The German Soul
Now you know.
The German spirit is one of enchanted rationality. Of nerdy mysticism, organic dissection, and subtle love pressed between paragraphs of transcendent reasoning.
We look at the world and see movements, final causes, ensouled things. We live surrounded by Geist; we ask, with Kant, what’s behind the appearances: only to conclude that we can’t really know, but then go on to constantly talk about it anyway.
Or we throw away the filter entirely, as Goethe did, and simply take in the cosmic stirrings directly, transmuting them into poetry, and: strange mixtures of poetry and academic writing.
Depending on your perspective, the German spirit descends into obscure soul-bending romantic weirdness, or ascends the staircase to a very German heaven by fulfilling the possibilities of our collective soul: riding the quirks of our language so hard that the more pragmatic civilizations can only shake their heads, sometimes in stunned admiration, sometimes in repulsed disbelief.1
And yet, there seems to be somewhat of a revival of German thought, especially the pre-War kind. Maybe this revival has something to do with the fact that the German soul, expressing itself in the German language, has a way of talking intelligently and with imaginative power about metaphysics and transcendence: offering a bridge between the positivist philosophies and philosophical theologies dominating the Anglo world, a schism that has led to many traps and dead ends.
Naturally adding a layer of mysticism to reason, German thought is not, however, a secular surrogate for religious discourse: what Thomas Nagel called the “view from nowhere,” in the German tradition, is not a fictious abstraction. It is the German equivalent of going on a psychedelic trip, catapulting oneself into beyond-spacetime to look at the cosmos through a synesthetic lens made of Geist-dissecting Begriffe (“terms that grasp so that we may understand”).
When we talk about Vernunft, we don’t mean what the English mean by “reason.” We express an internal whole, grasping the external whole at once: wholesome. When we talk about Seele (soul), we don’t just mean the immortal aspect of a human being. We mean the fine layer of reality where the real music is to be found: the hidden world, where all the subtle energies intersect, interact, mix, do their dialectical dance. (Remember that German psychedelic trip.) Perhaps most importantly, when we say Geist, usually translated “mind,” we mean spirit, intellect, ghost, character, type and individuated instance, all rolled into one.2 The German mind, at its best, is geistreich: rich in spirit, intellect, character; finely tuned to the stirrings of the trinity of soul, world soul, and the creative spark.
If that sounds “unscientific” to you, this is understandable, because materialist science, especially in the Anglo conception of it, has won the day—postmodern critique notwithstanding. But it wasn’t always like that. To understand what went down here, we must look at the days when Germany dominated science and intellectual life.
The Fall of German Academia and the Rise of Scientific Materialism
It is difficult to imagine today, but before World War II, Germany ruled the academic world. Between Heinrich Hertz, Max Planck, Konrad Röntgen, Einstein, Werner Heisenberg et al., modern physics was to a large degree a German(-speaking) affair. The Wikipedia entry about the beginnings of psychology might as well be called “the German discipline of psychology,” which includes its philosophical precursors. Needless to say, Germany and the German language had been philosophy’s lode star for a long time until British analytic philosophy took over—inspired by another German, Gottlob Frege. We could go on.
But German thought is, to a large degree, anti-materialist, anti-mechanistic, anti-positivist.3 Even in the face of the apparent successes of the natural sciences in the 19th century, the German soul couldn’t help but rebel against scientism: after the philosophical school of German idealism, to many Anglo ears the epitome of irrationality, the Germans went even further with their Lebensphilosophie—the philosophical movement that emphasized life, wholeness, organism as opposed to cold causality, materialism, and reductionism. This life-centered philosophy was everywhere in the early 20th century. Neo-vitalism, as advanced by Hans Driesch, was an accepted and popular theory; Rudolf Steiner and the anthroposophic movement embraced a thoroughly esoteric and mystical outlook; academic philosophy took the primary role of spirit (Geist) for granted. And of course we must not forget that the German term Wissenschaft (science) means "systematic knowledge,” and is usually separated into Geisteswissenschaft (knowledge of the spirit) and Naturwissenschaft (knowledge of nature). The connotations of these words alone are very different from those of the much narrower, more technical “science.”
While the positivists of the Vienna Circle had somewhat more nuanced views than is often recognized—many would be shocked to learn that some of its members were convinced spiritists—, its thought was perceived by academics and the greater interested public, with good reason, as the archetypical science-worship and program to “scienceify” everything under the sun. But the German soul would have none of it. As one of its members, Victor Kraft, later wrote about the movement in 1950: "It was only in Germany that the Vienna Circle's approach was not taken up at all."4
It is true that especially the esotericism at the time, and some of the more radical rejections of natural science by German academic philosophy, led to conflicts with some of the leading German scientists. But while those scientists were understandably not happy when people trashed their entire activity, they actually shared their critics’ attacks on scientism and materialism. Max Planck, for example, lauded a book attacking Steiner’s blaming of science for the problems of the time.5 But Planck, too, was a German, and far from embracing cold materialist reductionism. He spoke of morals coming from a “direct connection to God”6 and wrote:
Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony.7
And while Hans Driesch, the famous neo-vitalist, pursued very anti-materialist, very wholesome theories about biological life forces, he also defended rationality and natural science against those who perhaps went a bit too far in their eagerness to rescue the human soul from the clutches of scientific materialism. But he came at it from the other direction, so to speak: his warning was that we shouldn’t take science to only mean mechanistic science and abandon it on those, to his mind, false grounds.8 The point is, even those German scientists or thinkers who were critical of the more explicitly mystical approaches were very far removed from the sort of reductionist program gaining popularity in the Anglo world at the time, and which was bound to take over the entire Western world.
Some of the mystic reasoning so prevalent in the German tradition might actually have been fruitful even for the natural sciences: the development of Quantum Mechanics, in particular, can be seen in light of the rebellion of the German soul against the materialist program.
This is precisely what Paul Forman points out in great detail in his 1971 paper, Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927.9 He shows that the critical attitude of German physicists in the Weimar Republic regarding causality came before the development of Quantum Mechanics, which, once formulated, of course sparked further debate about causality and determinism.10 It could be argued that indeed, the German intellectual tradition was the fertile ground on which Quantum Mechanics blossomed. As Forman puts it, German culture “led physicists to ardently hope for, actively search for, and willingly embrace an acausal quantum mechanics.”
This quote from Forman’s paper encapsulates the German attitude towards the modernist scientific worldview:
Thus in November 1925 Wilhelm Wien described the great scientific discoveries of the early modern period, especially Newton's derivation of the motion of the planets from the laws of mechanics, as "the first convincing demonstration of the causality [n.b.] of natural processes which revealed to man for the first time the possibility of comprehending nature by the logical force of his intellect." But he then immediately conceded that this program, which the natural scientist finds so grand, has its limitations, and he proceeded to quote Schiller: "With out feeling even for its creator's honor/ Like the dead stroke of the pendulum clock/ Nature devoid of God follows knavishly the law of gravity." The quotation is clearly in response to popular demand, as the astrophysicist, Hans Rosenberg, makes still clearer in his academic address on 18 January 1930: " 'Your subject is, to be sure, the most sublime in space/ But, friend, the sublime does not reside in space,' I hear Schiller-Goethe call out to us."
Indeed, when faced with the—to our ears—cruelty that is scientific materialism, our instincts scream: go back to “Goethe-Schiller.” Here, sociologist Alfred Vierkandt summarizes, in 1920, the revolt of the German soul:
“We are generally experiencing today a full rejection of positivism; we are experiencing a new need for unity, a synthetic tendency in all the world of learning [Wissenschaft], a type of thinking [Eindenken] which primarily emphasizes the organic rather than the mechanical, the living instead of the dead, the concepts of value, purpose, and goal, instead of causality.”
You can clearly see this mindset in the work of Werner Heisenberg (of uncertainty principle fame), too. The great physicist jotted down his own philosophy and cosmology throughout his career, published posthumously under the title Ordnung der Wirklichkeit (“Order of Reality”). In it, Heisenberg explicitly follows Goethe’s work, painting a multi-layered picture of the cosmos where each level—physics, chemistry, biology, human consciousness, and the highest layer, “creative forces”—brings about entirely new planes of being that cannot be reduced to the layers below. Of the “creative forces” level, he said that it “can only be expressed in parables.”11
As Forman’s paper shows in detail, Max Born, Arnold Sommerfeld, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard von Mises, Walter Schottky, Heisenberg, and many more all embraced, to varying degrees, very Lebensphilosophie-inspired views about science, causality, and so on.
Today’s mind, steeped in materialism and science-worship for a long time, might be tempted to separate those giants in physics from their non-reductionist, wholesome, metaphysical views. But you don’t need to embrace cultural relativism to realize that the development of quantum mechanics, with its (at least initial) weakening—if not downright rejection—of causality and causal closedness, must be seen in the German context.12
Meanwhile, a very different mindset emerged in the Anglo world. Analytic philosophy, with its reductionist approach to philosophical concepts, took over and stood in stark contrast to the German focus on wholeness. And of course, Darwinism, tightly linked with eugenics13 as well as a general secular, naturalistic program to eliminate all traces of the mystical or supernatural, originated in Britain.14 The neo-Darwinian “modern synthesis” was Anglo-driven as well.
The rest, as they say, is history: first, the anti-intellectual, censorious Nazis ideologically suffocated German academia. It was never to regain its former strength. Then, America took over, and it would be naive to think the US would tolerate Germany as another academic and intellectual superpower after its defeat. In the spirit of political realism, we might say that the empire gobbled up what was left of the once-glorious German academic world, and over time has imposed its own ideas and ways on the defeated nation. A less cynical reading at least recognizes the enormous pull of the US-led Anglo world and culture, with Germany—among other nations—eagerly adapting to the new lode star. Be that as it may, today, German discourse, including political and philosophical discourse, often seems like a second-rate version of its Anglo role model. In that atmosphere, what’s left of the German soul are clichés about engineering skills, discipline, and thoroughness. But without mysticism and enchantment, these are stale and barren. And without them, even our ways of resisting authority don’t make much sense.
Are Germans Authoritarians?
It is often claimed that Germans are particularly obedient to authority. There is certainly some truth to that, as we could see during COVID-mania. Whether Germans just behaved worse than some, better than others, or they really channelled their inner Prussian Kadavergehorsam, coldly doing what they are told without second thought, is, at the end of the day, hard to say.
But there is a subtler point to make here about the German way, for better or worse, of dealing with authority. You see, where the French impulse is to mount the barricades, the American impulse to lecture about freedom rights (and stock ammo), the German impulse is to… sit back and think. As Wolfgang Menzel, a historian of literature, wrote in 1828:
“The Germans do not do much, but they write all the more. If one day a citizen of the coming centuries looks back at the present time of German history, he will see more books than people. [...] He will say, we have slept and dreamed in books. [...] The sensual German people love to think and to poetize, and they always have time to write.”15
No doubt, this can partly be seen as patriotic-romantic hyperbole. Then again, French writer Germaine de Staël expressed similar sentiments about Germany in 1813:
"Since the excellent men of Germany are not gathered in one and the same city, they almost do not see each other at all, and are in contact with each other only through their writings. ... The German writers occupy themselves only with theories, with erudition, with literary and philosophical investigations, and of these there was nothing to fear for the mighty of this world."16
Here’s an anecdote from Nazi times.
At some point after Hitler took power, Werner Heisenberg went to visit Max Planck. The much younger Heisenberg asked Planck for advice: one of his Jewish colleagues just lost his university chair, despite him having been a highly decorated war veteran. Heisenberg and some of his colleagues thought about stepping down in solidarity, to make a statement that they won’t tolerate this anymore. Furthermore, he asked whether he should emigrate to escape the madness? He had offers from prestigious universities abroad. What should he do in the face of the Nazi tyranny both men knew perfectly well would eventually leave Germany in shambles?
Whatever you think of it, Planck’s answer is remarkable, and perhaps very German. I quote it in full here; it is well worth it:17
I am glad that you, as a young person, are still optimistic and believe that you can stop the disaster with such steps. But unfortunately, you vastly overestimate the influence of the universities and the intellectually trained people. The public would know practically nothing about your step. The newspapers would either report nothing at all or only talk about your resignation in such a gloating tone that no one would think of drawing any serious conclusions from it. You see, you cannot influence the course of an avalanche once it has started moving. How much it will destroy, how many human lives it will destroy, that is already decided by the laws of nature, even if one does not know it yet. Even Hitler can no longer really determine the course of events; for he is to a much greater extent a man driven and possessed than a driver. He cannot know whether the forces he has unleashed will finally lift him high or destroy him miserably.
So, until the end of the catastrophe, your step would only have repercussions for yourself—perhaps you were prepared to put up with a lot here—but for life in our country, everything you do will at best have an effect after the end. So that's what we have to focus our attention on. If you resign, in the most favorable case it would probably only remain for you to seek a position abroad. What would happen in less favorable cases I would rather not imagine. You would then be counted abroad among the large number of those who have to emigrate and seek a position, and perhaps indirectly take a job away from someone else who is in greater need than you. You could probably work there quietly, you would be out of danger, and after the end of the catastrophe you could return to Germany, if you had the wish—with the good conscience that you never compromised with the destroyers of Germany. But by then many years may have passed, you will have become different, and the people of Germany will have become different; and it is very doubtful how much you could then affect in this changed world.
If you don’t go and stay here, you have a task of a very different kind. You cannot stop the catastrophe and, in order to survive, you will even have to make some kind of compromise again and again. But you can try to form islands of continuance together with others. You can gather young people around you, show them how to do good science, and thereby also keep the old correct values in their minds. Of course, no one knows how much of such islands will be left at the end of the catastrophe; but I am sure that even small groups of gifted young people who can be brought through the time of horror in such a spirit will be of the greatest importance for the reconstruction after the end. For such groups can represent crystallization nuclei from which the new forms of life will be formed. For the time being, this will only apply to the reconstruction of scientific research in Germany. But since nobody knows what role knowledge and technology will play in the future world, it may also become important for other areas. I think that all who can do something and who are not simply forced to emigrate, for example by their race, should try to stay here and prepare a more distant future. This will certainly be very difficult and not without dangers; and the compromises that must be made will later be rightly held up and perhaps punished. But perhaps it has to be done anyway. Of course, I cannot blame anyone if they decide otherwise; if they emigrate because they find life in Germany unbearable, because they simply cannot stand by and certainly cannot prevent the injustice that is happening here. But in such an appalling situation as we now find in Germany, one can no longer act properly. With every decision one has to make, one participates in some kind of unrighteousness. Therefore, in the end, everyone is also on his own. There is no point in giving or taking advice anymore. Therefore, I can only say to you as well, don't get your hopes up that whatever you do, you could prevent a lot of misfortune until the end of the disaster. But when you make your decision, think of the time that will come afterwards.18
And that’s what Planck did, keeping a low profile under the regime, inevitably making concessions, certainly. But in a sense, he kept his word: he worked diplomatically behind the scenes to protect colleagues and German science, even though it turned out he couldn’t do much. After the war, the founding of the “Max Planck Society” and its various institutes, a victory of German science against the allied forces—the US in particular—who wanted to dismantle German elite scientific institutions, can be seen as a symbol for his success.
Heisenberg, for his part, decided to stay as well. While he wasn’t politically active, he later went on to work on the Nazis’ nuclear bomb. He soon realized that the efforts wouldn’t go anywhere before the end of the war. He was later surprised to learn how many more resources the US put into its nuclear bomb program compared to Hitler’s (by comparison) feeble efforts. For whatever reason, the nuke doesn’t seem to have been a priority for the Nazis.19 In any event, Heisenberg, too, was instrumental in rebuilding what was left of German science after the war. If you read his autobiography, and his letters to his wife during that time, you will notice the hardships he had to go through even as a member of the elite. This is in addition to the moral hardships: to an extent, he had to play the game—the stupid salutes, the showing of respect for lowlife thugs, the maneuvering between his humanity and moral integrity, the protection of his family, and his action as an elite scientist under the regime.
Was Planck’s and Heisenberg’s sacrifice worth it? Was it really a sacrifice, or rather a convenient narrative? Should they have taken the way out, as Schrödinger did? Or should they have “taken a stand,” as they say, if only symbolically? Or would that, on the contrary, have been selfish? It is hard to say. But it is the kind of question we Germans are good at asking. Heisenberg apparently answered it for him partly based on Jacob Burckhardt’s 1905 work about history and the nature of revolutions, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen.20
To make sense of all that, we must once again remember that the German soul seeks the transcendent, the non-material, the hidden world. When it comes to freedom, we don’t default to framing it in terms of what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty,” that is, the absence of political and legal boundaries to what we can do. We tend to look deeper: can we fulfil our destiny even under tyranny? Is it part of our destiny? What is freedom, anyway, if not an inner strength, the metaphysical power of looking beyond appearances, towards the long-term? The fierce inner independence from external circumstances, whether they be tyrannical, democratic, ideological, religious, or whatever else?
To illustrate the difficulty, consider these two scenarios: a) You live in a Soviet-style system that severely limits some of your outer freedoms and ability to speak in public, but where most people don’t buy the propaganda; where you are part of a vibrant underground cultural scene, organize cool things, meanwhile cracking jokes about the regime among your friends to your heart’s content. b) You live under a democratic government that lets you do whatever you want. But the spirit is dead; nobody actually does anything interesting or uplifting. Everybody is just a fat, dumb consumer with freedom rights. Now, who’s more free?
This touches a key question that has been widely discussed lately, namely: given an increasingly crazy and authoritarian atmosphere in the West, what can we do about it, what should we do, if anything?
It was perhaps Ernst Jünger who best expressed the German attitude. What he chose—together with Planck, Heisenberg, and countless other Germans—is often called “inner emigration,” the Stoic, silently suffering endurance of bad circumstances. But this doesn’t capture the full depth of what it means to live under tyranny. It is not just about retreating into one’s private quarter and avoiding trouble. It is about cultivating that inner spark, nurturing it, even using bad circumstances to produce insight and growth. Faced with the Nazis and their insufferable dumbness and cruelty, this became a necessity for the sheer survival of the soul.
Jünger, in his famous 1953 book of the same name, called this way of life Waldgang, the Forest Passage. While he would not dismiss more overt forms of resistance—he was a soldier, after all—, German as he was, he saw everything through a metaphysical lens, the hidden world behind the appearances. True resistance, for him, begins in the mind and soul, and must be cultivated there. You must protect them at all cost, even while the surrounding spirit will do everything it can to corrupt it, crush it, channel it into dark waters. You must rid yourself of the illusions and false promises the regime erects around you like a prison. You must look at the metaphysical reality, the energetic currents manifesting in your environment. Only then can you come up with other forms of resistance where you don’t just react to circumstances or provocations, but act in line with transcendent reality, fulfilling your destiny. To gain freedom, you must first gain free will; to gain free will, you must first cultivate independence from the inner and outer forces seeking to control and spiritually harm you.
In other words, Jünger reacted to the Nazi experience as the German soul tends to do: he sat back and thought. The result was, just as Planck predicted for Heisenberg, accusations of collaboration—but also timeless books that resonated far beyond Germany’s borders, inspiring many people to think about their own conundrums around freedom, resistance, and soul growth in new ways.
Plus, here’s a plot twist: according to some, Jünger’s work has directly inspired members of the Stauffenberg group to carry out their 20 July attempt to take Hitler’s life. (Some say even Rommel participated in the plot after reading Jünger.) Stauffenberg himself was most likely directly spurred to action by the poems of another esoteric poet, Stefan George.21 Which goes to show that sometimes, thinking can actually have real-world consequences beyond soul-growth in the metaphysical world. Or perhaps we should rather say: resistance work in the metaphysical realm can alter the metaphysical world in certain respects, which may then play itself out in the real world in unforeseen and surprising ways.
Needless to say, this only works if our soul is intact. Otherwise, all that happens is inaction, or protest out of fear, based on longings for corrupted goals. Which is what happened after the war.
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The Corruption of the German Soul
There is, of course, an inherent danger in seeking enlightenment, the transcendent, the hidden world. Germans—going as they do through a mandatory Faust-reading in school—are astutely aware of this. The hidden worlds are full of traps; the slightest impurity in one’s desire to lay bare its mysteries might summon Mephisto. Indeed, the German tradition is not free of spiritual confusion, unleashed by those metaphysical “alien powers” from a realm where good and evil can come into close contact. The devil literally is in the details. The liminal has a habit of blowing apart all boundaries, sometimes with dire consequences.22
However, while an all-too eager contact with the transcendent can unleash hell, to cut oneself off completely from it can lead to soul death: especially for a people inherently predisposed towards harmony of rationality and the higher realms.
But we have lost our way. The German soul has been corrupted, subverted, stunted, with grave consequences for ourselves and the world. We have allowed the Nazis, and then the empire’s pull, to play with it, divert it, fragment it. We have come to believe that everything German is bad, and that we must see everything before WWII as a precursor to Nazism. To even reflect “Germanness” these days almost threatens to turn you into someone who reverse-causally “paves the way for Hitler.”
But contrary to the disastrous claim that Hitler was the fulfillment, the logical conclusion of the German soul, he represents its manipulation, its dark shadow, the black hole devouring it like a psychopathic light-eater feasting on spirit: we would do well to remember that evil is always about soul corruption. What happened here is a subtle affair, though, one that can be hard to see, especially for those out of touch with their own transcendent natures. Let’s explore this a bit further.
Oswald Spengler, in his Decline of the West (1918), unintentionally nailed two key features looming large in the German psyche:
As soon as, before the astonished gaze of early man, this enduring world of the orderly spatial extension, of that which has become meaningful, stands out in broad contours from a chaos of impressions, the deeply felt irretrievable contrast of this outer world to one's own inner world gives direction and form to waking life, at the same time the primal feeling of longing awakens in this soul, suddenly made aware of its loneliness.23
And further:
It is that deep word fear of the child's soul which never leaves higher man, the believer, the poet, the artist, in his boundless loneliness, the fear of the alien powers which loom large and threatening, disguised in sensuous appearances, into the enduring world.24
We have a deep longing for the overcoming of loneliness, and at the same time fear alien powers “disguised in sensous appearances.” These are precisely the sentiments the Nazis tapped into, with their promises of uncompromising—but ultimately numb—community and the destruction of the fearful alien powers.
As you should know by now, however, and as you can read in Spengler’s words, as always, the German longing, and the German Angst, are metaphysical in nature. It is not the longing for a purified blood race by means of genocide, neither is it the fear of Jews and communists. It is the longing for a community of German souls who deeply understand each other, connect on a metaphysical level, and, if we are lucky, contribute to the world’s spiritual and intellectual development, tapping into our quirky strengths with zeal and passion. And it is not the fear of some external menace that keeps us awake at night; it is the fear of soul-eating forces, of evil cosmic stirrings, of mephistolian powers “disguised in appearances.”
The tragedy here is that the Nazis “fleshified” those impulses of the German soul whose objects are transcendent in nature. This is what demons do: while residing on a higher plane of existence, they are in love with the material world; but since they cannot exist in it directly, they tempt humans to confuse the material with the spiritual. And so, under Nazism, various currents of German thought were woven together into a toxic mix that sought salvation by genocide, enlightenment by territorial subjugation, and spiritual fulfillment by paradoxically turning the Romantic anti-modernist impulse into modern bureaucracy, technology, and earthly socialist ideas.
Max Weber opined that it remained to be seen whether the "mechanized fossilization" of his time will endure forever or "whether at the end of this tremendous development there will be entirely new prophets or a powerful rebirth of old thoughts and ideals."25 Alas, whatever one thinks about the various prophets and rebirth movements of the Weimar era and how they interacted, the Nazi version won out, and with it the corruption of the German soul, a subversion both subtle and brazen. Instead of a Geistiges Reich, we got a Third Reich.26
This paved the way for the coarse negation of our proper metaphysical impulses, for the splitting of our soul in two. We have been cut off from our transcendent nature ever since: all that’s left are clichés about discipline, punctuality, and work ethic.
A case in point is Nazi physicist Johannes Stark’s 1937 diatribe against what he called “White Jews,” by which he meant Werner Heisenberg and other physicists of Quantum Theory fame who he saw as traitors to the Germanic scientific spirit: “…all great scientific discoveries and findings can be traced back to the special abilities of Germanic researchers to patient, diligent and edifying observation of nature.”27 He slammed the more theoretical approaches in physics, that is, theoretical physics, with Heisenberg as the prime target. The very same Heisenberg who was part of one of the greatest triumphs in physics ever: the development of Quantum Mechanics. The same development that, as we have seen, had at least partly been made possible by the strong non-materialist, anti-”mechanistic” currents in German thought. A theory that, yes, is very “out there” and doesn’t have much to do with the image of the table-filling 19th century scientist. It also happens to work fantastically well, and challenges some of our materialist-determinist assumptions. According to Forman, it was in fact the theoretical physicists who were most affected by Spengler and the Lebensphilosophie more broadly.
Stark paints a picture of the ideal scientist who is diligent, strictly earthly, boring, uninspired. No wonder: ideology will always extinguish humanity’s spark, its ambition to find the truth. No matter how much some German academics tried to pander to Nazi ideas, because of the inherent contradiction between the deeply anti-intellectual ideology and the nature of academic work and literature, they could only lose their spirit and their standing. (Quite tellingly, the Nazis eventually opted for the “White Jew” Heisenberg when they realized the importance of his research for the war effort. The mediocrities elevated to professorships for ideological reasons apparently didn’t cut it.28)
But the German soul, once split in two, has a way of making itself known. Ultimately, this can only lead to bad outcomes: a half-empty soul produces lopsided, warped, confused consciousness. The longing for transcendence, for enchantment, and its expression in literature and thought, runs deep and cannot be eradicated entirely. Once suppressed, it will resurface in surrogate ideas. Two examples of how this played out in the second half of the 20th century may illustrate this.
On the political left, the impulse went towards Marx and Freud, or more generally, the psychoanalytic and communist movements. But although these movements seem to point towards final causes and transcendent experience, and seem to stand in opposition to positivist and materialist science, they are ultimately materialistic themselves. With all that this entails: instead of the cosmic stirrings, “Goethe-Schiller” as the antidote to rampant scientism, they, too, represent the fleshification of the German longing and the German Angst expressed by Spengler.
They feel like reenchantment, but then go on to seek the mysteries of our existence in the banality of childhood, and salvation in a political, technological, technocratic utopia. Instead of mystic connection with Geist, in the German style of vision-by-Vernunft, rational wholesomeness, and organic analysis, they promote a pseudo-Gnostic materialist liberation of the worker against his will by violently opening his eyes—not to the world of nouemena, but its one-dimensional surrogate: unconscious capitalist brainwashing. But summoning utopia via psychoanalysis was a recipe for disaster, yet another modern replay of Goethe’s Zauberlehrling.
And then, there’s the Greens. As I have argued before, Germany has been ground zero of the modern Green movement, and for good reasons: it is another ugly, deformed outgrowth of a truncated German soul, deprived of the very object of its inherent transcendent longing and reasoning.
A good symbol for what happened may be the legions of German engineers, still among the best in the world, who are busy wasting their talent on nonsense. They build wind turbines that don’t work. They work on the best recycling plants that nobody needs and that do more harm than good. And wherever you look, they construct and research “carbon-reducing” schemes, dangerously confusing themselves with the master in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, when in fact they have become part of the chaos-unleashing forces by taking what’s metaphysical for the material, and the material for what’s metaphysical:29
Brood of hell, you're not a mortal!
Shall the entire house go under?
Over threshold over portal
Streams of water rush and thunder.
Broom accurst and mean,
Who will have his will,
Stick that you have been,
Once again stand still!
Can I never, Broom, appease you?
I will seize you,
Hold and whack you,
And your ancient wood
I'll sever,
With a whetted axe I'll crack you.
(From Goethe, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice)
Like zombies, they are still strong, but stumble around in a wasteland with no direction, trying to crack metaphysical broomsticks with whetted axes. What could go wrong?
Germans do love nature; if we listen closely, the Romantic period still fills our hearts. This has led to a certain proclivity for Gaia worship, even in the postwar period. But over time, due to our stunted soul, we ceased worshiping Gaia, the romanticized Greek goddess-slash-earth, and instead started worshiping “Gaia,” the angry, technocratic god-masquerading-as-causaility of the environment, of “protection,” of salvation-by-technology, culminating in the absurd destruction of our beloved, spiritually radiant natural world in the name of “fighting carbon emissions.”
Spengler’s fear and longing, stripped of its cosmic, transcendent essence, strikes again: fear not of soul death, longing not for connection between the inner and the outer world, but a deeply paradoxical fear of man-made technology, and longing for more man-made technology to fight old man-made technology. Of all the great things a healthy German soul could have contributed to the world, this crippled, crippling constellation turned out to be our most successful export. Truly, what Ernst Jünger called the “Titanic forces”—Gaia’s offspring, after all—have imprisoned us so thoroughly that we react with outrage at the mere hint of their existence. With Spengler, we may read this confusion around environmental questions as a confusion of causality and destiny.
A Soul-Deep Shift
Where are we today? In some sense, the German soul is reasserting itself, even in the English-speaking world. But although we are at a metaphysical nexus, many Germans seem to be busy merely correcting some of the symptoms that are a consequence of their arrested soul development since WWII. But there is hope: like in the Weimar Republic, we are in the midst of a cultural crisis, a Kulturkrise, and change will come. I hope that a healthy expression of a German soul, once more in harmony with itself, will contribute to paving a way forward, whether in science, philosophy, history, or culture.
Americans and Brits often talk about “the West” or “Western culture” as if we were one monolithic bloc. But this is partly an optical illusion created by US cultural imperialism. We are so steeped in the Anglo-Amercian narrative and framing that even us Continentals often don’t see it anymore. And for the Anglo world, it is rather convenient to pretend that we all think alike, as if, say, Germany and France weren’t very different from the US and each other, with their very different intellectual traditions, histories, and cultures.
For a long time, European thought has been bashed from the Anglo perspective, to the point that we are even blamed philosophically for the woke ideology, as if this wasn’t, at the end of the day, entirely a US product. (We don’t even have a word for “gender,” for God’s sake.) To add insult to injury, Europeans now have to suffer this nonsense because it is imposed on us via US soft power, which doesn’t feel so soft from where we’re at. But to even point this out is probably considered “anti-Americanism” these days, a term which, of course, is pure propaganda, and a very unimaginative one at that. Hilarious that some people take it seriously.
This is just to show my Anglo friends a different perspective—one that they might begin to hear more often as US hegemony wanes. But I don’t want to play the game of bashing or blaming other cultures. The fact is, we can never go back, only forward. We live in a globalized world now, like it or not—which offers us the chance to complement each other, rooted in our own traditions, in the quest towards understanding.
There is universal truth, of course. But depending on our roots, we have different ways of getting at it, different “thought modes,” different mind shapes. Pretending these don’t exist won’t bring us closer to understanding, quite the contrary. We need to reclaim our heritage—if only to understand ourselves. Then, we can take the useful aspects we find there and turn them into shining light, for the benefit of all. Diversity is strength, my friends.
And so, after long periods of suppression and sublimation, the German soul may once more shine forth with its weird, productive mix of mysticism, rationality, intuition, analytic thinking, and orientation towards the hidden, the subtle, the world behind words. May it avoid some of the inherent dangers in these traits, and again attract some of the best minds, wherever they may be.
Let us make the best of it. And if we can’t avert the catastrophe, at least we can heed Max Planck’s advice and focus on the beyond: the rebuilding of a new world.
Mark Twain was, of course, onto something with his loving diatribe against the German language. But not only does the language come quite natural to the German, it can be seen both as a sort of intelligence training and as a powerful tool to express ideas in this strange mélange of concrete connection to the world and abstract height. If done properly, that is: it can also serve as an excuse for preposterous and pretentious overcomplication. (Thanks
for reminding me of Twain’s piece.)In fact, one might argue that the rise of scientific materialism, especially in its most extreme forms in the second half of the 20th century, depends on the materialist connotations of the English word mind: nobody using the German Geist would think of it as identical to, or produced by, the brain. Maybe someone should look into this idea and do an etymological study of mind and see what it yields.
I’m not a fan of “analyzing” terms like materialism, reductionism, positivism etc. to death unless there is a good reason for it. They generally stand for a “thought package” that worships natural science, promotes “rationalism” as opposed to more literary, poetic, or mystical forms of thought, denies or downplays the role of transcendence or layers of being above the physical, chemical, or biological, and so on. And even where some of these ingredients are missing, the general battle lines and their motivations are often clear enough.
V. Kraft, Der Wiener Kreis. Der Ursprung des Neopositivismus. Ein Kapitel der jüngsten Philosophiegeschichte (originally published in 1950, as quoted by Forman)
Paul Forman, Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971): 1–115. https://doi.org/10.2307/27757315.
Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography, Frank Gaynor (New York, 1949), 185, quoted from O’Flaherty, J. C. (1992). Werner Heisenberg on the Nazi Revolution: Three Hitherto Unpublished Letters. Journal of the History of Ideas, 53(3), 487. doi:10.2307/2709890
Forman writes about Driesch's introduction to Man and the Universe (1928): “…for despite his vitalism, wholism, and idealism he too felt the milieu to be hostile to science and reason. Recognizing that it is "unfashionable" to take account of the results of natural science and that he will be put down as betraying his origin as a scientist, he nonetheless accepts the characterization of his method by the opprobrious epithet "rational" and holds that "the modern contempt for [natural] science is due to the fact that its champions take the concept in too narrow a sense, namely, as denoting a mechanistic view of the world.”
Forman specifically looks at the Weimar culture, as opposed to a more general German tradition, and he also paints a picture where the physicists and natural scientists face a hostile environment which rebels against materialism, leading to the opportunitstic adaptation of the scientists to that environment as a sort of unconscious political move. I would rather flip this argument around: the scientists themselves, steeped in the German tradition and German language, were rebelling — together with the larger cultural environment.
Forman also seems overtly hostile to the German tradition of Lebensphilosophie and German thought in general with its focus on wholesomeness, intuition, and life as opposed to cold reasoning, utilitarianism, and mechanistic causality. He clearly takes the side of supposed rationality (in a glorification of Einstein) against the wide range of German thinkers and scientists who questioned certain dogmas such as causality. This culminates in a confused footnote about Heisenberg that betrays his approval of the narrative that the German transcendent spirit is somehow right-wing or even a precursor to Hitler. His attitude was and is certainly widespread, and the overall tone of his paper can be seen as supporting the idea that there is a contrast between the Anglo and the German spirit when it comes to transcendence and the mystical. Perhaps today, the tide is turning somewhat, if we think about Iain McGilchrist’s work on the dangers of too much reliance on left brain hemisphere thinking.
To be fair, Bertrand Russell had already argued in 1912 that physics doesn’t deal in causality anymore, and that it is in face philosophers who impose a supposed “law of causality” unto science. (Bertrand Russell, On the Notion of Cause, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 13 (1912): 1–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4543833)
Werner Heisenberg, Ordnung der Wirklichkeit, Springer, 2019
Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West in particular, widely read by physicists in Germany, seems to have had an effect. Spengler was, after all, a Lebensphilosoph too, who thundered:
The abstract savant, the natural scientist, the thinker in systems, whose entire mental existence is founded upon the principle of causality, is a "late" manifestation of the hatred of the powers of destiny, of the incomprehensible. The words "time" and "destiny," for anyone who uses them instinctively, touch life itself in its deepest depths—life as a whole, which is not to be separated from lived experience.
Forman puts quotes from Schrödinger and Spengler side by side.
Schrödinger:
"In the world of visible phenomena”—governed as it is by statistics, and thus by the concept of pure number—”we have clear intelligibility, but behind this a dark, eternally unintelligible imperative, an enigmatic 'must.'"
Spengler:
"Out of the principle of causality speaks fear of the world. Into it the intellect banishes the demonic in the form of a continually valid necessity, which rigid and soul-destroying is spread over the physical world picture."
One wonders why Darwin and Galton are never accused of “paving the way for Hitler”…
In fact, many pre-war “anti-science” stances by the German philosophers and poets were explicitly directed at the Anglo world. Strong anti-Anglo sentiments can be seen, for instance, in the influential circle around Stefan George, but the dread of “Americanization” was generally widespread.
Quoted from Wikipedia, Dichter und Denker
Ibid.
Werner Heisenberg, Der Teil und das Ganze, p. 235 ff. (Engl. title Physics and Beyond)
Keep in mind that Planck said this shortly after meeting Hitler, realizing what’s up. However, he seems to have thought that the whole thing will only last for one or two years until the population realizes its errors. That turned out to be unrealistic. See O’Flaherty, J. C. (1992). Werner Heisenberg on the Nazi Revolution: Three Hitherto Unpublished Letters. Journal of the History of Ideas, 53(3), 487. doi:10.2307/2709890
See Ivan Todorov, Werner Heisenberg, online here: “A crucial role is played by the military requirement of December 1941 that a (fully supported) nuclear research effort should produce something of immediate military use within 9 months. After the physicists reply (correctly!) that this would be quite impossible, the uranium project is denied priority and is transferred to the National Research Council. Heisenberg’s much discussed June 1942 meeting with Albert Speer, Hitler’s newly appointed head of arms production, only confirms the earlier decision to assign a relatively low profile to nuclear research.”
Werner Heisenberg on the Nazi Revolution: Three Hitherto Unpublished Letters. Journal of the History of Ideas, 53(3), 487. doi:10.2307/2709890
Stauffenberg is said to have recited George’s poem Der Widerchrist the evening before the attempted coup.
The history of the Munich Cosmic circle around Stefan George—the one who might have inspired Stauffenberg to carry out his coup against Hitler—is a case in point: deep insights are mixed with cult-like structures, a longing for a reign of the spirit with confused sexuality and androgyny, etc. Without proper balance and boundaries, ideas from the realm of the spirit might be improperly translated to the material world.
For a related study about the paranormal and liminality, see George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal, Xlibris, 2001
Spengler, p. 158
“Sobald vor dem erstaunten Blick des frühen Menschen diese ertragende Welt des geordneten Ausgedehnten, des sinnvoll Gewordenen sich in großen Umrissen aus einem Chaos von Eindrücken abhebt und der tief empfundene unwiderrufliche Gegensatz dieser Außenwelt zur eigenen Innenwelt dem wachen Leben Richtung und Gestalt gibt, erwacht zugleich das Urgefühl der Sehnsucht in dieser sich plötzlich ihrer Einsamkeit bewussten Seele.”
Ibid., p. 159
“Es ist jene tiefe Weltangst der Kinderseele, welche den höheren Menschen, den Gläubigen, den Dichter, den Künstler in seiner grenzenlosen Vereinsamung niemals verlässt, die Angst vor den fremden Mächten, die groß und drohend, in sinnliche Erscheinungen verkleidet, in die ertragende Welt hineinragen.”
Quoted from Thomas Karlauf, Stafan George: Die Entdeckung des Charismas, Blessing, 2007, p. 310
Stefan George, a crazy poet who was very influential from around 1900 till his death in 1933 (the same whose poems inspired Stauffenberg to carry out his attempt on Hitler’s life), spoke of a “spiritual (geistige) Reich.” He wrote in 1918 to a concerned follower, who was worried that the project might fail due to the looming German defeat in 1918: “The Geistige Reich had and has, with or without victory, the whole world as its enemy.” In other words, no matter how the military (earthly) conflicts play out, we are dealing with “powers and principalities” of a higher nature here. His nationalist ideas were widely perceived as “geistig” (intellectual/spiritual) in nature.
George had talked about the coming of a “Secret Germany”—which some of his followers saw fulfilled in the Nazis. Others, not so much: Ernst Kantorowicz in 1933 argued in almost Pauline fashion that George’s “secret Germany” is not strictly of this world, and therefore not what the Nazis sought to establish: he talked about it as a “a realm of gods like Olympus,” of “spirits like the mediaval state of saints and angels,” a “kingdom of the soul.”
See Thomas Karlauf, Stafan George: Die Entdeckung des Charismas, Blessing, 2007
and
Ernst Kantorowicz, Das Geheime Deutschland: Vorlesung, gehalten bei Wiederaufnahme der Lehrtätigkeit am 14.November 1933, Edition von Eckhart Grünewald
"Weiße Juden" in der Wissenschaft [Folge 28 vom 15.7.1937, S. 6] , Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft ; Nachlass Werner Heisenberg
Online available here.
For a very tendentious telling of the story, which nonetheless gives a rundown of the chronology, see CASSIDY, D. C. (1992). Heisenberg, German Science, and the Third Reich. Social Research, 59(3), 643–661. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970709
From a translation of Goethe’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice
This is an astonishing read . I don’t recollect having read anything as insightful and rich in depth . Brilliant writing . It feels like an epochal piece . A call to action and awakening .
You’ve become quite the writer, luc. Probably your best to date!