The Deutsches Kolleg presents twenty-six provocative theses tracing a dialectical path from humanism through racism towards a plural order of peoples, civilizations, and sovereign realms.
This is an English translation of an essay originally published in August 2000 and available in German here.
Racism presupposes humanism, while humanism presupposes the expulsion from Paradise.
Man as man is a naked animal.
Humanism is the attempt to conceive of man as such systematically and without God.
Humanism is not merely a systematic theory but also its corresponding practice. Humanism is the thought and action of man as a naked animal.
Humanism is naked bestiality.
Human rights are particular animal rights; animal rights are universalized human rights.
Peoples or individuals who allow the Trojan horse of human rights to be imposed upon them lose their personality—and thus their ethical character, morality, and status as subjects of law—and receive abstract rights in return. Yet they now lack even the ethical strength to enforce these rights themselves, so the humanist world power gladly comes to their aid—and stays.
Humanism has triumphed, and the rule of the animal has been established once human rights are accepted as the foundation of the human world. The hour of the last man has then arrived. It raises what is ultimately human to the summit, thereby bringing it to consciousness and, finally, to its end.
The end of humanism is racism.
Within an animal species, its races constitute the first distinction.
Race is class because it classifies the species. Each race divides the human species into race and non-race, so that everyone is liberated, within his own race, from the rest of humanity.
Racism is the liberation of all human beings from humanism and hence from their naked bestiality. This is why the members of the respective non-race can so readily appear as subhumans who have failed to attain humanity’s true destiny: the superhumanity of one’s own particular race.
The non-race is the race’s human environment. Non-race thus becomes the ecological side, and race the identitarian side, of the single distinction between race and its negation.
There are therefore racists and humanists in the world. Humanists insist upon the common, naked, and therefore universal bestiality of all human beings; racists insist upon the particular bestiality of certain human beings.
In the werewolf, individual bestiality rises above merely particular bestiality. The individual wolf-man leaves the racially particular man behind in order to behold his truth as a human animal, as animal individuality attained, and as a genuine god-animal.
The werewolf overcomes racially particular humanity without relapsing into the abstract universal humanity of humanism. The werewolf returns to prehuman, or universal, animality and, as a super-animal, establishes social atomism. This condition, founded upon idolized individuality, marks the beginning of wolf society—that is, of liberalism as a total system, rather than as a legitimate class standpoint within the bourgeois society of a real nation.
The werewolf is not a beast, not a wild animal, but an animal that has returned—one that has passed through humanism and racism. As the primordial father of unbourgeois wolf society, the werewolf is also the sacred animal of contemporary global society and of its hunt for the clones of the golden calf. Taken as a whole, this is the downward, degenerative undercoming of racism, a descent out of the human species.
The overcoming of racism is its completion.
The first step towards the completion of racism is the recognition that a race finds in its respective anti-race the others of itself—that is, many other races.
From the recognition of the plurality of races, the next step in their completion leads to the differentiation of each race into its peoples. The peoples of a race have their roots in their community of descent; their trunk in the community of destiny that is distinct from it; and their limitless extensions—their crown—in the communities of language, territory, history, and culture that branch out from it.
Abstract anti-racism must regard ethnic distinctions as an especially dangerous form of racism precisely because they are concrete.
Concrete anti-racism, which seeks to overcome racism through its completion, will declare not race but the people—not the natural forms of humanity but the naturalized forms of those natural forms—to be the sovereign form of community within human evolution. It will energetically traverse the dialectic of people and non-people in order to advance towards recognition of the plurality of peoples as different manifestations of God.
Every people that understands its non-people as the others of itself, and thus its race as its community of peoples, raises that community to the level of a society of peoples when it confronts the other peoples as a subject of international law and recognizes them as such, on condition that they recognize it in the same capacity.
A race that has concretized itself as a community of peoples and been elevated into a society of peoples forms a civilizational sphere with corresponding spaces of faith, law, politics, and history. It has thereby become a political race and acquired a form of intercourse. Every race that wishes to enter world history as a historical sphere must undergo this development, to a greater or lesser degree. Racism is thereby completed and overcome.
The geostrategic landing of foreign races within the territories of recognized peoples belonging to a civilizational sphere reactivates racism at the lower level of the native race confronting foreign anti-races. It is therefore simultaneously an antipolitical assault upon a historical sphere and thus a form of counter-history. The principal battle line of the present consequently runs through the very heart of both racism and anti-racism: race stands against non-race (the remainder of humanity) or completionist racism against the “human race,” while abstract anti-racism combats concrete anti-racism.
The civilizational sphere under attack, which had long since overcome racism through its society of peoples, as a domain of international law, will also defend itself on the primitive level of mutually destructive biomasses and will therefore begin the racial war. The common racial war of the civilizational sphere consolidates its society of peoples into a higher community of peoples: the free empire of real nations—that is, a greater space governed by international law and protected by a prohibition on intervention by powers alien to that space.
This set of deductions is a wonderful example of the elasticity of defined terms. I understand humanism to represent the centrality of the individual human in all viable political systems. The author describes humanism as a regrettable deviation from a creed where the human is the subordinate to the creed. This strikes me as putting the lore above the need. I think the commonly held perspective is that life can be seen as a gift and it can be viewed as a tug of war involving disparate creeds. Humanism is a pragmatic solution that places a fence around the political and makes no claims on any other belief systems to the extent that none violates the core political philosophy. Such a path is supported by self-identifying deists and atheists, among many differing creeds, religions and locations, and this underscores a widely held sentiment that humans have value as creatures empowered to act on behalf of their species.
So if expulsion from Eden represents the sentience that humans gained through choosing to live in the real world, and choice is viewed as a gift from a creator, then it follows that the human capacity to organize to promote peace among strongly held creeds is the evidence of humans honoring their creator, and facilitating the survival of their species.
How is racism the consequence of that, when racists reject the humanist philosophy? Most racists that think, and most of them appear not to, believe that their superiority has been pre-ordained in a spirit realm and is immutable. Racism then,is much closer to creeds than to any attempt to keep a wall between personal creed and social and political choice.