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If a man is skeptical about the role of philosophy in life, let him put aside philosophy books. Let him leave the cloistered ivory tower of theory and plunge into the sprawling realms of practice. Let him observe the concretes of his society's cultural life--its politics, its economics, its education, its youth movements, its art and religion and science. In every area, let him discover the main developments and then ask: why? In every area..
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Leonard Peikoff |
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Kant also found it necessary to deny happiness, in order to make room for duty. The essence of moral virtue, he says, is selflessness--selfless, lifelong obedience to duty, without any expectation of reward, and regardless of how much it might make one suffer.
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Leonard Peikoff |
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9801e91
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When the leading voices of the emotionalist Republic championed "feeling," it was not as a source of knowledge or of human happiness, but of freedom: the freedom from objectivity, method, logic, fact. It was feeling not as an alleged means to truth, but as the nullification of thought." --
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Leonard Peikoff |
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Nihilism" in this context means hatred, the hatred of values and of their root, reason. Hatred is not the same as disapproval, contempt, or anger. Hatred is loathing combined with fear, and with the desire to lash out at the hated object, to wound, to disfigure, to destroy it."
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Leonard Peikoff |
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a0f269a
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In later years, the creators of "Weimar culture," the ones who survived, cursed the German people for not having listened to them. The tragedy is that the people had listened."
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Leonard Peikoff |
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de74778
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The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.
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Leonard Peikoff |
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506c656
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Observe in this connection that the Nazis, correctly, regarded the power of propaganda as an indispensable tool.
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Leonard Peikoff |
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e0b42d5
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The worker," said August Bebel (a revered prewar party leader), "has little interest in a state in which political liberty is merely the goal. . . . What good is mere political liberty to him if he is hungry?"
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Leonard Peikoff |
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947fcc1
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The pre-Greek civilizations, never discovering the field of epistemology, had no explicit idea of a cognitive process which is systematic, secular, observation-based, logic-ruled; the medievals for centuries had no access to most of this knowledge. The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach.
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Leonard Peikoff |
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4f5e95d
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One British writer describes these big bankers and industrialists, who prided themselves on their "practicality" in backing Hitler, as "too innocent for politics." William Shirer says that they were "politically childish." In fact, their "innocence" was anti-intellectuality, and their "political childishness" was (in effect) philosophical pragmatism."
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Leonard Peikoff |
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2cdb425
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In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible?
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Leonard Peikoff |
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1e5af0f
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When the country surrendered its educational institutions--in countless forms, direct and indirect, public and private, from nursery school on up--to the legion of Progressive educators spawned by Dewey, it formally delivered its youth into the hands of the philosophy of pragmatism, to be "reconstructed" according to the pragmatist image of man."
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Leonard Peikoff |
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0d9e376
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The Nazi] death camps," notes a writer in The New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s."10 What had those Ph.D.'s been taught to think in their schools and universities--and where did such ideas come from?"
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Leonard Peikoff |
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5fb8069
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The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach. In essence, the spokesmen of these earlier times did not know what reason is, or, therefore, what it makes possible in human life.
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Leonard Peikoff |
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8a9c7da
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The sneer is expressed by philosophic movements which boastfully offer no message, by educators who deliberately teach no subject matter, by artists whose work eliminates recognizable content, by psychologists who hold that ideas are mere rationalizations, by novelists such as Thomas Mann, and by all the alleged valuers in all these groups, which purport to love Mankind as a whole, a love whose reality may be gauged by a single fact: the sa..
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Leonard Peikoff |
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47116da
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On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it--or its representative, the state--deems this desirable. Fascism, said one of its leading spokesmen, Alfredo Rocco, stresses the necessity, for which the older doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of indivi..
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Leonard Peikoff |
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f3991a9
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German socialism had to overcome this "private," that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community.7 Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that ..
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Leonard Peikoff |
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1826eea
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The final product of the camps, one which the Nazis carefully shaped, was death. What the SS shaped was mass death without a murmur of protest; death accepted placidly by victims and killers alike; death carried out not as any kind of exception, not as an act of purposeful vengeance or hatred, but as casual, smiling, even homey routine, often against a background of colorful flower beds and to the accompaniment of lilting operetta music. It..
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Leonard Peikoff |
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f70c2f0
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Clarity is achieved when concretes are united by a concept and a concept is seen to be a union of those concretes. The two gravest breaches of clarity are: a set of unrelated instances that causes too much pressure on consciousness and a floating abstraction untied to reality. These
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Leonard Peikoff |
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375b1f6
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Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.
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Leonard Peikoff |
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c9a8ba2
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Both sides in Germany's cultural battle elevated feeling above reason. And both sides experienced the same basic kind of feeling. The left called it alienation or the angst of nothingness. The right called it gotterdammerung or the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The common denominator is the conviction of doom.
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Leonard Peikoff |
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5eb6c6f
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During the twenties, Germany's youngsters (both rightist and leftist) were in the vanguard of the growing rebellion against the Weimar Republic. The youngsters were rebelling against the establishment in the name of every fundamental idea which they had been taught by every influential spokesman of that establishment
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Leonard Peikoff |
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5a79aa8
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The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the course of society, men are helpless in the face of their own motivation, laissez-faire appeals to the evil in men, but men are stuck with it.
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Leonard Peikoff |
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To liberate humanity from intelligence, Hitler counted on the doctrines of irrationalism. To rid men of conscience, he counted on the morality of altruism. To free the world of freedom, he counted on the idea of collectivism
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Leonard Peikoff |
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950e165
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When the Americans flocked to pragmatism, they believed that they were joining a battle to advance their essential view of reality and of life. They did not know that they were being marched in the opposite direction, that the battle had been calculated for a diametrically opposite purpose, or that the enemy they were being pushed to destroy was: themselves.
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Leonard Peikoff |