Recently, I read and tried to translate the third chapter of Dickel’s Resurrection of the West. The chapter in question was entitled “Das Abendland (The West),” which further explores Dickel’s own discussions and criticism of Spengler’s Decline of the West (which Resurrection of the West was intended to be read as a critique of that particular work). Although Dickel does agree with Spengler that the Western world has a characteristic fixation on the pursuit of the infinite, he deviated from Spengler by arguing that the desire for the infinite coincides with the Western world’s Will-to-Live. It is what distinguishes Western Civilization from Greco-Roman Civilization and Ancient Rome in particular. Without that pursuit of the infinite, it is impossible to claim that Western Civilization has a genuine Will-to-Live.
As mentioned in the original translation of the first two chapters, this Will-to-Live concept is further elaborated upon within the context of economic life. Here, Dickel maintained that Civilizations construct and maintain their own economic systems in order to sustain themselves. Such economic systems cannot be understood in terms of access to natural resources or the quantity of production figures, but by understanding the social relations that ultimately govern the means of production. The most obvious is what Dickel referred to as the concept of the “Werkgemeinschaft (Working Community)” where everyone has to be involved in the production and consumption of goods and services as members of a Civilization.
The Werkgemeinschaft cannot be defined in terms of Bourgeoisie and Proletariat insofar as Dickel’s usage of the term includes other Civilizations where the concept of Liberal Capitalism is viewed as a foreign and alien construct imposed by Western Civilization. In essence, the concept refers to the economic activities of all members of a Civilization, all of whom are involved in one production process or another. Everyone who has a vested interest in a Civilization’s Will-to-Live is also a member of this Werkgemeinschaft. The economic interdependence exhibited by the Werkgemeinschaft is influenced by cultural and legal interdependence, implying the presence of a ruling State that governs every facet of economic life and the financial institutions which support it.
If the State provides the financial and legal framework through which economic activities are conducted, then where do the cultural and social relations of the Werkgemeinschaft come into play? Dickel was adamant that those aspects emanate from the family, in the relationships between men and women, employers and employees, farmers and craftsmen. It is here that we encounter true freedom and fraternity among equals, where the business competition resembles a friendly rivalry between partners to provide the highest Quality of Arbeit. One important prerequisite of fostering those conditions is a belief that men and women should be viewed as equals in economic life and should therefore be paid the same amounts of Geld proportionate to their Quality of Arbeit. It had to be nurtured in the family and reinforced across generations through economic organizations shaped more so by common social customs and norms than by their associations with a particular Profession or Industry.
It may seem rather tame, in a Western Civilization where women now enjoy more Rights and Duties than they did in past millennia, but Dickel specifically noted that such sentiments did not exist in Greco-Roman Civilization, where Romans like Tacitus had difficulty fathoming. In Ancient Rome, Dickel argued, if Roman women were not viewed as the sexual pleasures of Roman men, then they were deemed as absolutely subservient to the Roman Family according to Tacitus. Germanic women, by contrast, were seen as being equals or companions to Germanic men, which would also be extended to the sort of equality between Germanic rulers and their subjects. That too was reported by Tacitus in his descriptions of the Ancient Germanics.
The desire to interact with economic life as a member of a larger community of workers would later be nurtured further in the form of Guilds and Cooperatives. These Guilds and Cooperatives would form the crux of economic life in the Western world prior to the Enlightenment and the onset of Western Civilization. An entire Social Ranking system was even established with promises of advancement and specialization. Dickel was of course referring to the Journeyman System.
Moreover, in more recent centuries, the same desire would be refined further to lay the foundations of Federalism as a model for the political-economic organization of States as the self-governed members of a larger Nation. It has founded the Labor Union as another extension of itself, a phenomenon that occurred in response to industrialization, the rise of massive cities in the Western world, and the migrations of people away from the countryside to those cities.
If one had to summarize the essence of Western Culture in a Western Civilization where the meaning has been lost, then it is the idea of transcending the finite in pursuit of the infinite. It means bringing the Self into an everlasting communion with the Totality and State, from which the Self begins to define themselves afterward. Neoliberalism in this sense promotes the literal inverse: the Self is born as a Private Citizen forever divorced from the realities of Civil Society and Parliament.
The chapter does raise an important theme that has been a recurring philosophical premise in Pan-Germanic Socialism. Is Liberal Capitalist Parliamentary Democracy the perversion of what the German-speaking world and the broader Western Civilization desire and wish to accomplish? If so, does everything associated with it have a conceivable Western origin or were certain aspects borrowed from Greco-Roman Civilization? If we were to eliminate the aspects which emanate from Greco-Roman Civilization and replace them with more appropriate Western equivalents, are we truly undermining the philosophical underpinnings of Neoliberalism as a Weltanschauung?
What Pan-Germanic Socialism would like for us to entertain is the notion that Civilizations are not static, mechanical polities that exist independently of each other. They can and will interact with each other so long as their interactions remain beneficial for everyone involved. But there is the longstanding concern that there are certain values, beliefs, concepts, and ideas exclusive to a particular Civilization’s Destiny and thus cannot be readily reapplied to other Civilizations. A Civilization that adopts them in their entirety and fails to come up with its own equivalents will be subverted by that other Civilization’s designs, even if that other Civilization has been dead for two millennia. At that point, the affected Civilization may begin to lose its Will-to-Live at an unspecified point in the future because it will someday lose sight of its own Destiny and cease to exist entirely.
There is a certain kernel of truth to be found here. I am aware that certain aspects of the “Capitalism” in Liberal Capitalism have their antecedents in Ancient Rome. One example is the “Double-Entry Account Bookkeeping System,” the other the distinctly Liberal conception of Property Rights, “Private/Common Property-as-Wealth.” While these are Westernized conceptions of earlier Roman ones, they cannot be considered as truly Western (or Germanic in the context of Pan-Germanic Socialism). These concepts are more attuned to the sensibilities of the Ancient Romans and have no place whatsoever within Western Civilization or any of the other Civilizations that constitute the rest of humanity.
Categories: Philosophy
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