The
Essence of Fascism
by
Karl Polanyi
IV. "SOUL" VERSUS MIND
Let us begin by
a broad contrast. The first type of consciousness is the "Soul";
it belongs to the plane of vegetative or animal life. There
is no Ego. No movement towards self-realisation emerges because
there is no self. The tide of consciousness does not reach
out towards the faculty of intelligence; its climax is in
ecstasy. No vapour of the Mind hovers over the surface of
the Soul and drives the wedge of the Will into the tissue
of animal instinct. Neither power nor value have crystallised
in the day-dream of tribal existence. Life is immediate, like
touch: Touch comes when the white mind sleeps and only then.
Personalities exist apart; and personal intimacy has no heart.
Touch is of the blood uncontaminated, the unmental flood.
[1]
Whether it is the
rule of womanhood or that of manhood is doubtful; in
either case it is the communities of one sex alone which determine
the flow
of life whether in the clubs of the young men, or in matriarchal
"sororities." The urge of sex runs like a thin thread
through the rich flux
of homoerotic emotionalism. Blood and soil are the metaphysical
nourishment of this almost corporeal bodysoul, which still
adheres to the womb of
nature. Such is the structure of consciousness in undiluted
Vitalism.
The alternative
type of consciousness is as far removed from this as can be
imagined. The Mind is the chief actor in producing that other
plane of
existence in which there is society which is not personal
relationship.
Society which is the realm of Totality has not persons for
its units. The
Political, the Economic, the Cultural, the Artistic, the Religious,
etc.,
are the units; persons are not related to one another except
through the
medium of that sphere of Totality which comprises them both.
If they
exchange their goods they are fulfilling an adjustment Totality,
i.e. the
Whole; if they co-operate in producing them, they are relating
themselves
not to one another, but to the product. Nothing personal has
here substance
unless it be objectified, i.e. has become impersonal. Even
friendship is
not an immediate relationship of two persons, but a relation
of both to
their common Friendship. What the individual person is supposed
to contain as a subjective experience in himself, he thus
encounters as colourless semi-translucent objectivity outside
himself.
Society is a vast mechanism of intangible entities, of Mind-stuff;
the
substance of personal existence is merely the shadow of a
shadow. We are in
a world of spectres in which everything seems to possess life
except human
beings.
The details of
this broad contrast are more or less arbitrary, each of the
opposites being the compound of the spirit of a whole school
of thought.
Yet the values and methods presented in them ultimately derive
from
Nietzsche and Hegel respectively. They are biocentric in the
system
referred to in the first picture, i.e. survivalist, amoral,
pragmatist,
mythological, orgiastic, æsthetic, instinctive, irrational,
bellicose, or
apathetic; logocentric in the second picture, i.e. the values
and ideas are
related and graded, hierarchic, orientated on reason, a realm
of the
objective existence of the Mind and Spirit.
Both Nietzsche
and Hegel were thinkers of great intellectual passion. But
their present embodiments, though inferior in stature, surpass
them by much
in the capacity for a one-sided line of thought. Klages is
Nietzsche
without the Superman. Spann is Hegel shorn of his dialectic.
Both omissions
are so vital that they suggest a caricature rather than a
portrait. But as
with Klages so with Spann the change serves only to increase
the
reactionary effect. Nietzsche rid of anarchist-individualism;
Hegel
deprived of revolutionary dynamics; the one reduced to an
exalted
Animalism, the other to a static Totalitarianism: obviously
the change
enhances greatly the methodical usefulness of their systems
from the point
of view of Fascist philosophy.
NOTE
[1]
D. H. Lawrence, Pansies.
Go forward
to the next section: V.
SPANN, HEGEL AND MARX
Go back to
the previous section: III.
THE SOLUTIONS
