Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

INTERLUDE 223striving and the beauties of absolute renunciation. When twelve o'clockstruck from the near-by cathedral tower, he laid down his goosequill,took up a walking-stick with a silver handle, and betook himself — alittle old man with wild gray hair and a faintly apelike countenance, awell-known and much-ridiculed city character— to the Swan Hotel,where he consumed astonishing quantities of the finest foods. Heexpressed the hope that some day a wise man would succeed in boring ahole in the earth and sinking enough powder into it to blow the wholeplanet to bits. The most ruinous expression of human nature was for himsexual love; 'sexual desire,' he maintained, 'particularly whenconcentrated into love by fixation on a particular woman, is thequintessence of all the swindles of this noble world: it promises sounspeakably, infinitely, immeasurably much, and delivers so wretchedlylittle.'As for human progress, the greater happiness of the mass, Schopenhauerwould not even have understood the question, since he wasinterested only in the possibility of insight into the nature of things (orbehind the veil of Maya, as he put it) by a well-equipped individualmind. To him the world spirit on horseback, so admired by Hegel, wasonly 'the bandit Buonaparte.' The 'great' acts of history were just anaccumulation of crimes and follies. If a nation arrogated to itself anheroic or spiritual world mission, it was unquestionably a swindlingpretext for common robbery and mass murder — he expressly had Jewsand French in mind.In his lifetime, Schopenhauer remained virtually unheard by theGerman Hegelian generation, and this contributed no little to hisembitterment. But over the succeeding generation his philosophy ofdeath swept like a tidal wave, washing away all Hegel and all faith inworld reason. Amid all its material successes and despite all its vigor,the educated German bourgeoisie consoled itself in Schopenhauer'sgrim, sullen wisdom: 'Pass this world by, it is nothing!'In dealing with the influence of thinkers and poets on their age, we donot mean that these men determined the spirit of their time. They arewhat Hegel might have called the 'bookkeepers of the world spirit'; theyunderstood the laughter and tears of their time better than others andexpressed it with greater clarity and force. After