I’ll be giving a talk in Gdańsk, Poland, on Thursday May 24 at 5.30 p.m. My title is “The Philosophers and the Rise of National Socialism.”
Thanks to Dr. Marek Szymaniak of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk for the invitation to speak.
My thoughts on one philosopher’s relationship to the Nazis is here.
Gdańsk is also the birthplace of Schopenhauer, which intrigues me for some reason.
Good luck, Stephen!
The most important philosophical influence on Hitler, by far: Dietrich Eckhart. The Jew symbolized NEGATION OF THE IDEA OF IMMORTALITY. Too “bound to the earth.”
The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul. [From Dietrich Eckart: Ein Vermachtnis, edited by Alfred Rosenberg (Munich: Verlag Frz. Eher Nachf., 1928), pp. 214-219.]
Let us repeat once more, and again and again, the most important point that has been made up to now: the Jewish religion completely lacks the belief in a supra-sensible Beyond. Indeed, one even gets an almost positive impression that, in the course of time, everything that in the least could foster a belief in an incorporeal life after death was intentionally eliminated.
The Jews, with their religion oriented to purely earthly affairs, stand alone in the world! This should not be forgotten for a single moment; it is highly significant. For it is this exceptional situation which explains why a “shady nation” such as that of the Jews has survived the greatest and most glorious nations, and will continue to survive, until the end of all time, until the hour of salvation strikes for all mankind. The Jewish nation will not perish before this hour strikes.
The world is preserved, as we shall see, only by a positive yea-saying to the world. Among the Jewish people this world-affirmation is totally pure, without any admixture of world-denial. All other nations that have ever existed, and exist today, had, or have, such an admixture, characterized by the idea of a Hereafter, even if only a trace of it. This mere trace would have sufficed, or would suffice, to provide the necessary counterweight to the unadulterated yea-saying to the world, as embodied in the Jewish people.
For the inner light-and belief in immortality is the inner light-does not need always to shine with the brightest glow in order to produce an effect; it must simply be there, it must not be allowed to be snuffed out, or otherwise mankind would be lost forever to the terrestrial world. Everything takes its own time, however, a fact which is all too often overlooked.
The denial of the world needs a still longer time in order to grow so that it will acquire a lasting predominance over affirmation of the world.
At this time it seems again to have sunk to a zero point; its opposite, symbolized by the Jewish people, is triumphant as never before. It seems as if the inner light has completely vanished from this earth. But, to anticipate, it merely seems that way. Denial of the world cannot perish because it is part of the soul of mankind and the soul is immortal.
Where the idea of the immortal dwells, the longing for the eternal or the withdrawal from temporality must always emerge again; hence a denial of the world will always reappear. And this is the meaning of the non-Jewish peoples: they are the custodians of world-negation, of the idea of the Hereafter, even if they maintain it in the poorest way. Hence, One or another of them can quietly go under, but what really matters lives on in their descendants. If, however, the Jewish people were to perish, no nation would be left which would hold world-affirmation in high esteem—the end of all time would be here.
This would also be the case if the Zionist idea were to become a reality, namely, if the entire Jewish people would unite to become a national entity in Palestine Or somewhere else. Such a unification of Jews has never existed before: this must be stressed not twice but three times, inasmuch as it is little known. Long before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem a large part of the Jews lived in the diaspora, that is, dispersed among the “heathen” people.
And, as every schoolboy knows, at the beginning of their history they were “guests” among the Egyptians. What arose afterward in Palestine was anything but a state structure. At best it was an attempt to build one, when it was not a preparatory school for the exploitation or the destruction of foreign peoples. To the Jew Weininger [1] his own nation is like an invisible cohesive web of slime fungus (plasmodium), existing since time immemorial and spread over the entire earth; and this expansionism, as he correctly observes (without, of course, proving it), is an essential component of the idea, of the nature of Judaism.
This immediately becomes clear if we again regard the Jewish people as the embodiment of world-affirmation. Without it, nothing of a terrestrial character, and thus no nation, is conceivable. Hence, the Jew, the only consistent and consequently the only viable yea-sayer to the world, must be found wherever other men bear in themselves—if only in the tiniest degree—a compulsion to overcome the world.
The Jew represents the still necessary counterweight to them; otherwise that urgent craving would be fulfilled immediately and thereby would not usher in the salvation of the world (since the Jewish people would still remain in existence), but would destroy it in a different way through the elimination of the spiritual power without which it cannot exist either. I will discuss this idea more fully later on; here I wish merely to demonstrate that the world could not exist if the Jews were living by themselves. This is why an old prophecy proclaims that the end of the world will arrive on the day when the Jews will have established the state of Palestine…
From all this it follows that Judaism is part of the organism of mankind just as, let us say, certain bacteria are part of man’s body, and indeed the Jews are as necessary as bacteria. The body contains, as we know, a host of tiny organisms without which it would perish, even though they feed on it. Similarly, mankind needs the Jewish strain in order to preserve its vitality until its earthly mission is fulfilled. In other words, the world-affirmation exemplified by Judaism in its purest form, though disastrous in itself, is a condition of man’s earthly being—as long as men exist—and we cannot even imagine its nonexistence. It will collapse only when all mankind is redeemed.
Thus, we are obliged to accept the Jews among us as a necessary evil, for who knows how many thousands of years to come. But just as the body would become stunted if the bacteria increased beyond a salutary number, our nation too—to describe a more limited circle—would gradually succumb to a spiritual malady if the Jew were to become too much for it. Were he to leave us entirely (this is the aim of Zionism, or at least what it pretends to be) it would be just as disastrous as if he were to dominate us.
The mission of the German nation will come to an end—and this is my firm conviction-with the last hour of mankind. But we could never reach it if we lost world affirmation, the Jew among us, because no life is possible without world-affirmation. On the other hand, if the Jew were continually to stifle us, we would never be able to fulfill our mission, which is the salvation of the world, but would, to be frank, succumb to insanity, for pure world-affirmation, the unrestrained will for a vain existence, leads to no other goal.
It would literally lead to a void, to the destruction not only of the illusory earthly world but also of the truly existent, the spiritual. Considered in himself the Jew represents nothing else but this blind will for destruction, the insanity of mankind. It is known that Jewish people are especially prone to mental disease. “Dominated by delusions,” said Schopenhauer about the Jew… To strip the world of its soul, that and nothing else is what Judaism wants. This, however, would be tantamount to the world’s destruction.
Even now, while the Jews still live among us, all their undertakings reveal this aim, and necessarily so. Their aim is to strip mankind of its soul. This is why they endeavor to break any form behind which the living soul is operative. For as arch-materialists it is their insane opinion that it is precisely the spiritual, which they sense only obscurely, that is connected with the form as a matter of life and death and must perish with it.
Hence they are also, all and sundry, anarchists, consciously or unconsciously. In fact, they cannot be anything else but opponents of order and law, because order and law, in a unique way, bear the radiant imprint of a purer world. Schiller calls order “the daughter of heaven,” and for the divine origin of law we find much evidence in Schiller and still more in Goethe.
Without order and law no conception of state can be actualized, since they are the indispensable foundation for it. For this very reason, the Jew, the mortal enemy of order and law, can never create a viable state in Palestine. The result would again be chaos. For this word, correctly translated, means an infinite void, nothingness.
Best,
Richard
Thank you, Richard.
I need to look more into the question of the weight of Ekhart’s influence.