The time of the virtuosi seems to be nearing an end. We have grown tired of repeatedly allowing ourselves to be merely allured and bedazzled. We have had enough of the nervous showmanship of recent decades. We hate the technical display of everything which is called art. We feel that the period of intellectualism as a phenomenon which arrogated to itself the possession of cultural validity, lies in its death throes. We believe that the prophets who announce it as the wave of the future—as the ultimate end of our European culture—are already spokesmen of an obsolete past. These men, inwardly exhausted, had already lost their faith before they thought and wrote. Therefore, their philosophy and their view of history must also end in unbelief. Death and material power greedily consume their works. The weak are broken, while the strong feel their faith, and resistance grows.

The retreat from theoretical materialism in science and art can be regarded as inwardly completed. The pendulum is already swinging in the opposite direction. The direction of our spirit begins—in contrast to both currents—gradually to become clear again.

The time of the aesthetes with their prolific works is here. Revisionist and culturally and racially superior works are being produced. The intellectual power of these works is overwhelming. The great literature of the past is being revived. Alien works of past and present are being rejected. The general public honours Schiller, Kant and Schopenhauer. Still, there are limitations to their works. We are cautious of these not because we fail to find the profoundest thoughts in their works, but because we can no longer use them in their entirety for the study of art. Their limitations are clear. They look only to Greek art for inspiration, and they all speak of the possibility of a universal aesthetics. If they would accept the fact of racial differences in art, then on their theoretical thought—the thought which we describe as the philosophy of the 18th century—we would have an acceptable base on which to build. Their thought could seize the art products of their own peoples. This contradiction between philosophical theory and concrete practice is present in Goethe, Schiller and Schopenhauer. The great fault of all 19th century aesthetics was that it was not likened to the works of the artists; it merely dissected works of art. The philosophers did not discern that Goethe’s admiration of the Asiatic Laokoon was one thing, and Faust’s Nordic deeds something fundamentally quite different. Goethe’s Nordic instinct was strong, but he fell into the trap of believing that the Hellenes were artistically superior to the Nordic art forms.

The starting point of the aesthetics of dissection was a false one, for it failed to rationalise a philosophy of art. The 19th century aesthetics has not awakened a lucid Nordic racial consciousness. Nor has it given us a sense of direction. What it has given us is Greek—most often late, corrupted Greek—art as a standard for European art.

Much was made of an aesthetics and a philosophy of history for the allegedly superior orient. Eventually, we rejected the orient as a concept, as we realised that these peoples had conflicting, often mutually exclusive, cultures and art. Today, it has become modern to speak again of the west. We can speak of the west much more easily than we can speak of the orient. However, more emphasis must be placed on the role of the Nordic races here.

Heretofore, those philosophers who have written about the aesthetic condition, or the establishing of values in art, have bypassed the fact of a racial ideal of beauty. This ideal relates to the physical appearance of the racial types and to the race’s supreme value. In this respect it is evident that if the nature of art is to be discussed, then the pure physical representation, for example, of a Greek, must have a different effect upon us than, for instance, the portrait of a Chinese emperor. Every outline receives a different function in China than in Hellas and, without which, recognition of the racially conditioned formative will be neither interpreted nor aesthetically enjoyed. Every work of art has a spiritual content. Along with its formal treatment, this can only be understood on the basis of different race souls. Our former aesthetics are thus—in spite of much that is individually correct—to be regarded as operating entirely in a vacuum. In this respect the native and truly conscious artist has always proceeded in a racially formative way, and has outwardly embodied truly spiritual qualities through the utilisation of those racial types which surrounded him and which have become bearers of certain racial peculiarities. However much Hellas appears related to us in so many things, the Greek had a sense of things that is entirely different from our own Teutonic thought—or from the Roman or the Indian. This pattern of thought determined the rhythm of his life. This was an aesthetic value. Beauty was the measure of Hellenic life in the symposium. Beauty was the all motivating theme of the Iliad. The Greek search for beauty continued long after the decline of the world of the polis. So strong was its search that when a poor disintegrated Greece faced a Roman general whose presence awoke a remembrance of its own former ancestors, Titus Quinctius Flamininus was treated, because of his dignity and beauty, as a national hero. Athens celebrated him as one of its own great men. This was a mark of the profound Greek longing for the heights of life, even during decline. If we wish to understand Hellas, we temporarily ignore our own supreme value—character. A truly beautiful person could be honoured after his death as a demigod in Hellas. Even the half Greek Egestans erected a monument to the man held to be the most beautiful Greek in the struggle against the Carthaginians and made sacrifices to him. Sometimes the Hellenes spared an opponent if he impressed them with his beauty. For such beauty seemed to them to be a share of divinity, godlikeness. Plutarchos has left us a touching tale of such worship of beauty. Even the Persian general Masistios, killed by the Greeks, was, after his beauty had been observed, carried around by the Greek warriors for general admiration. The Greeks said of Xerxes that his beauty justified him on all counts as the ruler of his people. Outward appearance was—in spite of many bad experiences—regarded as the reflection of a noble soul. For the Greek the hero was always beautiful, and this meant that he was of a racial type.

The Greek as hero appears, for example, in almost the same shape, not only in Hellenic plastic art but also in petty art such as vase painting. With his slim body, the hero simultaneously provides the type of ideal modern beauty, although in his profile the Greek is more gently formed than the later Teuton. Alongside great Hellenic art, one must study the vase paintings of Exikias, Klitias, Nikosthenes, to observe how these show, for example:

Ajax and Achilles at the games

Castor with his horse

the Hydras of Charitaios with the Amazons

the blond wife of Euphronios on the Orpheus dish which is particularly reminiscent of Gretchen

the magnificent Aphrodite with the goose

the Neapolitan crater of Aristophanes and Ergines,

and so on. On thousands of vases and craters we find a constantly recurring racial type which changes only a little here and there, and clearly attests to the beauty and greatness of the Greeks and their excitement at what was heroic, beautiful and great. But a conscious racial contrast exists alongside this: for example, in the representation of Silenus, of satyrs and centaurs. Thus the (Inselionic) Phineus bowl contains three embodiments of masculine lewdness with all its attributes. The heads of the three are round and pudgy, the foreheads swollen as if with dropsy, the noses short and snubby, the lips puffy. This is exactly how Andokides describes Silenus, portraying him as hairy with a long beard and, in the profile drawing, the thick fleshy neck was also visible. The same type appears brilliantly represented by Kleophrades whose truly Greek Bacchante provides in figure and skull line a completely conscious spiritual racial antithesis. Nikosthenes likewise portrays the wineskin carrying Silenus as a virtual half animal, half idiot caricature, while Euphronios has left behind a Silenus dish which ideally represents the snubnosed, hairy negroid eastern racial type. Evident, then, are these two great opposites; the slim, powerful, aristocratic Hellene, and the short stunted bestial Silenus who unquestionably belongs to the race subjected by the Greeks or to the types of imported slaves.

With increasing infiltration of Asiatic blood, figures also appear in painting which at twenty paces distance are to be recognised as Semitic and Jewish. A bowl of the Eos master, for example, shows us a Semitic trader with a sack on his back, while on the early lower Italian Phineus crater, a harpy is represented so that its head and hand motions can be admired in nature on the Kurfurstendamm today.

On thousands of vases and art objects ranging from Asia Minor to the wall paintings of Pompeii, the fact can be proved that, over the course of eight centuries, the consciously willed artistic and aesthetic impression of a hero or an ardently possessed man is conceived and represented racially. With the progressive bastardising of the Greeks, human misshapen figures appear with spongy limbs and ill shaped heads. The racial chaos of a period of progressive democratisation goes hand in hand with artistic decline. No longer did a soul exist which could express itself. There is no longer a type which embodies the soul. Henceforth we find merely the man of Hellenism, a creature who can have neither aesthetic effect nor an inspirational one, because the race soul, style forming, of the Hellenes had died. Things degenerated to such a point that the blond haired Achaeans of Pindar formed something unique in the Mediterranean. From the beginning of the 5th century the treatise Physiognomika, by Admantios, said of the Hellenes that

They were particularly tall in stature, with firm white skin, and had well formed feet and hands, powerful of neck, with brown hair which was gently and softly waved. They had square faces, fine lips, straight noses and powerful eyes with a powerful glittering gaze. They were a people with the most beautiful eyes in the world.

Homeros and his creations were also Nordically conditioned like those in the plastic art of Greece. Telemachos tore himself away from his mother, the blue eyed daughter of Zeus who sent him a favourable sailing wind. When Menelaus’s destiny is foretold to him, he is prophesied a godlike life which will lead him to the ends of the earth, to the Elysian fields where the hero Rhadamanthos the Bold dwells. Only with a head of golden locks could Hölderlin picture the genius of Greece. Homeros, as a man conscious of his being a master, avows:

For the resolute man always conducts best to a conclusion

Every work, even if he approaches from afar as a stranger.

However, Thersites, a hostile, misshapen traitor, appeared to confront the blind hero. Clearly Thersites was the embodiment of the hither Asiatic spies in the Greek army. These traitors were the forerunners of our Berlin and Frankfurt pacifists. Homeros described the brothers of Thersites, the Phoenicians, as:

Swindlers, bringing with them countless trinkets in a dark ship.

Thus, Homeros created racial spiritual art and, at the same time, gave birth to those images which were later set up in honour of the blue eyed daughter of Zeus. He guided the brush of painters and gave a racial form to the alien antihero.

Silenus is not a characteristically depicted thickset figure, as our art historians attempt to persuade us, but the plastic representation of the peculiarities of an alien race soul as this appeared to the Greeks. The emergence of the later phallic cult and the debauched Bacchic festivals demonstrated the late Dionysian disintegration. This was caused by the emergence of the racially eastern oriental types who had, heretofore, been regarded as dull and limited.

This adjustment of racial type is seen in the elephantine strength of Sokrates. Platon glorified the hair splitter. In the Platonic dialogues Sokrates declared that a written paper roll could entice him away from the most beautiful natural surroundings. In the midst of the extroverted Grecian worldview, this was an admission of the dullest pedantry, yet Sokrates was an example of the spiritual racial strength of genius. However strong his moral philosophy was, Sokrates still failed in the field of aesthetics because of his insistence on universalism. In the devout and beautiful Greek life of old, struggle seemed to be an eternal natural law to the Hellenes in which Pallas Athena herself served. A new epoch of Greek history did not begin with Sokrates, but with him a completely different man entered Hellenic life. Admittedly, he inherited the sacred traditions of Athens, of Homeros, of the tragedians, of Perikles and the builders of the Acropolis. Admittedly, he took part himself as a soldier in the struggles for political power, but, nevertheless, Sokrates is the ungenial—although noble—brave man of another non Greek race. He lived in a time when Athens had embarked on false paths, wherein its once aristocratic democracy in which only Greeks, never foreigners, could participate, had begun its slide down into the abyss of chaos. Under the tyranny of the demagogues the great Alkibiades was banished and the entire Athenian army perished before Syracuse, and almost all other conquests were lost. The triumphant aristocrats then made the democrats drink poison by the hundreds. Later, they met the same fate themselves. Aristophanes mocked ancient tradition. The new teachers, Gorgias, Protagoras, and so on, took pride in the new, naked, beautiful forms. Then the alien man, characterised a thousand times in Greek literature, stepped to the fore. The new alien race unfolded its degenerate values, shaping Greek culture. The Greek values of sobriety and heroism were replaced. Sokrates substituted dialectics for substance, the ugly for the beautiful, and academic discussion for heroism. Beyond this, he sought the good in itself, preached the community of the good, and gathered around him a disputing new Greek generation.

Once Perikles, as lord of Athens, had to beg the court for its indulgence in granting civil rights to his son born of his foreign wife. This was granted him in an exceptional case. This strict racial law, made under Perikles himself, vanished with the progressive impoverishment of the blood of Athens. But it was Sokrates, the non Greek, who, in a time of decomposition, gave it a death blow. The idea of a community of the good resulted in a new human classification, not according to races and peoples, but according to individual man. With the collapse of Athenian racial democracy, Sokrates became the international social democrat of his day. His personal courage and cleverness gave his racially destructive teaching its self advertising blessing. It was his disciple, Antithenes, the son of a hither Asiatic slave woman, who then drew so many conclusions from Sokrates’s ideas and ventured forth to preach the destruction of all barriers between races and peoples in the name of human progress.

It was because of Platon that Sokrates was immortalised, and is, even today, honoured by armchair great men. Greek genius must recognise Platon as the man who, in the midst of a great decomposition, represented sober prudence. He loved this man, Sokrates, and so created an eternal monument for him. Platon placed the words of his own soul in the mouth of Sokrates. Thus, the true Sokrates vanished from the world. Only a few passages in Platon truly refer to him. In the Phaedon, for example, Platon relates that Sokrates had admitted that he possessed no aptitude for investigation of organic events. The true nature of things for Sokrates therefore consisted ultimately not in their investigation by observation, but in our thinking about them. One should not ruin one’s eyes by viewing things to excess. If man wishes to discover whether the earth is flat or round then it does not suit him to carry on research. Rather, he should ask: What does reason say of this? Is it rational to conceive the earth as the centre of the universe? While Platon certainly invented this passage, it fits the same Sokrates who turned his gaze away from a racially beautiful Greece in order to talk of a universal abstract mankind, a brotherhood of the good. Here he turned away from the sun of observation to look at the shadows of dogma. As the Jewish dogma has corrupted religion, so Platon’s scientific method, hostile to life, has corrupted European philosophy. Aristoteles was its systematic diffuser, and Hegel its last great pupil. Logic is the science of god, said Hegel. These words are an affront to a truly Nordic religion. It is the antithesis of all that is truly German and all that was truly Greek. These words are truly Socratic. It is not surprising therefore that university professors have canonised Hegel along with Sokrates.

Beauty of soul and beauty of physical appearance certainly do not always coincide. But with Sokrates this was the case. Through an environment where Eros and the Nordic racial beauty of blond Aphrodite ruled, passed the same ideal of beauty, forming and shaping the real Greek world. The ideal was always the slim, white skinned and blond creature—from Dionys of Euripides to the dear little blond heads in Aristophanes’s The birds. In the midst of all this, the uncouth type of the satyr appears like the symbol of what is alien. In the new, Asiatic Greek world, beauty vanished. The ugly and all that is repellent to the eye replaced natural beauty in later Greek art. The preaching of the rational good was the parallel phenomenon of Greek racial and spiritual disintegration. The philosophical good then destroyed the racial good as the idea of beauty. Heroic ideas no longer supported the state and social life. The greatest symbol of this new, hostile, racially unconscious chaotic group—the antithesis of the Hellenic racial soul—was Sokrates.

Viewed from this aspect of historical development, such a genius as Platon appears to have squandered his entire spirit on this man and presents him with immortality. Platon was essentially an aristocrat, an Olympian fighter, a formative artist, and a profound thinker. At the end of his life he wished to save his people racially by enacting a powerful constitution. None of this was Socratic; it was the last great flowering of the Hellenic spirit. Praxiteles later formulated a protest against all Socraticism. This was the swansong of Nordic Greek racial beauty. In art this was paralleled by the creation of the magnificent Nike of Samothrace. But Sokrates remained a symbol of decline. Hellas disappeared in racial chaos. In place of the proud Athenians the universally despised hither Asians populated the provinces. The Greeks allowed these characterless racial inferiors to educate them. They drove the true Greeks away when they tired of them.

Sokrates triumphed while Hellas perished. Healthy human understanding had destroyed genius in one last great hour. What was ugly became the norm; true beauty was only the good.

When Sokrates stood before his judges, he said: Athens has never had a greater servant than I. The humility and modesty of the messenger of the gods—as he called himself—nevertheless had its other side. Sokrates knew that Greece was disintegrating.

From the same spirit as Sokrates once embodied, the western aesthetes of a humanistic late period was also born. Like Sokrates, they looked for the man, not the Greek or the Teuton, not the Jew or Chinese. They discovered so called universal laws and preached of an aesthetic mood and contemplation because the originators of these ideas had lost every sensitivity for the spiritually racial will. In their enthusiasm for the Acropolis, our classicists forgot that here they were dealing with one side of Nordic man. Greek Nordic man was not necessarily the present Nordic German man. Where the Greek Nordic man viewed things formally and created separate works of plastic art, the Nordic Teuton created forcefulness of soul and richness of reference. Where the Greek turned racially heroic motion into rest, the later Nordic brother, driven by another formative will, transformed inertia into movement. Where the Greek generalised, the Gothic and the Romantic man personified. The delightful, rustling lines of the three women on the gable of the Parthenon and the Nike of Samothrace nevertheless strike a special chord within us. The profound impression is with us today because we are witness to a spiritually racial relationship laid bare. If the theoreticians of the 18th and 19th centuries had become conscious of this fact, they would not have admired the formally competent but boring Lao Tse. He would not be the starting point of a universal aesthetics. They would not have made the formal aspect of the Parthenon into a measure of absolute judgement for art. They have even overlooked what was full bloodedly created in Hellas. As a result, the artistically spiritual evaluation of both Greek and Nordic European art was falsified. So even today we see the figures of Hellas and Germania in false perspective.

Only for aesthetes who carry on aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics and not for the sake of art and of life, is a line nothing other than a line, mere ornamentation. But for every artist it is—consciously or subconsciously—function, the carrier of an achievement. It is linked to a definite material. In mankind, the various racial types are the embodiment of definite spiritual essences which condition, spiritually and racially, the coloured linear totality describing them. When Velasquez wished to make a contrast to a tiny blond haired Infanta, he placed alongside her a female dwarf, that is, one of those bastard types with which Spain is overpopulated. Everything stunted and slavish on earth is perpetuated for eternity in art from Velasquez to Zuloaga in these wretched squint eyed cripples. Sancho Pancha is the racial type of the purely dark eastern man—superstitious, incapable of culture, unimaginative, materialistic. Such a type of man is loyal up to a certain point, but mostly he is merely subservient. Sancho is not a fat man, but a concentrated racially spiritual entity. These masters also distort, in a tragically comic way, our Nordic knights. Such mockery, under an alien sun, is a convulsive excess. Even today, in the ancient aristocratic circles of Castile, Nordic skin is held to be a sign of noble ancestry.

The contours of the Greek Silenus correspond to the drawing of the Spanish Sancho and the Spanish dwarfs. Beyond this we find the carriers of the same stunted spiritual nature given similar shape all over Europe.

The peoples of the west are a consequence of racial mixtures and inferior systems of political education. Each of them, however, has received what is essential in formative state powers from the Nordic stratum, and, as a result, received the formative powers of the entire culture. Linked very closely with this fact is the determining Nordic ideal of beauty which often has great effect in regions where the Nordic blood has since almost completely been vanquished. The idea of the hero throughout the whole of Europe is to be equated with a tall slim figure, with bright flashing eyes, high forehead, with powerful, but not excessive, muscles. An image of the hero linked with an undersized, broad shouldered, bow legged, thick necked and low foreheaded man represents an impossibility even when types like Ebert have floated to the surface of life.

As we move to the post Roman period, we find the racial art motif again. If one looks at the heads of the Staufer kings, the memorial at Magdeburg, the head of Heinrich II, one sees racial soul art. Witness, again, the way in which Rethel represents the face of Charlemagne and the Frankian king’s enemy Widukind. One reads what ancient France has to say about Roland, what Wolfram relates about Parsifal, and he knows that these works represent, inwardly and outwardly, a close interweaving of the spiritual and racial. Again and again we see the Nordic racial form expressed as great art. However, a change in the type of hero as a form can be established. Earlier, the hero had personality and led his people into battle. The real person thus became a symbol in so doing. Today, another new dynamic has developed; the will of the great leader directs millions from the centre. Accordingly, in art forms, the head alone is drawn into prominent position. This representation symbolically shows what is significant, what is essential, for Germanic man. The forehead, nose, eyes, teeth and chin all become bearers of the will, of the direction of ideas. The movement from the static to the dynamic is discernible here. At this point, Nordic western art separates from the Greek ideal.

Schiller once wrote:

In plain words, man plays only where he is man in the full meaning of the term, and he is only a complete man where he plays .....

The unity of the material compulsion of natural laws and the spiritual coercion of moral laws brought two heretofore diverse worlds together, and, of this combination the first true freedom was born. Animated by this spirit, the new art forms extinguished the features of the old ideal. Simultaneously, the will emerged. The new form rests in itself, a completely closed creation unfolding as if it were from beyond, from space, without investigation, without resistance.

Beauty, conditioned by type, as an external static of the Nordic race is what is Grecian, while the racially peculiar beauty as an inner dynamic is the spiritual adjustment of the Nordic west. The face of Perikles and the head of Frederick the Great are but two symbols signifying the breadth of race soul—of a racial ideal of beauty.

It is shameful, but nevertheless a fact, that while there are numerous aesthetics, the unavoidable prerequisites of aesthetics in general, the representation of the development of racial ideals of beauty, has not yet been written. Outlines in this respect are so far to be found only in H. F. K. Günther’s Rassenkunde, and in Schultze Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse. Laymen, scholars of art, indeed artists themselves pass through the galleries without truly seeing anything. They read European and Chinese poems equally without seeing the true essence of either art form, because they seek only universal laws. Nonetheless, and without recognition, the Nordic soul soars upwards. To experience this feeling one needs only to cast his gaze at one of the most dignified works of European painting, such as the Eyck Triptych with the singing children. The Eycks repeat again and again and again the same ideal picture of Nordic man, from draft form to the soaring heights of their later works. Their work in inner form is the equal to our racial soul. The beautiful Nordic racial types are examples of Germanic racial beauty in its purest form. The Nordic ideal of man shows a deeply furrowed, manly countenance like the face of god. A similar spirit is shown in the Eyck heads in the Berlin museum. And, in reaching into the same depths, one sees that the god, through whom Michael Angelo awakens Adam, is the same head of god seen in the Van Eyck work, although Michael Angelo could not have had the slightest inkling of the Eyck creation. The same head appears—even if altered through spiritual tension—on the figure of Moses trembling with rage. To represent figures of high power was possible to the Netherlander as well as the Italian only if they used the Nordic ideal. Neither Jan van Eyck nor Michael Angelo could embody their ideal of nobility, strength and dignity through a face of Jewish race. One only has to imagine a face with hooked nose, drooping lip, beady black eyes and woolly hair, in order to realise the artistic impossibility of embodying the European god through a Jewish head—let alone through a Jewish figure. This one recognition alone should be sufficient to convince one of the necessity of totally rejecting the inner idea of the god of Jewry which forms its essence with the Jewish exterior. Our soul has been infected by the Jewish spirit in this respect. The means for this were the bible and the church of Rome. With their help, the desert demon became the god of Europe. Whoever opposed this god was burned or poisoned. Western man only saved himself through his art. In picture and in stone he created his own god, in spite of the tragic struggle. To realise an inner beauty in colour and marble, and to place this entire richness in the service of a spirit; to embody a god, indeed, as beauty, only the European artist has been able. One need only look at Michael Angelo’s Sibyls, his Jeremiah, his slaves, his boys or his Lorenzo to encounter the Nordic spiritually racial creed.

Virtually the same ideal of beauty was what guided Titian through his whole life. His Heavenly and earthly love and Venus (Berlin) gave us a type of woman. This is also shown to us in the women on the Parthenon gable who were also the women who once came with the Germanic conquerors over the Alps. Titian’s Flora, his Holy family (Munich) repeat the same language. Giorgione, as a fellow Venetian, created in his Venus a virtual classical work of Nordic female beauty. Palma Vechio, another Venetian, found pleasure in nothing so much as in blonde, blue eyed, tall women, as in his Three sisters in Dresden. This ideal beauty was so strongly stamped that dark women had their hair dyed blonde in order to appear beautiful.

Yet another great Nordic Italian must be mentioned here: Dante. His ideal of beauty is also Germanic conditioned, and finds perhaps its most direct expression in his Stone Canzoni. And when Dante meets King Manfred in purgatory, he writes:

I turned and looked him straight in the face,

Blond he was, beautiful and noble of appearance .....

From here it is only a step to Rubens. He admittedly overemphasised the fleshy, but the structure of his women is nevertheless determined throughout by the Nordic racial type, which, as once in Greece, is placed in contrast to the short, bull necked, low browed, round headed Fauns.

Rembrandt was well versed in the bible, or, more correctly, he read the bible itself little, but studied the Netherlands’ folk’s book, the Trouringh by Jacob Cats. He held to its descriptions on almost all occasions, and believed himself under an obligation to paint many Jewish heads in order to represent the biblical stories correctly. As soon as Rembrandt treated things seriously, he abandoned his interest in the Amsterdam ghetto. The father of The prodigal son (Petersburg) was divested of all Jewish attributes. He is a tall, old, Nordic man with intellectual, kindly hands. The regularity of the Nordic Italian artist was alien to Rembrandt as he did not seek to represent our thinking in atmosphere, tone colour symphonies and mystique. Nevertheless, his Christ in Emmaus (Paris) is likewise of Nordic sensitivity, as are the portraits of His mother (Petersburg). The splendid figure of Danae shows that Rembrandt could not represent true beauty other than as it hovered before the soul of Giorgione. One of the most sensitive portraits by Rembrandt is called Jewish bride, and it is compelling to have to affirm that even here every feature of Jewish beauty is lacking, replaced by robust, yet tender, Nordic feeling.

Raphäel’s portraits not only show manly beautiful, powerful figures, as our philosophers of art have assured us, but they are embodiments of the same Nordic race soul that we see in the youthful self portrait by Raphäel. A keen observer has correctly remarked that the Jesus child of the Sistine Madonna is frankly heroic in gaze and posture (Wölfflin). That is aptly expressed except that the fundamental ground is lacking as to why the apparent Jewish family had an heroic look to it. Here, only composition and colour distribution, not inwardness and dedication, are determining. These are the prerequisites to the success of a formative will, once again, the racial ideal of beauty. To see in place of the blond haired, light skinned Jesus child a blue black, woolly haired, brown skinned Jew boy would be an impossibility. Equally, we cannot think of a Jewish Mother of god or saint, even if the latter had the noble face of an Offenbach or Disraeli. The medium of expression of our soul has always been our Nordic racial art. It was the so called Christian churches which first gave us the possibility for such expression. But it must be remarked that, in this respect also, everything great has been realised despite the ancient biblical nature. A following of the old biblical spirit through a literal embodiment in art would have awakened only revulsion and derisive laughter. Had we followed Jewish Roman teachings of racial art types, we would never have had the beautiful Madonna of Holbein in Darmstadt, Raphäel’s women, or Botticelli’s figures.

One can follow these examples through the entire history of western art. Certainly there is often a mixture with other, western Mediterranean, eastern Alpine and Dinaric types, but, again and again, the Nordic racial beauty comes to the fore great and dominant, as the ideal and guiding star. Scarcely one in a thousand among us is shaped completely in accordance with this ideal. The appearance of many often is not in accord with the hereditary picture. The longing, however, which created and shaped, sought always to review itself in the same direction. One needs only to look at the head of Leonardo Da Vinci, at the self portrait of Tintoretto (Paris), the self portrait of the youthful Dürer ..... it is the same racial soul which we see confronting us.

The 19th century shows here, as in all things, a certain interruption since other problems—landscape, and so on—appeared in the foreground. In Germany, Uhde and Gebhard sought to continue in the sense of realisation of Nordic beauty, but they remained embedded in the past. They lacked the thrusting power of genius. Hans von Marées made efforts to adjust to the Greek form and tortured himself. In searching for beauty during his whole life he broke down—not surprising for he was half Jewish. Feuerbach also tried while living in the south. He, too, failed despite his material. The emergence of the city accelerated the work of racial destruction. The night cafes of the asphalt men were turned into studios. Theoretical, bastardised dialectics became the accompanying prayer of more and more new trends. We saw the racial chaos of Germans and Jews. Street families, alienated from nature, appeared on the scene. The result was bastard art.

Vincent van Gogh, a broken man filled with longing, wandered forth to paint. He wished to return to the earth. His Peasant figure at work was really modern, the heart of modern art which neither the Renaissance nor the Dutch school nor the Greeks could have done. He tortured himself for this ideal and vowed that if he had possessed the power earlier, then he would have painted holy figures. These would have been men like the first Christians. Today he would perish with this idea. He painted without thinking. He painted without racial spirit. His insane choices included: cabbages, lettuces, seemingly in order to calm himself down ..... And Vincent painted apple trees, cabbages and paving stones of the streets. Finally he became absolutely insane.

Gaugin sought ideal beauty in the south seas. He painted the race of his black women friends, melancholy nature, leaves rich in colour and the seas. He too was inwardly disintegrated like all of those who travelled the whole world seeking a lost beauty, whether their names be Böcklin, Feuerbach, Van Gogh or Gaugin. Eventually, this generation grew tired of its search and gave itself up to chaos.

Picasso once copied the old masters with the greatest care and painted powerful pictures in between—one of them hangs in Moscow—in order to finally offer his Theory—illustrations in bright and dark coloured clay squares to a directionless public. The journalistic parasites seized greedily upon this new sensation, and grew enthused over a new epoch in art. But what Picasso still shamefacedly concealed behind geometric artifices, appeared openly after the world war with arrogant boldness. The bastard claimed to represent in his bastard miscarriages produced by spiritual syphilis, an infantilism as the expression of the soul. One should study long and attentively, for instance, the Self portraits of such as Kokoschka, in order—when confronted with this art of idiots—to grasp the horrible inner life of it.

An idiotic self portrait of Kokoschka!

Hanns Heinz Ewers tells a short story of a boy who was so unnatural of disposition as to take a special delight in people sick with elephantiasis. Our European intellectuality finds itself in an identical condition today which, through Jewish pens, worships the Kokoschka, Chagalls and Pechsteins as the leaders of the Art of the future. Features of degeneracy are already apparent, as, for instance, with Schwalbach, who risks representing Jesus as flat footed and bow legged. Louis Corinth shows a certain robustness, but this master butcher of the brush also disintegrated into clay corpse coloured bastardy: a Berlin under Syrian influence!

Impressionism, originally carried by strong painting talents, was once the battle cry of an all disintegrating intellectualism. The atomist’s study of the world also atomised colour. Natural science, dulled in understanding, found its outflow in the practitioners and theoreticians of impressionism. The Mythless world also created a Mythless art of sensuality. Men who wished inwardly to escape from this desolation collapsed. Van Gogh is a tragic example of unsatisfied longing gone insane. Gaugin is another tragic example of the attempt to make oneself free of intellectualism. Only those such as Paul Signacs went on painting, unhindered and unconcernedly pasting their colour pieces together.

These men stood helplessly in their present. Their opponents, likewise without misgivings, had their backs to the future. The Homeric destiny which had once been promised to Böcklin had already been decided. To hang the Isle of the dead upon one’s wall today has become an inward impossibility. The play of the nymphs in the waves forces a material upon us which we simply can no longer bear. The women with Grecian blue gowns under the poplars, along the dark stream; Flora striding through the field, the girl harp player on green earth—these are things which signify for us an artistic absurdity.

Böcklin’s powerful originality is as it breaks forth eternally in his many works. But a generation of eclectics who, repelled by the atomistic teachings of the 19th century, looked back at the 16th century, felt Böcklin in his very weakness to be a refuge of German fantasy. The efforts to preserve for us this side of his nature have been of touching loyalty. Excessive fantasy had, however, to a great extent, not mastered life but rather, it galvanised antique models. It has taken hold forcefully and in a deceptive move of the media of representation. Böcklin is most powerful when he abandons allegories. Today, we think with the same lack of appreciation for many classical attempts, just as we wonder at Jacob Burkhardt who, in all seriousness, made art evaluating studies on the basis of imitation of Renaissance buildings of his own day. Such men, who surrounded themselves with furniture and pictures of the great times which represented, in a magical way, the birth of modern man in the Renaissance culture, had not any really great incentive to bring about the rebirth of man. Even if they knew this intuitively, they feared a positive conflict with the impressionist Zeitgeist. They withdrew from life and practised their talent on unfit objects.

The entire tragedy of a Mythless time is also shown in the ensuing decades. Intellectualism was no longer desired. The endless colour dissections were despised. Proper feeling led to a seeking for release, expression and power. The consequence of this great tension was the abortion called expressionism. An entire generation cried out for expression but it had nothing at all to express. It cried out for beauty but it no longer had any ideal of beauty. It wished to reach creativity in life but it had lost every real formative power. Then expressionism became the mode and thus, instead of creating a new force, style forming, the downward trend continued. Inwardly undisciplined, primitive art was swallowed up by a corrupted generation. There was excessive praise of Japan and China, and all serious European Nordic art was attributed to Asia.

Great talents like Cézanne and Hodler were defeated in their struggle for a new style, despite all attempts by their pupils to cling to these two as the standard bearers of a new will, and despite all attempts by literary critics to fabricate intellectual props under the effort.

Thus a beer cellar mysticism alternated with cerebrism, cubism and linear chaos, until people became tired of all this and attempted again—vainly—to escape with the new wave of objectivity.

The essence of all this chaotic development lies in the loss of that supreme ideal of beauty which, in so many forms and strivings, has been the supporting foundation of all European art creation. The democratic, racially destructive, doctrines and the folkish eliminating metropolis united with the deliberate Jewish work of decomposition. The result was that not only ideologies and ideas of state collapsed, but also the art of the Nordic west.

Here we have arrived at one of the profoundest criteria for every study of art, but one which all academic aesthetes have always overlooked; indeed they have hardly suspected it.

Aesthetics is, among other things, concerned with judgements of taste. It demands that a work of art should not only please one man but find universal recognition. The search for this universal law of taste has overheated heads for centuries. As a result, a prerequisite of all polemics has been disregarded: A work of art can only please if it moves within the framework of an organically bounded ideal of beauty. Kant (Kritik der Urteilskraft, page 17), gave the definition that:

Beauty is a form of purposefulness of an object insofar as this is viewed without the idea of its having a purpose.

Here Kant expressed a profound thought, but he drew the mistaken conclusion that one must assume a common aesthetic sense. This aesthetic sense rests on a purely human mode of perceptive powers, that is, on the mental condition, and is universally communicable. With this, Kant deflected his search at a critical moment in a fateful direction. The beauty of the Venus of Giorgione has effect upon us as unconsciously purposeful. Every other truly racial beauty, that is, beauty that is conditioned by an organic soul, has the same effect. As a logical conclusion from the first Kantian perception, we recognise that the demand for universal validity of a judgement of taste denies the possibility of a racial ideal of beauty. Therefore, it extends only to those circles which, consciously or unconsciously, carry within their heart the same idea of beauty.

Once we recognise this fundamental fact, we necessarily deny all prior aesthetic theories. Then and then only is the way prepared for a theory of the beautiful which finds the aesthetic related to the organic soul. We thus deny any atomistic individualistic aesthetics.

In the effort to separate the aesthetic object from all nonaesthetic elements, the content is always separated from the form in order to obviate the eternal mingling of moral sermons and aesthetics. This necessary difference in methodology is not complete in itself. We must never overlook the most important of all things—the great spiritual content of Nordic Germanic art. The choice or separation of certain elements of spiritual content is for us a formative, entirely artistic, process. But since this was forgotten in the face of the one sided glorification—still falsely spread—of Greek art, an essential component of western art has been allowed simply to fall to one side. Surprise should not be expressed if the average citizen then fabricates a moral art from what has been left.

This consequence appeared because the German aesthetes, fixedly staring at Hellenic art, declared that aesthetics is only concerned with beauty, that is, with the condition of easy freedom from moral necessities, mechanical pressure and spiritual tension. But this Greek beauty was only one—perhaps static—element of Hellenic life. However much we may debate whether it is architecture, sculpture, the epic or the tragedy which is the greatest legacy of Hellas, it is beyond doubt that inward and outward plastic art has been the beginning of the end of all Greek artistic activity. In Sophoclean tragedy this static plastic art is preserved. Even in the horrid works of Euripides, destiny appears less an inward state and development than as an interweaving of incomprehensible conditions and outwardly destructive essence. This same beauty in the art was a sin against the spirit of Europe. Our art was from the very beginning not adapted to a beauty based upon plastic, but upon spiritual movement. This means that it was not the external condition that became form, but the spiritual value in its struggle with other values or opposing forces. Through the choice of content as a standard giving impetus to the work of art, while conditioning its form, Nordic art is significantly adapted more to the personality and its enlightenment than was the Hellenistic. The highest work of western art is therefore not what is most beautiful but what best penetrates to our spiritual being, our souls. It is this factor of strong inward motive power that does not belong to Greek aesthetics. Rather, it is embodied in the Nordic west as a problem of form, and at the same time without relation to what is purely rational or moral.

As in many other cases, Schiller displayed the correct insight out of instinct, and despite his prejudices for Greek art, although he did fail to draw the appropriate conclusions. He wrote:

How much attention we pay in aesthetic judgements to power rather than to its direction; how much to freedom than to conformity is sufficiently revealed by the fact that we prefer to see power and freedom expressed at the expense of conformity rather than, conversely, at the expense of the former. Aesthetic judgement contains in this more that is true than one usually believes. Clearly, vices which give evidence of strength of will reveal a greater disposition to true moral freedom than virtues which borrow support from natural inclination, because it costs a rascal only a single victory over himself to turn all the consequence and strength of will which he wastes upon evil, to good.

These words proclaim openly one side of the explanation. Why, for instance, are figures like Richard III and Iago able to have an aesthetic effect upon us? They have effect because of the power an inner law has upon us. Without that inner light we are tempted to make absurd moralising judgements. It is the power of this inner strength which reconciles us with everything. However, this has been so not only since Shakespeare, but it has been thus since the beginning of German art. The Song of the Nibelungen is the result of the power of true creativity in western art. This great story moves the soul and frees the spirit. Even in its poorest form it still shows perfected artistry of the highest order.

I know that objections will be raised against the comparison of the Song of the Nibelungen with the Iliad because the historical development of the Greek and German people were not simultaneous. Nevertheless, a comparison is possible if one follows the eternal laws of form. If the Song of the Nibelungen is considered great enough to contrast with an artistic composition which is different from, but equal to, the Iliad, then we also find ourselves in disagreement with the Goethe who gave the assurance that one should not allow one’s enjoyment of the great German epic to be diminished by comparing it with the Grecian: Too great a measuring rod was brought away from Homeros.

The Iliad and the Song of the Nibelungen are often enough compared with each other, but only after long reflection by the Germanists, and only after an opinion that was long in coming from the Hellenists. The result of such comparison heretofore has always been that the Iliad stood far above the German poem. The worst that could be said of the Iliad was that it was quite violent.

Today it is customary to reject these views which were born of a belief in the universal validity of Greek art canons. To admit that a work of art can present strong personalities means it was produced by a formative creative power of identical intensity. It is shaped differently from the Hellenic, but it is equal to it, especially in artistic quality.

When we bring before our mind’s eye the richness and living sculpture of the Iliad, the diverse ways, for example, in which Agamemnon stirred up his army leaders to battle and the recurrent descriptions of individual combats, then, by comparison, German heroic poetry does not seem so well defined. The latter’s technique is often clumsy. The descriptions repeat themselves here and there. These repeats are, apparently, later minstrel additions. The Song of the Nibelungen was never formally polished. Despite all this, the Nibelungen live, inwardly, a far more vivid life. Their deeds flow from the inward strength of will and struggle. They act according to an inner logic and a definite spiritual attitude. The interweaving of actions, born out of personal inwardness, intensifies the tragic contrast which leads to catastrophe.

From the start, it is naturally necessary to guard against the temptation of wishing to disparage Homeros as a creative artist. He shaped a world of gods for the Greek people which set the pattern for hundreds of years of racial artistry. But Homeros’s artistic attitude did not correspond to our own nature. His figures moved in the middle sphere of the human. They did not descend to mysterious spiritual depths. They showed no longing for the ultimate heights. Actions were not formed by an iron will. The characters do not appear as expressions of the divine powers of will of man himself. They are, rather, determined by externals.

When, after a struggle lasting ten years, Troy had finally fallen, the cause of this conflict between peoples, a lady, was also freed. Helen appeared in the midst of the combatants. Homeros did not describe her beauty. Rather, he paid more attention to the impression she made upon her surroundings. The warriors who lost friends and brothers, who had suffered a thousand privations—they all found that it had been worth the cost, to have shed streams of blood for this woman, for this beauty. Such an attitude is truly Greek: whether Helen was inwardly worth being placed at the centre point of a drama between peoples, is unimportant. It is probably the case that the woman probably had felt just as much at ease with Paris as in the king of Sparta’s bed. No kind of sorrow about her fate is recorded.

A beautiful courtesan is thus the cause of war between two peoples. It is amazing that a woman was considered to be reason enough for war. Perhaps there are similar situations to be found elsewhere in history, but here a poet uses this fact as the foundation for a powerful work. Thus, in the choice of spiritual content, he already reveals a creative form which is entirely opposed to our nature. The demon working within is lacking or is pushed consciously to one side. Form and beauty appear in its place.

Just as the smallness and seclusion of the Greek polis allowed the ordinary citizen a clear vision of the conditions which determined his life without placing an unbalanced demand on his capacity of judgement, so the Greek spirit is also shown of clear capacity for demarcation in art. This certainty of artistic aim is revealed just as much in Iktinos and Kallikrates as it is in Phidias, Homeros and Platon. Nothing remains without clear outline, except that less is unexpressed. Everything takes shape—if one may so put it—in a concentrated form, and clarified with an enlightening objectivity. Once this has been completely successful, then the Greek did not become tired of transforming endlessly the basic theme found in the most varied way. This is a peculiarity which Goethe often praised in his talks with Eckermann.

There is nothing more magnificent than the manner in which Homeros elevates nature to an art form. We encounter no lengthy descriptions of nature. Rather he uses an atmospheric content, reflecting a mood, of the available material compressed into words. This wonderful, concise form used by Homeros has been the magic with which he has repeatedly held the centuries under his spell. It dominates all his works and breathes in all the details. It is a thing of everlasting youth and ever present immortality.

Its uniqueness lies in its creative power of being able to look away from descriptions of nature, of immediately humanising them, of bringing them closer to us through powerfully portrayed likeness. Homeros always described the Achaeans themselves as bronze armoured. Achilles passed through his siege works as the agile runner, Hector walked with his bushy helmet waving before the gates of Troy; Hera, the fiery eyed goddess, courted Zeus; the Greek ships were exhaustively described by only two words: dark and arched. All this has an affect like the brush strokes of a great painter, who with one movement, compels the colour and line of a creature onto the canvas. This is form in its highest perfection. This is the joyous message of the Greeks. If Goethe made up a composite word, for example, morgenschon (in his poem Heidenroslein)—he used this form only once, then here the same artistic law is shown as that which formed the spiritual breath of Hellenic life.

The Germanic poet selected and shaped in a different way. The spiritual content which is formed is not the person but a personality developed and determined by will. External events are only an occasion for the expression and consequence of a character—not its cause—or of the complete embodiment of the inward direction of the human will. Honour and loyalty appear in all forms as the motivating force at the beginning of Nordic art. Gudrun is carried off like Helen, but she does not surrender herself. She prefers service as a maid to a life in dishonour, although Hartmut, in his manliness and knightliness, represented an unequally greater, and more artistically based, cause for devotion than the sorrowful Paris. But beauty, and, above all, the pride and loyalty of the king’s daughter, provided us with a satisfying artistic motif sufficient to cause the bloody battle on the Wulpensande to be fought. The tragedy of the Nibelungen is rooted in this inward justification: the inward character as the supreme value. If the personality of Siegfried had been portrayed as a good for nothing like Paris, the wifely love of Brünnhilde would not have been comprehensible to us. Her demonic womanly loyalty would have been credible to none. None of us would find the betrayal not only of the brothers but of all Burgundians understandable, human or artistically satisfying, if the figure of Siegfried had been represented as the dying god of spring, as a moon or sun god. At the moment when he appeared in a poem, as a personality he became content to be shaped.

If perfect geniality is to be embodied anywhere, then it is here. Wherever Siegfried appears, all hearts fly to him. Where he could help, he placed himself without hesitation, selflessly and trustingly, in the service of chosen friends. Through love he invites—by the manner of his wooing Brünnhilde—guilt upon himself. And through this guilt he perishes.

His adversary, Hagen, is a mixture of avarice and unconditional manly loyalty, a figure who, in its giant schematic delineation, represented artistically the strongest counterpart to the radiant Siegfried. He represented a type of unconditional courage which, in conclusion, thanks to Hagen’s consistency until his death, reconciled us with much of what he had violated. The encounter of Kriemhilde with Hagen and Volker at the court of Etzel is one of the most dramatic poetic images which can be conceived. The night watch by the two companions and the song of the minstrel are examples of splendid, manly poetry.

With tragic necessity, the different natures conflict with one another as guilt and expiation, and give birth to new guilt, as honour fights against honour, loyalty against loyalty. This allegory embodies itself in a human character that is the powerful creation of Nordic Germanic nature as it appears from the very beginning, larger than life, in Germanic art.

These forces, whether loving or fighting, are the material with which a great poetic synthesis has emerged. It is completely useless to debate how many hands have worked on the Song of the Nibelungen because it is clear that many poems have become one work.

The latest researchers assert that the figure of Rüdiger was the final addition added by a fifth poet. Nevertheless, this one was a great artist. In the whole world of literature one will search in vain for a personality of such simple inner greatness as that embodied in Margrave Rüdiger. One is compelled to recognise the spiritual force and power that exist in this new character. Foremost stands the oath of loyalty to his queen, the pledging of his manly honour which must triumph over all other forms. He faced old friends, guests whom he has guided around the land and to whom he has guaranteed protection. He faced even the betrothed of his only daughter. So Rüdiger took death consciously upon himself with an iron will, although, with the defencelessness of Etzel and Kriemhilde, a strong temptation still grew to break his word. The idea of honour became the force that motivated all his actions. One should also consider in this reference the figure of Achilles, one of the most glittering heroic embodiments of all times, but who, because of a personal affront, left his entire people without a leader. Consider then the Margrave Rüdiger, who, before his battle to the death, presented his shield to an opponent in order to confront him in full armour. One can estimate the gulf which exists here between figure and content.

The souls of two peoples of a different type are at work, both of whom transformed nature into art. The one allowed its men to weep and laugh, love, hate and perform heroic deeds, but it did not make the will into an all motivating power; it left out personality as the shaping phenomenon, and it applied all love to the outer world. With word or chisel, it created a wondrous weapon to convey beauty; on the other hand, Nordic art dipped into the profoundest depths of the human will and mustered all powers of the soul into an inward, artistically conditioned whole, without granting formal beauty the decisive weight.

Even the greatest works of men show a weak spot—even the Song of the Nibelungen. The relationship of Siegfried to Brünnhilde was not so completely well grounded in the present version as it was in the old traditions. This relationship found its final interpretation in the Edda. The Lay of Siegfried’s death is one of the greatest expressions of Germanic nature. It is the song of love, loyalty, hatred and revenge.

One must cease regarding these poets of our very early history as clumsy verse makers, as is the usual case. Despite all the patronising recognition by our experts on aesthetics, there are great characters in these poems. We must recognise these authors among the ranks of the world’s greatest creative artists. Only an artist creates true characters, living personalities. Thus, figures which have remained a timeless allegory of our nature through the course of centuries, can only be the result of artistic genius and formative power.

No nobler hero will ever stand

in earth’s sunshine than you alone, Siegfried.

We understand Goethe when he says:

Homeros writes with a purity before which one is awestruck

— a remark which, in fact, refutes his other avowals about harmony. We believe we possess an appreciation of artistic self control and of the epic greatness of Homeros. We are correct if we think of the powerful creation of the Song of the Nibelungen as great art. If Homeros has been recognised as one of the greatest artists of all times and of all peoples, then it is time also to think of the Song of the Nibelungen in the same way.

Thus, as allegories of folkish art, the two epics stand facing one another. One turns more toward the inner birth of clear form. The other wrestles with the tragic epic of spiritual struggle. Homeros mastered the material, the poets of the Song of the Nibelungen—and the creators of all Germanic poems—the spiritual content. These different aims are conditioned by temperament and reflections. Great works of art of different cultures cannot be measured with one and the same standard. Therefore one needs different philosophies of art for each in order to do justice to each essential type. Just as one cannot approach Michael Angelo with the standard used by Phidias, neither can one use just one standard when contrasting the Hellenic epic with the German.

We will enter into individual details later. Previous reflections, however, now lead to another fact which is not only universally overlooked by aesthetes, but which is flatly denied by them: the existence of the aesthetic will. The denial of such a will is perhaps the most shameful chapter of German aesthetics. There is significant evidence to prove that European artists have struggled to achieve spiritual content and form. The professors of aesthetics have ignored this fact. It was a dogma that art was only concerned with apparent feelings, a nebulous kind of beauty, rising, untouched by life, from the dusty studies of scholars. For the sake of morality the will was lined with a protective shield that protected it from such lunacy.

Richard Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck:

They know that those like us look neither to the right nor left, neither forward nor backward. Time and the world are indifferent to us and only one thing determines us—the necessity for the releasing of our own will.

Balzac confessed in Cousin Bette:

Constant work is the law of art as of life, for art is idealised creation. The great artists, the complete poets, await neither command nor inspiration. They give birth today, tomorrow, always. From this follows the habit of labour, this constant knowledge of the difficulties which maintain them in permanent concubinage with the Muse, with the creative power.

Such thoughts, unfortunately, have not reached the ears of our philosophers of aesthetics. It is high time to establish the presence of the creative aesthetic will. It exists in both artists and those who comment on their art. In becoming aware of the choice of spiritual content, and in the longing of the will, the essence of the Nordic western concept of beauty is revealed. It cannot be understood through biology. It can only be intimated.

The essence of human existence is, bodily and spiritually, an ever renewed assimilation of material penetrating from the outside and being manufactured by our will. The formative will and the spirit seize the environment and the inner world. Such a formative process is mostly done through perception, but it may also be codetermined by an act of the will, whether this leads to the saint, researcher, thinker, statesman or artist. Every form is a deed. Every action is essentially a discharging of will. Our research into the psychology of art is almost exclusively concerned with how we appreciate and how we contemplate art. They believe this research is proper and justified, but we know that we must go beyond their research if we are to uncover the artistic will. Before motor sensory, emotional and intellectual influences of a work of art can be discussed, our point of departure must be clearly established.

The law of perpetual motion is valid not only in the physical, but also in the spiritual, realm. It appears to us as self evident that the heroic will is restless and creates more of itself. Our scholars make special efforts to uncover the initial energy of a religious or political phenomenon. Huge volumes are written in order to link the thought structure of our times with particular thinkers of the past. This activity by professors of philosophy is, even itself, frequently regarded as philosophy, so important does it appear. Systems of aesthetics are also exactly investigated and documented. Art and artists have been almost completely forgotten in the process. A special aesthetics will have to be constructed for them which will study the Nordic west. It may gaze at the southeast, or up into the clouds, and apply our standards of value to all European art.

What was it that drove Beethoven to rush around Vienna during a storm?—to suddenly stand still, forgetful of the world?—to beat out a rhythm with his fists? What was it that compelled the impoverished Rembrandt to stand at his canvas until he literally collapsed? What occasioned Da Vinci to investigate the secrets of the human form? What drove Ulrich van Ensingen to make plans for his churches? Precisely, it was nothing other than artistic, aesthetic will. It is a power which, alongside the heroic and moral, must be recognised as a primal riddle if we wish to move beyond the level of our high school teachers of aesthetics. Nowhere has the upsurge of the will in art appeared so distinctly as in the Nordic west. We must emphasise this with the utmost clarity because the great sinful act of the 19th century was in omitting this fact.

Inwardly, the Greek participated in an act of will at the hour of the birth of his art. There is a Greek legend which tells about an artist who loved his work so passionately that his love transformed dead stone into full blooded life. The creed of a universally shaping aesthetic will is laid down in this myth. The paintings on the Parthenon, Greek dance and the lost Greek music (from which all other Muses derive their name) made audible the thunder of the will much earlier than it appeared in our own times.

Aesthetic sensitivity signifies a feeling of joy. Aesthetic mood is contemplation devoid of wishes, devoid of desires, in which the pure subject of perception arises in unblemished objectivity. So runs Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s teaching of aesthetics. Ninety nine out of a hundred philosophers of art have since written in the same way. Forming the basis of their judgement was the dogma which condemned our entire aesthetics to barrenness: the incredible assertion that an aesthetic will did not exist. Otherwise embittered opponents found themselves united with this. The fact is that behind every work of art, just as behind a religious creed, there is an active force at work. This fact has been generally overlooked. This absurd assertion by our aesthetes had reference to outlook, to ideas, to concepts, to dissections of the feeling of beauty. It ignored the fact that a shaping will lies at the bottom of every art creation. It is concentrated in the work and it necessitates a powerful action of the soul. Without such a will, all our other efforts are in vain.

In the realm of art we experience a development parallel to a religious outlook on the world. A racial soul instinct creates works of a gifted, uncaptivated kind. It takes a far reaching hold on its environment, and autocratically alters its lines of power. When Wotan was dying and we sought new forms, Rome appeared on the scene. When the Gothic had ended its lifeline, Roman law and humanist priests of art appeared who sought to cripple us by application of new standards of value. With the rediscovery of Platon and Aristoteles, with the first discoveries of Hellenic works of art, the Nordic spirit, during a time of searching, seized upon the newly found art but with it also its late Roman falsification.

We know that the ancient Greek ideal of beauty did not correspond to the Nordic, that it was predominantly the blood of its blood. Nevertheless, this Greek beauty was particularly an evidence of a sheltered culture. Among a divided, individualistic people, the Greek idea of art provided a certain stability, a common Myth. Physical beauty has never been the highest value of the Nordic west as has the formative will which manifests itself as honour and duty (Frederick and Bismarck), as drama of soul (Beethoven, Shakespeare) and, as concentrated atmosphere (Leonardo, Rembrandt). This will in art, bristling with power, was presented in the 15th century with an aesthetic standard originating from a completely different environment. The Renaissance shows the struggle between instinct and the new idea in art just as with the reformers in the religious domain. After the 16th century, pulsating with life, in north Italy, and the penetration of the Baroque, the apparent highest Greek value gained more and more in importance. The results of research into Greek antiquities (gems, vases, various paintings and portraits) showed that they were made under the auspices of a universal aesthetics. Greek forms were evaluated as purely human. Then arises the doctrine of contemplation devoid of will, followed by the denial of the aesthetic will. The Greek Myth of harmony and willed repose overshadowed the Germanic instinct—the urge to powerful personal confessions of faith and the unleashing of will. This split has lasted up to the present and only modestly do new outlooks appear now and then.

Although our aesthetics had demonstrably drawn standards from Hellas, it proudly believed it could assume that its main features were universally purely human. As in state of life, so also in academic art, two archetypes of cultural life were accepted: individualism and universalism. This was a spiritual orientation which explained the ego and its interests as the starting and final point of thought and action, and which also wished to arrange this same ego into the laws of universality. The dangerous thing in this seemingly illuminating classification of types consisted in causing the universal to evaporate into the infinite. Universalism, only superficially splendid, led first to the international world church, to the world state, and later, to the Marxist International, and also to the democratic humanity of today. Universalism as a basic archetype of life is thus just as barren as individualism. The result, in the event of victory of one or other of these two outlooks on the world, must necessarily be chaos. Individualism gladly wraps itself in the universalist cloak which presents itself as good, moral and harmless. The matter is represented differently when both individualism and universalism are related to one another. Ego, race and people are the prerequisite of its existence. Each signifies the sole possibility of its secular salvation. But simultaneously, the generality which coincides with race and people finds its organic limitation. Individualism and universalism are, for themselves, straight lines into eternity. Related to race and people, they are rhythmically flowing powers, alternating forward and backward, standing in the service of racial commandments, making creation possible. This universal dynamic interpretation of life must also find its counterpoint in the study of western art.

In art, there are thus three organic prerequisites to this study upon which, in the future, all European aesthetics must be based if the latter wishes to be a serviceable link in the life of the awakening Nordic west. There are:

The Nordic racial ideal of beauty; the inner dynamic of European art, hence, content as a problem of form; and the recognition of an aesthetic will. These assumptions seem to lead us to discussions concerning the consequences of inward adjustment to the problem of art and to the popularised notion of Schopenhauer’s teaching on the will. Until this is overcome, there can be no talk of clarification—not only in matters of art—and the essence of the aesthetic condition can be seen to be understood neither instinctively nor consciously.

Kant’s words, now unfortunately reduced to triviality, that the starry heavens above us and the moral law within us constitute our existence without relationship to cause and effect, reveal a deep affirmation to a view of the world based on polarities and to a dynamic feeling of life. In reality, no true European has ever been able to exist creatively outside this basic presupposition, although in many, the longing for the elimination of opposites—for rest, for a static view of life, and for monism—has been enormously strong. Nothing is more typical of this longing and nothing proves the impossibility of monism for us more clearly than the case of Arthur Schopenhauer the Romantic, who believed he could master the full blooded dynamism of his nature with the flexible sword of reason. He broke down in the attempt. His explanation of the world as related to the will divorced him from the Indian thought which he believed he could equate with his own, even though the Indians did not regard salvation as an act of the will, but of cognition. Schopenhauer’s powerful monistic attempt at a representation of the world as will and idea, however, disclosed a procedure, the knowledge and evaluation of which is fundamental for our outlook on the world, and, no less, for our comprehension of the nature of our art.

Object and subject are necessary correlations to one another. Here is the point: the perception of a polarity. The point from which Schopenhauer proceeds. From here, he turns, on the one side, against dogmatic idealism which does not regard the principle of causality as a characteristic of man, but as an essential quality of the thing in itself which brings forth the object. On the other hand, he rejects that materialism which makes efforts to represent conceptual activity on the part of the subject as the result of forms and effects of matter.

It is the great fault of materialism that it proceeds from what is objective because the object is preconditioned by the subject and its forms of viewing things, and thus, is not an absolute. Equally well, one could regard matter as a modification of the perception of the subject. Thus Schopenhauer places himself between dogmatic realism and dogmatic idealism. He took his starting point neither from the subject nor from the object, but from the idea as first act of consciousness. He agreed with Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of space, time and causality, as pure, that is, nonempirical, categories of the mind which make experience possible. All his efforts in the first book of his principal work move directly toward proving this: that, if one regards matter as a thing in itself and attempts to explain the subject from this, then flaccid materialism results. If, on the other hand, one sees the subject as an absolute, then idealism results. If one separates object and subject, dualism results. If one asserts that both are one and the same, Spinozaism results. All these are dogmatic outlooks, against which we only know object and subject as two correlates, that is, being / object.

We possess two intellects; the understanding—the capacity for perception of the causal connection (which we have in common with animals)—and reason, the capacity for abstraction (which is given to us alone). The function of the understanding is the formation of perceptions—the activity of reason, in forming concepts from which develop our language, science and our entire cultural spectrum.

Reason is feminine in nature; It can only give after it has received. This points to the basic dogma of the Schopenhauerian philosophy: reason is a function of the brain. The world is unmasked as a phenomenon of the brain. Thinking is thus a process of separation similar to that of the secretion of saliva.

The work of reason consists in providing knowledge of abstract judgements. Knowing means to have such judgements in the power of its spirit for involuntary reproduction which have their sufficient degree of perception of any something outside them. The object is thus idea as it appears to us in the conceptual forms of time, space and causality. Everything is in these forms and everything comes through them. As a result, the view of the world is strictly closed off and a loophole seems to have been left nowhere so that one might ascend or reach down to a primal ground. But Schopenhauer finds yet another side of the world. Surveying our reason, past and future, and the certain death of the consciousness, the question must be raised as to the whither and whence of man, as to the nature of time and the individual consciousness. Schopenhauer, who previously gave the assurance that the entire world was through and through idea, breaks out of his self imposed limits.

But what drives us to investigate is particularly that it does not satisfy us to know that we have ideas, that they are such and such, and have a connection with this and that law of which general expression is each time the principle of causation. We wish to know the significance of these ideas. We ask whether this world is nothing other than idea, in which case it would pass over us like an insubstantial dream, unworthy of our attention; or whether it may nevertheless be something different, something in addition, and what this actually may be!

No one up to now has been able to give more than a purely negative answer, an answer which was completely abstract, devoid of content and limited—The nous of Anaxagoras, the Ãtman of the Indians, the thing in itself of Kant. Schopenhauer now unveiled this thing in itself as the inner essence known to us in the most intimate way as the will. One cannot arrive at it from idea, as it is far more than an essence, and is fully alien to its laws and forms. The will can only be intuitively perceived. Man would like to regard the movements and actions of his body in the same way as the alterations of other objects in relation to cause, stimuli and motive. But he would only understand their effects as a connection to every other effect that appears to him with a corresponding cause. But this is not so, for the word will gives him the key to his own phenomenon, reveals to him the importance, shows him the inner driving force of his nature, of his activity, of his movements.

The subject is thus given its body in a twofold way: In the first way it is idea, object among objects. It is subject to certain laws. In another way it is revealed through what is known directly to each, which is what the word will describes. And:

Every act of the will is simultaneously an act of bodily motions, not as if the one may be cause, the other effect, but they are one and the same brought to consciousness in a diverse manner. The action of the body is nothing other than the more objective action of the will appearing in perception.

I perceive the will not as something whole and perfect but only individual acts performed in time. I thus cannot imagine the will. It is without time and space. It is independent of ideas. The will is not subject to the principle of causation. It is groundless. It has the same essence in all phenomena. According to Kant this all belongs to the thing in itself. As such, it is free, yet, as a phenomenon, it is unfree, predetermined. Freedom thus lies behind us, never revealed in actions. It follows from this that our empirical character, as it approaches us in our actions, is unfree and unalterable. It represents the objective form of objects that are intelligible. The empirical character behaves to the intelligible as phenomenon to the thing in itself. In its most profound form, the will objectifies itself in the sexual instinct, in an unconditional will to reproduce. It is an eternal wishing and striving which, after brief satisfaction, is driven anew by lust, following these devilish characteristics unceasingly and remorselessly.

Not only in man does the will approach us as the thing in itself; it is the driving momentum in the whole of nature. In fact, it objectifies itself most perfectly of all in man. If we observe the powerful, restless urgency with which the waters hasten into the depths, the persistence with which the magnet turns again and again toward the north pole, the violence with which the poles of electricity strive to reunite and which—particularly like those of human wishes—are heightened by opposition; when we see the crystal rapidly and suddenly shoot upwards, then it will—according to Schopenhauer—cost no great effort of the imaginative power, even from a great distance, to recognise our own nature, dimly and tacitly, but no less illuminatingly than the manner in which the first rays of dawn share the sunlight with full midday. That is the will.

Accordingly, there are various stages of objectification of the will seen in the forms of Platon. They are those middle sections which are inserted between the two worlds: idea and will. These two forces establish an otherwise incomprehensible mutual relationship. Thus it is a plurality without a principle of plurality. At the lowest stage, the universal forces of nature—gravity, impenetrability, rigidity, elasticity, electricity and magnetism—display themselves. They are also, like our own will, groundless, and, like the latter, only their individual phenomena are subject to the principle of causation. They are a QVALITAS OCCVLTA. At a higher stage of the objectifications of the will, we see the individuality appear more and more with man and beast, chiefly with the former. It is here that the essence of the universe is revealed. The struggle for existence causes the will to make itself manifest. The universal struggle in nature is visibly revealed in the animal world which has the vegetable world for its nourishment, and in which in turn every animal becomes the prey and food of another. An animal can only maintain its existence through the constant elimination of a stranger—so that the will to live, without exception, consumes itself ..... until, at last, the human race regards nature as a product for its use. Fearful and insane is this power which—through so much diversity and expenditure of strength and so much feeling of sexual happiness, cleverness and activity—has only an ephemeral and fleeting feeling of happiness in copulation and the satisfaction of satiation to offer as a counterbalance. Effort and reward stand in no direct ratio to one another. Everywhere, Schopenhauer sees universal privation, ceaseless effort, constant pressure, endless struggle .....

Only a blind will could find itself in such a predicament. In inorganic nature the entire struggle proceeds of its own accord. This struggle is based on the unalterable laws of cause and effect. In the plant kingdom, movements follow stimulation, that is, causes call forth effects which are not identical. Finally, motive and perception appear as conductors of our animal actions. All this occurs legitimately. No place is left for freedom of reason. Reason and ideas are subordinate organs.

The world as idea has sprung from the will! In spite of Schopenhauer’s initial reservation against asserting a causal continuity, here causality appears, even if cloaked. The results are as follows: reason is only a reflex, that is, it is a feminine capacity through and through. It is conditioned by the notions which are determined necessarily through perceptions. Reason is thus uncreative. We are unfree. Our actions are necessarily determined through motives, be they actual or imaginary. Our intelligible character is shaped behind men. This character lies outside of necessity. It is innate in life and it is unalterable. Thus it is subject to the principle of causation.

Our reason, underdeveloped and captive though it may be, may elevate itself and conquer our demonic will through an excess of intelligence as a potent subject of perception. We may overcome the fearful power of the will. We see this in the genius of the true artist, who, freed of his will, is able to represent pure nature objectively. It occurs as well in the phenomenon of saintliness, a condition in which reason is successful in transforming passing aesthetic forgetfulness into permanent willless contemplation. The saint sees through the illusion of the world and denies the will to live.

The end of man, despite his efforts and torments, is nothingness. Schopenhauer wrote:

Before us remains, at all events, only nothingness. But that which strives against this dissolution into nothingness, namely, our nature, is indeed only the will to life ..... But if we turn our gaze away from our own need and look to those who have overcome the world, those in whom the will arrives at full self knowledge, then we find only a transition from wishing, to fearing, to the unknown. Instead of unsatiated hope we find peace which is higher than all reason. A total oceanic calm of the heart such as Raphäel and Corregio represented. Only perception is left, the will has vanished. But we then gaze with deeper and more painful longing upon this condition, alongside which our sorrowfulness and hopelessness, by contrast, appears fully exposed. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, contemplation is the only thing which can console us. If we, on the one side, suffer endless sorrow and enduring lamentation as the phenomenon of the will of the world; and on the other side we are able with elimination of the will, to see the world dissolve and only empty nothingness remain before us, we shall accept it willingly. What remains after total elimination of the will, for those who are still driven by it, is obviously nothingness. But conversely, to those in whom the will has turned away and has denied itself, this apparently real world of ours with all its suns and milky ways—is nothingness.

It does not fall within the scope of this book to discuss Schopenhauer’s entire philosophy, but only to emphasise those points which might be helpful for a judgement of the laws of life as they are expressed in ideology, science and art.

The central notion of the Schopenhauerian philosophy, the will, must be singled out at the start. It is represented as what is known and what is given to each of us directly. But if the word will is spoken, then in the consciousness of every mind still not hypnotised by Schopenhauer, there appears in the most intimate sense the familiar principle beyond interpretation which, despite inborn egoism, often speaks within us. It has, many times in the history of peoples, produced indescribably powerful figures. We think of the spiritual power of the German mystics, such as Luther; the dedicated lives of many men fighting for an idea; the figure of the overcomer of the world from Nazareth—in short, all the personalities who have represented free will as opposed to tyranny. We may think of them when we seek the essence within us, which is described by the word will, and is said to be known to us in the most intimate sense. But the more we read of Schopenhauer, all the more does it appear that this idea of the will must be false and childish. In fact, the will is completely different from all other phenomena. It is groundless and mysterious. It is a powerful and aimless urge which stumbles from desire to desire. It is alive within man and beast. It is revealed in plant and stone. It causes the water to thunder down the rocks. It causes the magnet to draw iron and the plant to shoot upward. It causes a man to be attracted by a woman and one creature to destroy another.

The will, then, which is assumed to be a unity, forces its way through a proliferation of ideas into a diverse physical world. It calls forth its objectification and kindles at its highest stage a light—the intellect—which is completely dependent on it and born to its service. It looks in all directions for reward, always showing obedience to its master. It outlines the world as idea. We experience the strange fact that the brain—which is the prerequisite for the ideas of time and space—arises in time and space, so that it is simultaneously both subject and object of idea. This recalls the old riddle as to which came first, the chicken or the egg.

Schopenhauer actually completed his philosophy in the first book of his principal work. He showed there that everything could be reduced to idea, that all time, space and causality had the conditional prerequisite that we are completely unfree. He left no door open to the reason, that subordinate organ, and restricted its entire capacity to idea. As a result, all his later philosophy follows this doctrine.

But the will, which otherwise so purposefully calls forth its objectivity, (why it does so remains an eternal secret) committed an indiscretion which is all the less understandable as the assurance is expressly given that the functions of the body are everywhere measured throughout by the will. The brain is provided with an excess of intellect. Some men suddenly rebel, abandon this thing in itself and see through the disastrous will, and then exist as pure subjects of the perception creating eternal works of art, becoming saints. We do not know the origin of the power of the tertiary organ, the intellect, to suddenly enforce obedience upon its invincible tyrant, the will. We do not know, but without his assertion, the disciple of Schopenhauer does not agree unconditionally to objectification of aesthetics, ideology, and so on.

What is essential above all is the recognition that the phenomenon of having linked the natural and metaphysical into a uniform monistic system has been made possible here with the interplay of two completely different interpretations of what is to be understood by will. I have not found this idea expressed adequately anywhere. Admittedly, Rudolf Haym, in his study of Schopenhauer, very energetically rejects the will as the principal explanation of nature. J. Volkelt elaborates the contradiction in the interpretation of will, but wishes to uphold the supremacy of the will. K. Fischer is woefully inadequate in his explanation of the will. Houston Stewart Chamberlain completely rejects the doctrine of the will (falling into another extreme). It seems to me that universally too little weight has been placed on the dual use of the term.

Some years before publication of his principal work, Schopenhauer had regarded the will as something great and holy. He says this:

My will is absolute, standing above all corporeality and above nature. It is holy in origin, and its holiness is without limitations.

But later his idea of the will recognised its metaphysical power. The will took on shimmering colours and, like a chameleon, it was blended in permanently throughout Schopenhauer’s entire work.

Schopenhauer is of the opinion that it is for acts of the will that we are responsible for that which we can alone be made responsible, since the intellect is a gift of god and nature. The will is used here in the sense that is directly contrary to the will, as it ordinarily appears in Schopenhauer. Normally it is an aimless and unalterable egoistic instinct.

When Schopenhauer sets up the world as a purposeful whole in which everything relates to everything else in an incomprehensible harmony, this again does not agree with the concept of a blind will. His expedient qualification that the will is, in fact, irrational, yet acts as if it were rational, is far too unsatisfactory.

If ideas are to represent stronger or weaker objectification of the will, then a measuring capacity will be attributed to an aimless entity insofar as the more it grows objective, the more differentiated it becomes.

Any teleological version of nature is abandoned in Schopenhauer’s system. I understand a human action as such only when I realise its purpose, that is, only when I presuppose creative will striving for an aim. But if I see nature as striving constantly for aims as much unconsciously as purposeful, then I presuppose an ordering principle, irrespective of how it was created, in advance of any insane, blind, aimless will.

One thing must be understood clearly. With the one word will, two fundamentally different concepts must be described. The one alludes to a principle opposed to the whole of nature with its striving directed solely and simply at self preservation; the other characterises the essence of egoism. In short, we must distinguish will and instinct. Will is always the opposite of instinct, and not identical with it, as Schopenhauer seemed to teach. The difference between will and instinct is not quantitative but qualitative. If I feel that here Schopenhauer was right—that an animal lust directed completely at the senses and subconsciously appearing within the circle of consciousness unassailably dominates and reveals its entire purpose particularly in its existence and its assertiveness—so can I, if I am a poet, also conceive a similar instinct in the plant and mineral realms.

I cannot make poetic analogy into the foundation of a philosophical conception of the world. I cannot do this rationally either without being caught up in a vicious circle. I am forced to establish that the other factors work against desire, other factors that embody other principles. Reason is coextensive and conterminous with this principle. It alone can overcome the yoke of blind instinct. It must be partially or totally conditioned through the brain, but it is not produced by it. An organ simply cannot conceive itself.

I am forced to admit that my will is divided into two parts: sensuously instinctive and supersensuously willed. These are the two souls which Faust felt within his breast. Only a blind dogmatism can represent these two separate principles as one and the same. If Goethe heard, completely softly, but very perceptively, a voice which told him what was to be done and what should be avoided, then it was passion which forced him into the opposite direction. The moral side of man accordingly rests upon a categorical moral law which rules within him. Otherwise, moral prayers would be a source of laughter, and both Christ and Kant would seem to have been really stupid men. Must and Can presuppose each other. Without freedom there is no feeling of responsibility, no morality, no spiritual culture.

In conclusion, Schopenhauer turns himself upside down. If instinct—which stirs so powerfully, discerned by the tertiary reason—suddenly whispers softly and begins benignly to purr, then this is a consequence which much have caused him headaches at times. The flexible sword of reason cannot solve world conflict through cognition alone. Either one proceeds from the factual and recognises the possibility of victory of the will over instinct, or one makes a violent sweep and declares the whole world to be unfree and, as a result, gives up every possibility of purification. The former is the viewpoint taken by Christ, Da Vinci, Kant, Goethe; the latter is that of the Indians and Schopenhauer. But the latter somehow allowed a single appearance in the world of freedom as the sole exception. The You shall, over which so much derision is generally unleashed, appeared in conclusion as DEVS EX MACHINA. A moral power suddenly appears in chaotic, aimless instinct and the moral world order, upon which Schopenhauer justifiably lays much weight, was saved. Otherwise, Schopenhauer’s original will recognises only the physical, not the moral, sphere.

Thus Schopenhauer, when he teaches the denial of the will, also includes the denial of instinct and affirmation of the will. But this is an illogical aspect of the whole system, and it tears it apart completely. What Schopenhauer taught, with zeal and energy, was that instinct formed the essence of the universe and of man, and that it was identical with the will. What he admitted with joy, but which was incompatible with his system, was that the will is, at the same time, morally redeeming, that outside instinct and tertiary understanding man still represents something quite different. The moral will, as it appears in the last book of the World as will and idea, denies the entire teaching of his first books, and Schopenhauer later admitted in a letter, when pressed by troublesome inquiries, that the matter was naturally a kind of miracle .....

This compulsive monistic view of the world is torn apart, and no amount of time will bind it together again. What Schopenhauer said later about individuality being rooted in the thing in itself and its transitoriness is beautiful, and does all honour to his overcoming of self, but, however, it does not accord with his everlasting derision about self. He says (letter of March 1st, 1859):

It follows that individuality does not rest solely on the principle of individuation and is therefore not mere appearance. It is rooted in the thing in itself, in the will of the individual, for a man’s character is, itself, individual. But how deeply the roots go, belongs to questions for which I do not accept responsibility.

So writes the man who claimed that he had found the philosopher’s stone, and the principle of world unity, and who despised everyone who did not unconditionally concede that this was so.

If instinct, veiled as will, is to represent a principle of unity, then it is not the unity of the entire man but only one aspect of him, the natural. Schopenhauer undertook to carry this through in a brilliant manner. That he interpreted instinct as the predominant principle is not materialistic, but it is certainly naturalistic monism.

Comparisons are often made between a man and his teachings. We frequently discover glaring contrasts between the two. It is true enough that this man, who in all seriousness regarded himself as the founder of a religion and preached denial of the world, lived a seemingly comfortable life as an established patrician. He was afflicted with a grotesque anxiety about his health and well being. Because of an unpleasant dream and out of fear of cholera, he left Berlin. He lived in Frankfurt on the ground floor of a house so he could save himself quickly in case of fire. When visiting, he always carried his own drinking glass with him so that he did not expose himself to the dangers of infections from dirty cups. Here, his own will makes its appearance with a vehemence amounting almost to sickliness. Schopenhauer was possessed by an almost demonic fear of death. He was also possessed by a brutal egoism and filled with a fury when anyone opposed him. He was, at the same time, a worldwide intellect in whose inspired insight and illumination of spirit thousands of spiritual revelations were captured. He had an amazing insight into many problems and wrote in a German style of splendour, colour and clarity as only a few among the very great can.

On the other hand, he had only rarely felt that quietly perceptible voice of which Goethe and Kant spoke. It appeared merely as an indefinable longing. He was unable to grasp the subtlety of Schleiermacher or the greatness of Fichte. He was oppressed and stifled by a boundless presumption and spoke only with malicious delight about the weaknesses of those he encountered in life.

The description of a man who cannot be compared in some clever book but is an image of nature with all its contradictions suits none better than Arthur Schopenhauer. Certainly, the contrast between instinct, insight and will was seldom concealed so widely in one heart. At an advanced age he noted with satisfaction that his sexual instinct had weakened, and from then on his words about fame noticeably diminished in favour of a fundamental pessimism. At age 70 he wrote:

The fact that the old testament sets life at from 70 to 80 years would trouble me little, but Herodotos also says the same in two passages. There is more to it. Only the holy Upanishad says twice: The life of a man is 100 years ..... that is a consolation.

Schopenhauer had earlier deeply felt the inward conflict of his two natures. His principal work was not written—as many superficial philosophers assert—by an onlooker at the theatre of life, as a participant in the grip of a demon. Otherwise with his intellect he would easily have discerned the discordant parts of his work which were, in fact, the reflection of his real experience. Since Schopenhauer often felt himself writhe in the thrall of a powerful instinct, so the surrounding world also seemed to him irrevocably given up to this. As he saw his own intellect expand, so he allowed the yoke of instinct to be theoretically stripped away from his path. Just as he himself possessed only a powerless feeling of foreboding as far as free will was concerned, so the moral order of the world only made a shameful appearance at the end. Schopenhauer preached as man’s longing that the recognition of instinct could alone lead to its overcoming. But he himself, in spite of all insight, was unable to realise it. If such an intelligence as his could not achieve this, then his imposing personal creed, the World as will and idea, is automatically self judging. Schopenhauer had not seen or, from sickly adherence to a dogmatic outlook, had not wished to admit that even a theoretically profound philosophy cannot on its own help abate the appearance of a factor over which all truly great men have been disposed: the will mastering or overcoming impulse. If Buddha recognised instinct as bringing suffering, then this is only one side of a man’s nature; but when he conquers it through vital action, then the act of willing is the other. If Christ acted against the generation of vipers, if he took death upon himself for the sake of an idea, then this is the effect of a principle of freedom opposed to the mere life instinct which no argumentation can abolish, and which is certainly founded on instinct alone.

The independent conscience is the way Goethe understood it—making its appearance like a moral sunrise, a principle which Schopenhauer believed he had overcome while he smuggled it into instinct in order to then allow both to shine through.

The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is a vessel filled with precious things which is held together by the iron hand of a robust individuality. Now that this stricture has burst, all parts, beautiful as they are, lie scattered among one another. His personality did not suffice for a perfectly rounded work, and his philosophy was the tragic dream of a despairing seeker. The will, in whose splintered assertions and upon whose occurrences the genial world spirit plays its ingenious melodies, can only be genial itself. But the will, which to him is only a groundless, aimless, blind urge, is a purely animal instinct. The former is a principle creative of value; the latter is uncreative, destructive. The former reveals to us the positive in human nature; the latter reveals the negative side. All great artists and saints are filled by the first. They have formed it in practice as a work of art and as life. Through it and through reason, with its formation of ideas, it has directed instinct into paths where it found its allotted place as a material of creativity. Arthur Schopenhauer also wished to take this path, and failed because his intellect lacked the will. This is the tragedy of his life and work. As such a tragedy, Schopenhauer will always be accorded our respect, but as the example of an heroic—in its powerful, truly European—struggle for the essence of this world, he gambled everything on one card and failed. But Schopenhauer, when completely divorced from Indian thought, admitted that the highest a man could attain was an heroic course of life. This is a particularly Nordic creed such as cannot be more beautifully found elsewhere. Therefore, Arthur Schopenhauer belongs to us.

This critique of Schopenhauer’s philosophy seems particularly important for what I wish to say in this book. Today, his writings are found not only on the tables of professors, but also upon those of businessmen and, thanks to their glittering style of persuasive art, have found their way into wide circulation. The notion of will is, as a result, current in all places, and is certainly now mostly regarded in the Schopenhauerian sense as a blind urge even if another interpretation unconsciously accompanies it. It is necessary to subject this conception of the will to a brief investigation and to reveal its self contradiction, or to interpret it as instinct and nothing else. The will must be grasped in its original purity as a principle of freedom working against egoistic impulses, as Kant and Fichte believed, if one wishes to clearly reestablish a foundation for a Nordic vital feeling. But this critique is also of fundamental importance to the understanding of European art and its spiritual effect. If I speak of a view of art which does not reject the will, then I do not wish to maintain the impossible assertion that art must have effect upon impulse, instinct upon Schopenhauer’s will, but that works of art, and especially a definite group of them, do not turn toward the subject of perception immersed in contemplative mood, but aim particularly at the awakening of a spiritual activity of a will.

One of the most important insights into the nature of everything human is the recognition of the fact that man is a creature that shapes. At the basis of all his spiritual and rational activity lies striving for change. And only in this manner can he gain power over his environment, and grasp it as a unity. He also uses his powers to form his own inwardness, projecting this outward as religion, morality, art, scientific ideas and philosophy. Five propensities live in man; each demands an answer:

1-In art he seeks outward and inward form;

2-in science, he seeks the truth in correlating judgement with natural phenomena;

3-from religion he desires a penetrating supersensuous symbol;

4-in philosophy he demands harmony of willing and perceiving;

5-in morality he creates for himself the necessary guiding principles of action.

Each time a man enters one of these five regions, another formative and active will makes itself known. This striving of will and perception is not to be discerned from the whole of nature. There are tendencies which face instinct and its satisfaction either indifferently (science, philosophy), or draw both into the realm of their formative activity. One must distinguish between these different attitudes of spiritual power which go back to reason and will and unite in the soul, in personality, and which signify the Myth of a race. The differentiation can be performed naively unconsciously or philosophically consciously. In whatever manner and from whatever colourful emphasis of individual inclination this proceeds, it depends also on the multifariousness, the rich diversity of a culture as the expression of a race of definite soul.
 

Space is simultaneity: the essence of time is a sequence. Space is only conceivable as rest; time measurable only by motion. A static artistic soul will therefore always prefer the spatial arts and emphasise a spiritual juxtaposition to the other arts more than sequence and separation. Again, a dynamic creative power will seek to realise all qualities of external and inward motion in its art, that is, to master the arts of time (music, drama) and also represent development and growth in the spatial arts. It will make efforts into one moment. Therefore, for example, the painting of the west is, in the first place, portraiture. This signifies that the highest inward motion must be charmed into a necessary spatial form: the dynamic of Da Vinci and Michael Angelo was so shaped, and such a dynamic is always to be equated with the unleashing of will.

These reflections are fundamental for grasping the essence of antiquity and of the past in general. If one has recognised that Hellas was artistically static, then Europe represented a will of dynamic art. The consequences of this different spiritual orientation were two types of style which I wish to call the Objectivity style and the Personality style.

Every serious student of the laws of art has seen himself compelled to recognise at least a duality of creation. As was established in a discussion of the Schopenhauerian notion of the will, the latter’s metaphysical doctrine was shattered by an unnatural mixture of two tendencies in the act of willing. Instinct and will oppose the intellect on a common front; in fact, both are a form of willing, but in divergent directions. Artistic creation as such is admittedly always a free style, but here a primordial formative will separates artists into at least two groups according to strength. This is not a new discovery. One kind of art has been called Apollonian, the other Dionysian. These terms attempted to describe both differences in mood and differences in style of artistic creation. But it was basically false to transfer these concepts, inseparably linked with the Hellenic spirit, to the art of other peoples. Nordic western art is never solely Apollonian, that is, serene, balanced, harmoniously formal, and never solely Dionysian, that is, solely sensually excited, ecstatic. One cannot even find the German words to capture the full spirit of Hellenic art. A German must personally view Kallikrates, Phidias, Praxiteles, Homeros and Aeschylos, the Greek ancestral cults and Bacchic games, grave memorials and beliefs in immortality, in order to grasp what the Apollonian and Dionysian styles intended to convey.

Schiller attempted to interpret the duality of art creation (restricted solely to poetry) as naive and sentimental. As a result, he strayed down many a blind alley and was compelled to describe both Homeros as well as Shakespeare as naïve poets. His acute understanding, however, saved him from a complete impasse. Even if he held firm to the rigid dogma of aesthetic contemplation in each of his essays, there is nevertheless rooted there a quantity of sharp observations which reveal our essential Nordic nature. Every German ought to be familiar with his Aesthetic letters, Concerning the naive and sentimental art of poetry, Concerning charm and dignity, Concerning the pathetic, Thoughts on the use of the common and the base in art, and so on.

The customary division into an idealistic and naturalistic style is neither formally enlightening nor otherwise revealing. Germanic art has always been both. Da Vinci, who recommended that his pupils even study the dirty marks on a wall, and who at the same time drew the head of Christ and Dürer; who with microscopic faithfulness painted a tiny hair or the wing of a bird, created Death, knight and devil, and the Little passion—both were idealists and naturalists simultaneously. Rembrandt was not frightened away by a description of human bestiality, yet he created The prodigal son. Grünewald spares no representation of tortures while alongside this he also painted The resurrection. Goethe wrote The Blocksberg witches sabbath and the CHORVS MYSTICVS. European art was never idealising in the saccharine sense familiar to us. It was never anxious to avoid or to soften nature. The formative path of western artists lay far more through nature, and before nature was finally surpassed it had been given ruthless expression.

It was not an ideal of harmonious beauty in the sense of antiquity which prevailed in Europe, but the ideal of a new aesthetic will ruthlessly embodying itself.

If he wishes to reveal the nature of our art, one cannot write a mere philosophy of the beautiful and harmonious. He cannot apply the standards learned in antiquity. The concept of the beautiful must—in order to be used generally—receive an enlarged meaning. For us what is beautiful in the Nordic racial ideal must consist in the inner radiance of a meaningful will working on material things.

The beauty of the Ninth symphony of Beethoven is fundamentally different from the beauty of a Greek temple. Rembrandt’s head of Titus (in Petersburg) reveals a different kind of beauty of the soul than the Apollo of Praxiteles.

Greek beauty consisted in the shaping of the body, while Germanic beauty consists in the shaping of the soul. The one signifies outward balance, the latter inward law. The one is, as a result, an objective; the other is a personal style.

The descriptive term typifying and individualising style has often been used. Since research is usually not carried out more far reachingly, then one may be of the opinion that the artist looked more away from incidentals and saw only the great features of character. The individualising artist particularly loves such whims and personal peculiarities. Through observation the problem of style is only grasped as a method and not as an artistic necessity. One can read page after page on how one artist pursued one, then another, style in order to work in his spirit. But it is mostly omitted that it is a matter of inward events, so many profound scholars come to the conclusion that Faust is the result of individualising, and at the same time, a typifying, style.

The inner development of personality cannot be grasped in this manner. If personality, individuality and subjectivity are set up as one and the same, then confusion is the inevitable consequence.

The typifying and individualising styles are not two methods which men from all peoples have used according to their need, but objective and personal styles are essential laws of artistic creation among particular peoples and, in a narrower sense, of individual artists themselves. Identical words are never like coins of identical value. Depending on context one must agree concerning the predominant meaning of a term, and, if possible, choose more specific words for other shadings. Personality (will plus reason) is a power representing the spiritual in man opposed to the material. In a narrower sense it is the inward and ceaselessly active force of his inward essence, the primordial riddle of the Germanic soul. Persona (instinct plus understanding) is the body of man and his interests. Individuality signifies the indivisible union here on earth of person and personality. Individual treatment refers to this unity, a personal treatment by a personality.

Our object is always the world. The strength of the objectivity of art is dependent on the strength and diversity of these attitudes.

He who found fundamental differences between the objective and subjective directions of creativity saw himself occasioned, through his investigations (which were not pursued further) to contrast with objectivity only subjectivity, that is, arbitrariness or a mood based upon feelings opposed without power, style forming, to the object value. Therefore many philosophers—in order to protect the great artists from this interpretation—also described crystal clear objectivity as their essence—as the sole measuring rod of the highest art. It is now necessary to cast away the dogma of the universal validity of the measuring rod of objectivity.

Goethe once made a remark that it was his opinion that something objective in nature corresponded to every personal will, that is, that every personal artistic act of will could be transformed into an objective conformity, into an organic law, and that its counterpart could be found there. This completely fixed, personal alignment to the world of matter led to the great inward organic deeds of the Romantic and Gothic eras, although the two stand quite alone in their inner unity. This self evident feeling, when confronting the cathedrals of Rheims, Ulm and Straßburg, has long caused us to overlook what violence has been done in these works to the stone material. We have not paid heed to what great formative power of penetration, what strong inner artistic power must have belonged to these artists in order to render such brittle material serviceable to an idea. It must, therefore, be made clear. It had still not occurred to other peoples to create glittering, pointed designs out of stone, and build towers with these blocks. The block of stone, the relief, the massive sculpture earlier signified the art of monumental sculptors. In the Gothic era a new spirit appeared. And yet, the Straßburg cathedral is: it stands there, as if having grown out of the ground. It has an objective effect. A remarkable state of affairs is revealed here. The weightiest artistic personality everywhere carries form with it as gravity, that is, it carries a living law with it. If, after several violent attempts artists discovered the means of mastering the material, then a work of art is, in the end, an organically effective creation. True personality at first hostilely faces the object to be altered, then the latter is forced to answer to a formal will. When this occurs, personality style is the result.

The subjectivist is not dominated by a direction of will (not even in an individual work) but by inward and outward contingencies. Subjectivism signifies in every respect, and on every domain, the violent mastery both of the personality and of the object. It is often a charming playfulness or repellent misshapenness—from the aspect of form—and a sensuous teasing, lunatic anarchy or unrestrained lust—as feeling—that is made manifest without an inner or outer law, without inner or outer form. Subjectivism as a philosophic, as well as a purely artistic problem, is the result of an inward barrenness of the racial crossing of a people, of an individuality, of a whole epoch of time in general, or, as an ultimate end, the reflection of spiritually racial collapse.

Static and dynamic art nowhere stand so clearly contrasted as in Greek and Gothic architecture. With all Nordic architecture these creations form the sharpest possible contrasting