-134).

Yockey argued that Europe had been able to resist Rationalism, thanks to tradition. Although he acknowledged that European tradition only lasted until the middle of the 19th century, he thought the European resistance had found support in Carlyle and Nietzsche. They proclaimed the coming of an anti-rationalist spirit in the 20th century.

Carl Schmitt

European Revolutionaries like Carl Schmitt shared Yockey’s belief that liberalism, democracy, individualism, and Enlightenment rationalism were the products of a superficial and materialistic capitalist society. The Revolutionaries yearned for the collapse of this order because its collapse would open the way for a new virile man of adventure. This man of adventure would be willing to risk all, due to an almost mystical belief in the state (Coogan p. 76).

In this Context, the Jewish Question is Never Far Away.

Yockey also argued that rationalist and materialist ideology made America vulnerable to domination by the Jewish ‘culture-distorter’. The Enlightenment was responsible, in his opinion, for opening up the West to Jewish influence. Jewish entry into Western public life would have been impossible if not for Western materialism, money-thinking, and liberalism–which he saw as Enlightenment concepts. These influences made America especially vulnerable to ‘Jewish capture’.

Feminism and the Irrational Right

Spengler called liberalism ‘the form of suicide adopted by our sick society‘; Yockey saw it as a sign of gender breakdown. According to Yockey, feminism was a means of feminizing man. In his opinion, man’s focus on his personal economics and relation to society made him a woman. The result in Yockey’s opinion was that American society is static and formal without the possibility of heroism and violence.

Polarity was a central concept for Yockey. Several of his polarities are listed on page 140 of Coogan’s book. He considered feminism and sexual polarity to be opposites. ‘Liberalistic tampering’ with sexual polarity would confuse and distort the souls of individuals.

The Right in general considered feminism to be against the natural order. However, the fascists’ definition of the natural order was different from that of the clerical and monarchist right. The old right still saw man as made in God’s image. By contrast, the Conservative Revolutionaries glorified the irrational, the wild, and the violent. At the same time, they were conflicted on this point.

They despised the Enlightenment argument that man was essentially a rational being who had been blinded by centuries of priestly superstition. But their confusion had to do with the irrational, wild and violent aspect of their belief system. They celebrated natural impulses, but the ‘natural’ pursuit of pleasure was in direct opposition to their idea of heroic life. They saw the pursuit of pleasure as weakness and degeneracy.

Rationalism or Polarity? Materialism or the Soul of Culture-Man?

In Imperium, Yockey wrote that the 20th century would bring about the end of Rationalism. Materialism would be no match against ‘the resurgence of the Soul of Culture-Man’. Unfortunately, the triumph of this new religiosity would not necessarily be a peace movement.

Conservative Revolutionary Ernst Jünger wrote in 1930 that modern war and technology were logical outgrowths of scientific progress. And war and technology had begun to undermine another Enlightenment idea–popular faith in reason. For Jünger, the real question was how to live in a new age of ‘myth and titanium‘ that was born in the trenches of Europe.

Jünger was one of the most decorated German soldiers in World War I. He believed that the sheer monumentalism of modern war had buried the idea of ‘individualism’ under a storm of steel. This marked the death of ‘the 19th century’s great popular church’, the cult of progress, individualism, and secular rationalism. In a world where a little man sitting far behind the front lines could push a button and annihilate the fiercest band of warriors, even battlefield heroics were meaningless.

Futurism built its mythology around speed, airplanes, and cars. Bolshevism gloried in an ecstatic vision of huge hydroelectric power plants stretching across the Urals. America saw the birth of the cult of Technocracy that viewed engineers as a new caste of high priests.

Coogan p. 141

In atheist Russia, even Stalin became a human god. Jünger wrote his essay The Worker to herald the coming of the new god-men of technology and total state organization in both the West and the Soviet Union.

Time and Space

However, the far right’s thinking was already in flux before World War I. Coogan says there was a rebirth of mythological politics after the French Revolution (p. 141). This rebirth was brought on by the feeling that bourgeois constitutional democracy and civil society were obsolete. The rebirth of the mythic in the heart of the modern led the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, to identify a nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition. He thought he saw the abolition of time in the writings of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. He called this ‘a revolt against historical time’.

In 1934, the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote an essay about the German new right. It was entitled The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State. Like Eliade, Marcuse noted the right’s devaluation of time in favor of space, the elevation of the static over the dynamic…the rejection of all dialectic, in short, the deprivation of history (as cited by Coogan, pp. 141-142).

Pope Francis, on the other hand, Tells us that Time is Greater than Space

Progressives may not have understood Pope Francis when he told us that time is greater than space. That’s because he wasn’t necessarily talking to us. He was talking to the new right. Aleteia and other Catholic websites have explained it for those of us who didn’t get it the first time. Here I will try to explain the importance of this concept to the right.

Coogan explains the right’s thought process regarding time and space.

The turn to myth was intimately related in the quest for a new kind of post-Christian absolutism, since the new right rejected ‘God’. ‘Blood,’ not faith, was at war with reason, honor fought profit, ‘organic totality’ clashed with ‘individualistic dissolution’, Blutgemeinschaft [the community of blood] struggled against Geistgemeinschaft [the community of mind]. The Conservative Revolutionaries set as their task the creation of a new, virile warrior mythology. Right-wing Sorelians, they hoped that such a mythology would slow, if not reverse, Germany and Europe’s perceived decline.

Coogan p. 142

This phenomenon also called universal truth into question. One of its basic premises was that ‘Man’ did not exist. And if Man did not exist, neither did his universal rights. Only unique cultures existed–Germans, Frenchmen, Japanese, and Russians. What was ‘true’ was each cultures unique inner spiritual truth, and this could not be shared with other cultures. Nor was it subject to rational analysis.

The Left Resisted the Conservative Revolutionaries’ Glorification of Irrationalism

This glorification of irrationalism came under fierce assault from the left. But they had a unique understanding of its threat. The left identified Marxism as the logical heir of Enlightenment ideals. That said, we now know that Steven Pinker, who is not a Marxist, is also a defender of Enlightenment ideals.

Georg Lukács

Georg Lukács was a philosopher, literary critic and Stalinist. He argued that irrationalism begins at the same point of antinomy as dialectical thought. However, irrationalism deliberately ‘absolutizes the problem’. It calls into question the power of reason to ever know. In the absence of reason, faith and myth take center stage.

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse stated the formulation of irrationalist theory: ‘Reality does not admit of knowledge, only of acknowledgment.’ In such an argument, ‘Life’ is the ‘primal given’. It is an existential or ontological state which the mind cannot penetrate. It follows that reason is actually hostile to life.

There are certain irrational givens (‘nature,’ ‘blood and soil,’ ‘folkhood,’ ‘existential facts,’ ‘totality,’ and so forth). These givens take precedence over reason. Reason is then causally, functionally, or organically dependent on those givens. Under such a paradigm, such existential facts became new absolutes. They are outside of time in the same way that myth is outside of time. Now antinomies are beyond the world of discourse and above historical mediation. In such a world, conflict between opposites could only be mediated by the stronger will. Will became to fascism what Reason was to the Enlightenment.

1. Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey And the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, New York, 1999. ↩︎