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Amit Varshizky, "The Metaphysics of Race: Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview" (Taylor & Francis, 2024)
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- [00:01]
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- [02:05]
Amir Engel
Hi everyone, my name is Amir Engel and I'm the Chair of the German Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I'm currently also a visiting professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Today I'm talking to Amit Vasicki about his new book, the Metaphysics of Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview, which came out with Routledge in 2025. Amit, welcome to the Show.
- [02:28]
Amit Vasifsky
Hello. Thank you for having me.
- [02:30]
Amir Engel
We have been planning this for a while, and so I'm very glad that we actually finally get to speak about the book. I think it's a. It's an important and innovative work. To me, there's something intensely relevant and topical about this project. And to see this, I want to read the motto of the introduction to the introduction. You have a relatively long quote from Ernst Cassirer, who wrote, in order to fight an enemy, you must know him. That is one of the first principles of a sound strategy. To know him means not only to know his defects and weaknesses, it means to know his strength. All of us have been liable to underrate this strength when we first heard of the political myth, and we found them to be so absurd and incongruous, so fanatical and ludicrous, that we could hardly be prevailed upon to take them seriously. But now it has become clear to all of us that this was a great mistake. We should not commit the same error a second time. We should carefully study the origins, the structure, the method, the technique of political myth. We should see the adversary face to face in order to know how to combat him. Let's talk a little bit about this wonderful quote. What is its context and why did you take it to be the motto for the book?
- [03:58]
Amit Vasifsky
Yeah. So I think what I'm trying to do in this work is to point at the. How should I call it, the appeal of the Nazi ideology and, you know, of this totalitarian ideology, which is. Touches, how should I say, the most fundamental anxieties and desires of our modern existence. So we should not. I think many studies of National Socialism and totalitarian movements tends to devaluate the power of these ideologies, whereas I'm trying to show exactly the opposite, the strength, the convincing power of these worldviews, because I think that this is the only way that we will be able to face these ideologies. Also today we're facing, as we know, this danger of authoritarian regimes, of populist ideologies. And in order to combat these ideologies, we need to acknowledge their strength and the way that they. The remedy that they tend, that allegedly provides for this existential anxieties and desires.
- [05:49]
Amir Engel
Yes, I agree with you very much. I think there is a lot of political myth that we kind of academic liberals tend to think are so ludicrous or not worth our. Our consideration. And I think, as you said, and as you and as Karsira said, this could be a grave mistake. Let's talk a little bit about Yourself. Before we go into the details of the book, maybe you can introduce yourself, tell us who you are and how did you get to write this book?
- [06:21]
Amit Vasifsky
Yes, so I'm a historian, Israeli historian, novelist and essayist. I held postdoctoral fellowships at the Hebrew University and the Yana University in Germany. I also lectured in both countries, Israel and Germany. This is a brief biography of my very brief academic career. Today I mainly dedicate my time to literature, to prose writing and essayist writing, write for Israeli journals and also a bit in Germany as well. So that's, that's about myself, my motivations to write this book. Well, I think this goes back to my childhood as an Israeli child growing up in the 80s. Like every other Israeli child, I was. I think my identity, my conception of the world was deeply influenced by the memory of the Holocaust. I remember myself drawn to my grandmother survival stories and also to the black and white images broadcast in the Israeli television every Yom Hashoah, every Holocaust Memorial Day. And I was gripped by the. I was gripped in a mixture of horror and curiosity. I was always asking myself how could people commit such atrocities to other human beings? I remember myself just asking myself over and over and how can people be so cruel? How can they be so malevolent? Malevolent. And in a sense I think this book is. Attempt to answer this naive question of this, you know, of this. Of this Israeli child. So I think, yeah, what motivated me is to understand the motivations of the perpetrators. Yes, of this. To understand the, the way they justified their crimes. The, the way they. The. The. Let's say the sociological, the psychological and the mental mechanisms that drive people to. To. To. To commit such atrocities. That's, that's. That's the main motivations of the, of the book. And also my point of departure, my I think is. Is the, the. The recognition that people, the few people are committing the evil, doing the evil in the sake of the evil. Yes, most of people doing the. Doing evil deeds in the name of. Of the goods in the name of. They always justify their criminal deeds in the name of justice, in the name of necessity. Necessary necessity. And so that's, that's what I trying to. To. To. That's what I basically tried to. To. To understand this. This system of justifications and the way that these mechanisms enabled transvaluation of basically of Western values. Yes.
- [10:18]
Amir Engel
I think the thesis you offer is in an attempt to answer these questions, very basic questions is both intuitive and very complicated. So let's start with the title of the book because I think it subverts something kind of very basic notions that we have. The book is titled the Metaphysics of Race, Science and Faith in the Nazi Worldview. So already the title, the very idea that race has metaphysics is kind of counterintuitive I think because we usually think about race as a very biological thing, a very imminent thing. So how can race have a metaphysics and science and faith? This is usually, you know, under the kind of common understanding of secularization, we usually assume that the scientific worldview dispelled the worldview of faith. Right. So, you know, this kind of Heberian notion of through the demystification of the world through science. But yet, I mean, you suggest already in the COVID of the book that you. That the, that that the Nazi worldview is made of science and faith. So let's, let's talk about it. How does it work? What, what is your. How, how can we speak about metaphysics of race? How can we speak about science and faith as a, as a, as an internal integral worldview?
- [11:51]
Amit Vasifsky
So that this is exactly the, the underlying argument of my book because at the beginning of the book I, I posed the, the question how did the Nazis understand the, the, the term biology? And you know, the mainstream, let's say the current scholarship, not only current but, but the, the general scholarship, the deals with Nazi ideology and Nazi racism, usually. 10 how should I say, to pose, impose this, our notion of biology onto the Nazi conception of biology and to impose our liberal scientific categories onto ideology and vocabulary, biological vocabulary that intended deliberately to negate this liberal conception of biology. So this is what I'm trying to show. I'm trying to trace the way that Nazi intellectuals and Nazi ideologies, the Nazi scientists understood biology not as a liberal, mechanistic, scientific, naturalistic category, but as something else that, as a, as a holistic, let's say vitalistic concept that goes way beyond mechanistic natural science, scientific understanding of biology.
- [13:43]
Amir Engel
Maybe it's, maybe it's worth thinking just for a minute about that a little more. I mean it's not just going beyond, it's a mechanism or kind of a mechanistic biology. It's an attempt to break through or to overcome mechanistic biology. Right? I mean the problem is mechanistic biology or this idea of blind natural selection that has nothing to do with the desire will value truth is. Would you say that is correct?
- [14:15]
Amit Vasifsky
Is exactly, exactly. Because, because this is, this is something that I'm doing in the, in my book because I, I traced the, the, the discourse in, in the twenties and the thirties Germany regarding the problem of, of, of mechanistic biology. And I show how many scientists and intellectuals tended towards alternative conception of biology and life. And this is also trickled into the racial anthropological discourse, of course, because if you are perceiving biology only as a mechanistic category, then you cannot draw from it any conclusions about mental faculties about let's say mental racial differences. Which was crucial to, to, to validate the, the racial racist assumptions, racist ideology. And it all also was crucial in order to, to, to establish the racial paradigm as a foundation for let's racial welfension, racial worldview. Because of this distinction between value and fact which is the mainstay of positivistic science. Yes. So that's basically what they tried to do. They tried to find a way to conceptualize biology as something which is not only mechanistic but also has intrinsic values. And the way to do it was to go towards holistic and vitalist and sometimes phenomenological conception of biology.
- [16:23]
Amir Engel
So let's, let's go, let's go and discuss the development of science. Because the, because the first part of the book does under. Has a title foundation and it really discusses the kind of. You do a survey of the history of the human science, biological human sciences in mostly in Germany, in Central Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century. But I want to just underscore what you just said and that is there's something completely scandalous about the idea that biological fact is not somehow, doesn't somehow have some kind of value, some kind of meaning. I mean it's just completely scandalous that you know, we are here and this has no meaning. It's just pure chance. It's very, it is very hard to accept. Don't you think?
- [17:14]
Amit Vasifsky
Oh, I'm not, I'm not very sure about this, you know, assumption. I think I truly understand the, you know, the psychological and mental and also cultural drive towards this, this, this new conception of biology. And by the way, this was not a Nazi premise. This was not a Nazi invention. The Nazi were the Nazis, were they. They drew on the, on this abroad cultural and intellectual climate in, into war Germany. Yes. Because we all know that not only in Germany, but Western civilization as a whole experienced a cultural crisis after World War I. Yes. And even before. If we want to trace this, you know, the roots of this conception of, of cultural pessimism and you know, anti modernist and anti materialist and anti positive thinking, we can go back to the last quarter of the, of the 18th century. Of course, this, this sense of decay, of decadence, of cultural decadence. This was something that was fairly prevalent in, among the educated segments in Europe. And we all know that the critic of positive science was not a fascist trend. This was also part of, let's say, the phenomenological conception. Let's take for example, Admon Husso, who wrote about the crisis of the European sciences. And he pointed at positive thinking as the source of this cultural and spiritual crisis. And he also offered biology as a way, as a strategy to overcome this crisis. Because biology in its holistic and vitalistic articulation can combine humanistic and natural scientific empiricist methods together. Yes. And we can find in biology a new ground for value making. Yes. This is something that was pretty much prevalent in interwar Germany culture.
- [20:17]
Amir Engel
Let's go a step before that, just to cover the grounds and know that we are in the right place when we get to speak about this. So let's discuss the issues that are brought up in the beginning of the book, which is the rise of German nationalism in the 19th century on the one hand, and the rise of certain kinds of sciences that most of them today are considered problematic. The kind of German anthropology of the turn of the century. You discuss these two things in tandem. So you discuss German nationalism and German nationalistic kind of trends in the 19th century. Just to remind ourselves, Germany was created as something of a nation state, not quite, but a nation state in the late 19th century. So in 1871, so relatively late on the one hand, on the other hand, you discussed Ernst Haeckel, that person who's known as the popular, the guy, the person who popularized Darwinism in the German speaking lands in Central Europe? So the question is this, what is the role that, that natural sciences play in the formation of, you know, German nationalism in the 19th century? And, and how is, you know, Darwinism and biology relevant to this question of you know, national, German national pride and, and, and political prowess.
- [21:45]
Amit Vasifsky
Yes, so, so I'm trying to. Yes, in, in the first part of the book, I'm trying to, to give some introduction to anchor the Nazi discourse in the right context, historical context and cultural context. I'm dealing with two main figures which were pretty much influential during this time. The one is Ernst Haeckel that you just mentioned. And the other one is the Houston, Houston Stewart Chamberline. And I show basically how, how biology in, you know, this, this two person were very, they were very different in their attitudes, their methods, their, their disciplines. Nonetheless, they were, both of them are, I think they are typical thinkers of their time. In the sense that they both tried to establish biology and therefore race as a new foundation for ethical and epistemological ground, infrastructure for new revolutionary, for a new cultural revolution or political revolution. That's how they perceive this. And I'm showing how this conception of biology, of holistic biology, vitalist biology, replaced religion. I mean, both consider biology as the new metaphysics in a sense. Thus the new ground for value making and. For German national revival. And although they. Each of them chose a different way to. To deal with it, both. So race and racial predispositions as the future ground for. For. For German national revival and cultural revival.
- [24:10]
Amir Engel
You have this wonderful quote from Chamberlain. He writes, Descartes pointed out that all the world's most intelligent people would be unable to define the color white. However, all I have to do is to open my eyes and see it. The same is true in the case of race. I think this is a very powerful quote. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about Chamberlain. I think he's not a household name, unlike perhaps Haeckel. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about him and what is he trying to achieve with this position, with this ideology of race.
- [24:45]
Amit Vasifsky
Yeah. So Chamberlain was a British man who fell in love with the German culture. And then afterwards he moved to Germany and he established himself as a main figure of the Bayreuth circle. In. He. He took. For a while he was. He married the. The. The daughter of Richard Wagner and he was a central figure in this volkish circles in Bayreuth surrounding Bosnia. Wagner, the.
- [25:25]
Amir Engel
Wife.
- [25:26]
Amit Vasifsky
Middle. The wife and. Yes, of. And he wrote a very famous and important book, the foundation of the 19th century, which influenced tremendously on folkish thinkers and also proto fascists and Nazi thinkers in Germany. Hitler admired him, of course, in Rosenberg. And I think the basic premise of Chamberlain was that human history must be seen as eternal struggle between races and especially between the Aryan race and the Jewish race, which each one manifest different value systems which had to clash. And Chamberlain's conception of race is very interesting because unlike Haeckel, he negates, he rejects the scientific notion of race and he articulates an irrational, let's call it irrational conception of race. An existential conception of race. He says rays like the color of. I don't remember exactly what color was it that you mentioned?
- [26:58]
Amir Engel
White, of course.
- [26:59]
Amit Vasifsky
Color of white. Okay. Like rays. Like. Like colors. We cannot validate colors. Objectivity. Yes. As we, as we. As we approach natural phenomena, we cannot. We cannot validate this sensual conceptions of colors of taste. Of all these secondary qualities, this is exactly how we cannot validate race. We can validate race only by feeling it, only by experience, experiencing it. Yes. Race is not something that we can objectively validate. It is existential phenomena which can only be validated as in itself.
- [27:57]
Amir Engel
Right, so, so, exactly. So you have to develop it through feeling. It's a secondary quality. How is that related to nationalism?
- [28:07]
Amit Vasifsky
To nationalism?
- [28:09]
Amir Engel
Yeah. German in Germany. I mean, German nationalism for us. Because this is the issue at hand, right? The ways by which race becomes a central issue for the creation of the Nazi state. So you have nationalism on the one hand develops in the 19th century. On the other hand you have people, very influential people that talk about race and describe it as a basic intuition, as something that is clear to us as the color white. Right. So how are these two things now combined? What, what is the, what is the kind of. You can sense it already, but maybe we can put. Say it explicitly. What, how did this happen? Did these two motivations collide?
- [28:52]
Amit Vasifsky
Yeah, yeah. So, so, so we all know, I don't know if we all. But, but people who are engaged with the, you know, the history for modern Germany knows that the German national identity was based on organic conceptions, on the conception of culture, nation, as, let's call it, as a mirror image to the French Anglo Saxon nationality that was based on mechanical agreements, on the social. On social agreements. The Germans saw themselves. The natural bonds are based on cultural, linguistical bonds. During the, the half part of the 18th century, these conceptions underwent metamorphosis. This organic conception that was previously based on culture and language gained more biological overtones. And in the Beginning of the 20th century, this conception of Volzgemeinschaft, which is based on organic bones on blood Kingship found a new ground, found a new conceptual, conceptual framework which is ratio differentiations, racial thinking. And so, so, so in that sense, German national began to, to, to be articulated more and more in biological terms. So this is, I think pretty much systematical evolution of, of this organic conception of nationhood.
- [31:19]
Amir Engel
Yeah, I think the, the, the, the ground is the, the set. The ground is set for the next phase. So we have nationalism as this kind of attempt to think about an organic essential trait. And you have the development of the racial sciences that also attempts to think about humans in terms of secondary but nevertheless self evident qualities. And these two are going to combine. Let's talk for a little bit about the creation of the singular human, the man, so to speak, in the racial theory. The book describes certain development within racial sciences, anthropology and others and the development of these key issues. And I think the key or one of the key issues or one of the ways to formulate the key issue is the mental racial question. And you say that it's an old question, a new closing. So let's discuss this a little bit. I'm sorry, what is the mental racial question and how is it an old question?
- [32:38]
Amit Vasifsky
So obviously, I mean, I discussed very in length the transition from the physical descriptive anthropology of the 18th century. The shift to the new.
- [32:54]
Amir Engel
The 19th century. No, are we talking about the 19th century?
- [32:57]
Amit Vasifsky
The 19th century, sorry, the 9th century to the 20th century. Biological anthropology, which is based on genetics, on new discoveries in the field of heredity. Mostly based on the Mendelian rediscovery of the laws of inheritance and the basic problem, genetics. The rediscover of Mendelian genetics in the first years of the 20th century was a revolutionary and there was successful implementation within the field of human heredity was perceived as a revolutionary discovery because for the first time it enabled to correlate between physical and characteristics. Yes. The bodily features of the human and his mental faculties. It was a sort of holistic conception that proved that there is a correlation between physical and mental characteristics. Nonetheless, this Mendelian methods owed two fundamental problems to this heralds of the. The new racial anthropology. The first one was a much more scientific methodological problem. And the other one was more ideological and ethical. We can delve into. Into this problems. So, so, so the Mendelian. The Mendelian method. Let's, let's first we must say a word about the. The importance of the mental inheritance, the mental characteristic for the racial anthropology in and. And the racist worldview as a whole. Yes. Because if we want to. Let's say, if we want to draw conclusions from racial differences about much more historical cultural differences, we must take into consideration the mental. The mental differences. Right. Because bodily differences make no change. Yes. If we say an Aryan person is much more. Is it taller or even more beautiful than the Jewish person? It makes no sense. You cannot draw any cultural. Any historical conclusion from this insight. Right. You have in some way to draw a line between these physical features, the mental creatures to the cognitive features in order to establish your conception of racial hierarchies. So the mental question was crucial. Was, was fundamental to this, to this scientific discipline. But the Mendelian method raised a methodological problem because according to the Mendel second lore, which calls the law of independent assortment, Genes segregate independently during reproduction. So this is very difficult to rule the distribution of Mental traits. Yes. It is very difficult to correlate between the phenotype, which is the visible manifestation of genetical traits, and genotype, which is the, let's say, the latent potential genetic code. Yes. Which sometimes stays latent. Yes. So this was a methodological scientific problem, this. And that's why many racial scientists tended to. To. To. To. To adopt alternative tragedies which goes beyond genetics, which go beyond mechanistic biology. We can touch it afterwards. The second problem was, as I said, ideological and ethical and especially the differentiation, the positive differentiation between fact and value and the neutral character of scientific endeavor. Yes. And this is also a problem because in order to establish a worldview on the. On racial premises, you have to combine facts with values. You have to show that racial typologies, racial categories, has some sort of implications about human culture and human value systems.
- [39:00]
Amir Engel
And morals. And morals. And morals.
- [39:03]
Amit Vasifsky
So, yes, yes. All these secondary qualities that modern science that has no tools to approach. Yes. To investigate. So they try to find a new method, a new scientific paradigm to combine facts and values, to find a new holistic method that can not only can answer the question of how not only to explain the causal relationship between phenomena, but also to have insights about the meanings. The values also can answer the what for and the why. What cheese. So that was the big enterprise of, I think, the racial. The new Rafenkunde, the new racial doctrine of the 20th century, even before the Nazi ceased to power.
- [40:14]
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- [40:32]
Amir Engel
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- [40:45]
Amir Engel
Have here a quote from Walter Scheidt. Maybe you can say a word about who he was. I'll just read it out as a kind of attempt to solve this problem. How to connect the, you know, the scientific objective observations and the moral and mental meaning. How do you ascribe moral and mental meaning to objective observations? He writes, a race is a group of hereditary traits that have undergone a selection process and not a group of people. It is not a totality of the people in the group that constitutes the race, but each of them, each of them individually has the race that differs in one way or another. So every person carries with him within himself or herself the Race. Right. So who's Walterscheidt? Maybe in one word. And how do you explain. How does this text explain the problem that you were describing?
- [41:54]
Amit Vasifsky
Yeah, so Vadel Shayt was the major figure in the. He was the head of the Hamburg Institute for Racial Faltering for Rasmussen Ocean Racial Research in Humble University. Although he was a very moderate, very rigorous scientist, he was very much obliged to. He was very much. He was a very mainstream scientist in terms of his. The methods and his. The approach to the racial question. I deal with him very briefly in my book. But he, in this quote, he encapsulates this very problem that the German racial Portia were facing with. Yes. During this time because on the one hand they tried to speak about races as homogeneous category. On the other hand, when they implemented the Mendelian and the genetic method, they had to acknowledge these very problems that I just mentioned about the difficulty to speak about racism as an homogeneous category. Yes. So that was a part of the problems that they had to face that they had to cope with.
- [43:54]
Amir Engel
Let's zoom out a little bit. You discuss the ways by which these issues, seemingly problems about, you know, issues between scholars and scientists and researchers kind of developed and become part of a much wider set of discourses, becomes part of culture, philosophy, literature, music, art, but also becomes part of politics. And you even talk about the language, how language is impacted by this kind of racial. By now I think we can call it racial ideology. So a racial worldview that combines both objective observation and kind of value judgment about the morals of different races. About. Let's talk about that. How does it become politics? How does this theory that is kind of debated among university professors and among scientific journals. How does this become a political issue?
- [45:07]
Amit Vasifsky
Yes, first of all, it begins already in the post World War I era. Yes, in the 20s, because people like Hans Junger, for example, and Ludic, Ferdinand Klaus and many others already in the early 20s, they spoke about the necessity of establishing a new racial worldview that is based on racial promises. And what they. Because of the problems that we just mentioned, they try to establish race as a holistic total category. Because there is very interesting discussion, I think in the book regarding fruit. Flands was also very rigorous scientist and he acknowledged that race can only be regarded as a principle of value because race cannot be. Also, as we mentioned about, we spoke about Chamberlain before, race cannot be validated in scientific terms. Race can only be validated as a kind of existential, intuitive category. That's why he calls, to establish race, as he calls it's A faith in race. And he is a scientist, very serious scientist. He has international reputation during this time. So race. These people regard race and biological predispositions as a ground for a new ethics, for new politics, for a new Weltenschaum, for a new worldview. Yes. And they see National Socialism as the natural, natural political manifestation of this realization of this. Of this philosophy, of this. Yes. Of this thinking. And. Yes. During, during the 30s, after the Nazi take power, this, this notion of race, which is, as I said, it's. It's. It goes beyond scientific formulations, becomes the official. The official framework, the official conceptual framework of. Of the new regime.
- [47:56]
Amir Engel
I want. I want to read the. I want to read a little quote you have here from. I think it's Alfred Rosenberg. He writes, soul means race seen from within. And conversely, race is the external expression of a soul. To awaken the racial soul to life, its ultimate values must be recognized. And under their direction, other values must be assigned their organic place in the state art and religion. So you have here kind of an attempt to. Not only. It's not only. It's not only a description. While some races have these. These values and other races have other values, now it becomes a normative kind of undertaking. We have to organize so that we express the inner meaning of our race. Is this, is this a correct reading?
- [48:51]
Amit Vasifsky
Absolutely, absolutely. I think this quote emphasize the raison d' etre of the Nazi racial ideology. And also, again, it emphasized this holistic and vitalist orientation of this racial thought. Yes. Which is not reductive, which is not materialist, which is not mechanistic. Yes. It's holistic. And when you see human history through these lenses. Yes. Of racial vitalism, then you have an entire new, how I would say cosmology, a new way to approach not only human history, but also, you know, broader metaphysical and ontological questions. And Arthur Rosenberg. Absolutely. He illustrates this. This way of thinking. Yes. And first of all. Yeah. We must acknowledge this biological racial ground. Yes. Truth, Absolute truth. And then afterwards, we need to establish our politics, our ideologies, our religious systems, our value values, system of values, culture and everything accordingly. Yes.
- [50:22]
Amir Engel
You know, I think as you're talking about it. I'm thinking about it. Hannah Arendt is usually known as the extreme opposite of this kind of discussion. She's. She's usually kind of put in the. As one of the most important figures of the camp of functionalist, you know, historians of Nazism. But in her Origins of Totalitarity, Totalitarianism. Excuse me. This is precisely how she described Nazism. Nazism is a project to fulfill a. She calls it biological, but a certain worldview that is meaningful and important within which every individual. So whether you're, I don't know, an SS soldier or a Jewish, you're supposed to fulfill your inner race. So if you're, if you're an SS soldier, then fulfilling your inner race is, is cleaning the world of unnecessarily kind of, or remnants of, of races that are, have no function in the world. And, and if you're a Jew, then your ultimate role in life is to, I mean, essentially to be annihilated, to, to disappear from the world. And this is how she describes the ideology. It's remarkably actually similar. I mean, she's known as a functionist, but I think she had a certain feeling to this kind of, to this logic.
- [51:53]
Amit Vasifsky
Yes, absolutely. She also, if I remember correctly, she describes the totalitarian regimes as a cultic, religious. Yes, they have a certain characteristic of a culture, which is very true. I think if we want to really understand National Socialism and in particular in the totalitarian movements of the 20th centuries in general, we must understand that they gave some sort of remedy for this sense of nihilism, for the sense of the collapse of the meaning structures which is all byproducts of secularization, of this disenchantment of the world. And I think in many senses this is something that we must take into account also. I think this is what Hannah Arendt basically points it. Yes, so, so, so yes, this, this, this crisis of value. Once we don't have any transcendental authority anymore, autonomous authority on which we can base our values, then we have to find new basis for values. The Nazis and this, this people tried to, to, to establish a new metaphysical and yes, ethical ground for value making. I think this is the point.
- [53:30]
Amir Engel
So I think this really leads me to the next point because I think, as it should be clear by now, there is now a quality that is almost religious sounding in this Nazi ideology, this racist ideology. It's about meaning giving, it's about value giving. It's about ethics. The ethics may seem cruel, but obviously it has a certain ethical base. And the last part of the book describes the conflation. You describe the conflation of Christianity especially, I think it would be fair to say Protestant Christianity with the Nazi ideology. You mention that scholars tend to think about Nazism as a anti Christian, anti religious movement, but you beg to differ. And I think it is important to just finish off with this thought. In what way is Nazism similar To religion. And how can we understand Nazism as you propose? The book between Natural History and the History of salvation.
- [54:43]
Amit Vasifsky
Yes. So what I'm trying to do in the last section of the book is exactly what you described to trace the way that Nazi ideologies themselves articulated their political faith. And what I discovered that they used religious vocabulary, religious reasoning to establish, to articulate their racial worldview. And you know, if you go, you can, if you go to Man Kham. Yes. For example, Hitler says that National Socialism needs to be established as the new politicia globe, as a new political faith. You see it in Rosenberg, the myths of the 20th century. You see it a lot. They use religious terminology when they come to describe national worldview. But moreover, if you consider race as a vitalist and holistic category, then you have to assume that it has its own spiritual qualities. Yes. And that's exactly what the Nazis tried to do. They tried to say that we are the authentic religiosity. By the way they describe their religious sympathies, the religious urge, not in the phenomenological. Phenomenological terms. Yes, as religiosity versus religion. Yes. We are not into the religious, institutional, historical religions. Yes. We are the real authentic religiosity, which is imminent, which is natural, which has nothing to do with transcendental and super natural supernatural entities. Yes, it is vital, it is imminent, it is organic and it's embedded within the, the. The racial organism. Yes. If you could perceive race as both as holistic category. So that's exactly what they try to establish. A new conception of religiosity, a new conception of spirituality, which is natural, which is imminent, which is within history, not external to history. And they also consider theology. And there were many discussions about theology, especially the dialectic relationship between Judaism and Christianity. They reinterpreted theology in anthropological perspective. Yes. So they considered theology as anthropological realization, I would say, of biological predispositions. Because once again, if we go back to Rosenberg, Rosenberg also said that each race has its own God idea. It's all its own conception of the absolute, of the divine. Yes. Because it comes from the. From the biological predisposition of the race. That's why Germans or Aryans have their own conception of race and their own forms of religion. And for example, the Jews have totally different conception of God, ideal of God and totally different conceptual forms of religious practices and institutions.
- [58:51]
Amir Engel
It's racially determined, basically, the conception of God and the conception of.
- [58:56]
Amit Vasifsky
Yeah, yes, yes, Fascinating.
- [58:59]
Amir Engel
So we're drawing to a close, but I want to go beyond the book and discuss current events just a little bit in Europe, in North America, in South America, in India and Israel. In other places there is a return to talking about the real, you know, the real Germans, the real Americans, the real Jews, the real Italians, whatever. There has been also this huge conflation between politics and religion. For example, Trump posting pictures of him as Christ or as a Christ figure. And also evangelical groups posting pictures of, of Jesus subverting the assassination attempt, saving Trump's life at the last moment. And of course, racial or kind of folkish tenets are very strong in Israeli discourse, as I'm sure we both actually follow. So let's talk just, just a little bit about the relevance of all this, of your research to the current debates about organism and belonging and this, how do you see this? Do you see a recurrence? Do you see similarities? What are the main differences? What are your thoughts when you're following these discussions? I know it's a very big question, but if you could share one kind of general observation, I would be grateful.
- [60:43]
Amit Vasifsky
Yes. Well, this is a big question and I have to admit that I find a lot of similarities between our period and the interwar period in Europe especially. It's resonance many of the topics that we just discussed because I think what we experience today is also a certain sense of annihilation, of loss of meaning, of moral decay. Yes. And this gives rise to all kinds of authoritarian forms of politics which allegedly give birth. Answer give their response to this, this, this, this cultural and spiritual crisis that we are experiencing. So in a sense this, this is in the mobile. Yeah. The global sense. And when it comes to Israel. Well, this is very difficult and charged, emotionally charged question of course, because I find many similarities between, I would say Zionism and the folkish conception of nation. This, this inter, intersection of national, religious and ethnic identity, conception of identities. This is, this is, and thinking of a nation which is something that is based on ethnic and blood kinships. This is something that is obviously very, very, this is characterized the Jewish identity as a whole Zionist ideology particularly. So what we see today in Israel, I think, think this is partly an outcome of this very problematic intersection of religion, ethnicity and nationality. And in a sense, I think we in the west we lost our way because we gave up. And I, I'm speaking about, you know, liberalism as a whole. Yes, it's very abstract now, but we lost our, our guiding star. We lost, yeah, this, the philosophical and humanistic discourse in favor of much more economical utilitarian neoliberalism. I think this is this is part of the problem. We have to go back to justify philosophically and ethically liberalism because we have to combat very powerful forces now that are threatening the liberal order. So I don't know if I answered your question.
- [64:10]
Amir Engel
No, I think you answered it very nicely. I would like to underscore what you just said. I would like to underscore what you just said very briefly and to remind ourselves of the beginning of our conversation. What you said, if I understand you correctly, is the idea that it is necessary to. And this is what I take also from the book. In general, we have to be able to speak about moral integrity and kind of metaphysical questions of justice, right and meaning in order to be able to follow through on our political program. I think I agree with you very much that on the kind of left leaning liberal side there has been a terrible lack of ability to speak about these things. I think the right wing kind of populist movement has been very powerful in offering thoughts and guidance that is useful to people. And I want to finish by quoting again the passage from Ernst Cassir with which you start. Ernst Kasir writes, when we first heard of political myth, we found them so absurd, so incongruous, so fantastic and ludicrous that we could hardly be perceived upon to take them seriously. And I think what your book does, which I found very impressive, is to call upon everybody to think seriously about political myths and what they mean for us. I'm going to conclude and thank you very much for this conversation. We were talking to Amit Vasifsky about the metaphysics of race science and faith in Nazi worldview. Thank you so much, Amit.
- [66:12]
Amit Vasifsky
Thank you, Amir. It was a pleasure.
- [66:25]
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