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THE JEW OF LINZ This is by no means a figure of speech. The history of mathematics has known many cases when a discovery made by one scientist remains unknown until it is later reproduced by another with striking precision. In the letter written on the eve of his fatal duel, Galois made several assertions of paramount importance concerning integrals of algebraic functions. more than twenty years later Kiemann, who undoubtedly knew nothing about the letter of Galois, found anew and proved exactly the same assertions. Another example: alier ,obachevski and Bolyai laid the foundation of non-Euclidcan geometry independently of one another, it became known that two other men, Gauss and Schweikart, also working independently, had both come to the same results ten years before. One is overwhelmed by a curious feeling when one sees the same designs as if drawn by a single hand in the work done by four scientists quite independently of one another.‘" What Shafarevitch says here about mathematics, as the product of a single intellect expressing itself through a variety of human instruments, is, as I shall demonstrate, Wittgenstein’s idea of language in general. In Wittgenstein’s philosophy, language (not merely the Will) uses its human instruments as vehicles for its own expression. It is not, as we naively think, a person who says something, but rather the proposition - language itself -that says something, through the mouth of a person. Anglo-Saxon readers, doubtful that Shafarevitch counts as a respectable lineage for the doctrine, might be surprised to find Coleridge expressing the same idea: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each and God of all?" I Now despite Wittgenstein claiming that his thought was one hundred percent Hebraic, on this one crucial issue his thought was one hundred percent non-Hebraic, for via Schopenhauer, he adopted this ancient Aryan doctrine - the supreme Jewish blasphemy - as his own. 22 In Hitler, as I shall demonstrate, the unitary Will of Schopenhauer is split on racial lines he thought there really was a single Aryan racial will, whose self-:will conscious realization of its own nature was in himself. He feared that this original Aryan doctrine of a single racial will was being parasitized by Jewish internationalism - externally the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, but metaphysically the no-ownership theory. And his discovery of the Aryan racial mind and its relation to history, philosophy and race was made while he was attending the Reafschule with Wittgenstein. What, then, is this strange and obscure doctrine I am claiming Wittgenstein expounded?Surprisingly, it is best approached through the religions of the Aryan invaders of India, who gave us both a mystical doctrine of the nature ========
FIVE Mystical Experience and the Self Wagner’s intended last opera - The Victors - was to have been on the life of Buddha, interpreted from the perspective of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Schopenhauer propounded the curious idea that Buddhism, rather than Judaism, was the original source of Christianity, and he outlined a sort of Aryan Christianity, whose nature Paul Rose presents as follows: there is one important idea in his revolutionary approach to religion that was to resound in the writings of Wagner and other racial determinists. This is the idea of a restored ‘Aryan Christianity’ - the original Christianity having been distortedly associated with Judaism in the course of history. In one essay, Schopenhauer remarks that, except for its attitude to animals, Christian morality comes close to his adored Buddhism: ‘We can scarcely doubt that like the idea of a god become man, the Christian morality originates from India and may have come to Judaea by way of Egypt so that Christianity would be a reflected splendour of the primordial light of India from the ruins of Egypt -but unfortunately it fell on Jewish soil. For Schopenhauer, the only authentically Jewish religious ideas are the pernicious ones of optimism, rationalism and free will; anything positive had been filched by the Jews from others. For instance, the nobly pessimistic concept of the Fall was taken from the Persians. In fact, ‘Judaism’ proper, he asserts, was invented only after Cyrus had liberated the Judean captives of Babylon: previously the Jews had worshipped Baa1 and Moloch! Christianity, however, is Aryan in origin and has nothing in common with the (Semitic) delusions of the Jews: ‘The New Testament, on the other hand, must somehow be of Indian origin. Christ’s teaching sprung from Indian wisdom has covered the old and quite different trunk of Judaism. . . Everything that is true in Christianity is Pound also in Buddhism and Brahminism.’ ,Any actual historical connection of the Jews with the origins of Christianity is explained away thus: ‘We should have to assume that the religious and moral elements in Christianity were put together by Alexandrian Jews acquainted with Indian and Buddhist doctrines.’ 118 The impact of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical revolutionary anti-Semitism on Wagner was immediate, and Wagner’s correspondence of the 1850s shows that he grasped the anti-Jewish potential of the whole Schopenhauerian system, especially its conception of a de-Judaized ‘Aryan Christianity’. This rapid recognition of Schopenhauer’s genius was made easier by the fact, as he himself explained, that his idol was expressing coherently notions that he himself had long intuited. One detailed example was the idea of the Christian Grail, which Wagner had already adduced in his ‘Wibelungen’ essay of 1849 as an allegory of the racial Aryan character of Christianity.’ Such was ‘Aryan Christianity’ - anti-Semitic in the extreme and totally in accord with the unsustainable doctrine of I Iouston Stewart Chamberlain that Jesus was not a Jew. Rose continues, sonic pages later, with a further outline: The Schopenhauerian complex of ardently anti-Jewish notions - Aryan Christianity, Jewish cruelty to animals, the need for a renouncing Mitleid to redeem men from Jewish materialism and egoism - rapidly found artistic expression in Wagner’s operatic plans of the 1850s, not only in Tristan but also in the drafts for The Conquerors (Die Sieger) and Parsifai, and even in the seemingly Teutonic Gotterdammerung. These works were all sketched out or developed conflatedly during 1856-8 in the aftermath of Wagner’s exposure to Schopenhauer. The Conquerors told a story of the Buddha in terms of renunciation and reincarnation - the fundamentals of Aryan Christianity. This subject was closely bound up with the first scenario of PurstJzl. Wagner had been struck by the medieval Christian poem in 1845 but it was only the Schopenhauerian revelation of Buddhist sympathy for animals that gave him the inspiration for his own individual treatment of the theme in 1857: the Buddhist/Aryan Parsifal ‘takes the animals’ incomplete existence upon himself and becomes the world’s redeemer’ - this was Wagner’s novel explanation of what became the Good Friday Music in the finished opera. Kundry’s peculiar history of transformations in the opera may also be read as a case of reincarnations, while Parsifal’s ritual of the Grail stems not from the Eucharist of ‘Jewish’ Christianity but from a purer Aryan Christian source. As to Gotterdamerung, Wagner placed his thoughts on changing its ending to a more Schopenhauerian ‘renunciatory’ one in the same notebook in which he jotted down The Conquerors in May 1856. Of course, the Jews per se are not mentioned in these drafts and finished works. As with Jesus of Nazareth, they do not need to be attacked directly since the anti-Jewish message impregnates the entire conception of the drama. Buddhism and Aryan Christianity, renunciation and self-destruction, were by definition non-Jewish, and any opera on these subjects was ipso facto a repudiation of Judaism. . . .* We can imagine that the climactic moment of The Victors would have been the Enlightenment, following the night’s meditation which Buddha 119 entered upon with his hand touching the earth as a visible sign of his resolution to succeed in his great endeavour. The musical build-up to this through the meditative night, and its musical resolution in the Great Enlightenment, might have rivaled the famous chord in Tristan und Isolde - who knows? The theme is certainly worthy material for a great opera. It was never written, but Wagner chose the theme because of his reading of Schopenhauer, who strongly endorsed what he understood to be the meta-physics of self-transcendence behind Buddhism. What exactly was this metaphysics? Whatever it was, it was no mere end of-life conversion for Wagner. As is clear from his prose writings about Schopenhauer, it is discernible in other of his operas. Michael Tanner, for example, identifies it in Tristun und Isolde, and expounds Wagner’s Schopenhaurian metaphysics as follows: In the centre of the work, at the climax of the most famous part of the so-called love duet, ‘0 sink hernieder, Nacht der Lieb’ (Oh sink upon us, night of love), the lovers sing together, ‘selbst dann bin ich die Welt’ (then I myself am the world), an astoundingly audacious claim, which means that they have expanded to embrace everything, or everything has contracted to satisfy their joint solipsism. One might have expected, given that they were going to be so extravagant, that they would say ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, and if they were only a little less extra-ordinary that is what they would have said. But Wagner gives them the logic of their convictions: if each of them is the world, then they are one another. That, too, is something from which they don’t flinch, as they move on to the final stretch of the duet, and do ,indeed exchange names, that is identities, building up on wave after wave oforchestral sound, in what is without competition as the longest, most extreme climax in music. . . .3 That is, the lovers sing together ‘selbst dann bin ich die Welt’ (then I myself am the world).’ We have here a statement in song of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics - as interpreted by Wagner - in which the individual self falls away. How might this tie in, as Wagner thought it did, to Buddhist ideas of renunciation? The great doctrine revealed by Buddha after the Enlightenment was the means to deliverance from suffering; and its essence - the Anatta doctrine -involved some sort of realization that the subject of experience - the self - did not exist. We have already noted a similar-sounding doctrine in the first book of the young Wittgenstein, the Tractatus. And the last sections of the Tractutus are shot through with a very strange logical mysticism, perhaps the most striking feature of the book. We read there about the Self, for example, the vatic pronouncements that 120 The world and life are one. I am my world. (The microcosm.) The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If I wrote a book ‘The world as I found it’, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. The subject does not belong to the world but it is the limit of the world. Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted? You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye. And from nothing in the end of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye. For the field of sight has not a form like this:5 And in the next comment but one, we read, ‘Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.’ This, and Wittgenstein’s earlier comment ‘I am my world’, sounds, of course, very like the lovers of Wagner’s opera singing, in the insight that love has brought them, ‘selbst dann bin ich die Welt’. In fact the doctrine here does not merely sound the same; it is, I am arguing, the very same doctrine, traccable in both Wagner and Wittgenstein, through their joint philosophical source Schopenhauer - and thus to oriental mysticism as interpreted by Schopenhauer. Wittgenstein even recorded the following archetypically Indian thought on 23 May 1915, in his Notebooks: ‘There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul. . . .’ That Wittgenstein’s interest in these matters was no mere flash-in-the-pan youthful infatuation with Schopenhauer is also clear, for it is clearly 121 expressed in many of the comments faithfully recorded in the late 1920s by notables of the Vienna Circle such as Moritz Schlick. The Vienna Circle was largely composed of logical positivists of left-wing political orientation and its entirely negative view of ‘bourgeois mysticism’ followed the Communist Party line. Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein offers the following, on the reception of Wittgenstein and his Tractatus by the mysticism-hating Vienna Circle, quoting the philosopher Rudolf Carnap: I had erroneously believer that his attitude to metaphysics was similar to ours. I had not paid sufficient attention to the statements in his book about the mystical, because his feeling and thoughts in this area were too divergent from mine. Only personal contact with him helped me to see more clearly his attitude at this point.6 Sometimes, Monk says, Wittgenstein would turn his back on the Positivists and read them the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali mystic, whose play, King of the Dark Chamber, proved sufficient inspiration to later have Wittgenstein and his student, Yorick Smythies, product their own version in colloquial English.7 Wittgenstein saw Tagore’s poetry as directly related in content to the central themes of the Tractatus. Tagore, of course, was a devout Hindu, and his work is permeated by Hindu mysticism, in which the goal of religious practice is to realize the identity of the individual soul with the world soul, the same idea that Wittgenstein had written in the Notebooks on 23 May 1915. In Hinduism, the individual Atman turns out, at the moment of supreme religious realization, to be identical with Brahman. In the other great oriental religion, Buddhism, the supreme realization is presented slightly differently as discovery of the non-existence of the Atman - the individual soul - in the first place. The denial of the existence of the Atman is in fact a defining doctrine of the Buddhist faith, described (from the Pali language of Ceylon, in which the earliest Buddhist scriptures have been preserved) as the Anatta (no Atman) doctrine. Since Wagner’s own focus was Buddhism, rather than Hinduism, we shall attend a little more closely to mysticism and the anatta doctrine. The goal of Buddhist practice is a state known as ‘enlightenment’ or ‘illumination’. It is clearly describable as a ‘mystical’ experience and it is intimately connected n-ith a belief in the non-existence of the individual self. Descriptions of exactly what enlightenment is - as opposed to what it is not - are extremely rare in the modern literature but there is a flourishing literature on the meditative practices that are necessary for its production. English translations of Buddhist texts have tended to describe these meditative states by the word ‘trance’, with all its connotations of hypnosis, passivity and lack of full awareness. In both Buddhist and Hindu texts, however, these states are not viewed like that at all. 1Two of the original Sanscrit terms applied here are dhyana and samadhi, each with a quite precise application, and neither really cognate to the English ‘trance’." In English, one thinks of a trance as involving a dulling of consciousness, or of a state akin to hypnosis. It is clear from the oriental scriptures, however, that dhyana and samudhi are intended to cover what we might metaphorically call super-conscious states. With these terms, WE appear to have the beginnings of a classification or typology of the intense , and clear focusing of the mind that is alleged to arise from meditative practices. In the Japanese Zen tradition, the goal of meditative practice is labeled satori where satori, from its descriptions in English translation, it would appear to be some sort of momentary revelatory ecstasy. (The very word ‘Zen’ is a translation, via a Chinese equivalent, of this Sanscrit word dhyana’ At least one reputable Buddhist writer has portrayed dhyana and satori as an experience of unity both with what one is perceiving and with the world, in which one has no feeling of being a separate subject in a world of objects. Thus Suzuki there is in satori no differentiation of subject and object’." What this might mean is none too clear, but similar-sounding descriptions are not unknown in the West. Graham Reed, for example, writes of a schizophrenic, who, on observing a carpet being beaten, asked, ‘Why are they beating me.2"’ And Masters and Houston quote a participant in a psychedelic drug experiment reporting afterwards that The world is experienced as a physical extension of oneself, of one’s own nervous system. Consequently I felt the blows of pick axes wielded by construction men tearing up the street. .I3 Clearly something very odd is being reported about the subject/object link here: neither subject had any sense of being confined within his skin. In another experiment, this time with psilocybin, one of the subjects reported: There was no duality between myself and what I experienced. Rather I was these feelings . At this time it seemed I was not me listening to a recording, but paradoxically was the music itself."’ A reader versed in the literature of comparative mysticism might doubt (probably too quickly) that the experiences reported here have anything to do with oriental mysticism. A jaundiced reader might even dismiss the 123 subjects in these cases as either mad or deranged by drugs. But non-pathological descriptions of similar-sounding experiences are quite easy to find. The poet T. S. Eliot, for example, after writing of the apprehension of reality granted to the saints, regrets that For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.‘5 For Eliot, unity with the heard sound is attributed to the listener being somehow lost in listening, other things being unable to intrude upon the depth of contemplative rapture. The state is well enough known to have been given its own label in at least one European language, the Germans calling it Einftihlung." Eliot was far from being alone in English literature in writing of the experience. Indeed, this theme, often allied with an unsystematized nature mysticism, is so common in Romantic poetry that it might be said almost to infest it." Abrams, in describing this characteristic of Romantic poetry, stresseshe extraordinary weight that other romantic poets, as well as Coleridge and Wordsworth, placed on the experience of Einfu’hlung, or loss of distinction between self and external scene. E.g. Shelley, ‘On Life’, Literary and Philosophical Criticism, p. 56: ‘Those who are subject to the state called reverie, feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction."’ Indeed not. Here is the idea as it expresses itself through Byron: My altars are the mountains and the Ocean, Earth-air - stars, - all that springs from the great Whole, Who hath produced, and will receive the Soul." In Byron, this theme of unity with the universe - as it informs Childe Hurolde in particular-becomes something oceanic, as in the following: I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me; and to me 124 High mountains are a feeling, but the hum Of human cities torture: I can see Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, Class’d among creatures, when the soul can flee, And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain And thus I am absorb’d. . ." And again: Are not the mountains, waves and skies a part of me and of my soul, as I of them?*’ Or yet again- .I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe." Byron’s lines are of importance to us because both Wittgenstein and Hitler came across them, quoted for their descriptive, explanatory power, when they read Schopenhauer’s World us will und Ideu.2" In a little while we will have cause to re-examine the crucial section 34 of Schopenhauer’s book. Now various passages in Wittgenstein’s early work convey this very thought of Schopenhauer’s." In these passages, the subject is not seen as confined to a body. Thus: The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world. The human body, however, my body in particular, is a part of the world among others, among animals, plants, stones, etc, etc. Whoever realizes this will not want to procure a preeminent place for his own body. . 25 Wittgenstein is saying here that the ‘philosophical I’, unlike the body, is not one ‘among others’. Let me now juxtapose two quotations, one from Schopenhauer (the same section 34 from which Byron’s lines were taken) and one from a lecture by L. E. J. Brouwer, the great twentieth-century Dutch philosopher/mathematician. Schopenhauer writes that it is possible to so perceive things that we devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building, or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in the object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception."’ This is a description by a Western writer (who would appear to have experienced it) of a contemplative state that sounds, in its consequences for the subject/object link, very much like what the orientals call dhyana. Whether we call it dhyana or Einfihlun~ does not really matter, since its nature is clear. I am not arguing here that these variously named states are identical in all respects. I am simply using descriptions from the considerable liter-ature on them to outline what seems to be common in states that transcend or obliterate the subject/object distinction. The point is that in Schopenhauer’s description we are dealing with a report of a subject/ object-transcending experience that is central in his philosophy - his own experimental evidence for it, as it were It would appear to be more than just a bit of florid prose that Schopenhauer dashed off while in an extravagant mood.2’ He was on to something important about the mind that these states appear to make evident. The relevance of this to the previous quotes from Eliot, etc is in any case apparent and of itself justifies further examination. Now compare this with Brouwer: . .it is possible at will either to sink into a reverie, taking no stand in time and making no separation between self and the eternal world, or else to effect such a separation by one’s own effort. . Why are these two quotes significant? Of course they express the same idea; the idea of a unification of subject and object that I have been labouring to convince the reader is important. But the claim in Brouwer’s case was made in one of his lectures in Vienna that Wittgenstein attended on 10 March 1928, along with the Vienna Circle philosophers, Herbcrt Feigl and Friedrich Waismann. At this stage Wittgenstein had been away from acad-emic philosophy since his time in Cambridge before the Great War - some fifteen years. But Feigl tells us that Wittgenstein came forth from the lecture on fire, in a fever of intellectual excitenlent.29 In Feigl’s opinion, this lecture of Brouwer’s marked the return of Wittgenstein to philosophical activities. But why should Wittgenstein have been so excited? Certainly there was the anticipation of Brouwer’s remark in Schopenhauer’s work, which Wittgenstein knew, but why should what Brouwer said in this lecture have been so important? He was excited because he had had this experience himself. In fact he had based his philosophy upon it."" This was the fundamental insight he spoke of to Drury - the one that he said came to him very early in life."’ It sounds identical with the youthful experience of Wordsworth that inspired the prelude and that was the concern of Coleridge and of so many other english poets. It was the great concern of Schopenhauer. It was the great concern of Wagner. And it is the Rosetta Stone that unlocks the secrets of Nazism. What Wittgenstein glimpsed was, I believe, shared with, accepted, but perverted, by Adolf Hitler. \ The pioneer studies of Wittgenstein’s early mysticism were made by Erich Heller in Encounter and by Wittgenstein’s biographer, Brian McGuinncss, in a paper in the Philosophical Review ."L McGuinncss convincingly documents that Wittgenstein underwent the unitive experience we have been considering. That he did follows in any case as a reasonable deduction from Wittgenstein’s own words. McGuinncss informs us that the trigger for Wittgenstein’s experience of unity appears to have been a scene in a play he saw. In this play (Die Kreuzelschreiber by Ludwig Anzengreuber) a character, after being depressed and falling asleep, wakes up with unreasoning happiness and exults: Nothing can happen to you! The worst sufferings count for nothing once they’re over. Whether you’re six feet under the grass or know that you’ve got to face it all thousands of times more - nothing can happen to you! -you are part of every thing and everything’s part of you. [my emphasis] Nothing can happen to you!‘" The crux here, of course, is the line ‘You’re part of everything and everything’s part of you.’ It is the one continuous thread that links together Byron, Emerson, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Brouwer and Wittgenstein -and thinkers further cast. There is perhaps a reference to this experience in a remark of Wittgenstein’s that can be dated to around 1942, and that was printed in 1956 on p 123 of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics-over thirty years on.34 After a discussion of the phenomenon of sudden realization, he adds intriguingly and quite out of the blue: ‘Cannot watching a play lead me to something?’ Direct evidence that Wittgenstein had undergone the unitive experience expressed by the lines of the play occurs in his Lecture on Ethics."’ Writing of this feeling of safety that was expressed by the character in 127 Anzengreuber’s play, he said explicitly that he knew it. Wittgenstein had been trying to convey what he thought of when he considered the meaning of ‘excellence’: . . .the best way of describing it is to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to use such phrases as ‘How extra-ordinary that anything should exist.’ I will mention another experience which I also know [my emphasis] and which others of you might be acquainted with; it is what one might call, the experience of being absolutely safe. I mean the state of mind in which one is inclined to say ‘I am safe, nothing can injure me what-ever happens.’ The trigger for Wittgenstein’s feeling of absolute safety (the one that he ‘also knew’) was, I am urging, precisely the man in the play expressing his feeling reciprocally a part of everything, which feeling I am identifying with the state of dhyana. After all, if dhyana is perception without consciousness of the subject-self-abandoned perception, as it were-what could someone experiencing it feel there was to be hurt? It is precisely ‘the self’ that is gone, lost in the experience and thus also the possibility of damage to the self. And I repeat, Wittgenstein said that he ‘knew it’? There is also the following conversation recorded by Drury, presumably referring to Julian Bell or John Cornford (the emphasis is mine): On the way home we mentioned a student we had both known in Cambridge, who had been killed fighting with the International Brigade in Spain. Some of his friends had said to Wittgenstein, ‘What a relief to know that this was the end of his sufferings and that we don’t have to think of a "future life".’ Wittgenstein said he was shocked at their speaking in this way. I tried to explain to him that for me the only perfect moments in my life were when I had been so absorbed in the object - nature or music - that aN self-consciousness was abolished. The ‘I’ had ceased to be. WITTGENSTEIN: And you think of death as the gateway to a permanent state of mind such as that. DRURY: Yes, that is how I think of a future life.3’ Wittgenstein, according to Drury, was ‘disinclined to continue the conversation’. But it is quite clear from all the evidence I have assembled that this experience of ‘losing of the self in contemplation’ was well known to him - from other works he had read (Emerson,38 Schopenhauer, James), from lectures (as with Brouwer), from conversation (as with Drury), and in his own experience. I have stressed that disappearance of the self/other distinction appears to be a common feature of the experiences labelled in I28 the mystical literature as dhyuna, Einftihlung, reverie, satori or self-loss-in contemplation. What is important for the moment is not the labelling - or even if these variously described states are identical in all respects - but correctly understanding the nature of what Wittgenstein appears to have experienced. This experience is the one that Wittgenstein fixed on when he wanted to focus on ‘absolute value’; his experience ‘par excellence’. And it, or something very like it, forms part of the meditative practice of the two major oriental religions. Now the cardinal point to note here is that important philosophical consenuences about the nature of the mind are said to follow from it. The claim of Buddhism in the Anatta doctrine proclaimed by its founder is that when, through arduous meditative practice, the world is seen aright, the self (Atman) is realized not to exist. In the case of Wittgenstein,39we know that the philosophy of mind he espoused in the thirties (labelled by the young Peter Strawson the ‘no-ownership theory’) also found no room for a multiplicity of subjects of experiencc. That he held a similar view in his Trucralus period is clear from Tractam 5.5421 where we read: there is no such thing as the soul - the subject, etc. - as it is conceived in the superficial psychology of the present day. And even more uncompromisingly in Tructatus 5.631: There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. We know that he thought the truth of the matter lay with a philosophy on the far side of solipsism. Discussing the idea that the world is idea, he said: .here solipsism teaches us a lesson. It is that thought which is on the way to destroy this error. For if the world is idea, it isn’t any person’s idea. (Solipsism stop short of this and says that it is my idea.)‘O In later chapters I shall show that this was no aberration of the thirties; he held a consistent philosophy of mind from the Tractutus days to his death. In any case, however, the important question to ask is this: Towards what philosophy of mind would we expect such experiences to incline a philosopher? Do they help us to understand Wittgenstein? I claim not merely that they do help us: I claim also that he cannot be understood without them, and that commentary ignorant of their role is just a waste of time." I claim further that they shed light on the causes of the Holocaust, 129 for these unitive experiences whose ultimate direction is towards a sense of oneness with - indeed mystical identity with - God are archetypally forbidden to Jews. There is a strong Jewish mystical tradition, of course, and in its higher flights the blessed Jewish mystic might even rapturously contemplate the Divine Throne. But that he might aspire to become the Holy One himself is not only a possibility not to be contemplated, but something to be fled from as an abomination. In the early Aryan religions of the Indian sub-continent, however, the means to these unificatory experiences - meditation, yoga, chanting, etc - were sought out and cultivated with an ardour that has survived even to the present day. With these, the divinization that is forbidden in the Semitic religions is the very goal. I shall therefore develop the philosophy of mind these experiences presuppose and use it to expound Wittgenstein’s aphorisms and make their background clear. Their background is Schopenhauer and, through Schopenhauer, early Aryan religion. This background is particularly worth investigating in view of the philosophy of Wittgenstein’s first musical love, Richard Wagner. For here is Wagner on the Artmork of the Future, discussing the modus operandi of the musician in terms of this very unificatory experience. (The reader can take it for granted that the future Fuhrer devoured this passage many times.) It is pure Schopenhauer and written with a passion that almost approaches an invocation: We can but take it that the individual will, silenced in the plastic artist through pure beholding, awakes in the musician as the universal will, and - above and beyond all power of vision - now recognizes itself as such in full self- consciousness. Hence the great difference in the mental state of the concipient musician and the designing artist; hence the radically diverse effects of music and of painting: here profoundest stilling, there utmost excitation of the will. In other words we here have the will in the individual as such, the will imprisoned by the fancy of its difference from the essence of things outside, and unable to lift itself above its barriers save in the purely disinterested beholding of objects: whilst there, in the musician’s case, the will feels one forthwith, above all grounds of individuality: for hearing has opened it the gate through which the world thrusts home to it, it to the world. This prodigious breaking down the floodgates of appearance must necessarily call forth in the inspired musician a state of ecstasy wherewith no other can compare: in it the will perceives itself the almighty will of all things.‘* We are investigating, then, Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the Holocaust, from a perspective that has been lamentably ignored and that is crucially important. We shall see that understanding National Socialism 130 MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE AND THE SELF (even the Nazi theory of art) demands a certain taxonomy of a particular mysticism that is best expounded through Schopenhauer, oriental religions, Wagner, Wittgenstein and Hitler. I shall try to establish that that which in Wittgenstein’s philosophy is unowned and not private - language itself, or the unowned Universal Mind - was in Hitler’s nationalist perversion of this doctrine transformed into the Mind of the Master Race - the ‘German Idea’. From participation in this, Jews were excluded by the essential nature of Judaism - which alone of the great theistic religions rules out any sort of mystical union. Jewish exclusion was thus for mystical reasons and the ground - the field of battle - was set for the great struggle between Yahweh and Odin that raged from 1933 to 1945.""
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