Philosopher King; Sample
Hitler: Philosopher King
Chapter 1 (draft). The Philosopher King.
In the
teaching of the history of the first half of the 20th century, it
seems to have become the fashion to describe the Great War, the “Seminal
Catastrophe”, as starting with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of the
crumbling Austrian empire in 1914, and ending after the deliberations at Yalta Waterloo
The
global conflagration of the Great War were a particular shock after nearly a
century of peace had supported men in their complacency of Hegel’s
phenomenology of spirit, made manifest in the contractual freedom provided by
the state, and at the next level, between the nation states, such that war was
a thing of man’s barbaric past. 19th century humans believed they
were living in an enlightened, diplomatic world, where war had been eradicated
just as had human sacrifice and cannibalism. The shock of the seminal
catastrophe was that the grim realities of war became the nightmare of the
future.
It is
true that there was a pause between 1918 and 1945. The shocked young but proud
German Empire declared fifty years previously through the humiliation of the
French in their own Palace of Versailles was itself humiliated in that same
setting by the temporarily victorious allies. Or rather the representatives of Germany
It is
also true, as school children will attest, that notwithstanding its
capitulation and unconditional surrender, Germany
was starved with a continuing blockade, suffered a number of revolutions and
was then crippled through the punitive war reparations imposed at Versailles Bismarck
But
notwithstanding the legitimacy and intuitive persuasiveness of these accounts,
the collective insanity that seemed to sweep over the whole of the German
nation with the Hitler phenomenon seems to require additional explanation. The
closest psychiatric diagnosis to the phenomenon of NSDAP Germany would be
“group hysteria”[i].
Although this is usually confined to small isolated groups of highly strung usually
young people in isolated setting, there is an argument that it emerges wherever
a crowd becomes adulatory to a powerful and charismatic leader or performer.
But to emphasise the extremity of the collective delusion, the racist,
grandiose and murderous delusions of Hitler and the NSDAP which are
understandable and even common in small sects, political or religious; these
were adopted, believed, embraced by and then fought for by a whole nation, and
perhaps the most educated, civilised, cultured and urbane nation globally at
that time. This phenomenon requires an explanation additional to the historical
and structural accounts adumbrated above.
This
book constructs such an explanation as a hypothesis; an account to bridge this
conceptual gap. It argues that Hitler and the NSDAP as a phenomenon were
different. Hitler and his NSDAP were not just another political party lead by
another charismatic demagogue. Hitler and the NSDAP were a product of a unique
moment in the cultural and philosophical evolution of human kind. If part of
the tragedy of the Great War was the Generals catching up with the paradigm
shift in the potentials for human violence brought about by progress in the
technology of killing; this thesis argues that the Hitler and NSDAP phenomenon
was brought about by humanity as a whole catching up with the paradigm shift in
the human condition brought about by the prodigious developments in philosophy
and culture over the turn of the 19th and 20th century.
Hitler and the NSDAP were able to opportunistically surf the tsunami of these
new ideas as they crashed through western cultural givens and beliefs, allowing
Hitler and the NSDAP to create their New Order in its wake.
The
success of the German Wermacht in the first half of the 39-45 war was not a
surprise. The states to the east capitulated easily and sensibly under the very
real threat of a militarised NSDAP Germany that had been preparing for war for
nearly a decade, and which was keening for violence rather than (like everybody
else) desperately trying to avoid it following the catastrophe of the Great
War, still very present in living memory. The sweep east through Poland first,
and then north and west, around through France through the invention of the
fast moving Blitzkrieg technique was the master craftsmanship of the culturally
militaristic Prussian state that had amalgamated as the new German Empire.
This
master craftsmanship from the Prussian people was the outcome of centuries of
combination combining militaristic breeding and culture set up by Frederick Holy
Roman Empire each had its own university and cultural centre, such
that there were more per head of population than anywhere else. That Germany
In
attempting to provide an explanation; a theory for this, the Hitler phenomenon,
this book combines two arguments, the first about a philosophy, and the second
about a person.
The Philosophy
Firstly,
the philosophy. The argument is that hand in hand with the leaps forward of
science and technology and the industrial revolution of the 19th
century, a quieter, but no less fundamental revolution in ideas was taking
place in philosophy and social theory. Hegel’s magisterial and optimistic
accounts of the unveiling and evolution of a human spirit with successively
greater syntheses of facts and arguments, captured a zeitgeist of scientific
and cultural development to some extent crystallised, as he saw it, by the
enlightened Napoleonic code. Hegel’s historicist sweep was translated Marx as a
“young Hegelian” into the language of materialism and social inequality, such
that revolution became a developmental stage in this evolution of humankind, or
of “spirit”. There was indeed a wave of peasant and popular revolutions across Europe in 1848 based upon these ideas, which were more or
less successfully repressed by the incumbent governments of the nation states.
In the subsequent peace, a question arose of why the Evolution of the Spirit
had stalled. Why people were indeed diverted from their material interests by
“bread and circuses”.
The
answer to this was a third Copernican revolution, this time a revolution in
psychology. Copernicus had proposed the original heresy that the earth was not
the centre of the universe. The second purported Copernican revolution was a
reversal in the way that we perceive things, outlined by Kant. This was more
esoteric, but equally fundamental. Kant demonstrated that all we can know are
sense impressions, “phenomena” rather than the real world out there, and that
we see or perceive the Platonic ideal and then fit the sense data into this
rather than the other way around. Important in this account was his statement
that the “thing in itself” (ding an sich); the actual physical world is
unperceivable and un-knowable. The significance of this revolution was to
amplify Descartes’ initial scepticism about the reliability of a common sense
realist perspective that the external world is reliable and real. Kant went a
step further by arguing that we have no idea what it is like because we never
perceive it. All we have to go on is out internal sense perceptions – and these
are based upon prejudices and previous experience. So, we can only “believe”
science rather than know it. There are no facts, only opinions or impressions.
The
hypothesis in this book argues that there was then a third Copernican
Revolution, which provides the philosophical component of the Hitler
phenomenon. As a named movement, “postmodernism”, it was not to be recognised
and described until several decades after Hitler’s death, but this hypothesis
argues that its implications wwere an “unthought known”; that is something that
is being culturally enacted, although not yet intellectually articulated. It is
proposed that the cultural implications of postmodernism were applied
politically on a local, then national, then global stage by Hitler and the
NSDAP with devastating efficacy.
Postmodernism
can be argued to have emerged from three different directions. Firstly, Darwin Darwin
Secondly,
Freud’s account of the unconscious brought together the emerging conviction in
thinkers that as humans, we are not even in control of our own minds. In
particular, Weber’s account of domination as obedience to authority presented
this as an internal psychological process. We obey the law because we choose
to; or because we choose to accept the legitimacy of the person laying down
those laws, and that this conformity to authority is laid down in experience.
Thus Engel’s account of “false consciousness” and the power of ideology,
explained why the workers in Capitalism’s “dark satanic mills” acted as if they
were better off being exploited and accepting their lot. Thus Schopenhauer’s
silent determining “will to life” hides beneath man’s thoughts, decisions and
perceived freewill. In the same way as Copernicus’ original heresy was that the
Earth goes around the sun rather than that the Earth is the centre of the universe,
human kind are not the centre of their own minds wishes and actions, but these
are controlled by other dark forces; instinctual (sexual, destructive according
to Freud); habitual (as with Weber’s internalised obedience to authority) or
manipulated and fabricated by powerful elites with vested interests (Engels and
Marx’s accounts of ideology as why workers accept their disadvantageous status
quo). In the United States Europe ,
Hitler and the NSDAP were planning to utilise the same manipulation of human
values to enact a political, social and cultural “coup de foudre”.
The
third contributor to this psychological Copernican revolution had been
emerging, but coded or frankly disavowed, and this was the emergence of a post
Judeo-Christian morality and ideology. For centuries, philosophers had
challenged the hegemony of the dominant western monotheistic religions,
although most choosing to veil this to keep their heads and their jobs (with
some notable exceptions such as Voltaire). By the end of the 19th
century, the devout Kierkegaard has carried out a meditation and analysis of
the ethics of Abraham’s near filicide; committing the heresy of subjecting an
epochal moment in Judeo-Christian mythology to modern ethical critique,
concluding that religious belief required a “leap of faith”, but simultaneously
detaching religion from rationality. More directly, Nietzsche has declared
Judeo-Christian morality to be against nature; a “slave morality” of resentment
and cunning rather than a more open, healthy, natural contest of naked, raw
power. “Morality is no more than a signpost of the emotions” he declared, thus
morality is entirely relative, and entirely mutable. Together, at the turn of
the last century, these ethical, cultural and philosophical tropes were
fermenting a heady brew of ideas that undermine the ideological givens of
centuries. Lyotard[ii]
would later term this the “collapse of the metanarratives” as he defined
postmodernism.
Hitler’s
Mein Kampf has been ridiculed as being a verbose and self serving vanity
project, but within it is are two things, firstly his belief and value set,
laid out and clear, and to which he would remain consistent and faithful; but
secondly, there is an intuitive grasp of the potential of the implications of
these ideological Copernican revolutions, and (this hypothesis thesis argues)
an intuitive adoption of the implications and political possibilities of
postmodernity. For example, in his discussion of the “big lie”, he argues that
in effect, people can be made to believe anything if it is in a clear and
consistent message, sufficiently frequently repeated, even after its falsity
has been demonstrated.
The
14-18 war was the first war fought with modern weaponry. The 39-45 war was the
first to deploy a post modern philosophy. Hitler and the NSDAP in the 1920s and
30s seized the philosophical finding of the mutability of ideology and combined
it with the new the solubility of millennia old ethical and belief frameworks,
particularly the Judeo-Cristian. They created a new morality, a new history and
a new religion, and used it in the single minded pursuit of the only thing of
value that survives the caustic post-modern challenge. Power.
This
book propounds a thesis that the philosophy adopted by Hitler in his role as
Fuhrer-King was firstly the rejection of all traditional belief and morality
enabled by the post-modern realisation of their contingent status, and the
adoption of entirely instrumental ones in the pursuit of power.
In the
exploration of the nature and implications of post modern and post structural
thinking, a consensus emerges about the centrality of power[iii].
As a critical and analytical tool, the medium of power as it is exerted and
manifest within systems can be used to explore social structures. For example
in the operation of capitalism, as mentioned above, the importance of ideology
is in the enactment and maintenance of the power of the bourgeois mill owners
over their exploited and impoverished workers, so that the workers,
ideologically blinded to their true interests, continue to use company loans to
buy essentials in the company shop, and to be relatively content in this
situation, while compounding their exploitation and the power that the mill
owner has over them.
The
difference between the capitalist and the postmodernist, is that for the
capitalist, power is exerted to increase his wealth. For the postmodernist,
within Foucault’s analyses and following Nietzsche’s dictum of “will to power”,
power for its own sake as the only legitimate and real currency is the goal.[iv]
This focus on power as an application of post-modernism is argued in this
hypothesis to be the philosophy that the Fuhrer-King adopted, and that became
the strategic power behind the throne. Thus he was able single-mindedly to
negotiate and strategise his way through local, revolutionary and then national
politics
This
post modern philosophy, however, was also the cause of the reversal and
downfall of the Hitler phenomenon. Operation Barbarossa in 1941, was embarked
on at the point at which, if Germany
Thus,
the power of a post modern philosophy that rejects traditions and extant
cultural givens and assumptions and builds in their place new ideologies and
moralities is that it can bewitch whole educated and sophisticated nations.
These new ideologies can be synthesised and manufactured to be entirely
instrumental to further the interests of the power elite. The weakness of a
post modern philosophy is its essential emptiness and meaninglessness.
Following the dissolution of the metanarratives, values, over-arching aims
there is nothing else to strive for. No Jerusalem
Bullock’s
authoritative nearly contemporary biography of Hitler[v]
ends with the desperate question of what it was all about; what it was all for.
What was the nature of the ideology that had cost a trillion 1945 dollars and
60 million lives. He struggles for an answer. However an interesting character
ideosyncracy of the Furher-King was that the ascetic vegetarian Hitler had a passion
for slabs of chocolate and large quantities of cakes and pastries, fed to him
by the doting motherly wives of the Wagners and the Bechsteins. Bullock’s
incredulous and even more desperate conclusion to his question was that it was
all simply to obtain “more cakes for Arians”.
The King
Having
described the philosophy, the second factor in the Hitler “philosopher king”
phenomenon is the man. In Plato’s republic, he (in the voice of Socrates)
argues that “philosophers [must] become kings”[vi].
Hitler was probably no philosopher himself. Biographically, there is a blurring
of history between his own propaganda and the manufacture of his personality
cult. The latter had him reading the German canon of Goethe, Kant, and Hegel
between whiz-bangs in the trenches on the one hand, and that of his
contemporary and posthumous biographical and political detractors and opponents
emphasising his lack of education and culture on the other. The reality was
probably more complex in that Hitler probably was an Aspergic savant, so that
there was an acute intelligence and even genius in several narrowly defined
areas, although he was in no way the well rounded and well read German
Intellectual that the personality cult proposed lay behind his enigmatic three
quarters photographic profile. The hypothesis of this book is that the specific
structure of Hitler’s personality with its Asperger traits was the spark that
combined with the petrol of the rigorous and nihilistic potential of postmodern
philosophy that was overwhelming thinking in the first half of the last
century. The NSDAP phenomenon derived from a combination of this savant/genius
leader with this high octane philosophy.
In
Hitler’s upbringing and development, there is no trauma one can point to that
provides an explanation of how this particular man was able to rise to the top
of the German political hierarchy, still less is there a pinpointable reason
that explains his behaviour and attitudes while in power leading to his
becoming an anathema. He was the son of a petit bourgeois Austrian civil
servant; he loved his mother, lost a brother, was a lazy teenager and dropped
out for several years living in poor men’s houses, moving around trying to
avoid the Austrian draft. His dreams seemed to move from operas in Lintz to
that of being another artistic hero in the prevalent romantic tradition; a
misunderstood artist whose talent went unrecognised by the academies,
disinherited in favour of his sister and eeking out a living copying postcards
which he sold, lecturing his fellow hostel dwellers about current affairs.
There were some oddities about his choices; he chose not to obtain proper work,
or learn a profession; as well as moving to Germany
As a
soldier he was a loner, out of kilter with the cynicism of his peers that
developed as the war that was to be “over by Christmas” dragged on and took
more lives. Hitler maintained the exuberant nationalistic fervour from the day
he joined up; an odd man as a soldier; friendless and rootless, lecturing his
weary and traumatised comrades at arms about their lack of patriotism. This
oddness is a manifestation of the key to his personality that combined with the
philosophical context described above.
The
oddness was because Hitler was probably Aspergic; with what the eponymous
neurologist Dr Asperger, who described the condition, connoted to be autistic
psychopathy[vii];
a particular character constellation that combined aspects of autism with
normal and even demonstrably higher IQ. At the time of writing, experts
recommend that the various different types of autism, including Aspergers’ are
grouped together as being within the Autistic Spectrum[viii].
Characteristic of these disorders is an inability (in the less severe) or a
disinterest (in the more severe) in social engagement and relations. People
with Aspergers’ are often on the more mild end of the spectrum, so one reads
heart rending accounts of their repeated attempts as they grow up to engage in
social relationships, but getting it wrong and not knowing how to get it right;
not understanding what they are doing wrong, so they end up isolated and lonely,
and, given the uncivilised brutal (Nietzschian) morality of the playground,
their isolation is compounded by the trauma of being teased and bullied because
of their isolation.
There is
another element of people with Aspergers’ that is described however, and this
is that they can have savant areas; intellectual skills and abilities that are
supra normal. There is a criticism of neurological explanations of things which
is that the brain is so complex in its physiology and function that
attributions of aspects of human experience to neurological factors is facile,
and comprises a new mythology, “neuro-mythology”. So there iss a
“neuro-mythological” explanation that people with Asperger’s have savant areas,
namely that being successful at social interaction is actually a very complex
and involved process, taking up a lot of brain function; literally a lot of
brain cortex area. People with Aspergers’ who do not have these social
abilities and skills utilise the areas of brain differently; for example in the
development of their savant areas.
The
second limb of the hypothesis on which this book rests is that Hitler was an
Aspergic savant-genius in several rather narrow areas, which will be discussed
more below, but which included recent military and political history on one
hand and leadership broadly defined on the other. On the broader questions of
value, ethics, relationships, the emotional and kinship bonds and cultural
assumptions that comprises the fabric of societies and social groupings, he was
a completely empty vessel. But this was also a strength, in that he was able to
reinvent a structure of ethics, value and assumptions, these being completely
instrumental in his post modern pursuit of power. He was unencumbered by
relationships, emotional and kinship bonds, or societal expectations that would
have held him back, or given him pause in his pursuit of his aim.
The line
of argumentation that Hitler was Aspergic derive from several angles, the most
obvious being that there must have been something psychiatrically wrong with
him to enact the policies and have the views that he did. That he was a
psychopath[ix],
or that he was “mad” in some way. This will be discussed in more detail below,
but he was not medically psychotic. Neither was he (unlike some dictators)
personally psychopathic, there being little evidence that the personally was
involved in violence notwithstanding the things that were done in his name, and
aside from activity in the 14-18 war. So he was not “crazy” or “mad” in both
the common uses of the term, and in the expert understanding. He was a
professional politician who had a partner and was a home owner; ran a (rather
ostentatious) car and paid (some of) his taxes. So he was not “mad” but there
must have been something wrong with him. Maybe this was Aspergers’.
The
arguments in favour of his having Asperger’s include the rigidity (consistency)
of his attitudes and political strategy and aims, there being a remarkable
consistency (even down to the wording) of his policy as stated in the “25
points” in about 1920, just after joining the NSDAP when it had fewer than 100
members and was a tiny regional political group; and the drafting of the
notorious Nuremberg laws depriving Jewish people of their citizenship in about
1935.
In this
account, Hitler is also argued to be a savant in leadership. Leadership is one
of those disciplines that is evanescent and difficult to define, but is central
and economically extremely important in social groupings. Leadership as a
discipline has a long tradition, although prior to the last century, it was
mainly concerned with the post hoc exploration of the lives and activities of
great political leaders, for example Carlyle’s study of Fredrick the Great.
Particularly from the second half of the last century, it has been explicitly
taught as the proliferation of MBA courses attest. Hitler has to be declared to
be a leadership genius; in his achievement of Chancellorship with a party that
had 30 or 40 members a mere decade before; in the innovation of his political
campaigns and strategies, then in his
manipulation of other national leaders when he obtained a place on the world
stage.
People
who met Hitler were met with a steady gaze and felt a spiritual connection. On
Hitler’s side, it was likely that this was a conscious orchestration of how he
would talk to people, rather than their being warm and having normal emotional
valence, they were a conscious performance, like the staged and practiced
performances of his demagogic oratory. He would practice his rhetorical
flourishes in front of the mirror and was obsessional about photographs of him
that were allowed to be published for example. His extreme awkwardness in any
other context than where he was the centre of attention and holding forth on
the lengthy exposition of his own opinions and perspectives are
characteristically Asperger like. Further evidence include his famed temper
tantrums where he would become completely incandescent, earning the name
“tappischfesser” (carpet eater);such catathymic outbursts being a
characteristic of Asperger mood and emotional regulation..
The
final argument in favpour of his being Aspergic was that he did seem to have
savant areas. There are accounts of Hitler being very interested in military
history, particularly the campaigns of the two Fredricks and the (then fairly
recent) glorious Franco-Prussian war of 1873, where Bismarck’s master
diplomacy, he knitted together the men of Saxony, Bavaria and Prussia to
comprise a German Empire, declared over the vanquished French in their own
proud palace of Versailles.
Machiavelli’s
book, the Prince, has been morally criticised for its articulating and
detailing the perceived necessary brutality of real politique; from the best
known notion that the end justifies the means, to his advocacy of cruelly and
brutally treating several unfortunate criminals to establish the prince’s
credentials; that it is better to be feared than loved[x].
But Machiavelli’s Prince is an acknowledged masterpiece. It has never been
ridiculed as Hitler’s Mein Kampf has been. However, in the Kampf, Hitler (among
some more tedious and self serving passages) sets forward some gems of
political genius, for example his exposition of the “Big Lie”, and his analysis
of the political success and survival of Jewish people as an ancient race.
This, in combination with his intuitive virtuoso grasp and use of charisma and
demagoguery; his political connivance, manipulation, threat and extortion of
individuals, and his strategic intuition support the contention that he was a
savant in the area of leadership.
These
arguments are discussed more below, but for the current summary, it is this
combination of savant intelligence with a tabula rasa in terms of emotional and
cultural sensitivity that enable his wholesale adoption of the new post modern
philosophy, and his complete abnegation of morality and values as it seemed
instrumentally advantageous to do so.
The philosopher king
The
distilled argument in this book is that in the first part of the 1900s had
developed a philosophy articulating the fluidity and relativity of culture and
morality that later has come to be known as post modernism; that secondly, this
cultural abolitionist philosophy was wholeheartedly adopted by Hitler as an
Aspergic with an undeveloped personal sense of morality and social emotional
ties and sensitivities.
Thirdly,
the question of how this came to be adopted by the German people as the most
educated on earth answered in terms of the combination between Hitler’s savant
command of leadership and propaganda combined with the intoxicating new
state/race supremacist religion that he created. In the context of a modern
industrial state; “instrumentally rational” in the Weberian sense, that is with
a (very) well developed rational bureaucratic structure to problem solve in a
completely value free manner, instructions from above[xi],
another characteristic of the Prussian psyche contributed as a critical factor.
For the previous century and a half the Prussian people had been bred to be
part of the military, and to obey in a militaristic manner. Armies obey orders,
and since Fredrick the Great’s time, the whole state was in or closely linked
with the military, so the whole country obeyed orders.
It was
this obeisance in combination with the two more important factors of the
savant/leader with the new amoral atheistic a-theoretical and a-cultural
philosophy that combined to enable the awkward puny white vagrant to bewitch
and take over the most educated and cultured nation on earth, then to lead it
into a self immolatory aimless war.
To
summarise the following chapters in the book, chapter two looks in more
biographic detail at the man himself, then chapter three engages in a more
detailed discussion of him as a psychiatric case. Chapter four outlines the
cultural and historical context of the time in which he was living, and which
provides the political backdrop to his professional life and work which is
described next, in chapter five.
The next
two chapters are more theoretical; chapter six looks in more detail at the
philosophical dimension of the books thesis, then chapter seven argues for
Hitler being a leadership savant by looking at the issue of leadership in
general, at charisma specifically, and then more specifically as aspects of
Hitler’s leadership style. Chapter eight sketches out the culture of the NSDAP
state in the context of earlier arguments; the “leistungstaat” or power state
being one that had invented its own religion, ethics and values, taking
advantage of the cultural vacuum left by the post modern philosophical sweep.
In
Hitler, two forces came together, the man, with an Aspergic-savant genius for
leadership and politics, and a philosophical zeitgeist with the potential to
dissolve generations of culture, morality and ideology..
References
[i] Group hysteria reference
[ii] Lyotards report on post
modernism
[iii] Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth
of a prison. London
Foucault, Michel (1998) The History of Sexuality: The
Will to Knowledge, London ,
Penguin.
[iv] Nietzsche will to power
[v] bullock
[vi] plato republic
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm
book V
[vii] Asperger psychopathy
paper
[viii] Autistic spectrum
reference
[ix] Psychopathic God
reference
[x] Mach – the prince
[xi] Weber M (1978). Economy and
Society. University
of California
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