Fichte and the Price of Excess
Both the high-mindedness and potential difficulties of Nanbara's system are striking, but to comment on all their aspects would take us far afield. Clearly, Nanbara's insistence on an autonomous value of justice as the end of politics contains liberal implications. He had separated critically the values of the good, true, beautiful, and just, defining the state as that which safeguards and "sponsors" the moral autonomy of individuals in a community. How was this sponsorship to work? How tenable a distinction was Nanbara making when he insisted that the state was not a definer of value, or its source, but rather the locus of its realization? How, in short, was Nanbara's neo-Kantian liberalism supposed to pan out?
Nanbara's conception of the state did not really stop with "sponsorship." Here lay the problem. For he could not, just as Plato, Kant, and Fichte could not, conceive of genuine freedom outside a state. He followed closely the tradition that saw the state as an educator in freedom—and not necessarily in a participatory sense. Not only did the state guard the material life of the national community, it also raised its spiritual level—defined in terms of the moral freedom of its members. It is not hard to see that this protective, sponsoring state could easily become identified both with freedom, and with the national community. (Freedom, equaling membership, became formal and tautological.) Yet as we shall see, Nanbara resisted such an identification. How? And how convincingly?
Aristotle had said that those outside the polis must be either beasts or gods. The problem of twentieth-century politics, Nanbara had come to realize, was that those who dwelt within increasingly assumed the character of both beast and god. What was more, they had philosophies to justify their transformation.
It was this spiritual condition that Nanbara sought to combat. His vehicle, as noted, was the work of the later Fichte. In political terms, Nanbara found in Fichte's notions of nationalism (kokuminshugi or minzokushugi ) and socialism the seeds of a viable philosophy of freedom-in-community. Not that he accepted Fichte's thought in toto. Some aspects of it troubled him deeply. But he found in it weapons to use against those worldviews whose inherent brutality had, to his mind, brought humanity to its present state. Nazism and Marxism each represented for Nanbara a reductionist "positivism," one of race, the other of class. Each had absorbed and twisted part of Fichte's message. How had
that been possible? Fichte had to be defended. More important, he had to be understood anew.
Nanbara devoted immense labor to explicating Fichte's "science of knowledge" as it was set forth in successive editions of the Wissenschaftslehre (1794–1804). But it was in the "popular" works, the lectures and tracts published after Fichte's embrace of nationalism in 1800, that Nanbara saw the ideas and moral force that could lighten the spiritual burden of his own age.[134]
The central thesis of Nanbara's Fichte studies holds that the unsystematic political writings of the later Fichte must be viewed in the light of his epistemology, even as that epistemology shifts from an ethicopractical (heavily Kantian) to metaphysical (proto-Hegelian) basis. Fichte's notion of the state and its relation to the Volk grew progressively more "totalistic," in that he came to abandon the Kantian distinction between legal and moral (objective and subjective) order. He moved from a conception of the political state as the legal mechanism for the enforcement of Virtue (the Notstaat ) to one in which, as the embodiment of reason, it "not merely leads to the land [kokudo ] of heaven; the very idea of state must represent the kingdom of God on earth."[135] In the Theokratie des Verstandes , the highest form of state, we have the ultimate in what might be called Lutheran metaphysics. Nanbara himself, as we have seen, believed in a kind of national providence for Japan, but this was based on faith in a God whose will is not accessible to unaided reason. The closer Fichte approached Hegel in his identification of reason with the divine, and of the state with its embodiment, the more wary Nanbara grew. Such an identification removed purposeful human action from history, stripping the idea of subjectivity of any meaning. The panlogism of Hegel was inhuman, Nanbara thought, and it pained him to see Fichte anticipating Hegel in any sense.[136]
Now it is vital to keep in mind, as Nanbara constantly reminded his readers, that Fichte, although he had rejected Kant's Ding-an-sich as a "relic of dogmatism," had done so in order the more to exalt the self-conscious freedom of the "transcendental" ego (Ich ).[137] Nothing material outside the subject was to bind it. But the members of the nation had to be educated in this self-conscious freedom; it was a normative construct, not an automatic capacity of the empirical self. Hence Fichte's "pedagogical mania"[138] and his view that the state was not only to provide but was itself the means of education in freedom. The state, as national community, was to educate itself, at first (and only at first) by relying on an elite that would eventually educate itself out of business.
There is no Führerprinzip in Fichte. Education was to be oriented toward the unity of state (polity) and culture (nation). For Fichte political sovereignty and cultural nationality were not coterminous. But such unity was the end of all cultural endeavor. A nation (minzoku ) without sovereignty would not stand for much in the end. It would inevitably come under the conqueror's heel, its culture—beginning with language—to be extirpated.[139] Such was only to be expected. This is not the place to discuss the historical and political background of Fichte's work. It should suffice to point out that he had lived through the Napoleonic invasion and seen Prussia occupied by the very army whose revolutionary legacy had fired his own Jacobinism. The turn in his thought from Enlightenment cosmopolitanism to an increasingly metaphysical nationalism reflected this history of dispossession.[140] There is no question that his nation's humiliation was for Fichte a personal abyss, and that the vision of a united, sovereign Germany powered his philosophical impulse toward the identification of history and metaphysics in the state. Fichte learned from his times the power of negation. The "present age" was one of corruption, humiliation, and "sin run rampant." Yet it was in the depths of national despair that the seeds of regeneration waited. The divine logic of history would effect a new synthesis of culture and politics. Germany would rise again.[141]
But who were the Germans? What made them? What was the particular genius that assured their rise from the ashes? Why, indeed, should history look to Germany to inaugurate the "reign of virtue"? What sort of state would Germany establish? These were the questions that Kant could not ask—he had not needed to. Fichte did. And so did Nanbara.
For Fichte the Germans were an Urvolk , an "original people" (genminzoku ), a spiritual essence produced by history in order to accomplish its work. The past had seen such peoples in Greece. The once great vitality of the Latinate civilization that followed was now "played out," and it had lost its original genius. The Germans were the Urvolk to come. Fichte's criteria for originality seem to have been twofold. The first lay in language—more accurately, the "spirit" of the language, its genius for expressing transcendental ideas. Second, the Urvolk had achieved consciousness (jikaku ) of its historical mission of translating reason into action in historical time, of serving as the vessel of reason.
Fichte did not conceive of Germany's regeneration as an imperialistic crusade.[142] Germany was not to turn around and attempt to subjugate those who had humiliated it. Rather, the reborn state was to lead spiri-
tually, by example. What Germany achieved within, other nations could regard as a moral law to be made their own. Nations were to be preserved as such. This is a theme we have encountered in the earlier discussion of Kant, but one that for Nanbara extends back to his education and non-church religiosity.
What qualified Germany—we can see the circle of reason closing—was its self-consciousness of mission. Fichte's Germany, despite a long historical past, was to enter fresh "into a stream of time which had already corrupted other peoples."[143] This through the realization of what ought to be, of the progress of Humanität , by Germany. The urgent need of the present thus impinged on the past, and the more urgent need of the future on the present. Thus Fichte's Germany, as Windelband described it, was a "Germany lying in utopia."[144]
Fichte saw with great specificity what features of social organization would characterize his German utopia and the steps toward their attainment. These he described in the work that announced his "later" period, Der geschlossene Handelsstaat of 1800. Since Nanbara professed to find in it suggestions for the organizing principles of a just, postliberal order, his account of it may serve as a bridge to our discussion of Nanbara's Japan.
Nowhere in Fichte's oeuvre, Nanbara points out, are the notions of nationalism and socialism systematically linked.[145]Der geschlossene Handelsstaat , while it recognizes problems in the economic order insoluble by the individual moral agent, retains traces of the distinction of legal from moral that would disappear from its author's later work. The state at this point is limited to a regulative function over the national community. Its historical particularity was barely established. It was thus the task of later interpreters, Nanbara said, to attempt such systematization, and of critics to distinguish potentially valid syntheses of Fichte's ideas from violent imposters.
We saw earlier that Nanbara found in Fichte the concept of the nation as a "spiritual essence," one united linguistically (although in an abstract sense) but most of all by a shared consciousness of personal freedom and national mission. Such a community was the ideal underlying Fichte's economic thought. What sort of system would best reflect man's nature as a self-creating "active being" among like beings? Each individual was to be guaranteed basic rights—life, property, labor—mutual recognition of such implying that individual freedom is self-limiting. The common good of the community necessarily requires (as in Plato's Republic) a division of labor. But in Fichte's conception oc-
cupation is "freely" chosen, given what nature has provided and the prior development of the requisite civic consciousness. Society is further divided into corporations, whose activities are directed by a class of "civil officials" who serve the common good, not the state apparatus. Their regulation of work is also educative. Given the rights each individual possesses, and the materials provided by the state for the pursuit of his chosen activity, all should be free to "act on their freedom." This is what the state seeks to make possible. But a problem arises that Nanbara does not address. Utopian schemes that place a class of supervisors to assist in the attainment of freedom are plagued by the nagging question, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Where do the self-conscious, nonegoistic civil officials come from? Who appoints them? What guarantee is there against abuse? There is an infinite regress in idealist thinking on society. Sooner or later one runs up against the unyielding core of faith that Sollen will become Sein . It is from this core that the system is spun out. It seems to be part and parcel of such thinking that an elite is required to regulate activity until it becomes self-maintaining. Nanbara certainly never outgrew this sense of his own indispensability, with its concomitant administrative bent. But this did not make him authoritarian, and there is a difference.
To return to Fichte: as the title of the work implies, the state is closed to foreign trade by individuals, Fichte believing that control of trade by the state was the only guarantee of economic self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency in turn was the only guarantee that the state could pursue its moral end, which was "to promote . . . conditions which facilitate the moral development without which there is no true freedom."[146] Freedom, that is, not to possess or accumulate, but to act. At this point in his philosophical development, Fichte believed that as planner and controller of economic activity, the state was fated to "wither away." When the moral level of the community had risen so that individuals spontaneously "manifested reason," the Vernunftreich would have arrived, and the state would give way to the nation.
Nanbara recognized the potential for excessive centralization and power hoarding by the elite in Fichte's outline. He was, of course, aware that the economically backward Prussia on which Fichte based his thinking at the dawn of the nineteenth century scarcely provided a standpoint from which to prescribe remedies for the inequities of industrial capitalism.[147] But he believed that Fichte's precocious insights into the nature of laissez-faire economy remained valid. Fichte had warned that such a system would produce ever greater disparity of wealth and be
consumed by class conflict. No system premised on egoism could provide a foundation for moral progress, period. All these were ideas Nanbara found apposite. In terms of his philosophy of coordinate values, it is evident that economic activity, while an indispensable means in cultural life, could never be an end in itself. It had to be directed to serve the end of justice, that is, political value. Left unregulated, it would subject the community to "unease and contingency" that would corrode the material foundation of cultural life. At the same time, Nanbara admitted the existence of independent laws of economic life (never spelled out), the attempt to gain total control over which would produce injustice far worse than existed already.[148] Presumably these laws have to do with the "basic rights" Fichte had defined: life, labor, property.
With its regulation of production, distribution, and foreign trade, Fichte's closed commercial state did indeed add up to "national socialism." But Nanbara makes an immediate qualification. First, the "nation" in Fichte's sense is above all a cultural—rational, normative—concept premised on a community of free individuals. The state to which the regulation of the economy is entrusted serves this community, not itself, by ensuring the just distribution of goods as the foundation of moral progress. Fichte's socialism, Nanbara ventures, could best be termed "cultural." All of which, he admits, sounds very utopian. But do we not all of us desire "a social order in which all individuals participate in social labor, and to the degree that they do so, also participate in the enjoyment of the fruits of that labor; [a social order] in which, in this sense, the rights and duties of the multitude are held equally, so that one segment of the whole membership may not be exploited by any other?"[149] Such an order is socialist. "However much one may despise the name or try to force it into oblivion," Nanbara concludes, "socialism remains the task [kadai ] of our age."[150]
Nor was there any question that "contemporary socialism"—national and Marxian—had failed to bring about such an order.
In Marxism Nanbara saw a doctrine that remained imprisoned in a nineteenth-century positivist framework. If Nazism erred in identifying the national community with race, at least it had recognized the deep yearning of the postwar generation for some sort of identity. Marxism, on the other hand, continued to buy into a utilitarian concept of society in which individuals were atoms in aggregate, with "needs" to be satisfied through the application of social mechanics. This was happiness: the satisfaction of want.[151] The hard kernel of truth in Marxism lay in its recognition of the exploitative nature of class structure in capitalist so-
ciety, its reduction of individuals to means of acquisition. Philosophically, the concept of alienation derived from the "activist idealism" of Fichte and Hegel (in fact there are hints of "proto-alienation" in Kant). Nanbara duly recognized this lineage. He fully acknowledged the nobility and moral passion of Marx's desire to "humanize" the proletariat through the restoration to this basic class of the means of production, deprived of which it had fallen into an intolerable state of alienation from its "active" essence. But Marx and Engels, Nanbara believed, had committed an error as grave as their insight was profound. Despite the claims of their socialism to be scientific, they in fact based their hopes of utopia on a value judgment far more irrational than any Fichte had dreamt of. This lay in their postulate of a self-propelled dialectical motion of economic "laws." At some future date, "history" would begin with the restoration to the working class of its productive essence. With this collective control of matter established, happiness (the satisfaction of wants) and liberation would follow. Nanbara thus understood Engels's famous "in the last analysis" to mean that the laws of motion in the economic base were "irrational" and lay beyond human power to direct with any constant certainty.[152] They had first to be believed in, then elucidated in objective reality: this was their "scientific" aspect. Even a cursory look at Nanbara's references (he wrote in 1940) shows that he relied almost exclusively on Engels, always tending to absorb Marx into Engels, attributing to Marx a materialism so total as to be untenable.
Nanbara's main objection, however, was not to the scientism of Marxian thought. To his mind, Marxism reduced humanity to an empirical and psychological amalgam. At one level, it denied any primary noneconomic bonds between human beings. The notion of a national community that had inspired Fichte was rejected as at best historically necessary, the ideological expression of a bourgeoisie in quest of a national market; like the state, concern with "nationality" was fated to wither away. Marxists, of course, had gone deeper, denying humanity's spiritual nature. In so doing, Nanbara recognized, Marx was reacting to the tenacious hold of institutional religion over society and trying to show how deeply embedded relations of dominance, expressed in religious terms, maintained humanity in alienation. But had Marx not done away with humanity in the process? Nanbara wondered whether there was any human essence left to liberate once its spirituality was denied. Marxism as a worldview had, in fact, condemned itself to permanent poverty.[153]
If Marxism "could not feed the hungry heart," Nanbara's opposition to it, philosophically, and politically, paled in comparison to his visceral horror of Nazism. To his mind Nazism posed a far greater threat, and he poured his heart into his wartime essays on the Nazi Weltanschauung.[154] Nevertheless, it had first to be understood that Nazism was itself a "counterattack," a racial naturalism opposed to the "social" (economic) naturalism of Marx, which had arisen initially as part of the nineteenth-century critique of bourgeois individualism. It was the answer of the postwar middle classes to socialism, and had, in fact, incorporated socialist elements into its ideology.[155]
Nazism was a dangerous failure because it had mistaken blood for community, vitalism for spirit. Its concept of freedom consisted in the collective right of Germans to treat other peoples as things (Sache ). As such it was a direct repudiation of the entire idealist tradition, essentially a doctrine of race and power-worship, divisive and hostile. It vaunted the community but reduced its members to living as a herd.[156]
Nanbara found particularly odious the myth making of Alfred Rosenberg, to whose Mythus der 20 . Jahrhunderts he devoted, in 1942, a searing critical essay. His hostility stemmed partly from the fact that Rosenberg had concocted a wretched "Germanic Christianity," which he intended as a heroic religion fit for the Herrenvolk . That Rosenberg had misappropriated Nietzsche's Übermensch for gross ideological purposes was obvious. Nanbara refused to indulge in a hunt for the "roots of Nazism," however, distinguishing Nietzsche's essentially individualist will-to-power from Nazism, which he regarded as a phenomenon of the mass.[157]
Not that Nanbara was so terribly concerned to defend Nietzsche. What Rosenberg had perpetrated symbolized something far worse. His "Germanic Christianity" parodied an idea that Nanbara, as we know, took very seriously. In the modern world, he believed, "national" forms of Christianity would be called upon to "complete the Reformation." Rosenberg, ironically, used precisely the same terms to describe the mission of his brainchild. We have seen how much Nanbara owed to Uchimura, and his debt to Kant and Fichte. It should not be difficult to imagine how intolerable it was for him to see his deepest hopes mocked under the aegis of a regime of nihilists. It goes without saying, also, that Nanbara's attack on Germany in 1942 (before the tide had turned against the Axis) was no cheap shot. The Hitler regime was his country's ally in war.
Nazism was diabolical, an inverted form of what Nanbara took to be
the most profound of human values. Freedom was not to be enjoyed in isolation; historically as well as morally, it is within the life of the political community—its paradigm being the Greek polis—that freedom takes on meaning. This idea of freedom-in-community was then immeasurably deepened by the intrusion of Christianity into the classical world. Nazism twisted this truth into its monstrous opposite.
Nanbara admitted the apparent similarities between Fichte's nationalism and Nazi ideology. His response—that simply blaming past thinkers for the uses to which their systems are put ignores more immediate problems—has a certain validity. But it also skirts an important issue. Is the "use" of the system merely a willful abuse? Is it only an accident—would not the national socialists try anything, claim anything, twist anything, in order to broaden their appeal? Perhaps. On the other hand, was there no underlying pattern, a persistent logic, of the idealist philosophical discourse that was also problematic? Why the virtually presumptive philosophical capitulation to the state, particularly after Kant? Why the privileging of the national community? Was this inevitable once the tense dualism of Kant was resolved, as Fichte and Hegel resolved it? And was this ultimate identification of freedom with obedience for the ruled, and with power for the state or party, simply a question of ambiguity and misunderstanding?
Perhaps all this is to say that Nanbara was in the end caught in his own idealist web. He was intensely self-conscious in his interpretation of Fichte; he had made a value choice, a commitment to read Fichte along lines that seem hopelessly strained. It was an audacious attempt to use Fichte to overcome what Nanbara regarded as a desperate cultural and philosophical crisis. We may, indeed must, question his choice of weapons. At the same time we are bound to recognize the logic underlying that choice. Deeply repelled by the "false totalities" of race or class, Nanbara urged a redeparture along idealist lines. Only idealism—the only philosophy not soiled by idolatry—recognized and cherished the autonomy of the prime values. Only idealism could save modern societies from the common fate of total systems, the total politicization of life, which was at the same time its depoliticization.[158]
In Fichte Nanbara found his own voice. This said that nationality lay in essence in a spiritual ideal. True, Fichte had given far too much weight to the metaphysical claims of the state. He had nearly mistaken the glimmerings of his own intellect for the "separate light" of the heavenly city. "Man must conceptualize," Fichte had said.[159] But he tried to do too much. Still, he had come as close as anyone to the "synthesis" Nan-
bara held to be the unending project of Western—and now Japanese—culture.