Philosophers From Austria

"When brought to the proletariat from the capitalist class, science is invariably adapted to suit capitalist interests. What the proletariat needs is a scientific understanding of its own position in society. That kind of science a worker cannot obtain in the officially and socially approved manner. The proletarian himself must develop his own theory. For this reason he must be completely self-taught."

"The worst reproach that Engels could make against the first English Marxists was that they were applying Marxism in a sectarian spirit. What would he have said, had he lived to see it, about a school of Marxists who after succeeding in capturing the state power proceeded to make a state religion of Marxism, a religion whose articles of faith and their interpretation are watched over by the government, a religion, the criticism of which, nay, the slightest deviation from which, is sternly punished by the State; a Marxism ruling by the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, propagated with fire and sword, practicing a theatrical ritual, as illustrated by the embalmed body of Lenin: a Marxism reduced to the status not only of a state religion but of a medieval or oriental faith? Such a Marxism may indeed be called a doctrinaire fanaticism."

"The Bolsheviki under Lenin's leadership, however, succeeded in capturing control of the armed forces in Petrograd and later in Moscow and thus laid the foundation for a new dictatorship in place of the old Czarist dictatorship."

"Under all circumstances we shall remain the champions of democracy and humanity. We reject as senseless and cruel and ruinous to both our cause and our nation the suggestion that we strive to arrive at humanity by the method of brutality."

"After 1910 there began in Vienna a movement which regarded Mach's positivist philosophy of science as having great importance for general intellectual life [...] An attempt was made by a group of young men to retain the most essential points of Mach's positivism, especially his stand against the misuse of metaphysics in science. [...] To this group belonged the mathematician H. Hahn, the political economist Otto Neurath, and the author of this book [i.e. Frank], at the time an instructor in theoretical physics in Vienna. [...] We tried to supplement Mach's ideas by those of the French philosophy of science of Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem, and also to connect them with the investigations in logic of such authors as Couturat, Schröder, Hilbert, etc."

"Generosity is a virtue more frequently found in the small top layers than among the masses. After all, it takes intelligence to suspect that generosity very often pays while egotism does not."

"For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution."

"The demand for equality and identity arises precisely in order to avoid that fear, that feeling of inferiority. Nobody is better, nobody is superior, nobody feels challenged, everybody is "safe." Furthermore, if identity, if sameness has been achieved, then the other person's actions and reactions can be forecast. With no (disagreeable) surprises, a warm herd feeling of brotherhood emerges. These sentiments – this rejection of quality (which ineluctably differs from person to person) – explain much concerning the spirit of the mass movements of the last two hundred years. Simone Weil has told us that the "I" comes from the flesh, but "we" comes from the devil."

"Patriotism, not nationalism, should inspire the citizen. The ethnic nationalist who wants a linguistically and culturally uniform nation is akin to the racist who is intolerant toward those who look (and behave) differently. The patriot is a "diversitarian"; he is pleased, indeed proud of the variety within the borders of his country; he looks for loyalty from all citizens. And he looks up and down, not left and right."

"He was the world's most fascinating man."

"Marx, although a man of broad knowledge, had one blind spot: he was ignorant of the true character of economics. He did not realize that economics can only be understood in close relationship to the other humanities (and certain sciences), and therefore should not be studied in vacuo. Ironically, this very weakness was largely instrumental in making Marxism successful. Marxist economics—yet another instance of a false but clear idea—can be explained to the merest child in a matter of minutes. (Conversely, to explain the workings of the free market economy to an adult would take weeks of hard work.) Because it was easily grasped, Marxism flooded the world within a few decades, as had other simplistic ideologies and religions, such as Islam and the Enlightenment; this same sort of simplicity gave rise to the French Revolution and national socialism. Christianity, on the other hand, took three centuries to triumph."

"It is most amazing that one encounters fairly well-educated Christians who believe that "we are all equal before God." If Judas Iskariot were equal to John the Baptist or John the Evangelist, Christianity would have to close shop. Dominican R.L. Bruckburger said rightly that the New Testament is a message of human inequality. (Could one imagine that, at the Day of Judgment, all sentences could be equal? That God would not "discriminate" between saints and sinners?)"

"Almost everywhere and at all times the saying of St. Augustine aptly described the situation: "et paupera et inops est ecclesia — the Church is poor and helpless." The Church was powerful only when the state wanted it to be so or when pious laymen had a burning desire to make it so. In the Middle Ages especially the Church was sedulously oppressed: Popes were frequently imprisoned, made the pawns of secular rulers, persecuted, ridiculed, besieged, plundered, exiled, imprisoned and insulted. What about Canossa? People forget how the story ended, and the words of Gregory VII on his death-bed in exile: "Dilexi iustitiam et odi iniquitatem, propterea morior in exilio [I loved justice and hated injustice, therefore I die in exile]." Finally there came the Babylonian Captivity at Avignon. It is true that all of this looks quite different in the elementary schools of Kazachstan, in McKinley High and to our intellectuals, whose grasp of history is almost nil. The situation altered very little in the nineteenth century. Once again there was a prisoner in the Vatican, Pius IX, whose body the mob yelling "Al fiume la carogna!" wanted to throw into the Tiber. This brings us to the twentieth century: Mexico City, Moabit, Dachau, Plötzensee, Auschwitz, Struthof, Carcel Modelo, Andrássy-út 66, Sremska Mitrovica, Vorkuta, Karaganda, Magadan, Lubyanka, Ocnele Mare — these are the modern Stations of the Cross of our clergy."

"Now, there is a genuine social justice which proceeds not from the principle of equality, but from the principle: Suum cuique — to each his own. It is true that to deprive the workman of his just wage is not only a sin, but a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance. When one hinders social advance by putting barriers in the way of the diligent and the talented, one not only commits a personal injustice, but damages the common good of the whole nation, which always requires a genuine elite of ability and the contribution of extraordinary brainpower in every walk of life. And it would be socially unjust if a few individuals or certain groups had so much material wealth that, in consequence of this concentration of property and income, other classes had to live not only in povery, but in misery. Whoever lives in real abundance has a Christian duty to assist those living in wrechedness. Before we proceed, however, let us affirm that the notion of misery is different from that of poverty. Péguy has already drawn the distinction between pauvreté and misère. To live in misery means to suffer genuine physical privation: to know cold and hunger, to have no proper dwelling, to be dressed in rags, to be unable to secure medical attention. The poor, by contrast, have the necessities of life, but scarcely any more. They can borrow books, no doubt, but cannot buy them; they can hear music on the radio, but cannot afford a ticket to a concert; they cannot indulge in little extras of food and drink, but should, by self-discipline, be able to save a little. The poor have, therefore, the normal material preconditions for happiness — unless plagued by acquisitiveness or even envy, which has become a political force in the same measure as people have lost their faith. The fact that there are happy poor (alongside unhappy rich people) is beside the point. Demagogues know how to stir up terrible and murderous unrest even among the happy poor, as has been demonstrated clearly by the history of the left from Marat to Marx to Lenin to Hitler."

"'Welfare State' is a misnomer, for every state must care for the common good."

"Even 51 per cent of a nation can establish a totalitarian and dictatorial règime, suppress minorities, and still remain democratic; there is, as we have said, little doubt that the American Congress and the French Chambre have a power over their respective nations which would rouse the envy of a Louis XIV or a George III were they alive today."

"The monarch is a responsible person. The fact that a monarch is responsible "to God alone," rather than to an assembly or a popular majority, is rather shocking to an agnostic mind; but while God cannot be fooled, the masses can. While it is perhaps true that "one cannot fool all the people all the time," it seems one can fool millions for centuries. History abounds with such examples, especially the history of religions. In spite of the republican-democratic emphasis on "responsible government," subject to the sanction of not getting re-elected (and if being impeached only in the grossest cases of corruption), the demo-republican government nonetheless derives its authority from anonymous, secretly voting masses on a purely numerical basis. It is even impossible to trace the empowering individual; and thus we get what French authors call the "cult of irresponsibility." The electees, rejecting all responsibility, can easily blame the electors for their "mandates." Thus we get today the immoral idea of making whole nations responsible for the misdeeds of their rulers, regardless of whether these had majority support or not. This collective judgment of moral acts is one of the great maladies of the democratic age."

"The Christian insistence on freedom — the monastic vows are voluntary sacrifices of a select few — derives from the Christian concept that man must be free in order to act morally. (A sleeping, a chained and clubbed, a drugged person can neither be sinful nor virtuous.) Yet, the free world which is practically synonymous with the world of free enterprise alone provides a climate, a way of life compatible with the dignity of man who makes free decisions, enjoys privileges, assumes responsiblilities, and develops his talents as he sees fit. He is truly the steward of his family. He can buy, sell, save, invest, gamble, plan the future, build, retrench, acquire capital, make donations, take risks. In other words, he can be the master of his economic fate and act as a man instead of a sheep in a herd under a shepherd and his dogs. No doubt, free enterprise is a harsh system; it demands real men. But socialism, which appeals to envious people craving for security and afraid to decide for themselves, impairs human dignity and crushes man utterly."

"In the last two hundred years the exploitation of envy—its mobilization among the masses—coupled with the denigration of individuals, but more frequently of classes, races, nations, or religious communities, has been the key to political success."

"I never met anyone with a mind so capacious and so filled, not just with facts but with connections among those facts."

"The dropping of the [atomic] bomb on a populated center was another totally superfluous crime. Even if callous arguments for the annihilation of Hiroshima could be made, there was no necessity for the slaughter in Nagasaki, cradle of Japanese Christianity. Within a split second the bomb wiped out one-eighth of Japan’s Catholic Christians. Here the argument resurfaces—Truman wanted to impress the Soviets, just as Churchill had with Dresden. But how could any butcher impress the arch-butcher from the Caucasus? Not even the late Adolf Hitler had succeeded."

"Liberty and equality are in essence contradictory."

"When then is liberalism correctly understood? Liberalism is not an exclusvely political term. It can be applied to a prison reform, to an economic order, to a theology. Within the political framework, the question is not (as in a democracy) “Who should rule?” but “How should rule be exercised?” The reply is “Regardless of who rules—a monarch, an elite, a majority, or a benevolent dictator—governments should be exercised in such a way that each citizen enjoys the greatest amount of personal liberty.” The limit of liberty is obviously the common good. But, admittedly, the common good (material as well as immaterial) is not easily defined, for it rests on value judgments. Its definition is therefore always somewhat arbitrary. Speed limits curtail freedom in the interests of the common good. Is there a watertight case for forty, forty-five, or fifty miles an hour? Certainly not. ... Freedom is thus the only postulate of liberalism—of genuine liberalism. If, therefore, democracy is liberal, the life, the whims, the interests of the minority will be just as respected as those of the majority. Yet surely not only a democracy, but a monarchy (absolute or otherwise) or an aristocratic (elitist) regime can be liberal. In fact, the affinity between democracy and liberalism is not at all greater than that between, say, monarchy and liberalism or a mixed government and liberalism. (People under the Austrian monarchy, which was not only symbolic but an effective mixed government, were not less free than those in Canada, to name only one example.)"

"There is no such thing as a historical fatality; there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible."

"It is a commonplace that the great values of life cannot be expressed in numbers and statistics, and this is partly the reason why the ideas of quality and permanence have been so neglected in the period of the Great American Impasse. Neither the holiness of a Santa Teresa, nor the heroism of Tone, nor yet the profundity of theological truth can be expressed in numbers. But in the technicized world numbers become involved with human or inhuman activities of every kind, which find their expression in statistical recording. The various denominations vie in their yearly revenues from whist drives and bingo parties; games are expressed in numbers which are broadcasted all over the country; human beings are said to be "worth" so and so many thousand dollars a year; Bridge has been evolved into a system of mathematical probabilities (Culbertson); houses are evaluated by their rooms and floors, and public squares by their equivalent in money."

"Neither are the progressivists, in present-day America, revolutionaries or enemies of the order. Being "radical" or "progressive" they merely want to continue with greater speed and determination along the established, wrong trail."

"Historical Europe is mountainous. The Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Croatians, Serbs, Slovenes, the Slovaks and the Austrians, the Swiss, the Norwegians and the Icelanders, the Scots and the Welsh, half the Rumanians and Ruthenians, the Turks, the South Germans, the Sudeten Germans and the South French are either living in mountains or at least in very hilly countries. Many people see the "real" Europeans in these moutaineers. In these parts of the world traditions have been better preserved; patriarchalism, piety, loyalty, altruism — all the truly "romantic" virtues are here more at home than in the progressive plains."

"We witness in the eighteenth century the preparation of the French Revolution by individualism and the degeneration of the old "liberal" trends into economical liberalism of the deterministic Manchesterian pattern. Egalitarianism only appears in strongly collectivistic societies where strong exogenous powers try to shape persons into "individuals," deprived of their original character. The "individual" is merely the last indivisible unit of the "mass," and individualism the last, grotesque, and hopeless fight of depersonalized man within the ocean of collectivism to withstand the encroachment of the masses. Charles V had a personality but Gustave de Nerval, who promenaded a tamed lobster in the streets of Paris, was a mere individualist."

"In the Middle Ages, people were born and baptized into the Church. But the Church was the corpus mysticum and it depended upon one's own free will whether one wanted to be a living or a dead member of the Mystical Body of Christ. The cry "traitor" was only raised against those who broke the solemn oath of allegiance, not those who chose to go ways different from their status of birth. The Connêtable Charles de Bourbon who served with Charles V, or Marshal Moritz of Saxony, the great general under Louis XV were hardly considered to be traitors. Soldiers picked out the countries they wanted to serve. Prospective monks chose their orders. There were no "traitors to the proletariat" or "traitors to democracy." Today we live in an age of increased predestination and decreased free will, where Calvin, Freud, Marx, Luther, Darwin, Dewey, and the host of racial biologists have laid down the inexorable laws of anthropological, religious, psychological, environmental, and sociological determinism with no hope for escape. We are merely exhorted to make a virtue out of necessity and to be loyal to our prison and prisoners. Every attempt from our side to escape the artificial shell or to use our dormant remainders of free will to destroy the chains is branded as treason and punished accordingly by State or Society or even by both."

"Rightist ideas are only truly magnetic if they are absolutely pure; Leftist ideas, on account of their materialistic and heretic essence, never demand perfection. Mediocrity is the death of every Rightist movement, but it is the very air in which Leftism thrives. A totalitarian leader who betrays practically every point of his party program hardly shakes the faith of his fanatical followers, but mediocre monarchs, Popes, and prelates have destroyed the old order."

"Once Europe could boast of a large class of craftsmen — free people with the opportunity for artistic creation; but now everything is manufactured by mass production and the result is an incredible shrinkage in the variety of forms due to standardization. There is probably a greater variety of goods in Timbuctoo or in the Sooks of Marrakesh than in Frankfort or Los Angeles. The artifacts are thus "democratized." (Mr. Gray and Mr. Green get an identical product for an identical price.) […] The defenders of mass production emphasize the fact that modern manufacture makes more goods accessible to a greater number. They are not aware psychologically that the gain is nil. It is true that a book used to cost during the Middle Ages the equivalent of two to five hundred dollars whereas Gone With the Wind can be bought in editions of $1.49 and even less. Libraries were the privileges of a very few. But on the other side people enjoyed books far more, and the purchase of a book was a greater event in life than today the acquisition of a Cadillac. Nowadays one walks nonchalantly into a bookstore, pushes two and a half dollars over a counter, reads the book and forgets it sometimes in the suburban train."

"The horizontalist is tied down and cannot rise above himself. In his antagonism toward all hierarchy he even finally opposes the idea of God as a superior to himself, as a Supreme Being, and therefore also the conceptual images of Popes, emperors, kings, and fathers."

"The worship of size and number is an old ochlocratic as well as materialistic trend as opposed to the Christian traditional love for quality. It is "bigger and better" and not "better and bigger" which inspires our democratists with their competitive and recordistic tendencies."

"The personal mystery of medieval man has been largely destroyed by capitalistic technicism and bourgeois scientism. There was always something mystical in personal creation as well as a "secret" in manual, artistic skills; convents and monasteries jealously kept the secret of their liquors; craftsmen had their secrets and so had doctors, alchemists, astrologers, and pharmacists in their more or less dark trades. Mystics, hermits, midwives, cooks, and violin builders harbored their secrets. Nature was full of unpenetrable mysteries and strange events; the scarcity of written documents furthered the growth of sagas, folklore, and legends. But not only man, nature, and life had their mysteries; even today we speak of the mysteries of the Rosary, of the Mass. In the Armenian Rite of the Catholic Church a veil is spread between the altar and audience during the Consecration of the Host. These mysteries on the other hand, personal as they might be, were far from creating walls between human beings who were by them not less magnetically attracted than by distance. Bodies are mutually attracted by nearness, knowledge, and pleasure but souls by distance, mystery, and suffering."

"Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political "freedom" appear a bitter joke."

"A Christian will consider a tyrannical person bossing a city brutally a lesser evil than a whole city lynching one man. In the first case there is one sinner and thousands of sufferers, in the latter case thousands of sinners and one sufferer. The materialist will look at the problem the other way round. He is never interested in sin, but as a humanitarian only in suffering. His final logical conclusion is euthanasia and the sacrifice of individuals to the whim of the masses."

"Ochlocracy is revolution in permanence."

"The traditional European of the prereformation period lived and believed in the patriarchal principle which was one of authority based on love. Medieval man had not only a physical father, but also a Father in Heaven, a Holy Father in Rome, the Monarch (the Pater Patriae), the godfathers, and a "Father" in the person of his confessor. It was his physical father who had brought him into being, cooperating with the Divine Power of Creation. The physical father was truly regarded to be the auctor (in a similar, not identical sense, as God is creator mundi) and human beings looked upon themselves to be existing ex voluntate viri. Woman was merely in the position (physically as well as psychologically) to accede to man's will, to reject it or to influence man's free will through her power of attraction."

"Europe's rise is written in the terms of Christianity and Monarchy, Europe's decay in the terms of Republicanism, "Progressivism," and Godlessness."

"On the surface there was a strong monarchical, rightist, and "medievalist" reaction to be felt all over Europe; Chateaubriand, de Maistre, de Bonald, Schlegel, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Zacharias Werner, Clemens Brentano, the brothers Stolberg and Manzoni wrote their great works within this movement. Romanticism east of the Rhine was truly diversitarian and romantic. A wave of conversions swept over the Continent and the Tractarian movement in England was not far off. The Church seemed to regain her old influence. Yet, under the surface, the nationalists of the herdist pattern would render all efforts of the spiritual-intellectual elite illusory. The vast masses of Slav inhabitants of the East European plains began to raise their voices in favor of a union. And from the northwestern plains and islands another monster raised its head, another phenomenon bound to change the face of the earth — the Industrial Revolution. While Kaspar David Friedrich and Kriehuber painted mountain scenes and Schwind and Ludwig Richter dwelt on the subtle lore of small German towns, tall chimneys and great machines, heralding the advent of another scourge, made their appearance; while poets, painters, and princes spoke in glowing terms of the coming New Middle Ages a German of Jewish descent, horrified and bewildered by the spectacle of British industrialism, first conceived the ideas which a few years later led to the publication of the "Communist Manifesto.""

"The natural, romantic man, regardless of whether he liked or disliked the Jews, saw in them the representants of an interesting and ancient race, blood brothers of our Lord. Yet the true herdist resented the baptized or unbaptized sons of Abraham violently, and for the identitarian National Socialist, with his latent inferiority complex and his petit bourgeois lack of worldly experience, they were the worst offenders against the sacred law of uniformity."

"Ninety-five per cent of modern people have no ideas or convictions of their own. Five per cent have views and convictions but again ninety-five per cent of these do not dare to stand up for them. There are five per cent of five per cent who have courage and convictions. These make history for good or evil."

"The worship of numbers, quantity, and size has also wrought havoc wherever it found little opposition. Education is, after all, something thoroughly "aristocratic" in the intellectual sense. Already the Ancients were aware of the fact that there are different degrees of knowledge, but ochlocracy spread the conviction that everybody with the proper educational facilities is able to learn everything. The very idea of genius or inborn talents as disequalizing factors must be repulsive to people who not only believe that we are (theologically speaking) created as equals but that we also remain equals all through our lifetime. There naturally are a fair number of scholars and educators who have protested desperately against the low standards in American higher education as well as against the view that a true education should teach "how to make a living" instead of helping the student to solve his problem "how to live" by giving him the philosophical and cultural elements for a cultured existence."

"Hardly is there anywhere in the United States a church possessing originality which has been built after 1840. The houses of God are usually misplaced gothic or romanesque imitations squeezed in between dismal railway stations or surging skyscrapers. It is even more shocking to see the abortive efforts of town planning, or the utopian habit of naming streets after mere numbers or letters. A cultured man cannot possibly live in room 6489 on the sixty-fourth floor of a house on the corner of 109th Street and 10th Avenue. This may be fitting for one of the unfortunate creatures in Huxley's Brave New World but not for man created in the image of God."

"The Catholics can find consolation in the fact that Catholicism is the only conscious negation of our ailing and perverted modern world, and therefore (spiritually and intellectually at least) the only revolutionary movement. All other political philosophies — Leftist "Democrats," National Socialists, Continental Liberals, Communists, and Technocrats — agree on the coming earthly millennium of equality, plumbing, hygiene, and statistical increases in the material sphere. Their fight against each other is so bitter only because it is in its essence fratricidical. They all believe in a more or less identical Utopia yet they differ about the means to achieve it. In this respect they resemble the unfortunate masons trying to build the Tower of Babel but who failed to achieve their goal because the confusion of languages prevented them from mutual understanding and common planning; the man who could translate their thoughts would indeed be antichrist."

"Liberty is the ideal of aristocracy, just as equality stands for the bourgeoisie and fraternity for the peasantry. One can combine liberty with fraternity but neither of them with equality."

"There is hierarchy as well as function in every organism. One man may be more important than another just as the eye is more important than the finger."

"There used to be once the dominating idea of "Christendom," but this was far from being collectivistic in character as it contained two hierarchic principles: the visible one from beggar to Pope and the invisible one from sinner to saint. "Humanity" as such scarcely existed as a living principle in the Middle Ages because man had in regard to eternity no collective existence. Individuals sacrificed themselves for their families, their manorial lords, kings, cities, rights, privileges, religion, their beloved Church or the woman they loved, in fact, for everything or anybody to which or to whom they had a personal relationship. The anonymous sand-heap "humanity" was unknown to medieval man and even the concept of the "nation" was not equivalent to a gray mass of unilingual citizens but was looked upon as a hierarchy of complicated structure. Sanctity as well as heroism were problems of the individual."

"This change from the fatherhood of God to the fatherhood of the pithecanthropus erectus, Dubois' "Walking Ape-Man," has destroyed a good deal of genuine human pride. Once everybody was proud of his own class or station in life. But now there is everywhere an unquenchable thirst for identity and equality. Nobody wants to serve, nobody wants to be subjected because service in a nonhierarchical society means going under the level of equality. [...] the genuine pride which people used to feel for their station in life, vanished: the aristocratic pride, the craftsman's pride, the burgher's pride and honor. Everybody wanted to get quickly to the top of the ochlocratic sand heap of equal gains. The feeling of inequality begins now to be a burning pain, snobism lifts its ugly head, the element of general human competition gains headway in every phase of life."

"This pagan geocentrism has changed the very content of our culture. The "happy end" of the cheap, popular novels and the films is nothing but the outcome of the supposition that the human drama finds its ultimate conclusion here on earth. The Calvinists in their materialism took a similar attitude. The more subtle Atheist, of greater experience, has contempt for the "happy end" and substitutes for it a stubborn heroical pessimism which comes pretty near to integral despair. The modern Catholic French writers like Mauriac and Bernanos avoid the happy end in relation to this life. Paul Claudel, in L'Ôtage, expresses his disbelief in earthly justice by punishing the people of good will and rewarding the villains in the last scene of this play. For the Christian the earth is essentially a "vale of tears.""