Christian Illner’s Die Tiefe Rechte: For such a small book, it is very difficult to do justice to this deep Right.
(Montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Christian Illner: © Christian Illner, Niagara Falls: Frederic Edwin Church, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Christian Illner has thereby earned praise and admiration just as honestly as he has earned scorn and hatred. That is very rare. I have never encountered this absurd contrast in any other book. It often happens that an author overreaches himself, going beyond the limits of his knowledge after a work that is only half successful, or attempts to milk conclusions from his material that the material simply does not support. Neither of these would be anything special, but Illner can’t be accused of either. The reason for this juxtaposition of clarity and obscurantism, goodness and poison, lies in Hegel’s dictum that the owl of Minerva begins its flight only at dusk, a dictum that became a curse to more than one thinker. Next week we will discuss another thinker here, for whom this became his fate in a completely different way and on entirely different historical dimensions: Robert Filmer. Filmer’s tragedy lies in the fact that he wrote at the end of 5,000 years of agrarian high culture, shortly before the Industrial Revolution rendered obsolete his historical derivation of royal authority from paternal authority, a theory against which John Locke’s polemic remained merely a battle against a straw man.
Illner, like all of us at present, stands at the temporal dividing line of a political movement. Future intellectual historians will presumably be left standing rather confused before this book and the reactions to it if they are not familiar with the details of every single year, perhaps even individual months. In this respect, at least, Die Tiefe Rechte has something in common with quite a few books of the 1920s.
So what is the bone of contention?
It is that Illner presents as a demand for the future what ought to have been an ordering retrospective. An imperious, commanding tone jars at a place that should have been reserved for remembrance, understanding, and also forgiveness. What Illner has now, as it has reached the end of its natural development, called the fellowship, we have lived.
But let us begin at the beginning:
Illner wants to show ways of living together within the Right.
To this end, he asks what the Right actually is, rejects this question, and replaces it with the question of who the Right is. The answer: We. We are the Right. That is, those who were “put into the right-wing corner” and then step into this existence as Rightists. That seems insane. Illner refuses to give the Right any content, and yet we are supposed to be the Right? If he does not say what, precisely, is right-wing, how are we then supposed to say who is right-wing?
The riddle resolves itself once one understands that throughout the book Illner consistently projects a contemplation of the past into the future as a demand. Illner’s right-wing “we” already exists. It is a group of people who have traveled a common path over the past ten to twenty years as a right-wing fellowship. In retrospect, we can say who belongs here and who does not. Whoever was there, was there. It is that simple.
The number of fellows in question is also quite manageable. There are a little more than nine, but the fact that this fellowship could exist in this form was due in large part to the fact that the number of all the reasonably relevant people fell within Dunbar’s number. It would be very difficult to find two people who were ever involved and who are separated by more than a single mutual acquaintance.
This fellowship is defined by its shared past. It requires neither a shared worldview nor, least of all, a common programme. It arises through a shared history even if, since then, people have become divided over matters of substance or even personally hate one another. Both of these things have happened often enough within this fellowship. This determination by a shared past, however, naturally works only in retrospect, never when looking toward the future. It is a question of perspective. And the temporal perspectives are both views from the present: one forward, the other backward.
It is actually very simple: There are two non-biological forms of determining a “we.” One looks to the future and rests upon common goals. The other looks to the past and rests upon a shared history. The biological “we” is a separate matter; it is more than a mere reproductive community, but that would take us too far afield here.
Illner pits the “we” of the shared past, in his words the “actually existing right-wing fellowship”1, against the “we” of the shared future. Illner does not accept the latter as a “we” at all. On the contrary: To him it is a trick by which the individual attempts to emancipate himself from the “we.”
“Through this maneuver, the individual Rightist emancipates himself from the claims of a right-wing ‘we’ and gains the freedom to choose a ‘we’ according to his own interests. Identity, however, is unchosen at its innermost core: one must already be someone, possess qualities and a will, in order to be able to choose at all. Identity therefore precedes the choice of identity, guides it, and binds it back to itself.”2
That is indeed true. Illner describes here, entirely correctly, the “we” in the present between past and future. Every “we” has an origin, and if it is to remain a “we,” then it needs a future. Anyone who has ever been part of a fellowship in the literal sense knows this: a group that sets out on a journey together. The fellowship exists, on the one hand, through the path traveled together thus far. From this perspective, goals are irrelevant. One may even have become lost together. At the same time, the fellowship exists through the common goal. What bothers Illner is that the future of the fellowship is not fixed as irrevocably as its past. That is simply the nature of past and future. Someone who suddenly decides, while standing on a cold road in the rain, that he would rather be at home is nevertheless still standing on a cold road in the rain. But he can decide not to continue with the others. Or he can decide to go somewhere else. Not to this summit, but to that one. Whether it is justifiable simply to leave in a particular situation is another matter. But even the question of who leaves whom behind, or indeed abandons whom, is, beyond the metaphors, not quite so simple.
But Illner does not want the fellowship to be capable of breaking apart. “Whoever wants to participate must now begin to internalize the fellowship and regard himself as part of it. There is no place here for a denial of the right-wing ‘we.’ It must become unassailable.”3 That is his demand. Yet only the past is unassailable. Whoever wants an unassailable fellowship gets a fossil.
The fellowship cannot be unassailable if it is to fulfill the other demand Illner makes of it: that of openness. Illner sees that the Right does have goals, above all negative goals, such as stopping the Great Replacement. But it could not agree upon a common final goal. He does not see this emptiness as a space into which he himself would now have to insert a blueprint, which would then have to be imposed upon everyone else, but as an openness toward the future that is yet to come. This is one of the two great strengths of Illner’s thinking: that here, more a disciple of Hegel than of Heidegger, he understands that the true is the whole, and indeed the whole in time:
“The fellowship is its own beginning, its own path, and its own goal all at once. Yet instead of conflating these three states into a single indistinguishable whole, this trinity directs the fellowship by unfolding its temporal moments and bringing each into its own proper right. This can be compared to the growth of a tree, which extends from the stage of the seed to that of the fully formed tree. In a certain sense, the seed already contains growth and tree. Each of the three elements contains the other two, yet they can contain one another only by stepping back for one another. The seed must allow itself to be sublated into growth, and growth fits itself into the mature tree.”4
This quotation is pure Hegelianism, and even the example is modeled on that of bud, blossom, and fruit from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit.5
But beyond intellectual-historical genealogies: this is the only way a movement can be understood at all if it has to live and fight through historical upheavals. Hegel’s thought would never have become what it was if Hegel had not lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the young Hegel, who planted a tree of liberty in Tübingen, would probably have been surprised by the state thinker of the Prussian monarchy. Nevertheless, it is one life and one intellectual path.
We are living in the midst of a period of upheaval, and that means that our own role in this period cannot yet be entirely clear even to ourselves. Within this movement in the process of becoming, which Illner conceives the Right to be, stands his paired opposition of the deep and the shallow Right. If the Right lay before us as something already formed, as a dead result, in Hegelian terms, then this distinction would be pointless; or rather, it would then be very shallow. There would only be different degrees of understanding of the phenomenon of the Right, just as there are popular science and academic science.
But because the Right is in the process of becoming, the situation is that on the one hand it has to deal with the business of the day, while on the other it has to deal with goals and reasons. Illner even speaks of ultimate things. These ultimate things must now be protected from the noise of the day, while conversely the work of the day must not be suffocated by brooding over ultimate things. At the same time, deep thought should not become detached from reality, and the view of the superficial should not become banal. A classic problem of the unity of identity and difference.
And Illner is right: it can only be sublated through a fellowship, community, scene, camp, let us use, if we must, the sterile sociological term “milieu.” Within such a common framework, things that originate in the depths can become prerequisites, self-evident assumptions, or simply habits. Conversely, attachment to something shared prevents the thinker from drifting into navel-gazing within his own world of ideas.
The good news is that the right-wing scene, community, fellowship, whatever one wishes to call it, of the last ten to twenty years has, by and large, accomplished this sublation between shallow and deep. But this is precisely the moment to engage once more with the words “shallow” and “deep.”
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