Page 48 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

Hitler, drawn and governed by the eternal true and ideal, the loftiest ideals of the forms of beauty and proportion, seeks to romantically transform and unify Germany’s struggles in spirit and will, by turning everyone’s gaze towards Plato’s ideal of the Good and the Beautiful.
By encouraging Plato’s ideals of the Good and the Beautiful, Plato and Hitler confront us, once again, with the age-old controversy concerning Philosopher Kings, or “preaching programmakers,” in Nazi Germany, and their ideals of the absolute against the relative, the objective against the subjective, the universal against the individual, these conjugated in monism against pluralism. In Hitler’s own words, man dwells for higher ideals, and these, in turn exist for him. “We may therefore state,” says Hitler, “that not only does man live in order to serve higher ideals, but that, conversely, these higher ideals also provide the premise of his existence, and thus, the circle closes.”88 To close the circle evokes Plato’s closed monism. In Mr. Berlin’s words,
“the enemy of pluralism is monism – the ancient belief that there is a single harmony of truths into which everything, if it is genuine, in the end must fit. The consequence of this belief (which is something different from, but akin to, what Karl Popper called essentialism – to him the root of all evil) is that those who know should command those who do not. Those who know the answers to some of the great problems of mankind must be obeyed, for they alone know
88 Hitler, Adolf and Johnson, Alvin. Mein Kampf, Complete and Unabridged, Fully Annotated. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939. 380.
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