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SIX Schopenhauer, Rosenberg and Race Theory In his Biographical Sketch of Wittgenstein, Von Wright states bluntly that Wittgenstein appears to have had no historical predecessors in philosophy.’ This is certainly a tribute to Wittgenstein’s originality, but by now the reader ought to have developed some doubts that it might be so. My own belief is that, through Schopenhauer, his predecessors occupy a greater historical and geographical spread than do those of any other Western philosopher. Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mind has an ancient and curiously split pedigree. Some of its lineage goes back through Schopenhauer to Kant. But its apparent novelty is due to the other branch that goes back through Schopenhauer. It is basically Indian, in just the sense that Schopenhauer’s philosophy of mind is Indian. This is not to say that the source was necessarily Indian. But Wittgenstein’s doctrines have (as Schopenhauer acknowledged of his own philosophy) an Indian character, a discernible Indian ‘smell’. Western philosophers such as Von Wright, unused to seeing modern philosophical issues in Indian religious doctrines, are thus unlikely to detect their eruption in the work of the most original philosopher this century. It is also possible that the source of this Indian smell, certainly in Schopenhauer’s philosophy and therefore possibly in Wittgenstein’s also, really was India after all. We shall examine some of the internal evidence in Schopenhauer’s works in a moment. The trail is hardly over virgin ground, for details of Schopenhauer’s abiding interest in Indian thought have been recorded already, most recently by Wilhelm Halbfass: Schopenhauer’s interest in India was awakened early by the Orientalist F. Major: who was effective as a recruiter for India among the Romantics. . .3 Halbfass also quotes Schopenhauer’s own words of 1816, written during the production of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation: By the way, I admit that I do not believe that my doctrine could have ever been formulated before the Upanishads, Plato, and Kant were able to all cast their light simultaneously on to a human mind.4 What was the ‘harmony’ that Schopenhauer discerned between his own and Indian thought? Halbfass continues: His approach to Indian philosophy was, so to speak, that of a ‘recognitive historiography of philosophy’ (‘wiedererkennende Philosophiegeschichtc’) which remained open to the possibility of finding the same insights in the most diverse historical contexts. Schopenhauer felt that the basic ideas of his philosophy, viz., the doctrine of the ‘world as will and representation’, of a fundamental unity of reality and an apparent projection into spat&temporal multiplicity, could be found among the Indians, and not just in the form of historical antecedents, but in a sense of truth which knows no historical and geographical restrictions.’ This approach is exactly the one we have been following in our interpretation of Wittgenstein in the light of Schopenhauer. And we shall try to bring out the relevance of the doctrines ‘found among the Indians’ to both Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, again ‘in a sense of truth which knows no historical and geographical restrictions’. The reader must note that these doctrines found among the Indians are the only surviving examples of the religious beliefs of the early Aryans. We shall see soon what the Nazi race theorists were to make of these Aryan doctrines. Suffice to say that, they present a theory of the mind that is fundamentally at odds with the Jewish doctrine of the ‘otherness’ of Yahweh. For these early Aryans, the Divine Mind is the individual mind, if only the individual mind could purge itself of the errors that prevent it from discerning this fact. Modern commentators on Schopenhauer tend to downplay the significance of the Indian connection. There appears to be a feeling that his interpretation of Indian religious doctrines was idiosyncratic and quite certainly wrong; even that Schopenhauer was somewhat of a crank. The commentators might be right about this, but it is foolishness to ignore the beliefs of influential cranks. Schopenhauer’s ideas infected Nietszche, Wagner, Wittgenstein and Hitler. It is therefore important to bring out what Schopenhauer thought was significant about Indian religious doctrines, for he had no doubts at all about their value. He was rather contemptuous of Anglican missionaries in particular and wrote: WC, on the contrary, now send to the Brahmans English clergymen and evangelical linen-weavers, in order out of sympathy to put them right, and to point out to them that they are created out of nothing, and that they ought to be rateful and pleased about it. But it is just the same as if we fired a bullet at a cliff. In India our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought6 It certainly did have a role to play in changing Schopenhauer’s thought. Halbfass isolates an idea of Schopenhauer’s which became central to Wittgenstein’s own philosophy and continues: Schopenhauer often invoked Indian thought when he wished to illustrate what he saw as the central relationship between ethics and metaphysics. As early as 1813, while working on his doctoral dissertation, he formulated his principle of ‘a philosophy which should be at once ethics and metaphysics’. He attempted to achieve such a unified system of thought by anchoring the fundamental ethical phenomenon of compassion in a metaphysics of identity which he found exemplified in the Vedanta. He repeatedly explained that for him, ‘the foundation of morals ultimately rests upon that truth’ which was expressed in the Upanisadic formula tat tvam asi (‘that art thou’).’ For Wittgenstein there was no doubt at all that logic and ethics hang together. And the key to this unity, in Wittgenstein also, was the identity of all subjects; not, as in Schopenhauer, with ‘the pure subject of knowing’, but with common language; with the one proposition articulated through millions of mouths, showing the true nature, the mystical nature, of the mysterious ‘I’.’ He might even have known Kabir’s expression of it via the translations of Rabindranath Tagore, whom he greatly admired: No one knows this ineffable movement. How could one tongue describe it? If any man has a million mouths and tongues, let that great one speaL9 The proposition speaks, contingently through this or that mouth, while remaining the numerically one proposition; not ‘private’ but public: expressed through ‘a million mouths and tongues’. This is the ‘great one’ that speaks, and full recognition of its (= ‘one’s own’) nature is the ineffable movement, that is, divinization. In Schopenhauer, the Will expresses itself contingently via this or that creature while in itself remaining numerically enc. In Hinduism, the apparently many individual Atmans are in truth one Brahman. In Buddhism, the whole idea of the individualized Atman is I34 simply swept aside as the root cause of the ignorance from which Buddha offered deliverance. But the reasoning behind the move in each case is apparent: it was first recorded in India and only later repeated in Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein. The Indians - the early Aryan invaders of the sub-continent - therefore have inventor’s rights, and justify my use of ‘Indian’ in describing the doctrine. Schopenhauer’s philosophy and his attribution of its core to Indian origins, crankish or not, was accepted by a number of European thinkers, and they were to prove enormously influential. The most important of them, for our purpose, was the composer Richard Wagner, and from Wagner, the idea percolated through the mind of Adolf Hitler to become incorporated into Nazi race theory. What is fascinating in this transforma-tion is that these Indian doctrines were held to be acccptable provided they were restricted to Aryans only. Alfred Rosenberg, the chief Nazi race theoretician, who, in his capacity as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territorics, was deserverly hanged in 1946, incorporated this theme from the Schopenhauer/Wagner view of Indian religions into the very core of Nazi racial theories. It is clear from Rosenberg’s writings that the Atman/Brahman identity was seen as a central insight of Aryan philosophy. The fault of the Hindu branch of the Aryans, however, was that this insight, due to ‘bastardization’, lost its racial base. It is perhaps not clear to a reader how race can enter into apprehension of a philosophical idea, but the following turgid prose from Rosenberg illustrates how the official Nazi race theorist saw it: The Indian, as a born master, felt his soul expand to be a breath of life which filled the entire universe. At the same time he felt the world throb within his bosom. Even Nature herself, mysterious, rich and all-generous, could not entice him out of this metaphysical profundity. A lift of action which had been recognized by the old teachings of the Upanishads as being an indispensable precondition for even the ascetic thinker, began, before the wanderer’s eyes, to fade into the universe of the soul; and this course from variegated colour to the white light of knowledge Ied to the most grandiose of attempts to overthrow nature through reason. No doubt, at that time many exceptional or aristocratic Indians succeeded in surmounting the mundane world. However, later Indians were bequeathed only the teachings, not their vital, living, racial preconditions. Gradually they lost all understanding of the blood-colour sense of VWU."’ Today, the application of Yarna to the area of technical division of labour represents the most hideous mockery of one of the world’s wisest insights. The later Indian did not know of Blood, Ego and All, but only of the last two entities. The vital attempt to grasp Ego in itself died within him. The Indian fell heir to a race-crime whose offspring can be seen today as the spiritually impoverished bastards who seek to cure their crippled being in the waters of the Ganges. . .‘I Rosenberg granted, then, that exceptional or aristocratic individuals among the early Aryans in India attained to metaphysical insights through knowledge of the Atman/Brahman identity. The problem was that these insights were vitiated by racial admixture as the Aryans interbred with the aboriginal inhabitants of India. Thus Rosenberg continues: The Indian monist, even after he had ‘overcome’, through rational decision, the spiritual polarity of Ego/All in favour of the latter pole . . . was therefore not inclined to consider race and personality as concepts which possessed a high value. . All that is real is embodied in the world-soul (Brahman) and in its eternal rebirth in individualities (Atman). Above all, there resulted from this turning away from nature a continuous weakening of the earlier clear representation and conception of race. Instinct was enticed from its earthly kingdom by dogmatic-philosophical perception. If the world-soul is all that exists and Atman is its essence, then the idea of personality has to disappear. The shape-less All/One has been attained." The Atman/Brahman identity, then, while perfectly acceptable to exceptional, racially pure Aryans, had, because of the all-inclusive universality of the doctrine, permitted miscegenation. This miscegenation had destroyed the conditions that had created individuals capable of realizing the truth of the doctrine in the first place. Those aspiring to Aryan metaphysical knowledge were now different - no longer Aryan. The sublime Aryan metaphysics had changed as the race of those professing it changed. Thus Rosenberg continues: When this occurred, the Indian ceased to be creative; the dark, foreign blood of the Sudras - who were considered equal because of Atman - flowed in, annihi-lated the original concept of caste or race, and bastardization began. Snake and phallus cults began to fester among the natives. The symbolic expression of one-hundred-armed Siva became realistically represented as a fearful bastard-art developed in the primeval jungles. The old heroic odes were remembered only at the imperial court; only there could be found the lyrics of Kalidasa and other, mostly unknown, great poets. Cankara attempted to create Indian philosophy anew. It was in vain: the arteries of the race-body had been severed, and the Aryan-Indian blood flowed out, only here and there fertilizing the perme-able soil of ancient India. Only a philosophical-technical doctrine was left behind for later life; and in its subsequent insanely distorted form this dominates contemporary Hindu life. We must not intolerantly maintain that the Indian gave up or perverted first his race and then his personality. Much more 136 to the point is the metaphysical occurrence that was reflected in the passionate demand for the overthrow of the phenomenon of dualism, as well as the reciprocally-conditioning lower forms of this polarity. Seen from the outside, philosophical recognition of the great equality of Atman-Brahman led to racial decline. In other lands such a phenomenon did not signify the solidification of a philosophical idea but was, rather, the consequence of uninterrupted miscegenation between two or many opposing races, whose respective capacities were neither elevated nor complemented by this process, but subjected to mutual annihilation. Nazi race-theory, in other words, held that philosophical recognition of the Atman/Brahman identity - or rather admitting other races into knowl-edge of it and thus miscegenation - ‘led to racial decline’. Is this not extra-ordinary? And yet, if our considerations of the previous chapters are correct, something very like the Atman/Brahman identity lies at the heart of Wittgenstein’s philosophy! It is therefore a genuine possibility that when Hitler railed against the ‘Jewish doctrine that does away with the person-ality’, it was just this that he was referring to. The doctrines Hitler attrib-uted to Jews, in fact, would be rejected by any pious Jews at all. We know, however, that a certain twentieth-century philosopher of Jewish descent propounded just such doctrines under another guise at Trinity College, Cambridge, not just in the Ig3os, but quite certainly as early as before the Great War and just possibly when he was attending school with Hitler. Rosenberg was no one-off in expounding Nazi philosophy in this wise. Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader, said of astrology: We cannot permit any astrologers to follow their calling except those who are working for us. In the National Socialist state astrology must remain a pn’vi-legium singulorum. It is not for the broad masses. . . . We base our attitude on the fact that astrology, as a universalist doctrine, is diametrically opposed to our own philosophical view of the world. . .. A doctrine which is meant to apply in equal measure to Negroes, Indians, Chinese, and Aryans is in opposition to our conception of the racial soul. Each one of the peoples I have named has its own specific racial soul. . . .I3 Aryans have a ‘racial soul’! Remarkable; is it not? Let us now consider an hypothesis that draws together the various factors . Hitler and Wittgenstein, as we saw, had some sort of interaction around 1904. Wittgenstein’s personality even then - forceful and used to commanding servants and expressing itself in High German - had a profound effect upon the young Hitler. Somehow, Hitler came to a knowl-edge of Wittgenstein’s youthful Einftihlung experience and of what it I37 purported to show about the nature of the subject of experience: to wit, that Aryan, Jew, Negro or Chinese, we all share the one mind. (None of this is outside the bounds of possibility for intelligent teenage boys.) For some unknown but historically crucial reason, they fell out. Hitler came to find repellent belief in a common, universal mind that included Jews. He came to see the doctrine as a means by which Jews could preach internationalism and the brotherhood of man, while weakening Aryan solidarity against the Jews. While Wittgenstein presented himself as an ‘international secker after truth’, his family was exploiting Austrian Germans through its control of the cmpirc’s economy. The solution Hitler arrived at was to fight against the universal aspect of Wittgenstein’s doctrine and restrict the common mind to those of pure Aryan race alone; that is, to restrict it to Aryans and rule out the Jews. There was indeed a ‘racial mind’, as the Aryans had believed, but only Aryans could attain to it. In the extract from Rosenberg’s writings I presented earlier, we see precisely this hypothesis I have presented about Jews in Europe transferred to the Sudras in India. Rosenberg writes that ‘If the world-soul is all that exists then the idea of personality has to disappear.’ Certainly in Wittgenstein’s writings, as I shall show, there are no individual minds. Rosenberg then writes that ‘when this occurred . . the dark, foreign blood of the Sudras [read ‘Jews’] - who were considered equal because of Atman [read ‘because of a common consciousness’] - flowed in, annihilated the original concept of caste or race, and bastardization began.’ In Europe, of course, the Nazi protest against ‘Jewish internationalism’ was indeed that it led to overthrow of purity of race, to ‘the arteries of the race-body’ being severed. Hitler’s protest in Mein Kuttrpfwas that he saw this process taking place in the Vienna of his youth: legal equality of the races under the Habsburgs leading to racial degeneration through ‘bastardization’. He complained to Hermann Rauschning about Vienna that ‘Austria is rotten with Jews. Vienna is no longer a German city. Slav mestizos have overrun the place."’ Slav mestizos? Who were these ‘Slav mestizos’? Given that an earlier Ludwig Wittgenstein had been prince of Russia, the description ‘Slav mestizos is, I think, obvious. The foreign blood that was flowing into Austria - like the Sudra blood that allegedly corrupted India through unre-stricted application to other races of Aryan metaphysics - was, in the first instance, the Slav/Jewish blood of the Wittgensteins. There is also another interesting way in which the thought of the Cambridge philosopher connects with that of the Nazi leader. It is a char-acteristic of the no-ownership theory of mind that it sees thoughts and ideas not as the activities of particular thinkers which vanish when the thinkers die, but rather as eternal forms which can connect to us in the 138 present. It is therefore of compelling interest that Hitler explained the ‘meaning of history’ in terms of forms also. His vision was of a universal mental community of Aryans in conflict with an external threat whose most dangerous weapon was precisely the internationalism flowing from Einftihlung. This threat was ‘the Jew’, considered not as an individual human being, but rather as a form, as something eternal; Ludwig Wittgenstein objectified into the eternal Jew. Thus in Mein Kampf Hitler writes: His traits of character have remained the same, whether two thousand years ago as a grain dealer in Ostia, speaking Koman, or whether as a flour profiteer of today, jabbering German with a Jewish accent. It is always the same Jew." ‘It is always the same Jew.’ What we see here is ‘the Jew’ as eternal form not as individual and whose nature it is to be separate, to ‘jabber German’. In missing the universal nature of the Mind, however, Hitler came to see the publicity of thought as making possible contact with the minds of deceased Aryan individuals-Frederick the Great or Frederick Barbarossa. What should have been understanding of the nature of the living, immortal Mind became instead a sort of occult communion with what had to be seen as the souls of the dead. Hitler committed suicide, yet looked for the coming of another ‘genius’ in a hundred years or so. Who did he conceive this future genius to be? I suggest that the individual he had in mind was none other than himself, again conceived of as an eternal form. He lamented before his suicide, ‘What an artist dies in me!’ echoing the last words of another great persecutor of the Jew, the Roman Emperor Nero. Just as ‘the Jew’ was described in Mein Kampf as a form, so the persecutor ofJews was a form. Hitler was indifferently Nero, Hitler and the persecutor to come. And his struggle - Mein Kampf - was likewise something eternal. The occult communication with the souls of the great departed German heroes that Himmler had the SS engage in at Wewelsburg Castle, near Padersborn in Westphalia, can also be interpreted from a no-ownership perspective: He was also a convinced believer in reincarnation - in a speech to high-ranking SS officers, delivered at Dachau in 1936, he told them that they had all been with each other somewhere before and that they would all meet again after their present lives had ended. He believed that he himself was the reincarnation of Heinrich the Fowler (875-936), the monarch who had founded the Saxon royal house, had driven the Poles eastward, and whose memory he held in peculiar veneration. On the thousandth anniversary of Heinrich’s death he swore an oath to continue the king’s ‘civilizing mission in the east’ and each year thereafter he spent some time in silent meditation before the dead monarch’s tomb which, so he said, was ‘a sacred spot to which we Germans make pilgrimage’. It is some-what difficult to reconcile Himmler’s belief that he was the reincarnation of Heinrich the Fowler with his simultaneous belief, confided to his masseur Felix Kersten during the war, that in the silences of the night he held long conversa-tions with the dead man’s spirit - perhaps he meant that he retreated into the inmost recesses of his own soul, perhaps that he was in the habit of talking to himself. It is to be presumed that Himmler believer himself to be a descendant of Heinrich the Fowler, for the particular form of the theory of reincarnation to which he gave his assent was that advocated by Karl Eckhart, who argued that each man was reborn in the body of one of his descendants, that we are all, in a sense, our own ancestors." Himmler was not ‘in the habit of talking to himself’. What he was doing was quite different: he was linking himself to Heinrich’s thoughts; becoming Heinrich through this very meditation technique. Heinrich the Fowler was contactable via re-enactment and expression of his character-istic mental processes through the vehicle of Heinrich Himmler’s body. We ha\-e, then, in the no-ownership theory of mind, a model for under-standing one characteristic occult practice; communication with the mental processes of the dead. That this practice is discernible in so high-ranking a Nazi as Himmler (and one so close to Hitler) forces us to examine how the no-ownership theory relates to magic and the occult. As we shall see in the next chapter, there is not one single no-ownership account of magic and its mode of operation, but three. None of these dispute the efficacy of magic. These accounts were presented by Schopenhauer, the Oxford philosopher Collingwood, and Wittgenstein. Certainly Schopenhauer believed magic had its own mode of operation. Wittgenstein devoted one of his substantial works to an examination of how magic, like language, could represent, as in, say, a curse. And Collingwood presented virtually an entire chapter on the topic in developing his theory of art. Hitler’s life, of course, reeks of magic and the occult. Compre-hension of the Schopenhauerian account of magic goes a long way to help us understand exactly what it was that Hitler wrought and how he was able to bring it about.
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