On Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, Part IV
In February 1947, Dürckheim’s cell door swung open and he left Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison a new man. He had new ideas. He had abandoned his völkisch beliefs. Spiritually rewritten, the virtual, the possible, the set of futures to come had shifted. All appearances suggested that Dürckheim had abandoned Nazi ideology. So thoroughly had he erased his former allegiance that this decorated propagandist escaped any significant punishment for his wartime activities. Back in Germany, the denazification court in 1948 simply fined him 100 Reichsmark and declared him a Mitläufer like Heidegger, a man that later became his neighbour and teacher.1 He went on to promote his mystical ideas and develop a new psychotherapy he called ‘initiation therapy.’2
By 1948, Dürckheim was free to pursue his post-war career. With his bountiful liberty Dürckheim laboured hard on his new intellectual edifice, working with the same fervour shown when he promoted the Third Reich’s ideology. His efforts would eventually lead him to become a spiritual leader whose ideas had a subtle yet far-reaching influence on Western culture in the second half of the 20th century. Notably, his work had an impact on the “Human Potential Movement” which emerged from the Californian counter-culture of the 1960s. The movement counted among its adherents other theorists, including Abraham Maslow, whose “hierarchy of needs” would have a great influence on business management theory, as well as bestselling author and developer of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl. The link is indirect, but it would appear that an obscure connection exists between this ex-Nazi and the ante-fascist psychologist and theorist of potential, Jordan B. Peterson.3
The fruits of Dürckheim’s post-war labours are voluminous; The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as Spiritual Exercise is perhaps his essential work. First published in English in 1971—just before David Bowie released Hunky Dory and became Ziggy Stardust, at a time when Jordan B. Peterson, a boy of the tender age of nine, might have felt the first stirrings of chaos in his heart—Dürckheim begins this book audaciously:
“The destiny of everything that lives is that it should unfold its own nature to its maximum possibility. Man is no exception. But he cannot—as a tree or a flower does—fulfil this destiny automatically. He is only permitted to become fully what he is intended to be when he takes himself in hand, works on himself, and practises ceaselessly to reach perfection. Here we must ask ourselves the question—what is man’s most important task? It is none other than himself, the making of himself into a ‘true man.’”4
Man must reach his utmost possibility through labour. With work one can become a ‘true man.’ Within his first paragraph, Dürckheim reveals that he has retained his Nazi obsession with man’s potential. Echoes of Rosenberg’s vernacular also abound, for whom ‘the race soul lives and unfolds itself in nature.’5 But Dürckheim is not a Nazi anymore—he is now a liberal thinker, we recall, interested in the ‘universally human.’ With this newfound universalism, Dürckheim rejects—but never explicitly—the notion of the race soul. Instead a metaphysical force he calls ‘Divine Being’ now unites men.
Divine Being, our spiritual master says, is the atemporal ‘unconditioned reality’ that is the ‘essence of all that exists.’ Timeless in nature, Divine Being opposes our conditioned reality of time and space; it nonetheless tries to express itself through men that inhabit the world.6 Acting as conduits for Divine Being, men synthesise the universal and the particular, the limitless and limited, and so unfold themselves to their ‘maximum possibility.’7 A man’s ‘destiny’ is to surrender to Divine Being as it tries to ‘manifest itself in him and through him,’ says Dürckheim.8 He is ‘valid and can endure’ only if he fulfils this ‘purpose.’9 Like those who refuse to work in Peterson’s world, only death and invalidity await if he turns away from Divine Being.
Racked between destiny and death, Dürckheim’s man is divided and commanded. First he has his worldly existence shaped by history and physics. Then he has Divine Being, a ‘supernatural’ and ‘transcendental’ part of himself beyond time and understanding that defines his ‘destiny.’ These two realities split man, forming the ‘two poles of the one self that is ever striving within us towards realisation.’10 This Platonic (or Rosenbergian) division within can lead man to feel ‘torn between the two aspects of existence.’11 Nonetheless he must aim to be ‘open and submissive’ to the demands of Divine Being.12 The ‘true man,’ Dürckheim writes, ‘embodies and reveals the Divine Being within himself.’13 And as we recall, we must all become true men.14
Once Dürckheim had paid his Reichsmarks, he no longer believed the völkisch race soul governed everything. Divine Being had instead become man’s ‘destiny’ and ‘essential being’ and it was his highest duty to surrender himself to it. Much like the Nazis’ ‘new man,’ however, Dürckheim’s ‘true man’ was duty-bound to a higher force whose ‘three essential facets’ are, tellingly, ‘fullness, order, and unity.’15 Even after the war, Dürckheim believed man must genuflect to a powerful authority that unified him with others. He remained shackled to the transcendent. Through submission man could make himself.
By now Dürckheim’s philosophy ought to sound familiar. With this polar construction of the self, Dürckheim inscribes a ‘split’ in man’s centre that puts him into ‘a state of tension between two realities.’16 In Dürckheim’s eyes, man is constantly and originally lacking. Like Viktor Frankl, Jordan Peterson and Alfred Rosenberg, then, Dürckheim sees the individual ego as a striving thing. For him the ego is divided between what it is and what it must become. It is submissive to the call of some ‘higher’ part of itself. Man must try to complete himself by striving toward a transcendent force that commands him to be more than he is—the race soul, ‘meaning,’ potential or Divine Being.
Dürckheim’s post-war philosophy forms a family with these other doctrines of potential. All these writers believe man must reach his inherent potential through work. While Frankl, Peterson and Dürckheim espouse a human universalism that justifies individualistic striving, they diverge from Rosenberg’s collectivist potential-fetishism only once they consider the conditions, limits and purpose of our ambitions. The ‘non-ideological’ core of their belief systems, in Žižek’s words, is the same; only the ‘explicit ideological text’ differs. Nazi writings imply that life’s meaning derives entirely from race; meanwhile, Frankl and Peterson believe that meaning is ephemeral, singular and plural.17 Dürckheim’s Nazi thought featured fascist rigidity. After the war, though, he decided life’s purpose changes and ‘is different for everyone.’18 Dürckheim adopted the liberal perspective shared by Frankl and Peterson after the war. Yet as Friedrich Hayek showed, liberalism relies upon authoritarianism. The same latent authoritarianism infects Dürckheim’s liberal position. Despite his belief that life has many possible purposes for different people, a ‘single answer’ to the question of meaning, he believes, is ‘valid for all.’ ‘The meaning of human life,’ he says, ‘is nothing other than becoming a witness’ to Divine Being. Life’s overarching ‘meaning’ is the ‘work’ that ‘bears witness to Being.’19 It is to close the gap between the two poles of existence—to manifest our potential and become a ‘true man.’ To ensure that the ego becomes one with its ideal. The meaning of life is narcissism.
As early as Mein Kampf, Nazi ideology valued human activities based on their worth to the völkisch cause. An ex-Nazi, Dürckheim adopted a more pluralistic view influenced by Zen Buddhism. ‘There is no activity, serving whatever external purpose,’ he says, ‘that does not contain an opportunity to dedicate ourselves more ardently to the search for truth.’20 No matter what we do, we can ‘carry it out with a posture and an attitude’ that establishes contact with Divine Being.21 In Dürckheim’s world all reality is a theatre for self-realisation. Every act and moment can be used to manifest our potential. We can submit our entire lives to the authority of Divine Being. In every instant we can obey. Much like human capital ideology—a belief system built on that blend of totalisation and individualisation Foucault attributed to neoliberal governmentality—a certain totalitarianism lurks in Dürckheim’s post-war thought.22 For him we both can and should submit everything to Divine Being’s dictates. Though Dürckheim rails against the rationalised world of work and tells us to discover our ‘depths within’ by abandoning our existential ambitions, we need not take him at his word. As long as we adopt the correct ‘posture and attitude’ when we work, we can keep our jobs and ambitions.23 Divine Being can descend on us at the meditation centre or the office, in a Tokyo jail cell or a concentration camp, as long as we remain open to its touch. Like Frankl’s and Peterson’s philosophies, then, Dürckheim’s ideas cohere with the demands made of labour in our narcissistic culture of potential and total-work. We can achieve our utmost potential in any situation if we are prepared to work.
The Way of Transformation ends with a beatific picture of the fruits of this work, this striving, this ceaseless becoming. Once we commit to serving Divine Being, we attain unprecedented freedom and unity; plenitude, which gives nourishing strength; and order that provides us with revivifying purpose.24 With Divine Being resounding through us we can finally ‘measure up to the requirements of the world in a way that accords with the world’s traditions and values.’25 Abiding by Dürckheim’s doctrine we can become Friedrich Hayek’s or Jordan Peterson’s ideal man—a strong, purposeful, free and ordered individual who upholds society’s values and protects its traditions. With Dürckheim’s ‘life-giving’ wisdom we can conserve and conform to the order of liberal individualism. We can work, happy and free.26 Once again we can discover that terrible truth—Arbeit macht frei.
In Tokyo’s Sugamo jail, Dürckheim apparently denazified himself. Nonetheless, The Way of Transformation shows that his Nazi totalitarianism survived. Work, authority and submission remain central concerns. Like Rosenberg, Frankl and Peterson, Dürckheim depicts man as a divided creature, his ego in a perennial state of lack, endlessly striving to close the gap between himself and an idealised authority. Dürckheim’s philosophy therefore relies on the same psychological structure as the philosophies of these thinkers, fascist and liberal—narcissism. But now we also see that narcissism underwrites both neoliberal human capitalism and the ‘racialised consciousness’ essential to Nazism. But for the replacement of a racist, collectivist ego-ideal with an individual, universalist one, Dürckheim’s systems of belief share an identical architecture. Only the ‘explicit ideological text’ changes.
When the Nazis lost the war, the realisation of Germany’s racial potential became impossible. Hitler’s Aryan state would never be established. Out of shrewdness, fear, psychological necessity or genuine intellectual progression, Dürckheim refocused his philosophy upon individual self-realisation. While Dürckheim abandoned his overt racism and nationalism, and shifted his ambitions in that Tokyo prison, his change was not a transformation. It was a conservation. His narcissistic heart survived the revolution.
Endnotes
Bieber, H.-J. (2015) Zen and War: A Commentary on Brian Victoria and Karl Baier’s Analysis of Daisetz Suzuki and Count Dürckheim. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 13(20), p.11; see also the author biography in Zen and Us.
According to Baier, Dürckheim’s therapy was partly inspired by the ‘initiation therapy’ of self-proclaimed ‘super-fascist’ Julius Evola, a man Dürckheim befriended sometime after 1965.
The Way of Transformation, p.11.
The Myth of the 20th Century, p.197. We hear another echo of Rosenberg on p.24 of The Way of Transformation. ‘Life never stands still. Its order is never rigid, like that of some system established by the world. It is always flexible, always changing, always in the process of becoming. And so it is with man. He is not merely an external form, but a Form-in-Time (Zeitgestalt) and therefore forever in the act of becoming.’
The Way of Transformation, p.14.
The Way of Transformation, pp.13 & 105.
The Way of Transformation, p.13.
The Way of Transformation, p.13.
The Way of Transformation, pp.14-16.
The Way of Transformation, p.16.
The Way of Transformation, p.16.
The Way of Transformation, p.16.
The Way of Transformation, p.11.
Zen and Us, p.125.
The Way of Transformation, p.14.
Man’s Search for Meaning, p.131, and 12 Rules for Life, pp.224–225.
Dialogue on the Path of Initiation, p.33.
Zen and Us, p.124. See also The Way of Transformation, p.22, and Dialogue on the Path of Initiation, p.33.
The Way of Transformation, p.42.
The Way of Transformation, p.42.
Foucault, M. (1982) The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry,8(4), p.782.
Dialogue on the Path of Initiation, p.32, and The Way of Transformation, pp.34 & 42.
The Way of Transformation, pp.21, 33, 76, 78–79 & 92.
The Way of Transformation, p.105.
The Way of Transformation, p.92.