Human Dignity and Radical Stupidity

In the series of definitions of democracy I have just given you, I have focused on the question of being human or of not being human. Now we must become clear about a number of concepts: first, What is man? and second, What are the symptoms of the falling down and the derailment of man? For they all play a big role in the decline of a society and made it possible for a type like Hitler to come to the top.

The idea of man is not a question of arbitrary definitions; rather, man is discovered in quite specific historic places and in quite concrete situations. We have two such points where what man is was experienced, and from the experience of man in the concrete case, the idea of man was then generalized as binding on all men.

I say this as a methodological introduction, so that you do not come up with the objection that man can be defined in one or the other way, and that human nature may be such and such but that it changes, and so on. We are dealing here with strictly empirical questions: When was man as such discovered? and What was he discovered to be?

These discoveries have taken place respectively in the Hellenic and in the Israelite societies. In the Hellenic society, man was experienced by the philosophers of the classical period as a being who is constituted by the nous, by reason. In the Israelite society man is experienced as the being to whom God speaks his word, that is, as a pneumatic being who is open to God’s word.

Reason and spirit are the two modes of constitution of man, which were generalized as the idea of man. We have not gone beyond these contents of the idea of man, that is, his constitution by reason and spirit. That seems to be the definitive discovery.

The Two Basic Questions in Philosophy

What does it mean to exist as constituted by reason and spirit? The experiences of reason and spirit agree on the point that man experiences himself as a being who does not exist from himself. He exists in an already given world. This world itself exists by reason of a mystery, and the name for the mystery, for the cause of this being of the world, of which man is a component, is referred to as “God.” So, dependence of existence (Dasein) on the divine causation of existence (Existenz) has remained the basic question of philosophy up to today.

This was formulated by Leibniz in the classic proposition that metaphysics has to deal with two questions: Why is there some­thing, why not nothing? and the second question, Why is the some­thing as it is? These why-questions place at the beginning of all reflections on man what we can call, with a classic philosophical expression, the etiological problem of the existence of man and world. There is a ground of being in the sense of a first cause, a prima causa or a proton aition, to which we remain in relation philosophically through the seeking, the zetema in the Platonic sense, and pneumatically through hearing the word in the sense of revelation.

In both manners, through the seeking for the divine, the loving reaching out beyond ourselves toward the divine in the philosoph­ical experience and the loving encounter through the word in the pneumatic experience, man participates in the divine. The concepts are methexis in Greek, participatio in Latin, participation in the di­vine. Insofar as man shares in the divine, insofar, that is to say, as he can experience it, man is “theomorphic,” in the Greek term, or the image of God, the imago Dei, in the pneumatic sphere. The specific dignity of man is based on this, on his nature as theomorphic, as in the form and in the image of God. This is a basic complex of ideas we must start out with in order to critically investigate the defection from this complex.

The Loss of Man’s Dignity

The defection at its core always takes the form of a loss of dig­nity. The loss of dignity comes about through the denial of the participation in the divine, that is, through the dedivinizing of man. But since it is precisely this participation in the divine, this being theomorphic, that essentially constitutes man, the dedivinizing is always followed by a dehumanizing. One cannot dedivinize one­self without dehumanizing oneself–with all the consequences of dehumanization that we shall still have to deal with.

Such dedi­vinization is the consequence of a deliberate closing of oneself to the divine, whether to the rationally divine or the pneumatically divine, that is, the philosophical or the revelational divine. In both cases there occurs a loss of reality, insofar as this divine being, this ground of being, is indeed reality too; and if one closes oneself to this reality, one possesses in one’s range of experience less of this part of reality, this decisive part that constitutes man.

In this sense we speak of a loss of reality. Please understand that I am now giving only a series of concepts; their application will fol­low. We must then employ them so that we understand what it is we are really speaking of. Thus we can speak of loss of reality through dedivinizing and dehumanizing. The typical manifestations of this loss of reality are that the reality of man is put in the place of the lost divine reality, which alone grounds the reality of man, so that in place of the ground of being as the cause of being, man as the cause of being advances to the point of exaggeration in the idea that man must be the creator of the world.

We will later deal with this special German problem of rebellion, which has its roots in the Romantics. But I will here quote this one sentence of Novalis: “The world shall be as I wish it!”¹ There you already have in a nutshell the whole problem of Hitler, the central problem of the dedivinizing and dehumanizing. However, with that the phenomenology of the defection from full humanity is not experienced. This is a problem that has always occupied human beings. How are these defections to be classified? How do they appear?

Let us first take the classical attitude toward the question, that not all men are fully man in Aristotle’s terms.² In the Nico­machean Ethics [1095b 10-13] Aristotle falls back on Hesiod–that means, to the eighth century. For Hesiod, these insights still derive from what can be called commonsense experience. I will quote this passage from Hesiod, which Aristotle later develops. In the Works and Days, from verses 293 f., Hesiod classifies men into three groups: First, that man is the best, pan aristos, who himself considers or thinks through all things, who can advise himself, noese: The nous plays a part here. The second type is also good, an esthlos, who listens to the best, to the pan aristos. The one, however, who neither thinks [noe] nor listens, is a useless man.

So here you already have three types of men: the man who is in full possession of the nous and can advise himself, where, by nous, is meant openness toward the divine ground of being; the one who, in case of doubt, has at least enough reason to listen to him who is in full possession of it; and the one who has neither the one nor the other and therefore is a useless fellow, who can also become a dangerous fellow.

The Aristotelian divisions follow this Hesiodian classification. The man in full possession of freedom is the man who has authority and lets himself be led by his own nous, by reason. Then there are the others, some who are still being educated, others who never get beyond certain educational levels, but at least are still approachable, insofar as they listen when a wiser man tells them what is right and what is wrong. And then there is the third class, which he called the slaves by nature.

Now what are we doing with this classification? An expression such as the Aristotelian “slaves by nature” can hardly be used for our purposes, for we no longer have slavery as a formal legal institution. The Hesiodian expression of the useless man, the achreios, is not all that useful either. Aristotle’s slave by nature and Hesiod’s useless man belong–the latter at least partly–to a kind of social substratum, while our problem is that the useless man exists at all levels of society up to its highest ranks, including pastors, prelates, generals, industrialists, and so on.

So I would suggest the neutral expression “rabble” for this. There are men who are rabble in the sense that they neither have the authority of spirit or of reason, nor are they able to respond to reason or spirit, if it emerges advising or reminding them. Here we again approach the Buttermelcher Syndrome: that it is extremely difficult to understand that the élite of a society can consist of a rabble. But it really does consist of a rabble.

That of course is only the division derived from classical politics. We must now supplement this division–of those who have hu­man authority, those who can follow authority, and rabble–with a whole series of other phenomena belonging specifically to the German National Socialist period.

Stupidity and Illiteracy

These phenomena are: First, the stupidity that we have already repeatedly adduced. Stupidity shall mean here that a man, because of his loss of reality, is not in a position to rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives. So when the central organ for guiding his action, his theomorphic nature and openness toward reason and spirit, has ceased functioning, then man will act stupidly. You will remember that Professor [Waldemar] Besson spoke of Hitler as an idiot, and I said that that is not entirely unjustified, if one understands by “idiot” the stultus in the technical sense.

This phenomenon was always recognized in ancient civiliza­tions. The fool, in Hebrew the nabal, who because of his folly, nebala, creates disorder in the society, is the man who is not a believer, in the Israelite terms of revelation. The amathes, the irrationally ignorant man, is for Plato the man who just does not have the authority of reason or who cannot bow to it. The stultus for Thomas is the fool, in the same sense as the amathia of Plato and the nebala of the Israelite prophets. This stultus now has suffered loss of reality and acts on the basis of a defective image of reality and thereby creates disorder. For the moment, that is all on the question of stupidity. We will have more to say about it later.

A second point is closely connected with this stupidity: If I have lost certain sectors of reality from my range of experience, I will also be lacking the language for appropriately characterizing them. That means that parallel to the loss of reality and to stupidity there is always the phenomenon of illiteracy.

In statistics we speak of illiterates as persons who cannot read or write. And the word has this meaning in other languages, too. But in English, better than in German, we have worked out that a man can possibly read and write at the primary school level but still may be a totally stupid guy who cannot express himself with regard to very wide ranges of reality, especially matters of reason and the spirit, and is incapable of understanding them. Such a man is an illiterate.

The question is now, can one simply introduce the word “illiteracy” into German as Illiteratentum? I would hesitate to do so and would rather use the established German word Analphabetentum, extend­ing this expression Analphabet to stupidity and to the deficient command of language through loss of reality, in terms of the English meaning of “illiteracy.”

So there is illiteracy among people who are able to read and write very well, but who, as soon as it is a matter of understanding a problem of reason or of spirit, or questions about right action, of justice, are completely uncomprehending, because they do not get it. There the loss of reality can be noticed, which then also expresses itself in the deficient command of language.

There is also the very interesting case of Aldous Huxley, who ex­pressly speaks of people who can read and write as the “Alphas” and “Betas.”³ They know the alphabet, but that is all. In Germany, in contrast to other Western societies, illiteracy–in this sense of the deficient command of language for the fields centrally important for action–runs through the élite. Not in the sense that all of the élite are illiterate–there are also in Germany very cultured people who have command of the German language; but the socially dominant popular literature that appears in public, including that by certain professors, is written by illiterates.

Notes

1. “Logologische Fragmente,” Fragment 124, in Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg], Schriften, ed. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mahl, and Gerhard Schulz, vol. 2, Das philosophische Werk I (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgessellschaft, 1965), 554.

2. Voegelin discusses these texts in The World of the Polis, vol. 2 of Order and History (1957; available Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 140, and in Plato and Aristotle, 301-2.

3. See Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Granada, 1983), passim, on “Alphas” and “Betas,” the most intelligent of the still thoroughly controlled opera­tives in Huxley’s anti-Utopian novel, as contrasted with “Epsilons,” the selectively bred proletariat, suitable only for manual labor.

This excerpt is from Hitler and the Germans (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 31) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

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