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Moving Beyond The Right Wing — Left Wing Dichotomy — 2

 

The following quote is from Jakob Fries’s 1816 pamphlet, ‘The Danger Posed by the Jews to German Well-Being and Character’, translated in a footnote to Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right by H.S. Nisbet:

Jews can be subjects of our government, but as Jews they can never become citizens of our people, for as Jews they want to be a distinct people, and so they necessarily separate themselves from our German national community. Indeed, they form not merely a people, but at the same time they form a state. The basic laws of Jewish religion are at the same time the basic laws of their state, their rabbis are at the same time their chiefs, to whom the people owe the highest reverence and the most blind obedience . ..Their nationality signifies in itself only their physical origin from a distinct people. Here we have to judge them as favourably as possible. No man who loves justice wants to stand by the proposition that black is the colour of slaves, or any other proposition of that kind. In every civilized state, the same innate rights of a free man, equal protection and equal civil rights, pertain to everyone, whether by origin a Saxon, Wend, or Jew. But let us observe that we may not concede these same innate rights to anyone if he is not ready to fulfil to the state in full measure all the duties of a free man and a citizen. And here, even disregarding religion, state, and trade, and considering their mere derivation, we encounter the first great failing of Jewishness. They have existed for millennia between all other peoples on the earth, and they have cultivated themselves only in becoming rich through bargaining and haggling; they teach this to one another and that is how they preserve the purity of their race . .. It is not against the Jews, our brothers, but against Jewishness, that we declare war . . . Jewishness is a relic of an earlier, uncivilized age, which must not be merely limited, but wholly extirpated. To improve the civil condition of the Jews would be precisely to extirpate Jewry, to destroy the society of conniving second-hand street peddlers and tradesmen . . . For the Jews themselves it is of the greatest importance that Jewishness should be made an end of as soon as possible . . .So the Jewish caste, wherever it has been admitted, has always had over the whole people, above and below, from the highest to the lowest, a frightful demoralizing power. Here is the most important moment of this whole affair: that this caste should he extirpated root and branch, since of all societies and states, secret or public, it is plainly the most dangerous to the state.

Jakob Fries was a liberal, today we identify this point of view with the right wing. I am not specifically talking about Jews but exploring the line of thought. Jews are considered to be a distinct nation owing allegiance to their own Rabbis and so not capable of integration with the German community. A distinction is drawn between Jewish religion or Jewishness and the Jews and it is Jewishness that needs to be extirpated. The integration of Jews is possible only by extirpating Jewishness from them. Here an abstract notion of identity is in play where the other is not allowed to be different and tolerated because toleration is always of someone different but has to be assimilated by eliminating what makes them different. To be integrated is to be identical and difference is the cause of conflict. The other cannot be allowed to be and has to be either integrated or eliminated and the difference between Jewishness and Jews becomes a difference without a distinction. Fanaticism is the elimination of difference.

The Left on the other hand wants to get rid of identity — a form of self-love. The predilection towards the self always makes the other an enemy. The philosopher Epicurus was asked about the Pythagorean view of abolishing property and pooling together all resources. His reaction was that such a view is based on distrust of others. The Left wants to give full play to difference over identity. Toleration is based on equivocal standards because there is an asymmetry in social relations between different classes. The value system of one class is nothing but a means of oppression towards another and tolerance is not based on an extension of the same universal standards to others but on denying the self for the sake of the other. 

Both sides do not believe that there are any universal standards of values applicable to human beings by their being human beings. For one side values are ‘our’ values by us being this group of people, for the other values are relative to those who set values and they are just instruments of domination over another.  



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