It has been known since the last days of the journal Encounter that Adolf Hitler and Ludwig Wittgenstein were for a short time fellow pupils in the Realschule in Linz. In his first chapter, Mr Cornish deploys evidence suggesting that "the Jew" of Mein Kampf was originally none other than this particular contemporary. Certainly the two boys had a quite unusual amount in common. For they shared not only an intense interest in and remarkable knowledge of music but also a commitment to the peculiar ideas of the philosopher Schopenhauer. Both retained this interest and this commitment throughout the rest of their lives.
Chapter 2 concerns "The Spies of Trinity" (College, Cambridge). Mr Cornish opens by pressing a question never previously asked: "What is the explanation for the fact that Wittgenstein was in 1935 offered the Chair of Philosophy in the University of Kazan?" An explanation is needed since Wittgenstein was very far from being a Marxist philosopher. And the Great Terror, which had been signalled by the assassination of S.M. Kirov in late 1934, was during 1935 in full swing. Mr Cornish contends that the reason why the government of the USSR treated Wittgenstein with such peculiar generosity was that he had been the recruiter of all the Cambridge spies.
The question whether or not this hypothesis is true or false can be definitively settled only if and when the relevant Soviet archives are examined. But I am myself as confident as without such knock-down decisive verification it is possible to be that Mr Cornish is right. For people who during the crucial years between Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929 and that 1935 offer were attending his classes and/or enjoying other personal contacts with him have given me accounts both of the extraordinary and overwhelming force of Wittgenstein's personality and of the absoluteness in those years of his Stalinist commitment.
Chapters 1 and 2 constitute an historical Part I. Parts II and III are more ideological. The former begins with an attempt to show that Wagner's anti-semitism and Hitler's anti-semitism
were not simply parallel hates, directed at Jews in general, but rather a single entangled web of hatred woven together around a single . . . family, whose characteristics were taken to be typical of Jews generally.The next chapter brings in Schopenhauer, who constituted for both Hitler and Wittgenstein the crucial formative influence. The titles of the remaining three chapters of Part II are "Mystical Experience and the Self", "Schopenhauer, Rosenberg and Race Theory", and "Magic, Sorcery and Hitler".
The whole of this Part II constitutes essential reading for students of National Socialist ideology. If any such there still are I can only wish them joy of learning such things as that
the early Aryans in India attained to metaphysical insights through knowledge of the Atman/Brahman identity.Such revelations remind me of the confession which Gilbert Ryle once made as Supervisor of my graduate studies:
Some of my colleagues think I'm prejudiced. But in my opinion there is nothing which rises in the East except the Sun.It is in Part III that we find the most thorough discussion of the fundamental metaphysical doctrine apparently shared by both Hitler and Wittgenstein. On the very first page of Part III, Mr Cornish explains that the essence of this doctrine
was expressed by Emerson in his restatement of the original Aryan doctrine of consciousness: ‘. . . the act of seeing and the thing seen, the see-er and the spectacle, the subject and the object is one'.I confess, not very shamefacedly, that confronted with such doctrines I want to quote Groucho Marx: "It appears absurd. But don't be misled. It is absurd." On the first page of the next chapter the same unbelievable doctrine is recycled as a Zen revelation:
I came to realise clearly that Mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth the sun and the moon and stars.From such unbelievable not to say absurd premises we are supposed to be able, indeed required, to draw the equally unbelievable not to say equally absurd conclusion that there is really only one mind; and that the occurrences of consciousness of every kind in the minds of everyone are really occurrences in that single universal mind.
This bizarre doctrine can, according to Mr Cornish, be attractive to both National and International Socialists. For it might seem to show that and how, come the revolution, everyone might agree to abandon the supposed illusion of individuality and live solely in and for the collective whole.
Antony Flew