Hitler and his God

A Higher and a Lower Choice: What Went Wrong

And yet, seldom has a non-German shown a greater appreciation for the qualities and possibilities in the German people than Sri Aurobindo. “Germany was for the time the most remarkable instance of a nation preparing for the subjective stage because it had, in the first place, a certain kind of vision – unfortunately intellectual rather than illuminated – and the courage to follow it – unfortunately again a vital and intellectual rather than a spiritual hardihood – and, secondly, being master of its destinies, was able to order its own life so as to express its self-vision … The real source of this great subjective force which has been so much disfigured in its objective action, was not in Germany’s statesman and soldiers … but came from her great philosophers, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Nietzsche, from her great poet and thinker Goethe, from her great musicians, Beethoven and Wagner, and from all in the German soul and temperament which they represented. A nation whose master achievement has lain almost entirely in the two spheres of philosophy and music is clearly predestined to lead in the turn to subjectivism and to produce a profound result for good or evil on the beginnings of the subjective age.

“This was one side of the predestination of Germany; the other is to be found in her scholars, educationists, scientists, organizers. It was the industry, the conscientious diligence, the fidelity to ideas, the honest and painstaking spirit of work for which the nation has been long famous. A people might be highly gifted in the subjective capacities, and yet if it neglects to cultivate this lower side of our complex nature, it will fail to build that bridge between the idea and the imagination and the world of facts, between the vision and the force, which makes realisation possible … In Germany the bridge was there … For more than a half-century Germany turned a deep eye of subjective introspection on herself and things and ideas in search of the truth of her own being and of the world, and for another half-century a patient eye of scientific research on the objective means for organizing what she had or thought she had gained.”

Then what went wrong? “[Germany] had taken her vital ego for herself; she had sought for her soul and found only her force. For she had said, like the Asura, ‘I am my body, my life, my mind, my temperament’, and became attached with a Titanic force to these; especially she had said, ‘I am my life and body’, and than that there can be no greater mistake for man or nation. The soul of man or nation is something more and diviner than that; it is greater than its instruments and cannot be shut up in a physical, a vital, a mental or a temperamental formula. So to confine it, even though the false formation be embodied in the armour-plated social body of a huge collective dinosaurus, can only stifle the growth of the inner Reality and end in decay or the extinction that overtakes all that is unplastic and unadaptable.” 974

This paragraph was written during the First World War; it would still more fully apply to the Germany that caused the outbreak of the Second World War. For a time Germany was the only nation in which there was a longing and a possibility to go beyond man, as shown in the pages of our story about the projection of one kind of a superman or other, as well as in those about the knowledge that “God” was to be met in one’s own soul, and that this soul could communicate with the soul of the nation and the soul in all. What power distorted these perspectives and bend them back to the nether regions we will now have to find out.