GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OP FASCISM 6l
by a process of exposition and argument Fascism would
emphatically disassociate itself from the Rationalism of
such a writer as Mill. 1
Professing a general distrust of
abstract reasoning, it has much in common with the
criticisms of scientific method which have been authori-
tatively put forward during the last two decades. 1 It is
the nature of reason, it is pointed out, to analyse and
abstract; analysis and abstraction may be suitable methods
for the scientist and the mathematician, but they are
inapplicable to life, for life is an art, and its nature, therefore,
can only be grasped intuitively. Life, again, is a whole;
to analyse it into its component parts and then to
classify the parts is to destroy the. whole. Life, finally, is a
process, a constant flow of change, and to pigeon-hole
it into the abstract categories of the intellect is to arrest
the process and to falsify the flow. The influence of con-
temporary anti-rationalist philosophies, particularly those
of Bergson,* and the neo-idealist philosopher Gentile, who
has held important posts in the Italian fascist government,
is fermenting here, more particularly in the thought of
Italian Fascism. Life is conceived by Bergson as an active
and continuously creative principle. To try to freeze this
principle into immobility for the purpose of inspection,
to pin it down for dissection by the scalpel of the intellect,
is, Bergson insists, to falsify
it. Its nature can be grasped,
the fascist adds, only by the instinctive insight of the man
of action, by the vision of the saint, or by the secular
wisdom of the peasant whose roots are in the soil. The
German thinker Heidegger has announced that he
learns more from peasants than from philosophers. Hence
to the
it is to the business house, to the military academy,
open fields, above all to the battlefield, and not to the
study or the laboratory that we must go for an understand-
l
Scc Chapter XIV, p. 534, for an account of the "distinctive
characteristics of Mill's Rationalism.
Sec my Giadt to Mod** Thought, Chapter IV, pp. 100-106, for a
luminary of these criticisms.
'See my Guide to Pkitoopty, Chapter XIX,
Bergson's philosophy.
for an account of