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that life is life, nation is nation, ego is ego, x equals x. These modest
truths have restated, not answered the question of value judgment.'' The
"third" assumption is that of "false analogy": because change and evolu·
tion govern nature, that which in the world of human affairs changes and
evolves is eminently good; the static and permanent is bad, whether it hap·
pens to be an elemental organism, a species, a people, a law or a value.
From these three "assumptions" comes most of the evil. One is to infer
that they made German fascism almost inevitable.
The abstraction of the "assumptions" must have required a good deal
of intellectual labor; nevertheless, they are gross over-simplifications.
Of
the three assumptions, the first- the "mathematical fallacy," or "organic
assumption"-is the only one to have actually been employed by the
Romantics as an
assumption.
And it is not a fallacy. Does or does not any
living organism amount to something greater than the sum of its parts?
And is it true or not that a new quality becomes manifest when people
group themselves together, not present before in their mere aggregate as
individuals? The second assumption is a fiction. The German Romantics
did try to answer the question of value j.udgment. Life, said Schelling,
was valuable because it was the Divine working itself out. For Fichte the
nation was valuable because among other things it guaranteed the rights
of the individual and reconciled conflicting interests. And so cin. As for
the assumption of "dynamic analogy"- the high value the Romantics set
upon change and evolution was not an assumed truth from which they
reasoned, but something which they tried to justify; it was also a taste, a
temper, a response to a period of transition, or in the case of some a reac·
tion to the triumph of "safe" middle-class standards. It was the state in
which those who are radically dissatisfied with the existing order auto·
matically find themselves.
Mr. Viereck seems too unsophisticated historically to realize that in
tracing the sources of the Romantic "error" to these "assumptions," he is
actually attacking 19.th century naturalism with all its radical philosophic
and political connotations. And so his book, when it is critical, tends to
become a kind of vulgar
anti-moderne
polemic. Whether he knows it or
not, the errors of which he finds Romanticism guilty are only
errors
according to an assumed Christian orthodoxy.
The term "romanticism," in the lower case, is an over-simplification.
As Mr. Viereck uses it, it implies something that persists beyond historical
limitations, a permanent category of human behavior, i.e. "romanticism"
is the way human nature shows in general its impatience with reason,
tradition and external norms. But it is something that can be refuted:
"Time and again romanticism has been correctly refuted, but it always
survives its refuters.'' At the same time, "Civilization's task is not a ques·
tion of destroying but of harnessing the eternal romantic element.'' It is
painful to see Professor Babbitt's fatuities resurrected to confuse further
the already sufficiently confused opponents of Hitler. In repudiating the
