Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Hitler and the Germans

Titel: Hitler and the Germans

Stichwort: Grunddefekt d. Menschen; Entgöttlichung als Entmenschlichung -> Verlust der Realität

Kurzinhalt: The defection at its core always takes the form of a loss of dignity;

Textausschnitt: 87b The defection at its core always takes the form of a loss of dignity. The loss of dignity comes about through the denial of the participation in the divine, that is, through the dedivinizing of man. But since it is precisely this participation in the divine, this being theomorphic, that essentially constitutes man, the dedivinizing is always followed by a dehumanizing. One cannot dedivinize one-self without dehumanizing oneself-with all the consequences of dehumanization that we shall still have to deal with. Such dedivinization is the consequence of a deliberate closing of oneself to the divine, whether to the rationally divine or the pneumatically divine, that is, the philosophical or the revelational divine. In both cases there occurs a loss of reality, insofar as this divine being, this ground of being, is indeed reality too,- and if one closes oneself to this reality, one possesses in one's range of experience less of this part of reality, this decisive part that constitutes man. (Fs) (notabene)

87c In this sense we speak of a loss of reality. Please understand that I am now giving only a series of concepts,- their application will follow. We must then employ them so that we understand what it is we are really speaking of. Thus we can speak of loss of reality through dedivinizing and dehumanizing. The typical manifestations of this loss of reality are that the reality of man is put in the place of the lost divine reality, which alone grounds the reality of man, so that in place of the ground of being as the cause of being, man as the cause of being advances to the point of exaggeration in the idea that man must be the creator of the world. We will later deal with this special German problem of rebellion, which has its roots in the Romantics. But I will here quote this one sentence of Novalis: "The world shall be as I wish it!"11 There you already have in a nutshell the whole problem of Hitler, the central problem of the dedivinizing and dehumanizing. However, with that the phenomenology of the defection from full humanity is not experienced. This is a problem that has always occupied human beings. How are these defections to be classified? How do they appear? (Fs) (notabene)