Thinking the Holocaust with Schelling

Reflection a mystical experience at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 2005

Originally written in 2013, I decided to slightly revise and repost the following reflections in light of current events.

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Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) is a text I have returned to time and again over the years. Short, salty, and bittersweet, its alchemical depths continue to nourish my love of wisdom. Schelling’s core claim is that freedom is not a choice between prescribed options, but a primordial de-cision; it is not about choosing what to do, but deciding whether and how to exist at all. Freedom is what it feels like to be the gaping wound sundering good and evil at the core of cosmogenesis itself.

Schelling’s thesis defies easy comprehension. Heidegger’s commentary casts some clarifying light, but I find myself drawn to Iain Hamilton Grant’s reading foregrounding the subterranean currents of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. The truth is that the opacity of Schelling’s meditation on freedom is no accident of his presentation. It marks his transition from philosophical theses to anthroposophical theosis.¹ Obscurity belongs to the very nature of his subject. In the Freedom essay, Schelling attempts the impossible task of illuminating darkness itself:

“All birth is birth from darkness into light; the seed kernel must be sunk into the earth and die in darkness so that the more beautiful shape of light may lift it and unfold itself in the radiance of the sun” (29).

I will continue to read and re-read this text in search of its deeper, occult meanings. It has shaped and reshaped my conscious worldview for reasons I cannot yet fully fathom. One reason I keep returning to it is that Schelling’s inquiry into the nature of evil has helped me come to psycho-spiritual grips with one of the most powerful mystical experiences I’ve ever had. It happened when I was a sophomore in college back in 2005. I visited Jerusalem during a “birthright trip” organized by the Hillel Foundation at my university. It was an all expenses paid sixteen-day adventure across Israel. At the end of the trip, they offered all the college-aged American Jews in my group Israeli citizenship right then and there. They even offered to help pay for our wedding if we met our sweetheart on the trip. That is, if only we were also willing to be conscripted into the Israeli Defense Force.

I was 19 years old at the time, immersed in and somewhat inflated by the California Buddhism of Alan Watts, the depth psychology of Carl Jung, and the anarchist politics of Chomsky and Zinn. I was living in student housing on the outskirts of Orlando, a city almost entirely surrounded by the most despicable aspects of capitalist imperial America: theme parks like Disney World and Universal Studios on one side of town, defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman on the other. In between there were endless grids of suburban sprawl: prefab houses with gas guzzling SUVs in their driveways, all linked together by shopping plaza parking lots. In comparison, Israel felt like a mystical desert island that I might escape to, thereby saving myself from the nihilistic void at the core of contemporary campus life. My desire for a spiritual home—a god, a people, and a land to call my own, and to belong to—made living in Israel very appealing to my meaning-seeking survival instincts. I dreamt of finding a kibbutz, though I soon discovered they aren’t what they used to be.

In part it was the geopolitical situation—the fact that Israel is an apartheid state—that kept me from accepting citizenship there. I continue to insist on separating Zionism from the Jewish religious tradition. The Hebrew prophets would be ashamed of what Israel is doing today. Mostly though it was my spiritually formative experience at Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial on the outskirts of Jerusalem, that made taking Israel’s side in any ethno-nationalist war impossible for me.

The trigger for the experience was the children’s memorial. I descended a stairway into a dark cavern of grief. Once all the light of the sun had been extinguished, I encountered a dozen or so photographs of children in death camps. Who was taking these awful photos, and why?, I wondered. This was followed by a wall of candles fitted with mirrors that reflected each flame’s image hundreds of times as it receded into the seemingly infinite darkness. The name and place of birth of murdered child after murdered child was read over a speaker.

After hearing the litany of loss, each name a soul ripped too soon from this life, I began climbing the stairs at the other end of the long, dark hall. My heart was broken and mind was racing, desperately questioning “How? How is such evil possible?! How could human beings do this to one another??!!” My initial question was not “why?” mind you, it was “how?”—I wanted to know the metaphysical conditions of evil; that is, I wanted to know the nature of the structural flaw in creation that clearly must exist in order for something so heinous to be permitted to take place.

It wasn’t long before I realized there was no answer to my question. I saw that my sailing off into theoretical abstraction was only a thinly veiled attempt to avoid and repress the swelling emotional turmoil that had been stirred up within me as a result of being confronted with the systematic murder of 1.5 million children. My question changed to “why?”—a question of interpersonal meaning rather than metaphysical possibility. I quickly found myself shamanically merging with the soul of a Nazi guard at Auschwitz, experiencing his wavering degrees of self-justification and self-doubt, realizing that he was just as human as me, just as capable of love and friendship, of deceit and jealousy, just as flawed and internally contradictory… “But this can’t be!,” I thought. “Nazis must be evil, how else could they murder so many children, how else could they send so many tiny faces to their deaths?”

As I left the sunken memorial and returned again to the sunlight, I found myself sobbing, not only because of my feelings of overwhelming anguish about so many murdered children, but because I couldn’t find a suitable scapegoat to hold accountable for such evil. I inhabited as many Nazi souls as I could manage up to and including Hitler, searching for someone who might take responsibility for the Holocaust. I found no one. Only other fragile human souls like me, most of whom were already dead. Tears welled up in my eyes. Why? why did humanity do this?… Or, was it God’s fault?

Just then I caught the gaze of another person and was immediately torn out of my inward struggle with theodicy. I took in the living faces all around me. That each could be so externally unique and yet also hide something so universal just beneath the surface—that each could be so individual and yet also so God-like (see p. 47)—overwhelmed me even more than the photographs of the murdered children had.

I became embarrassed when I remembered I was still crying, so I turned away from my fellow humans and looked down at the grass below my feet. I couldn’t help but notice the unique individuality of each separate blade, infinitely different from the one next to it. I realized how much beauty was being destroyed every time I took a step. I was overwhelmed again.

The unending originality of reality swallowed me in that moment. I realized that creation was not a one time event but a continuous onflow, and that I was fully involved in the process. I like to think that it was then and there that I first became responsible for myself, for my freedom, for my goodness and for my wretchedness. I saw immediately through a kind of intellectual intuition that evil is in all of us, that it is a necessary by-product of our creative freedom as individuals. Without the possibility of evil, there would be no opportunity for love, for the free decision to love. Schelling writes that “whoever has neither the material nor the force in himself to do evil is also not fit for good” (64). The creative struggle between individuals and communities, between me and we, is the engine of evolution. It’s as true for humans as it is for any other living being. But for the human, the subcreative creature who “stands on the threshold” between good and evil, the stakes of the struggle are infinitely higher. “It would be desirable ” writes Schelling, summarizing Franz Baader, “that the corruption in man were only to go as far as his becoming animal; unfortunately, however, man can stand only below or above animals” (40).

Life itself, as Schelling understands it, depends upon struggle and opposition. “Where there is no struggle, there is no life” (63). Without continual crisis to disrupt the very ground of our existence, all creative activity would cease, all the whirling worlds would slow and sink into the silent ocean of indifference (a dark night, yes, but without cows of any definite shade).

“The whole of nature tells us that it in no way exists by virtue of a merely geometrical necessity; in it there is not simply pure reason but personality and spirit…God himself is not a system, but rather a life” (59-62).

Kant was right after all about the singular blade of grass (see sec. 75 of his Critique of Judgment). Its life exceeds finite understanding. How much more so the life of God. For Schelling, the divine life reveals itself in the evolution of the universe, both through its cosmic phase (the primordial struggle between gravity and light) and its anthropic phase (the spiritual battle between good and evil). “The birth of spirit is the realm of history as the birth of light is the realm of nature” (44). Our humanity depends for its existence on the abyssal depths of nature, the same groundlessness that first called even God into consciousness. But unlike God, the human being “never gains control over his condition, since it is only lent to him” (62).

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Here’s a video of me describing my experience at Yad Vashem about a year later:

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The late integral philosopher and poet, William Irwin Thompson, posted a response on his blog: THOUGHTS ON EVIL, June 11, 2013

THOUGHTS ON EVIL, June 11, 2013

By William Irwin Thompson

Dear Matt, [Matthew Segall, Doctoral Candidate at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco] That was a good essay on Evil posted on your BLOG, Footnotes 2 Plato (https://footnotes2plato.com/2013/06/13/thinking-the-holocaust-with-schelling/), if I may be paradoxical about such a serious issue.

I make a similar point, but, of course, like the blade of grass at your feet you mention, also take a different tack into the resisting wind. See MY 1976, EVIL AND WORLD ORDER, p.83 f., and then again in my novel, ISLANDS OUT OF TIME, 1985. I see now why you wanted to go to CIIS when I hoped you could get a fellowship to the University of Chicago. The new CIIS seems to have worked out very well for you.

Ever since the hominization of the primates, the survival of the group has been based on identity, and identity-formation was based on the creation of an “other” in which “we” could be figured against a “them.” So chimps and elephants can empathize with a fellow member of their group and seek to console them. To enhance group solidarity chimp males will go on hunting trips in groups where they will seek out an Other in the form of Colobus monkeys. When these monkeys scream as the chimps dismember them and eat them alive the chimps do not empathize with the monkeys but rather most probably feel the companionship and solidarity with their group that will be needed in the future to defend themselves against enemies. This is the Bruderbund, the famous comradeship of the men in the German Wehrmacht, or even in the JDF persecuting the Palestinians. In order for these normal German or Israeli soldiers to do evil they must be good to one another.

This loyal behavior is the social evil that is part of the identity formation of the binary “Us” and “Them.” But there is a higher and more scary evil that is Metaphysical Evil–the evil not so much of the Wehrmacht but the SS. Just as Hitler was an artist manque’, so the metaphysically evil person is a mystic manque’. He hates God and His ego trip of the Higher Plan in which all is made nice in the end. The metaphysical evil person thrusts each murdered baby in God’s face and says: “Is it worth it if it is based on this?”

Just as mystics feel an ecstatic union with Godhead in Love, so the mystic manque’ feels the ecstasy of the Hatred of God. Heinrich Himmler reveled in occult and esoteric mysteries that were parodies of the Rosicrucian underground. Evil, of course, requires something to violate, so the “Devil is the Ape of God” and cannot create, for to create would be to fall into the metaphysical sin of Being–of God’s disgusting Existence that is based on suffering. Because the metaphysically evil person is not simply following orders and staying in ranks with his group, he is scary to the ordinary folk who conform to norms, whatever they are. This is why villains so fascinate us, and why evil characters hold our attention. William Blake noticed this paradox when he read Milton’s Paradise Lost: that his Satan was fascinating but his God was a pompous ass and an inflated windbag. Notice in Blake’s image above how St. Michael the Archangel fighting Satan has become a Yin/Yang mandala of the mutual entanglement of Light and Dark.

But Blake’s art can also lead us to a deeper understanding of the cultural phenomenology of myth and art. In telling stories the artist can become a shaman or medium and draw off deeper levels under the more limited surface- consciousness so that in telling one story, he or she is also telling another and larger story. The story of the battle of St. Michael the Archangel with Satan is also the story of the evolution of the solar system recast into a dream narrative. Like all Creation stories, from the Babylonian Semitic Enuma Elish to the Judaic Semitic Genesis, or Hesiod’sTheogeny, the story is not a literal but a figurative and metaphoric rendering of the emergence of our ordered world from chaos. St. Michael is the sun and Satan is the primordial and dark gaseous nebula, and the “war in heaven” is a rendering of the swirling bumper car battles before there emerged a sun, planets, and a Kuiper Belt of planetoids, asteroids, and cosmic car wrecks. Similarly, the story of Eve being taken out of Adam is a story of the moon being taken out of the primordial Earth from the collision of Thea with Earth. When a fundamentalist takes myth literally, he is thinking like a simple-minded superstitious peasant and is completely lacking in an understanding of the shamanic nature of under-consciousness transmissions, story-telling, and art. Blake is a perfect example of the archaic shamanic artist living in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.

Because “We become what we hate,” the tragic wheel spins round and Satan paradoxically becomes Christic and feels our cosmic suffering and takes on a soteric life in Hell to negate God’s ego trip. And in the moral paradoxes of the West Bank settlers, one can imagine a karmic “likely story” in which Nazis reincarnate as JDF soldiers shooting Palestinian teenagers or bulldozing to death protestors. The only way off this metaphysical moebius strip of Samsara, in which the President, the NSA and the CIA violate the Constitution in fighting terrorism and become an infected force for evil themselves, is to get off the wheel of love and hate as identity-formation to ascend into Universal Compassion.

1. Schelling writes in his System der gesamten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere, in the section: “Special Natural Philosophy or Construction of the Individual Potencies of Nature,” as follows:

“That special organism which is required here can therefore only be one which is neither merely a plant nor merely an animal organism, and thus stands in opposition to both, and is not so much their synthesis as rather their absolute identity. That such an organism can only be the human one, would have to be proved through all possible moments. However, this, as well as the entire construction of the human organism (not as an organism in general, as is done in physiology, but as a human organism, as a potency-less image of potency-less identity) would be the task of a new science that does not yet exist and should actually be called Anthroposophie, something entirely different from what has been previously called anthropology.”

-Schelling [1860], p. 487 f (Quoted in Christian Clement’s article on Steiner and Schelling in Steiner Studies Journal, p. 27)