At the beginning of this lecture, we talked about the existential self-reflection of the human regarding his actual being, in terms of being free from his apparent total dependence on the biological, sociological and physiological laws of the “type” that he belongs to, as stipulated by naturalism. If we talk a little more about this essential human freedom, then we will want to confront it with its dialectical opposite—fate. To define something as fateful, only things that oppose my freedom come into question, in the sense of the fate within me as well as the fate around me. The latter is primarily the material factor, “material” in the wider sense of the word, meaning also “economic.” Consequently, we are talking about man’s economic situation. Finally, we need to consider his external fate in the sense of his social situation, since it is understood by sociologism as the only determinant of human existence. Therefore, we are faced with the problem of historical materialism, which claims that the material (economic) conditions or the social situation clearly and unambiguously determine the social “being” and the consciousness of the human being.

  Is it true, we ask ourselves, that the (social) environment has such character-forming power that the individual is completely dependent on it and is not only psychologically influenced, but in fact dominated by it? For example, let us look at the changes in character that the psychologist and characterologist Emil Utitz believed he observed in long-term concentration camp prisoners. These character changes, as he interpreted them, were a displacement of the character structure towards schizoidia ([Ernst] Kretschmer). The prisoners became increasingly irritable as well as apathetic. What we need to remember, however, is that—verifiably—every single one of those prisoners still had the inner freedom to resist these (only seemingly necessary, and externally induced) deformations of character. Time and again it was evident that there were also concentration camp prisoners who could suppress their irritation and overcome their apathy. Every human being has this inner freedom until their very last breath, even when faced with apparently overwhelming influences from their surroundings. And even though everything was taken away from this concentration camp prisoner, he kept his inner freedom. Whatever fate befell him, he held onto the freedom to react to his fate in this way or that way; and there was indeed a “this way or that way,” even in the concentration camp. If others, who were themselves concentration camp prisoners, have interpreted the psychological reactions to being imprisoned differently, in fact in accordance with Freudian psychoanalysis, and claimed that imprisonment and life in the camp caused a “regression,” a regression to more primitive forms of instinctive behavior, I myself can only refer to the fact that there were always individual cases that proved that a person is capable of escaping these apparently inevitable character changes. There were enough examples showing that, for some, the identical experience of the situation in the concentration camp led to nothing like a regression; on the contrary, it led to a progression, to an inner “striding forward and stepping up,” perhaps in the sense of Hölderlin’s observation that went like this: “When I stand upon my misfortune, I rise higher.”

  However, we don’t want to do Marxism an injustice by claiming that it asserts that external, economic and societal conditions solely and unambiguously determine the consciousness of man. Whoever claims this is not a true Marxist, but only a Marxist in a vulgar sense. For even doctrinaire Marxism admits that the relationship of dependence between social existence and consciousness is not just one-sided, but that consciousness also affects social existence. That a person’s class clearly determines their class consciousness is only half the Marxist truth. We are still keeping to Marxist thought when we add that the opposite is also true: class consciousness influences a person’s social situation—or rather, their political development. If a Marxist were to maintain that the fate and fortune of every human being is indeed categorically dependent on the socioeconomic structure, then we would only have to ask this Marxist how he can justify talking about “education in class consciousness,” because education always assumes the pupil’s freedom, the freedom to adapt and take one’s (social as well as historical) fate into one’s own hands.* So we can see that freedom is also a precondition, both in socialism and Marxism, as a means in the political struggle. Let us then ask ourselves whether or not it is also implicitly assumed in the ultimate political goal of socialism. And we find that freedom really is included in the ideal form of a community, the creation of which is the very purpose of socialist politics.

  However, such a definition of community is far removed from the concept that we could almost call “political zoology.” If you take this term literally, you will immediately understand what it means: a picture of a human being as a pure zoon politikon!** It’s the idea of a human being as one whose society would be that of a creature, zoonic. But this is not the case; rather, every true human community contains a free and intentional commitment to it—the individual is not simply a slave to, and rooted in, the community, like an animal, but the individual always decides in favor of the community. In such a decision lies the impetus for freedom, and so we can see that there is a fundamental relationship between human freedom and human community.

  Furthermore, this version of the idea of human community as one that is founded on freedom differs from the idea of “community” in totalitarianism, which doesn’t actually mean true community, but rather a mere collective. The old question of whether the individual or the community is more important is a rather juvenile one—and perhaps people only continue to ask it because apparently humanity is also still in a state of puberty. However, we stand by the view that, besides the fundamental relationship between freedom and community, there exists a genuine dialectical relationship between the individual and the community. And we can formulate it thus: only the community can ensure the meaning of individuality for the individuals, but also, only the safeguarding of individuality for the individuals can ensure the meaning of community. This, and this alone, is what distinguishes the community from a mere collective, or even from “the masses.” For in the collective, the human being is not only unindividual but, in fact, inhuman; in the collective, the human being gets lost, since for the collective, he only has “meaning” as just one of many productive elements. We have seen where this ends, in the euthanasia perpetrated by the National Socialist state, which, from the outset, viewed life that was no longer productive as “unworthy of life” and, as such, had to be destroyed. Meanwhile, every value that was truly human, everything that made the person valuable, even beyond his productivity, and that made his existence decent and dignified, was no longer recognized.

  Therefore, in this section we have ascertained that human freedom is also required for a proper understanding of Marxism, both in the sense of a means as well as in the sense of an ultimate goal. Or, in other words, that socialism can never do without freedom—neither as socialismus militans nor as socialismus triumphans. And therewith, in the course of our examination of the problem of historical materialism, we have effected its change to personal socialism by revealing the impetus for freedom.

  Now we come to the next point, where we have to confront human freedom not with the fateful situation around us, but in fact with the (apparently) fateful situation within ourselves. However, our inner fate is represented primarily through what we commonly refer to as a disposition. This brings us right into the middle of a critique of biologism—having critically examined sociologism earlier—for a person’s traits represent the biological dispositions within him, both in the sense of “inherited” familial dispositions and in the sense of national dispositions or characterological tendencies. In this regard, I would like to immediately stress the following: although all dispositions within a human being are fateful and, as such, lie outside his freedom and sense of responsibility from the outset, they are in themselves, in terms of their value, either neutral or else ambivalent. They are just possibilities—which are only actualized through a form of personal decision. It’s only the actualization of these inner possibilities in and through the individual that can produce a value or a non-value, a virtue or a vice, from originally value-neutral dispositions. And so we have now arrived in the middle of the problem of collective guilt. But here, we must distinguish strictly between three things. Collective guilt actually exists in three forms, but these three forms of collective guilt are hardly ever referred to in current parlance. The following three forms are the only ones in which guilt or responsibility can truly be collective:

  1. Collective liability. Firstly, so-called collective guilt can be understood—and thereby make sense—as making members of a particular collective in its entirety collectively liable for the consequences of misdeeds committed by the collective as such. I will now illustrate how collective liability can apply even when the individual bears no personal responsibility: if I have to undergo an appendectomy—the necessity of which I surely cannot be held responsible for—I am not “guilty” of being afflicted with appendicitis. And, nevertheless, I will owe a fee to the doctor who performed my operation and will be “liable” for the payment. And so, a nation in its entirety and also every single individual who belongs to that nation, is liable for the fact that it had to be liberated from tyranny and terror by other nations, and that those other freedom-loving nations had to sacrifice their young people on the battlefields in order to free all these blameless individuals from their government—since they were not able to do it themselves, and since they were too powerless to do it, as they themselves continue to assert. Thus, I am jointly liable for the consequences of these crimes, even if I am personally innocent of the crimes that my country committed on the world stage.

  2. Guilt in joining a collective. If I have joined a collective, let’s say a political party, then I may be personally guilty to a certain extent; I may have made myself complicit in any crimes that were committed under the party’s policies. But firstly: one doesn’t join a nation, so I cannot in any way be held responsible for coincidentally belonging to a nation that, for example, once declared an illegal war. Secondly: even if I have joined a political party and, in so doing, have become complicit in the crimes the party has committed, even then, it is a question of whether and to what extent I was verifiably put under pressure and whether this act of joining the party, for which I am now held responsible, was more or less enforced, against my will, and was something that was neither done entirely of my own free will, nor entirely within my responsibility. Now, it may not be easy to decide upon this admittedly sensitive question in individual cases. However, a person can only claim the right to condemn others and to admonish someone with the fact that they should have been able to withstand pressure and coercion—only he has the right to admonish others who can prove that he himself withstood them. Only he who would rather have gone to the concentration camp himself than give in to the pressure—only he should be allowed to condemn the person who capitulated. It’s all too easy for those who were not in the same situation as the accused—for example, those who were sitting in safety abroad—to demand heroism or even martyrdom from others, or to accuse others of weakness and cowardice.

  3. Collective responsibility. Finally (and this can cause misunderstandings), collective guilt can also be understood as the form of collective responsibility according to which every individual is somehow jointly responsible for every other individual—“one for all,” as the saying goes. But then we also have to complete the motto: “and all for one!” If each person really is jointly responsible for every other person, then I would rather we said, “Everyone for everyone.” And here, any instance of Pharisaism would be extremely inappropriate, whereby one nation might be weighed against another. Let’s admit, every human being, every single one, as well as every single nation, is constantly “accompanied by” evil. And, to use a musical expression, this accompaniment is truly “obbligato.” Evil is everywhere! And just as in the last few years we have seen all that man is capable of, we have also learned that every single human being is capable of it. Of course, evil will not become a reality in every individual; but evil is present in everyone, at least as a possibility. And evil was not just a possibility in everyone in the past, but it is and remains a possibility in everyone. Just let us not believe this: that the devil took up residence in a nation or that he monopolized a particular party. Those that think National Socialism created evil in the first place are also mistaken. That would be overestimating the powers of National Socialism because it was not creative or inventive, not even when it comes to evil. National Socialism did not create evil, it just encouraged it—perhaps like no other system before it. It encouraged evil through a negative selection process that it operated, and through the power of an evil example to beget evil.

  But shall we now turn the tables? Should we do the same thing under another name, should we do the same thing over and over again and just change the nuance? I know a boy who was once asked whether he would like to help himself to an alcoholic drink, and in his linguistic clumsiness he replied, “No, thank you, I’m an anti-Semite when it comes to alcohol.” This is what many of today’s “isms” look like. Although people may not be anti-Semites in the actual, original sense (in other words, people may not be anti-Semitic when it comes to “Semites”) they are “anti-Semites” regarding something else instead. Using the same means that exist within the system people claim to fight, they want to defeat the system itself. However, there arises an inherent contradiction, not dissimilar to the one contained in, say, an “association of anti-associationists.” And as we said before, only the nuance would be different, so we would be correct in saying the prefix has stayed the same, i.e., the “anti”! And so another slogan would be born. But we should have had enough of impactful slogans by now. For we have not only seen what we have always seen: one person collapsing from the impact of a blow. We have seen much more than that. We have seen an entire nation collapsing in on itself, impacted by a slogan.

  What we need now is to break the chain of evil—not to repeat the same mistakes and repay evil with evil, but to use this unique opportunity that we now have to overcome evil precisely by not perpetuating it, by not insisting on “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” For if anyone tries to use that proverb to bring the Old Testament into the debate, we would be justified in responding with a different citation from the same book that supports our position—the story of Cain. If you ask people what the purpose of the mark of Cain was, most will say that God wanted to stigmatize Cain in order to make others aware of this first murderer. But far from it. If we check the passage we discover that after God imposed the penance on him, Cain objected that he would now be driven out, exiled and slain; and to prevent this, he was given the mark of Cain, precisely so that people would not do him any further harm, would not go on committing murder—in other words, would not answer murder with murder. And truly, as is expressly written, the murder of Cain should be more harshly punished than even Cain’s murder of Abel. This is how it was meant, and only in this way was it possible not to perpetuate fratricide.

  Let us return to our original question as to whether such a thing as collective responsibility exists—responsibility in the sense that we are no longer allowed to talk of “guilt”—and after everything that has been said, we could articulate it like this: insofar as collective responsibility exists, it can only be a global collective responsibility. The right hand should not imagine that not it, but the left hand has been afflicted with boils; for it is always the whole organism that is sick. And so, one nation should not rejoice over the fact that it was the Germans and not itself that degenerated into National Socialism, for it was the whole human race that had fallen sick.

  Thus, we can see how a critical evaluation of the issues concerning collective guilt leads to the idea of global responsibility.

  But it’s not solely the “biological” in me—the predispositions which determine my inner fate—that my freedom has to confront. It’s also the psychological that forms part of fate, along with the sociological and the biological. The psychological fate in me is the “id” (Freud). For it’s the id that is intrinsically opposed to the ego and its freedom. The id drives—and whom does it drive? We are thus asking about the object in the grammatical sense. And psychoanalysis gives the answer: the id drives the ego. The ego therefore also becomes an object in the psychological sense! And it becomes an object to such an extent that from the psychoanalytic perspective, in the end, its character as a subject seems to have been fully conjured away. Ultimately, the ego itself is interpreted as being made up of instinctual drives (ego-drives). We counter that psychoanalytical concept of human existence as essentially dominated by instinctual drives with the concept of Jaspers, when he spoke of human existence being a “decisive existence”—an existence that doesn’t simply exist per se but rather constantly decides what it is. We speak of being human as being responsible because human beings are intrinsically free.