German philosophy and politics

by John Dewey

"perhaps Rousseau was right when he preferred the savage state to the state of civilization provided we leave out of account the last stage to which our species is yet destined to rise."

But since the condition of civilization is but an intermediary between the natural state and the truly or rational moral condition to which man is to rise, Rousseau was wrong.

"Thanks then be to nature for the unsociableness, the spiteful competition of vanity, the insatiate desires for power and gain."

These quotations, selected from Kant's little essay on an "Idea for a Universal History," are precious for understanding two of the most characteristic traits of subsequent German thought, the distinctions made between Society and the

State and between Civilization and Culture. Much of the trouble which has been experienced in respect to the recent use of Kultur might have been allayed by a knowledge that Kultur has little in common with the English word "culture" save a likeness in sound. Kultur is sharply antithetical to civilization in its meaning. Civilization is a natural and largely unconscious or involuntary growth. It is, so to speak, a by-product of the needs engendered when people live close together. It is external, in short. Culture, on the other, is deliberate and conscious. It is a fruit not of men's natural motives, but of natural motives which have been transformed by the inner spirit. Kant made the distinction when he said that Rousseau was not so far wrong in preferring savagery to civilization, since civilization meant simply social decencies and elegancies and outward proprieties, while morality, that is, the rule of the end of Reason, is necessary to culture. And the real significance of the term "culture" becomes more obvious when he adds that it involves the slow toil of education of the Inner Life, and that the attainment of culture on the part of an individual depends upon long effort by the

community to which he belongs. It is not primarily an individual trait or possession, but a conquest of the community won through devotion to "duty."

In recent German literature, Culture has been given even a more sharply technical distinction from Civilization and one which emphasizes even more its collective and nationalistic character. Civilization as external and uncontrolled by self-conscious purpose includes such things as language in its more spontaneous colloquial expression, trade, conventional manners or etiquette, and the police activities of government. Kultur comprises language used for purposes of higher literature; commerce pursued not as means of enriching individuals but as a condition of the development of national life; art, philosophy (especially in that untranslatable thing, the "Welt-Anschauung"); science, religion, and the activities of the state in the nurture and expansion of the other forms of national genius, that is, its activities in education and the army. The legislation of Bismarck with reference to certain Roman Catholic orders is nicknamed Kultur-kampf, for it was conceived as embodying a struggle between two radically different philosophies of life, the

Roman, or Italian, and the true Germanic, not simply as a measure of political expediency. Thus it is that a trading and military post like Kiao-Chou is officially spoken of as a "monument of Teutonic Kultur." The war now raging is conceived of as an outer manifestation of a great spiritual struggle, in which what is really at stake is the supreme value of the Germanic attitude in philosophy, science and social questions generally, the "specifically German habits of feeling and thinking."

Very similar motives are at work in the distinction between society and the State, which is almost a commonplace of German thought. In English and American writings the State is almost always used to denote society in its more organized aspects, or it may be identified with government as a special agency operating for the collective interests of men in association. But in German literature society is a technical term and means something empirical and, so to speak, external; while the State, if not avowedly something mystic and transcendental, is at least a moral entity, the creation of self-conscious reason operating in behalf of the spiritual and ideal interests

of its members. Its function is cultural, educative. Even when it intervenes in material interests, as it does in regulating lawsuits, poor laws, protective tariffs, etc., etc., its action has ultimately an ethical significance: its purpose is the furthering of an ideal community. The same thing is to be said of wars when they are really national wars, and not merely dynastic or accidental.